Mark's Letters

Because the Scripture tells us to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind, it is surprising that anti-intellectualism is so enduring among Christians. This distrust of the mind and reason is expressed in several ways. Sometimes it is a faith in having faith. Oddly, many non-Christians will say, “You just gotta have faith!” To their exasperation, I often ask, “In what or whom?” If they are vaguely Christian they may say, “God, of course.” And then I ask, “Why?” Most give no answer.

This rejection of the mind for the heart is supported by the assertion that doctrines separate people and what’s really important is sincerity, a good heart. Sometimes this is anointed with the postmodernist cliché about all people having their own truth or the mantra of tolerance that assures us that there are many paths to God. Increasingly, many who aren’t Christians say, “I believe in prayer.” To their dismay, I often say, “I don’t.”  I then explain that I believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and God’s son, Jesus. I believe in the God who answers prayer–not in prayer. All these rejections of rationality assert that sincerity is enough, but fail to consider that being sincerely wrong can have eternal consequences.

A more subtle expression of anti-intellectualism is the reduction of a Christian’s mind to a hard drive onto which God can down load His Word. This approach encourages memorizing Scripture, but not thinking about it. If we think, we may ask questions—questions that the Sunday school teacher or pastor can’t answer. Instead of dynamic truths that require all our heart, soul, mind, and imagination to grasp, interpret, and apply, the Word of God becomes either a set rules or magic words which have power apart from their meaning. Legalism and mysticism can both keep us from loving God with all our mind. 

Sometimes Christians let the mind out to play but only within a well-fenced Christian playground. Here in our Christian subculture we are safe from the kinds of questions and challenges we would face in the world and on most university campuses. Although the intentions may be good, the result is often that children on the playground either wrap their fragile faith in the bubble-wrap of ignorance or jump the fence when they grow older.

At a Christian college I was blessed to have a philosophy professor who not only had us read the secular philosophers but challenged us to evaluate them according to biblical truth. We were even encouraged to consider where these philosophers might be right. In another course I took twice, the instructor assigned us a stack of history books written from a variety of secular perspectives: capitalist, Marxist, socialist, conservative, liberal. Through these courses, I was thoroughly introduced to the intellectual debates of the last century. As a result, I rolled into a secular graduate school unafraid. Instead of having a frail faith needing protection, my faith was fearless. And the more I read and the more I listened to my secular colleagues, the more I realized it was their ideas that were weak and tottering. I became unashamed of the gospel and intellectually secure as a believer. I found the joy of loving God with both my heart and my mind.

The truth is, however, that many Christian professors do not approach their discipline from a Christian perspective. For instance, many Christian professors of biology put their faith in one box and their belief in evolution in another. This intellectual schizophrenia is especially common in the humanities and the soft sciences like psychology and sociology. Christian English professors will have students read Shakespeare, but often not challenge to them work out Christian approaches to literary criticism and analysis. The result is often that English majors can do a postmodern deconstruction of literature, a Marxist or Freudian interpretation, but have no clue as to what a Christian approach might be.

The last way we reject reason is through an escapist appeal to the sovereignty and inscrutability of God. Often this is cited when someone asks a hard question—especially about the origin of evil and its persistence in the world. When a child falls into a pool, nearly drowns, and spends the rest of her life in a vegetative state, a parent might ask why a loving and omnipotent God didn’t intervene. When we trust in God, for what exactly do we trust him? To what extent does Satan (“the prince of this world”) influence events and to what extent does God control events? Or is God controlling Satan? If God’s control is complete, his providence meticulous, how can we avoid blaming God for all the evil that happens?  Well, you get the idea. Often these questions are only answered with “God’s ways are not our ways”, or “God is infinite and we are finite, so we can’t possible hope to understand how God controls both the good and the evil, but should only be given credit for the good.” All these answers end up telling us one thing: stop thinking, stop asking the hard questions. While it is certainly important to hold onto our faith in the goodness of God, we do not have to hit the off switch of our intellect. We can trust in his goodness while seeking to understand his ways.

The challenge is to bring all we believe to bear upon all we study and to bring all we have studied to bear on what we believe. No fear, no separate boxes. All truth is God’s truth, so the truth of faith and reason are one. It is both/and—not either/or.

God’s people have always struggled, and often failed, to keep external and internal spirituality in right relationship. The history of the Christian faith has been characterized by pendulum swings between suffocating legalism and defiling license. Jesus again and again confronted the Pharisee’s failure to keep both the inside and outside clean:

But the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the platter; but inside of you, you are full of robbery and wickedness. You foolish ones, did not He who made the outside make the inside also? But give that which is within as charity, and then all things are clean.” Luke 11:39—41 NASB

In the American church there have been times and traditions that have emphasized looking holy more than being holy. When preaching on the prodigal son who squandered his inheritance on sin and whores, we have often failed to see that the heart of the elder brother was just as wandering and just as defiled by his jealousy and resentment.

Much of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is a plea for people to be holy through and through. Jesus tells us not committing adultery is not enough; we must not even lust in our hearts. Not murdering is not enough; we must not even harbor the hatred from which murder springs. Jesus is not saying the external obedience is unimportant, it simply is not enough. 

Jesus confronted the extreme legalism of the Pharisees that ignored the heart and asked only for external conformity to God’s law. However, it is easy to overlook that Jesus did not condemn the external holiness of the Pharisees. In the Sermon on the Mount he tells his disciples to enter the kingdom of God, their righteousness must surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees (Mat. 5:20). After listing how the Pharisees tithed on every herb, Jesus rebukes them for ignoring justice and love of God. He then says, “But these are the things [justice and loving God] you should have done without neglecting the other.” In other words, Jesus is telling the Pharisees that it is not a choice between the inside of the cup being clean or the outside. It is both/and.

We now live in a culture where the pendulum has swung the other way. The life styles, habits, language, and appearance of believers are often not discernibly different from most unbelievers. The emphasis, especially among evangelicals, is now on God changing us from the inside out. But polls about the behavior of evangelicals suggest that too much of the change is never making it to the outside. The epistles of Paul and John often battled a gnostic gospel’s claim that holiness of the spirit was all that mattered and that sins of the flesh were inconsequential. Although Gnosticism is seldom preached openly today, many claiming to be Christians are living out a gnostic lifestyle that leaves their moral decisions unaffected by their faith.

One result of this emphasis on only our internal experience is the tendency of some Christians to live from experience to experience, Sunday to Sunday, or conference to conference. Instead of integrating the spiritual disciplines into their daily lives, they wait for the next “good” service, prophetic word, or anointed message. We should indeed treasure all these experiences, but how much more lasting fruit might such experiences bear if received by believers who were growing daily?

Evangelicals have (rightly I think) emphasized the transforming born-again crisis experience, but have often failed to balance this with an emphasis on the spiritual disciplines that deepen holiness and give external expression to our faith. By doing this the Church often fails pastorally to provide the help new Christians need. Yes, we usually exhort new believers to pray, read the Bible, and attend church. But beyond that, or in the actual details of that, we offer little. We often fear empty ritualism so much that we swing to an extreme individualism where each believer is on his or her own to progress as the Spirit leads. But we can have both.

For example, I often raise my hands in worship as a spiritual discipline. In other traditions and liturgies worshipers may stand or kneel. Yes, sometimes I might be led by the Holy Spirit to lift my hands in worship and at other times my uplifted hands may express my emotional response to God, but often I lift my hands to God because he is worthy to receive my praise and it helps me lift my heart. I need not wait until moved by the Holy Spirit—God is worthy! In a similar way, I sometimes kneel because God has humbled my heart in reverence, but I also kneel as a way to humble my heart. I sometimes pray because God has moved me, and sometimes pray because I need God to move me. God is changing me from the inside/out and from the outside/in.

The danger today is the paralyzing passivity that comes from only emphasizing change from the inside. When everything depends on God sovereignly visiting us, we often fail to embrace spiritual disciplines that help us press into God. For example, regarding the discipline of giving or generosity, we may find ourselves giving not because God has moved on our heart to be generous but rather to help rid our heart of covetousness and keep our heart free from the love of money. I have a tendency to be a loner. As a spiritual discipline, I often ignore my inclination, choose to fellowship, and am then blessed by the fellowship. I would have missed this blessing had I waited for God to give me a deep love for fellowship. Cultivating the external habits of obedience is gradually changing the habits of my heart.

We risk missing much God has for us when we passively, rather than actively, wait upon the Lord. If the woman who pressed through the crowd and touched the hem of Jesus’ garment in faith had waited for Jesus to come to her, she may have never been healed. Spiritual disciplines of solitude, silence, and prayer are often just ways of pressing through the crowd of noise, busyness, and worries that keep us from touching Jesus. External disciplines can also preserve and nourish what we receive from God in times of grace. By analogy, we know that setting out buckets does not make God send rain. God is sovereign and is not manipulated by our prayers or actions, but God does respond to acts of faith, cries for help, and our decisions to trust in him. It may seem more pious to say, “Rain will only come by God’s sovereign grace; I can do nothing so there is no need for buckets.” It is so much wiser to do all faith can do, humbly ask for rain, and capture that rain so that it can give life to others for weeks to come. Many of the spiritual disciplines are simply buckets set out to receive the free gift of God’s grace—sometimes it rains and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it pours. But it would be silly to polish buckets, re-design buckets, argue about the arrangement of buckets and forget that buckets aren’t rain. We must always be asking for the rain.

In these examples we can see that internal and external expressions of holiness have a dynamic relationship. Because my heart feebly desires God, and I have made a commitment to follow Jesus, I will turn off the TV, get in a quiet place, and begin to pray. Often my mind will wander and I will get drowsy, so I will read my Bible until I again begin to nod. To focus my attention I will pray some of Psalms and Paul’s blessings aloud. I may do this while walking. Sometimes, but not always, this will result in a moving of God’s Spirit that empowers me to intercede passionately for the Church or individuals. My externals actions were a result of internal convictions, but also resulted in an internal work of the Holy Spirit.

We need both internal and external godliness in our relationships with others as well. In our zeal to avoid all hypocrisy, believers can often wound or neglect others. If I did or said loving things only out of the overflow of love in my heart, I am afraid I wouldn’t do much. I desire the overflow of love, but I do much and overlook much not because I feel like it, but because that is what love does. I often discover, however, that after I decide to do the loving thing, real love springs up in my heart. To avoid hypocrisy, should I have waited until moved by powerful feelings of love? Like the man who said to Jesus, “I do believe, help my unbelief!” I often choose to do the loving thing while praying, “I do love; Lord, crucify my selfish heart.”

We need external actions that open the way for God to work in our hearts and we need transforming experiences of regeneration that change us from the inside/out. We need crisis experiences of the heart and gradual growth in holiness through the spiritual disciplines. We need spontaneous expressions of love that spring from the abundance of God’s love in our hearts and we need those hard daily acts of self-denial that make us  love God and one another faithfully. We need God working from the inside/out and outside/in making us like Jesus through and through.

At the beginning of the 20th century, one false either/or that bedeviled the church was the choice between ministering to the bodies or ministering to the souls of people. In 1917 Walter Rauschenbusch proposed a social gospel that addressed economic injustice, poverty, and institutional sin and oppression. Some evangelists like Dwight Moody opposed this emphasis and said the work of the church was the saving of souls. And, of course, we have the long tradition of Billy Graham, the best known evangelist of the last century, never addressing social issues, but simply and powerfully presenting the message of salvation. Although there is a genuine shift among evangelicals toward ministering to both body and soul, we still have denominations that are known mainly for evangelism and others for their work among the poor.

Jesus did both. Even his miracles are directed toward both goals. Some of his signs and wonders were meant to testify to the validity of his teaching (see John 10) but others are simple expressions of his compassion (see Mark 1:41). When Jesus fed the multitude, he didn’t say, “This should be an effective strategy of evangelism.” He said, “I feel compassion for the people because they have remained with Me now and have nothing to eat.” But in all his compassion he did not avoid speaking the hard truths about being his disciple (Luke 14:26) and He did not indulge in a naïve idealism about the poor. Jesus knew some were just following him for the bread. Jesus healed ten lepers but saw only one return to “give glory to God”. He didn’t carefully calculate the return on his investment; he loved and gave with wild extravagance.

The failure to minister to both the physical and spiritual needs of people is a failure to love. Love does both. James warns us against passing a brother in need and saying, “Go in peace, be warmed and be filled” and then doing nothing to meet his need. As James argues, it is not faith or works: it is works because of our faith. But it is also a failure to love if we don’t proclaim the gospel that leads to forgiveness of sins, a new creation, and the hope of eternal life. When we fail to proclaim salvation, we often ignore the very cause of their physical needs. Sin, hatred, bitterness, guilt and all the sins of the flesh ruin our bodies as well as our souls.

The power of God heals bodies and the mercy of God in Christ saves souls. The example of Christ and genuine love should move us to do both through his grace. We do not want the Church to be merely another social agency: a nice bunch of do-gooders. Nor do we want the Church to tally up souls saved while ignoring the physical suffering of the people. We want to love the bodies and souls of those for whom Christ died. We want both/and. The church is called to be Jesus to a lost world.

The church should not have to choose between holy character (the fruit of the Holy Spirit) and powerful ministry (the gifts of the Holy Spirit). The split between charismatic and non-charismatic traditions is silly and hurtful. Charismatics and Pentecostals need the emphasis on holiness expressed in the Wesleyan and holiness tradition. Simply to be biblical, the Church needs to accept the gifts of the Holy Spirit without explaining them away with naturalistic definitions: prophecy is preaching, healing is medical skill, tongues is linguistic talent. Worldliness and sin have ravaged the charismatic church—the message of  holiness is desperately needed. Within the holiness tradition, confusion about the gifts of the Holy Spirit has reigned regarding the office of the prophet, the gifts of healing and prophecy, and the gift of tongues because many evangelicals want to be biblical but fear the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

And all of this either/or-ism has been exacerbated by those who insist only those who speak in tongues have been filled with the Holy Spirit. Let God be God and pour out his Holy Spirit however He likes. Let the Holy Spirit distribute gifts as He decides. We can ask the Holy Spirit to come in sanctifying power to burn away deep-rooted sin. And we can ask the Holy Spirit to give us the gifts to powerfully testify to the resurrection of Christ. We can have both and we need both.

Burn-out and disillusionment can also nourish either/or-ism. Having spent a lot of time in the holiness tradition, I have seen enough carnal, and just plain mean, people claiming “sanctification” to make me give up any belief in the Spirit’s power to free us from sin. And in my ten years within the charismatic/Pentecostal tradition I have seen enough silliness and abuse of the gifts to make me wonder if the gifts are real or useful. But in both traditions, I have met those who are the “real deal”, humble folk who walked daily in the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit and genuine believers who used the gifts of the Spirit to build-up others and set the captive free. The answer, a pastor once told me, to mis-use isn’t no use—it is right use. So I am stubbornly both/and about the gifts and fruit of the Spirit.

Jesus is clear that the Holy Spirit is sent to continue his ministry and express his nature:

Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father. John 14:12

When asked if we want to have the fruit of the Spirit which is the character of Christ or to do the works of Christ as empowered by gifts of the Holy Spirit, we must boldly say, “Both/and !” Through the Holy Spirit, the Church can be like Jesus was and do what Jesus did.

The other day I watched this TV show where the chef and star of “Hell’s Kitchen,” Gordon Ramsay, rescues failing restaurants. The owners are often deep in debt and losing money and customers. In many cases the restaurant was a family business whose troubles were destroying relationships. What intrigued me was that although Ramsay is brutal and profane in his critique, at the end of the show many  thank him for changing their lives and healing their families. Many of these failing owners and managers are like us: they had found something that didn’t work and done it with all their might, over and over.

I watched a second episode to discover how and why Ramsay had such a profound and positive impact even though every other word had to be bleeped. The answer was soon obvious. Because of his celebrity and expertise, these restaurant owners would let him speak the truth as brutally as needed. If they treated employees badly he said, “You treat your workers like #%&#.” If the food was horrible, he said, “This tastes like a pile of _____!” Well, you get the idea. Even when expressed crudely and rudely, the truth has the power to change lives. By the end of the show, the owners who have been much abused by Ramsay are hugging him and thanking him for telling them the truth and rescuing their business.

How often in the church do we watch people go spiritually bankrupt, but never say a word lest we offend? Yes, we are called to speak the truth in love—but too often we lack the courage to speak at all. And perhaps even more to the point is how many of us are letting the Holy Spirit speak to us about ourselves? He is the Spirit of truth, but are we listening as He evaluates our business, our fruit, and our practices? We have a truth speaker far better than Gordon Ramsay—are we listening?

It is easy at this point to say, “Yeah, we should all be listening more to the Holy Spirit” and then run off to do everything on our list. However, we must be more deliberate. Back in the 80’s I took a group of college students on a three day silent retreat at an Augustinian monastery in Kansas City, Ks. They had their Bibles and notebooks, but were not allowed to speak to anyone Friday through Sunday. I did, however, allow them to come and talk with me about their experience. What I found amazing is that after a day of jittery withdrawal from noise and busyness, a steady stream of students came to tell me how the Holy Spirit had spoken to them about their pride, jealousy, fear, or distrust. Many were broken, but many left changed. They had their Gordon Ramsay truth-speaking moment. No sermons, no altar calls, but many got the make-over they needed. All we did is get quiet, and get still. God was faithful to speak.