Am I Putting God in a Box?
Over the last several posts I have tried to answer several of the most common questions people ask about my view of God’s will and Christian decision. In this last post on this topic (for a while anyway) I want to tackle one final question that is almost always asked about my view on this subject: “Aren’t you putting God in a box?”
This question goes well beyond the boundaries of this series, as it is commonly asked of anyone who questions a “new movement of the Spirit,” such as the Toronto Blessing; which many Christians, myself included, had grave doubts about. In this way, it is often not so much used as a question but a device to shut down inquiries and doubts regarding a given “spiritual” event.
I find this question somewhat illegitimate, although many who ask it are undoubtedly sincere, for one reason: It can be used to justify anything. A number of years ago, Greg Koukl (who, you may figured out by my frequent citations of him, is one of the most influential Christian teachers in my life) responded to this question this way:
What if I told you that you should come with me to a church that has a brand new work of the Spirit? You say, what is it? I say, when the Spirit moves us, we stand in a circle and urinate into a big tub. We pee in a pot. We call it "whizzing in the Spirit." You say, Koukl, that's bizarre. I say, there are no verses against it. Find a verse against it. In fact, I've got a proof text: "From his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water." There it is! Works for me! After all, you can't put God in a box, can you? God can do whatever He wants, can't He? So who are you to judge Him?
This is, of course, a humorous example, but it gets at the heart of the problem with the question (or statement), “Aren’t you putting God in a box?”
Whenever we teach about God and what it means to follow Him, we must be exceedingly careful to only teach what is Biblical. Is it possible that God could speak to you through your inner feelings and intuitions? Yes it is. Is it possible that God, if He so chose, could speak to you from a garden gnome under your bed? Yes it is, God certainly could do that if He wanted to. Am I, or you, or anyone else, allowed to teach that God does things in this way? No. The reason is simple: The Bible itself does not teach that God works in these ways. As teachers (all of us are in some capacity or another), the only things we can teach about God and His ways with any authority, or any surety, are the things taught to us first in the Bible.
Series Conclusion (for now, anyway):
Am I saying that I don’t believe that the Holy Spirit interacts with us on a sometimes unconscious level to influence or to assist in bringing to mind some wisdom that we didn’t know we possessed? Not at all, I do believe that God interacts with Christians in such a way. However, the danger begins when we start claiming that our “inward nudges” are instructions from God. Such claims give divine authority to our passing whims and thus shut down the possibility of wise counsel from other Christians who might advocate a different course of action. After all, if God really told you to do X, who are they to say not to?
Whether you have read all my posts on this subject, or only this one, the thing that I want everyone to understand is this: Our inner impressions, the thoughts and “nudges” that we feel from time may be from God, our own mind, or even from the Devil, but we don’t to agonize over the source of their origin as so many Christians do. What I understand to be the Biblical response, is to evaluate every potential course of action in light of God’s moral will and of wisdom. If we follow this Biblical prescription, we will never be far wrong. We will weed out the suggestions of the Devil and our own bad ideas, and (for the most part) follow through on our good ideas and the things of God.
It may be that there are things, many things perhaps, that we attempt that don’t meet with perfect success. That is the nature of life. The thing that counts for the most in the end is not whether our efforts meet with brilliant success at every turn but whether we consistently sought to honor and glorify God with our life through wise and Godly decisions and actions. It is in this way that we will find ourselves in the center of God’s will for our life.
4 comments:
Nathan,
You're to be commended for taking on such a *hot topic* with clarity and balance. I know what you're saying, and that Christians should not run with their "inner nudges" as if it's the movement of the Holy Spirit. I've heard Christians say that they hear the voice of God all the time. When questioned about this, they say that His voice sounds like their's (in fact, in a movie years ago about Moses -- not Ten Commandments -- the voice of God was actually the voice of the actor playing Moses; we need to be weary of ascribing to God the fevered imagings of our own souls.). The problem is that in many cases the voice they're hearing IS their own, and they are mistakenly identifying it as the voice of God.
There is a balance. Evangelicals have historically affirmed that Christianity is a personal relationship with God through Christ by means of His Spirit. By definition, a personal relationship assumes interaction. God does speak to us (in fact, A.W. Tozer was famous for saying that God is constantly communicating with us; we just don't stand still enough or quiet our spirits enough to hear him), but we must check what we hear against what we know of Him from scripture. Whenever I hear a Christian, or a group of Christians, claiming some extraordinary experience with God, I check it against scripture. I don't buy the "Toronto Blessing" because I see no evidence in scripture that a movement of God upon a person results in hysterical laughter. But when a person claims to have been touched by God and received the ability to speak in tongues, I pay more attention, because tongues is revealed as a manifestation of the Spirit. (Disclaimer: Upon further study, I believe that tongues did not cease at the end of the apostalic age. I do not panic that I do not speak in tongues; God is sovereign enough that He can give me that ability if He wants to...and this attitude is also biblical).
Adherence only to experience, without the balance of Scripture, is sensationalism. Adherence only to what's on the pages of the Bible without an expectation that God will interact with us is, as Tozer said, adhering to the "dead letter of textualism." There isn't a person I've read or know of in the history of the church who was as devoted to the letter of the Bible as A.W. Tozer, and yet he understood that a walk with God involves fellowship and communion with God, in the Spirit.
This is an important balance to maintain, and judging from the recent history of the church, it's very apparently a difficult balance to maintain.
"The thing that counts for the most in the end is not whether our efforts meet with brilliant success at every turn but whether we consistently sought to honor and glorify God with our life through wise and Godly decisions and actions. It is in this way that we will find ourselves in the center of God’s will for our life."
I loved this last bit. It is so true, and I it is so often lost on Christians.
Dad,
Thanks for the kudos, I appreciate it.
I don’t know whether you meant the information about God’s communion and relationship with us as a correction or as an addition. Either way, I don’t think that I disagree with you (or with Tozer). The Bible, in my opinion, does speak about the communication of God with us. For most believers such communication falls within the realm of the work of the Holy Spirit, which I touched on only lightly in my post on His work. Obviously, a great, great deal more could be said about the Holy Spirit and His work in the lives of believers, but I did not have room for it in a blog post.
Clearly, God does speak in other ways as well. The Bible contains many examples of God doing just that. The thing I was attempting to address with these last few posts was the widespread problem of evangelicals advancing a patently un-Biblical model of communication from God, particularly in the arena of decision making, that confuses and misleads many young Christians. I know from my work with high-school aged Christians that confusion about Biblical choices may be the number one question they have; it’s certainly in the top five at the very least.
As far as what Tozer refers to as the “dead letter of textualizm,” I haven’t read enough of him to know what he means by that. That said, Tozer is one of those people who “studied and shown himself approved” to teach on Biblical issues and since I have the deepest respect for him and have never had a disagreement with him before, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt. I assume that what he is referring to is Biblical, and in-line with what I have had to say on the topic (not because I said it, but because I believe that the Bible says it and that I have accurately interpreted what it says; although I admit that I could be wrong). Maybe if you fill me in some more on Tozer’s position, or at least tell me where he writes about this subject, I could come to some conclusion about it.
Thanks again the comments, very thoughtful.
Nathan
A lot of what you are saying is so true. I'm currently on the same subject and I am reading Freison's book as well.
The poster's comment about balance above is so true also.
http://laidbackchristian.blogspot.com
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