The Table Video

Roberta Hestenes speaks at a CCT pastor’s lunch about the Christian’s call to “take every thought captive.”

Transcript:

Although I am in the sense that we all are, making sense out of the meaning of life and our existence and the universe that God has given to us and given us a place in. But I’m not a professional philosopher, and I’m not a scientist. I’m married to one and I have often over the years had others made the observation to me that when you talk about the controversies and the intersections between science and religion, my husband and I have lived out that reality every day of our 53 year marriage. [congregation applauding] Because John is a biophysicist who has done heart and brain research.

And one of the ways the Lord brought us together was that both of us became Christians during our university years. And we first met at an intervarsity conference. And from that moment on, religion and science were destined to walk the road together. And I commend that to you. Is simply in the fact that the Lordship of Christ covers all of the domains of human existence and it’s an adventure to be able to walk these different roads of learning and interaction, and a complex intersections. One of the things that I’ve learned over John’s career, first in nuclear physics and then in biophysics and then in cognitive science and brain research, is that the cutting edge in much of the scientific community today is not deep within a discipline, but it’s at the margins where that particular academic discipline meets and intersects with another discipline.

So we have biology meeting physiology and technology and the whole world of genetics and biomedical discoveries and new applications that these intersections very often is the place where we find ourselves challenged to think new thoughts or to revisit old territory, but bring a new perspective or a new angle or a new way of engaging with that. Then opens up the world just a bit more and sometimes explodes the world of understanding and challenges. One of the things that I wanna talk about today is first to just lay a very basic biblical foundation.

And then I wanna talk a little bit about the challenges in this whole area that I think are facing the evangelical movement of which Biola and Fuller and so many church parachurch groups, et Cetera, have been identified by now just using the word evangelical is tricky. Yeah, I have found and dealing with media, etc, whenever I hear somebody use the word evangelical, I have no idea what they’re talking about and when they ask you if you share X evangelical, whatever, I have no idea if we are talking the same language or if we are on the same page.

So I wanted to do a little bit of definition and then talk about some of the issues that I see facing the evangelical movement as we are experiencing it in American Christianity today. And all of the 9 million things that I don’t cover, we can handle in the question and answer time. At the end. Two Sundays ago I was sitting in my church and I’m in about my third or fourth attempt to retirement. And one of the challenges of that is that I have spent over 40 years, most Sundays preaching somewhere as a senior pastor, also visiting pastor as a guest speaker.

And awful lot of the Sundays of my life have been being on the platform or in the pulpit. And one of the challenges of the retirement or semiretirement as I’m on my fourth attempt at it, is that instead of being in the pulpit every week, I’ve had the experience now of several years of being primarily in the pew. It’s quite a different experience. And one of the challenges of course, is not sitting there and thinking about all of the ways in which I would have said it differently or done it better or use that argument instead of this argument or that illustration instead of this illustration, I taught speech at Fuller for about five years and it’s a professional disease.

That academics get really good at critiquing, and we have to constantly be drawn back to the humility that we are called to as servants of Jesus Christ. And the fact that in and around any conversation about methodology or a technology or approach or any of that, what we want is to lift Jesus Christ high, and to worship him in the fullness of his glory and his greatness. And in whichever avenue of the Christian kingdom, Christ has placed us. That is our calling to worship, heart, mind, soul, and strength.

But my pastor two weeks ago made the following statement, “I hate to read.” In fact, he said, “I don’t think I have read a book in years.” And then he whipped out his iPhone, now you gotta remember this is a man I respect, a man used of God, a man that… I am grateful to God for the privilege of sitting under his preaching. He didn’t preach every week in my church, but he preaches regularly in that church.

And I have to confess that I didn’t hear one more word of the sermon. “I don’t like to read.” Then I thought about all my educational theory, which says people learn in different ways. Some of us learn visually. Some of us learn through hearing. Some of us learn through touch and there many different ways in which we are invited to the kingdom. We live in the kingdom and we learn in the kingdom. And reading has been a primary means of Christian growth and learning only really since the reformation and the invention of the printing press and this particular slice of history. But that got me thinking why was I bothered by that? I thought, “Well, because I’m an academic. “I have my own prejudices and biases.”

And then I thought, “No, “my concern is something deeper than that.” So let me do two scripture verses and then talk a bit about that concern, because that’s just one little tiny thing, but it really triggered a lot of my reflection. The two verses that I want to hold it before us, 2 Corinthians 10:3-5, For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The reality of the spiritual battle that the Christian is engaged in is significant for how we live, witness and act. We are engaged in a battle. In the world of higher education, in many aspects of the constantly changing, globalized context that we find ourselves in that one of the best metaphors to understand that is we are engaged in war.

The forces of the Kingdom of God, arrayed against the kingdoms of this world, and yet we are called not to wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. Now, there is a universe [laughs] within that text, but let me go on and do an even more mind blowing one. Colossians 1:15-20. I believe that this text is the foundational texts that undergirds any effort at Christian thinking, the life of the mind and the world of Christian study and scholarship.

Jesus Christ, the son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through him and for him. He’s before all things, and in him all things hold together. We’re living in a culture that is constantly bombarding us with a message that says everything is falling apart. A message of discouragement, a message of nihilism, a message, often tenged with bitterness and cynicism and at the bottom of it, a sense of hopeless despair about is there any thing that holds it all together? Is there any one who gives life meaning and purpose?

But in Jesus Christ, all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church. He’s the beginning and the firstborn among the dead so that in everything he might have supremacy. Here’s my thesis sense. That the life of the mind alongside the life of the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit given to us by God when we embrace Jesus Christ and enter his kingdom, that the life of the mind has the significant role to play in the power, effectiveness and our witness to Jesus Christ in the world.

And my concern is that in much of the evangelical community, there is, if not overt, but often a temptation and sometimes the reality of disdain, hostility or fear of moving into the world that was created by Christ and for Christ and taking it captive so that the philosophies of the world do not become the philosophies of Christians. And our understanding of discipleship does not become parochial with a privatized God. That sometimes I think that we have a temptation to turn into a tribal God, which is the ultimate idolatry, that this God who created all things and that everything is sustained by His grace and that even with the mark of the fall, this is God’s good creation and we are still under the creation commandment to stewart this world.

And when it talks about Christ supremacy over all things visible and invisible, material and immaterial, yeah, is talking about engagement with the real world of physical reality and social structures and power structures and everything that is on this planet that we have been given into our care as those who are in the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. And what concerns me is the temptation to abdication of the battlefield.

The temptation to look at the forces arrayed against the Kingdom of God, and there are several characteristics of the evangelical movement that Mark Knoll, who is a renowned historian, who’s a tenured professor at the University of Notre Dame, wrote a book about 20 years ago. And he has just recently written in a brand new book, which is called “Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind”. He wrote a reflection on that book, which really was stunning to some members of the evangelical community. He called that book “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind”. And the opening sentence in the book as a committed evangelical Christian himself, as a scholar of church history himself, first at Wheaton, and then at Notre Dame, he made this opening statement. “There is no evangelical mind”, because the evangelical movement has a number of characteristics which are very good, strong, powerful, but they have shadow sides, one of which is to devalue the work of intellect and the hard task of taking every thought in every sphere of life, whether it’s art and literature or economics or political structures or anthropology or in whatever area of life on this planet and beyond, that God has given human beings the gifts and the capacity in the commandment to stewart.

That there is very often in the evangelical community this fear, this distrust, this neglect and this disdain of the challenges that come from being academically involved. I wanted to just share a couple of things that fit what he said and which fit some of my own experience over 40 years now. Longer than that. 50 years in the evangelical community. Let me do a definition first as it’s being used in this particular context. A classical definition of evangelical has…

As part of the larger Christian movement encounter distinction to the main line, to Roman Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity has been a couple of distinctives that are fairly universally agreed on, not by the press, not by the media and all of its various forms that uses the language anyway it chooses to use it, but an emphasis on the need for conversion. The necessity of Christian conversion, sometimes called Crisis Conversion. My younger son who is now an analyst lesson psychologist at the University of North Carolina, came home when he was a senior in high school and he was…

We had gone to the missions committee to see if he would be approved to go on a short term mission assignment and he came home and he said, “Mom, they’re not gonna approve me.” And I said, “Well, why wouldn’t they?” And he said, “Well, because they asked me, “when did I receive Christ? “And I told them that as near as I know, “every memory I ever have, “I have always loved Jesus “and loved the Bible and wanted to be his follower, “but they wanted me to name the time and the moment “and I couldn’t do it.” I flunked.

And I knew better because our journeys are different in Christ. But one of the distinctives of evangelicalism is that we have stressed the necessity of the new birth. In the mature forms, we recognize that that new birth takes a number of different shapes and different journeys, but conversion is a key aspect. Second one is the emphasis on biblical authority. The supremacy of the scripture as our authority for faith in life is one of the, to me, wonderful hallmarks. Conversion is as well wonderful hallmarks of evangelicalism that we take the Bible seriously. That we look to scripture for God’s revelation.

God has revealed himself in the glories of nature. He has revealed himself in the living word, Jesus Christ, Hebrews 1:1-3, and he reveals himself to us through the written word which he inspired. And so the authority of scripture is crucial to evangelicalism. The shadow side of that is that in much of evangelicalism, it can be that Sola Scriptura, or the authority of scripture for faith and life, turns into the Bible only. Only the Bible. Two days ago there was a Bible study going on here in Newport Beach and one of the women they were studying a book written by a well known Christian pastor and thinker, and one of the women who was there said, “Why are we wasting our time “reading this book?”

I should tell you, it was by Tim Keller. “And why are we wasting our time? “The only thing we need to read is the Bible.” And Bible only ism. While the scripture and the reform tradition has always asserted that we have everything needful for our salvation and faithful obedience to Jesus Christ. That does not mean that the Bible tells us everything there is to know, and that we do not need to engage at the intersection between biblical truth and how that truth is to be lived out in the kind of culture and world that we are in.

Third characteristic of evangelicalism, activism. Activism. Now this is one of the things I love about the evangelical movement, but it also has a shadow side. If you give us a choice, and I put myself right in the middle of this category, and you put a problem, a need, a situation in front of me, my first reaction will be, “Do something.” The first reaction in so many places, if you see the brokenness of the world, for instance, about three weeks ago, our church was engaged in a serve weekend. You know about those, you’ve done those in some of your congregations and so no church on Sunday, but everyone goes out and serves the community. But one of the things that…

And it’s wonderful, I mean it’s you know, things get painted and cleaned and tidied up and seniors get their houses fixed and the needy have responses. But one of the things that happened was that a group of people decided for serve day, what they do is go to McDonald’s by a bunch of hamburgers and go and distribute those hamburgers in a certain area of town where there is poverty and hunger. “Activism, do something.”

And yet the day after those people are still hungry. Most of our churches, many of our churches, I’ve been a part of this forever is that Thanksgiving time we will do something special. We will gather baskets and we will do something about hunger. We will put the food in the basket and we will find a way, work with a parachurch or not for profit and we will take that food. And it hit me one day, you know, if they’re hungry on Thanksgiving, they’re hungry on the 1st of February. If they’re hungry at Christmas, they are hungry in the middle of July. And while activism is good, it’s not the sole remedy for what is needed in meeting the needs of the poor and the hungry. I’ll give you a couple of illustrations.

One is that when people go on short term mission trips, which has become one of the major movements in the Evangelical Church over the last years, and they’re large parts of that that are absolutely wonderful. But a person at Calvin, a scholar at Calvin did some research and discovered that the claims we make about the impact of short term mission trips are way overblown. That in fact simply taking someone and exposing them to the needs of the poor can result in something like what happened in my church where I was senior pastor in Solana Beach, San Diego area.

And we pulled together a bunch of ministries that were working along the border. In the hallway, one of the recipients of those ministries in Tiawana said that in a confidential aside, that his orphanage got painted seven times a year. Why? Because the Christians who wanted to help, wanted to do something, and the something they wanted to do gets to another ingredient that’s been identified with evangelicalism, which is immediacy. That we want to solve this issue, now. We want to be able at the end of the week to say, “We did that, “and we made a tremendous difference for the kingdom.”

Now is it wrong to go and serve and to help and get our hands dirty? Of course not. But one of the things that we need to understand is that without sustained study, without reflection, without taking the time to understand what is really going on in the names of a neat book that I really recommend is you know, “How to Help the Poor “Without Hurting Them” or hurting ourselves. Because there are so many ways to engage the world, which in fact demean the dignity, disempower and reinforce dependence and do not lift up Jesus Christ and his power to transform not only the individual heart, but the social structures and the systems and the principalities and powers that are keeping people in bondage and need to be understood, so that they can be tackled at multiple levels of engagement.

Congregation: Amen. [congeregation laughing]

Let me give you one other illustration of something I have watched over my own ministry experience. I began my ministry at a large church in Seattle and as near as I know, we were the first major church in the country to begin Christian small groups program. And after some years of involving thousands of people in that congregation and Christian small groups, I moved to Fuller and taught a course, the first course in any seminary on Christian small groups. Christian small groups are a wonderful tool that God uses to build community, to provide a context for people to understand who Jesus is and what it means to be his disciple, to engage people in the study of the scripture and help propel people into witness in service. True. Absolutely true.

I have watched, however, over the last 40 years as most of the Evangelical Church has abandoned systematic teaching in any form of adult education beyond the sermon now, and depending on which tradition you’re in, that sermon in one tradition could be eight minutes. Anything you can’t say in eight minutes isn’t worth saying. You know, it could be 10 minutes. I was in a tradition that said 20 minutes was God’s sacred time.

Congregation: Oh no.

That if you preach one minute more than 20 minutes, we run you out of town on a rail. And the interesting thing though is how the evangelical mind becomes captive to currents that may or may not be related to reality. Because they always start looking around and all of a sudden, “What?! “That pastor is teaching “for 45 minutes in the worship service “and people aren’t getting up and walking out. “Now you better have something to say. “You better have a gift of teaching. “You better be deep in the word “so that what you say really does nourish “and build your people.” But we were captive to a certain mindset that said we had to do ministry in a certain kind of way.

Well, as it happened, I know Robert Wothnow who is one of the leading scholars. He’s a senior professor at Princeton University and heads an institute for the Study of Religion and Society, particularly, but more broadly. But Christianity and society. And he asked me if I would participate with him in the first study that had ever been done on small groups, systematic research involving hundreds of thousands of people over a period of time.

And I was thrilled to be a part of that. And there were many other advisors on the project, etc. And the end result of that was a set of findings that were published in a book called “Sharing The Journey”, some years back that absolutely shook me because I had been teaching and advocating Christian small groups still do today, for so many years. But we found something when we studied.

And one was that Christian small groups had a tendency to move people towards self absorption and the psychological satisfaction of their inner journey rather than towards active, vibrant, sacrificial servanthood for the cause of Christ. And the second finding, and this one shook me even deeper, was that the typical Christians small group had this tendency to spend its time talking all about themselves and diminishing the transcendent grandeur and glory of God. And so without some correction, just to simply say the way we do church, is you come on Sunday and you get in a small group and that’s going to automatically produce the kind of deeply committed spiritually formed active obedience in all of the spheres of the world, it doesn’t just happen.

In fact, it goes the other way because the forces of the culture are so strong, they must be actively resisted. And so one of the questions I find myself asking in the evangelical world is, do we need to rediscover the importance of the Teaching Ministry of the Church as we do our evangelism, as we do our good works, as we do the other tasks of community building and caring that God calls us to, do we actually need to spend some intentional time systematically talking about the great doctrines and truths of the Christian faith?

Can I really study Roman sitting in a circle saying, “And how does this speak to you?” [congregation laughing] Well, yes, but the tendency, if that’s all you have, do you hear me clearly? I can easily be misunderstood. But if that’s all you have is to a shallowing of our Christian understanding, and when that understanding is shallow, it can become cliche dependent. And we may choose to meet the challenges of the world with our predigested answers to every question that people may have, instead of fresh study and fresh thinking.

A woman who’s in the middle of a great deal of personal and family suffering said to me, to my shock the other day, she said, “If I hear one more person say to me “in the middle of my suffering “that all things work together for good, “for those who love God, “while I love God and things aren’t good, “am I allowed to say that, “and in some places we’re not?” And that took me to the reflection on Steve Jobs. Some of you probably got to page 13 of the massive biography written by Walter Isaacson. One of the privileges of semiretirement is that I could read all 800 and something pages and found it fascinating because I love technology.

I love the creativity and the brilliance that was there, I don’t agree with so many things, but it was fascinating to see his development, and then this account of a turning point. And I believe that everyone, all of us have turning points in our lives. We have moments that matter in which a word or a conversation or a teaching or an illustration make an impact that changes us. And this one for Steve was in 1968, he was 13 years old. He was out of a family where his parents, unmarried, had abandoned him. And he’d been adopted by parents who really loved him and cared about him, and taught him many things, how to care about excellence and detail and fixing things and making things.

And one of the things they did was they took him to church. And when he was 13 years old, he was the kinda kid that the teachers hated to see coming because I don’t think I can use this language. He was too smart for his britches, how will that do? But there was one teacher who really saw that this was a very bright young man and took him seriously and made an enormous difference in his life. But the day came when Steve Jobs went to his pastor, and he asked his pastor a question. And those of us who are pastors or teachers, we know youth workers, we get asked questions and we have to respond to those questions.

And Steve Jobs had in his hand a cover of Life Magazine that had on its cover the picture of starving children in the civil war in Biafra, Nigeria. And Steve asked his pastor, “Does God know everything? “If I move my finger, does God know “that I’m moving my finger?” And the pastor said, “Yes, God knows.” And then Steve pulls out the Life cover with the picture of these suffering, starving, dying children. And he says to the pastor, “Well, does God know about this? “And what’s gonna happen to these children?” The pastor answers, “Steve, I know you don’t understand, “but yes, God knows about that.” And Steve Jobs walked out of the church that day and never went back. That was a turning point in his life. It’s been interesting to read the blogs and the comments on this. Some have said the pastor gave him an absolutely right answer. God does know everything. Classically, we call it the doctrine of Omniscience, one of the attributes of God. It’s important to know that about God.

But as I pondered this pastor’s response and then Steve Jobs walking away and he’s accountable for his own decisions and his own choices before the Lord. But as a pastor, I found myself thinking, “What would I’ve said? “What would I respond “if I were asked that question?” And as I pondered it, I thought to myself, I think it’s possible that the pastor thought that this young, troubled teenager was asking a factual question about the attributes of God. “Does God know?” And I suspect that Steve Jobs was really asking a moral question, “Does God care?” What is the character of God? And how is God involved in the reality of this world? He’s 13 and he’s asking the toughest questions about suffering, and evil and meaning. Does the universe have any meaning? Does it have any purpose? Is there any hope?

One of the challenges I think is that if we surrender the life of the mind and we are content to give the old answers that worked in a different cultural context instead of the fresh wrestling with the real questions that are being asked in the real world, then it’s very possible. We might need to hear the words of James 3:1, which is don’t let man have you teach because those of us who teach will be judged with greater strictness. Gordon MacDonald wrote about this and Gordon recorded his prayer. “Lord, make me aware of the implications of any word “that I say to people during the course of the day, “who can know what a spoken word. “Direct someone to the right path “or on the wrong path.”

Sometimes we preached to the lowest common denominator. Sometimes we are afraid of the controversial or the complex and yet that’s the world we live in. At one level it’s simple. Jesus Christ is Lord of all. At another level, it’s incredibly complex and requires the best effort of the mind, fully engaged to wrestle. I’ve thought, “What would I have said?”

I don’t know the right answer, but I found myself wanting to say something like, “I struggle with that too. “But I believe God cares and God is at work in the world. “He’s in the world working through his son “who died that the world might be reconciled “and we might have peace instead of hatred. “He called his people his church “to be his arms and instruments “of doing his will in the world. “And we have the privilege of doing that “and making a difference. “God does care about you “and your life “and your future “and your brokenness, “but he’s not just a personal psychologicalised God. “He also cares about the brokenness of the world.”

Congregation: Amen.

May God give us the courage, the will, and then the power because with the Apostle Paul, we would all say “who is competent for these things?” but through Jesus Christ, we are more than conquerors. Let’s keep at it. Amen. The way in which we teach the faith takes a variety of shapes. John and I, at one time we were with aboriginals in the interior of Australia and there was no way writing a study guide with the right way to disciple them in the faith, they’re an oral culture. And so they needed resources that would speak to them and visualize and help them. They needed art as one drama, you know, as other ways.

Great truth can be taught through literature and art and other kinds of things. But I think right now an evangelical movement, to be dead honest with you, I don’t believe we have an imbalance much at all. I think that the focus is much more on building relational connections and that is important, than it is on thickening the faith understanding of our people. I think many times we have a pretty thin faith, so it has to do with looking at the preaching over a period of time. I don’t serve steak and potatoes every night at my house, or a cholesterol levels would go clear off the roof.

There are times when you do the meat, there are times when you make sure that it’s right there out. You know, that it’s easy for anyone at any level to respond to it. But to neglect passing on the faith once for all delivered to the saints, I mean, that’s our calling. But that faith is related to what is the culture saying that is contrary to that. And how then is Jesus Christ, Lord in our politics, in our economics, in our… In the way power works in this town or in this country or in this world. So I think we have to be very intentional. The second piece that I would put is then in addition to the preaching schedule, and then the opportunity for serious teaching regularly in a congregation is the pastor’s study, that I noticed in earlier conversation at our table. I heard references to the pastor’s office is very interesting over the last decades. It used to be the pastor’s study. More and more, it’s the pastor’s office.

And we need to find allies, and work with wise leaders in our congregations, et cetera. But that study, whether it’s week by week or study leave or time taken away where systematic learning, somebody I talked to over here reading, engaged in the Doctor of Ministry program and he said, “Even though I’m in my 50s, “I want to keep learning, “and do what God wants me to do in my congregation.” And he got back and the Doctor of Ministry program. So I think some of it has to do with our own life of the mind, cultivating it. And if I’m saying the same thing in the pulpit word for word that I said 10 years ago, maybe I need a little refreshing. [congregation chattering] And the second thing or that would go along with that is, sometimes we need to read people who don’t agree with us, because when we only read literature and books that all think of things the same way we do, we can have blind spots and we can be speaking to issues that aren’t the real issues that people are grappling with.

And so we need to read some things that don’t necessarily come straight out of the middle of our tradition. Now, scriptures always gonna be the foundation, but those are a few things. One of the privileges of having been [mumbules] a long time and traveling is that I get to meet graduates. It’s one of the thrills of my life to meet students who are now in the middle, at the beginning and in the middle and the maturity of their ministries, etc. But one of the things that I’ve noticed so many times is I can walk into a pastor’s office and I take a look, I can’t help it. And I will ask them, “Is this the place where you study?”

Yeah, and sometimes they’ll say, “No, my real study is at home. “I can’t get anything done while I’m here, I’m fine.” So then I go visit their home. And the last book that they ever read was for the last class that they took in seminary. They haven’t read anything since then. And so I do think the challenge of understanding the seminary experience, in all education experience, as the beginning of a life of being a learner of Jesus, not the end of that.

And that the foundations are being laid for us, but we have to work out how the building gets built in our own life and ministry. Three sentence. I think theological education and it’s traditionally been done is broken. I think we need new and fresh models. I believe a great deal of good work is being done in our seminaries.

And one of the good signs that Mark Nolls points to in a reevaluation of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind is the maturation of a number of Christian colleges, universities and seminaries, among which I’m very proud to say that he mentioned Eastern, which I have a special place in my heart, and Biola as two of the schools among about 10 or 12 that he lists where he says he believes that the work of the mind, grounded in Christ, but it’s being taken seriously and moving forward.

And so I think that a word of encouragement. But I think we do need new and fresh ways that do both mind and heart and world and bring those together. The tendency in theological education is to put those into separate spheres and let the student do the integration. But in fact, students need models of integration. Of how does my theology connect with this and that and the other thing. And we need more of that integrative approach. I believe in Christian higher education and of its forms.

Announcer: Biola University offers a variety of biblically centered degree programs, ranging from business, to ministry, to the arts and sciences. Visit biola.edu to find out how Biola could make a difference in your life. [upbeat music]