12 Things to Do After Graduating

By Matt Jenson
The Gospel Coalition

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2013/05/09/12-things-to-do-after-graduating/

We are less prepared for college graduation than for any other transition. We have stacks of books orienting high schoolers to college. As people get older, we offer them full curricula on how to get a job, how to date and get married, what to expect when you're expecting, how to navigate mid-life crises, how to let your kids spread their wings and fly while coping with your empty nest (my mom wrote one of those). But when it comes to graduation, we give them some career counseling, maybe point them to an internship or two, and give them a big "hurrah!" when they finish.

That's it.

All of a sudden, they're supposed to be adults. Yet all they've ever been is students. What do you do when there's no class schedule? What do you do when you have to cook for yourself, clean for yourself? What do you do when, suddenly, you go from being the golden child to just another kid trying to get a job at Starbucks?

Here are a few things that you (or that graduate you know and love) should do upon finishing school.

1. Something else. Really. Just do something else. Anything else. But make it new. Make it fun, too. If you're going to be drowning in transitions, you may as well enjoy the process and take some risks. Just out of a no-dancing college, I joined a few high school friends in regular outings of swing dancing. It was a welcome bit of undiluted fun in the midst of an angst-ridden time.

2. Read a book for fun, not because you have to. Even though you've taken hard classes and thought smart thoughts, it's no guarantee that you will continue to think. So make sure to read. But make sure it's something (at least to begin with) that you want to read. If you don't know where to start, try Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or David James Duncan's The Brothers K. Or extend the trying-something-new experiment to reading-something-new by exploring works in a subject you know nothing about. 

3. Find a less than perfect church. That's the only kind of church there is, of course. Graduates face change on every front, and a bit of continuity can go a long way. Find a church where you can serve and grow in community in the midst of the swirling waters of post-college life. What should you look for? Try a church that builds up the people already there and reaches out to people who aren't. Also, find a church that loves the Bible, makes you think and feel, and welcomes a lot of different kinds of people in the same place. Do not choose a church because it's comfortable and full of people just like you.

 4. Find a less than perfect job. They all are. I spent many years looking for a perfect job—and I can assure you, it's not out there. So just take a job. You'll need to pay your bills while you figure out your life, so find something that won't drive you crazy and will help train you in some way (because your 20s are the time to train). I delivered flowers, worked as a secretary, lived in the Philippines as a go-between, paid sales tax, did some writing and editing, went to grad school, worked as a children's club assistant, and pastored a church—and I still ended up happy in a career by the end of my 20s. It's okay, and all but inevitable, to bounce around jobs in your 20s. Don't be flakey, but also don't expect to walk away from college into your dream job.

5. Find a bizarre, never-do-this-in-your-40s kind of job. Move to Mongolia to teach English. Work on a fishing boat in Alaska. Become a window-washer in Manhattan. This is a great time to take a job that you couldn't or wouldn't take later when you're grown averse to risks, picked up a mortgage, and support a family.

6. Focus on a few friends. Your peer group will shrink considerably when you graduate (as, incidentally, will the dating pool). Look for friends you can grow close with and pursue that closeness. These friends, like that church and job, will also be less than perfect. But cultivate friendship with them by spending regular times together. You will never regret investing in friendships, and these will bring stability and needed perspective in these topsy-turvy years.

7. Learn how to cook five meals. It'll help you save money, teach you to slow down, and train you in hospitality. Try the taco soup I got out of the cookbook my mom gave me: equal parts canned corn, canned tomatoes, chicken broth. Heat it up, pour it over tortilla chips, sprinkle with grated cheese. Hearty and healthy.

8. Tithe 10 percent of your paycheck. It doesn't matter how little your paycheck is. Give from a glad heart to God. Don't begin your post-college years with a plan to tithe when you get on your financial feet. Begin regular practices of giving small amounts in a time of want so that you will be ready to give larger amounts in a time of plenty. God owns the cattle on a thousand hills; he'll take care of you.

9. Save 10 percent of your paycheck. I know you don't know where you're going in life, but you can still plan ahead. Put away some money out of each paycheck for a rainy day—or a grad school tuition bill, or a wedding ring, or your kids' college. Set up this withdrawal automatically with your bank. That way you only have to make this smart decision once.

10. Explore and examine. Explore and examine three things: your city, your neighborhood, and your heart. Get to know where you live, the historical landmarks and hiking trails and regional peculiarities. Get to know your neighbors, too, and the local shops and restaurants. Learn about the plants and animals outside your home.

11. Slow down. Keep the Sabbath. It will be easy to be so frantic to figure out your life that you never stop to explore and examine your own heart. Make yourself slow down. Make yourself reflect on this admittedly tumultuous time of transition. Spend regular time in silence. Spend an entire day without driving or spending a penny. Fight the demon of hurry. Keep the Sabbath. Student after student has told me of the transformative effective of their reserving Sunday to worship, rest, and play.

12. Pray and meditate on Scripture. In doing these two things, we invite God into our lives to do what he will with them and we seek to fit our lives—our thoughts and words and actions—to Scripture. Ask God what he wants you to do with your life, whom he wants you to marry, all of that. But don't just do that. Ask him to teach you about who he is, to make you someone who loves him and loves others, to enlarge your heart and open your mind to the things of the Spirit. And expect that he will do just that as you read the words of the Bible, commit them to memory, and return to them again and again.

Athanasius: Battle on Ten Fronts

By Fred Sanders
The Scriptorium

Athanasius of Alexandria (born around 293, died on this day, May 2, 373) stands out from the great crowd of witnesses that make up the early history of the church. If you’d like to begin reading the church fathers but don’t know where to start, consider starting with Athanasius.

Anybody who understands the work of Athanasius in its context understands the most important things that happened in the early patristic period (that is, from about the passing of the apostles to the arrival of Augustine of Hippo). He was involved in all of the most decisive conflicts of the age, and he shaped Christianity in numerous ways. Here are ten battles Athanasius fought and won:

1. He defended Christianity against paganism. One of his earliest books is Against the Pagans, which is a classic piece of patristic apologetics. He begins by asserting that it is not irrational to follow Christ, and then turns the tables by saying that since Christ is the Logos, the reason of God, those who do not believe in him are the ones who are a-logos, without reason, irrational. He backs this up with a damning account of idolatry, tracing its descent from worshiping great things (stars, the sky, mountains) to worshiping small things (men) to worshiping imaginary things (gods in the form of crocodile-headed men). Christianity was still a sometimes-persecuted religion when Athanasius was young, so marshaling an intellectual apologetic against paganism was a crucial task.

What to read: Contra Gentes (Against the Pagans), which is, by the way, the seldom-read first half of the much-read On the Incarnation.

2. He refuted the Arian heresy. This is his main accomplishment, for which he will always be remembered. Arianism taught that Christ was the greatest of all creatures, through whom all other creatures were made. Athanasius countered: Our problem is that we are estranged from God himself, and no created mediator is capable of reconciling us. Only God can bring us back to God. Therefore if the gospel is true, Jesus is God. Through endless biblical argumentation, Athanasius pursued the errors of Arianism and pressed the logic of salvation.

What to read: Almost anything by Athanasius will have a strong anti-Arian component to it, but the Four Books Against the Arians contain are the motherlode.

3. He defended his predecessors and the Council of Nicaea. The first Arians (including Arius himself) appealed to earlier theologians and church officials in support of their views. Any time a thinker like Ireneaus or Origen said something that could be interpreted to detract from the full deity of Christ, the Arians would claim to be the true conservators of Christian tradition. Athanasius did the careful historical work of citing the earlier church fathers in context, and showing that even if they occasionally slipped, the only reasonable way to read them was as proponents of the full, eternal Godhood of the Son. Throughout, he maintained a calm confidence in the essential correctness of his predecessors, and he even avoided insulting wild characters like Origen (who really did say some indefensible things here and there) when he could help it. Athanasius was a young man at the time of Nicaea, and he had several decades of productivity and influence. He out-lived and out-argued most of his key opponents.

What to read: Defence of the Nicene Definition (De Decretis) is the best short piece showing Athanasius in defense of his tradition and Nicaea in particular.

4. He trained the church in how to interpret the Bible. The fight against Arianism was mostly a Bible-fight, and Athanasius took the lead in showing how to marshal biblical evidence to prove the most important points. He had an uncanny grasp of the main things in Scripture, and could argue them in detail. And when the detailed arguments were met by Arian quibbling, he could back out of the trees and see the whole forest, even using new terminology not found in Scripture to specify what Scripture meant. Patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser said “he was the inventor of what one can call the ‘dogmatic exegesis’ which became one of the principal forms of biblical interpretation throughout the great controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries.”

What to read: The Four Books Against the Arians are the most copious, but for a quick look at his exegetical technique, see On Luke 10:22 (In Illud Omnia).

5. He defended the deity of the Spirit. After working out his anti-Arian theology, Athanasius extended his arguments to the deity of the Spirit, which some people began denying in the fourth century. Athanasius’ presentation of the deity and personhood of the Holy Spirit is a classic statement of this topic, though in the next generation Basil of Caesarea would write a more influential and definitive work on the subject.

What to read: Though it’s out of print and I don’t think it’s available online anywhere, the collection Letters of Athanasius to Serapion on the Holy Spirit is the book to read.

6. He articulated the full doctrine of the Trinity. When Athanasius extended his anti-Arian arguments to include the Spirit, he didn’t just add another character to the pantheon. He rounded out the complete doctrine of the Trinity, and that pushed Christian thought to a new level of clarity and biblical power. “For the holy and blessed Triad is indivisible and one in itself. When mention is made of the Father, there is included also his Word, and the Spirit who is in the Son. If the Son is named, the Father is in the Son, and the Spirit is not outside the Word. For there is from the Father one grace which is fulfilled through the Son in the Holy Spirit; and there is one divine nature, and one God ‘who is over all and through all and in all.’”

What to read: Again, the Letters to Serapion are the best, though some parts of the Four Books Against the Arians are also rich in trinitarian theology. Also, you can pick up Athanasius’ direct influence on the next generation (especially the Cappadocians, and most especially Gregory of Nazianzus) with its increasingly potent trinitarianism.

7. He helped launch monasticism as a protest against worldliness. For a church coming out from under mortal persecution and marginalization, the blessings of imperial recognition were great. But overnight, it became possible to be a Christian just by being a Roman citizen, and in some places there were even political and social advantages to being a church member. The result was a creeping worldliness in the church, a dumbing-down of discipleship, and a lowering of expectations for what the Christian life could be. One of the the reactions against that was the first great wave of monasticism. Athanasius was a great supporter of the monastic movement, and wrote the biography of Antony of Egypt.

What to read: The Life of Antony, a must read of early Christian biography.

8. He pastored (as bishop/overseer) an important church. It’s easy to think of theologians as floating heads with big ideas about God in them, but in the early church the leading theologians were usually bishops: overseers of churches. Athanasius gave pastoral oversight to the churches of Alexandria in Egypt, a huge and influential metropolis. Athanasius had an unusually close relationship with his congregations, and enjoyed widespread popular support from them.

What to read: The Festal Letters, which he sent to his congregations before Easter each year, are the best place to catch a glimpse of Athanasius the pastor.

9. He took a stand against imperial control of church and doctrine. Modern conspiracy theorists think the church jumped into Constantine’s lap and obeyed the political powers, but consider the career of Athanasius: Five different times he was sent into exile by the emperors, and this gave him a unique perspective on how much the Christian church could count on political support.

What to read: Athanasius rarely writes about this subject, so it is best seen in accounts of his life. For an ancient source, see the Historia Acephala.

10. He was first to document the New Testament canon. It’s not as if the church had been clueless about the canon before Athanasius: after all, the one thing the Arians and the Nicenes agreed about was which books counted for making arguments about the deity of Christ. But if the question is, “Who wrote down the first surviving list of the 27 books of the New Testament, excluding none and adding no extras?” then the answer is Athanasius.

What to read: The Festal Letter for the year 367.

The ‘new legalism’

By Anthony Bradley
World Magazine

How the push to be ‘radical’ and ‘missional’ discourages ordinary people in ordinary places from doing ordinary things to the glory of God

Is Paul’s urging to live quietly, mind your own affairs, and work with your hands (1 Thessalonians 4:11) only for losers? Do you feel that you’re wasting your gifts if you “settle” into an ordinary job, get married early and start a family, or live in a small town or suburb? Acton Institute Power Blogger Anthony Bradley has some provocative thoughts on the “new legalism.” —Marvin Olasky

A few days ago on Facebook and Twitter I made the following observation:

“Being a ‘radical,’ ‘missional’ Christian is slowly becoming the ‘new legalism.’ We need more ordinary God and people lovers (Matt 22:36-40).”

This observation was the result of long conversation with a student who was wrestling with what to do with his life given all of the opportunities he had available to him. To my surprise, my comment exploded over the internet with dozens and dozens of people sharing the comment and sending me personal correspondence.

I continue to be amazed by the number of youth and young adults who are stressed and burnt out from the regular shaming and feelings of inadequacy if they happen to not be doing something unique and special. Today’s millennial generation is being fed the message that if they don’t do something extraordinary in this life they are wasting their gifts and potential. The sad result is that many young adults feel ashamed if they “settle” into ordinary jobs, get married early and start families, live in small towns, or as 1 Thessalonians 4:11 says, “aspire to live quietly, and to mind [their] affairs, and to work with [their] hands.” For too many millennials their greatest fear in this life is being an ordinary person with a non-glamorous job, living in the suburbs, and having nothing spectacular to boast about.

Here are a few thoughts on how we got here.

Anti-Suburban Christianity

In the 1970s and 1980s, the children and older grandchildren of the builder generation (born between 1901 and 1920) sorted themselves and headed to the suburbs to raise their children in safety, comfort, and material ease. And now millennials (born between 1977 and 1995), taking a cue from their baby boomer parents (born between 1946 and 1964) to despise the contexts that provided them advantages, have a disdain for America’s suburbs. This despising of suburban life has been inadvertently encouraged by well-intentioned religious leaders inviting people to move to neglected cities to make a difference, because, after all, the Apostle Paul did his work primarily in cities, cities are important, and cities are the final destination of the Kingdom of God. They were told that God loves cities and they should, too. The unfortunate message became that you cannot live a meaningful Christian life in the suburbs.

Missional Narcissism

There are many churches that are committed to being what is called missional. This term is used to describe a church community where people see themselves as missionaries in local communities. A missional church has been defined, as “a theologically formed, Gospel-centered, Spirit-empowered, united community of believers who seek to faithfully incarnate the purposes of Christ for the glory of God,” says Scott Thomas of the Acts 29 Network. The problem is that this push for local missionaries coincided with the narcissism epidemic we are facing in America, especially with the millennial generation. As a result, living out one’s faith became narrowly celebratory only when done in a unique and special way, a “missional” way. Getting married and having children early, getting a job, saving and investing, being a good citizen, loving one’s neighbor, and the like, no longer qualify as virtuous. One has to be involved in arts and social justice activities—even if justice is pursued without sound economics or social teaching. I actually know of a couple who were being so “missional” they decided to not procreate for the sake of taking care of orphans.

To make matters worse, some religious leaders have added a new category to Christianity called “radical Christianity” in an effort to trade-off suburban Christianity for mission. This movement is based on a book by David Platt and is fashioned around “an idea that we were created for far more than a nice, comfortable Christian spin on the American dream. An idea that we were created to follow One who demands radical risk and promises radical reward.” Again, this was a well-intentioned attempt to address lukewarm Christians in the suburbs, but because it is primarily reactionary and does not provide a positive construction for the good life from God’s perspective, it misses “radical” ideas in Jesus’ own teachings like “love.”

The combination of anti-suburbanism with new categories like “missional” and “radical” has positioned a generation of youth and young adults to experience an intense amount of shame for simply being ordinary Christians who desire to love God and love their neighbors (Matthew 22:36-40). In fact, missional, radical Christianity could easily be called the “new legalism.” A few decades ago, an entire generation of baby boomers walked away from traditional churches to escape the legalistic moralism of “being good,” but what their millennial children received in exchange, in an individualistic American Christian culture, was shamed-driven pressure to be awesome and extraordinary young adults expected to tangibly make a difference in the world immediately. But this cycle of reaction and counter-reaction, inaugurated by the baby boomers, does not seem to be producing faithful young adults. Instead, many are simply burning out.

Why is Christ’s command to love God and neighbor not enough for these leaders? Maybe Christians are simply to pursue living well and invite others to do so according to how God has ordered the universe. An emphasis on human flourishing, ours and others’, becomes important because it is characterized by a holistic concern for the spiritual, moral, physical, economic, material, political, psychological, and social context necessary for human beings to live according to their design. What if youth and young adults were simply encouraged live in pursuit of wisdom, knowledge, understanding, education, wonder, beauty, glory, creativity, and worship in a world marred by sin, as Abraham Kuyper encourages in the book Wisdom and Wonder. No shame, no pressure to be awesome, no expectations of fame but simply following the call to be men and women of virtue and inviting their friends and neighbors to do the same in every area of life.

It is unclear how millennials will respond to the “new legalism” but it may explain the current trend of young Christians leaving the church after age 15 at a rate of 60 percent. Being a Christian in a shame-driven “missional,” “radical” church does not sound like rest for the weary. Perhaps the best antidote to these pendulum swings and fads is simply to recover an mature understanding of vocation so that youth and young adults understand that they can make important contributions to human flourishing in any sphere of life because there are no little people or insignificant callings in the Kingdom.

How Dallas Willard Changed American Christianity

By Matthew Lee Anderson
Relevant Magazine
 http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/church/how-dallas-willard-changed-american-christianity




“Jesus offers Himself as God’s doorway into the life that is truly life.  Confidence in Him leads us today, as in other times, to become apprentices to eternal living.” —The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard

Confidence in Christ—it is the virtue that I knew my experience of Christianity lacked growing up, which is why I gravitated toward a generation of writers that I intuitively felt knew we had lost something. It was not until after I had spent years reading C.S. Lewis and Andrew Murray, giants of the intellectual and spiritual life, that I found Dallas Willard.  I immediately was drawn to his work, which was infused with the intellectual depth of Lewis and the spiritual sensitivity of the best devotional writers, but was also startlingly practical without being pragmatic.  I always turned the final page of his books knowing I could live differently, but never feeling burdened by lists or guilt.

Willard’s confidence in Christ was not won cheaply or easily, though.  He was a world-class intellectual operating in a world that can sometimes be skeptical—is a gentle way of putting it—of outspoken Christians.  It isn’t the musty confidence of someone who only buried themselves in books, though he clearly read plenty of them. I knew from my first reading that he was a man who himself spoke as an apprentice in eternal living, who had learned much from the Master and could help those new to the craft.  We have not many of his kind among us anymore and we are the worse off for it.

To speak of Christianity in terms of apprenticeship is itself one of the great contributions of Dallas Willard to Christianity today.

My own experience, like many of those who grew up in evangelicalism, was marked by conversions and reconversions and re-reconversions, between which I wandered aimlessly until finding my way into sin and then out again through walking down for the altar call.  I rarely felt like there was something for me to do in between.  I had no concept of daily obedience. But as Willard often pointed out, “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.”  Or as he summarized in his early work, The Spirit of the Disciplines, “Salvation is a life.”

It’s this sort of careful thinking that prompted Willard to frustrate liberals  and conservatives alike—and call all of us to a wider scope of understanding the Gospel.

In The Divine Conspiracy he would offer this about the “Christian left”: “We have from the Christian left, after all, just another gospel ... whose substance is provided by Western (American) social and political ideals of human existence in a secular world.” But Willard would critique “right wing theology,” too, and the reductionist focus on the individual forgiveness of sins.  Both ended up affirming the “gospel of sin management” that eliminated the need for the transformation of life and character of the Christian.

It was Willard who first introduced me to the “Gospel of the Kingdom,” by which he meant that through Christ the “rule of God from the heavens is available for all.”  It wasn’t an anti-personal conception of the Gospel’s effect; the Gospel might come to individual human hearts, but it does not stay there. Rather, we pray “Thy Kingdom come,” we ask that the Kingdom would “take over at all points in the personal, social and political order where it is now excluded.”  Faith is too robust, too powerful, too expansive in Willard’s view to be confined to a single soul.

This idea, of course, has deep roots within the Christian tradition, yet it’s often forgotten in our at times impoverished world of American Christianity.  I remember excitedly repeating Willard’s understanding of the “Kingdom of the heavens” in a classroom discussion and suggesting offhand that it was revolutionary.  The professor gently corrected me, pointing out that it was neither revolutionary nor had Willard presented it that way.  It was simply Christianity—yet we often forget.

And perhaps the area where we most forget is the physical body. Willard may be best known for his teachings on the life of Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount, but his careful unpacking of the nature of the human body reveals an incredibly intricate philosophical truth. I still remember reading his treatment of St. Paul’s understanding of the physical body in The Spirit of the Disciplines, which is still (I think) the most accurate exposition of Paul’s views that we have today.  It is masterful biblical exegesis which knocks silly any idea that Paul had a “low” view of the human body—a misconception Christians today desperately need to let go of.

The Kingdom for all is not a revolutionary idea. Neither is the idea that the body and soul are both part of human faith and wholeness. But both are ideas American Christianity has strayed from—and Dallas Willard was there to remind us.

Dallas Willard’s legacy and influence will continue, despite his death.  His writings will endure and the many institutions that looked to him for guidance will continue to practice the life of the kingdom in the ways he commended.   But those of us whose lives he has shaped, both up close and from afar, will doubtlessly feel the lack.  His life was a gift to American Christianity, for it was the life of one who had found true life indeed.  Which is why, in feeling sorrow at his death I have found myself taking up the mantle of apprenticeship once again that Willard had commended, and finding myself in the prayer that Willard loved so well:  “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven.”

Confessional Integrity and the Stewardship of Words

By Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com

http://www.albertmohler.com/2013/05/01/confessional-integrity-and-the-stewardship-of-words/

In the beginning was the Word. Christians rightly cherish the declaration that our Savior, the crucified and resurrected Lord Jesus Christ, is first known as the Word — the one whom the Father has sent to communicate and to accomplish our redemption. We are saved because the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Believers are then assigned the task of telling others about the salvation that Christ has brought, and this requires the use of words. We tell the story of Jesus by deploying words, and we cannot tell the story without them. Our testimony, our teaching, and our theology all require the use of words. Words are essential to our worship, our preaching, our singing, and our spiritual conversation. In other words, words are essential to the Christian faith and central in the lives of believers.

As Martin Luther rightly observed, the church house is to be a “mouth house” where words, not images or dramatic acts, stand at the center of the church’s attention and concern. We live by words and we die by words.

Truth, life, and health are found in the right words. Lies, disaster, and death are found in the wrong words. The Apostle Paul warned Timothy, “If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain.” [1 Timothy 6:3-5]

Later, Paul will instruct Timothy that sound words come to us in a revealed pattern. “Follow the pattern of sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you.” [2 Timothy 1:13-14]

Theological education is a deadly serious business. The stakes are so high. A theological seminary that serves faithfully will be a source of health and life for the church, but an unfaithful seminary will set loose a torrent of trouble, untruth, and sickness upon Christ’s people. Inevitably, the seminaries are the incubators of the church’s future. The teaching imparted to seminarians will shortly be inflicted upon congregations, where the result will be either fruitfulness or barrenness, vitality or lethargy, advance or decline, spiritual life, or spiritual death.

Sadly, the landscape is littered with theological institutions that have poorly taught and have been poorly led. Theological liberalism has destroyed scores of seminaries, divinity schools, and other institutions for the education of the ministry. Many of these schools are now extinct, even as the churches they served have been evacuated. Others linger on, committed to the mission of revising the Christian faith in order to make peace with the spirit of the age. These schools intentionally and boldly deny the pattern of sound words in order to devise new words for a new age — producing a new faith. As J. Gresham Machen rightly observed almost a century ago, we do not really face two rival versions of Christianity. We face Christianity on the one hand and, on the other hand, some other religion that selectively uses Christian words, but is not Christianity.

How does this happen? Rarely does an institution decide, in one comprehensive moment of decision, to abandon the faith and seek after another. The process is far more dangerous and subtle. A direct institutional evasion would be instantly recognized and corrected, if announced honestly at the onset. Instead, theological disaster usually comes by means of drift and evasion, shading and equivocation. Eventually, the drift accumulates into momentum and the school abandons doctrine after doctrine, truth claim after truth claim, until the pattern of sound words, and often the sound words themselves, are mocked, denied, and cast aside in the spirit of theological embarrassment.

As James Petigru Boyce, founder of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argued, “It is with a single man that error usually commences.” When he wrote those words in 1856, he knew that pattern by observation of church history. All too soon, he would know this sad truth by personal observation.

By the time Southern Baptists were ready to establish a theological seminary, many schools for the training of ministers had already been lost to theological liberalism. Included among these were both Harvard and Yale, even as Yale had been envisioned, at least in part, as a corrective to Harvard. Theological concessions in theological seminaries had already weakened the Baptists of the North. Drawing upon the lessons of the past, Southern Baptists were determined to establish schools bound by covenant and constitution to a confession of faith — to the pattern of sound words.

Confessional seminaries require professors to sign a statement of faith, designed to safeguard by explicit theological summary. The sad experience of fallen and troubled schools led Southern Baptists to require that faculty members must teach in accordance with the confession of faith, and not contrary to anything therein. Added to this were warnings against any private understanding with a professor, or any hesitation or mental reservation. Teachers in a confessional school not only pledge by sacred covenant to teach “in accordance with and not contrary to” the confession of faith, but to do so gladly , eagerly, and totally.

We are living in an anti-confessional age. Our society and its reigning academic culture are committed to individual autonomy and expression, as well as to an increasingly relativistic conception of truth. The language of higher education is overwhelmingly dominated by claims of academic freedom, rather than academic responsibility. In most schools, a confession of faith is an anathema, not just an anachronism. But, among us, a confession of faith must be seen as a gift and covenant. It is a sacred trust that guards revealed truths. A confession of faith never stands above the Bible, but the Bible itself mandates concern for the pattern of sound words.

Theologian Russell Reno has noted that confessions of faith serve a dual purpose — to define truth and to isolate falsehood:

“The impulse behind confessions of faith is doxological, the desire to speak the truth about God, to give voice to the beauty of holiness in the fullest possible sense. However, the particular forms that historical confessions take are shaped by confrontation. Their purpose is to respond to the spirit of the age by re-articulating in a pointed way the specific content of Christianity so as to face new challenges as well as new forms of old challenges. As a result, formal confessions are characterized by pointed distinctions. They are exercises in drawing boundaries where the particular force of traditional Christian claims is sharpened to heighten the contrast between true belief and false belief…. As they shape our faith, confessions structure our identities.”

Confessions structure our identities. If not, they are useless. Within a theological seminary, the confession must function as a living commitment, not as a dead letter. As Reno notes, confessions are characterized by pointed distinctions. They are exercises in drawing boundaries, addressing new heresies and new forms of old heresies. False teachings are always around us. Our task is to make certain that they do not take hold among us.

For many denominations, churches, and seminaries, confessions of faith are kept as references to a faith once believed, but available only in the present as a remembrance of things past. Among us, the confession must guard the faith once for all delivered to the saints as a living faith.

Southern Baptists learned these lessons the hardest way, and we have paid the price of theological controversy for the sake of recovering that which was lost. By God’s grace, we have been granted a recovery, if we will keep it. Now, a new generation must take up this responsibility in the face of new challenges, knowing that these challenges, like the denial of biblical inerrancy, will require the full force of conviction to confront, and the full force of confession to contain.

We must look to a new generation of teachers who will gladly teach in accordance with and not contrary to all that is affirmed in our confession of faith, without hesitation or mental reservation. We must pray for an army of theological teachers ready to do battle with the spirit of the age and, at the same time, to offer a glad defense of the hope that is in us, with gentleness and respect. We must look to professors who will be determined to stand with the apostles and the saints of God throughout the ages in the sacred democracy of the dead that points to doctrinal fidelity.

Faithfulness will be found in the stewardship of words, in the pattern of sound words revealed in the Holy Scriptures, and in the teaching that accords with godliness. There can be no lasting fidelity without confessional integrity.

The ultimate purpose of confessional integrity is indeed doxological — to make certain that we rightly worship and love God. The confession guards the sound words of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and is thus essential to missions and evangelism.

As Fanny Crosby taught us to sing: “Tell me the story of Jesus, write on my heart every word; tell me the story most precious, sweetest that ever was heard.

In the end, theological education is all about the stewardship of words. So it was when Paul commissioned Timothy. So is it now.

“Follow the pattern of sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you.” [2 Timothy 1:13-14]

May those words serve as the Magna Carta of theological education, May the church faithfully teach, even as it is faithfully taught, until Jesus comes. Amen.

Doubting 101

By Janel Leaijian
The Scriptorium

This week Fred Sanders posted a link to a meditation on Barth and the experience of doubt in the life of a Christian, and especially of a theologian. The article deals with two forms of Christian doubt, one innocuous, one dangerous, but both negative. While this post rightly identifies two ways doubt can go wrong, any student of Pascal will argue that there’s also a way that doubt can go right, acting as a corrective for presumption and pride in the life of a believer.

Barth divides the experience of doubt into two types, which I’ll call intellectual and existential doubt. In the first case, a theologian, because he’s doing analytical (pick apart-y) work on Christian doctrines, reaches a moment where he’s pulled his theology to pieces and isn’t sure how the pieces go back together again. This kind of doubt, Barth says, isn’t something to worry about. It’s a natural consequence of analytical work, and provided we don’t “slack” and fail to put the pieces back together again, we’ll be fine.

When I hear this description, it reminds me of Descartes’ Meditations. Descartes decided that in order to do find out which things he knew for sure, he would take the machete of doubt to all his beliefs, and see which ones were so solid that no amount of doubt could hack them away. In short, Descartes and Barth believed that doubt is a part of analyzing well.

A person who never entertains doubts, even about her most closely held beliefs, cannot really be said to be believing them well. This is why whenever I teach Hume’s Enquiry to my students, I try to make them worried about even the simplest relationships of cause and effect. One of my jobs as a teacher is to move beliefs from the “unreflectively accepted” category to the “thoughtfully concluded” category, as Dewey would have it. A student can only properly believe that there are laws of cause and effect once he has seriously wondered for a moment why he thinks the pen will fall the next time I let go of it.

Barth’s second, existential, doubt occurs when the theologian starts to wonder whether theology is worth doing at all, a doubt that seems more akin to despair than uncertainty. This despair might occur as he becomes overwhelmed with the problems of the world or the brokenness of the church on earth. It also might occur because the theologian is experiencing a disconnect in his personal life, either performing a faith he doesn’t believe, or devoting himself to theology to the point that he is no longer living in the world.

Barth argues that this kind of existential doubt is wholly negative, only, always the work of Satan. This is interesting, given that Barth also advises every theologian to expect exactly this kind of attack. God does not create doubt in the life of the believer, but in every believer—especially every theologian—God allows the satanic temptation to doubt. Again, this message applies to a broader audience. One thing the church has been doing a better job of recently is teaching Christians to expect experiences of doubt.

One thing the church has perhaps been doing poorly, Barth notes, is mistaking confidence for shallowness, and doubt for depth. Kierkegaard talks about this kind of attitude in the introduction to Fear and Trembling, the assumption that doubting is the first step to being a real intellectual. Kierkegaard spends the rest of the book firing back a different message – it’s not doubting faith that’s deep, it’s believing in it. The kind of constant reverent faith we associate with grandmothers isn’t simple, Kierkegaard argues; it’s the hardest thing in the world. Rather than despising it and glorifying our doubts we should stand in awe and wonder at the greatness of that real thing, faith, when we see it.

So, for Barth doubt can be an intellectual tool for examining beliefs carefully, in which case it’s useful. Otherwise, it is an attitude of hopelessness in the light of communal failings or personal hypocrisy, in which case it’s dangerous, especially if the doubter finds her own doubts impressive. I want to suggest that there’s a third type of doubt not mentioned by Barth. This is a type of existential doubt not founded in hypocrisy or despair, but in an accurate understanding of human fallenness, and if used correctly, this doubt can lead us further into knowing God and ourselves.

For Pascal the first rule of human thought or behavior is that we are not what we were meant to be. God did not create us to live lives shrouded by doubt, but sin has distorted even the faculties that give us knowledge. That means that understanding who I am according to the Christian story means understanding that I am, fundamentally, fallible. I know that my desires can distort the way I see the world. I know that my reason can become prideful and dogmatic, and lead me into error. So for Pascal, and here he echoes Augustine, doubting myself is sometimes just good common sense. It’s thinking rightly about my own limitations in light of the distorting effects of sin.

This third type of doubt, if used correctly, can result in two fundamentally Christian virtues: humility and hope. Humility, because I understand that without God redeeming even my reason and my senses, I am always in danger of being deceived and deceiving myself. It’s easy as a Christian intellectual to think that I can secure my faith by constructing a perfect system of proofs and arguments, but ultimately my faith is dependent on God’s faithfulness rather than my cleverness. The right kind of doubt reminds me of this. Secondly, as long as I remember that I need God to know truth, not just generally but at every moment, I can feel firm hope. Because I hope in God, even my doubts lead me to trust him more fully, to recognize my dependence on him, and to believe that through him I am coming to know fully, even as I am fully known.