In the past few months, I have made the Psalms feature much more prominently in my daily Scripture reading by working them through each month. As I got around to the end of last month, I came to one of my favourites, Psalm 119. It always strikes me that David's longest Psalm is an extended reflection on how much he loves God's law.
This time around, I spent some extra time thinking about verses 97-104. What stood out to me was David's perception that wisdom and understanding were given to those who loved God's law and feared him. Sometimes Christians find themselves on edge when they are confronted by some of Christianity's highly intelligent detractors, who have seemingly well-thought out and sophisticated objections to the faith. Indeed, dealing with these arguments can be troubling.
But that is why David's words here provide so much comfort, because it is not about how sophisticated your arguments are, or how airtight your logic is, or how knowledgeable you are. Wisdom and understanding, David says, come from following God's Word. And because he submits himself to God's revelation, he writes, David is now 'wiser than my enemies... I have more insight than all my teachers... I have more understanding than the elders.'
This is not to say, of course, that Christianity is something that defies all logic and reason. It makes sense, and provides the most coherent framework for understanding the nature of reality. We have apologists who have gone to great lengths to provide us with reasoned and sound defenses of our faith.
But if you have trouble making sense of all arguments and debates that take place on more academic levels, don't be discouraged by the seemingly intelligent and sophisticated criticisms that people level against Christianity. The truth is that by fearing the Lord and meditating on his Word, we gain the fullness of wisdom and understanding. All the knowledge in the world means nothing if you do not confess Jesus as Lord.
Some good advice from John Owen on being modest and prudent when dealing with contentious theological issues:
I must desire you, that when ye hear an objection, ye would not be carried away with the sound of words, nor suffer it to take impression on your spirits, remembering with how many demonstrations and innumerable places of Scripture the truth opposed by them hath been confirmed, but rest yourselves until the places be well weighed, the arguments pondered, the answers set down; and then the Lord direct you to 'prove all things, and hold fast to that which is good' (1 Thess. 5:21).
While the context here is the discussion of universal redemption around which his treatise, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, centers, the point stands for dealing with any theological issue we may find ourselves confronted with.
In an introductory philosophy course in college I had to read Steven Garber's book, The Fabric of Faithfulness: Weaving Together Belief and Behavior During the University Years. The basic premise of his book is that the college years are some of the most formative years in a person's life and it is in this setting that students begin to think about many big questions, going through a process of forming convictions about the nature of reality and the purpose of life. They must deal with a simple, yet significant question: Why do you get up in the morning?
What makes this process of worldview formation so complex is that the university, culture, and dominating zeitgeist provide a type of atmosphere that makes it very difficult for a Christian student to explore these questions. For this reason, Garber argues that it is critical for Christian students to have mentors, those who have coherent and biblical worldviews and who faithfully live out of those convictions. In these critical years, Garber says, it is essential that students do three things:
develop a worldview that can make sense of life, facing the challenge of truth and coherence in an increasingly pluralist world;
pursue a relationship with a teacher whose life incarnates the worldview the student is learning to embrace;
commit themselves to others who have chosen to live their lives embedded in that same worldview, journeying together in truth after the vision of a coherent and meaningful life (171).
Naturally, it is not as simple as a three-step program, but these suggestions form a starting point from which the student can begin "to understand the world that God has made and our place in it." The college years can be an intensely difficult period of intellectual turmoil if students are not equipped to walk that road. This is where the community becomes so important, because "for a student to truly understand the content of his convictions he must see them lived...students need to see their worldview incarnated in the lives of their teachers if it is to be grasped in a way that can make sense of life for life." Garber then concludes that for students to decide which commitments will give shape and substance to life they must put on
bifocal lenses—developing a worldview, set alongside the history of ideas; being drawn into relationship with a teacher who incarnates that worldview, set alongside the ethic of character; seeing one's worldview embedded in a community of character, set alongside the sociology of knowledge—[lenses which] provide depth and breadth as we continue to ask and answer [these big questions] (173).
Students in the Christian community are, like the young man of Proverbs, continually exhorted to seek true wisdom. During this crucial time in their lives it is our calling as teachers, mentors, and fellow believers to point them to and incarnate the wisdom of Scripture as they seek to find their place in God's story and live faithfully as His children in this world.
Talking about how to address cultural issues from a biblical and theological standpoint since the Bible does not speak directly to many of things we need to deal with as Christians in our society, Jonathan Dodson says this:
The problem...is that we often start with cultural assumptions about what is right, beautiful, and good and go to the Bible to prove them. Instead, we need to bring cultural questions about what is true, good, and beautiful to the Bible, reflect on them theologically and then prayerfully, and carefully form our opinions. Don't begin with cultural convictions and end with biblical proof-texts; end with cultural wisdom by beginning with biblical-theological reflection. Start with the biblical text and reflect theologically on cultural issues. Move from Text to Theology to Culture, not the other way around.
Often, we are entirely unaware of the influence of the values and ideas of our culture on our own heart and mind. This has a significant bearing on how we look at, think about, and speak to culture. In order to begin to think about how we are to relate to culture, it is essential that we first make a conscious effort to ensure that we are rooted in the wisdom found in Scripture and operate from a worldview that is shaped by that wisdom.
We have been conversing a little about the concept of a Christian worldview here in the past while and the role that worldview plays in our life. It has been a popular concept to talk about, and for good reason--a biblical worldview is essential to faithful living in this world. But you might recall the quote I posted from an interview with J. Mark Bertrand last week, in which he said that while many had adopted the rhetoric of the worldview concept, they had not embraced the reality of it. It is not enough to simply talk about a biblical worldview. Further, I stressed the importance of rooting that worldview firmly in Scripture because our beliefs must be rooted in the authority of God. Failure to do so will result in unfaithfulness and an appropriation of the beliefs of our culture.
In an interesting analysis, John Peck and Charles Strohmer, in their book, Uncommon Sense: God's Wisdom for our Complex and Changing World, point out the inconsistency between the Christians in our present Western context and the people of God of the Old and New Testament. Our culture has so effectively demarcated the ideas of "religious" and "secular" that we have accepted that divide, often unconsciously. Sometimes we confront a set of issues or ideas and automatically "assume [the Bible] has little or no distinctive wisdom for such matters." But, say Peck and Strohmer,
this is not the way that Jesus, or the apostles, or God's Old and New Testament people saw Scripture. They had a God who was involved in the whole of life and they had a Bible to match. For them, the Bible was not relegated to religious affairs only; it had significant instruction for what we today would call secular life (11).
There are a lot of practical ways that this separation of parts of our lives play out, and I am sure you can think of many; I will not get into listing examples. What made this divide even more problematic was that the vast majority of our lives fell into the category of secular. Everything we did from Monday through to Saturday, unless there was a Bible study at church or a prayer meeting or whatever else, properly belonged to that division and our faith had little or no bearing on what happened in the confines of those six days. Creating that dichotomy in our lives was completely influenced by how culture distinguished between secular and religious, private and public.
Then came that infamous "paradigm shift" here in the West, where all of a sudden our culture was possessed by a hunger for spirituality, especially fabrications of spirituality influenced by Eastern philosophy and religions. Christians were not prepared for it, because they had only just finished ironing out the distinctions between religious and secular, a pattern which still haunts us today. In the meantime, part of our culture was beginning to increasingly see things holistically and spiritually. This extremely abridged cultural analysis is only to make the point that Peck and Strohmer do: we have some catching up (or perhaps some recovering of biblical patterns) to do.
God has created all of life and He is equally involved in all of its parts, not just in the religious ones...we may say, 'If He's not Lord of all, He's not Lord at all,' but living as if we meant it...that is another matter entirely. Our lives, as Christians, are unavoidably becoming more and more bound up with the world around us--with its culture, its thought, its science, its art, its politics, its industry, its social structures--and with its evolving new paradigm. To learn how to address this as the Bible would is the homework before us (17).
What we need to do, the authors contend, is to see the Bible not just as a strictly religious book, but as one that provides us with underlying wisdom to live, think, and act in our everyday life. In this way we can understand Scripture as speaking to all areas of life in a way that makes its divine authority even more meaningful and relevant.
We must take seriously the command to 'love the Lord your God with all your mind' in this new age, and we must do it through an acquaintance with the pages of Scripture that resonates with a wisdom that sees life as a whole and a God who is equally involved in all its parts. When we learn to do this it will make all the difference in the world (22).
This wisdom is essential to challenging the spirit of this age. For this wisdom, which comes from Scripture, a wisdom rooted in the fear of the Lord, is the most crucial element in living a life that is glorifying to God. We must let His sovereignty extend to all of life.
In the past few months, I have made the Psalms feature much more prominently in my daily Scripture reading by working them through each month. As I got around to the end of last month, I came to one of my favourites, Psalm 119. It always strikes me that David's longest Psalm is an extended reflection on how much he loves God's law.
