Look at me, blogging up a storm. Who knew I could stay so on task with blogging?

Today I was working on some web design stuff, watching tutorial videos so I can learn Flash CS5, and scanning old documents so they can be thrown out, when an unexpected interruption came.

I heard a firm knock on the door, followed by a muffled bark. (PS is trying to become more of a guard dog these days by barking when people knock on the door, but she’s still getting the hang of it. It’s hit and miss, sometimes she gives a series of loud, threatening barks, sometimes no bark at all, and sometimes a half-hearted, quiet bark like today.)

I ignored the first knock, thinking that it might be the FedEx guy finally delivering the bubble envelopes I ordered on Ebay early last week. (I’m also in the process of selling many of our old books we don’t want anymore on Amazon, so I needed a large, cheap supply of bubble envelopes.) Anyway, I figured if it was the FedEx guy, he would knock once, leave the package, then take off and leave me in peace to finish my many projects. No such luck. Another knock came (this time no bark).

Photo by brentdanley (flickr.com)

I grudgingly got up to answer the door. I glanced through the peephole to see two nicely-dressed women smiling at me. They were youngish looking, not very threatening, and didn’t seem to be moving off my doorstep, so I decided to answer the door instead of pretending like I wasn’t home. I had a feeling they were religious solicitors, but we’ve had several fundraising solicitors come to our door in the past (selling cookies, magazine subscriptions, etc.) so I figured I’d give them the benefit of the doubt and maybe get some cookies out of the situation.

Unfortunately, cookies were not to be. My initial instincts were right. Young, well-dressed, happy-looking people = JW or LDS. These two were LDS. I wasn’t in the mood for, nor did I have time for a rigorous debate with them, so I feigned ignorance about their purpose and tried to be polite/nice/non-inviting. I left the door half-closed as I talked to them so they would understand that I didn’t want to invite them in.

As soon as I found out they were Mormons, my gut reaction was to end the conversation immediately, send them packing, and pray away the evil from my front door. After all, I was raised in a denomination in which people anoint their homes with oil and pray God’s blessing when they first move in so nothing left over from previous pagan occupants has an effect on the new owners. I was quite tempted to view these two girls as abominations and Satan’s workmanship, created to do evil works that he prepared for them in advance.

Then I caught myself emotionally. Also, it’s hard for me to treat anyone, no matter how much I may disagree with them, rudely to their face. So instead of making the sign of the cross and slamming the door in their faces, I talked to these girls like I would talk to anyone else. I answered their questions honestly and nicely. I asked them a couple of questions about their faith in a non-threatening way.

Although I would have liked a chance to share my faith with them and really get into the nuances of Mormonism versus orthodox Christianity, I didn’t have time for it, nor did it seem that they were prepared for that type of conversation.

At one point in our conversation, I asked one of the girls if Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon. She had told me that the Book of Mormon is the “words of Christ.”

“But how can they be the words of Christ if Joseph Smith wrote it?” I asked.

She quickly responded that Joseph Smith didn’t write the Book of Mormon; the prophets wrote it. “You know, like how the prophets wrote the Bible. Like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and all of the other writers of the Bible. They were the Eastern testimony of Jesus. The Book of Mormon was written by the Americans who were here at the same time that the Bible was written in the East. It’s the Western testimony of Jesus. Jesus isn’t just for one culture, He’s for all cultures. So this is just another testimony of Jesus, but it says all the same things as the Bible. Everything about Jesus has to match up and be true. Joseph Smith found the writings of the American prophets and translated it by the Holy Spirit.”

“So the Book of Mormon was written by Native Americans?” I asked with a hint of skepticism in my voice. (I really tried hard not to sound skeptical, but at that point, I couldn’t help it.)

“No, it was written by American prophets,” she responded.

“But you said that it was written at the same time that the Bible was written. And when the Bible was written, American hadn’t been discovered yet. So the only people here were Native Americans. So they had to have written the Book of Mormon.”

“Yes, so it was written by Native Americans,” she said.

At least we were getting somewhere logical. These ladies were pretty adamant about the Book of Mormon being entirely compatible with the Bible and simply illuminating the Bible even more. It would take hours to travel down nuanced paths of theology with them to point out incompatible things between the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and unfortunately I was out of time.

They could sense my impatience, so one of the girls asked if they could give me their number so they could come back and talk for 15 more minutes. (She actually said, “Would you have 15 minutes to have us come back and talk to you again another day?” I guess the LDS church teaches 15-minute increments for best conversion practices.)

I took their number and told them I would see if my husband wanted to talk to them. One of them was Chinese and I thought he might be interested in practicing his Mandarin with her. But mostly I took the number because I would have done the same if they had been generic fundraisers and not religious people. I did it because I wanted them to feel normal, and I wanted them to think of me as a kind person.

At the beginning of our conversation, they had asked me if I went to church. I told them about Calvary and why we liked it. I told them I went to Wheaton College. I made it clear that I was an evangelical Christian. I didn’t want their impression of an evangelical Christian to be someone who is hateful and afraid. I wanted them to see that I treated them with respect and care.

It was funny – when they small-talked with me at the beginning and the end of their spiel, I felt like I was talking to any normal girl. They were nice. I felt like we could actually have been friends in other circumstances. But the reason they were on my doorstep talking to me was because they wanted me to convert to their beliefs. They had an ulterior motive.

On the one hand, it impressed me that they were so zealous about what they believed that they would knock on strangers’ doors and ask them about their faith. It impressed me that they cared about others’ relationships with God enough to do uncomfortable things.

On the other hand, I feel like genuine relationships (versus doorstep blitz conversations) have a lot more weight in actually changing the way people think. I have never made any life-changing transformations in a 15-minute conversation with a stranger.

Instead, it was hours of discussion over lunch, it was midnight prayers and tears, it was genuine compassion and love from people who really knew me, that had an impact on me – drawing me closer to Christ and shaping the way I relate to Him. In those 15 minutes today, I wished that I could give that kind of relationship to these two girls. Maybe we’ll connect again, maybe we can develop a relationship. But probably not. It’s hard to have that kind of relationship with people, even people you see every day.

Relationship is uncomfortable. But I think it’s how God wants us to relate to each other, how He chooses to reveal Himself, and how He’d like us to reveal His love.

So what do you do when Mormons come knocking?

First off, I strongly recommend the book I’m reading right now: Surprised by Hope by NT Wright.

I think I read NT Wright in a Bible class at Wheaton, but I’m pretty sure it was the class I took with the worst Bible prof Wheaton has probably had. He was no longer teaching right after the semester I had him for New Testament. The highest grade in our class on our midterm exam was a D. For New Testament. At Wheaton College.

Anyway, because of the other negative parts of the class, I don’t think I paid much attention to Wright.

But now, reading through this book for pleasure and for desire of the knowledge it contains, I am really falling in love with Wright as a writer. He reminds me a whole lot of CS Lewis, and that’s pretty sweet, because he’s still alive. Hence, there is a chance I could interact with him some day. I probably won’t, but the mere prospect makes me happier to read his writing.

But on to the topic of the book…

Ever been confused about what happens when we die? There are a lot of scriptures about this, but I always felt confused. People say you go to heaven when you die. Movies show the saved knocking on St. Peter’s gates, being let in if they were good (or for Bible-fearing Christians, if their names were written in the Lamb’s book of life). Then the saints sit around worshiping God, falling on their faces and calling Him ‘holy’ for the rest of their lives.

I’ve heard that you see everyone you know when you get to heaven, that it’s okay to lose Christian loved ones to death, because they’re waiting for you “on the other side.”

And then there’s “the other side of the other side” aka hell. In youth group, I remember being shown a video about a girl who died in a car accident and went to hell. The video graphically showed a place of horrific terror. Then at the end of the video, the girl came back to life and knew that she had to change her life so she wouldn’t go to that awful place. I can’t count the number of altar calls I’ve heard given with the threat of “Do you know where you would go if you walked out of this building today and got hit by a bus?”

People die, they go to heaven if they’re good (or if they accept Jesus, depending on whether you’re a Christian or you’re following popular belief about life after death in our culture); they go to hell if they’re bad (or if they reject Jesus).

Okay, easy enough.

But then I knew the Bible has all this stuff about “new heavens” and “new earth.” What does that mean anyway? What is a glorified body? Do dead people have consciousness?

I won’t say any more for now because I have to go to bed, but I will say that NT Wright’s book answers these questions with great sensibility and understanding of Scripture. My thoughts on heaven, hell, salvation, resurrection, Kingdom of God, stewardship of the earth, and so much more have been radically transformed by this book. Check back soon for part two…

We are not theologians by any means in the traditional sense of the word.  Sure, we practice theology informally all the time, but we aren’t trained professionals.  We haven’t been to seminary.  We can’t rattle off the doctrinal views of Edwards, Calvin, and Luther off the top of our heads like some of our more distinguished theologian friends can.  (*cough* David Bawks)  But based on an interesting dialogue I (Angel) was a part of in my Doctrine of the Holy Spirit class at Wheaton a few years ago, we have what we feel is a pretty solid understanding of how scripture should be interpreted.  It is logical, reasonable, and probably biblical.  But it is not intuitive, easy, or what either of us were taught to believe growing up.  It also seems to directly contradict much of the teaching and assumptions we see in mainstream evangelical culture today.

A model of traditional Protestant revelation

The above diagram was drawn on the board by a classmate during the discussion I mentioned.  It shows the Holy Spirit inspiring the original biblical authors to write the Word of God.  The Word of God then inspires the individual and the Church at large.  There is really no inspiration outside of the Word.  Even when the Holy Spirit inspires me with a direct word for my life, it is usually by using something in the Bible.  We have come to refer to the Bible in the Church today as “God’s Word” almost flippantly, without stopping to think about what we mean.  Then, because we translate scriptures like John 1:1 to refer to Jesus as “the Word,” the Bible begins to take on supernatural properties mirroring the person of Jesus.    We stand on the Word and claim it over our lives.  We pick out scriptures and believe that they mean something to our specific situations, whether it is that I will get this new job because “God has plans to prosper me and not to harm me, to give me hope and a future” or whether it is that God will bless America if it keeps His name on its coins because “blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD.”  We can be falsely led to put our trust not in God Himself, but in His Word.  We become, as one professor at Wheaton put it, Bible Deists.  We don’t say we believe this, but in practice, we act as though God created the Holy Scriptures and then sat back to watch His Word save the world.

I didn’t realize that I thought this way until my sophomore year at Wheaton, when I started to really think about what I meant when I claimed God’s Word for my situation.  I also began to see the contradictions in believing in spiritual gifts for the Church today, in the Holy Spirit’s active voice, and yet thinking that all of the practical implications of my Christianity (read: rules) came ultimately from the Bible.

We totally get why the above diagram became integral in the Church’s thinking about revelation.  When Luther promoted the doctrine of sola scriptura, the Church was in a pretty bad state.  The Church was equal with God.  The diagram was basically missing the Bible altogether.  Something needed to be done.

In the past couple hundred years, we’ve gotten past the initial faults of the Church that first led us to this extreme elevation of scripture, and now we think it’s time to come to a more balanced view.

A balanced view of revelation

As our dialogue in Doctrine of the Spirit class continued, this diagram was drawn on the board to compare with the traditional view of revelation.  In this view, the Holy Spirit still inspired the biblical authors to write the scriptures.  However, the Spirit also inspired and continues to inspire individuals and the Church community, using both direct revelation and the Bible.  Why is this an important distinction?

1) It more clearly shows the distinction between God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, author of all revelation, and everything below.  In the traditional diagram, we see three levels.  The Trinity is giving revelation through the Spirit to the biblical authors, creating the Bible.  Then the Bible is passing that revelation onto the community/individuals, and all further revelation from the Spirit is filtered through the Bible, which is put on a higher level (easily leading us to Bible Deism).  Again, I know very few Protestants who would actually say they believe that this hierarchy exists.  But the way we live out our theology indicates that we believe it. When our particular sect of Christianity comes up with an idea that much of the Church community disagrees with, and we say that it doesn’t matter, we’re sticking to our guns because that’s what the Word of God says, we are actually adhering to that traditional view of revelation.  Some of you are probably balking at what I just said.  You’re thinking my reasoning would allow for things like the current trend in the Church ordaining homosexuals.  If everyone else tells us to ignore what the Bible says about homosexuality or to interpret it differently, should we just cave in?  This kind of thinking can only lead to liberal immorality, right?  But I’m not saying we throw out the Bible altogether.  What I am saying is that the reasoning that “The Word of God says it, so I live it, no matter what anyone says” might lead to some great stances.  But it can also lead to churches who teach that speaking in tongues is of the devil, that drinking any alcohol ever puts you in danger of hell, and that anyone who doesn’t believe in pre-trib rapture can’t do anything for the Kingdom of God.  I actually had a meeting with a ministry leader once who said those exact things to me.  He said that their ministry refused to work with people who spoke in tongues, believed in social drinking, or didn’t uphold pre-trib rapture theology.  “We just try to follow what’s in here,” he said, patting his Bible lovingly.  (He had no idea that I was a life-long Pentecostal who prays in tongues pretty regularly.)  So this same reasoning can get us some great, beneficial doctrines that promote holiness and the will of God, but they can also lead us down a path of nitpicking, hypocrisy, and false interpretations of scripture that ostracize quite a lot of faithful, holy believers.

2) The distinction between the traditional view and the balanced view is important because it allows for the canonization of scripture to be just as important as the writing of scripture.  I know many nonbelievers who think that Christians are insane for thinking the Bible is anything special because it was put together by humans, and we admit it.  It would be different if Christians claimed that God shipped the book down straight from heaven and someone found it in a cave somewhere, but we don’t.  We affirm that the scripture was put together by the community, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.  You see, this is the primary distinction (we believe) between Christianity and every other religion that even comes close.  Our God IS a living God. He is active, present, speaking, through every stage of our personal lives and the history of humanity.  He didn’t stop speaking when the Bible was written, and He didn’t stop speaking when the Bible was canonized.  We trust that scripture is trustworthy because we trust that God was directing the process of preserving the scripture.  And even when translation errors have occurred, we trust that He continues to direct the process of preserving accurate scripture.  Misinterpretaton and mistranslation do not negate the validity of the scripture because we know that the Holy Spirit has worked through the Church and will not stop working through the Church to bring about God’s purposes. Many years ago, scripture was used to uphold the ideology of slavery.  Hopefully, none of us would take that stance today; our culture has changed its view, and the Church as a whole has changed its view.  The traditional view of revelation (sola scripture to the extreme) would logically dictate that things like slavery, which are technically “upheld” in the Bible, should continue to be upheld.  (Paul says if you are in slavery to remain there and be the best slave you can be.)  But the balanced view of revelation says that God not only works through the text of the Bible, but also continues to work through individuals and the Church community to bring about cultural shifts, societal transformations, and prophetic movements of grace.  These three things–the Bible, the Spirit speaking to individuals, and the Spirit speaking to and through community–are intimately related and should be inseparable in the lives of Christians.

3) Without these three areas being in completely equal, integrated standing with one another, you will always get gross errors in Christianity. As we mentioned, when Luther posted the 95 theses, the Church was being led horribly astray.  Community trumped everything.  Individuals couldn’t understand the Bible or sermons or have a personal relationship with a God who didn’t even speak their language.  Church leaders decided what holy living meant, and didn’t take scripture into account as much as they took their own whims and financial needs into account.  But now in many churches and ministries, like the ministry I mentioned above (when the guy told me they were just following what the Bible says), the gross error comes when putting the Bible above everything else.  Who cares what God speaks to individuals?  Who cares that someone had an undeniably real experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues?  Our view of the Bible doesn’t allow for it.  Who cares if loads of other believers think there might be other valid views of the end times besides pre-trib rapture?  I guess they’re all going to hell because our Bible teaches pre-trib, baby.  Obviously this view of scripture trumping the other two elements is problematic.  It places too much sovereignty on individual interpretations of the text and allows for no accountability from other believers.  (Which ironically enough isn’t even biblical, 1 Cor. 12:12-25) Finally, when the third element of individual revelation becomes greater than the other two, you get errors like cult leaders who decide that because God spoke to them, no matter how much it may contradict the words of the Bible or the rest of the Church community, their followers should commit suicide, do drugs, practice group sex, and worship the cult leader.  Okay, so that’s an extreme example.  A more common example might be that you date someone who’s really pretty terrible for you and isn’t very godly, not because you found support in biblical ideas for dating them or because you had the counsel and wisdom of the body of Christ, but because you were in love with them and God told you to do it.  Or maybe you heard what you wanted to hear…  But we never mishear God, right? 

Hopefully this makes pretty good sense to everybody and doesn’t sound too heretical.  Again, we are not saying that the Bible isn’t the inspired “word” of God.  We are just saying that it is not THE be-all, end-all WORD OF GOD.  There is only one LORD and His name is YWH, not HOLY BIBLE. We can’t treat scripture like a spell we cast over our lives to charm our way into God’s blessing and abundance.  Relationship with Him, the living, active God is the primary goal of our lives, and as uncomfortable as it may be, as much as it means wrestling with many perspectives and ideas, we think that means that the Bible needs to be viewed as a living document too.  Not because we can change the text to mean what we want it to mean, but because we are limited creatures who probably already have a lot of inadequate understandings of scripture and need to be tempered by the Holy Spirit’s action in our lives daily and in the history, past and present of the entire Church community.

We wanted to present this post before we get into some other issues that we care deeply about and may think differently about than mainstream evangelical viewpoints.  Our views have been largely shaped by the personal journeys God has taken us on and by many wonderful believers in our lives.  We still believe the Bible is relevant, breathed into by God, and useful for instruction, but we also believe that scripture must be interpreted through the lenses of the Holy Spirit’s constant interaction with us as individuals and with the greater community of believers.  Like we said in the first paragraph, this is probably biblical, certainly logical, but not easy.  It requires us to engage with many different views and to have an intense, active dialogue with God.  But we want to challenge you to take the hard road.  Don’t believe things just because the Bible tells you so.  That’s great for easy issues like “Does Jesus love me?”  But for more complex issues, nuance is important.  God blessed us with brains and more importantly with relationship and discernment in the Holy Spirit.  Let’s be good stewards of our gifts and commit to engage the difficult issues. Because of our emphasis on the Spirit’s equal revelation to individuals and community, as well as through scripture, we may have some opinions that make people uncomfortable.  Just sayin.  We’re pretty sure Jesus made people uncomfortable too.  Hopefully we’re able to do it for the reasons He did and not just because we’re awkward, weird, and difficult.  But you, our readers, can be the judge of that