The Sick Fruit of our Speech in an Age of Platforming
This post is going to begin a series of wrestling through our speech, which means it is going to begin a series of reflection where we think about being online. If social media has shown us anything, it is that when given the chance to ignore Scripture’s teaching about speech, many Christians boldly go where angels fear to tread.
In James 3:1, for instance, we hear that not many should become teachers. But if someone is using social media to try to convince people of a theological, biblical, or political point of view, then they are obviously taking up the mantel of a teacher. Even using these accounts to buttress others is to be a teacher that validates other teachers.
With this warning in James we find teaching about the tongue and how it is like a rudder, steering the whole of a life even though it is only a small part of the body.
Provocatively, James tells us, “How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell.”
I’ve been reflecting on this lately because of a trend I’ve seen for many years in Christian publishing and platforms: The folks who give vent to the boldness of their tongues are often seen as the most insightful and prophetic.
Rather, I think we need to see this impulse as a kind of spiritual adolescence - an immaturity that seeks to advance oneself by reacting against the ways they have been failed in the faith.
It is this latter claim that is important to sit with. We have all, in one way or another, been failed in the faith. We have had people teach us false things, even if the “falseness” merely names how reductive the assertions are (I hear a lot of claims about how the “Protestant tradition believes x,” or “the Reformed believe y” that are false because of how incredibly reductive they are, for instance).
Most Christians I meet today can name at least one, if not several, Christian leaders who have impacted them deeply and whose sin has made them unfit for ministry. That is a disorienting reality.
I say this because it is helpful to remember that we are all writing, speaking, leading, and living, in one way or another, in relation to pain, brokenness, and our own sinfulness. We are not perfected in a moment and we do not live in a vacuum. The problem is, once we start teaching and leading, we are now held to higher standards. We don’t look at false teachers and shrug thinking, “Oh well, they have gone through a lot.”
My worry, in particular, is how often we hear new voices who make a name for themselves by convincing people that everyone has been wrong about everything before they showed up. Or, as is often the case, everyone has been wrong about everything until this present moment (in this case, they are not the only one who is right, but are linking themselves with whatever the “new” movement is).
This does not mean that we can’t criticize the tradition, but it does mean that before we make claims that are “new,” we had better do the work of being faithful to the tradition we are criticizing. Unfortunately, that rarely happens. Instead, we become enamored by what is new, ever-more impressed by how right we are and how wrong everyone else has always been (just notice how juvenile that sounds).
Let me suggest that our broader impulse should be to love to quote others. We should relish in showing others how God’s people have known the truth, even as we might be tweaking little pieces here and there. We should love to point out how much we are in conformity to the saints who have gone before us, and how hesitant we should be to assert ourselves against what has gone before. We should love to point beyond ourselves to the tradition and to remind people that there is nothing new under the sun.
Instead of suggesting to folks that the gospel has been lost for centuries (for goodness sake, if I hear this again I’m going to lose it), which is nothing more than railing against your old youth pastor, what if we actually do the work of going back and listening intently to the tradition to read Scripture along with others who do not share the same presuppositions as we do.
Also, and this is perhaps most important, let’s make these bold claims of originality and ignorant assertions against our tradition passé and uncouth.
Let’s just not accept them any longer. We can do that you know. We can just decided that overly reductive grandiose posturing is infantile and call it so. We can recognize that folks who constantly cause people to question their own church tradition are, to use the older language, rabble-rousers, creating stumbling blocks for people and are divisive in the church.
But as long as we continue to hold them up as prophets we baptize the very sort of speech that Scripture names as evil. The tongue is a fire indeed. Let us remember that as we bear witness to the crucified Lord of glory in our words.
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