They Believed what was Right in their Own Eyes
When everyone is the magisterium
“In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Judges 21:25
I have had several interactions recently that brought to my mind a paraphrase of this passage in Judges. The paraphrase would read something like: “In those days there was no theology in the land. Everyone believed what was right in their own eyes.”
It might be more correct, however, to say, “In those days there was no authority in the land.” Authority has always been a problem in evangelicalism. It is not that authority doesn’t exist, but that we naively assumed we don’t have to submit to one. Instead, a vacuum developed, and was filled by anyone with a platform.
The danger of the current ideology is predicted in 2 Timothy 4:3-4:
“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.”
I want to take this in a different sense than we often do. Typically, this is associated with straight-forward heresy, and it no doubt includes that. But my worry today is something a bit different.
What I see going on today is the weird belief that we don’t have to submit to a theological system of belief, but can, instead, treat the theological tradition as if it is a random buffet-line of options.
So I see evangelicalism thinking that they can take a bit of Eastern Orthodoxy here, a dash of Catholicism there, and a pinch of pop-psychology for flavor, as if we can treat doctrines and practices in isolation from the theological womb where they developed.
The fantasy is that “I am just learning from the tradition,” when the reality is that you are destroying the entire tradition and recreating one in your own image.
What this does not mean is that we shouldn’t learn from the tradition, or read the Catholics or Eastern Orthodox. To reject these traditions would fail to be Protestant. Protestants have always read the tradition broadly and deeply. It is an essential feature of our theology. But we read it as Protestants, and we recognized that we couldn’t just borrow things without integrating them into a holistic vision (I co-edited this volume years ago to teach people how to read the spiritual tradition with breadth and depth, while still reading it “Protestantly”).
Today we have lost that holistic vision. This is one of the reasons I am encouraged to see that Gavin Ortlund has published a book on “mere Protestantism.” The last thing we need in the church right now is a theological system for every single person: everyone believing what is right in their own eyes.
We need to recover the deep vision of Protestant theology and spirituality, one that wasn’t narrow or short-sided, but that sat long with the full witness of Christians throughout history.
So we do need to read deeply.
We need to read broadly.
But we need to do so in light of the truth of our Protestant convictions.
Nowhere is this more pressing, and more absent, than in the current spiritual formation conversation.
There is often an entire neglect of Protestant beliefs and practices that are often replaced with alien visions of the church, growth, and habit formation. We have a profound vision of these things in our own history, that we should attentively and patiently consider before starting from scratch as if we’ve never thought about these things before.
The reason I think this is so pressing, beyond the obvious, is that because of the authority gap in evangelicalism, the way that vacuum gets filled is by those who are loudest, savviest, and most pragmatic. These folks are often reacting to what they experienced in the evangelical church, but who haven’t gone back and sat patiently with the Protestant tradition.
In their reactions they are tossed by the waves, and through their teaching the church is increasingly tossed back and forth to greater extremes, often simply recapturing views rejected as false or even heretical. In this storm we need to rest in deeper things. In the storm we must not focus on the waves tossing us about, but as Kierkegaard declares,
“When the sailor is out on the ocean, when everything is changing all around him, when the waves are born and die, he does not stare down into the waves, because they are changing. He looks up at the stars. Why? Because they are faithful; they have the same location now that they had for our ancestors and will have for generations to come. By what means does he conquer the changeable? By the eternal. By the eternal, one can conquer the future, because the eternal is the ground of the future, and therefore through it the future can be fathomed.”
The Protestant and evangelical theological vision is one that rests upon the truths of God, Christ, and salvation, and is one that is always reforming around Scripture as the purifying fire of our theology. This theology rests on the truth of who God is and who he is for us in Christ Jesus, that by the power of his Spirit we can draw near and rest in him. These are the stars that ground us against the waves of over-reaction and the ever-pressing oppression of the new, relevant, and shiny.
We do not need less theology today, but more. But the theology we need is a spiritual theology that rests in the deep things of God as it articulates life before his face. Fortunately, this is exactly what our own tradition provides.