Welcome to the MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my twenty second episode. Tonight I want to talk about what the church is missing. Now, when I say “what the church is missing” I don’t mean every church everywhere. I also don’t mean to say that the church is getting things wrong. I think many of our church leaders are correct and do a fine job in the areas they pay attention to. It’s the areas that they don’t pay attention to that I’m concerned with today.
So before I get into this I want to tell you something that I think is true. The world is moving forward. We cannot be dependent on the accomplishments of our ancestors to the degree that we render ourselves incapable of discovering new ideas. But here’s the thing about new ideas: almost all new ideas are stupid and dangerous. There’s a reason why certain ideas stand the test of time while most fade into the ash heap of history. But here’s the other thing about new ideas: within the tangled mess of bad ideas there will always be one or two that are absolutely vital to the continuation of mankind. Our job is to be diligent and careful as we seek to uncover new ideas. In this effort, free speech and critical thinking are mandatory.
I’m about to begin teaching a weekly Bible study. I plan to podcast each of these lessons for you as well as teaching them live at my church. With these classes, I hope to begin what is likely to be a very long process of bridging a very short gap. The gap is between what you know with your heart and what you know with your mind. I would say that most churches, especially the mega churches, are doing a fantastic job of speaking to your heart. The Bible has a way of cutting right through to your conscience and telling you things that you just “know” to be true. You can feel it. Speaking to your heart has been enough throughout most of human history. In our culture today, it is no longer enough.
We have to be very careful here. I’m not saying that the Bible is no longer enough. I’m saying that we as a people are no longer enough for the Bible. Here’s what I mean: almost all people in the west are educationally developed in a secular school system. This would be okay if the school system stuck to the disciplines. But they don’t. Humanity has built up a religion around the disciplines. Secularism is that religion. It is an ideology. An ideology can be defined as something that tells an incomplete story as if it is complete. That is what secularism does. The disciplines do not do that. In their truest forms, science, history, anthropology, archaeology, psychology, etc. are worldview independent. Facts are neutral with worldviews.
If I light a piece of wood on fire, it will burn the same way whether I’m a Buddhist, Jew, Christian, Muslim, or Atheist. That’s because facts are independent of values. But this independence goes both ways. Since facts are independent of values, I cannot derive values from facts. That means if I try to build a worldview on empirical evidence I end up with a worldview where values have no authority. This means I have no absolute right or absolute wrong and everything is relative. Sound familiar? That’s what building a worldview on science gets you. Today, we cannot rely on speaking to the hearts of people through the Bible because people in the west are ensconced in the religion of secularism.
What did God do in the Old Testament when the Israelites went off to worship idolatrous religions? He gave them special object lessons to extract them out of the idolatry and set them back on track. That’s why many of the laws and utterances of God in the Old Testament sound silly or downright brutal to us today. Because we are not iron-age Israelites caught up in Canaanite religion. If you saw a baby crawling around in a diaper you would automatically infer that the baby has not learned to walk or use the restroom yet. If you saw an adult crawling down the street in a diaper you would call the police.
In one very specific way, our nations in the west are babies crawling around in diapers. What I mean is that we need object lessons to extract us from the religion of secularism. Today, most of us are trained to think with our minds and base our hypotheses on empirical evidence. This is an absolutely wonderful byproduct of the enlightenment. The world has enjoyed vast improvements and advancements at the hands of science. But because of this training, we tend to apply science in domains it is not meant for. So when a pastor is really great at speaking to the heart, he can fill a stadium with people who are listening with their heart. But that same pastor may get ridiculed at a university. Here’s the reality we face: the number of people who are conditioned to favor the mind over the heart is growing. Our church attendance is decreasing in correlation.
So what is the church missing? I believe the church is failing to engage with the disciplines, or the facts, about reality. Remember, the disciplines and the facts do not belong to secularism or any other worldview. Why then do so many churches turn a blind eye to the disciplines? Because they are trying to get their facts from the Bible, and that is not what the Bible was designed to give us. The Bible is designed to give us values. We can use these values to build a structure through which we can engage the facts of reality.
I need to unpack this. Everyone has values, whether they know it or not. You have to have a hierarchy of values or else you cannot understand your environment. For proof of this, listen to my sermon on Holiness and the Hierarchy of Values in MHB 17. Your values produce a filter that you use to observe the world. The facts that pass through your filter are associated with your values. This is why an atheist scientist can observe genetic similarities between species and infer common ancestry, while a Christian scientist infers a common designer. This filter is built by your hierarchy of values, and it is called your a priori interpretive structure. Your a priori interpretive structure literally makes you see the world of facts differently. And everyone has one of these structures, even if they are not religious. This is why CNN can show us one reality, and Fox News can show us a completely different reality. Both realities are derived from facts, but each entity is using a different interpretive structure to gather and describe those facts.
So how do we know what is true? This brings me into the discussion of first order truth and higher order truth. Let’s imagine a person sitting in his living room. His living room is not on fire, but the rest of his house is. Let’s assume that he has no way of detecting that his house is on fire from his living room using empirical methods. In one scenario, this person says that since he cannot observe that his living room is on fire, he’s going to remain on his couch. In the other scenario, the person takes it on faith that his house is on fire and jumps out the window. The first person dies in the fire and the second person doesn’t. Despite the first order truth that his living room was not on fire, the second person took it on faith that the rest of his house was. Even though he had no empirical way of detecting it. The irony is, the second person is the only one who lived long enough to discover the real truth of the matter. The highest order of truth is always the truth that is most relevant to your well being.
And that brings us to the Bible. The Bible has two fundamental purposes. First, it is God’s revelation of Himself to us. Second, it is instruction as to how we, as fallen humans, can share in His holy character. This instruction to be holy is meant to impart values onto us which will produce a filter through which we can engage the world of facts. This is where most churches stop. They read and teach the Bible to impart values but they refuse to engage the world of facts through the disciplines of science, history, psychology, and the like.
The consequence of this disengagement is a gap between the heart and the mind. People can know in their heart that their biblical values are true without knowing in their mind why they are true. This creates Christians who go out into the secular world and are forced to choose between being silent about their faith or being ridiculed because they can’t explain why they believe what they believe. To the nonbeliever who emphasizes empiricism, it makes Pastors look like they’re saying “trust me” instead of “trust God.”
But it doesn’t have to be like this. The disciplines can become powerful tools for the church when engaged with the proper a priori interpretive structure. Imagine a Christian counselor who is equipped with the writings of the best psychological clinicians of our time. Imagine a teaching pastor who can explain the history behind how biblical values gave rise to the enlightenment. Imagine a Christian biologist who can point out how God does not conflict with evolution. Imagine a social scientist who can draw the connections between the diminishing of biblical teaching and the atrocities of the 20th century.
All of this is possible, and it might be required in the west. I think the biggest reason the church avoids this is because of a fallacy that says we as humans have a grasp on ultimate reality. People have been doing this for a millennium. They think they are absolutely sure of ultimate reality until they discover something that turns everything they thought upside down. There’s this idea that we can gain good purchase on all there is through our five senses. If you think that’s true, get on YouTube and watch “Carl Sagan’s Tesseract.”
Church leaders get stuck in this thinking as well. Then they back themselves into a corner where they have to say that everything in the Bible happened in a way that our limited senses would be able to perceive. So, instead of teaching the true point behind the story of Samson slaying one thousand Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey, they are requiring that nonbelievers submit to that story literally before even giving them a chance to access the biblical truth behind it.
Jesus spoke in parables for a reason. He understood the importance of a heuristic. A heuristic is a method of teaching that enables a person to discover or learn something for themselves. Think of it like this. Let’s say you’re going to teach a teenager how to drive for the first time. When they get behind the wheel, you don’t tell them to avoid certain atoms and molecules in front of them. Although you would be factually accurate if you did. You tell them to avoid cars, sidewalks, trees, and guard rails – even though all such items are made up of atoms. They can’t see all of the atoms and know how to avoid them. You give them this heuristic because it’s the only thing they can perceive. If Jesus told us exactly how everything works, it would register with us in a similar way. We just could not possibly understand. Knowing this, He gave us parables that were meant to impart specific values.
It’s these values and knowing the character of God that are the purposes of the Bible. In my teaching, I want to focus more on these values and less on how the biblical account played out in our limited understanding of reality. If I can help people understand these values and bolster them by living them out and seeing the fruit of their enactment, then I can move to the next step. The next step is encouraging people to get out there and engage with the world of facts using their value structure. I want to encourage people to use the disciplines to become better Christians and to stop worrying about how exactly things happened in Bible times. It’s clear to me that the Bible’s intention is focused on these values, or sharing in God’s holy character, rather than being a comprehensive text of the facts on the ground during those times.
I think believers everywhere would hear that and tell me it sounds like I’m saying the Bible is not true. This reaction is symptomatic of the problem. In order to know something is true in the highest sense, we would need a full grasp of ultimate reality. Guess what? No one has that. The Bible is the only ultimate truth that we do have. This is where our definition of truth needs to be understood. I’m saying that the highest order of truth is that which promotes well being. This is because humanity cannot advance towards discovery if we are all stuck in instability and conflict. What do I mean by well being? I certainly do not mean a prosperity Gospel. I don’t mean wealth and I don’t mean success.
Again, we are conditioned by our western upbringing to think that wealth and success are equivalent to well being. What I mean by well being is the stability of humanity at large and the enduring sense of meaning in your life. Having a sense of meaning in your life is the only way to prevent misery. If you want further evidence for this, reference the increasing cases of depression and anxiety in the United States – the most free, most prosperous country the world has ever known. Lack of meaning is the source of misery – not lack of prosperity. Wealth, success, and happiness are not wrong by themselves, but if you sacrifice meaning to pursue them you will be left feeling empty.
You should also know that misery and suffering are not the same thing. A person who has a sense of meaning can transcend their suffering without falling into a pit of misery. Nietzsche said “A man with a why can withstand almost any how.” The source of eternal meaning is God, which is why Hell is utter misery – separated from God and from meaning.
I’ll close with this. It looks to me like there is a gap between the heart and the mind within the church. More and more people are shutting off their ability to listen with their hearts as a consequence of being trained to use their minds in the disciplines. This has resulted in church leaders appearing to say “trust me” instead of “trust God.” This gap between the heart and the mind can be closed by steering away from literal perception and focusing on building up the values put forth in the Bible. If people are grounded in these values, they will be equipped to traverse the world of facts via the disciplines and gather the information they need to improve their own life and the lives of those close to them.
I want to summarize this whole thing in one thesis statement. My calling in teaching the Bible is to explain God’s values to people so that they can engage with the disciplines in such a way as to promote the stability of humanity and to provide an enduring sense of meaning in each individual life.
If you find this content valuable, feel free to share it and to use it in your own studies. If you’d like to support this podcast, you can do so at www.patreon.com/michaelhbaun. There is a link in the description. Your generosity goes a long way to promoting the growth of this enterprise and the cause of free speech. Thank you all for joining me this evening, and I will see you in the next episode.
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