Dropping a little Wisdom

My wife is great at just dropping little words of wisdom in conversation and sometimes by email. I am never quite sure if she drops them for me to use or if she is sending me a message that I should take note of personally. Sometimes it could be both, so I thought I would share this dropped message with you all.

Don Carson is a Christian theologian and scholar who, in his thinking about our world and God, offers sharp and practical applications for consideration. As he reflected on our age, and my wife passed on the reflection, he said, “We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.”

Tolerance, freedom, superstition, indiscipline, and godlessness are massive subjects in their own right, but in brief, I want to say something about them all.

Tolerance can be a virtue but also a vice. Tolerance does not equal agreement. I may acknowledge and respect differing opinions, but I do not have to agree with them. That’s tolerance. The charge of intolerance, when a person takes a different point of view, fails to understand tolerance. There are as many differing opinions among those reading this as there are readers. We all hold opinions that can be argued and debated, but a dis nc on needs to be made between opinions and convictions. Convictions are held with greater force than opinions. Opinions may yield to compromise, but convictions don’t. On a broad range of topics, tolerance is permissible, but on some issues, tolerance is unconscionable, for example, tolerance of domestic violence or child abuse. Of course, many of us have differing convictions on a range of topics. My conviction is that God is real and Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. Others share a conviction that God does not exist, that Jesus Christ is irrelevant, and that sin is just psychological. None of us may change our mind on these convictions, but while all may need debate, tolerance demands we not lose sight of love. To do so would be arrogance, and that is hard to tolerate.

Like tolerance, freedom can be a virtue but also a vice. Used for evil, freedom must be taken away. Such evil producing freedom always centres on the self. Used for good, freedom allows for the giving of more freedoms. Such freedom is always exercised in love toward others. Freedom can be self-centred, or it can be other person-centred. You can always evidence the direction of love in both. One’s love is all about self-gratification, while the other’s love is all about bringing blessings to those around them.

Superstition is, by definition, unhelpful and fails the tests of faith. Faith is not a blind jump, as some suggest, but a jump based on evidence. Faith is the action of someone to move forward based on the facts they have. Faith is required every time you get on a plane and trust a pilot you have never met. You don’t make your destination because you carry a rabbit’s foot or wear a St Christopher’s medal. You make your destination because of the trusted efforts of your pilot. If you crash, then maybe you travelled with the wrong pilot. Marriage is an act of faith. You enter into a life-long union based on the lived-through proof of the other person’s reliability. You can’t know for sure that they will remain faithful to the promises they make, but on the evidence of what you know and have seen in the person, you make the jump with confidence. I don’t avoid walking under ladders because I am superstitious, but because I don’t want what is on them to fall on me. Superstitions about wearing the right-coloured underpants at sport may indicate psychological deficiencies, but have little effect on the results of the game, other than that comfortable underpants are easier to play in than the uncomfortable ones.

Indiscipline loses games, fails exams, ruins relationships, prevents advancement, stops accomplishment, and, while you might call it relaxation, others will call it laziness or irresponsibility. I guess that others would be right.

Godlessness is where a person lives as though God does not exist, where you imagine the power of life is in your own hands. Sounds good, but might that be a dangerous superstition? The evidence suggests that when people pilot their own lives, they are never sure of life’s destination and where to land. There is no objective meaning or purpose in that, just the subjective hope that your coloured underpants theories on life will bring some pleasure to it all. The great danger is that one’s ethics become self-determined and imposed with little tolerance for other self-determiners. As you would expect of the Anglican minister, I am a great advocate for reintroducing God to the public sphere.

David Wells, author of “God in the Wasteland”, offered us a warning in his writing about the weightlessness of God in our contemporary world. “It is one of the defining marks of our time that God is now weightless… he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable… less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than our appetites for affluence and influence, his judgements no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertisers’ sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness…

It’s unsurprising that when God is absent or weightless and “I” become the most important person in the world, that intolerance will cancel the freedoms of others. It’s no surprise to hear such an able thinker as GK Chesterton declare, “When people choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe nothing, they then become capable of believing anything.’’

That should be a warning for us all.

Rick Lewers