In which
our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile
than usual.
Immanuel Can: A thought occurs to me this morning. If there is one thing I could do for
the people of God, I would want it to be this: I would want them to start
talking again as if being a Christian really matters.
What I mean is that I’d like to provoke people to start
saying things like, “Well, that’s the natural perspective, but how does the
Lord fit into this situation?” or “What does the Lord have to say about the
choices I have to make?” or “How do I get my kid to be more spiritual?”
or “What will happen if I do X, in view of heaven?” You know the kind of
thing … talking and debating as if something’s at stake there.
Tom: Okay, I can see that ...
The Biggest Modern Failure
IC: I think the biggest modern failure of Christian thought is to imagine that being a
Christian is a kind of “background”, not material or of front-page importance to
life. So if I could get my brothers and sisters to talk as if the Lord was
a live issue in their thinking, then even if they did some wildly off-point
stuff for a bit, or even if it created disputes, it would be a good thing —
because at least then we’d be thinking of the Lord as mattering, as an issue
that needed discussion, as a serious factor in planning and executing a
practical life.
Tom: I think I know what you’re saying. But I suspect that if you were to put your
concern to the average Christian, you might meet with a few objections. Things
like: “People who try to squeeze God into every single conversation are only virtue-signaling
their own piety,” or “It sounds really unnatural when someone jumps in and
tries to force a conversation into a direction it wasn’t going,” or “You’ll put
people off.” And maybe there is something to that.
On the other hand, there are times when a sudden dose of
Christian perspective in an unexpected place is really refreshing and helpful.
I guess it depends on who it is you’re having a conversation with. What
you don’t want to do, I think, is inadvertently encourage younger
Christians to adopt some kind of phony piety when they are around you, and then
go right back to talking the way they always used to around everyone else.
IC: Yes, well, I think that nobody sensible would say it’s a good idea to “squeeze” into conversations an
interest in the Lord you don’t actually have. That would be hypocrisy. (On the
other hand, it isn’t much better to be authentically indifferent to him,
is it?)
Tom: Agreed.
Cultivating Authentic Speech
IC: What I’m suggesting is not that we artificially install religious language into our speech, but that
we actually start to care about the Lord in such a way that we make him a
recurrent theme of our authentic speech. I’m speaking of a change of our
hearts, not a merely of a gloss on our behavior.
Tom: Okay. That’s something any of us can work at for ourselves, certainly. If we make it a habit to bring the
Lord’s values and agenda into our own thinking — seeking first the kingdom, if you like — then
we will probably come across as more authentic than the person who is just
posing to appear spiritual. In all likelihood we will find ourselves bringing
the Lord into conversations in a very natural way because doing so has become
habitual for us.
Is there a way to encourage others to think and talk the same way that isn’t
faux-pious? And if so, what would that look like?
IC: Yes, sure. People who spend time with Christ
talk differently. In regard to content,
it’s not that they are impressive in some superficial way, but that their
speech shows that they’ve been taken to a depth of thought and understanding of
things that is beyond what might normally be expected. They seem to have
a more profound engagement with reality and with the meaning of things than the average person of their type ordinarily has. And, of course, their speech has
a different general tone, too. It’s gentle at most
times: it is not the speech of wimps, pleasers and politicians. At times, it’s
incisive and defiant and even
thunderous, but always legitimately so. And, of course, it’s
always truthful.
However, I don’t think we can ever get that ability to speak from merely, say,
summarizing its features and making special efforts to reproduce them in what
we say. That sort of content, discernment and timing comes only from people who
have spent quality time with the Lord, and only comes to the extent that
they have actually done that. There is no other way.
Life Around Genuinely Committed Christians
Tom: I get that. What I’m not seeing is any way to transfer the desire for that sort of way of looking at the
world to others — beyond modeling it ourselves, of course.
Here’s what I suspect will happen if we start living and talking like that: some
people will absolutely love it, and some people will really dislike it. It will
be very polarizing. The people in the Christian community with a desire for
reality in their faith will find it very attractive, and some of them may start
to act and speak much the same way. The people who are just posing, on the
other hand — and there are always plenty of those — will find it
irritating, challenging and downright offensive. It’ll spoil all the fun
they’re having playing church.
IC: I think so. You’ll see real venom from two groups of people: those who hate God, and those who claim to
love him but do it only superficially. (I’m not hugely concerned about
offending either group, myself.) But as Christ said, “My sheep hear my voice.”
Tom: What’s the line? “If you’re not taking flack, you’re not over the target ...”
IC: Living like our faith really matters will be hugely appealing to other groups of people: genuine disciples,
those who want to become genuine disciples, those who are hungry for something
better, those whose lives have lacked direction and certainty, those who have
not yet experienced the love of God, and those who have been wounded or
crushed, and who are ready for a change.
So we’ll lose some, and gain others. But it will all be for the right reasons.
The Cost of Change
Tom: There’s is a cost to this type of change. People who are known to start talking about Jesus at the drop
of a hat are not generally known as fun guys. It’s difficult to be frivolous
and goofy and suddenly turn super-spiritual on a dime. The fact that you choose
to work at stimulating profitable conversation of necessity excludes other
sorts of activities and more casual repartee. If you turn the weekly card game
into an impromptu examination of Ephesians, there will be those who love it and
those who hate it ... but I find there’s also a third group, now that
I think about it.
There are guys who really know better, but have gotten comfortable with the dynamics
of their current Christian relationships and have drifted away from serious
attention to the word of God. When you start rocking the boat, they are on one
level a little annoyed to see people gravitating to something different —
something that isn’t them — and
on another level they are a little embarrassed they weren’t the ones to
initiate moving things in the right direction. Secretly they realize this is
what ought to be happening.
IC: Yeah, and I bet there’s a lot more of them than of any other group. Some people who’ve never yet really
been up to anything might suddenly come around.
Tom: There were probably Pharisees like that in the first century. Guys who thought, “Boy, he’s going to
spoil the whole game, but it really needs to happen. We have been awfully fake
for a long time.” There’s shame that goes with that realization, but it’s a good
thing too. Those people can make good lieutenants.
IC: What did the Lord say to one of them? “You are not far from the kingdom of God,” I believe.
Artificial Religious Language
Tom: I want to come back to something you said earlier about not artificially installing religious language
into our speech. It seems to me that’s really important. If we are going to
talk about the Lord Jesus as if he matters to every aspect of our lives, and do
it convincingly and helpfully, we really have to work at avoiding religious
clichés. The problem is that they are really, really easy to fall into. For
most Christians, churchspeak has become our default mode. And nothing will ease
us right back into unreality quicker than a dose of evangelical bafflegab. I’m
thinking it would be really useful to check each other when it happens with
questions like, “IC, how would you say that to your unsaved neighbor in a way
she would understand?”
IC: Yes. And actually talking to our neighbors would be even better, because very quickly we’d see the perplexed
looks on their faces when we lapsed into church-language. We’d (quite rightly)
be embarrassed, and we’d stop. We’d learn to use authentic language, and to
talk about things we really believe.
Tom: I have a friend who says this all the time, and he’s dead right.
IC: You can test yourself. Just take an important but clichéd phrase like “Repent of your sins” or “Worship is
the responsibility of every believer.” Try to put those into language that
anybody — especially a person who had no knowledge of church language at
all — would grasp immediately, and would not misapprehend in any way. If
you find out you can’t do that, what it really means is that YOU don’t
understand it. You may think you do, you may have heard many people
use it, and you may have said it a thousand times in confidence that you did know what you meant; but you don’t. And the proof is that all
you’ve got is the cliché, and no more.
Tom: Amen. Oops. Er, “So be it.”
Concealing Your Meaning From Yourself
IC: We owe it to ourselves and others to do this kind of rethinking. As the great writer George Orwell so
perceptively wrote, the alternative is this: “You can shirk it by simply
throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in.
They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for
you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important
service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”
That’s powerful. Inauthentic language will do your thinking for
you, and will end up concealing what you mean even from yourself.
So if you won’t learn to speak plainly for your neighbor’s sake, then do it for your own.
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