In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
David de Bruyn’s series of Letters to Stagnant Christians at Churches Without Chests hit what both Immanuel Can and I considered its peak this week. It’s an insightful post entitled “Confirmation Bias” in which David makes the case that it is possible for Christians to fail to grow in Christ as they should, not because they agree too little with what they hear, but because they agree too much.
Tom: Now, that sounds a bit counterintuitive, doesn’t it, IC?
Immanuel Can: Well, yes. We might wonder how it’s possible to agree too much with anything God says. That seems highly implausible at first. You’re going to have to unpack that a bit, I’m thinking.
Unpacking That a Bit
Tom: Sure. I very much related to the situation he was describing in the post, so let me give you a personal illustration. I have a much-loved younger relative who has many good qualities. But he is a no-nonsense guy who likes to cut to the chase, a device that serves him well in business. On occasion, he’ll ask for advice, and I try to help. But I’ll get two sentences into my answer only to find him saying, “Yeah, yeah, I know. I get that.” He’s agreeing with me profusely, but can’t possibly understand the basis for my point because he’s not heard everything I had to say or had time to give the issue any deep thought. De Bruyn says, “It is possible to adopt a kind of ‘agreeableness’ that never reflects on what it is agreeing with.”
IC: Yes, that’s very good. That’s right. Or one could think of the person to whom you’re telling something of your personal sorrows, and they keep saying, “I know, I know, I’ve been there; I know exactly how you feel.”
And you know, in that instant, that they do not. They are not you. They do not get it. They have not “been there”. This is not their story. All they’re doing is absorbing your story into the empathy they feel for themselves … not for you. If you’ve dealt with somebody like that, all you can do is make it a short conversation, because you can see they don’t get it.
How We Learn the Faith
Tom: Right. The thing about studying the Bible is that it’s wholly inadequate to know the “what” without the “why”, and the “why” takes time to explain and time to process. New Christians who get handed a systematic theological framework without the contextual, verse by verse rationale on which it has been built don’t actually know what they believe at all, and it’s far worse if they are not inquisitive about what they are learning.
That’s how the apostles learned the faith. They went back and forth with the Lord asking questions, getting answers, and responding to his provocations, not frantically scribbling notes at his lectures and nodding their heads like parrots. These were not easy, prepackaged conclusions they were handed. They had to work through parables, paradoxes and mysterious sayings, the significance of which they didn’t initially grasp.
If you tell me “I agree” or “I know” before you’ve even sat down to process something you’ve just heard, you’re not even aware yet how much you don’t know. A much healthier spiritual response is “How can that be? Tell me more” or “Where are you getting that from?” or “Show me how you came to that conclusion.”
Words That Sink In
IC: I wonder if this doesn’t pick up on Christ’s admonition to the disciples, “Take care how you listen.” Not that you listen, or what you listen to, but how you listen — not with a spirit of “I know-ness”, but rather so as to understand, interpret, digest, absorb, assimilate, apply and above all, to obey. There are ways of listening that do not involve any real commitment at all. All the words that are heard are correct, but the connection to their content is absent.
Tom: How about “Let these words sink into your ears” or “What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand.” Both times the Lord was indicating that even the most committed disciple could not possibly process everything he heard in the moment, and the Lord didn’t expect him to. In the first instance, full understanding awaited meditation and faith. In the second instance, further information was required to make sense of what the Lord was doing, information the disciples would not possess for some time. Knowledge was like seed growing in the soil, waiting to sprout at the right moment.
A Love Song in a Beautiful Voice
This expectation that we should be able to reduce everything meaningful to a pithy aphorism or a punchline … Where does that come from, IC? Is it a product of our instant gratification culture?
IC: I don’t think so. I mean, it can come from that, but I don’t think it usually does. In my experience, the bad habit of hearing without really listening is most commonly developed among those who are used to hearing lots of truth, and who have become too familiar with the words, maybe at a time when they were too young to understand, and so have become insensitive to it.
Tom: Kids raised in Christian homes.
IC: Raised going to church, perhaps, and surrounded with Christian language. They’ve memorized verses, they sing the songs routinely. But it’s all like water off a duck’s back, at the end of the day; all those words slide off them and the meaning is lost — even though they feel very reassured that they have heard what was there to be heard. It reminds me of what the Lord says to Ezekiel: “And behold, you are to them like a love song by one who has a beautiful voice and plays well on an instrument; for they hear your words but they do not practice them.”
Confirmation Bias
Tom: David uses the term “confirmation bias”, and I think that’s a good description. An agreeable person of this sort cannot learn anything new from the text because they always hear it the way they have always heard it. The first time anyone in church told them what any given text meant, they filed it away and have regurgitated it on cue ever since. But they never understood what they heard, and they never had any spirit of inquiry or urgency to ask, as they did at Pentecost, “Brothers, what shall we do?” There is a certain laziness about it; a lack of interest in learning what their own responsibility to the Lord might be.
IC: Right. And it’s compounded by another human tendency: the tendency toward measuring ourselves by those around us. When we sit in the middle of groups of people who hear a lot of truth and do little or nothing with it, we may start feeling we are doing enough if we are only doing what they are doing; that thinking or questioning beyond that will not be well-received, appreciated or encouraged, and probably won’t even be recognized as a good thing to do. An agreeable person will take her temperature from those around her, and get no warmer to truth. If there were anything more to understand from this bit of truth, she thinks, the people around her would surely pick it up and let her know. They don’t, so she’s fine: she knows all there is to know about that.
Tom: One of the interesting revelations about writing this post is that I must be chronically disagreeable. That sort of apathetic line of thinking never occurs to me anywhere other than a boardroom gathering at work where, frankly, it’s usually appropriate. With the word of God though?
IC: I think so. I remember my early years, too … hearing many, many messages, but processing far less than I ought to have, and not really having a sense that I ought to do more. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of Christians today were in a similar state of mental stagnation. And I don’t despise them for it, though I now recognize it was never a good state for them or for me to be in.
The Road Out
What’s the road out, Tom?
Tom: Well, David de Bruyn believes over-agreeability is primarily about fear. I’m not sure that’s the entire problem, but I think David has rightly identified a significant percentage of it. He writes, “Someone in your position, Lana, is either afraid of the experience of ignorance and mental re-organisation, or afraid of appearing to be ignorant.” If insecurity in front of other Christians is really the major problem, then the answer may lie in helping our brothers and sisters in Christ to find an environment in which they feel it’s okay to ask questions, and where they won’t be judged for saying something stupid in the process.
Another word he uses earlier on in his post is “laziness”. I believe he’s on to something there too. Some people will agree with you just because it gets them out of having to do any intellectual heavy lifting. They are not fearful, they’re just “not that into you”, as the saying goes.
If laziness is the problem, changing the environment in which agreeable Christians learn will not help them in the slightest.
IC: No. He also concludes by talking about learning to listen actively … practicing the skill of engaging what you’re hearing, especially if you’ve become used to not really hearing it.
Tom: True. We need to be doing way more serious and consequential listening, and way less waving our hands to encourage people to “Get to the point.” They may be taking their sweet time getting there so we will learn a lesson that really matters.
IC: Well, most importantly, I think, we’ve got to shake that impression that we know it all already … or at least the confidence that we know enough. The Christian life is supposed to be one of unrelenting growth, and if we’ve slowed down to the point where we’re not growing or hardly growing at all, it’s not because we’re mature; it’s because we’re stagnant. So if we’re not hearing things that shake us up, unsettle the status quo for us, challenge our beliefs and make us re-examine ourselves, and if we think we “know” it all already, then the fault is with us; we’re just not listening. It’s not that the Lord has quit needing to speak to us.
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