Lindbeck goes to Church

Where we finally make some connections

In the beginning, there was fire and a flame. Or there was a voice and a silence. Or a wind and an earthquake. It should go without saying that the driving force of the Old Testament is God who gathers to Himself a people. Because Israel’s recorded history is so replete with wandering and chastening and even a violent correction here and there, it is easy to forget that all of this history was in the service of reorienting Israel to the God who is already there, present in their midst.

            So Genesis recounts the God who brings order to chaos, and then does it again (Genesis 6) and again (Genesis 11) and again (Genesis 22). This reordering does not just need to happen once. God is constantly having to appear, as if just offstage, and remind Israel “I am the Lord your God”, right before he goes on tidying up the mess that Israel has made, right after he’d just tidied up this very same room. For all the “God is a mother” language, certainly it is God’s persistence to continue to clean up his children’s messes that is among the most compelling example.

            God comes to bring order to chaos not simply because he can’t abide a mess. No, this ordering is a chief fact of Israelite religion; God will be “their God” and he, in turn, will make them a people. The people of Israel are made a fact in just this way- that God has promised himself to them, to be among them. They are the people of the book, the people brought out of the water, the people of the flame.

            You could tell Israel’s story by recounting the collection of individuals who God uses to assist this project. There is Abraham, who must make Israel’s God his own and only. There is Moses, who is drawn out of the water just as he will draw Israel’s way through the waters, only a few chapters later. There is Joshua, who was strong and courageous toward Canaan, leading the way out of a people of idols, toward Israel’s only God.

Out of one thing, towards another. This is the repeated pattern of Israel’s God and Israel’s people. Everything else is derivative of this movement from chaos to order, from slavery to freedom, from darkness to light. The covenant binds Israel to God and God to Israel. The Law hems in and orders God’s covenant with his people. The histories tell the story of evil deeds and sometimes good ones, of miraculous recoveries and violent losses. But all of Israel’s storytelling is hemming in the one greater story of the God who was with them.

We are telling worse religious stories and are worse off for it. When I began writing about Lindbeck, the goal was to look at doctrine and religion differently. Much of my work functions like this; “if you just look at it this way”, perhaps you might see it differently, an alternative might offer itself that is fruitful and open-ended. Lindbeck gives three forms of doctrine that in turn produce three practices of religion. There are those who see the enterprise as primarily a cognitive-propositional one, where truth claims should be harnessed and assent to them gathered in order to secure religious belief. There are the experiential-expressivists, who think God is in the soul and might be unearthed there. They are the modern mystics, the ones who know God when they feel him in their emotions. Much of American Christianity, I have argued, takes these two forms.

The deficiencies of these two forms, or at least their alternative, still remains to be drawn out. The thing with both C-P and E-E forms is that they can operate at a remove from Israel’s project. Israel’s “project” was to be a people gathered around God. Their history recounts the ways they tried and fail to do this. But they could never succeed at gathering without being a people with a history. It was in living badly and horribly and sometimes according to the commandments that they realize God’s own promise to them- that they would be God’s people, and He would be their God.

My chief concern with both C-P and E-E forms is that they are not religious projects, not really. The first is primarily concerned with asserting and articulating “right doctrine”, or right ways of thinking about and understanding God. Public worship becomes centered around the sermon, which might be an engaging lecture or an interesting talk. The goal of “worship” in many C-P spaces is the sermon, and pastors are judged and belabored by giving a good one. The pressure this creates, and the opportunities for churchmen to sit in judgement! The whole thing is so heavy. Spiritual formation in these circles is often cerebral and content-based, oriented around helping people understand more about the Bible, about doctrine, and about Christian behavior.

In largely E-E traditions, public worship is about making space for an event or an emotional response. The way practitioners know that God is with them is by taking account of their emotions- do they feel a sense of dependence? Do they have more trust, more faith? Were their emotions affected- their conscience pricked, their love enlarged, their forgiveness engaged? The goal of pastors here is to model and choreograph weekly events that will help others engage emotionally with something beyond themselves. Spiritual formation, in such a view, works to cue the emotions and enhance emotional engagement with doctrine and religion.

Please note two things about both forms of religion. First, they do not necessarily have anything to do with God. You could imagine an intellectual project and an emotional one that are funded by someone’s favored beliefs or greatest memories. And second, in both forms, the primary job of the pastor and religious professional is addition. You have to program and choreograph knowledge acquisition, assent, and experiences such that people accrue enough to fully gain entrance into communities that are founded on knowledge acquisition and experience. Learning more, or feeling rightly, become elaborate enterprises funded by increased exposures.

It is not all that dissimilar to training an animal. When I trained my dog, I spent a lot of time repeating the same activities and offering the same positive reinforcements. Sit, then get a treat. Etc. By repeating these behaviors over and over again, I produced the result that I wanted. The training was about repetitions. This is often how catechism and spiritual formation is approached in churches; increase the reps, offer some rewards, and hope that eventually people “get it”.

Practically speaking, what these approaches produce are church cultures and staffs that spend a lot of time trying to offer programs that glean results. And do you know what does not produce results in people, for the most part? Programs.

So what else am I suggesting? Subtraction.

In Israel’s history, God gathers a people, and a people gather around God. That’s it. If you are a pastor, your job is to set the table. Light the candles. Pray. That’s basically it. There is no need to offer programs and imagine new paradigms and read endless volumes of ministry “strategy”. There is no strategy, if the religious picture is God and his people. You get to lead the people. Just as God’s presence has always gathered a people, so it does today.

What does that mean, actually? I think it means you have to do less. A lot, lot less. Cancel all of your meetings (which are usually about strategy, anyway). Cut the programs. Ignore and refuse to engage “feedback”. Have a comment box that people can leave written feedback in, and have someone else read it once a week. Pray more. If you really do this, you may find yourself longing for meetings. Meetings make you feel important and productive. Your own personal goal might for a season need to be to feel less important and less productive. This, in effect, is why so many pastors report struggling with depression when they go on sabbatical. They do not know what they are if there is nothing to do and no meetings to convene! But with this third view, even if you are not working, or if you are retired, or disabled, your job doesn’t change. You carry the fire. You tend the flame. You turn your focus to God, and you lead those who are following you. That’s it.

If you are a person who goes to church, or who is trying to raise your children in church, imagine that it is baseball. Or even more basic, imagine it’s a campfire. God is real, and has bound himself to a people. You are one of these people. So you gather weekly (at least weekly!) to be warmed by the presence of God, and to remember that before God you are not alone, but together. If you are a leader, you tend the fire. If you are a church person, you gather around it. It could be that simple.

The feedback I always get when I make these sorts of suggestions is that it won’t work. This is why we need a rule of life, or a curriculum or a new approach to spiritual formation. But there was no spiritual formation in Israel, or in the time of Christ. There was God and his People. The people were gathered around God, and that was enough. Nothing about God has changed. What has happened is that we have become technological men whose religious imaginations have been flattened to the shape of a digital project, a technical interface, a program. In the next installment I will write about how technology has threatened and altered Lindbeck’s vision. For now, tell me- why is gathering around God no longer enough? Must the church do more than this? Or can it try to do less?