What's the deal with "Rules of Life"?

please argue with me in the comments

There has been some energy in online-writing circles to think critically about “Rules of Life”. The idea of a “rule” traces back to Benedict (530), but has been picked up recently by Christian authors who are seeking to help readers think about faithful use of time. A few authors writing in this area have been

Jen Pollock Michel

, Tish Harrison Warren, Rich Villodas, and John Mark Comer.

Recently there have been a few critiques of the idea in Mere Orthodoxy (as well as a rebuttal), and my friend

Myles Werntz

is working on a longform piece to be published on the same topic. I’ve not read these pieces. I want to neither scoop anyone or pile on, but this topic is in my rearview mirror frequently lately. I’d like to include a few ways to think about how a Rule of Life functions ecclesially, and what kind of ecclesial temptations it might reflect.

All of this is in the service of building up the church, not piling on or acting as an outside commentator. I find it quite difficult to land some of these critiques, as it can feel to church leaders and pastors that they are getting criticized from every corner when I/we am only trying to help. Consider this instead some insider baseball from someone who is just here to fix the furnace, but knows a bit about how furnaces work.

A side note, and something I’m not sure if I’ve written about before (let me know if I have!). There are different modes of working as a theologian.

1. One is to play mostly insider baseball. This kind of work aims to clarify definitions or secure intellectual genealogies. It happens at seminaries and academic conferences, and can be quite fun, if you like this kind of thing. But it’s basically like the stamp collector guilds of old; it is really a specialized hobby intended for specialists. We might wish everyone loved stamps! You get the point.

2. There is also “contextual” theological work. This is the kind of work David Fitch is calling for here. I actually found Fitch’s thesis pretty engaging, until he reached his conclusion. Pastors have always served as on-the-ground theologians, and professional theologians have sought to resource pastors doing this work. I’d speculate that more than half of the books written by theologians intended
   ”for the church” are actually intended for this type of pastor. My concern here is both that theologians are often a poor judge of what churches need (see stamp collectors, above), and that the kind of training someone would need to be a truly “contextual theologian” is not the kind of training Fitch is advertising. It just won’t be thorough, extensive or diverse enough. I’m happy to be proved wrong on this point, but I don’t think I will be.

3. Additionally there are theologians who are like furnace repairmen. We know furnaces. We’ll come into your building, look at your furnace, and adjust it so that it works more efficiently. We can see things you can’t, because you know little about furnaces. You can tell it’s not doing what it is supposed to do, but we can tell you why. The “why” includes knowledge of the deep structure of the thing, of its history, parts, and function. That’s what theology does, too. It is very hard (very very hard!) for many churchmen to understand this function of the discipline. Theological correction often feels like a personal attack, and many respond accordingly. “Heresy”, for instance, is a *technical distinction*. I used this correction recently in a conversation and immediately realized my mistake. I was being a furnace repairmen, but the individual thought they were receiving a personal indictment. For this reason, I’ve come to dislike my job. But!- sometimes you need the furnace to work better. And then you know who to call.

4. I play half furnace-repairmen, and half anonymous mother who brings snacks and does what is needed. If the church is going to be built up, it has to be done from within.

So- these observations about “Rules of Life” are from me, the furnace guy, just here to fix furnaces.

A few observations about Rules of Life, that you may take or leave.

1. Improving people is not the primary work of the church.

   1. But comeon! Don’t you want better people? I’ll be completely honest here- I don’t. Sometimes I wish for worse people, vice-ridden people who come to church because they have tried literally everything else and know themselves only as sinners. Our sin gets in the way, that’s why we are here in the first place. This is when we can receive grace, which is the Church’s unique gift to the world.

2. People can’t be programmed.

   1. You know that sin I talked about, up above? That will get in the way of your rules, your habits and your desires to follow Christ. Jesus tells us only a few things about what it means to follow him, and what he most often says is that we must come and die. Sure, we pray and give of our possessions and love one another. But so much more of the Christian life is about suffering, picking it up and doing it again. You can’t program that- in fact, usually you just have to look around at the fragments of your own life to know what your cross is. We can deceive ourselves as we seek to improve.

3. The Church is not a social program.

   1. I know what Brad is after here, and he includes a line or two that demonstrates that he knows, too. Sure, the church is in fact- analog, “real”, communal, etc. But if I have told you anything, it is that *the church is not for us*. It exists only because there is something other than us, with whom we have to do. I am not eager to invite to church those who are needing more in-person community, actually. God can get them for the wrong reasons once they are there, of course. But the church is there not to fix a need you have but to tell you the truth about the world- a truth that is not told elsewhere. This might be turned into an argument about general revelation- as also with the “enchantment” discourse- but I won’t take it there today. “The Real” that Israel encountered in Old Testament religion was God. This certainly reordered their lives around things like care for the poor and the widows and orphans, but it was because the burning heart at the center of reality had made demands on them- the kind of demands that change you from within. We can embrace a more analog life and still have our lives ordered by technology such that we worship science and politics and expect the State to intervene in our finitude. I could go on.

4. Rules of Life arise from community, they don’t exist as individual devices, or to form a community.

   1. I suspect this is

      Myles Werntz
      angle, so I’m going to leave this here. If he doesn’t address it, I’ll pick it back up after his piece is published.

5. If we do not stop expecting worship to do something, it will never do the thing it is actually for.

   1. The question I get most often is how we actually “do” what I’ve called for. The misunderstanding at the heart of this question is huge. Our desire to create a system so fine-tuned that we don’t have to be good- or in this case, so that we won’t be as sinful- is *the* technological vice that Ellul calls out in The Technological Society. I think Ellul’s insight basically stops there, BUT this insight is worth the price of admission. When you consider a man to be something to be improved, you abstract from him that which makes him a man- Christianly speaking, you make him something other than “prone to sin”. I’ll tell you now that I think sin, and its opposite, grace, is the chief misunderstanding we are having in our technological age. It’s not “the problem of the human” merely; it is how we operate, what kinds of things we are prone to, how we will and don’t and how our desires can so turn us against ourselves that we become hedgehogs, operating at a remove from ourselves, we desire to outsource virtue and vice. This is why things like algorithms and advertising are so so hideous. We consider that man himself might be bought and sold and formed, as an outcome, as a product, as a result. I am concerned this might need to be my next book and let me tell you, someone writing a book about sin is great at parties. No better way to make friends that I know of.

      6. One more thing! I fear the Rule of Life exhibits one of the characteristics of the modern American church, which is that we need something to do. We have so minimized worship as the work of the church that we find ourselves needing to demonstrate our value by adopting programs and strategies to achieve results. We are acting awfully like a marketplace.

   2. And so I will continue to risk the misunderstanding and say again, you do not need a technique or a strategy or a Rule. The fact that you think you do suggests to me that what you do need is a better understanding of what it is you are. A creature, a vessel, a sinner in need of grace. “Holiness” is not an output.