Discernment

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Whenever a new movement starts spreading through Christian circles, calls go out for 'discernment'. If we have 'discernment', we are told, we'll be all right - we won't end up like the 'lunatic fringe' who have taken the teaching far too far. And this has merit. After all, showing that immature people have taken a theology to an unbiblical and harmful extreme is not the same as showing it to be false. But what is this discernment stuff?

The Concise Oxford defines it, concisely, as 'Good judgement or insight,' and this is certainly a reasonable working definition. How, then, can we develop good judgement or insight in order to evaluate the next teaching which comes along?

An accusation often levelled at people who are skeptical of new movements is that they 'lack faith' and so do not 'discern' its truth - the implication being that only believing in and accepting the movement enables one to judge it or have correct insight into it. This seems to me to be backwards. Surely we should gain an insight first, and then decide whether to accept it?

Ah, but no - the 'natural mind' is in 'enmity towards God', we are told, and only by setting our doubts aside can we perceive the truth. This is a paraphrase of Romans 8:7, which actually says that the mind set on the flesh (the Greek word used for 'mind' means the reflection of a person's priorities, convictions and beliefs, not the intellect) is in enmity towards God - it is really a paraphrase of 'No man can serve two masters.' It has nothing to do with the unreliability of thinking. Os Guinness, who has written an excellent book on doubt, has this to say:

'The hoary rumour that doubt is a problem of too much thinking has surely been laid to rest. Most doubts . . . have far more to do with wrong thinking or no thinking at all than with too much thinking' (Os Guinness, Doubt, Lion, 1976, p 198). Paul was not, after all, talking about the exercise of discernment about spiritual matters (which he urges continually), but about the struggle between godly and ungodly desires.

Another passage often referred to to deny the legitimacy of rational thought in spiritual matters is 1 Corinthians 2. Here, Paul is urging the Corinthians to become spiritual so that they can 'make judgements about all things' (v 15), and proclaiming the worthlessness of worldly wisdom. He is not, however, saying that the 'superspiritual' Corinthians, who 'lack no spiritual gift' (1:7), have it together here and so can understand matters which are irrational. Just the opposite. He is talking about the central mysteries of the Christian faith, which cannot be grasped by the unspiritual, and saying that the divided, unloving Corinthians have evidently not grasped these things (otherwise they would display love and unity). He is not saying that if a teaching makes no sense it is evidence that it is spiritual.

The natural man can gain knowledge from the Scriptures, but only the spiritual man can gain wisdom from them, since wisdom is partly a set of attitudes and approaches, at least some of which the natural man is unable or unwilling to acquire. Among these are submission of the mind and will to Christ and to the Scriptures. And a mind in submission to Christ doesn't cease to think, any more than a will in submission to Christ ceases to decide.

If we are not thinking about what we are being taught, we are not displaying faith, but gullibility. I agree with John Broadus: 'It is a mournful fact that Universalists . . . [and] Mormons can find an apparent support for their heresies in Scripture, without interpreting more loosely, without doing greater violence to the meaning and connection of the Sacred Text than is sometimes done by orthodox, devout, and even intelligent men' (John A. Broadus, A Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons [30th edition], qu. in Henry A. Verkler, Hermeneutics: Principles and Processes of Biblical Interpretation, Baker, 1981, p 95). It often scares me when I see Christians believing things for no better reason than Mormons believe their doctrine. I have spent some time speaking to Mormons, and their ultimate argument, their unanswerable proof of the truth of their religion, is the same as that of many Christians: 'Pray to God and ask him to give you an experience to show you this is true, and then you'll have no more questions.' (See 'Spellcasting in the Pulpit'.)

I have two problems with this. The first is that I don't see how having an experience proves anything; and the second is that what can be proved by an experience can be disproved by an experience.

I like Mark Twain's analogy of the cat. 'We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit on a hot stove lid again - and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.'

The problem is, an experience can mean a great many things. No, that's not really the problem. The problem is, if we have an experience and then are given an explanation by someone in a position of authority, whose word we trust, we will interpret it in that way - even though no experience brings its interpretation along with it. I have heard it said that many of the same experiences which are common in certain Christian circles are also found among those who are involved in the occult. The experience is identical; only the interpretation differs. Hence, the experience is not a proof of the interpretation. We have to find some other means of testing the interpretation. Fortunately, we have one.

The sufficiency of Scripture is a neglected and misunderstood idea in much of the church. What it means is that the Scripture is fully adequate for the purpose for which it was given - that is, to completely equip the person of God to do every good work, through teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Tim 3:16-17).

An under-emphasis on the sufficiency of Scripture leads, in practice, to a reliance on secular and non-Christian insights (or the words of self-appointed 'prophets' or 'teachers') more than upon Scripture, a subtle shifting of dependance from the wisdom of God to the flawed wisdom of man. An over-emphasis leads to proof-textery, where there is a text for everything, where all questions can be settled and all subjects fully covered by reference to Scripture alone, and here, too, the flawed wisdom of man creeps in and distorts Scripture to a purpose for which it was never given. The conclusion I am forced to is that there are some areas where, regrettably, we have to rely on the flawed wisdom of man, and reliance on the wisdom of God must act as a check, an aid to spotting the flaws. God has given us all we need to live our lives, but we still have to live them (1 Peter 1:3-7). This is the problem. Because it is such a problem, discernment is urgently needed.

The freedom to think for ourselves, to weigh all of the evidence carefully, to make up our own minds without being pressured, is essential to genuine faith. One of the primary marks of a cult is the denial of this freedom by various tricks of persuasion so that eventually the cult member has surrendered his autonomy to the point that the "guru" or "prophet" does his thinking for him. Unfortunately, almost any church can, either wittingly or unwittingly, exert the same kind of pressure so that members conform to group thinking rather than coming to a deep and carefully-thought-out conclusion themselves.

"Is it faith," John Calvin asks, "to understand nothing, and merely submit your convictions implicitly to the Church?"

- Dave Hunt, Beyond Seduction, Harvest House, 1987, p 84.

The other problem, as I mentioned, is that an experience can easily drive you out of a belief which an experience drove you into. As C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity: 'There will come a moment when there is bad news, or [the believer] is in trouble or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Now faith, in the sense in which I am using the word, is the art of holding onto things your reason has accepted, in spite of our change of moods.' But if it wasn't your reason that accepted it in the first place, this is not what will happen. This is why Os Guinness says, in the passage quoted earlier, that doubt is often a consequence of too little thinking rather than too much. 'The injustice is that the donkey is beaten until it collapses and then it is beaten for collapsing. In the same way many Christians drive their faith unfairly when they believe, and then they flog their faith unmercifully when they doubt' (Os Guinness, Doubt, Lion, 1976, p 17).

This is not to say that feelings are not important. Feelings are extremely important. 'If we take our doctrines into our hearts where they belong, they can cause upheavals of emotion and sleepless nights. This is far better than toying with academic ideas that never touch real life' (John Piper, Desiring God, IVP, 1989 (Multnomah, 1986), p 28). But the order is also important. If your decision is based on your emotion, the next emotion could overturn it. But if your emotion is based on your decision, the next emotion will just be the next emotion.

Anybody who talks to people about their beliefs to any degree at all will soon discover someone who is 'thinking with their tears' - who holds the position they hold because of past hurt, and argues passionately in order to retain the position, grasping at any argument that supports them and utterly dismissing any argument that opposes them. I was talking to an atheist once about why she rejected Christianity, and discovered, among her evasions and changes of topic, that her parents had been extremely active in serving their church. So active, in fact, that (reading between the lines only a little) she came to associate the church, and hence Christianity, with something which would not provide love but would take it away. She was a philosophy student, with many highly sophisticated arguments against the existence of God, but behind it all she was a little girl whose parents had neglected her because they thought they were serving God. Experience, if we believe in it strongly enough, will cover over the truth for us and keep us from accepting it.

Don't ever doubt that beliefs are powerful. What you really believe will determine what you do in all kinds of situations. I say what you really believe, because this is not always what you say you believe. I heard a classic example at a New Zealand Institute of Management seminar recently. The woman who was teaching the seminar was telling us of her experience working with a group of businesspeople, with whom she had been discussing 'multiskilling' (people being able to do several jobs within an organisation). Everyone said they were in favour of it. But just as they were about to move on, she caught a mutter from one participant: 'Jack of all trades and master of none.' She queried the person, then the rest of the group, and even though they were saying that multiskilling was what they wanted for their organisation, they all actually believed this old proverb heard in their childhood.

This is why it is very important to be careful of what you believe to be discerning. If you are enslaved by an idea, it will strip you of your humanity and parade you as an object in the marketplace. If ideas are to be your slaves, you must strip them of their pretensions and false hedgings and look at them naked, to see what you are getting and whether they will do the job you have in mind.

I wish that, having said 'Test it by Scripture,' I could just leave it there and everyone would now have a clear idea on discernment. The trouble is, one of the things we need to exercise discernment on is people's interpretations of Scripture. People who get their doctrines from their experience are liable to then read them back into Scripture, which is definitely the wrong way round. If someone says, 'I had an experience where God showed me so-and-so, and then I looked in the Bible, and see, here it is . . .' I immediately go to theological Red Alert and raise shields. Certainly, I often have experiences which illuminate passages of the Bible to me, which help me to understand them, perhaps from angles I never saw before. But the Scripture is always primary. Just because I have sometimes found that after I've complained about something the problem comes right, I don't develop a theology and then look in the Scriptures to find something that I can twist to say God answers our complaints as if they were prayers (I'm sure I could come up with something - probably from Psalms - about 'the words of my groaning' or some such thing). If anything, I look at the Scriptures which tell me not to complain, and try to do so less, while being grateful for the grace of God who knows what I need before I ask.

'No man has a right to say, as some are in the habit of saying, "The Spirit tells me that such or such is the meaning of a passage." How is he assured that it is the Holy Spirit, and not a spirit of delusion, except from the evidence that the interpretation is the legitimate meaning of the words?' asks Alexander Carson (Examination of the Principles of Biblical Interpretation, qu. in Henry A. Verkler, Hermeneutics: Principles and Processes of Biblical Interpretation, Baker, 1981, p 95), and it's an excellent question. People talk about the 'gift of discernment' as if having it guaranteed that nothing would ever get out of hand, no inaccurate 'words' would ever be tossed off. But both Scripture and experience show us that this isn't the case. The Corinthians had whatever this gift was (1 Corinthians 1:7, 12:10), yet Paul had to remind them that nobody speaking by the Spirit of God would say 'Jesus be cursed' (12:3) - something which I would have thought you would not need a spiritual gift to work out! It also becomes circular. If somebody says that God tells him something, and you claim that you have 'discernment' in this sense and that God tells you that it's OK, it really is him speaking - who is to guarantee that you aren't deceived yourself? And what is to stop me from saying that I have the gift of discernment and, on the contrary, you are both wrong? There's no standard outside our own feelings and experience by which anyone can judge - except that there is. We have the Scriptures, and can check if the person's teaching lines up. We can wait around, if they have said a certain event will occur, and see if it does, and if it doesn't, then the word was not from God (according to Scripture). We can see if some claimed spiritual insight into a person in the room is really true (if they have the courage to stand up and say, 'No, it's not,' and if we have the courage to let this be said and not sweep it under the rug).

'If we judged ourselves, we would not come under judgement,' Paul reminds the Corinthians (1 Co 11:31). Many, we are told, will say at the judgement seat of Christ that they have done many things for him, but be told that he never knew them and that they are workers of iniquity; and we are to watch out for these false prophets and exercise discernment concerning them (Matt 7:15-23). You will not be judged on how extensive (or even correct) your knowledge of God is. You will be judged on how responsive you are to that knowledge. You will not be judged on how extensive your experience of God is. You will be judged on how responsive you are to that experience. You will also, it seems to me from these warnings, be judged on the basis of your zeal in seeking out the true knowledge of God, on becoming one of 'the mature, who by practice have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil' (Heb 5:14).

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