Clergy: Please Don’t Preach Just “the Party Line”

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2 responses to “Clergy: Please Don’t Preach Just “the Party Line””

1. 

   2006-10-30

   Karen B.

   D.C. your post seems to assume that preaching is divorced from truth. I know you and I differ in terms of our beliefs about absolute truth. But your post surprises me because you seem to think a “traditionalist” priest should be willing / able to set aside his/her beliefs to satisfy or accomodate what the folks on “the other side” in his/her congregation want to hear.
   It’s not about what we want to hear or accomodating our beliefs. Traditional Christians believe that pastors are shepherds. They have a responsibility to lead and protect the flock from danger. They are clearly called and exhorted in Scripture to proclaim truth and expose error.
   What you’re proposing sounds dangerously to me like what Paul warns against in 2 Timothy:
   2 Tim 4:3
   3 For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.
   (NIV)
   Read that verse in context (verses 1-4) and you will see exactly why traditionalist priests don’t do what you suggest.

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2. 

   2006-10-30

   D. C.

   Hi Karen B.; nice to hear from you, as always.
   1. I think you and I probably agree about absolute truth. Unlike some post-modern relativists, I do think there is such a thing. I just don’t think any of us — including the scriptural authors — is individually capable of apprehending the truth with 100% reliability.
   2. What our brains come up with are models of truth. But the evidence establishes convincingly that our brains are limited and fallible. So we should be cautious about what we assume to be the truth. In deciding what to do and not do in our lives, we shouldn’t depend on our truth models too heavily. (In particular, if following our truth models would cause harm to others, we should be extremely cautious indeed.)
   3. Experience teaches that, when we make decisions about how to live our lives, we do best when we test our truth models against observations of the real world that God actually created, as opposed to the world we imagine he created. That’s not a perfect approach, but it seems to work better than any other. (Recall Churchill’s quip that democracy is the worst of all forms of government, except for all the other forms that have been tried.)
   (And by “observations” of the real world, I mean not just our own individual observations — which are likewise limited and fallible — but those of others as well. On the subject of collective observations, I was fascinated by James Surowieck’s 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds. Surowieck recounts how 787 visitors to a London exhibition made guesses about the weight of an ox. None of the guesses was correct — but the average of the guesses proved to be within one pound of the exact weight. Similarly, in 1968 a variety of naval experts estimated the location of the missing submarine USS SCORPION. The combined estimate was within 220 yards of where the sunken vessel was found. Surowieck explains how this works: If a diverse group of knowledgeable people independently estimates something, each estimate will have an error component. The errors will vary in some kind of distribution. When the estimates are appropriately averaged, the errors will more or less cancel each other out. What remains is “the truth.” In other words, each of the diverse, knowledgeable, independent estimators is fallible, but collectively they can get pretty close to the right answer.)
   4. Theology is a truth model. No more, and no less. Like any model, it’s a product of our imaginations. Unlike most models, however, theology is almost entirely speculation and conjecture. Very little theology is capable of being corroborated by observations from the real world. It’s therefore dangerous to rely too heavily on anyone’s theology per se in deciding how we’re going to live our lives.
   5. To my mind, the First Commandment requires us to remain open to the truth of what God has actually wrought, whatever that truth turns out to be (paraphrasing the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor). To let ourselves become enslaved to a particular truth model, to abandon our God-given critical faculties on grounds that some prior thinker supposedly got it exactly and absolutely right, is arguably to commit the sin of idolatry.
   6. I agree with you 100% that clergy are supposed to proclaim truth. A crucial part of that truth is this: Every human truth model, and every human observation, is fallible — including those relating to theology.
   7. For that reason, while I believe there’s an absolute truth about God and his desires, I remain deeply suspicious of preachers who claim categorically that they absolutely possess that truth.
   Thanks for stopping by!

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