The Worldview Debate: Are You a Scribe or a Real Disciple?
May 24, 2010
John H. Armstrong
ACT 3 Weekly
May 24, 2010
The Worldview Debate: Are You a Scribe or a Real Disciple?
John H. Armstrong
I suggested a few weeks ago that the whole discussion of Christian worldview had broken down into political, social and economic ideologies and debates that were of more harm than help to the mission of Christ’s church. My concern, in these worldview debates, is rather simple. I believe “the church exists for mission as fire exists for burning.” I am deeply concerned with the sad reality that multitudes of American churches, in only one generation, have lost their mission and embraced a political and social ideology that has been baptized as a “Christian worldview.” Let me explain.
Are We Making Disciples?
I think the failure of our churches to make disciples was the beginning of the problem. We assumed that a decision was enough. Multitudes of people made decisions, especially those who grew up in the church and attended Christian schools. The problem then became rather obvious—their lives were not all that different from those of their non-Christian peers in the culture at large. Some began to worry about this problem. Enter the increasingly popular “worldview” movement that sought to restore Christian values to our personal lives and American culture. The link between decisionism and moralism was fairly obvious but most missed it. Add a dose of Abraham Kuyper, a little bit of John Calvin, something of John Wesley’s emphasis on faith and radical holiness and presto—you get a movement for restoring “weightiness” to Christian living. The initial problem here was that few made the proper link between the supremacy of Christ in the human heart and the outcome of lives truly lived for the glory of God.
“Have You Understood All This?”
In Matthew 13 Jesus tells a series of related parables to both crowds of listeners (13:2) and his twelve disciples (13:10). These parables were often misunderstood then and are rarely understood by Christians today. The implications of this failure directly impact this whole matter of worldview thinking.
The word parable literally means “a placing beside.” A parable involves a comparison, or an illustration. Jesus generally used them as illustrative stories from nature and everyday human life. There are thirty such parables in the Synoptic Gospels. John’s Gospel does not use them but is rich in other figures of speech; e.g. vine, door, a sheep pen, etc.
Matthew 13 includes seven parables! Six of them refer to hearing the Word of God and to (specifically) the issue of whether or not the hearer “understands” the gospel of the kingdom. In six of these seven parables Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like . . .” (Only the parable of the sower does not use this phrase!) The kingdom of Jesus had a rather insignificant beginning but in time it would spread to the whole world (13:31-32, also cf. Mark 4:30-34). All of this, by allusion, should be related to Daniel 4:21, where the kingdom of heaven is going to expand to world dominion. Then people from all nations will find their rest in this kingdom (cf. Daniel 2:35, 44-45; 7:27; Revelation 11:15). Even the “yeast” of Matthew 13:33 suggests that this kingdom message will permeate the whole of a person’s life and through such people, God’s kingdom people in Christ’s church, the kingdom will grow by the power of the Holy Spirit using the good news of the kingdom message incarnated in the lives of his followers.
In Matthew 13:44-46 there are two parables that teach the exact same truth—the kingdom is of such value that we should be willing to give up all we have in order to gain it. Because Jesus is clear that money and worldly status can never gain entrance into the kingdom we fail to consider that the kingdom does call upon everyone of us to give up everything (thus to turn from our own idolatry) in order to enter fully into its power and presence.
What follows is the most amazing dialog in the entire chapter. Jesus asks his disciples, “Do you understand all this?” They answered, “Yes.” His answer does not condemn this response but in the light of what he says to them in Matthew 15:16—“Are you still without understanding?”—one has to assume that they plainly overstated their grasp of his teaching.
Did They Get It?
Did the disciples really get what Jesus was teaching them in Matthew 13? Was their assurance founded or unfounded? I think the larger context, here and elsewhere, clearly shows us that their confidence was unfounded. In this case I suppose “ignorance was bliss.” It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to conceive of them believing, at least for the moment, that their ability to understand Jesus and his kingdom was exceptional.
Right after the disciples assured Jesus that they understood his teaching about the kingdom we read these words from Jesus: “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Matthew 13:52).
What seems to happen here is perplexing. Jesus says, in effect, if you think you got it then try this one.
What is going on here? Jesus is teaching disciples. A disciple is a learner. But he refers here to “scribes.” A scribe is a person who has studied a great deal, memorized a ton of texts, and (we might say) “knows it all.” A scribe is an expert in the law. So what is Jesus saying? I think he is commending the disciples, not in a false way but in the way a good teacher always does, by expressing approval of their learning to this point. But there is a play on words here that is critical. Jesus refers to a scribe who “has been trained for the kingdom of heaven.” This means a scribe, in this particular illustration, must move on to become a disciple, which is the word for those trained for the kingdom. A disciple is called to something deeper, higher and wider than anything a scribe could ever conceive.
Conclusion
My problem with the repeated use of “worldview” terminology in our day is that it has the tendency to create new scribes who are not always good disciples. Let me explain this briefly.
Bill Yaccino, who directs Catalyst, an organization that connects people and resources for greater kingdom impact across Chicagoland (www.Catalystweb.org), helped me understand this text last week. (Catalyst seeks to implement the vision of the kingdom that I teach in my new book, Your Church Is Too Small.) Bill suggests in an article titled “The Storeroom” that Jesus was saying something like this to his disciples:
You have done what the others have not, you have understood my teaching. For that I am proud of you. I am glad you are getting it and quickly becoming experts. But please know that the real accomplishment once you are an expert is that you become a learner again. For those who know it all, the only place to go is to become a learner again! Once you get this, you will be able to pull out of the storeroom of your life wisdom from the things you have mastered, as well as wisdom that is new and fresh and novice! Both are treasures that help us live out the kingdom of heaven.
The goal of discipleship is not mastering content so that one can become a well-trained scribe. The goal of discipleship is to keep learning from Jesus himself. This is why I struggle with what I believe to be the wrong emphasis on worldview that I often hear today. (This comes especially from the more conservative Reformed side of the church aisle.) Any emphasis that does not see a whole range of Jesus-given theological responses to the present world context is just too systematic for its own good. It is formulaic and generally leads its proponents to become the modern scribes who have memorized and mastered the answers to every single complex issue.
I will leave you with an illustration that is both current and extremely hot—homosexuality. No single issue creates the type of emotional debate that this one does. (There is way too much to say about the issue in this short space.) I am on the record as an opponent of the church accepting of same-sex practice as normative (morally sound) Christian behavior. But how Christians respond to sexual promiscuity is no small issue. Like it or not this issue has specifically become central to our public witness. If your singular focus is on moral purity then the way you will respond to this matter will be fairly easy. But if your aim is mission, and not just worldview answers, then the way you will deal with this issue will require you to become a teachable disciple. This kind of thinking, which requires us to believe that our tradition and the present moment are equally important, will deliver us from being “expert” scribes. Face it, inside all of us is the tendency to either become easy-going about every tough issue we face or to become experts who have all the answers. I think the Bible refers to this tendency as pride. But if we become real disciples, people who keep learning and thinking through such difficult issues, we will move beyond being worldview thinkers who reside inside the box of expert interpretations. This means that every one of us must again become “learners” who are “trained for the kingdom of heaven” by Jesus himself.
