3: The Broken Discipleship Factory: Part 2

[00:00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail Podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God.

Welcome to episode three. Today we continue with part two of our first series, The Broken Discipleship Factory. In the last episode, we set up an overview of the Broken Discipleship Factory as understood in the book, The Solution of Choice, written by my father, Marcus Warner, and our friend, Jim Wilder. Today, we’re going to dig in and look at the Enlightenment and the solution of truth.

Hello, Father.

[00:00:46] Marcus: Hello. Good to be on again with you.

[00:00:49] Stephanie: Always. Always. How are you today?

[00:00:53] Marcus: I’m doing well. We’ve got a beautiful day here in Indiana. The sky is blue, temperatures in the seventies.

[00:01:00] Stephanie: Oh, lovely.

[00:01:01] Marcus: I may actually pull out the golf clubs later.

[00:01:04] Stephanie: Very good. Very good.

[00:01:06] Marcus: Yep.

[00:01:08] Stephanie: So, Enlightenment and the solution of truth.

[00:01:12] Marcus: There you go. That’s quite the topic, isn’t it? That should get everybody signing in. So, it’s kind of funny. Dr. Wilder introduced this topic several years ago when he did a webinar for a Deeper Walk. We used to do what we called “Life Model Mondays” where we would do a webinar on Mondays featuring Life Model content.

I remember he did a three-part series on voluntarism, and I had never heard of voluntarism. I have a doctorate degree, two masters, and I taught philosophy for one semester at a college. And I was like, okay, this is a really obscure thing. As it turns out, Jim’s brother is a PhD-level scholar in all things philosophical, and is especially good at Medieval and Enlightenment time period. They had been talking about this for quite some time back and forth.

So during the webinar, Jim introduced this idea that voluntarism is the idea that the will is the most central thing to being human. And he went back to the early Puritans. In some of their writings you see the strong emphasis on the will. In fact, when they would teach theology back in the days when Harvard was a Puritan school, the first part of their lesson was on will and understanding.

So think about it: how many theological debates have been about the will? Doesn’t God determine what happens? Do we have free will? What’s our job? What’s God’s job?

So there has been a lot of that underlying our theology for a long time. But he said that the emphasis on the will did not come directly out of the Bible as it came out of the philosophical conversations of the 1500s and 1600s during the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.

So to lay the foundation for understanding what we’re going to dive into today, we’re talking about how the Enlightenment actually impacted the church and how that is related to the discipleship model.

[00:03:23] Stephanie: Small potatoes.

[00:03:26] Marcus: Yeah, something simple, just to keep it light.

[00:03:29] Stephanie: And the Enlightenment, eh?

[00:03:31] Marcus: Yeah, well, very punny.

[00:03:34] Stephanie: I am your daughter.

[00:03:38] Marcus: You’ve heard dad jokes long enough, right?

[00:03:40] Stephanie: Yep. So tell me more.

[00:03:44] Marcus: All right, the Enlightenment. Let’s start here with the scientific revolution when people like Galileo and Copernicus discovered that the sun did not go around the earth.

And this was a hugely upsetting thing because it basically said that the church is no longer the final arbiter of what is true and what is false. The church no longer can tell us, “This is true, just trust us.” Because they were [proven] wrong on [geocentricity], so it created this huge question of, “Well, what IS truth?”

How do we know what truth is? And so there was this explosion in philosophical thinking, specifically oriented around the idea of truth. And so it came to the idea that the ability to know what is true is a decidedly human pursuit. You don’t see lions and tigers and zebras going around trying to figure out what’s true, what’s false. It’s a human pursuit.

[00:04:50] Stephanie: You are very close to a Wizard of Oz reference right there.

[00:04:53] Marcus: I was, actually, now that you mention it. “If I only had a brain,” but you get the idea. So what happens here is that in this search, the question of truth became central to philosophy, and with this, the Church took a tremendous left turn in its disciple making. They agreed with culture that truth is the primary question.

Before this shift, what we are suggesting is that at the center hub of the discipleship wheel is relationship. At the center hub of the discipleship wheel is a person – Jesus Christ. And discipleship is about strengthening our attachment to Jesus, growing that attachment,and at the same time growing our attachment, first and foremost with other followers of Jesus, and then eventually with all of the people in the world until it includes even loving our enemies.

So discipleship is kind of going out of the circle, learning to love Jesus, learning to love his people, learning to love those outside of that, even learning to love those who are actively persecuting us and attacking us for our faith. You’ve got to keep that at the hub though.

And so what happened after the Enlightenment was that when we made a left turn, we replaced that hub at the center of the wheel with truth. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with truth. We’ve got to make sure that our worldview is accurate. We want a worldview that reflects reality.

[00:06:24] Stephanie: So truth is very important.

[00:06:25] Marcus: Truth is very important. Truth really does matter. And unfortunately, we have a lot of Christians in some circles today who act like it doesn’t. “Can’t we all just get along?” becomes, “Who cares what’s true?”  and that’s not a good place to be either.

Truth is really important. It’s just that we moved truth from being one of the spokes on the wheel to being the hub of the wheel. It fundamentally distorted the nature of Christianity. All of a sudden, being Christian became about believing the correct things, and if you could check the box off all the things that you believed correctly, then you say, “Okay, I am now a Christian.” It gave this intellectual gloss to it.

I can remember growing up feeling like true spirituality was measured in how deeply you could think about your faith. I can remember your grandpa, my dad, thinking about, talking about how surprising it was to see these really intelligent Christians not being closer in their walk with God. But I could tell that he had been influenced by this kind of thinking, that somehow intellect was an advantage to spirituality.

But that’s only true if you think that spirituality is about truth and getting everything, getting your system accurate. But, if discipleship is primarily about attachment, then there is no advantage to having intellect in order to form a trusting, loving attachment to Jesus. In fact, the smarter you are, the easier it is to have doubts, the easier it is in some ways to question things. To rely on your own understanding gets easier because you’re used to figuring everything out.

If you grew up a smart person, you’re just used to the idea that, “I’ll figure this out,” Sometimes we confuse that with faith, but it isn’t faith to feel like you can explain it. It’s a form of our intellect trying to figure out Christianity.

[00:08:26] Stephanie: It becomes brain power instead of heart power. And then also we’re getting power, which is…

[00:08:36] Marcus: We’re going to get to power in a minute. I remember when Jim said that the greatest compliment you can give anything in Christianity is  “Wow, that was powerful!” It comes from the same idea that, while we’re focusing on truth in this episode, just so people get the big picture of the four good ideas that neutralize Western Christianity are these four spokes on the wheel that were all made to be the hub.

And so the first spoke on the wheel we’re talking about today is truth. That was where the Enlightenment started with the question of truth. And the Church said, “You’re right. Truth is the central thing,” and all of a sudden we moved this question of truth to the center of Christianity.

When we did that Christianity became more academic. It became more intellectual. It also became much easier to divide, because instead of truth uniting people, all of a sudden it became much easier to divide over “Your truth is not quite pure enough to hang out with me.”

[00:09:29] Stephanie: Right.

[00:09:29] Marcus: So it does create a problem.

We’re not saying the truth is not important. You’ve got to believe certain things to be a Christian. Paul said that we’ve got to believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, that we’ve got to be able to proclaim that Jesus is Lord. There are belief elements to this. There are truth elements to this. But is that really it? Or was Paul talking about forming an attachment?

My personal favorite image for becoming a Christian is the vine and the branches. It’s the idea of being grafted into a vine so that you have a shared life. Now that is an attachment image that I have come into.

Think about adoption as an attachment image, that I’m now coming into this relationship, even being given the right to be called children of God. To be called the son of God is an attachment image. This is the idea for Deeper Walk. We’re not about, “Come here to have deeper thoughts or deeper ideas.” but it is literally about a deeper relationship.

Think about it, the word relationship isn’t found in the Bible, nowhere that I’m aware of. I’m not sure if either Greek or Hebrew has a word for relationship, but they use a lot of synonyms and images and metaphors. Perhaps the most common metaphor for relationship is walking with God, they walked with, together. This is another way of saying that they had a relationship.

[00:10:52] Stephanie: All the way back in the Old Testament, when Moses said to God, “I don’t want to go anywhere unless you’re going with me.”

[00:11:01] Marcus: Exactly. The presence of God is a major issue for Moses. And we see this throughout the Bible.

So, again, how did the discipleship factory get broken? The discipleship factory got broken back when the Enlightenment said that truth is the central hub around which everything revolves instead of attachment. And that was the beginning.

Next week we’re going to dive into this a little bit further. We’re going to be talking about voluntarism specifically; how not only truth, but also the will, became central to the idea of what it takes to be a good Christian. How does the will make me a good Christian?

Again, the will was a spoke on the wheel. Making good choices is a spoke on the wheel, but when you make it the hub, things start falling apart, that wheel starts to wobble, the machine doesn’t work right. And what happens here is that if your growth model is off, if it gets distorted, then the solutions that you’re offering to people for their problems are not going to be as accurate.

You can find yourself actually offering bad solutions or wrong solutions to people’s problems, with good intentions, but because the growth model that you developed on which you build discipleship is not truly accurate. That’s why we’re starting here. We want to make sure we get our model correct. We want to make sure that our model is as accurate as possible.

Someone might say, “Then aren’t you making truth the center?” We’re not making truth the center. We’re trying to use truth correctly, to use reason correctly. That is, we do need a rational faith, but that doesn’t mean that reason and rationality are the center of the faith. We can use our reason to understand that attachment is actually the centerpiece of the faith and that’s what we need to build on. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish here.

[00:12:52] Stephanie: Ah, so can you give us a summary of where we’re heading with the next couple episodes?

[00:12:58] Marcus: Absolutely.

We’re going to be taking a look at the four good ideas that neutralize Western Christianity. We started with truth in today’s session, then we’re going to be looking at the will.

After that, we’re going to be looking at power. And power is a touchy one because we tend to say that oppressed people simply need to be empowered. We’re going to talk about that a little bit.

There are also a lot of people who don’t know how to separate the Holy Spirit and a conversation from power. I think that the Holy Spirit is about relationship, wisdom, and attachment, but sometimes we reduce the Holy Spirit to being only about power.

And so we’re going to talk a little bit more about the Holy Spirit and what his job actually is in the Christian life, and how the emphasis on power has actually created some problems for the solutions that we offer. So, we’re looking at the truth today, we’re looking at the will the next session, then we’re going to look at power.

Finally, we’re going to look at tolerance, which is a Christian virtue. Tolerance is this idea that we love our enemies. You can’t love somebody if you’re not tolerant of them. But what has happened is we’ve taken tolerance and made it the end of loving our enemies instead of the beginning of loving our enemies. I think as a church, we have also tended to embrace tolerance, not so much out of a core value, but because we have lost confidence that we actually have a model that transforms anybody.

We don’t believe in transformation anymore because our model seems to have failed so many people. So there’s a sense that if nothing works and there is no transformation, maybe we should just not even try anymore. So we sometimes call tolerance waving the white flag of surrender, saying, “I guess there’s no point in actually trying to help somebody change if change isn’t actually possible.”

So that’s where we’re headed. Again, these ideas are based on the book, The Solution of Choice: Four Good Ideas that Neutralized Western Christianity, and they are also unpacked a bit in my new book, A Deeper Walk, that has just come out from Moody Publishing.

[00:15:07] Stephanie: Yes, It’s coming out August 2nd, 2022! Huzzah!

So any final thoughts on Enlightenment and the Solution of Truth as we wrap up today?

[00:15:17] Marcus: Yes, I want to focus on this word solution. Let’s take the person who goes from church to church to church looking for a solution to the problems that they have. And it’s not uncommon. You go to one church and it’s all Bible, Bible, Bible. And that’s good. I hope that what we say is biblical. I hope that we offer biblical truth and biblical wisdom and perspective to people. But if you only share the Bible, and you never get to the spiritual realities behind the Bible, you’ve got a problem. If the Bible doesn’t lead to attachment, you’ve got a problem.

So they go to another church and this one’s all about power, power, power, power. Let’s cast out the demon of alcoholism. Let’s cast out this and you’ll be all better. Let’s just get the right person to lay hands on you and you’ll be all better. We look at power as this almost like a magic bullet that’s going to be the solution that you need. And let’s be honest, if the solutions that we offer as a church don’t work, we tend to blame the person instead of looking at our model, instead of looking to see if there’s something missing in our model. That’s what we’re looking at here.

Why this is so important is that a lot of what happens that damages people in the church happens because they are offered solutions that don’t work and then told that they didn’t work because there is something wrong with them. We don’t want that to happen. We want to minimize the amount of spiritual abuse going on in the church. We want to minimize the number of people who are getting damaged because their problem just doesn’t happen to fit the paradigm that the church is offering for its solutions.

And that’s where we’re headed as we move forward.

[00:16:55] Stephanie: Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, Dad. And thank you, listener, for joining us on the trail today.

If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the Deeper Walk podcast and share with your friends. You can find more at our website, deeperwalk.com.

Thanks again. And we’ll see you back next week.