In a recent conversation with a brother pastor not too long ago, we were talking about the fact that while many people do not take in hardly any spiritual nourishment during the average week, there is another problem common to Christian people in our day of indiscriminate inclusion that is equally troublesome.
For the purpose of rhetorical flair, let me refer to these people as the flip-top faithful. Maybe some of you remember the 1980’s commercial for Reach toothbrushes that suggested that if you wanted clean teeth that you should either buy their product or get a flip-top head. That image of a hinged head has always stuck with me.
And it is an image that describes many people in our churches today. Rather than not digesting anything spiritual during the week, they instead ingest everything spiritual. It is like they have flip-top heads whose hinges are stuck in a manner that leave the mouth wide open. They will eat anything described by anyone as “Christian.†They devour every forwarded email with a supposedly biblical basis, every song on the Christian radio station, every book on the shelf at the local Christian book store. They watch every TV show on the religion channel and every movie produced by some church organization. They listen to every preacher teaching on the radio. They contribute to every pseudo-Christian cause.
And while this may seem better then those whose mouths seem to be wired shut making eating anything spiritual impossible, many times they end up just as far from the truth. Because not everything called Christian draws one to the Christ. Some things just rile up the emotions. Other things placed false ideas into the mind. Still others are just useless wastes of time or money.
We need to be discerning about what we digest. Not everything called Christian is good. But you may think, Pastor, how do I know the difference? There is no rating assigned to each thing to make it easy. I say, know the scriptures and you will be able to discern what is right and what is wrong. Or even more concisely know the six chief teachings of the scriptures as they are summarized in the Small Catechism of Martin Luther. If you know the Commandments, Creed, and Lord’s Prayer and their meanings, you will be ready to judge. If you understand the means by which God delivers his salvation to you (Baptism, the Office of the Keys, and the Lord’s Supper), you will know when something in set against these means. And finally if you are still not sure about something, remember that God has given you a Pastor to help you discern what is good and pleasing to God. Ask him before you digest things you are not sure of. That way you will eat only that which is good. You will not be a flip-top faithful filled with all sorts of falsehood.
Phil,
This is an excellent article and I can see exactly where you are coming from. There are many impoverished Christians who jump on anything that has the title “christian” in them from books, to movies, to documentaries, to artwork, to causes, etc.
As the bookstore manager at my church, I frequently get requests about why I don’t have such and such a book in the bookstore (I can’t carry very much anyways since this is a small operation). And frequently, I tell them that I haven’t heard of such and such a book. Then they tell me about it and I can only help but wonder: why are you reading this? Are there not plenty of Orthodox books that deal with these subjects in such a way that there is no chance of heresy in the contents? Why do you purposefully chance something that can do real spiritual damage to you? Books that are written by evangelicals, in particular, and Protestants and Catholics are screened with great scrutiny before I will even consider them.
Let me offer though an explanation as to why you may be seeing this even among your own congregation. And you will forgive me for bringing up yet another indictment of Lutheranism when I was growing up. I am a bibliophile–you know this. But growing up Lutheran, there was nothing strictly Lutheran to read. I remember being frequently inundated with books written by Evangelicals all of which were about “me and Jesus” and “personal faith” and basically any kind of theology that was 1 inch deep and 1 inch wide. THere were no books about the Liturgy or its importance (that is if a congregation ever used the liturgy) or about the sacraments or even prayer books which were not in existence! The Catechism was required learning for catechumens but that was it. Nothing more. And for those of us who hungered and thirsted for more were left hungry and thirsty. For many of us that lead us to abandon Lutheranism.
That being said, I will say that for the past decade, Pr. Paul McCain of Concordia Publishing (whom, I will confess, I do not like at all personally) has done a magnificent job of making things readily available for the Lutheran layman about confessional Lutheranism. This wealth of information was never visible when I was growing up Lutheran. I had to find out information from sources outside of the imprimatur of the Lutheran church.
Now that this material is available and growing by leaps and bounds, hopefully more and more people can get their spiritual enrichment from sources that are in harmony with the Lutheran confessions. It’s going to be an uphill battle, to be sure.