Taking and Receiving

The last two weeks, as I read Bob Sorge’s discussion on quietness and confidence in The Fire of Delayed Answers, I saw where the discussion was at least partially headed – the theological chasm that has divided evangelical Christianity for a long time.

I mentioned last week what a difficult time we had finding a church when we moved to St. Louis from Houston. We had been attending a non-denominational church in Houston. We were in our mid-20s, and were something of innocents when it came to theology wars. Sorge would say our church in Houston was in the “confidence camp” – the camp that emphasizes “the availability of God’s promises and power to those who believe.” We ended up joining a church in St. Louis that Sorge would say was in the “quietness camp,” which emphasizes the sovereignty of God.

“Camps” is probably the right word, although we never heard anyone in our church in Houston refer to the theological debate between the two. Later, when we joined a “confidence” church in St. Louis, again we rarely if ever heard about the debate.

The church we joined in the quietness camp, however, was anything but quiet. Here, the debate was a living, breathing thing. The confidence crowd was simply wrong. Flat-out wrong. And it was discussed a lot. Sunday School classes. Small-group Bible studies. Membership classes. Training for deacons (I stepped away from this training when the book we were using went way off the deep end about “confidence” churches; it didn’t help to be told that this was a standard, widely accepted text).

Our problem was that what we were hearing about the Christians in the “other camp” simply didn’t square with what our experience had been in Houston.

We had walked into the great divide in the evangelical church, and we were ill-equipped to deal with it. We didn’t even know there was a divide.

Sorge uses this discussion about quietness and confidence as a lens for a discussion about the kingdom of God. Is the kingdom something you select, or does it select you? And there it is in flaming technicolor: free will or predestination?

I am not drawn to this debate. I’m aware of it: I’ve read about it; I’ve even studied it. But it’s never drawn me in, on one side or the other. (I’m also not drawn into the debate over human origins; there might possibly be a connection.) Perhaps that explains why I can be comfortable in churches on both sides of the question, except when they go overboard (like our first church in St. Louis). I understand that people can become quite exercised about it, but I’m not one of them. (And this may well reflect my own Lutheran upbringing.)

Sorge turns to the words of Jesus in the gospels of Luke and Matthew.

In Luke, Jesus says we must receive the kingdom of God as a little child, and note the word “received.” That means it’s given to us; we don’t make the choice. (I hear cheers from the quietness camp.)

In Matthew, Jesus suggests the kingdom is taken, and taken violently (likely where Flannery O’Connor found the title of her story “The Violent Bear It Away”). Unless you think the two gospels are on different sides of the question, Luke also expresses the same idea of taking in “Seek and you shall find.”

So which is it? Quietness or confidence? Receiving or taking?

Sorge says that Jesus simply answers “Yes.”

I think he’s right.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. To see more posts on this chapter, “Waiting for Delayed Answers.” Please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Reaching for Quietness

In The Fire of Delayed Answers, author Bob Sorge, discusses two camps (or two dominating ideas) of Christian faith, at least as practiced in the United States. The camp of quietness emphasizes the sovereignty of God; the camp of confidence emphasizes “the availability of God’s promises and power to those who believe.” And there you have to two major wings of evangelical Christianity in America.

We didn’t know it at the time, or refer to it this way at the time, but the terms fit. And they’ve fit for a long time. When we moved to St. Louis in the late 1970s, we had a difficult time finding a church like we had in Houston. In Houston, we attended a church that Sorge would characterize as firmly in the camp of confidence. We couldn’t find a similar church in St. Louis, and we ended up at a church just as firmly in the camp of quietness.

Some years later, we did find a new church (confidence camp) and another that was closer to where we had moved (again, confidence camp). When that church began to blow up, we eventually found our way to where we are now, a Presbyterian church that is heart and soul in the camp of quietness (Presbyterian is another name for “sovereignty,” I think).

The fact is, you need both camps. And the fact is, you rarely find both in the same church. But you can individually keep the two in balance, until, as Sorge puts it, the Assyrians invade and “all hell breaks loose.” He says it’s amazing how quickly “our quietness and confidence can disappear. It can be an enormous challenge to rebuild both quietness and confidence while the crisis continues to rage about us.”

Did someone say crisis? What crisis?

What crisis, indeed.

A very close relative has just been moved to hospice care.

I haven’t had a boss at work in over four months, the organization is being reorganized around us, and I’m not likely to have a boss for at least another four months.

In the past six months, our church has lost almost all of its pastors and some key staff people. The elders are working very hard to lead, which I think will be a very good thing for the long run. In the short term, things seem bewildering at times (and I’m a deacon).

Two of the organizations I write for online are experiencing change, and both are still sorting things out.

It does feel at time the Assyrians have arrived. I don’t feel quiet, and I don’t feel particularly confident.

But I know which camp I lean towards in a time like this one, and that’s the camp of quietness, the cleft in the rock away from the wind and fire.

As Sorge says, hear of the heart of your Father:

“Find a place of quietness in Me by settling your soul and stilling your spirit, and relinquish everything into My hands; and let your heart rise up in confidence in Me, by pressing into My face, devouring My word, claiming My promises, and making the good confession.”

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. Today concludes the discussion on chapter 10, “The Dance of the Two Camps.” To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

What I Write in My Journal

I have a journal. Actually, I have a whole collection of journals. I started keeping one when a friend gave me a Moleskine journal some years ago. I didn’t start using it right away; I waited for a good year. One day I opened it and started writing. Nothing really prompted me to do that.

The Moleskine became another Moleskine, became a spiral notebook or two, became another Moleskine, and then I regularized the process by using a Levenger journal with a tan leather cover. When I ordered a refill, I learned that Levenger owns Moleskine.

The journal goes just about everywhere I do. Most of the poetry I write begins in the journal. So do quite a few blog posts. I use it for sermon notes. I keep schedules in it. Things I need to write down so I don’t forget them usually land in the journal.

The last few journal entries I’ve done include “Thoughts on St. Martin’s,” which became part book review, part musing; a review of Rowan Williams’ A Silent Action; two poems yet to be published; the poem “The White Room” posted yesterday; what eventually became my post Monday on A Million Little Ways by Emily Freeman (“Where Does Poetry Come From?”); some sermon notes; and a few notes on Robin Robertson’s The Wrecking Light, which were used for my post at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Those entries are fairly typical. What I don’t write in it is anything that might prove a problem if someone picked it up and read it. Not many people would get upset to be reading rough drafts of book reviews, notes on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, and a lot of poetry.

In The Fire of Delayed Answers, Bob Sorge describes using a journal in a very different way. He even includes a few journal entries. Reading them is painful, because he describes the spiritual pain he’s experiencing, the wrestling with God and the wrestling with faith.

What the entries reveal is the struggle between “two camps,” as he calls them – the camp of quietness and the camp of confidence. And then he describes those two camps – the camp of quietness, the one that emphasizes “the necessity of surrender to the sovereignty of God,” and the confidence camp, the one that emphasizes “the availability of God’s promises and power to those who will believe.”

And there it is – the great divide in the church, and especially what we call the evangelical church. Sorge calls them the “two general schools of thought in the body of Christ today.”

I’ve attended churches that were in the quietness camp, and churches in the confidence camp. The one I attend now, and have attended for almost a decade, leans pretty hard to the quietness camp (who ever heard of noisy Presbyterians, anyway?). The church we attended before, for some 14 years, leaned pretty hard toward the confidence camp.

As I look back over the entries in my journal, I believe I was too quick to dismiss what I’m writing about. There’s more here than I realized, more pain and more wrestling. It’s subtle; it’s not obvious like the entries Sorge shares in the book.

But it’s there, mostly in the poems. It’s clearly there.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. To see more posts on this chapter, “Dance of the Two Camps,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact. Next week we’ll finish discussing this chapter.

Photograph by Junior Libby via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.