Freedom to Think
"It's okay Megin," Jon said, "You talk to God about it. That's what you do."
Better advice, I had never been given. Jon was a year senior Christianity major, music minor, a brother, mentor, friend. I was a freshman music major...one day to be double major in Christianity and Music. Jon gave me permission to ask God about God's self and not just obey. Jon gave me permission to think about God. My professors in the Christianity department had been suggesting I do just that, THINK about God, telling me that if God were who I believed God to be, God could handle me questioning Him, but I knew they were all going to hell. Most of them were not Southern Baptist, much less FUNDAMENTAL Baptist. They needed saving, and a lot of it at that. Those rebel-without-a-cause professors, might as well have come to class wielding leather, silver chains, and drinking alcohol. That is how OUT there they were to me. Thank God for them and their apostasy. They changed my life. I am indebted. Praise God.
I took Jon's and the professor-hellions' advice, and questioned this faith I believed and had proclaimed was all about relationship. I held it up to its standard, and in God's sovereignty, God added a substantial douse of reformed mentorship from a campus pastor to my mix and a few summers overseas teaching English, and suddenly, I was on my way to learning how to formulate my personal thought, becoming a believing priest, (Hebrews 4:14).
But it's unfortunate, isn't it? The way the many grow up... not allowed to formulate their opinions and express them without being put down or told they are wrong, at home and in their churches. So unfortunate. Diane Langberg writes extensively about the abuses in churches at the hands and staves of unwise, unloving, and unrepentant shepherds in her book Suffering and the Heart of God. This is not how it should be, but far too often, this is exactly how it is. Abuse. Heresy. Heresy is Abuse. Abuse is Heresy.
When pastors lead and leave no room for congregants to express their feelings and opinions without being told they are sinning, it is abusive. When leaders are allowed to continue leading even though they are blatantly practicing sinful behaviors behind the scenes, it is abusive. When spouses are allowed to control and hurt in the name of headship, it is abusive.
Michael Horton writes of the dangerous practice adopted by many of the abusers of the bible, stating, " heretics often go “directly to the Bible.”" He suggests that we must be wise, having "learned the Bible from previous generations, going all the way back to the apostles. They teach us the systematic teaching of Scripture on the essentials, from Genesis to Revelation. Otherwise [we] will fall prey to a clever communicator who can isolate verses and force them to say something that, in context and in relationship to the whole teaching of Scripture, they cannot be saying," ('I Just Believe The Bible' Doesn't Make You Orthodox).
We have to have structures in place that can call into question our leadership and its teaching. I don't mean that we should blame our leadership for everything and CONSTANTLY question our leadership, but there must be boundaries. This happens at home as well. Being a Christian doesn't mean a person isn't dangerous. We all need to be aware of our propensity toward sin, toward abuse. Probably a true statement can be made that for those of us who have been abused to some degree, we will, to some extent, struggle each day lest we become our abusers.
Thus we need creeds. And we need community. We need boundaries, and we need honesty, and we need grace. Creeds are our safeguards- "They’re not true because the church says so; the church says so because they’re true." -(Horton, The Gospel Coalition) And our friends are the mirrors telling us to behave better. I'll forever be grateful to one of my best friends, Titus, for calling out behaviors Jesse and I were exhibiting toward one another in our relationship. It took courage on Titus' part to speak into our lives, but we needed to hear it. We were treating each other like crap. He spoke up, and it started a revolution.
A revolution. Thinking for oneself. Hopefully that concept is not novel, but if it is, I encourage you, keep at it... there is freedom, and there is hope, and it gets easier. God will help you. God will gift you people to guide you along the way...people like Jon, and my crazy apostate professors that I am quite sure, by the way, will all be spending eternity with me in the New Heavens and the New Earth. People like Titus who has been a friend closer than a brother. God will provide, and God will help you learn to think. You'll wake up one day shocked because you had no idea you were under a cloud of abuse all those years, and you'll cry because you will be so sad over all the lost time, but it will be okay, because God will be there waiting to restore the years the locusts have eaten... to mend your clipped wings, and show you just how great of a dancer and thinker you are after all...
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