Beeson podcast, Episode 414 Rev. Laura Smit October 16, 2018 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now, your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast, where today I have the privilege of introducing you to one of my favorite preachers. She is the Rev. Dr. Laura A. Smit, professor of theology at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she's been teaching since 1999. She's very active in the life of the church in many different ways, serving as pastor and minister in several different congregations and different denominations. She's now affiliated with what is called ECO, E-C-O, a covenant order of evangelical Presbyterians. We're gonna hear a lecture that she gave here at Beeson Divinity School in connection with our William E. Conger Jr. Lectures on Biblical Teaching. It was presented in February 2016. It's called Proclaiming the Truth, the Appeal to Reason. It's actually the first of a two part series. Maybe we'll get to hear the second lecture in this series a little bit later, but we're going now to Hodges Chapel to listen to our friend Rev. Dr. Laura Smit speaking on proclaiming the truth, the appeal to reason. Laura Smit: Since I'm not preaching today, I'm lecturing, I have notes. I had a few notes yesterday, but I never looked at them, but I'll probably have to look at these. I'll have to look at them to start with, because I've got a quote from C. S. Lewis. In the 30s at some point, I haven't been able to find the date, C. S. Lewis gave a lecture at Manchester University. Then in 1939 he published this lecture in his collection called Rehabilitations, and it's since been republished in his collection of select literary essays, so it's not one of the more central Lewis works. Some of you may not have heard of it. It has a doozy of a title, Bluspels and Flalansferes, a Semantic Nightmare. Those two words are words he makes up in the course of the article. It's a sort of strange paper. It's about metaphors, and how they work in language, and how imagination is a necessary tool for us to explore concepts that are a little bit beyond our ability to understand. So, that context aside, here's where he ends up in that article. He says this, "It must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the imagination as the organ of truth. I am a rationalist. For me reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning." Reason is the organ of truth. Imagination is the organ of meaning. Well, I'm structuring my two talks today and tomorrow around that quotation, today talking about proclaiming the truth, the appeal to reason, and tomorrow talking about the move to meaning and the appeal to imagination. Some of you are now thinking, "Oh. Clearly tomorrow will be much more interesting than today. I wish I had scheduled this differently." I'm sorry. You're probably right about that, that tomorrow will probably be more interesting than today, but we'll see. I think that the preaching act has to include both these things. We have to proclaim the truth, and then we have to somehow communicate that in a way that touches the imagination, touches the heart, moves the truth into the life of the people who are listening to us, so that it has some traction. That I think is the movement that requires imagination. We have to do both those things, and I'm guessing that everyone in here who's a preacher, and that's probably a lot of you, that each of us is better at one side of that than the other. Each one of us is going to be more gifted either at the straightforward proclamation of the truth or at sort of creative ways of talking, but I think if you try to do just one of these two things without the other, you're going to have a problem, because preaching needs to do both. Preaching that simply proclaims truths, but in a way that never appeals to the imagination and never makes a move to meaning, is not living preaching, is not preaching that transforms. It's not the living presence of the word of God, but preaching that's just creative and interesting, but never roots itself in the truth, may transform people, but in very bad directions. So, we need to have both these things. The truth needs to be proclaimed, and the imagination has to be engaged. Now, it is my impression that the truth is not being proclaimed in the American church the way it used to be. Maybe that's just an older person looking back nostalgically, and we all do that, right? But I have some evidence from my own students that the truth isn't being terribly well proclaimed in a lot of their churches. I teach undergraduates. I don't teach seminary students. My undergraduates are Christian people almost completely. Once in a while we get a non-Christian who wanders into Calvin by mistake, but that is sort of a rare moment. Most of our students are deeply committed Christian people. They love Jesus. They want to live a Christian life in every area of life. They want the lordship of Jesus to be manifested. That's why they're at Calvin College, and yet they show up in my Intro to Theology class and they almost absolute nothing about the theology of their own tradition. They have little catchphrases that they can say to me. They can say, "Jesus died to save me from my sins." They can say that, and then if I start saying, "How does that work?", "No idea." I'll be teaching a class on the sacraments, and I'll say, "How do the sacraments work in your church?", and they can tell me. They can tell me things like whether they go forward or whether they stay sitting in the pew. They can tell me if they use grape juice or wine. Then I say, "What does your church believe happens in the sacrament?", "No idea." So, it's not that they aren't present. They're there in church. They're listening. It's not that they're stupid. These are smart students. It's not that they're indifferent. They love Jesus. It's that they haven't been taught. They haven't been taught. Now, it's possible of course that this is more a problem about youth ministry than it is about preaching, but I think that most of these students have spent a fair amount of time listening to sermons, sitting in worship services. I have only this anecdotal evidence to go on for myself, but there are other people who have done more studies about these things. Kenda Dean, for instance, has done some research about what is actually being taught to our young people. She says the reason they don't have much grasp of the faith is that their parents don't have it either. Somehow there's been a lack of teaching that's been happening in the American church. Christian Smith has done a lot of similar studies, looking at how in many, many churches what's called Christianity is really some form of moral therapeutic deism, a kind of self-help religion that bares very little resemblance to the gospel. So, although it might seem self-evident that sermons should proclaim the truth, in point of fact there's a lot of preaching going on that does not proclaim the truth. Now, I'm hopeful that that's not true of any of you, because this is Beeson Seminary. I know you're taught how to proclaim the truth. I know you're taught doctrinal preaching, but even those of us who are really committed to proclaiming the truth face a lot of cultural pressure to do other things, and we may find ourselves moving a little bit away from the pure proclamation of the truth, because there's a lot that pushes us in other directions. There are a few counter-cultural principles I'd like to hold up for you. First, Lewis tells us that the organ that we use or the faculty that we use to perceive truth is reason. So, if Christianity is true, then thinking about Christianity has to involve the reason, but there are an awful lot of Christians in our culture who think that reason is the enemy of faith, that in fact we should believe things precisely because they're not reasonable, that we shouldn't worry about reason, that's what those crazy secular people care about, because we have faith instead. Now, I don't think that that's at all what Christians have believed for most of history, and I don't think that's what the scriptures teach us. Jesus tells us that he himself is the truth. He is the second person of the trinity who has proceeded from the father. He's the speaking forth of everything that needs to be known about the father. He's the showing of the glory of the father, and he means for that to be understandable for us. He has come to reveal things to us, not to keep us in a state of mystification. The great mystery has been revealed, Christ in you, the hope of glory. Most Christians throughout history have understood that reason and truth proceed from God, that they're rooted in the very nature of God, God who is the truth and from whom all truth proceeds, God who structured the cosmos in ways that are compatible with his own being, his own nature, so anything that is reasonable here stems from him, but now there are a couple kinds of reason. One sort of reason, sometimes called discursive reason, what I think we usually think of as reason, where you kind of deduce things from other evidence, in the Latin that's called [foreign language 00:10:55]. Someone like Aquinas, who talks a lot about reason and faith, says, "Okay. [foreign language 00:11:01] not gonna get you very far in understanding much about God. It might get you to the point where you think there is a God, but you're not gonna know a lot about him through that kind of reason, because he's beyond that kind of reason, but there's another kind of reason, the kind of reason that apprehends or receives." In Latin, that's called [foreign language 00:11:23], where we get intelligence from, right? Aquinas says, "Now, that kind of reason applies, because that's the reason that sees, apprehends, receives. When God reveals himself, we are made with a reason that's capable of understanding what he reveals." That's part of what it means to be made in God's image, that when God tells us things about himself, we have some idea what he's talking about. We can receive what he shares with us. So, our reason is not our enemy when we come to proclaiming the truth. That means that the reason of the world is not our enemy either. Sometimes I hear a very strong anti-intellectual spirit amongst Christians, as if any kind of academic work is sort of dangerous, and especially of course science. You want to avoid any of that science. As soon as science comes up with any insight, well, you know, that's just science, so we don't want anything to do with that. Now, that's not honoring the truth of God. All truth belongs to God. We're not afraid of truth. I give you another quote, a great quote. This is from Thomas Aquinas. I'm a medievalist, by the way, so I have to quote these old people. Okay? "Since faith rests upon infallible truth, and since the contrary of a truth can never be demonstrated, it is clear that the arguments brought against faith cannot be demonstrations, but are difficulties that can be answered." Okay? Faith rests on truth, infallible truth. So, if someone has an argument with you against faith, well, you know it's not a demonstration. It's not a proof, because truth can never contradict itself. You may not know the answer, but you know there is an answer. You can be calm about it. You don't need to get all stressed out or worried. So, science comes up with some new theory, and it seems like it's true, and you don't immediately see how that's reconcilable with your faith. Don't panic. If it's true, it's not a threat, because God is truth, so we don't need to worry about this. We don't need to be in a posture of defensiveness in our preaching or in anything else. When I was a girl, the pastor of my church had a sort of favorite target, sociologists. I don't know why he picked on sociologists, but whenever he was talking about secular culture and secular explanations of the world that we had to reject, he always blamed them on sociologists. Now, my father was a sociologist. He taught at Calvin College for 35 years, and every time my pastor would make some crack about sociologists, my father would be rolling his eyes and sighing deeply. You know? But I think every generation has its own favorite villain, and right now it tends to be science more than the humanities or the social sciences, but we need to avoid that kind of antagonistic attitude toward learning. We're not afraid of learning. I think that for me one of my favorite examples of this receptive kind of reason is seen in Anselm. I hope that some of you have read Anselm's Proslogion, where he makes this argument that has come to be known as the ontological argument. That's not a very good name for it. It's where he talks about God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. I think so much of the difficulty of the argument is the grammar of that little phrase. It's the that than which that just freaks people out, right? But God is that being that you can't imagine anything bigger than. That's awkward too, isn't it? There's no grammatically easy or fluid way to say that, but from that claim then Anselm gets to a claim that God exists necessarily. God has to be. Existence is part of the very definition of who God is, but what's interesting to me about that argument is he's not using [foreign language 00:15:34] at all. That's not what he's doing. He's not just trying to come up with a cool proof for the existence of God using his reason. The whole discourse begins with prayer. First, a prayer of confession, where he says, "Lord, I am so sinful. I'm so wrapped up in myself. I can't see you aright. You have made me to do one thing in life, and that is to see you, to know you, to be in relationship with you. That's what I'm here for, and I can't do it. My sin is getting in the way, and all I want is to know you, so I'm asking you to show yourself to me." That's how this starts. Of course, Anselm already has a lot of factual knowledge about God. He's at this point, when he writes is, known as the smartest man in Europe. He's writing all sorts of treatises. He's the abbot of a monastery. He's going to become the archbishop of Canterbury. He knows a lot about faith, but what he still wants is to see God's face, and [foreign language 00:16:39], that kind of discursive reason, will never get him that, so he prays, and he asks for God to show himself. Then he continues his life of going to worship many times every day, singing through all the psalms once a week by memory. In his course of singing through the psalms by memory once a week, twice in the course of the psalms he'd run into this expression, the fool says in his heart, "There is no God." Every time Anselm hits that he thinks about it, so he's meditating on scripture, and he's carrying that verse around, and he's thinking, "Why is it so very foolish to say that there is no God?" It's out of that place of confession and prayer, and asking for revelation, and then meditating on scripture that then he has this insight. God has to exist. That's why it's foolish. To say God doesn't exist is like saying the bachelor is married. It's a stupid, nonsensical thing to say. Existence is part of the very definition of who God is. Now, that's not an idea he could get to through that other kind of reason, but his reason is the faculty that's receiving that idea from God. When it's revealed to him through the scripture, through his meditation, his reason is very much involved in getting that insight, and it's an insight that for Anselm ... maybe this wouldn't do it for you, but for Anselm is does really make him feel as though he has made a step closer to God, that he knows God more intimately, that he's had a little bit of insight granted to him as a gift from God, and it's an answer to that prayer, "Show me your face." You take that argument that Anselm creates in that way, and then let a philosopher loose on it who's going to try to analyze it as if it's a piece of [foreign language 00:18:28], and it doesn't quite work. It doesn't quite make sense, but when you understand it as a prayer, begging God to show himself to my reason, which is here as a big receptor, it works very well. It's a beautiful argument, and all of us can have that kind of experience of God. We pray for understanding. We pray for enlightenment. In my tradition, the Presbyterian tradition, we typically do that together. We believe we're wiser together than we are alon. We deliberate in deliberative assemblies, where we ask the holy spirit to open our minds to receive new understanding. We don't think that's unreasonable. We think it's God lighting up our reason, using our reason as a big receptor for what he wants us to know, usually through the scriptures, his word directly to us. So, we're not being anti-reason, and we're also not being private when we proclaim the truth, because Christian truth is public truth. Christian truth is not just true for you and me and not for other people. When we claim Jesus Christ rose from the dead, that's true, whether you believe it or not. It's not a truth that's dependent on your belief. You know, Jesus is not Tinkerbell, who dies away if you stop believing, so everybody please clap your hands. That's not how this works. Jesus is reality. C. S. Lewis somewhere calls God the great, eternal fact, right? The unchanging fact against which all of our little ideas crash and fall apart. When we proclaim truth, we need to proclaim it with boldness, not as our opinion, not as something that's only true for the people in this room, but as an expression of the way things are, the nature of reality, the structure of the cosmos. That's the kind of truth that we need to be claiming. Now, you're gonna see some aspects of truth more clearly than I will, and I have some aspects of truth I see especially clearly, so we share our minds with each other, and the more we share our minds with each other, the bigger our pictures get. One of the things you have to be careful about though as a preacher is that you don't just always preach the little sliver that you see clearly yourself. You have to find ways to broaden your preaching, so that you're proclaiming the full truth of God, not just your favorite bits. There are different ways to do that. When I was young, my church was very big on catechetical preaching. We would go through the Heidelberg Catechism. Not always the most exciting way to structure sermons, but it does make sure that you kind of cover the whole waterfront in terms of doctrine. Of course, it's limited to one tradition. Other churches use a lectionary. That has its pros and cons. Lectionaries leave out big chunks of scripture. Some people try to preach all the way through the whole bible, but whatever structure you use, I think you have to be very intentional about saying, "I'm not just going to always find in the text my favorite theme. I'm not just always gonna find ..." Maybe you're a God is love person, and somehow every text you pick up that's what you say. If that's the only thing you ever tell your people in your congregation, that's not the full truth of God that needs to be proclaimed. This public truth is not just my favorite idea. It's the way life is. That involves a lot of aspects, so we have to try to get clear about the state of affairs. Christian truth is also not a personal moral code. I think a lot of people in secular culture today want to reduce our religious commitments to a personal moral code, kind of say, "Well, yeah. That's your religion. That's very nice, but you can't impose it on other people. Doesn't it just mean you should be kind to each other?" But of course that's not what Christian truth is. Christian truth has a lot more to do with events, and history, and God's role in the world, and the kind of people we're made to be, and what we are failing to be. Christian truth is not ever to be reduced to morality. This I think is one of the biggest problems in preaching today that I see, that so much preaching reduces down to moral guidance. I mean, this is the confusion that leads you to preach a series of five sermons on how to strengthen your marriage. Now, it's good to strengthen your marriage, but self-help is not what people come to church for. They come to hear the truth of the gospel. If you happen to be preaching a passage that talks about marriage, by all means preach it, but that passage will also talk about the relationship of Christ in his church, and it will situate marriage within the greater community of faith, the covenant community, the body of Christ. It will not just be a little self-help guide about how you and your partner can get along better. If that's the kind of preaching that is happening in your church, then you are not hearing or giving the full proclaiming of the truth. Christian truth requires the supernatural. If your preaching is purely natural, purely contained within the natural world, just a self-help piece of advice, just musing on being nice to each other, then you have not captured the truth of the gospel, because the truth of the gospel is that the world as we see it is not all there is, the world of our senses is not all there is, that the God who made the cosmos and who's holding it in existence is not visible to us, but is radically imminent, present at every moment, involved in everything we're doing, and also radically transcendent, beyond anything we can think or imagine, and that we are constantly living and moving within that God's presence, that we are living before his face, and that his approval is the most important thing in life for us. The worst thing that can happen to you is not that you die, but that God would not approve of you. That is the kind of supernatural truth that we need to be proclaiming. Where do we start in talking about the truth? We talk about the creation, and whatever you think about what science says about creation, I just don't think you need to get all worked up about that myself. Maybe that makes me liberal to you. I don't know. It seems to me the clear message of Genesis one and two is that God made everything. He's the source of it all, and he made it all good. If you have any science that says something contrary to that, you have to say, "Well, I've got to be pretty skeptical about that science," but for the most part that's not what science is speaking to. For the most part science is just speaking about a whole different set of questions than the questions we should be talking about. What we do need to resist is any time a scientist starts making theological claims, right? I've had scientists say to me things like, "Well, the fossil record establishes that there was already sin in the world before there were human beings." I say, "I'm sorry, but the fossil record is not sufficient to establish when there is sin in the world. Sin is not something that can be detected in a fossil record, just like the soul can't be detected in the fossil record. The presence of God cannot be detected in the fossil record." You gotta keep science in its place. That's not anti-intellectual. That's good intellectual work, saying, "You are exceeding the limits of your discipline." So, I don't get too worked up about science, about creation, but I do think we have to assert that here at the very beginning of the story everything that exists comes forth from God, because there's no place else it can come from. "God is the only one," as Anselm said, "Who must exist, the only one who exists in pure actuality." The only way anything contingent, like us, anything that doesn't have to exist, the only way we could come into existence is if God's there first, bringing it all to be. Whatever you think happened on this human timeline, in terms of how long that process took, the big thing to know is that the whole timeline is being held by God, who is beyond time, that he is the sustainer and the maker of all of it, and he made it all good. We know he made it good, because it proceeds from him, and he is all good. He can't make anything that's not good, because nothing that proceeds from God is anything except good. We know even more than that. We know that the God who made everything in our cosmos is the father, son, and holy spirit, a community of love, and that the most basic truth about everything in the world is that it's rooted in, and proceeds from, and is supported and made by love. Now, that is an optimistic place to start in the proclaiming of the truth, that love is the beginning of everything, that we exist as an overflow of love and grace on the part of a God who doesn't need us, but just chose to have us anyway, a god who wasn't lonely, wasn't desperately wanting someone to talk to, a God who's completely self-sufficient, as father, son, and the holy spirit, and who brought us into existence as a gift. God called us out of nothingness into existence, into reality, intending to draw us ever closer to himself, intending to draw us ever closer into the beings he designed us to be, but we took a look around and said, "You know, you have shown us one path, and we are gonna go down another. We would like to be the authors of our own destiny, thank you very much." We started drifting back into the nothing, becoming less and less fully what God meant us to be, more and more a mixture of illusion and lie in with the truth of our being. Then there's the great good news that God did not let us just drift away. He could have, but he came to rescue us. He joined us in all of that nothingness. He came all the way into death, and the only way he could do that was to take our nature to himself, so that he could enter all the way to the bottom of that pit, and then explode his glory, and give us a way out. God did that in the person of Jesus, a real person, a real human, who is also mysteriously really God. He was born on a particular date, in a particular time, in a particular city, and he died, and then he came back to life, not as a resuscitation, but as a glorified human being. He ascended into heaven. He is right now fully human and fully God, seated at the throne, at the right hand of the father, reining over everything. It doesn't look like it, but he is. For reasons that are somewhat mysterious, rather than just making everything okay, he chooses to use us as his agents in making things better, and someday he's going to come again, and we're gonna have a new Heaven and a new Earth, and all of us will go through the same process he's gone through. These are public truths. If these sorts of clear, straightforward proclamations about the gospel are not featured front and center through your reaching, then your preaching is too horizontal, then your preaching is not enough about the gospel. It is not enough about the truth that must be proclaimed, and it is too much about some kind of a self-help religion, some kind of a therapeutic process, but that's not what we're called to talk about. We're called to talk about the truth who came to live with us in Jesus Christ. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host, Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, BeesonDivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school, training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work, and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson Podcast.