Theology and Reason are Dead! Trust Me.

What is this page about?

First, let us not answer a weak form of what the pastor says. He does not mean, “I do not like reading.”

He is saying something about where authority is. You have a book about a person. The book is not the person, and the person is alive. If the living Christ says something this morning, and a dead man’s paragraph says something different, why choose the paragraph?

He also has a hard Bible passage on his side. The people in the Gospels who knew the Scriptures best did not know Jesus when he stood in front of them. He said to them:

You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and these are they which testify about me. Yet you will not come to me, that you may have life.

John 5:39–40 · World English Bible

In simple words: You study the Scriptures, because you think that you have life for ever in them. They speak about me. But you will not come to me to have life.

That is a serious argument. This page agrees with much of it before it disagrees with anything.

The short answer

1. Much of what the pastor sees is right. Dead religion is real. The risen Christ wrote to a working church: “you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead” (Revelation 3:1). To know the teaching is not the same as to know God.

2. But the sentence breaks itself. “Theology does not matter” is a sentence about God: about how he speaks and what he has given us. That is theology. And every reason that the pastor gives for it is reasoning.

3. The name “Jesus” came from somewhere. See Part 3.

4. The Bible itself tells churches to test a message that someone says is from God. And in every test, someone other than the receiver does the testing.

• “don’t believe every spirit, but test the spirits” (1 John 4:1).
• “Let the prophets speak, two or three, and let the others discern.” (1 Corinthians 14:29)
• Even an angel from heaven does not stand above the message that was already given (Galatians 1:8).
• The people of Berea checked the words of an apostle, and the Bible praises them (Acts 17:11).

5. A sign that comes true decides nothing. In Deuteronomy 13, the sign happens. But the people must still say no to the prophet, because his message leads to other gods. Results are not the standard.

6. The old church never said that God stopped speaking. When someone said, “I have a word from God,” the church never answered “impossible”. It never answered “of course”. It answered: let us look at it. The creeds are that answer, written down.

7. This argument is much older than most people think. About the year 180, a bishop named Irenaeus wrote about his opponents. He showed them the Scriptures. They answered that the truth did not come through writings. It came, they said, “by the living voice”. They also said that they knew better than the apostles. So this is the same argument. It is older than the Christian emperors and older than the popes. It is older than everything that people complain about.

8. The churches say that they can be wrong. One Protestant statement of faith says in writing that great church meetings “may err, and sometimes have erred”. This page never needed a perfect church. It needs only this: something to check against that the speaker did not write himself.

9. If the church was wrong from the beginning, everything goes. The list of Bible books goes. The copied text goes. The translation goes. And the promise of Jesus that his church would not be destroyed goes too. You cannot cut off the branch that you are sitting on.

10. History shows two endings. See Part 4.

11. So the disagreement is small. It is not about whether Jesus speaks. It is about whether anyone except the hearer may check.

What does the old church really deny?

Here are ten sentences. Does the old church agree with each one? “The old church” here means Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant together.

The old church agrees:

1. Christ is alive. We can speak to him, and he can answer.
2. A church can have all the right teaching and be dead.
3. A person can know the Bible text very well, and this knowledge can stand in his way. Jesus said this in John 5.
4. The Holy Spirit guides ordinary believers. The book of Acts is full of this.
5. The church has been wrong, sometimes badly.
6. We accept the creeds because they can be proved from the Bible. We do not accept them only because a church meeting said so.

The old church denies:

1. To say the creed correctly is all that God asks.
2. We should accept a message “from God” because the speaker is clearly honest.
3. If a prophecy comes true, the message was from God.
4. The person who received the message is the only one who may judge it.

Most people find that the second list is much shorter than they expected. And sentence 10 is the whole disagreement.

“Jesus told me.” How would you know?

Accept the experience fully. This page cannot judge anyone’s inner life, and it does not try. Ask a different question: how does the hearer know who spoke?

The sentence “Jesus told me” has a name in it. The name says that the voice belongs to one certain person. It is not another spirit. It is not a strong feeling. It is not a stranger. And everything that tells us who this person is came from somewhere.

It came in four parts.

1. Which books are in the Bible. No book in the New Testament has a list of the others. The church took three hundred years to settle the list.
2. The words. People copied them by hand for 1,500 years before printing.
3. The translation. Careful scholars made it. They used exactly the kind of thinking that the pastor calls dead.
4. The teaching about who this person is. He was born of Mary. He died on the cross and rose. He is one person, truly God and truly man. “Jesus” was a common name in the first century. This teaching tells us which Jesus is meant.

So the pastor is free to say, “The church got things wrong.” But he is not free to say, “The church got things so wrong that we can throw all of it away.” The thing he throws away is what brought him the name in his own sentence.

This has happened before

This idea is not new. It does not escape from tradition. It is a tradition, and we know its history. Here are five stories. All are from long ago.

Asia Minor, about the year 170. A man named Montanus and two women said that the Spirit was speaking in a new way through them. The church did not answer, “Prophecy has ended.” It complained about the wild way they spoke, and that they let nobody weigh their words.

Germany, 1521. Three men came to Luther’s town. They said that their authority was direct messages from God, not the Bible. Luther came out of his hiding place to preach against them.

Prague, 1521. A man named Thomas Müntzer said it better than almost anyone. He wrote that a person who does not hear the living word from the mouth of God “is nothing more than a dead thing”. He said that he wanted to pray to a speaking God, not to a silent one. If this page cannot answer that, it is not worth writing.

Luther did not answer, “God is silent.” He said two things. First, God comes to us from outside first, through the preached Word and the sacraments. After that he works inside us. Second, a true spirit lets itself be tested. Luther wrote:

a true spirit would allow it to be tested beforehand and humbly submit to judgement, as Christ did

Martin Luther, 1524

In simple words: A true spirit would let others test it first. It would humbly accept their judgement, as Christ did.

Münster, Germany, 1534 to 1535. Read this one with care. It is not a normal case, and nobody should use it to attack others. Men who said they saw visions took control of a city. One said that God had sent him, rode out, and was killed. The next one crowned himself king. After a year the city fell, and about three thousand people died. Most of the people who baptized adults in those days said no to this, and their churches today love peace. The point is not that private messages lead to this. The point is that at each step only a standard outside the man could have stopped it. And that standard was the first thing to go.

Kentucky, America, 1804. This is the kindest case. Six ministers closed their church organisation. They put away every creed. They wanted no name but “Christian” and no standard but the Bible. They were honest people with a real complaint. Within seven years, two of the six had joined a group that was built on the messages of one woman. Two others went back to their old church. And a hundred years later, the movement that wanted to end division had divided itself.

The two endings.

• It splits. Two honest people have both heard from God, and the messages do not agree. Nothing can settle it. They share no text and no meeting that both accept. So one of them leaves.
• It gathers around one man. Nobody may question his word, because to question it is called a failure. A man who refuses a teaching office that must answer to others has not ended teaching authority. He has moved it into himself, and he has taken away every check.

The strongest arguments against this page

Here they are, said fairly. This page agrees with all five.

1. Dead religion is real, and the Bible speaks against it.
2. To be right about the teaching is not the same as to know God.
3. God does speak directly in the New Testament. Paul says that his message came from Christ and no human taught it to him.
4. The church has really been wrong, sometimes shamefully.
5. New life has often come from the edges of the church, and the centre fought against it.

What do these five points show? They show that the church needs correction. They do not show that we should throw away the church’s teaching about who Christ is. And they do not show that a “word from God” needs no checking. Paul said that his message came from Christ. And still he went to Jerusalem and explained it to the leaders, “for fear that I might be running, or had run, in vain” (Galatians 2:2). John wrote about the Spirit who teaches believers. And in the same short letter he wrote “test the spirits”.

How would you know that it was him?

The pastor says: “You have a book about him. I have heard from him. Why should I choose your book?”

The answer is not, “Because he does not speak.” The church never said that.

The answer is not, “Because the book is greater than he is.” Nobody in the old church believed that.

The answer is a question: “When you say that it was him, how do you know?” You name a person, and the name has a meaning. That meaning came from the record. So the record is not the enemy of the voice. It is the only reason why you can say whose voice it was.

The creeds are not against that voice. They are the church’s long answer to the question, “How would we know that it was him?” The people who wrote them believed that he is alive and that he speaks. They wrote against other people who also said this. Those people were right that he is alive. They were wrong about what he had said.

Check it yourself

1. Read these and ask each time, “Who does the testing, and against what?”: 1 John 4:1-6, 1 Corinthians 14:26-33, Galatians 1:6-12, Acts 17:10-12 and Deuteronomy 13:1-5.
2. Read what Irenaeus wrote about the year 180 in his book against false teachers, Book 3, chapter 2. It is free online. Look at the date.
3. Read the other side in its own words: Thomas Müntzer’s short writing from Prague, 1521.
4. Do this one. Ask in your church, in private and politely, as a real question: “If something taught here from the front was a mistake, how would we find out? And who would be allowed to say so?” Whatever the answer is, you will know something new. You will also learn what it cost to ask.