I date models

The Church gives us not a system, but a key; not a plan of God’s City, but the means of entering it. Perhaps someone will lose his way because he has no plan. But all that he will see, he will see without a mediator, he will see it directly, it will be real for him; while he who has studied only the plan risks remaining outside and not really finding anything. Georges Florovsky

 

It’s a great line from an Andy Stanley podcast someone recently shared with me:

 

Date your models, be married to your values.

 

Stanley presents it as an organizational principle – one pointing to our great need for flexibility when it comes to organizational systems and procedures and policies. His point is to know and hold to your values without wavering, but to hold your models, your systems, your policies loosely, because the latter are subject to change depending on how we need to apply and live out the former.

 

Great principle! It’s one we often fail to recognize, and when that happens we can actually find ourselves with a system that is working counter to the very things we stand for – like the Pharisees of old upholding a tradition/system of offering that ended up flying in the face of a key value on which the people of Israel were founded (see Mark 7).

 

Makes me wonder. Just what is it that I’m married to? While this isn’t an exhaustive list, this is how I’d summarize where my non-negotiable commitment lies:

 

I am married to the One, the Only, the Trinitarian God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit;

I am married to the Story of the Great Rescue he has accomplished in the Son and is bringing to completion as “all things are summed up under one head, even Christ”;

I am married to the Book that faithfully tells this Story.

 

That’s not exactly how Paul sums it up in 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 or in Ephesians 4:1-6, but it’s an accurate description of where I’m planted.

 

It’s taken me thirty years to finally get something of a grip on what it is that I’m married to – chiefly because during the first two decades of that thirty year journey I didn’t date a model, I married it. The model masqueraded as the Mate and I was so taken in by it that I truly lost sight of the Groom altogether. In many ways, I had failed to see Him at all due to the veil of the model I married.

The “model” or system was one that I was taught as being identical with the Book; if you loved the Book, if you took the Book seriously (and thus took God seriously) then this is the model you would hold to. The model literally wrapped itself in the Book – verses everywhere to be memorized and repeated. It was solidly Arminian (a heavy nod to man’s free will, to “whosoever will”) and decidely anti-Calvinist. I learned the TULIP of Calvinism by heart to defeat it: “This is what Calvinists say (false teachers all!) and here are all the verses that clearly defeat their great errors, their gross and falacious so-called ‘reasonings.’” This model taught me that Christendom as a whole was lost and in the wilderness of false teaching (like Calvinism) and denominational error. The model’s prime directive: to expose the errors of Christendom at large and “restore the ancient order.” Billy Graham was a false teacher. Oral Roberts and his kind were heretics riding an emotional rollercoaster straight to hell unless we could convince them of their error. Protecting our “flock” from all this error became a key focus. We regularly taught about the evils and errors of Mormonism, JW’s, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists (we really didn’t like the Baptists!) just to name a few. This model taught its people to know the “truth” (which only we possessed) and to refute error (which everyone else was stuck in) so as to “snatch some out of the fire.”

The model was ultimately founded upon the belief that the Bible could only be correctly understood and applied through a system of authority that the model claimed was inherent not only within the Bible but within the very thought processes of humanity. Command, approved example, necessary inference and a host of subordinate system laws (law of inclusion, law of exclusion, law of expediency, et al) were absolutely essential to “rightly dividing the word of truth” and avoiding the fires of hell.

Wow, what a trip down memory lane this is!

But over a period of several years, I had an awakening. I realized that I had, in fact, married a model and missed the very One, the only One I was to be married to. What I thought was a secure bridge collapsed right beneath me. It was just a bridge, a model, a system of thought, an effort to “get it right” and to keep people on the right path. And while it had moved me forward towards Christ and had been instrumental in instilling in me a deep love for the Book that continues to this day, when it collapsed I found myself awakened to the Reality it had ultimately obscured as much as revealed.

 

So I have repented.

 

No more marrying any models.

 

Now don’t misunderstand, models are good, necessary even. It’s difficult not to develop a system of thought and theology to try to explain what we see in the story. The most dangerous and seductive model of all is the one that we deny even exists; the most divisive creed the one that is never committed to writing. One of the surest signs you’ve been sucked into marrying a model? To say you don’t have a model but that you just believe and practice the Bible, which is just another way of saying your model = truth (that Arminianism or Calvinism or Pentecostalism or Evangelicalism or Fundamentalism or whatever other ism = Christian/salvation/truth). Game over. Freedom gone. You’re toast. You’ve married the model and will likely, eventually, inevitably miss the Man.

 

I chose to marry the Man and date models. Whether models or systems of thought presented by Augustine in his Confessions or Thomas Acquinas in Summa Theologica or Calvin in his Institutes of Religion or CS Lewis in his God in the Dock (what I’m currently reading) or Bishop Kallistos Ware in his The Orthodox Way (another current read) or even Brian McLaren in his A New Kind of Christianity, I will only date them and the system of thought and theology they embody. Some may have flashes of brilliance, shining a bright light on the face of Jesus and His kingdom; others may leave me shaking my head or gagging – and in fact all of them will do both to one extent or another. Exposure to different models so as to truly understand and see from the perspective that each model in turn offers is one of the best means of insurance against becoming overly committed to any one of them. Checks and balances. Seeing through another model’s eyes can do wonders in exposing the blind spots of the model with which we are currently “going steady.” Currently I’m experiencing this through reading Bishop Ware’s book The Orthodox Way. How illuminating to view the same Trinitarian God, the same Story of Rescue, the same Book through Eastern as opposed to Western eyes. To deny there is a difference between the two is to be doubly blind – and is to flash your wedding band placed on your finger by your current (probably) western model.

Marrying a model is not all it’s cracked up to be.

And so, if you dare, date.

 

Stay loose.

 

Play the field.

And marry the Man and his Story of rescue – and the Book that proclaims Him.