With four children and two parents with pack-rat proclivities, spring cleaning has by necessity become a year-round activity. You never know when you'll need the odd thing, but you don't want to take the time to evaluate its value. So you accumulate a garage full of clutter.
Much the same can happen in the storage of our life-driving convictions. One of the things I encounter often, in my own life and in others, is a tendency to take on board certain beliefs without thinking about how they fit with the others we hold. Especially in our Internet age, it's easy to surf the world of ideas the way we are drawn to knick-knacks at garage sales. Something interesting from this source, then the next site’it's all interesting. We don't know quite what to do with it when we click or pick it, adding it to our stock of clutter, but we file it away.
Over time, though, the danger is that we don't end up holding anything with great seriousness. We have developed a habit of acquiring clutter rather than convictions. Instead of taking the time to evaluate (a) what we already believe and why we believe it and (b) the consistency of the new candidate of belief with these other convictions, we just add it to the attic.
I've used it before, but a great 1994 Entertainment Weekly piece by Jeff Gordinier makes this point well. Citing examples from TV, pop music, and best-selling books, Gordinier notes that "pop culture is going gaga for spirituality." However,
Seekers of the day are apt to peel away the tough theological stuff and pluck out the most dulcet elements of faith, coming up with a soothing sampler of Judeo-Christian imagery, Eastern mediation, self-help lingo, a vaguely conservative craving for "virtue," and a loopy New Age pursuit of "peace." This happy free-for-all, appealing to Baptists and stargazers alike, comes off more like Forest Gump's ubiquitous "boxa chocolates" than like any real system of belief. You never know what you're going to get.
Another analogy for this pack-rat habit is the ever-expanding loose-leaf notebook. We may keep adding pages, but never tear anything out. We need to take time to focus on at least some of our big beliefs and weed out the ones that contradict or undermine them.
We would do well to recall the wisdom of our spiritual forebears on this account. Think of the precision of the ecumenical creeds. After a few centuries of answering objections, fending off heretics, and edifying the faithful, the church fathers became skilled at knowing what to throw away and what to keep. These early creeds were able to cut off each major contradiction of the faith in a concise phrase that included both an affirmation and a denial. If this then not that. It's common in our churches once a year to recite together the Athanasian Creed. If anyone was misty on the Trinity and the person of Christ before they walked in, they discovered clear boundaries of Christian teaching by its rapier-like conclusion. Similarly, Reformation confessions and theological treatises often included both affirmations and denials: "This we affirm….Therefore, this we condemn."
The problem with us today is that we affirm all sorts of things loosely in our cluttered notebooks. We add pages from a conference here, a blog there, but without tearing anything out. We skim, nodding to things that sort of sound right, and rush on to our next immediate task. R. C. Sproul once told me about someone who exclaimed, "Dr. Sproul, you're my favorite Bible teacher’you and Kenneth Copeland!" How could one possibly put those two resources in the same notebook? I heard something similar when, after expressing gratitude for the White Horse Inn, the person wondered why I would disagree with Joel Osteen. We need to be not only careful teachers, but also careful students’to be attached to the truth and not to men or movements. As Walter Martin used to say, the Feds know that the best way to learn how to identify counterfeit bank notes is to study carefully the real thing.
One of the dangers of looking to movements, perpetually anticipating The Next Big Thing, is that we lose real treasures in the clutter’and, more importantly, the habits that enable us to distinguish truth from error, the serious from the trivial, and the primary from the secondary. Good sommeliers develop a habit of discrimination over time, with practice and devotion to the craft. If they just replied to all of our queries about a bottle of wine, "Oh, that's a great vintage!" we would doubt their skill. We're always willing to invest in anything that's valuable to us’sports, hobbies, family history, or technology. The more invested we are, the more we care for it and for the people who are a part of it. Since our first calling is citizenship in Christ, with his body, we should seek to develop habits of discriminating between what is beautiful and ugly, good and bad, true and false. Often we will find that things aren't totally one or the other, but even that is a wise and generous appraisal that comes from discriminating habits.
Sometimes in my periodical spring cleaning, out of exasperation I have thrown out important things. As all the stuff comes pouring out of the door like a tidal wave, I go into a "take-no-prisoners" stance. All I want is a pristine garage. I want to start over. Yet it doesn't take long before the garage is once again captive to the chaos monster. Over the years, I'm sure that I have thrown out some important things that my wife and I wanted to pass down to our kids.
Evangelicalism is like that garage. There are some real treasures in there, gifts that should be shared with others and passed down to future generations. Yet we vacillate between indiscriminate accumulation and equally indiscriminate discarding. Each new generation seems to want to "reboot" Christianity, starting over from scratch. What we need instead is the patience, born of a love for what’and who’really matters, to evaluate what we believe and why we believe it and how it shapes our identity and living in the world.
So let's allow the parade to pass us by as it marches behind The Next Big Thing. Instead, let's do a little spring cleaning each day. There will be some forgotten treasures amid a lot of clutter, "but examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good" (1 Thess. 5:21 NASB).
