He who trusts in his own heart is a fool but he who walks wisely will be delivered.
Proverbs 28:26 (NAS)
He who trusts his own instinct is a dullard, but he who lives by wisdom shall escape.
Proverbs 28:26 (JPS)
Something I want to get to before I round off this series is to attempt to discuss a spectrum in which we may consider the statements of those who call themselves prophets. I wrote earlier that the scriptures are valuable for making these assessments. I believe it is necessary to discuss this as a subject in itself with respect to would-be prophets.
A few simple, perhaps troublingly simple, guidelines may be proposed. The first is that the scriptures are the common gift of all the Lord's people and this means that we must be informed by the scriptures first before we attempt to convince ourselves we play any kind of prophetic or corrective role toward other Christians. We must be sufficiently immersed in the scriptures that we reflexively think in terms of what they say.
This is not something where I advocate rote memorization of Bible passages. In fact a person apt to memorize isolated biblical passages is probably more rather than less likely to be apt to both abuse scripture and to, dare I say it, fancy himself or herself a prophet without cause. It is far better to know the scriptures not like a series of salient proof texts or life verses that can be memorized like schematics for a building or checklists. It is better to know the scriptures the way you know the lyrics and guitar riffs and chord changes to one of your favorite songs. Have you ever spent time with someone who is not a musician but loves a song utterly? He can sing all the words, knows all the melodies, can even vocally replicate parts of drum fills and bass lines and, if you are a musician yourself, you can hear how he imitates the tiniest gestures on the high hat or even changes in the tone of the guitar or bass line. Though he may not be a musician himself this person knows the song intimately. In the same way, whether or not you or I know all the ins and outs of Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and the like we are urged by the scriptures themselves to know them like a favorite song.
This immersion will do two things, it will imprint within us the Lord to whom the scriptures point and will shape our imaginations to think and feel within the categories of scripture. Of course false prophets have an ability to misinterpret and distort scripture so even here this is no certainty that things won't go awry. My opening with a passage from proverbs is strategic because the more I have reflected on proverbs and seen how Christians use Proverbs the more I have realized that proverbs are emblematic of how scripture can be abused. It is easy to cite a proverb as a "rule for life" as though the proverb is a law or a promise/law that ensures that if you follow it then God will give this, that or the other thing you want.
One of the things that we Protestants can "sometimes" be embarrassed about, depending on our roots (yeah, yeah, savor the irony and all that those of you who get the irony) is that there are schools of thought about interpreting scripture that can go unexamined. I have made it clear here that I am not a dispensationalist/futurist in my approach to scripture. I also have concluded that it is wisest to reject both premillenialism and postmillenialism. Why? Well, I could get into various complex reasons as to why but the simplest reason is that these are interpretive grids which lead to a particular generational temptation that is present in almost nay generation, the temptation to, however you splice it, to see in the scriptures a secret message for me that, thanks to my wisdom, allows me to interpret the signs of the times.
What do I mean? Well, I would hope it would be obvious but I will say, briefly, that Hal Lindsey types fall prey to this mistake. Harold Camping falls prey to this mistake. What is given as a gift to all Christians across space and time is transformed into a Bible code book that allows a man to make a profit off of religion in a way that lets him part people with their money on codes and timelines that warn of doom for those who don't subscribe to the timeline. But that is a systemic thing. Theoretically if one bears in mind that the scriptures are God's gift through the inspiration of the Spirit for all of us then we should be humble enough to recognize that the mystery of our faith has been given to all who put their faith in Christ. There is no special code or special insert in my Bible compared to the Bible received by Luther or Augustine or Jerome or Athanasius or Wesley.
Clearly even I don't have time to discuss all the details of how one ought to interpret scripture at every single point with respect to understanding prophetic activity. I do suggest that the more we let scripture inform us and submit our understanding to the scriptures (rather than the other way around) the less likely we may be to stray.
And one of the ways in which we may be tempted to stray is in the over-interpretation of dreams. A person once told me without batting an eye lash that the Holy Spirit visited her in the form of a spider. Now the scriptures, which I just mentioned we should let shape our imaginations (more or less) do not anywhere attest to the Spirit taking the form of a spider. The Spirit is described as being like a rushing wind whose movements we cannot perceive or contain. The Spirit is described as descending on the Lord Jesus in the form of a dove. The Spirit is also described as descending in what appeared to be divided tongues of fire.
This is to point out the obvious, that where the scriptures speak to the manner and likeness of how the Lord may appear it should serve as a hedge against dreams in which we might suppose the Lord appears in some way that has no testimony in scripture. A person who declares the Spirit came to him in a dream in the form of a spider will be completely convinced he has been visited by God but if this person has really saturated himself in the scriptures he will bear in mind that this is not normative imagery. The renewal of the mind we are admonished to by scriptures would, I suggest, preclude the possibility of taking seriously that the Spirit would visit me in the form of a spider. Feeling great spiritual experiences or having dreams that "feel" like spiritually significant dreams will not make those experiences so.
Now I have not at any point said spiritual dreams don't happen. I know a fellow who had a dream of being in a demon infested house at the age of eleven, At the end of the dream he heard a voice that assured him of God's love despite where he was. At the age of sixteen the boy ended up in the house that he dreamed about at the age of eleven and it was not a pleasant experience but he got through it. As I mentioned earlier in this series, dreams that are really from the Lord do not necessarily give us the power to avert the disaster or trial warned about in the dream but they do allow us to face the trial with an understanding that this, too, is from the Lord. So the person I know who had this dream could at least tentatively say that the nature and role of the dream, though perhaps not automatically one we should presume was given by God, did not, at any rate, flatly contradict the nature of dreams given by the Lord in scripture either in nature or use with respect to the conduct of an individual believer. What the dream revealed came to pass.
Now one could equally propose, perhaps, that the dream was a kind of deja vu created in a stressful moment and that the dream was a confused false memory. Well, I grant that might be possible. I can't entirely rule it out. A more compelling reason to wonder if the dream had any spiritual or prophetic role is simply that the person who had the dream is of no particular significance to any local or regional church. It may well have been from the Lord but it is still, even if it were such a dream, not so important that detailing everything about the man who had itor what it might have meant is of any significance. I mention it only because I know of at least one possible case in which the Lord may have given a person a dream that helped him remember to trust in God's providence despite some discouraging and unpleasant circumstances. So far as that goes I would propose that though it may not be confirmed as from the Lord it is at least not antithetical in content or purpose to those dreams described in scripture.
I have not attempted to be exhaustive here in describing how scripture can be a check as well as a guide for the imagination of someone who proposes to be a prophet or have spiritual insight. I concluded after my last entry in this project that I needed to at least share some anecdotal but not entirely useless examples of what I'm trying to get at. I disagree with John MacArthur's overall handling of Pentecostal and charismatic teaching with respect to the activity of the Spirit. Many cessationists are as self-serving in imagining that they are the spiritual varsity for their cessationism as charismatic/Pentecostals imagine they are spiritual varsity for speaking in tongues or getting slain in the Spirit. These reactionary poles are not, I propose, what we as Christians are actually called to where life in the Spirit is concerned. As I am not a professional theologian or biblical scholar I can't provide more than a tentative outline as to what a healthy, scripturally informed and historically Christian path may be. I have had just enough first-hand and second-hand experience with what it is not that I feel I can at least broach the subject of how Christians distort and misuse what is considered a "prophetic" role in a Christian community.
Per chris e.'s earlier comment, yes, I agree that there is a spectrum rather than a polarity to consider. This is why I consider Carl Trueman's thoughts about the nature of pastoral calling to be parallel to and intertwined with concerns about the nature of prophecy and spiritual discernment among Christians. We do not have to deny that it is possible the Lord will speak to us but it is problematic if we insist that God must speak to us.
At the risk of grossly simplifying a topic over against those who claim prophetic gifts we should remember that Paul wrote that spiritual gifts and offices are for the edification of God's people, not those who hold the offices. Scripture widely attests the Lord's disapproval and judgment of those who use spiritual offices and gifts merely to bless themselves and not also serve the Lord's people. One of the gravest misconceptions we can have is that these two aims are mutually exclusive, just as it is a grave misconception to imagine that merely one or the other is all there is to such a role. David clearly benefited and prospered while the appointed messiah for God's people. It would be wrong to suppose David did not benefit from his role or that it was wrong from him to seek prosperity within that role. A starving king cannot adjudicate issues among the people anymore than a starving prophet can be much focused on speaking of God's will to His people.
Perhaps by way of closing this series I can refer to the prophet Jeremiah. The prophet said things from the Lord regarding judgment. There were those who were outraged at this activity and sought to stone him. Some of the older nobles of the land remembered, however, that there was a prophet who spoke earlier and in a similar way and that those things came to pass. They urged the people of Judah to consider that perhaps there was something to this.
This is not to say that every time someone claims "fresh fire" we should pay attention to them, far from it. This is to suggest that when there is a real possibility that the Lord is providentially speaking through someone in a prophetic role the Spirit attesting within the hearts of God's people (and not just formal leadership, though ideally that, too, will happen) will speak to its reliability. If you think you have a prophetic gift and spiritual insights and not a single Christian who confesses Father, Son and Spirit and Christ risen from the dead who forgives sins agrees with your spiritual observations you may be on a wrong path.
People commenting on the internet don't count. People who are in some way under your authority don't count. A parent who conceives himself or herself to have a spiritual gift can't expect to get any backup from children because children can't vet one's spiritual authority since they are enjoined to submit and honor parents. A kid might question your spiritual discernment or authority with cause for all we know. People who are entirely in your camp on eschatology should not be counted, either. Why, well because you don't know that your prophet, even if a real prophet, doesn't have some unexamined sin in his or her heart. Jonah was still a sinner despite his eventual obedience to the Lord. Jonah's success lay in his failure, as he saw it. He predicted the devastation of Ninevah and yet God spared the city within Jonah's life. God also spared Ahab. If a person appointed as a prophet forgets that the Lord's goal is to inspire repentance and not justify the destruction of others merely so a prophet can look good then one has gone down the wrong path even if one is genuinely appointed by the Lord to a prophetic role.
So let me get specific, perhaps specific in ways some folks may not enjoy. People can be considered prophets by certain Christians selectively and with certain agendas in hand. R. L. Dabney can be called a prophet by home-schoolers who say he reliably predicted the inevitable secularization of the United States through public schools. They are much less apt to cite Dabney's objection that public schools would turn Negro children into more skilled criminals, which was about all Negro children were good for anyway. Premillenialists who think that Obama is the Obamination of Desolation won't want to hear even the name Antiochus Epiphanes because that would mess with their prophetic mojo. People busy assuming that number of the beast must refer to someone alive today won't want to hear how all the variant renderings of the number add up to Nero.
In all of these cases the error is relatively simple to distill, national and cultural agendas got conflated with the will of God in ways that distorted the character of the Lord. As many American Christians have asked, what is America's role in the end times? To that we can answer with Psalm 2. Rather than subject the scriptures to our individual "prophetic" imaginations we must continually challenge ourselves with the testimony of scripture and the lives of saints before us to consider both how we and they err. As Jesus warned his adversaries, they searched the scriptures and failed to see the scriptures pointed to Him. We can err completely in understanding what the scriptures point to if we go it alone. I don't want to digress on to the subject of the Christian amidst God's people at this point and will save that for some other post.
No comments:
Post a Comment