6-30-18 You Can't Figure out Your Faith on Your Own
I have a friend who goes every week to the movies alone. That is, he goes to the movie theater and pays money to watch a movie all by himself. I’d never heard of such thing. I’m not a big movie-goer. But on the rare occasion that I do go to the movie theater to watch a movie, I always go with someone else.
That’s not to say that going to the movies by oneself is wrong. It actually makes sense. Watching a movie is, at one level, a fiercely individualistic act. Probably more than anything, my surprise about solo movie going looks back to a different age, a time when movie watching was a profoundly communal event.
It was what you did on Saturday nights. It was where you took your girl. There was always dinner and a movie.
Solo movie going reminds me of Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Bowling used to be the epitome of the communal. There were bowling teams and bowling leagues, and the gatherings all revolved around the bowling alley’s bar or restaurant.
But somewhere along the way, the unthinkable happened. People started bowling alone. And then that reminds me of the crazy story that Sebastian Junger recounts in his book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging about the difficulty of repatriating those who had been taken captive by the Indians.
He quotes Ben Franklin:
“Tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in short time they become disgusted with our manner of life… and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.”
In other words, as Junger concludes, there was a preference among whites for the tribal life of the Indians not found among their own people.
The point of all this is relatively simple. We are communal beings—made in the image of the communal, triune God—and thus designed to live and flourish and have our being communally. And that includes doing theology.
Far too often as Protestants we are guilty of theologically bowling alone. We think that we can sit down with our Bibles all by ourselves and figure everything out. It’s time wake up and smell the roses and realize that we don't do anything in life like that. We can’t figure it out alone.
Think of the way we learn to speak or the best way we learn a second language. We don't give babies books to study so they can learn to speak. No. They parrot their parents and their elders. They learn to speak words that have already been spoken by someone else. That is how theology is done best. We learn to speak the words of our fathers and forefathers and those before them.
That is why creeds and confessions and catechisms are so important. In the ancient creeds and confessions of the church we learn what the tribe thinks and believes. We learn what we need to embrace if we are to become one of them. That is what the best creeds and confessions do. They keep looking back—the very best of them harkening back as far as one can go, to what I have dubbed the big three: The Apostles’ Creed, The Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer.
C.S. Lewis suggested that there is within all of us a tendency toward “chronological snobbery.”
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means old books… The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.
And the only way to keep the clean theological sea breeze blowing in our minds is to go back to the ancient creeds and confessions of the church and be weaned on them.
Comments