Downsizing gurus and sacred cows

Paul: You know, one thing I've noticed in my Christian walk, which has been around a half dozen years now, is that Christians are by no means immune to the celebrity worship culture within their cultural faction. I am speaking specifically of those personalities within Christianity with whom we identify with what they say and how they say it, then take the step to identifying ourselves with those individual Christian celebrities. This is not a new phenomenon, but I've run into people who might say words to the effect of "I am of Al Mohler. I am of John MacArthur. I am of John Piper."

Laurie: "...I am of Mark Driscoll. I am of R.C. Sproul. I am of John Calvin. I am of Jonathan Edwards. I am of Martin Luther. I'm Reformed...NO, I'm Reformed. And whatever you do, don't invite Rick Warren to your conference!"....Sorry, I got a little carried away.

Paul: Now, I'm not meaning to slam those individuals by any means, and I purposely picked famous pastors with decent doctrine. Along with them, there's also a lot of Christian celebrities with horrible doctrine who are put on pedestals by other Christians.

I'm also not trying to be on any high horse. In the interest of full disclosure, I love listening to Steve Brown and John Frame. I'm sure I've been guilty of putting Martin Luther on too high of a pedestal at times in my Christian walk. It happens.

It is my, and I think Laurie's, intent to talk about gurus this week. Why do we follow other humans too closely? And why is it dangerous? I would also point out the converse of what I said at the beginning that this is not peculiar to Christianity. This is something humans do and it is my belief that it is a dangerous thing that humans do.

Laurie: Yes, it is a very human thing to do. There is nothing religious about it. Or should I say, there is something very religious about it. It is at the heart, really, of almost every religion I'm acquainted with.

Paul: Well, yes, but I don't think it's a novelty confined to the world of religion. I know when I was younger I had a version of this very same phenomenon with me and some authors who I idolized and whose careers and personalities I sought to emulate. And, in some of those cases, you end up holding the bag in sort of a Richard Cory situation because you don't really know these people. All you know is a highly edited product with their name on it.

Laurie: Yeah, me too. Only I wasn't as smart as you. For me it wasn't authors, it was musicians and celebrities. I had exceptionally poor taste in gurus. But, hey, it could have been worse. Look what happened to those Manson girls.

Paul: Well, that's part of what I'm saying and given the contemporary authors I was interested in, I wasn't exactly the pinnacle of wisdom. And there's a huge problem with saying "I love so and so" or "I want to be like so and so" when you don't know them personally and probably never will. This was shattered for me a few years ago when two of the contemporary authors I'd idolized in college both, entirely separately, killed themselves within a very short window of time of one another. Although by that time I'd moved into a life more independent from gurus, I have to say I was struck by the contrast of two men I once thought I wanted to be like who had both committed suicide.

Laurie: Well, there you go. What I was getting at was, that there is just nothing Christian about it. It is actually a very anti-Christian phenomenon. What I mean is, we are specifically instructed in Scripture not to do this very thing. As you said, it is dangerous. It destroys the church, and it destroys its people. I hope you, and those who read along who don't share our faith, will bear with me while I quote a bit longer from Scripture than I normally would in this setting:

"I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment....But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ...for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one says, 'I follow Paul,' and another, 'I follow Apollos,' are you not being merely human?...I have applied all these things to myself and Apollos for your benefit, brothers, that you may learn by us not to go beyond what is written, that none of you may be puffed up in favor of one against another....'knowledge' puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God....For we know in part and we prophecy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away..." (1 Cor. 1:10; 1 Cor. 3:1,3-4; 1 Cor. 4:6; 1 Cor. 8:3,4; 1 Cor. 9:9,10,12; 1 Cor, 13:9-10)

And notice all that talk of "the flesh". That means just what you were saying, Paul, that it's just base human nature to behave that way. But, like you said, behaving that "human" way is dangerous, and your namesake agrees. In another place Paul (the apostle) says:

"For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another." (Gal. 5:13-15)

The guru mindset is dangerous on a number of levels. I say "mindset" because it can apply not to just an individual guru, but also to a particular movement, or system - a "brand". In this case one will swallow just about anything said by anyone that falls under a particular umbrella, or carries the right "brand name".

Paul: Right, and this is what I think lays in the core of the matter. I see this time and time again. Dittoheading is very attractive to humans because we tend toward the lazy and the quick path to self-righteousness, self-assurance. It removes any need for original thought. You get a set reaction approved by the guru and you apply that knee-jerk reaction wherever applicable (and sometimes, embarrassingly, where it isn't. I can't tell you how often I've mentioned something about science near a Christian and had them blurt out of the blue something about evolution being false.) But I think I've opened a few cans and derailed a few trains here. You were talking about The Church specifically and the tendency toward following gurus.

Laurie: Yes, I was, but so are you, tangentially anyway. Anyway, you're getting ahead of me.

On one hand this brand-name type of thinking destroys Christian love and leads to us tearing each other and the church apart. I've witnessed, and to some extent participated in, much of this and let me say, we Reformed-types can be among the worst. We feel we have the right, because we are so concerned about doctrinal precision. But if the the authority of Scripture is really foremost in our hearts and minds, then why are we so quick to disregard to warnings of the apostle Paul in so many places? What I have in mind just this moment is the recent outcry against John Piper for inviting Rick Warren to speak at his upcoming Desiring God Conference.

Paul: Which, for the record, I applaud. We need more bridges.


Laurie: Oh yeah, me too. But, speaking of bridges, in response to this deal I heard a reformed-type whip out an R.C. Sproul quote: "The thing about building a bridge is that traffic comes from both sides." Whatever that means.


Paul: Well, who knows what the original context may have been, but in this case the quoter seems to imply that we don't want to build bridges because the rabble will come over to Our side and some of Our people will go over to Their side. Clearly we can't have that here on Elitist Isolationist Island!


Laurie: I have to admit, the kerfluffle over this has left me feeling a bit ill. I'm stunned really. I've yet to hear the reformed-types taunt Piper for his extensive and on-going admiration of C.S. Lewis. Why is that? Lewis was not Reformed, and even believed in purgatory of all things, and that's not all. (Now, before you jump down my throat here, remember, I love C.S. Lewis. I look forward to meeting him in Heaven. But he, too, was a flawed human being.) It's just so ironic to me is all. Oh, the complaints the Reformed have against Rick Warren! (And, yes, I understand them.) But, the man is not a heretic. He's just not reformed. He preaches Christ crucified, and whatever one may think of his methods, that is what matters. And here's a bit of sound doctrine to back me up:

"Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will....What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice." Phil. 1:15:18

I've finally come to the place in my Christian life where I'd rather participate in a group where Christian love is preeminent. If forced to choose, I will choose love over perfect doctrine. And I wish with all my heart that such decisions were not necessary. Sound doctrine without love is not Christianity, it is dead orthodoxy; Christian love is the truest form of doctrine, and the fulfilling of all God's commands.

Paul: At the risk of being labeled a liberal or Emergent or some other disparaging buzzword our Reformed brothers and sisters toss around like dodgeballs, perhaps love is perfect doctrine.

Laurie: It is the one doctrine that will never fail and the one most essential to the Gospel. "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:34-35, See also 1 Cor. 13, 1 John 3:14-23) Seeing that love is this critical to the gospel, why is it that it's never more Christian love we are fighting for?

Paul: And why is it that I hear people concerned with right doctrine mocking things like "people who just want to hear about love", "just preaching the Gospel", or "being all about Grace"??? Why on Earth would any of those be bad things? Frankly, given the choice of fitting into a historical confession (I have yet to find one that I do) or fitting the bill of those three phrases, I'll take the love, Gospel and Grace, thank you very much.

Laurie: I'm so glad I married you. If it weren't for you, and the grace of God you're always extending to me, I'd be a miserable and intolerable legalist.

Well, I'd like to get back to that other point you mentioned - the danger of becoming a ditto-head, brainwashed, in a position of near-blind following. As you said, we begin to let our guru do our thinking for us, letting them become the filter through which we view everything. We begin to trust our leader to interpret Scripture and life's events for us. In a sense, we come to trust them more than the Scripture, in that we let them be the filter of what the Bible says rather than the other way around.

Paul: Clearly there are wonderful insights to be learned from others. Teaching from a variety of sources is a very illuminating thing and I think we ought to have more and more intramural conversation with varied points of view. It broadens our horizons and teaches us aspects we may not have thought of on our own. I have strong suspicions that the Gates of Heaven are far wider than any of us tend to imagine. But that's exactly my point. While listening to many people is of great value, no one of them is the final authority. Nor is any one group of them. I mean, I just think about how often I'm wrong and then apply that same flawed humanity to anyone who might become a guru.

Laurie: Yes, we need each other desperately, which is one reason why it's such a travesty when we allow ourselves to be divided over anything less than core gospel truths. Like limbs separated from a body become useless, so do we when we overestimate our capacities and cut ourselves off from the rest of the body.

Paul: I daresay that is one of the harms of idolatry in any form. Of course, the main being it's misplacing one's worship and the purpose of one's very life by worshiping something other than He who alone is worthy of worship. But idolatry also focuses us in unhealthy directions, limiting us to sort of a self-imposed intellectual retardation. As opposed to what neo-atheists might wish one to believe (in their defense, I suspect most of them have not encountered many earnest Christians), seeking to worship God is the one way out of that trap. People are otherwise putting things in small boxes or sometimes seemingly enormous boxes, but boxes all the same. I would give as an example the compulsive need some Christians have to discount and discredit any mention of science because they've bought the hype that science and religion are at odds. This is a very new phenomenon. A more classical view of science is that the more we learn about the universe as it objectively is revealed by our scientific findings the more we learn of God (to paraphrase Calvin's famous view of the two kinds of knowledge.)

In other words, my presuppositions are that there is ultimate truth and that I have yet to figure it out completely. And so has everyone else. But in its existence as ultimate truth, one must accept it on the terms in which it reveals itself, not on the terms in which one would wish. Which I think is somewhere in the same zip code where true science and true religion meet.

When we start building a box in which we view all of reality, idolatry is exactly what we are doing. This is what following a guru without question of any kind accomplishes no matter how close they come to truth. Reality does not fit in boxes and neither does God. We must accept Him on the terms in which He reveals Himself. While maps may be extremely helpful we should not confuse them with the territory.

Laurie: Well put, dear friend! And that is, I suppose, the deepest and most lasting danger - the subtle idolatry of it all. And as Christians it leads us to warp the gospel, sometimes beyond recognition. But there's another kind of danger that I don't want to overlook, it's the more immediate and obvious kind, the kind that causes unimaginable suffering in the here and now and shrouds the name of Christ in scandal. It is guru mentality that leads people to withhold medical care from their children as an act of faith; that leads many to refrain from any form of birth control even at the risk of a mother's life and health in a mis-guided understanding of what it means to be "pro-life", and an over-extension of a single Old Testament reference; that's apparently led to at least one child being literally spanked to death, because a guru taught that a spanking is not complete until the child is completely submitted; that's led to the deaths of 909 people in Jonestown; that's led to child marriages and polygamy, to "Christian" militias, to the Manson Family.... I could go on, but I think you get my point. The thing is, no one sets out to get themselves a guru, or to join a cult. They want some truth and some feelings of righteousness and end up settling for just that - some truth and a lot of self-righteousness. Once they have that, they are inclined to swallow whatever else comes along with it.

Paul: There seems to be no end to the examples available. I think, in conclusion, the lesson I glean from this is to listen to all kinds of people with all kinds of points of view. Keep an open mind and heart, keep questioning and thinking through things, hold people's ideas up to the light of Scripture and seek to draw closer to God. Although I'm no longer a carnivore nor specifically a Discordian, I think Robert Anton Wilson may have put it succinctly when he said "Sacred cows make the best hamburgers."

Laurie: Well, that certainly makes sense, seeing as they are no doubt the best fed and most lovingly nurtured cows of all....Vegetarian or no, every so often I get an overwhelming craving for tri-tip....