ARE YOU “FILTERING” OR “ORGANIZING” THE TEACHING OF JESUS?
ARE YOU “FILTERING” OR “ORGANIZING” THE TEACHING OF JESUS?
Every morning I make a thermos of my favorite Chinese Puerh loose tea. After letting it steep in boiling water for about three minutes I pour it though my strainer, pollute it with honey and cream and start enjoying it.
That strainer is a “filter” and there are all KINDS of filters. I have a filter on my kitchen faucet. On detective shows they can filter out background noise to hear what the bad guys are saying on a crowded street. On camera lenses you can filter out certain colors.
But one thing that that ALL filters have in common is that they cause things to be left OUT of what reaches you, whether it is tea leaves, chemicals, noise, colors, or whatever. The things that are “filtered” are things that are kept from making it THROUGH the filter. And those kinds of filters I mentioned are good for us to use.
But when it comes to what is recorded within the teaching of the Son of God and His inspired apostles, filtering is bad: BIG TIME bad!
God’s Word must NEVER be “filtered” because He insists that it ALL get through into your mind and your heart. To approve of some “filtering” of the teaching of Jesus or His apostles, implies that there is something, false, irrelevant, improvable, or needing correction in those teachings.
On the other hand, “organizing” of what He has revealed is both commendable and NECESSARY. In order to get a complete understanding of what your favorite biologist, politician, or author has to say about any topic requires that you read ALL that he or she has said about that topic, and then work to organize it all into a coherent body of information. That is also true of what God has revealed through His Son. For example, within the four Gospels you might find a parable or a passage that differs from its counterparts in the other Gospels. Since Jesus probably said the same parable, and spoke about the same idea, in DOZENS of towns, He may WELL have changed the details from place to place. So, you don’t pick only one of those instances; rather, you bring them all together and organize them into a coherent presentation, because He believed ALL that He taught no matter where He taught it. The same holds true, for example, about what His Spirit-inspired apostles may have taught about baptism, or the Lord’s Supper, divorce, or the end of this age. It is critical to the truth that you not filter out ANY of those God-inspired teachings: you must treat them all with the same reverence (since they are ALL inspired by God); and it is critical that you use the same interpretive principles on EACH of them; none of that “THIS passage is to be taken in the way it SEEMS to mean, but THAT passage is to be treated as poetry.” The debates between “Calvinists” and “Arminians” that have been raging for centuries is a perfect example of how that shoddy “two bucket” interpretive system works, with each side taking the other sides “literal” bucket as poetry, and insisting that only what agrees with THEIR side be taken in that grammatically natural and literal sense, an instinct that we all use naturally when reading any other form of serious literature.
So, when it comes to what is recorded within the teaching of the Son of God and His inspired apostles, “organizing” is good: BIG TIME good!Since all of this that has been presented so far has been done so in high-level generalities, you probably all agree with me so far. But let’s get into the “nitty gritty” about some of those SPECIFIC nasty “filters.” I am confident enough to make the claim that, no matter HOW much you hate the idea of those “filters” it is almost certain that YOU are using them! They are very, VERY difficult to escape.
Because what we are all calling “Christianity” has undergone so many kinds of changes since the days of Jesus and His apostles, different kind of filters have been wittingly and/or unwittingly instituted within the different kinds of churches, denominations and theological traditions that bear the name “Christian.”
There are filters that are unique to most versions of “Protestant Christianity,” filters unique to “Catholic Christianity,” or “Liberal Christian filters” or “Conservative Christian filters.” And there are even filters that are common to virtually ALL the versions of Christianity!
In my two-volume catechism of Apostolic Christianity I have worked hard to present both the PRINCIPLES that are needed to “un-filter” what is written within the New Testament, and worked hard to present unfiltered versions of all the SPECIFIC commands, doctrines, promises and experiences contained within the New Testament. That took over six hundred pages to accomplish, but I can present here some examples of those various filters that you have likely gotten trapped into using.
Let us deal first with Protestant filters, since most of you reading this probably come from that background:
If you have grown up as a typical “Protestant Christian” you have gotten used to filtering out the word “IS” from what Jesus taught about that Last Supper. What He had said was “this IS my Body…” and “this IS my blood.” And the filter that you have gotten tricked into using filtered out that “is” and replaced it with the phrase “is a symbol of” or “is like.” Now, Jesus – being the One who INVENTED your ability to communicate with words – knew full well how to use the phrase “is like.” He said numerous times, “the kingdom of God IS LIKE …”, did he not? Yet He did not use that term “is like” THEN, at that Supper, did He! But being a good Protestant, you are convinced that He needed your help in order to say what He must have “REALLY meant.” Surely, He could not have REALLY meant what He chose to say! Hmmm! So you stick in your simple “correction” instead of wrestling with and stretching into the amazing depth contained within what He DID say! And something that would be of gigantic help in making your union with Him more intimate has been lost. The most ancient Christians would have considered that your “filter” actually turned you into a heretic!
And being a Protestant, you have learned to filter out the numerous New Testament passages that indicate that individual church members have no authority to “figure out for themselves” what is taught within the New Testament. This “authority” is, supposedly, one of the benefits of that “priesthood of all believers,” where every believer supposedly has the right to interpret the Scriptures for himself. I am not describing what any particular Reformation leader actually taught, but what has become the practice within Protestantism. If you don’t like what your denomination is teaching about “X” you are sure to find one that you DO like – isn’t that what living in a democracy is SUPPOSED to be like?
One Scriptural example to challenge such a filter is to be found in Acts 15 (that first “Jerusalem Council”). Some of the “Judaizers” insisted that “It is necessary to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the Law of Moses.” You may observe that the solution was not achieved by letting each of the believers interpret that challenge for themselves: “YOU believers can each decide whether that is true or false!” Instead, the apostles and elders sought the mind of God’s Spirit and then sent instructions that ARE to be observed by all believers. If you do your homework, you will find many examples of such “authoritarian” action in the apostolic church. The mature disciples of Jesus back then were imbued with a Spirit-given instinct to all think and act TOGETHER: “Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment” (1 Corinthians 1:10).
One final example of those many discernable Protestant filters concerns the subject of the baptismal immersion. Jesus and Peter each said something that is quite simple (grammatically) to understand:
Jesus: “He who believes AND is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned” (Mark 16:15)
Peter: “38 Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ FOR THE FORGIVENESS of your sins;’…’” (Acts 2:38).
“Corresponding to that, baptism now SAVES you–not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but an appeal to God of a good conscience–through the resurrection of Jesus Christ,”
The filter of most of Protestantism is quite simple – it simply rejects the clear language of those three passages. Most evangelicals boldly assert that baptism has nothing to DO with what THEY define as “salvation.” But even those who are not THAT bold, add clever “hedging” theological tidbits around what Jesus and Peter clearly said. They will often act like clever defense attorneys and claim things like, “But, Jesus said that you are only condemned for lack of BELIEF, not lack of baptism; so THERE!” But is it at all likely that what Jesus said SO clearly in the first phrase of that sentence He would want weakened by his second phrase? Is it not much more reasonable to understand that if you were an “unbeliever” then you would OF COURSE not then get baptized, so why need to bring up the issue at all in the second phrase? And furthermore, that “unbelief” that leads to your “condemnation” might well include the refusal to take seriously His COMMAND to be baptized!
The Protestant filter then turns on Peter’s command to be baptized “FOR the forgiveness of your sins” and simply drops out the entire phrase, turning it into a simple command to be baptized. But anyone who knows how to speak carefully with words (whether Greek OR English words) knows that being immersed FOR your forgiveness means that you get immerse IN ORDER THAT your sins may be forgiven. Suppose that you are told “For admission, enter the proper pin number into the door’s lock.” You would NECESSARILY understand that to imply that if you do NOT enter the right pin number, you will NOT get the door open. But, because you are a Protestant, Peter simply COULD not have meant what he actually did say, and we had better help him out a bit, so that the world can know what a good Protestant he ACTUALLY had to have been!
And when they get to Peter’s boldest affirmation, their minds freeze: baptism actually SAVES you? What PETER meant by “baptism” is actually a part of what GOD’s norm is for “salvation” (leaving room for that famous thief on the Cross!)? They are too timid to say that Peter was “flat out WRONG,” so mostly they ignore the passage altogether because, of course, we all KNOW that being saved “by faith” MUST exclude something as grossly “works-oriented” as DOING something (and even get WET while you are doing it)!
So, you see, filters can be created by adding words, omitting words or ignoring words, but in every case something that is clearly revealed by God is being kept from reaching you. And when you grow up within that “filtered” tradition you are actually being brainwashed in the name of godliness.
The filters used by Christendom’s other forms of “Christianity” will be covered later.
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