A passage of scripture that has been nudging me deeply over the past several weeks can be found in the book of James. It’s one of those passages that invokes a gut check every time I read it.
Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. – James 3:1 (NRSV)
James’s words seem to always jab that small still part of me that I believe he deeply intended them to jab. The part that says “are you really good enough?” To which my answer is always unequivocally, “no.” I am not good enough to teach. But in the greater context of James’s discourse we find that he is indisputably concerned about the human tongue, the words we use, and the effects that they have on the people who hear them and the world that we live in. His ultimate goal is to get us to understand that an unrestrained tongue is a dangerous thing, and the only hope that I’ve got for restraining the tongue is my willful surrender of it over to the Holy Spirit. With God’s help I teach, and I pray that only that which is good and profitable for God’s mission to this world comes out of my mouth when I do.
But I believe this verse has been prodding me for the last few weeks because it has become more and more apparent what the consequences of bad teaching are. A nasty version of the Gospel and of Christianity seems to have taken main-stage. What was once seen as a fringe movement by the likes of the Westboro Baptist Church and other reprehensible groups that resemble satan more than Jesus has reared its head and shown us that these movements have been festering and growing, not in compounds in the wilderness, but within the confines of mainstream Christianity. And I want to know what happened because I want to believe that no one is teaching this garbage from a pulpit.
The sociologist in me just has to understand how we move from “For God so loved the world” to white-nationalism. How has the kingdom of God gone from an unstoppable worldwide movement to something that is perceived as threatened by the “wrong” people being elected. Have we forgotten that the Gospel thrived under the pagan government of Rome? That it thrives today under the iron-fist of the People’s Republic of China?
I don’t really have all of the answers to these questions, but I do have an idea of where it all started. It all started with the thing James is concerned about, the tongues and the pens and the keyboards of teachers. They come from ideas. Dangerous ideas, that at the time they are conceived don’t seem so dangerous at all. We all have ideas, but for some of us our ideas hold more weight based on the way that we are perceived by others. There is a general power dynamic that is created by those who hold positions of authority, advanced research degrees, or are empowered by some board, agency, or church to teach and act on their ideas. What is of utmost importance, however, is that those whose ideas carry the most weight be very careful about the way that they are handled.
What is “Trickle Down Ideology?”
Borrowing the phase from the famous Reagan era economic system, Trickle Down Ideology pretty simply means that every way of thinking or seeing the world has an ultimate source at the top that has informed, influenced, and directed it. This can happen quite directly, as is seen in the ways that totalitarian regimes can completely transform a culture in the matter of a generation, or for us churchy people in the ways that certain thinkers have influenced entire theological systems that we follow. We like to think that as Christians, our theology comes from God and only God, but the truth is that our systems of thinking were hard won and bitterly contested over thousands of years. Confession: Even the term “trickle down ideology” is something that trickled down to me from someone else.
James’s words that “not many of us should become teachers” seem particularly harsh, until we take a look and realize that even the most faithful and celebrated “teachers” of the Christian faith have had their ideas twisted and used for ultimate evil. It is no secret that Martin Luther was no friend of Jewish people (nor was he a fan of the book of James… he wanted to oust it from the Bible). His biblical interpretations often had a side of anti-semitism. But we forgive that all because his major contribution to the faith was his stunning rebuke of the power politics of the Catholic Church. But wouldn’t you know that those smaller, less talked about anti-semitic undertones gave the nazi party and their leader theological legs to stand on.
Certainly Calvin never meant for young people to be legitimately afraid to tell others that “Jesus loves them” because his theology has been taken and overly twisted into a hyper-predeterminism that has believers really questioning whether they are lying when sharing the Gospel. Nor did Wesley mean for the social religion that he preached to become a watered down version of the movement he created. But these things have happened, and these are just a few examples of well intentioned ideologies by good and righteous humans that have come around to have less than profitable application. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as indebted to Luther, Calvin, and Wesley as anyone, I’m just making a point.
As ministers of the Gospel, this should be a sobering reminder to check ourselves at the door. As lay people of the church this should remind us to ask questions of our pastors. Ask for the clarification of the intended applications of the ideas that they preach and teach. As thinkers, we often can’t see the full circle effects of what comes out of our mouths, and trust me… people don’t always hear what we say, they hear what they want to hear.
Such a Time as This
I believe that at such a time as this, where our nation is split by competing ideologies, leaders must be cautious of the ideas that they espouse. Our president has positioned himself in such a way that even when he calls for peace, there are people using some sort of cryptography to find a hidden meaning that says the opposite of what he says. He literally can not denounce what has happened or what will happen because those who want to believe that the election was stolen and that it is their job to take it back are going to hear the secret battlecry that they crave.
The discouraging thing is that this ideology has been allowed to fester and spread for the past several years, to the point where Christians no longer resemble Christ, facts are no longer objective, the truth is a lie, and Jesus is not Lord. Is it discouraging that this has been either spearheaded or willfully allowed to continue by those with the most widespread air-time in the world? Certainly. But it’s more disappointing that these ideas have found their way into mainstream Christian thought and theology.
What we need going forward is for people of faith to take back the moniker of Christianity from this cultish blasphemy. The term evangelical is no longer good news to the poor. Rather, it has become the flag flown by those who seek to use the Bible as a weapon rather than an invitation to the family of God. It is a word that is becoming more synonymous with Pharisee as the years go by, and it is a word that needs to be reclaimed by the Lordship of Christ. That work beings with right teaching, because right teaching flows down like a waterfall of righteousness. Right teaching doesn’t come from us as humans alone, it comes from the very Spirit of the Living God. Let’s make space for God to speak, instead of saying what we want God to say.
Grace and Recovery 