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How Can I Know What I Believe Until I See What I Do?

Are you a practicing Christian?

You don’t hear that question a lot these days, though I can remember when it was fairly common. D. L. Moody once buttonholed a prospect who, when questioned about his faith, replied, “I’m a Baptist, but have not worked at it in a good while.” Perhaps “worked it out,” per Philippians 2.12, would have been better phrasing, but the man was onto something. Christian faith, in other words, should produce some sort of activity. That’s the subject of James’ whole rant in James 2.14-26.

We don’t talk a lot about being “practicing Christians,” but the term “Christian practices” does seem to be all the rage. Dorothy C. Bass defines the term as “patterns of cooperative human activity in and through which life together takes shape over time in response to and in the light of God as known in Jesus Christ.” She refers, in the same place, to “the ordinary, concrete activities of actual people - and also the knowledge of God that shapes, infuses, and arises from these activities.”

It’s that last phrase that deserves closer attention. Sally Brown of Princeton Seminary, in an article in the October ‘09 issue of Theology Today, invites us to explore what she terms “the text-practice interface.” Her idea seems to be that while we do things because the Bible tells us to, we also understand what the Bible by watching what we do about it. She offers the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who absorbed the worship services and social activism of African American churches during his trip to the states, then read his Bible in Germany in a way radically different from many of his fellow German theologians under the Third Reich. “No Christian community’s practices,” Brown boldly asserts, “are solely derived from its authorizing texts, nor does any community in actual point of fact employ only the Bible to adjudicate disputes about the appropriate conduct of the community’s practices.”

As Dr. Carey Newman, director of Baylor Press and my former seminary roommate, likes to put it, “Obedience is a fully hermeneutical act.” Or, as Mark Marquez, worship leader at Bay Area Fellowship Church once told some of my students, “If you want to understand God, pick up a broom.”

So I’m curious: What are your “Christian practices,” whether personal or communal? How has your reading of Scripture shaped them? How have they shaped your reading of Scripture? At the porous border of text and activity we do well to examine whom we’re letting into the Promised Land.

This entry was posted on October 12, 2009 at 9:41 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “How Can I Know What I Believe Until I See What I Do?”

  1. lisa says:
    October 13, 2009 at 10:36 am

    The boarder is indeed porous, but I don’t think we don’t do well mind the gate, examining those coming into the Promised Land. At best, minding our own balance of enacted gospel hermeneutic mildly well, is more challenge than a lifetime can afford.

    My most influential spiritual practices right now involve much prayer/dialogue with God; and reflection; acts of compassion; walking with others, in a spiritual sense, on a regular basis; and efforts to live simply.

    thank you for this much needed and thoughtful post.

  2. djackson says:
    October 14, 2009 at 9:25 am

    Lisa - Thanks for your input! Doubtless you are right - since there’s no border fence we have to patrol all the more carefully. I think the trick is to realize that we have to watch the traffic in both directions. The current issue of “Review & Expositor” has a good article on the liturgical year and how it can help form us in Christ. We Baptists rejected the calendar for any number of reasons, many of them good (like the fact that it had gotten junked up with names until, like the chapel in Tennyson, one “scarce could spy Christ for the saints”). But we also rejected it because it isn’t “in the Bible.”

    Well, true enough - but we have discovered (or some of us have, or I hope we have) that we eliminated a practice which read the Bible in important ways for us. Instead, we created a vacuum (the Bible, after all, doesn’t seem to say much directly about a “Christian year”) that let the secular year take over so that now we mark time as if Jesus never came, died, and arose - opening day of baseball season, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Superbowl Sunday, and a vague mashup in winter vaguely called “The Holidays” that starts with overeating, leads to overspending, and ends in a hangover and lots of college football on TV. This is a case where our practice read our Bibles for us in a very helpful fashion. Your wonderful Ebenezer Stones are another example: perhaps not directly mandated in scripture, but helpful in reading and living it.

  3. Sue says:
    November 21, 2009 at 1:00 pm

    Where has following the prompting of the Holy Spirit gone when we focus intently on doing the things dictated by the calendar? Reading the Bible, prayer and listening to the Holy Spirit are not on man’s timetable. It is as if the calendar guides our entire focus and our work instead of relying on the Spirit. Why help at the “soup kitchen” only on Thanksgiving and Christmas? Why focus on the needy only through “Operation Christmas Child” or at the beginning of a school year? Why give to missions only when the Baptists call for extra giving to a particular cause? Why only honor our parents on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day? And why celebrate the birth of our Lord only during Advent and Christmas? Aren’t all these things the work of God? Jesus taught us to pray “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” It is up to us listen to the will of God and enact His will on earth. When will we open our eyes to see life around us as God sees it? He is at work everywhere and waiting for us to join him.

  4. djackson says:
    November 21, 2009 at 4:30 pm

    Sue - I think I see your point but I cannot agree that we should do away with the observances of the Christian year on the argument that we should observe all of these things all the time. On the same analogy, parents should never celebrate a child’s birthday, nor spouses their anniversary, because we should love our children and one another every day in the year. We can’t do everything all the time, not if we want to do any of it well. Days of special observance fuel us for the 24/7 honoring of those specific areas of focus. We see a pattern for this in the Old Testament, where God set aside specific times for Israel to remember his forgiveness and his goodness in material provision.

  5. Sue says:
    November 21, 2009 at 6:12 pm

    Your point that we cannot do all things all the time and that the Old Testament observances provide the pattern for celebration and forgiveness is an excellent point. I do believe that setting aside time for celebration, praise, forgiveness, recognition, etc… are extremely important. I am a “big” birthday, Christmas, Thanksgiving, anniversary, person and want these days to be a huge celebration of love. Those celebrations do indeed fuel us for our ongoing relationships. I simply see that sometimes we tend to let those specific observances drive our behavior toward our Lord and toward each other. Things in which we should engage on an ongoing basis are rolled into a “one time shot” each year, and we fail to realize that we are only working on these things and relationships when the calendar requires us to do so instead of listening to the Word that God is whispering in our ear each and every day.

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