Writing in Mockingbird, Simeon Zahl surveys competing “theories of change” in Christian ministry and offers his pitch for an “Augustinian” approach. As he explains at the outset,

Every ministry makes basic theological assumptions about human nature and about how God works in people’s lives. In more theological terms, you could say that every form of ministry has an implicit theological anthropology and an implicit theology of grace. These assumptions are not always conscious or clearly articulated, but they have huge effects on pastoral practice — and on Christian experience.

He looks at the implicit anthropologies of a “sacramental participation” approach to ministry and a “Christian information” approach. (I trust you can envision the broad contours of these approaches.) While acknowledging that these various approaches are not mutually exclusive, Zahl argues that typically a person has a primary theory of change that informs their overall approach to ministry.

In the second half of the essay, Zahl outlines his Augustinian approach, which (obviously following Augustine) gives priority to the heart and its desires as the key to change. He lists three theological assumptions of this approach:

1. First, as I’ve already said, human beings are driven not by knowledge or will but by desire. We are creatures of the heart, creatures of love.

2. Second, the human heart is very hard to change. It strongly resists direct efforts to change it. The truth of this point is easy to demonstrate. Have you ever tried to change someone’s mind about politics through rational argument? Have you ever tried to talk someone out of loving the person they have fallen in love with? I rest my case.

3. Third, human beings are wired in such a way that judgment kills love. When we feel judged, we hide our love away, we put up our walls, we resist. If your theory of change depends in any way on the idea that telling someone what is wrong with them will lead to them changing what is wrong with them, you will be sorely ineffective. Augustine says it beautifully in his treatise On the Spirit and the Letter: “[The law] commands, after all, rather than helps; it teaches us that there is a disease without healing it. In fact, it increases what it does not heal so that we seek the medicine of grace with greater attention and care.”

He then provides four implications that this theory of change—this Augustinian approach—has for ministry practice:

First, it means that the heart of Christian ministry is the facilitation of an emotional encounter with the God revealed in Jesus. I say this without condition or reservation. If you are not successfully engaging with people’s feelings and desires, with their anxieties, their loves, and their pain, then you are just playing a game with Christian words; you are not doing ministry. The intransigence of the human heart is the fundamental problem of Christian ministry. The Spirit of God traffics in emotion and desire. […]

Second, the Augustinian approach assumes that effective ministry always must deal with the fact of human resistance to judgment and law. It means that you won’t end a sermon or a church service with a moral exhortation or a set of behavioral guidelines. And it means that you are likely to deploy the great preaching paradigm, the distinction between the law and the gospel. Law-Gospel preaching is one of the most powerful technologies of the heart that we have available to us as Christians.

Third, if the Augustinian approach is true, it means that certain other approaches are not going to work very well. If you think you can change people by preaching sermons whose purpose is just extracting practical advice for Christian living from Scripture, you are not going to make much of a dent in that brick wall, I assure you.

This perspective is also important for thinking about spiritual practices. Yes, habitual prayer, service, contemplation, justice work, and Bible reading can have powerful shaping effects on people, including on their emotional experience. But — and this is an important but — the Augustinian perspective tells us that we can do all this only once our hearts have already changed enough that we desire to engage in the practice. No one will develop a transformative and durable new practice of prayer unless they fundamentally want to and want to enough to carry them through life’s inevitable obstacles. As Jesus told us, you must change the tree first, then the right fruit will follow (Mt 12:33-35). Focus on the heart, and the practices will follow; focus on the practices alone, and we’re back to the brick wall.

Finally, an Augustinian theory of change means that technologies of the heart are important in ministry. Novels, stories, movies, illustrations — these are powerful technologies of the heart, much more powerful than mere words and ideas. The reason we love stories, the reason we love art and music, and the reason such things can be so transformative when we draw on them in ministry, is that they know how to speak the strange electric language of the heart.

The whole piece is absolute gold. The first implication in particular (“the heart of Christian ministry is the facilitation of an emotional encounter with the God revealed in Jesus”) rings truer with each passing year. Most ministers probably can only learn this lesson the hard way (i.e., on the far end of much ineffective experience). But for those who never learn it: How do you keep at it? I genuinely wonder…

Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Everyone enters discipleship alone, but no one remains alone in discipleship. Those who dare to become single individuals trusting in the word are given the gift of church-community. They find themselves again in a visible community of faith, which replaces a hundredfold what they lost. A hundredfold? Yes, in the mere fact that they now have everything solely through Jesus, that they have it through the mediator. Of course, that includes “persecutions.” “A hundredfold”—“with persecutions”: that is the grace of the community which follows its Lord under the cross. The promise for those who follow Christ is that they will become members of the community of the cross, they will be people of the mediator, people under the cross.

Currently reading: Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis 📚

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, reminding us that Jesus' burden—that of bearing one’s cross—is lighter, and more life-giving, than the unbearable burden of trying to construct one’s own self:

God is a God who bears. The Son of God bore our flesh. He therefore bore the cross. He bore all our sins and attained reconciliation by his bearing. That is why disciples are called to bear what is put on them. Bearing constitutes being a Christian. Just as Christ maintains his communion with the Father by bearing according to the Father’s will, so the disciples' bearing constitutes their community with Christ. People can shake off the burdens laid on them. But doing so does not free them at all from their burdens. Instead, it loads them with a heavier, more unbearable burden. They bear the self-chosen yoke of their own selves. Jesus called all who are laden with various sufferings and burdens to throw off their yokes and to take his yoke upon themselves. His yoke is easy, and his burden is light. His yoke and his burden is the cross. Bearing the cross does not bring misery and despair. Rather, it provides refreshment and peace for our souls; it is our greatest joy. Here we are no longer laden with self-made laws and burdens, but with the yoke of him who knows us and who himself goes with us under the same yoke. Under his yoke we are assured of his nearness and communion. It is he himself whom disciples find when they take up their cross.

(emphasis mine)

An incredibly illuminating essay from John Ehrett on Protestant theological retrieval. Ehrett contrasts two forms of retrieval: one focused more narrowly on specific doctrines (e.g., theology proper, Christology) and an “expanded” form that seeks to retrieve Reformation-era thinking about social and political issues as well (e.g., gender roles, established religion). The “expanded retrieval” camp, which includes many so-called Christian Nationalists, argues that fidelity to the tradition requires closer adherence to the reformers' entire socio-political vision. Ehrett demurs from this expanded view. Here are a few choice quotes:

Reformation-era claims about social and political order are in general more likely to be contingent and time-bound, while [specifically doctrinal claims] are not. […]

Arguments for comprehensive social order are always put forward against a backdrop of certain material and civic conditions. The old logic of households as sites of economic production, for instance, was profoundly unsettled by industrialization and its concomitant changes. Similarly, cultural exchange—and the possibilities for formulating common ground between representatives of different religious traditions—became quite different once global travel and intellectual exchange became easier. To call for a restoration of “Reformational” patterns of social order (on gender roles, religious toleration, or what have you), under circumstances where those patterns would—if revived today—necessarily be disembedded from the material and social context that was operative in the Reformers’ day, is not really to call for a return to tradition, but for the creation of something entirely novel and untried. Background assumptions matter. Hence, it does no good to claim that simply because Luther or Calvin or Althusius said something, that necessarily settles the matter for today. Even assuming the normative force of the Reformers’ teachings, that social configuration which would be instantiated under present conditions if their words were heeded would be fundamentally unlike the pattern of social order the Reformers no doubt envisioned in their own time. (emphasis mine)

What appears, at least at first glance, to be a straightforward essay about the merits of applying the reformers' social teaching to present circumstances ends up widening out to a deeper exploration about tradition and how to debate its enduring relevance. Bravo.

With all due respect to those who’ve weighed in on Jordan Peterson’s new book (I’m thinking particularly of Brad East and Rowan Williams), Bonhoeffer already identified the fundamental weakness of Peterson’s approach way back in Discipleship:

Discipleship is commitment to Christ. Because Christ exists, he must be followed. An idea about Christ, a doctrinal system, a general religious recognition of grace or forgiveness of sins does not require discipleship. In truth, it even excludes discipleship; it is inimical to it. One enters into a relationship with an idea by way of knowledge, enthusiasm, perhaps even by carrying it out, but never by personal obedient discipleship. Christianity without the living Jesus Christ remains necessarily a Christianity without discipleship; and a Christianity without discipleship is always a Christianity without Jesus Christ. It is an idea, a myth.

In a footnote, the editor notes how Bonhoeffer had underlined a passage in Kierkegaard with much the same flavor: “‘Discipleship’…really provides the guarantee that Christianity does not become poetry, mythology, and abstract idea.” In Peterson’s hands, the Bible must remain mythic, symbolic, archetypal (which, it should be said, is compatible with quite fresh and energetic readings of the text). Ultimately, though, it’s the difference between Christianity as self-help and Christianity as call to discipleship.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, with words every minister should take to heart re: how failing to offer Jesus and his word plainly leads many people to become estranged from the church unnecessarily:

When we go to hear a sermon, his own word is what we want to hear. This matters to us not only for our own sakes, but also for all those who have become estranged from the church and its message. It is also our opinion that if Jesus himself and Jesus alone with his word were among us in our preaching, then quite a different set of people would hear the word and quite a different set of people would again turn away from it. It is not as if our church’s preaching were no longer God’s word, but there are so many dissonant sounds, so many human, harsh laws, and so many false hopes and consolations, which still obscure the pure word of Jesus and make a genuine decision more difficult. We surely intend our preaching to be preaching Christ alone. But it is not solely the fault of others if they find our preaching harsh and difficult because it is burdened with formulations and concepts foreign to them. It is simply not true that every word critical of our preaching today can be taken as a rejection of Christ or as anti-Christianity. Today there are a great number of people who come to our preaching, want to hear it, and then repeatedly have to admit sadly that we have made it too difficult for them to get to know Jesus. Do we really want to deny being in community with these people? They believe that it is not the word of Jesus itself that they wish to evade, but that too much of what comes between them and Jesus is merely human, institutional, or doctrinaire. Who among us would not instantly know all the answers which could be given to these people and with which we could easily evade responsibility for them? But would an answer not also demand that we ask whether we ourselves get in the way of Jesus' word by depending perhaps too much on certain formulations, or on a type of sermon intended for its own time, place, and social structure? Or by preaching too “dogmatically” and not enough “for use in life”? Or by preferring to repeat certain ideas from scripture over and over and thus too heedlessly passing over other important passages? Or by preaching our own opinions and convictions too much and Jesus Christ himself too little? Nothing would contradict our own intention more deeply and would be more ruinous for our proclamation than if we burdened with difficult human rules those who are weary and heavy laden, whom Jesus calls unto himself. That would drive them away from him again. How that would mock the love of Jesus Christ in front of Christians and heathen! But since general questions and self-accusations do not help here, let us be led back to scripture, to the word and call of Jesus Christ himself. Away from the poverty and narrowness of our own convictions and questions, here is where we seek the breadth and riches which are bestowed on us in Jesus.

Currently reading: Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer 📚