The Scope of Christian Teaching
“Peter said, ‘Lord, do you intend this parable especially for us, or is it for everyone?’”
(Luke 12:41)
When Peter asked Jesus, “Lord, do you intend this parable especially for us, or is it for everyone?” he raised a question that has never been silenced in the Christian Church for 2000 years.
“What is the scope of Christian teaching?” remains the topic of the Church’s Great Debate. Who ought to attend Sunday school – just growing children, or should adults and young people also be enrolled? The conviction persists among many that Bible study, though recommended for the very young, is unnecessary for mature people, that it should be put in the same category with sweet-milk and vitamin pills and never considered a must for busy adults who have little interest in any further study, particularly the study of religious doctrine and Christian ethics.
Presumably Peter and the other disciples, and all the saints since, have not listened very attentively to Jesus’ answer to Peter’s question. Our Lord left no doubt that all His teachings were for all people. His last words to His disciples were: “Go ye, therefore, into all the world and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all things which I have commanded you.”
The particular parable Jesus was telling when Peter raised his question was a story counseling watchfulness and alertness. It was about a gate porter who had been set by his master to guard the door. The master of the house had gone away to a banquet. There was no way of predicting the hour of his return. The porter had just better be ready whenever the moment came of the lord’s return.
Who needs such a teaching? Just Christians who are committed to a belief in the doctrine of the Second Coming of Christ? No. Everyone who lives in this kind of world needs it. Why? Because the judgment and the mercy of God are always coming unexpectedly upon people, and not just at the end of the world. “We live always on the edge of eternity, either heaven or hell. . . Our actions whether good or evil, have unlimited significance. . . We stand under incalculable responsibility.” (Interpreters Bible)
H.J. Cadbury says that this parable of Jesus and others like it contain the notion of an absentee God, teaching that much of our life is lived without the conscious experience of God’s nearness. . . For long intervals we may have no conscious contact with the One to whom we are responsible. He is, it may seem to us, in a distant country and there is no certainty that He will return soon. Our business is to live as we should live, were He present or absent. Normal rectitude, fidelity, diligence are expected of us and not emergency behavior. Blessed is the servant whom his master, when he cometh, shall find him so doing.
The mysterious presence of evil in the world makes it mandatory that all know something about the Scriptural revelation on right and wrong, truth and falsehood, God and man. Jesus on another occasion said to Peter that Satan had been given the power to sift all people, like wheat. Everyone was included, even the disciples. Therefore, a knowledge of theology, of Scripture, of anthropology, is essential equipment for every one of us if we are going to live any sort of life. These are not elective courses, fashioned for book worms only, and old women, and hairsplitting moralists and dogmatists, but for everyone who encounters the common ventures of life: birth, marriage, death, work, friendship, the aging process, war and peace, politics, etc.
If you don’t believe this go with any minister or social worker, or policeman or ambulance driver who is called on to help pick up the pieces in the wrecks of human catastrophe, or to lock up the suspects. Oh, the abysmal ignorance, the dastardly perverseness in people that produce such tragedies! They cry out for more knowledge of the divine goodness and for forgiveness and justice, and for just a minimum of the human gumption and goodness that could have been fostered by a knowledge and application of scriptural fundamentals.
There appeared in the want ads columns of the daily paper in Oxford, England, this notice: “Wanted – Fifty years background in Oxford.” To everyone of us there comes the emergency when what is wanted above everything else is about fifty years background of Christian teaching, living, and experiencing the grace of God, in order to have on tap the Biblical knowledge and the moral training pre-programmed to reveal instantly the eternally correct decision in a given crisis, and the ingrained integrity of character to act on that right decision – not just for that moment when Gabriel blows his trumpet – but at every moment of this thrilling business of living.
If anyone has doubts about the continuing urgency and the universal scope of Christian teaching, ponder for just a moment how persistent and persuasive is every other conceivable teaching that is beamed at our destruction rather than our redemption, at our frustration rather than our salvation.
Perhaps you’ve heard that TV and radio advertisement being aired innumerable times every day, which with consummate dramatic skill presents a woman who is about to leave her husband because he won’t take her on a vacation trip. “But honey,” we hear the husband plead so pathetically, “We can’t go anywhere. We have no money to take a trip.” Then in syrupy tones the announcer comes in as the supreme wisdom and solver of household problems and the patcher-up of threatened marriages: “But you don’t need any money. You can go anywhere you want to go, and do everything you want to do and charge it on your Blankety Blank Credit Card.”
And any fool that takes such advice to indulge in unrestrained, selfish expenditures is heading not only for worry and anxiety over the non-payment of his just debts to the Blankety Blank Credit Card Co. when pay up time rolls around, but he is on a collision course for the smash-up of his marriage, as any counselor who is called into such catastrophes will testify. The mis-management of money rates high on the list of causes of all marriage failures.
These are the principalities and powers of the 20th century that St. Paul was talking about back in the 1st century. Still arrayed against mortal man are his most deadly spiritual enemies of false ideas, phony values, and new and ancient slaveries of baser human desires. But today they are more powerful and deadly than ever before because of the weapons forged for them by this souped up electronic age.
What is our defense? There is no other than the ancient Christian armor of the spirit that St. Paul described in Ephesians 6; the sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation. But the poor Christian who won’t put on this armor stalks around spiritually naked unprotected in this high-powered, double exposure, audio-visual universe of ours. He will be shot down like a clay pigeon.
Sometimes one hears that addlepated remark: “It is not what you believe but what you do that matters.” Or, “Let a person believe what he or she pleases, just so one does what is right.” Archbishop William Temple once knocked such foolish fantasy talk into a cocked hat by his cogent reference to the burning issue of Temple’s time, namely, the emergence of a new and more horrible paganism than the world had ever seen in the doctrine and teaching of Hitlerian Nazism. Temple pointed out that the Nazi doctrine of Nordic supremacy and anti-Semitism, race genocide, and the Nazi publication of a new set of Rosenberg commandments to displace the antiquated Semitic Ten Commandments, were promoting false beliefs and false teachings. And, Temple said, “It is precisely because the Nazis believe that it is right that they should do these atrocious things that the Nazis’ acts are so perfidious. Their horrible doctrine issues in their horrible deeds.”
We have come too far ever again to nod in acceptance of that silly notion that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. Rather what you don’t know may blow you up. And it is an utterly false dichotomy that divides deeds and doctrines, assuming that one can entertain any foolish set of beliefs he pleases, just so his deeds are right. Deeds and doctrines are of one piece, and false teachings and pernicious doctrines are the most insidious virus in the mental and spiritual universe. Until they are overcome by truth, there is no hope for health in society or in the individual. Therefore, the teaching of Christian truth, or Christian doctrine, is the most important business in all the world.
PASTORAL PRAYER
Lord, have mercy on us Thy shaken people. Our health is fragile, our relationships unstable, our allegiance to causes and institutions fickle. We handle shaky dollars. We invest in fluctuating stocks and bonds. The successes of our big deals depend on so many uncertainties. Lord, have mercy upon us. We are like reeds shaken in the wind. We spend our years as a tale that is told.
How many times, Lord, have we been lead astray by false hopes and cruel promises and crooked values. We have been enticed to believe that all morals are relative and that every man and woman of us can live as it seems good in our own eyes and that the society we achieve will be a paradise of doing everything our way. O Righteous Father, deliver us from such a hell of our own making, by converting these hearts and minds and wills of ours to a glad acceptance of the holy and righteous laws of Thy eternal kingdom.
Lord, we are concerned about the hard-line retaliationists – about the cruelty and the anxiety the terrorists and the avengers create in our world and about these unconverted hearts of ours when we demand our pound of flesh in vengeance.
We confess, O Lord, our failures of patience in our glorious business of forgiveness. We have failed to persist in forgiveness. How many battles we have lost, how many people whom we could have helped, had we only held out a little longer in our willingness to forgive – in our out-going in love for them and to them. O Lord our God whose forgiveness outlasts all our sins, how wondrous is Thy steadfast love for us. Establish us in Thy Love, O Father, the love of Him who suffered all things even death on a cross that we might receive unearned forgiveness. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord we pray. Amen.