The Danger of
McScripture
My wife and I recently
watched a movie entitled “Supersize Me”, in which the subject of
the film used himself as a guinea pig in an experiment to uncover the
effects of McDonald’s food on the human body. His approach was to
eat nothing but McDonald's food, three meals per day, every day for
one month. The result was not only unhealthy and debilitating, but
potentially fatal because it actually damaged his internal organs.
Sound extreme? Well, what if we are doing the same to the body of
Christ with a fast food diet of what I have come to call McScripture?
Good Old Fashioned
Home Cooking
There
was once a time when meals involved a great deal of work and
preparation. Food was often grown or raised at home, and made from
scratch with whole ingredients rich in nutrients, and tailored for
our health by God Himself. Conditions such as cancer, diabetes, heart
disease, high blood pressure, and obesity we nearly nonexistent. An
added benefit of dinner time was the richness of relationships
enjoyed around the dinner table. In the same fashion, the food once
dished out to the flock was (and still is in some churches)
painstakingly prepared by stewards of the Word to grow the body of
Christ by feeding it nutrient rich food. These men would labor long
hours over the text, working through faithful exegesis from the
original languages, and then searching the scriptures for connections
into the bigger picture that God has revealed about Himself. They
would cook up side dishes from the historical and cultural contexts,
and for desert they would show us how Christ is displayed in every
part of the scriptures. They would then, agendas laid aside, don the
server's apron and serve God's children a meal made with love, having
let the the Word and Spirit of God speak first into their hearts, and
through their gifts and labors to their hearers.
Feeding the Flock
Fast Food
Modern
life (or should I say post-modern life) has pretty much spelled the
end of family meals as many of us remember them. Driven by a
relentless race for success and fulfillment, and coupled with an
abundance of cheap, calorie rich and nutrient poor, fast and
convenient food supply, we have become a society of mostly weak,
sickly, overweight, and unhealthy consumers searching for the next
quick fix to satisfy our ever increasing cravings. The result has
been a barrage of artificial medical fixes to combat the flood of
disease brought about by our poor diet. It has created a drain on our
economy due to medical expenses and lost productivity. But it might
serve as a reflection of American evangelicalism, and of the American
church in the last two centuries. What I mean is this: at some
point there was a fundamental shift from a spiritual diet that was
home cooked to a fast food spiritual diet. Now we spend much of our
time and energy trying to deal with the disease and chronic
conditions that it has introduced into the Body.
What is Spiritual
Fast Food?
Spiritual
fast food (McScripture) is quite simply the quick and easy handling
of biblical texts. Quick and easy to prepare (not to mention cheap),
convenient to consume and digest, empty calories that satisfy
immediate hunger, but severely lacking the nutrients that satisfy a
body's need to be truly fed. Biblical lessons are all too often mass
produced for mass consumption in mass media. Instead of being the
product of hard study and honest exegesis to bring forth the inherent
truth of the text, truth now comes ready to go and prepackaged in
traditional understanding. I was shocked the first time that I heard
texts , like Matthew 18, that are taken for granted by many,
properly unpacked to reveal the actual meaning, instead of the
meaning they had come to have. Instead of slow cooking the whole
text in the context of the original language, the passage and the
book, the Eastern understanding of a first century Greek or Jewish
reader, and the whole of God's revelation of Himself, we toss it
into the microwave and enter 3:16 so that we only have to punch in
one number. We deep fry it in the natural understanding of a 21st
Century, western, English speaking mind so that it comes out golden
brown and delicious.
A Fast Food Culture
All
of us have grabbed a bite to eat on the go. After all we have so
much to do, so much to get. McScripture provides a twofold benefit
to both the producer and the consumer. It saves both time and
resources. For the man in the pulpit or the Christian writer it
means no more laboring to become proficient in Greek and Hebrew; just
point your cursor with the mouse and out pops the definition of the
original word! No need to worry about things like meanings brought
forth through parsing, morphology and grammar, its McScripture! No
more are truths and ideas vetted by a thorough searching of Holy
Writ, just find a few single verses that seem to mean what you want
to say, then write your book and get invited to speak at conferences!
No more tediously supporting your views with the greater truths of
the Bible, because you would lose people and go over their heads
anyway, right? It also meets the needs of the modern Christian
consumer quite nicely as well. Need to get home for the football
game? Just pull up to the window and say “I'll have a God's All
About Me Value Meal”. You know, the one with the ten minute gospel
sammich and the greasy grace on the side and a nice decision to wash
it all down with. It even has a relationship with Jesus toy surprise
inside! Quick, easy, and cheap. Then run off to live your life
because after all, God just wants to stay out of the way of our
hapiness, doesnt He?
A Fast Demise
I
have to apologize for my sarcastic tone; I only adopt it to make a
point about a serious condition. As a member of the SBC, I follow
the news of its decline with increasing frustration and sadness as
the leaders ask one another what to do while cramming cheeseburgers
and fries in our mouths. They tell us that their methods just need
some tweaking as they baptize unregenerate people, and then begin
movements to disciple them. I admit that I am not characterizing a
complicated situation completely accurately or fairly. I do not
claim to have all the answers. I only seek to maybe offer al little
insight into one facet of the picture. We desperately need to rely
again on the Word of God. We need to let it speak to us again
instead of using it to make our points for us. We need gifted men to
devote their lives, minds, and resources to rightly bringing forth
the riches of its truth instead of building huge churches and
striving for celebrity. We need the Spirit of God to teach us again
instead of popular Christian Gurus with the latest Church Growth
Methods. We need to turn aside from corporate business models and
psychological fixes thinly disguised as discipleship. We need to
rediscover who Christ is, instead of who we have reinvented Him as.
We need to recover the glorious Gospel of the Scripture which
glorifies God and lays bare the depraved hearts of men. We need to
stop loving our own wills, and worship Him as He is revealed to our
hearts and minds by the Bible. For us to regain our health and vigor
as a church, simply adding a few healthy elements to our fast food
diet is not enough. We need a total, radical change of our eating
and cooking habits to bring a radical change of our body. Maybe it's
time for another Reformation. Maybe we should just return to the old
one. Bon Apetite brothers and sisters!
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