No. 004: The Most Important Thing about You—No, Not That One.
On Tozer, Nineveh, and the preeminent love of Christ.
In my time spent as a freelance proofreader, I have read many books by Evangelical authors, and over the years I have put together a mental bingo card of the most commonly cited quotations. Certainly the majority of them are from Lewis (you know—Aslan [i.e., God] isn’t safe, but he’s good; and Christianity is like the sunrise because by it we can see everything else; and if we find ourselves with a longing that the world can’t satisfy, then we were probably made for another world; and we’re all busy making mud pies in the slum instead of enjoying a holiday at sea; etc.); but you’ll also be able to find plenty representation of Keller (“You are simultaneously more sinful…”), Elliot (“He is no fool…”), and, of course, the classic Augustine (“Our hearts are restless…”). My bingo card is large and spilling over with sound bytes from a myriad of writers, pastors, theologians, church fathers, and more.
One quotation that I have seen on repeat these past few years, and that I’m sure you’ve likely heard by now, is twentieth-century pastor A. W. Tozer’s claim that “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
As much as it makes me squirm and blush to be that person pushing the thick-rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose, muttering obnoxiously, “Aaactually…”—I’m going to do it. I’m going to be her. My sincere apologies.
This quotation does not sit right with me.
Of course, what comes to mind when we think about God is an important thing—and not just that, but a vitally important thing—about us. As we all can certainly quote in our sleep, “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Indeed, John’s gospel records the indispensable role of “belief” over eighty times within its twenty-one chapters. The apostle Paul instructs us, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9), and according to the apostle Peter, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Insofar as it concerns the justification of the soul, it is requisite that when a person of mature, healthy mind thinks about God, she (1) recognizes Christ as Lord and (2) recognizes her sins as forgiven in his death and her body and soul as redeemed in his resurrection.
What comes into our minds when we think about God changes everything about the way we live. It changes the way we think, the way we speak, and the way we act. It changes the way we spend our time and our money. It changes the way we vote, the way we raise our children, and the way we care for the health of the planet and the creatures who call it home. It certainly changes the way we approach our own deaths. So yes, it is very, very important (and, I could be wrong, but I suspect that this is simply what Tozer was getting at when he said what he did).
I will here admit that I have personally read neither the full context of Tozer’s quotation nor any of his other writings. Therefore, my intent is certainly not to pooh-pooh the man’s entire theology, nor is it to present myself as more theologically astute and nuanced than such a faithful and influential teacher of the church. I am sure that he has many valuable things to say, and I have no doubt that his wisdom has led many more people to faith than mine has.
However, if we are going to treat this isolated quotation as a prooftext—which is exactly what we typically do—then we should be willing to consider its overall helpfulness and the potential pitfalls of taking its message too far. (Remember, this quotation represents just a pithy sliver of one man’s stated opinion, not inspired and infallible Scripture, so inasmuch as it may have something to teach us, we also must ultimately submit it to the normative Word of God.)
One of the most helpful voices in my personal research concerning the role of material culture in Christian discipleship has been that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I am always amused when contemporary, conservative, American Evangelicals—thanks to the politicized pop-“biography” that came on the scene back several years ago—speak chummily of Bonhoeffer, as though he could comfortably be considered one of us. With all due respect, I suspect that these Evangelicals have never actually read much of the twentieth-century German Lutheran pastor’s work. If they had, they would find that his blunt words send many searing critiques into our current context—condemning us for our prioritization of Christian liberty, which is afforded by what he would call “cheap grace,” above all else; for our leniency toward material indulgence; for our hyper-spiritualization of the gospel; for the liturgical paucity of much of our worship and community discipleship; for the individualistic and consumer-oriented models of our local church communities; and for our desperate grabs for political power and influence. I suppose we would all like to identify with the inspiring, anti-Nazi heroism of Bonhoeffer, but very few of us, certainly myself included, actually pursue the disciplines of watertight conviction and relentless, uncompromising death to self that empowered his heroism. Reading Bonhoeffer always makes me feel uncomfortable, exposed, and convicted, but I am thankful for the ways in which his words admonish and edify me.
Towards the beginning of his book The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer considers the gospel accounts of the first disciples as they receive their call to discipleship from Christ, immediately dropping the accouterments of their various occupations and stepping forward in obedience to follow him (all italics mine):
The call goes forth, and it is at once followed by the response of obedience. The response of the disciples is an act of obedience, not a confession of faith in Jesus. How could the call immediately evoke obedience? The story is a stumbling-block for the natural reason, and it is no wonder that frantic attempts have been made to separate the two events. … Something must have happened between, some psychological or historical event. … Unfortunately [the biblical] text is ruthlessly silent on this point, and in fact it regards the immediate sequence of call and response as a matter of crucial importance. It displays not the slightest interest in the psychological reasons for a man’s religious decisions. And why? For the simple reason that the cause behind the immediate following of call by response is Jesus himself.
So what is Bonhoeffer saying—that the most important thing about us isn’t our knowledge of God, but our obedience to God? Let us keep reading:
Discipleship means adherence to Christ, and, because Christ is the object of that adherence, it must take the form of discipleship. An abstract Christology, a doctrinal system, a general religious knowledge on the subject of grace or on the forgiveness of sins, render discipleship superfluous. … With an abstract idea it is possible to enter into a relation of formal knowledge, to become enthusiastic about it, and perhaps even to put it into practice; but it can never be followed in personal obedience. Christianity without the living Christ is inevitably Christianity without discipleship, and Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ. It remains an abstract idea, a myth which has a place for the Fatherhood of God, but omits Christ as the living Son. And a Christianity of that kind is nothing more or less than the end of discipleship. In such a religion there is trust in God, but no following Christ. Because the Son of God became Man, because he is the Mediator, for that reason alone the only true relation we can have with him is to follow him. Discipleship is bound to Christ as the Mediator, and where it is properly understood, it necessarily implies faith in the Son of God as the Mediator. Only the Mediator, the God-Man, can call men to follow him.
And one more time, for those in back:
No one wants to know about your faith or unbelief[;] your orders are to perform the act of obedience on the spot. Then you will find yourself in the situation where faith becomes possible and where faith exists in the true sense of the word.
Didn’t I warn you that our friend Dietrich wasn’t your run-of-mill, sentimental Evangelical megachurch pastor? When our hearts, grounded in our sense of American liberty and our exaltation of the Doctrines of Grace, see the repetition of that triggering word, obedience, we naturally recoil. If we accept Bonhoeffer’s words as truth, wouldn’t that make us legalists—or, worse, Catholics? (The horror.) Our temptation will be to shrug Bonhoeffer off, to suppose that perhaps in this instance he has wandered a bit from his Lutheran orthodoxy, and to cease engaging with the text.
But don’t walk away—look harder! Look for what, according to Bonhoeffer, precedes the obedience. Again, “the cause behind the immediate following of call by response is Jesus himself,” and “Only the Mediator, the God-Man, can call men to follow him.” Yes, the call to Christian discipleship is a call to step forward in obedience; however,
The step into the situation where faith is possible is not an offer which we can make to Jesus, but always his gracious offer to us. … Salvation through following Jesus is not something we men can achieve for ourselves—but with God all things are possible.
We are now in a better position to understand Bonhoeffer’s prioritization of the obedience of faith (cf. Rom. 1:5). Whereas our Tozerite prooftexter would encourage us to focus our efforts on the increasing perfection of our minds as we meditate on our justification by grace, Bonhoeffer admonishes us that, “The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ. Such a man knows that the call to discipleship is a gift of grace, and that the call is inseparable from the grace.” Yes, God desires to draw your mind to himself; but the active love of Christ mobilizes your whole human self to “love the Lord your God with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30).
As part of my sons’ homeschool curriculum, each day I read out a list of questions, and they are expected to have the answers memorized, to sit up straight, and to recite their answers with confidence. My second-grader should be able to tell you at the drop of a hat that the five categories of vertebrates are fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals; and my kindergartener should be able to skip-count to 100 by 5s.
Towards the end of last school year, I started asking the boys each morning along with the rest of their recitation questions, “What is the most important thing about you?” Of course, I suppose Tozer’s disciples would expect them to answer, “What comes into my mind when I think about God.”
But, as I’m sure you’ve already come to guess, this is not the answer I have fed them.
Instead, our simple catechesis goes as follows:
Q: What is the most important thing about you?
A: God loves me.
This is not an answer that I have pulled from thin air. Let us return to John 3:16, this time emphasizing the first half of the verse: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Yes, the response of belief is indispensable to this equation. But that response of belief wholly depends upon the preeminent love of God, materialized in his gift of the Incarnate Son, and, therefore, God’s love for us must be accepted and celebrated as the most important thing about us.
Notice in the framework of this catechesis that while the question asks about “you,” the subject of the answer is not “I.” That is, the most important thing about me is not even “that I know that God loves me.” It is that God loves me. The most important thing about me, in other words, is something completely beyond the scope of my effort, my manipulation, and my mental comprehension.
This is a vulnerable place in which to find ourselves, my friends. And it would be a terrifying place in which to find ourselves if we had any doubts about the character of the God who holds the reins. But this is why we cannot lose sight of the glorious news that when Christ looks upon those whose hearts are plagued by anxiety, doubt, or confusion, “he [has] compassion on them, because they [are] like sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:34).
I now think about both of my dear grandmothers, who—after full lives of devotion to the Lord—spent the last years of their earthly lives bed-ridden with dementia, hardly able to communicate, much less able to hold and read a Bible or to travel to church to sit under the teaching and preaching of the Word. I recognize that we are on safest ground developing our theology vis-à-vis the norm rather than exceptions to the norm, but cases such as these should at least give us pause. If it is true that the singular most important thing—that is, the very first thing that God saw—about my two grandmothers, in the final years of their lives, was what came to mind when they thought about God, then God would have looked upon them with contempt for the muddled theology of their failing brains. However, if the most important thing about them was that God has always loved them, then we can trust that our Good Father was holding out his merciful hand to them, desiring to draw them into fellowship with himself and using even those last, vulnerable years of their lives for the service of his kingdom, perhaps even in ways that are incomprehensible to our rational minds.
Now, I suppose, is a good time for us to regroup. I recognize that the argument I have written above begs some questions about the ordo salutis, about election, about free will, and about the content of orthodoxy. However, this is not the focus on which I here desire to expound. Many theologians throughout church history have recorded for us their wisdom on these topics, and I do not suppose that I could do a better job here in this casual space. For what it’s worth, I do consider myself a committed Calvinist. However, I have learned much from the writing and teaching of several thoughtful and faithful Wesleyans, as well as Catholics, and I can affirm that all of us are simply using our limited faculties of reason in order to understand the work of our magnificent, boundless God.
My focus here, rather, is on God’s attitude toward his people. I am motivated to write this piece because I have been around believers who, I’m pretty sure, really did believe that the absolute most important thing about them was what came into their minds when they thought about God, and I would submit to you that this is not a healthy cornerstone on which to build your faith.
To begin with, consider that “what comes into our minds when we think about God” is not a complete sentence, and it does not offer us any criteria by which to gauge whether we have adequately construed our thoughts into a pattern with which God might be pleased whenever he looks upon this so-called “most important thing about us.” This vagueness opens the door to two dangerous pitfalls: pride and anxiety, which are really just two different flavors of the same foundational insecurity.
Every November, there are a handful of academic conferences that are always held in the same city over the span of two weeks, each centering on distinct yet overlapping topics—biblical studies, theology, and Near Eastern archaeology. Since, during college and graduate school, I focused my studies on ancient Near Eastern anthropology and ancient languages, I attended several of the archaeological conferences. A couple times, however, I also joined my systematic-theologian boyfriend-then-husband in some of the sessions at one of the theological conferences. I enjoyed and learned from both conferences, but, if I’m being honest, the archaeological conferences were significantly more fun. Why? Because the ideological stakes are relatively low in archaeology, and all of the archaeologists were generally excited to share in their discoveries and to learn from one another. Amongst the theologians, however, there were far more whiffs of self-importance, self-righteousness, contempt, and divisiveness, as individual scholars chased down their own niche, intellectual rabbit trails, each convinced that God was on his or her side. (Of course, not all theologians are so self-important—far from it! But when people believe that their unique minds have most successfully interpreted the truth about God, that temptation will certainly follow.)
We all have heard of the proverbial young seminarian who returns home for Christmas break after his first semester of studies and cynically attends the church in which he was raised with a laundry list of theological complaints against the middle-aged pastor who has served his congregation faithfully for decades. And I certainly do not need to tell you that in the minds of many God has been politicized, such that he has become nothing more than a puppet of a political party’s agenda, and Christians of one political persuasion lazily condemn Christians of the opposing political persuasion that they “just can’t understand” why they vote the way they do, creating ugly divisions that publicly dishonor the supremacy of Christ’s kingdom.
When we Evangelicals speak of “legalism,” we generally are referring to behavioral legalism. However, I would submit that the temptation toward intellectual legalism is just as real and just as harmful. I am not here advocating that we neglect to teach and hold one another accountable to the historic creeds and confessions that define our orthodox faith. I am, however, encouraging us to keep our hearts humbly grounded in the truth that we do not earn favor with God simply for thinking through the details of our theologies correctly.
Jesus, of course, condemned the Pharisees for holding such an attitude, but I personally cannot think of a better picture of the dichotomy of a heart of intellectual assent versus a heart of genuine faith than that described in the book of Jonah. Jonah, of course, is an Israelite prophet, and he correctly identifies the Lord whom he worships as “the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land” (1:9). The Ninevites, in contrast, are a pagan people, who worship a pantheon of gods, and who know and care nothing of God’s election of Israel or of the details of the Mosaic law.
God calls Jonah to preach against the Ninevites on account of their wickedness, but Jonah, as we know, runs in the opposite direction. After three uncomfortable days in the belly of the great fish, Jonah again receives God’s call, and this time he acquiesces. “Forty more days and then Nineveh will be overthrown,” preaches Jonah (3:4). (Wow, Jonah—thanks so much for the thorough and riveting sermon.)
But the Ninevites “believed God” (3:5). Although Jonah has provided them with no instructions for how they might turn and please God, they scramble to do whatever they can—proclaiming a fast and donning their sackcloth—to demonstrate their repentance, for, so figure the nobles, “Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish” (3:9). And indeed, God does show them compassion: “When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened” (3:10).
The narrative then returns to Jonah:
But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live (4:1–3).
The Ninevites, who know virtually nothing of God other than that that their behavior has provoked his wrath, step forward in the obedience of a humble, intellectually-unformed faith, understanding that their security rests entirely in the hands of a god who they very much hope is at least somewhat compassionate.
Jonah, on the other hand, perfectly understands God’s character and his law. He knows that God is compassionate. And yet his heart could not be farther from the heart of God. Jonah has trusted in the accuracy of his personal theology to justify himself before God, and he will not tolerate that God should bestow his compassion upon the Ninevites—those crude, godless, liberal idiots! So great is his hardness of heart that he would prefer to die, maintaining that he is “in the right,” rather than to live and see God’s blessing bestowed upon those whose theology he disdains.
The book closes with God’s admonishment of Jonah’s pride and self-righteousness: “And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left?” (4:11). People are quick to the judge the “God of the Old Testament” as a God of wrath and the “God of the New Testament” as a God of love, but here we can clearly see that God’s heart of compassion has always been the same. That is, the same God who would one day take on flesh and look upon the crowds as lost and hurting sheep here gives his benevolent grace to the Ninevites, and to this day he offers this same benevolent grace to all who will respond to it in repentance.
There were a couple of years as a young mother, I will admit, when I struggled to discipline myself in regularly spending time independently reading Scripture. At the time, I was surrounded by a number of men and women whom I have sometimes referred to as “Cross-Fit Christians”—people who would daily pore over the Scriptures with five different highlighters and a stack of commentaries by their side. I do not mean to speak of these of these believers in a derogatory way, because I recognize that there is plenty of good fruit to be gleaned from reading the Scriptures with such diligence. However, at this time in my life when I was mentally and emotionally exhausted, I would look at the extent of their effort, feel discouraged at my own lack of motivation to dedicate so much of myself to the study of the Word, and submit myself to defeat, supposing it wasn’t even worth trying if I knew I couldn’t match their efforts.
My intellectual anxiety toward Scripture actually prevented me from sitting at the feet of my gentle Master, feasting upon the riches of his love as recorded by the Word. If we wake up each morning and the first thought we entertain is that we must constantly strive to perfect our theology, we will approach our faith from a position of insecurity, for our systems of thought will never be fail-proof or complete, and any challenging questions or doubts we face will shake us to our core.
Of course, I absolutely do believe that theology—or “faith seeking understanding,” in the words of Anselm—is an invaluable exercise. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this post, or any other post that I have so far offered! God has given us our mental capacities in order that they may be filled with the knowledge of his goodness and love and therefore respond in praise. We certainly honor God when we seek to understand the Scriptures and their application to our philosophies of life, and a thorough biblical theology will help us to understand God’s expectations of how we are called to live, how we are called to worship, and how we are called to treat other people, God’s creatures, and the planet.
However, always remember that the purpose of your pursuit of theology is to facilitate your worship and enjoyment of God. It does not earn you brownie points with your Savior, and if chased at the expense of humility and compassion it may actually harden your heart to his goodness.
As a high school student, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young disciple of Christ, I decided that I wanted to pursue a college major in systematic theology, which, at the time, I simply understood as the exercise of translating established biblical truth into nuggets of dialectic that were more easily digestible to contemporary, American ears. The extent of my “theological” knowledge back then was essentially limited to Piper and Keller. When I observed that my college also offered a degree in biblical studies, I laughed at the “superfluousness” of such coursework: Why would anyone need to spend so much time studying the biblical text if we already confidently know everything that each pericope teaches?
When I finally went to college, I ended up majoring in biblical archaeology, not theology, but my major did require significant coursework in biblical studies and systematics as well. Both my undergraduate studies and my later graduate studies in biblical exegesis were intellectually humbling, to say the least. Whereas once I might have believed that archaeology could be used to “prove” the Bible (sure, in a few, limited cases it might), I would come to learn that the archaeological record also leaves us with not a few big, confusing questions about the historical record. I learned about textual variants, about transmission history, and about the Masoretic vowel points that were added at a much later date to the original Hebrew scripts—all of which make our efforts at biblical exegesis a little less straightforward than some would have us believe. I took a couple of upper-level courses on hermeneutics, and I have continued to read on the subject in recent years, and after all of this I have come to the conclusion that no one actually has one solid, working definition for the word “meaning.”
To be clear, I attended an Evangelical college and graduate school, and all of my professors were faithful, Christian men and women who held to the doctrine of inerrancy. They were in no way encouraging students to “deconstruct” their faith. However, these professors loved us enough to teach us that we stand on slippery ground if we build our faith solely on a foundation of intellectualism. By opening our eyes to all of the real difficulties and uncertainties embedded in the hermeneutical spiral, they taught us to understand our faith through a lens of humility, recognizing that our security must be found in the preeminent love of Christ, not in our own mental abilities.
When I drill into my children’s memories that the most important thing about them is that God loves them, my goal is to facilitate the construction of a foundation for their faith that is truly built upon the solid Rock of a loving, gracious, and compassionate savior, rather than upon either their behavior or their intelligence. I want them to know deeply, before they meet life’s many challenges, that no matter what they do and no matter what questions they entertain, God’s loving arms will always be open to them.
When you wake up in the morning and your brain is in a fog, and you have yet to focus your thoughts on the truth of the Word, the most important thing about your day has already been accomplished, because God already loves you. When you struggle with doubt, or a passage of the Bible leaves you in earnest bewilderment, or you compare yourself to someone more “spiritually intelligent,” you can rest secure in the trust that the most important thing about your faith has already been perfected, because God perfectly loves you. When you remember the unformed theology of your past, before you received whatever theological education now shapes your thoughts, there is no need to look back on that time in your life with shame or embarrassment, because God has always loved you. And when you grow frustrated with brothers and sisters in Christ who do not hold the same theological, political, or philosophical opinions as you do, you can bend your heart toward charity, unity, and affection, because God sufficiently loves them just as well as he loves you.
I pray that your mind will always be enthusiastic to learn more about God and to submit its thoughts to the truth articulated through the Word. Theology is a worthwhile pursuit, and your soul will suffer if you willfully neglect it. However, my dear friend—please hear this and believe it: The most important thing about you is that you are loved by a compassionate and gracious God. There is no better news than this, and from the posture of humble rest that this truth affords, you can be “confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6). Thank you, Christ, and amen.
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Until next time—
Affectionate thanks,
HLS