by
Rick Sutcliffe
(index)
Faith and Learning
For TWU FA meeting 2005 03 08
Scripture Reading
Matthew 16:6 "Be careful," Jesus said to them. "Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees." 7 They discussed this among themselves and said, "It is because we didnÕt bring any bread." 8 Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked, "You of little faith, why are you talking among yourselves about having no bread?"
and he goes on, in each passage that reports this discussion, to further discuss faith, the clear implication being that the yeast of the Pharisees and Saducees was in part a defective teaching on faith.
Who were these groups?
The Pharisees were originally a pietistic reform movement. By ChristÕs time, they were highly regarded by the Jewish people for their knowledge of the scriptures, their reputation as men of prayer and for their outward compliance with the law and the traditions.
Jesus said of these in Luke 11:42 "Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You should have practised the latter without leaving the former undone. 43 "Woe to you Pharisees, because you love the most important seats in the synagogues and greetings in the market-places. 44 "Woe to you, because you are like unmarked graves, which men walk over without knowing it."
The Saducees were the sophisticated, worldly liberals of their day, knowledgeable in the content of the scriptures, but with more interest in finding reasons to ignore whole books of it, explaining its teachings away, or denying its doctrines, than they had in applying it. Having reached an accommodation with Rome, they held the levers of power and privilege in Jerusalem and were loath to give them up.
Jesus said of them, in Luke 11: 46 Jesus replied, "And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them. 52 "Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering."
Between them, these two groups could tell Herod exactly where the Christ was to be born, but couldnÕt generate sufficient interest to go look for themselves. They could understood perfectly ChristÕs allusions to his own deity and to his resurrection, but deny both. They could recognize sin in others, but not in themselves.
So, what kind of faith did Jesus say it is that saves? Was it the sophisticated, liberal, scripture-denying, worldly "faith" of the Saducees? Was it the ritualistic, tradition-bound, and ostensibly scripturally-compliant "faith" of the Pharisees?"
Matthew 5: 3 "Blessed are those who are conscious of spiritual poverty, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Mr 10:15 & Lu 18:17 I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it."
John 3:3 In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no-one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again."
1Pe 1:23 For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.
Application:
As academics we can easily fall into the same intellectual traps as those of ChristÕs day, perhaps without even being aware we have done so.
- we could become so caught up with tradition and ritual that, like the Pharisees, the pure gold of our simple, childlike, pietistic Sunday school faith, the very faith in which we were saved, gets overlayed with layers of dross that obscure the truth, thus becoming a snare for our students,
OR
- we could become so enamoured with our own learning, our own theories, our own sophistication, that we forget our first love, becoming lukewarm and useless to the kingdom, or like the Saducees we might even decide our theories (or those of Greece and Rome around us) better explain truth than do the scriptures and so replace GodÕs word with that of humankind.
Let us remember that our task as Christian academics is to employ the talents and the word God has given us, not to scorn our studentsÕ faith as simplistic or to replace it with something we deem either more ritualistically appropriate or more sophisticated. Rather it is to bolster saving faith by informing it, providing evidence for it, sharpening it apologetically, backing it up with sound hermeneutics, undergirding it with biblical theology, and filtering it through epistemologies and presuppositions that are judged by the scriptures rather than being made by us a judge over them.
We are here to polish the gold of our studentsÕ pietistic faith to make it reflect more fully the image of Christ, to make it proof against the wiles of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Faith affirming and equipping learning is our mission, and while we welcome the supplementary activities of other departments, only we academics can deliver 100% integrated mission fulfillment every hour of every day in our classrooms. This we need to do, and be seen doing it.
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