A noted Western philosopher, introduced to the world in 1926, was one day sitting on a log when he heard a buzzing sound. He was puzzled and fell to pondering. As his leading chronicler remembers the event, the philosopher reasoned along the following lines:
“ ‘If there’s a buzzing-noise, somebody’s making a buzzing-noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing-noise that I know of is because you’re a bee.’
“Then he thought another long time, and said: ‘And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey.’
“And then he got up, and said: ‘And the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.’ ”
Now, even though this philosopher carries the strange title of Winnie-the-Pooh, and even though his work is mostly appreciated by children, this bit of reflection deserves our serious attention. After all, it resembles the way the American church is more and more thinking about God and discipleship.
This incident shows Pooh to be a pragmatic individualist. He cannot imagine the bees possessing an existence and purpose apart from his own use and interest. The Pooh is the quintessential consumer, entirely practical and entirely self-centered: The only reason for being a bee is to make honey, and the “only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.”
Thus reasoning, the Pooh has a range of other possibilities blocked from his vision. He cannot see, for instance, the wider ecological purpose of bees, how they weave into a fabric of flora and fauna not only by providing honey, but also by such crafts as pollinating flowers. Another thing Pooh cannot see is a theological purpose for bees: that in the wonder of their existence, they speak and spell the glory of a Creator God.
Pooh-Speak
The Pooh, in short, is a bear of very little vision. And that is part of what makes these ingenious stories so amusing. What is not so amusing is that our language for God and life—our serious, Christian, adult language—has become every bit as restricted as the Pooh’s playful, areligious, childlike language. More and more, we American Christians are limiting ourselves to a kind of Pooh-speak for talking about God and discipleship. We are forgetting the language and grammar of Scripture. Increasingly, our only tongue is the language of pragmatic individualism and the grammar of consumerism.
The most obvious examples appear in the pervasive prosperity gospel and in the trend to “market” the church. Across all denominational lines, churches are promising health and wealth as shamelessly as once only extreme Pentecostals did. A suburban Lutheran church near San Francisco, for instance, recently advertised a “money-back guarantee.” Donate to the church for 90 days, and, if you aren’t blessed, you can have your money returned.
American Christians largely envision the church as a spiritual supermarket. We choose churches on the basis of whether or not they “meet my needs.” We move to a new community and describe our search for a place of worship as “church shopping.” Recently I talked with a professor at an elite evangelical college. He brought up some problems at his church, then sighed, “Ah well, most churches only have a shelf life of about three years anyway.”
All this is Pooh-speak, pure and simple.
There is less and less a sense that finding (and being found by) a church is something entirely different from choosing a new car. We seem increasingly blind to the limits imposed on us by consumeristic language.
Is Holiness Good For You?
Writing and editing in the evangelical world for over ten years, I have seen our language increasingly forced away from the language of the Bible and toward the language of religious consumerism. That is not to say that the language of pragmatic individualism does not have great power and even some benefits. Many Christians, for example, now insist their faith has something to do with everyday life. Also, we are now more inclined to dismiss theologies that assume God can only be glorified if we deplore ourselves or say that if we are having fun God must be dismayed.
But if we are only comfortable speaking as pragmatic consumers, we will ignore or distort entire vistas of the biblical terrain. This was brought keenly home to me recently when two authors independently submitted book manuscripts on the same topic—the holiness of God.
Both manuscripts worked directly, explicitly, and consistently from the biblical text. Both were well written and, on their own terms, interesting. I saw value in both and moved to the editorial task of conceiving how the authors might draw in the widest possible readership.
I needed, in other words, to start translating their manuscripts into a “marketable” language.
But here was a translating headache. The authors had begun with God; I would have to push them to begin with the individual human. They had addressed needs theologically perceived, fitting humanity onto God’s agenda; I would push them to write about felt needs, fitting God onto the individual human’s agenda. At the heart of what these authors had to say, in fact, was the conviction that humanity is in deep trouble exactly because it tries to use God to its own ends. So if I pushed these authors to speak in the idiom of pragmatic individualism, I would push them to say exactly the opposite of what they wanted to say!
In short, the holiness of God is not easy to conceive in Pooh-speak. More than that, if it is forced into Pooh-speak, it will no longer resemble any biblical sense of the holiness of God. God’s holiness is not for my use or self-interest, though the language of consumerism would have me imagine it must be. It is the other way around. Apart from God I am lost, without direction and purpose, unable to know my true worth—the worth of a creature among creatures wrought and redeemed by a transcendent God.
Snared in the net of Pooh-speak, I live with a grossly stunted imagination. This stuntedness would have been well understood by the Puritan Richard Baxter, who wrote, “If you will glorify God in your lives, you must be chiefly intent upon the public good, and the spreading of the gospel through the world.” The alternative, according to Baxter, was a “private, narrow soul … always taken up about itself, or imprisoned in a corner, in the dark.” Such a soul “sees not how things go in the world: its desires, and prayers, and endeavours go no further than they can see or travel.”
If I can imagine a good that is bigger and grander than myself, a purpose beyond what will satisfy merely me, then, in Baxter’s words, I can be a “larger soul” who “beholds all the earth, and desires to know how it goes with the cause and servants of the Lord.” Thus, Baxter recognized, those who understand the holiness of God “pray for the ‘hallowing of God’s name,’ and the ‘coming of his kingdom,’ and the ‘doing of his will throughout the earth, as it is in heaven,’ before they come to their own necessities.”
Sabbath And Sex
Holiness is not the only biblical concern that drops from sight when we confine ourselves to Pooh-speak. Consider the Sabbath.
Recently I spent a weekend with a group of ministers. In one discussion, they emphasized the need for Sabbath rest in our frenetic society. The leader extolled the value of rest and restful exercise because it refreshed him and made him sharper at his ministry. The Sabbath, in other words, was useful since it facilitated his ministry.
Biblically, though, the point of the Sabbath is exactly its uselessness, its sheer impracticality for us and our work. It is a regular reminder that God alone is God; the universe and its maintenance does not depend on me or my ministry.
Another example is the Christian confusion over sexual ethics. We tell our young people they should reserve sexual intercourse for marriage. But then we justify our position in terms of consumer choices. We tell them that abstinence before marriage is the least harmful and most healthy alternative. We warn them about AIDS and venereal diseases. We talk about how the really “good sex” is had between two people without previous partners.
The problem is that this approach, presented by itself, encourages each teenager to think only about himself or herself. And if they think of themselves only as individuals, they can always find exceptions to the rule. Most people who have sex outside marriage never get AIDS; individuals who have had sex partners before their spouse may still have wonderful sex on their marital bed. What is “good for them” may not seem so obvious.
But what if we turn to a language and imagination more like Baxter’s than Pooh’s—a vision “chiefly intent on the public good”? Then it is not difficult to see how it is good to keep sex connected to marriage. Any worthy society will want to promote the birth and healthy upbringing of children, for only so can it insure its future. And children can be healthy only if their parents are capable of the commitment and fidelity that build family stability. As the political philosopher Michael Walzer recognizes, “From the point of view of society as a whole, private affairs are marginal and parasitic upon marriages and families.”
Yet people who see sex individualistically, mainly as a means of recreation or self-fulfillment, are sensitive only to their own needs and gratification. Commitment and fidelity are beyond them.
A Zero-Sum War
In short, Pooh-speak disposes me to think first, and often only, of myself and my benefits. At its extreme, it reduces life to a contest of self-interests in a zero-sum economy: For me to gain, someone else must lose.
Enslaved to the language of individualism, we do not see our profound and unavoidable connections to others. Philip Slater writes, “The notion that people begin as separate individuals, who then march out and connect themselves to others, is one of the most dazzling bits of self-mystification in the history of the species.” We are now so individualistic and pragmatic that we can fight against tax raises to improve schools for the next generation without ever feeling stingy or selfish.
Biblical language, Baxter’s language, opens up other possibilities. It disposes me to see my connection to others and to see us benefiting together under God. Thus Paul, in 1 Corinthians 12, sees individual Christians as members of a community, each with gifts used to build up all. The kingdom of God is a limitless rather than a zero-sum economy. It is more like life as family than as war: The new child does not steal parental love from big sister, but instead creates more love to go around.
Biblical language, then, calls us into a new and wider world. “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Cor. 5:17, NRSV). Incorporated into Christ, the individual can now see everything in a transformed way, connected under God, created and redeemed in Christ.
Such a vision is what Augustine had in mind in the rhapsodic final book of The City of God. There, looking ahead to the consummation, “God will be the source of every satisfaction, more than any heart can rightly crave, more than life and health, food and wealth, glory and honor, peace and every good—so that God, as St. Paul said, ‘may be all in all.’ … And in this gift of vision, this response of love, this paean of praise, all alike will share, as all will share in everlasting life.”
That, to understate the matter, is not a pragmatic individualist speaking.
Called To Be Multilingual
The insidiousness of consumer language is that it confuses the kingdom with the kingdom’s benefits. It mistakes certain effects of the gospel for the gospel itself. Someone who repents and follows Jesus can expect direction in life, an easing of guilt and anxiety, moral growth, and many other benefits. “But,” as John Howard Yoder writes, “all of this is not the gospel. This is just the bonus, the wrapping paper thrown in when you buy the meat, the ‘everything’ which will be added, without our taking thought for it, if we seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.”
For Christians, Pooh-speak cannot be our first tongue. Instead, we need a sharper and reinvigorated sense of how the people of God are called to be multilingual. We may need to know the language of pragmatic individualism (or, at other times, the language of existentialism or Marxism or the New Age). But our primary language, our first tongue in every time and place, must be the language of Scripture.
While the Assyrian army beseiges Jerusalem (2 Kings 18–19), its negotiator Rabshakeh taunts the people of Judah in their own language. He stands just outside Jerusalem’s wall and mocks Yahweh, comparing the Lord God to failed deities of other nations. Rabshakeh uses the language of Judah, but only to pervert it, to show Assyrian kings more powerful than Israel’s Creator and Redeemer. Similarly, when we dress Pooh-speak in the language of the Bible, we twist the biblical language.
More important than the conversation at the wall, however, is the conversation going on behind the wall. Judah’s King Hezekiah prays to Yahweh in the language of Judah, rightly recognizing the Lord as the maker of heaven and earth and the sole God over all the kingdoms (19:15). As Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann comments, “The conversation on the wall is crucial, because the Assyrians are real dialogue partners who must be taken seriously. They will not go away. But unless there is another conversation behind the wall in another language about another agenda, Judah on the wall will only submit to and echo imperial perceptions of reality.”
Likewise, we must retain a facility in consumerism as a second language because it is the language of our society. It will not go away—at least not for a good, long time. In fact, I fear it may become so dominant that the “truth” and “reality” it presents will be more true and real to Christians than the truth and reality of Scripture. For example, some in the church already accept the idea that the “bottom line” reliably determines what we should be and do; or that theological designations such as the “Trinity” and the “kingdom of God” are supposedly more abstract and less “practical” than psychological formulations such as “dysfunctionality” and “self-esteem.”
The conversation at the wall must always go on. But our hope lies behind the wall, where we must renew our first language. Pooh-speak is fun. Pooh-speak can be grand. Pooh-speak is sometimes useful. It just isn’t the gospel.
