Critical thinking

One of the topics that I would be teaching if I were in Mexico right now is ethos, or credibility. When a speaker starts talking, we are making a decision whether or not that person is trustworthy. We take everything into account including body language and the person’s past. If we don’t know anything about the speaker, we make snap decisions based on appearance, accent, eye contact, opening words, even the volume and modulation of their voice. As we settle in, we are checking what the speaker says against what we already know. Once we decide that a person is trustworthy, we are open to the new things they throw at us. Otherwise we shut them out.

In these days of election in both Canada and the US, we are well aware how political candidates manipulate ethos. But we do this with preachers in our churches, too. Do they sound like they fit the profile we know we can trust? We’re listening for certain key phrases so we can judge whether to stay open or not. What I find frustrating as I get older is that more people I thought I could trust also say things I don’t agree with, and people I’ve written off start saying some things that make sense to me now. I just can’t trust the stereotypes anymore.  I can’t go into conversations predicting the outcome. I find I have to sift the content more and not buy all of it wholesale. Checking ethos is more complicated—more work. Sigh.

In this last month, I have been going to my home church but also listening to a good sermon series at another church that I occasionally attend, a church in the same denomination, just down the road, that helped start my church. The series is called Bible Study, taught by a guy named Mike. It tackles the ways that the Bible, a divine book that teaches salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus, is also a human book narrated by people in specific historical contexts (Your antennae are already going up; I can see them). So they tell the stories from perspectives that made sense thousands of years ago but might not be strictly “accurate” today. They describe the world in terms of domes and storehouses in the sky and pillars and waters under the earth (not scientifically accurate terms). They change the chronology of events in different narratives depending on their focus, and their numbers and names don’t always match up. Mike even says that Jericho during the time depicted in Joshua might not have had walls. No walls? He goes on to say that anyone listening is totally free to disagree with what he says, that’s not a problem. Whew. Because although most of what he says makes sense to me, not all of it does. (I’ve got to check out those walls.) And there are other things Mike says that I heartily disagree with. He doesn’t believe in missionary calling. At all. No missionarying other than what happens right at home.

But what he is saying about the Bible being a divine-human book (like Jesus was a divine-human man) is a relief, and I like this series and have recommended it because I have noticed details in the Bible that could be called inconsistencies when read in a modernist style, and I don’t want these details  to undermine anyone’s faith in the Bible as God’s Word. So in terms of ethos, Mike is a mix and, what I’m discovering is, most of us are.

Meanwhile, down the road, the preaching at my home church is very different. It claims that if you don’t believe in literal 24 hour days during creation, your faith is suspect. You could be in danger of losing your salvation. These are drastically different kinds of preaching going on in sister churches next door to one another, and I’m connected to both and respect both and agree with parts and disagree with parts of what each one teaches. Their ethos is a tangled mix.

My guess is that this scenario is only going to get more complicated as I get older, and that what God wants is for me to listen to my brothers and sisters and think and make the best decisions I can and respect others as they do the same. This is called critical thinking, and it’s what I would be teaching at school, if I were there. We have been good at shutting other people out as soon as they say something we disagree with as if listening were dangerous. With this philosophy we are going to end up with a very small group of people we can talk to, and I don’t think this is how God’s kingdom works. I think it grows, and we grow, rightly dividing the word of truth.