Discipleship Targets Polarization

Sep 28

Much has been written about the increasing tribalism which sees those who are outside my tribe not just as different, but as the enemy that must be opposed by whatever means necessary. Opposition typically includes coarse speech and perhaps verbal violence and sometimes actual physical violence. Part of this polarization is due to the ability social media offers to enable those who share extreme views to find each other. But the heart of the matter is the pandemic of expressive individualism that gives the self sovereignty and selectively marshals or even invents “alternative facts.”

Distressing as this is to witness in our culture as a whole, the barbarians are no longer at the gate—they have entered our churches. Real Christians are indwelt by the Spirit of God. When believers keep in step with the Spirit they exhibit the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness (Gal. 5:22 ESV). It is, of course, painfully possible to quench the Spirit and to grieve Him. This spiritual callousness threatens to make us just like the worldlings around us. It also opens us to legitimately being charged with hypocrisy since the world holds us to a higher standard.

What follows is an approximate transcript of the podcast episode on this important topic.

The aim of this podcast is two-fold.

To show how to use questions in the study of scripture to catalyze the renewed mind of a true disciple that leads to transformed dispositions and actions.
To make the biblical case that God’s plan for regenerated humanity is unity, not fragmented tribalism. When I say unity, I do not mean unanimity. Different gifting as well as different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives produces unique individuals, although all should submit themselves to the plain teaching of scripture. It is by properly focusing our uniqueness that the Body of Christ grows (Eph 4:15-16 ESV). The unity comes from the common purpose or goal: “to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus.” (Eph 3:21 ESV)

In the previous podcast I advocated for an overhaul of discipleship within the church. Effective disciple making doesn’t come about by sprinkling the congregation with truth. Teaching as telling leads at best to learning as remembering. Real learning transforms the learner. Transformative learning requires personal wrestling with scripture that confronts and deconstructs our fleshly status quo. The essence of discipleship is personal rebuilding through immersion in the truth.

Intentional Immersion

Immersion should be intentionally designed through encounters in small groups either in Sunday School or community groups. It isn’t just the teacher to student ratio that matters. A “teacher” who merely transmits truth to a small group is missing the opportunity to make disciples as surely as a lecturer in a large auditorium class. Contrary to conventional discipleship wisdom, broadcasting good content is not teaching.

Transformative teaching purposely constructs scenarios where class members are active participants in uncovering the logic of scripture and its personal application. There are multiple options for active learning, but I’ll focus on only one in this podcast. The most straightforward approach is to focus the class session on asking a series of well-constructed questions and expecting that the students will answer the questions. This requires great self-discipline. The teacher must wait for the answers to come from the students. Higher quality answers come when there is a longer wait time for answers, so teachers need to get comfortable with silence. Studies have shown that professional teachers who ask questions typically answer their own question within two seconds! That undercuts the accountability of the class to take the questions seriously.

This question-forward approach will require an adjustment both from the teacher and the students, but the transformative growth of disciples will be obvious if this becomes the new normal. This is not modern educational theory sticking its nose into the church. if you need encouragement regarding the validity of this approach, I submit that this is how Jesus made disciples. Question posing was typical as he interacted with his disciples. For now, consider a well-known example in Matthew 16:13: Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” After the disciples answer in verse 14, Jesus follows up in verse 15 with, “But who do you say that I am?” A very important question indeed.

Of course, the disciples also asked Jesus questions and a good teacher needs to rejoice when questions go both ways in a class session. In Matthew 17:19 we find the disciples perplexed and wanting to learn after their failure to cast out a demon. “Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, ‘Why could we not cast it out?’” Now that’s a teachable moment!

You can set the context for your questions with brief declarative sessions, but each of these should be 5 to 10 minutes maximum and focused on setting up questions or on using questions already answered to arrive at a summary of where things stand so far.

Constructing Questions

A well-prepared teacher has constructed in advance a tree of questions that will move students through the major logical steps in the argument in a passage of scripture. I say a tree because one question should lead to the next question as in “Who do people say I am?” —->“ Who do you say I am?” Scripture doesn’t record it, but we could keep this line of questioning going with “How did you arrive at that conclusion?” or “What assumptions are you making with that answer?” A question answered always leads to the next question. It is appropriate to preplan questions, but this way of teaching should feel like a conversation. That means that questions that clarify responses are also needed.

I won’t pretend this is easy. It will drive the teacher to deeper comprehension, but teachers need to be discipled too. Learning to extract the central argument is the essence of competent exegesis. If you are new to this, I suggest you look at the approach John Piper uses. He calls it “Arcing” and he has recorded a series of videos he calls Look at the Book in which he walks through this process verse by verse. Piper’s process extracts the structure of the argument. He doesn’t always articulate the actual questions that would help someone else efficiently engage with the argument in scripture. His approach will give you a leg up on understanding the passage and the points where questions will be most effective in advancing a line of reasoning.

You can’t script all the questions in advance. Relax. When you aren’t getting the answers you anticipated or your pupils are stuck, you’ll need to construct different questions in real time. View this as a conversation where you’ve lost the other party and you need to go back to where you were still on the same page. Ask a simpler question or reword what you asked eliminating words that might have alternate meanings that are muddying the water.

That’s enough background for now. I’ll link to some additional helpful resources on framing questions at my web site: deepanddurable.com You can also listen to the whole season of my podcasts on question asking from season 5 which first aired from January to May of 2023. Start here.

What I’d like to do now is to walk through a study I recently led with my church life group as we studied Ephesians 1-3 together. These studies were follow-up to a sermon series that our pastor is preaching on this same set of chapters. A podcast or even seeing things in writing in my blog post isn’t the ideal place to do this, but I think you’ll get the main idea as I walk through this. The main difficulty is that you’re listening and not answering the questions as my group did. I’ll pause after each question, but I’ll have to answer it myself which I would almost never do in a small group setting. It was a great learning experience for me to prepare the questions, and I believe my group members gained a new level of ownership and comprehension of these crucial chapters by answering them.

Compare and Contrast

A typical approach to teaching a book of the Bible is to give some facts about the author, who he wrote the book to and when, etc. That isn’t where we’ll start for our “small group discussion.” Those facts aren’t the focus and the opportunity for application is limited.

Instead, I printed out these 3 chapters from BibleGateway and read the chapters multiple times looking initially for the big picture and the flow of the argument. A paper printout allowed me to draw arrows and other ways of interacting with the text which are cumbersome on the computer without specialized software.

It is fairly well known that Ephesians is divided into a doctrinal section in chapters 1-3 and an application section in chapters 4-6. The theology of 1-3 sets up the applications in 4-6. This makes getting the logic of 1-3 crucial for understanding the whole book.

From my critical reading some big ideas emerged. Here are a few overview statements from reading chapters 1-3:

A God of unfathomable love is seeking to enlarge His family by pursuing individuals to adopt.

Those He would adopt have nothing to offer Him. In fact, they are dead (powerless) and yet in active rebellion against Him.

God’s chosen people the Jews, viewed all Gentiles as unworthy of redemption. But God loved the unregenerate world regardless of ethnicity or origin.

God is the Reconciler and orchestrated (and continues to orchestrate) peace between humanity and Himself and peace between all His adopted children.

It was always God’s intent to unite all of believing humanity into one family. The Jews were never loved more than Gentiles.

God needs to grace us with strength to believe the limitless dimensions of His love.

God has chosen primarily to display His glory in what He creates—the physical universe and in the unity of His family—His body the Church.

Q & A

Out of these big ideas, one emerges as the biggest and it leads to a really big question from which many others will flow:

What is Paul’s purpose in writing the letter to the Ephesians?

This is equivalent to asking what Paul is trying to accomplish with this letter. Everything he writes in Ephesians should relate in some way to this purpose, so what is it?

To persuade them that God’s purpose is to unite all things in heaven and on earth (including Jews and Gentiles) to the praise of His glorious grace. 1:9-10

Well, if God needs to create unity, that implies what?

Given the biblical narrative, it means that the original creation that was very good and functioning in perfect harmony has fallen into disunity.

Disunity was created by the willful disobedience of our first parents as well as the sinful choices of each of us since then.

What does this mean our biggest problem is now as creatures in God’s world? (or more simply— What is the opposite of unity?)

Alienation

Alienation of separation from what?

Everything—God, each other, ourselves, the Creation.

Now that’s a huge problem and it explains an awful lot from the current epidemic of loneliness to the sense of hopelessness that pervades the populace. In the previous podcast I said in this podcast we were going to discuss polarization, its causes and cures. We are addressing it! As you can see, it comes up naturally in the book of Ephesians. Here’s the root cause of polarization— alienation. We have become a bunch of isolated individuals suspicious of others. And this is not what God wants. He’s inspiring the Apostle Paul to write this book of Ephesians to persuade us that he is orchestrating a path to reunify all things. We should be very interested in achieving God’s objective—unity!

The tone of chapter one of Ephesians is overwhelmingly positive—amazingly good news that God has adopted his redeemed children, his chosen ones. On the other hand, chapter 2 contains our ugly backstory—true for each of us. The first three verses of Eph 2 are past tense and recount our active rebellion against God.

Eph 2:4-9 recount our unexpected rescue.

What motivated this rescue?

Love in verse 4 is the root cause: “because of the great love with which he loved us.” Mercy, grace, and kindness are extended because of His great love.

Why is this the only solution to our problem?

God must intervene since we were dead and separated from God.

Paul takes pains in Eph 2:8-9 to make certain the Ephesian believers understand that their rescue was not the result of what?

Works—anything that they could muster up. They were dead. Even their faith was a gift.

Look at Ephesians 2:11-22.

According to these verses, what is the means by which unity [being united with] among believers will be accomplished?

We all have the same backstory of being dead in trespasses and sins and being rescued by God by being given the gifts of repentance and faith. No individual or group has any special merit. Horizontal unity is the byproduct of mutual submission to the head, Christ Jesus.

Ephesians 2:11-22 addresses the Jew vs. Gentile hostility by acknowledging that Gentiles were outside the covenants of promise that God made with Israel. Paul calls on the Gentiles in verse 12: “remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.”

For the Gentile the outlook is bleak indeed. No hope. Alienated. Not covered by the covenants.

The Jews might view their position as superior; after all they are God’s chosen people so they already have an in. God is inexplicably permitting the Gentiles to join the Jews.

How is this mentality undercut by 2: 14-15?

The means God uses to create this horizontal unity is (v. 15) “by abolishing the law of commandments and ordinances.” In other words, the whole system of law keeping that Judaism was invested in has been swept aside. A system in effect for more than a thousand years is gone. Jews and Gentiles are equally recipients of grace. This true story has an unexpected twist in the narrative.

Who is the actor in 2:14-15? His actions are recorded as verbs which include has made, broken down, abolishing, create, making.

Christ Jesus is identified in v. 13 as the one who disrupts the hopelessness of the Gentile, while at the same time setting aside the law keeping of the Jew.

Unity (the goal of God’s actions) is literally oneness. The word “one” is used four times in the ESV from 2:14-18.

Read each occurrence of “one” in these verses and comment on what it points to.

This kind of question is used to engage more reluctant participants who don’t want to stick their necks out.

Oneness means the alienation is gone and the sense of special status is gone. Unity has been achieved in principle.

Believing Jews and Gentiles have been made one (v. 14-16) and are indwelt by one Holy Spirit (v. 18).

As a follow-up to nail this down you could ask a related question. The result of unity (oneness) is peace.

The word “peace” is used four times in v. 14-17. Read each occurrence and comment on its significance.

I won’t take the time to go through each occurrence, but I’ll summarize by saying that peace means cessation of hostility between Jew and Gentile and true union. Even more importantly peace means we and they are no longer alienated from God.

The hostility between Jew and Gentile may be too abstract for you.

Identify groups within the church that may be hostile to one another.

Music or worship styles; Bible translations; political views; GMO vs. organic; traditional vs. alternative medicine, etc.

What should the application of this scriptural principle look like in practice?

The reality of our oneness in Christ should override our differences. Our unity in Christ needs to become our focus rather than our differences. We are more alike than we are different. We need to recognize that each one who has come to Christ was dead in trespasses and sins, without hope and alienated from God. As verse 19 says: “you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.”

I’m reminded of this 2005 song by Keith and Kristin Getty:

Beneath the cross of Jesus
I find a place to stand
And wonder at such mercy
That calls me as I am;
For hands that should discard me
Hold wounds which tell me, "Come."
Beneath the cross of Jesus
My unworthy soul is won

Beneath the cross of Jesus
His family is my own
Once strangers chasing selfish dreams
Now one through grace alone
How could I now dishonor
The ones that You have loved?
Beneath the cross of Jesus
See the children called by God

Additional resources on asking good questions:

A More Beautiful Question