Ever read Dostoevsky? In case you’re wondering, it’s pronounced dough-stoy-ev-skee. To be honest, I haven’t read a full work of his. But I’m familiar with The Grand Inquisitor, a poem that Ivan Karamazov recites to his brother in The Brothers Karamazov. Here’s the gist.
Jesus has returned to earth in 16th-century Seville, at the height of the Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor, who just the day before executed about a hundred “heretics” to God’s glory, has Him arrested and monologues. His argument is that the Church has embraced the very offers Jesus refused in the wilderness (bread, miracles, kingdoms) because people want their bellies filled. “We are not with Thee, but with him,” he says, “and that is our secret!”
Jesus remained quiet. At the end, He kisses the Inquisitor on the lips. The Inquisitor lets Him go but tells Him never to return.
Dostoevsky’s church in the poem was the Roman Catholic Church, and I’m not Roman Catholic, so I have no experience with that system. But I don’t much care which denomination you’ve known; they all have systems and traditions. In the poem, the system had replaced the living Christ. That’s the warning I want us to hear.
When Tradition Voids the Word
Jesus walked into the same situation. In Matthew 15, the Pharisees asked why His disciples broke the traditions of the elders by not washing their hands before eating. Jesus didn’t flinch. He showed how their traditions let them violate the Scriptures, culminating in verse six:
So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God. — Matthew 15:6
Nothing has shaped my journey more. In 2016, I began a slow deconstruction and reconstruction of my faith, taking it apart to see whether it stood up to Scripture. I had long lived with tensions between how I read the Bible and how I’d been taught to understand it. The easiest example is speaking in tongues.
The New Testament treats tongues as normal, with instructions for their use in worship. Yet I was taught they ceased long ago, so those passages merely describe the early church instead of prescribing for ours. That never sat well with me, even though I had never spoken in tongues.
So I tested it. I asked cessationists for their reasoning, and one refrain kept coming back: they didn’t see the usefulness of gifts like tongues. Some preferred the simplicity of avoiding the more complex structures those gifts require. That’s pragmatism, letting what’s useful and simple outweigh what the text says. When a church keeps a tradition that nullifies the plain reading of Scripture for the sake of a simpler experience, which is loved more, the tradition or the Word?
I jettisoned that tradition. I didn’t have all the answers, but I decided that, in all its strangeness and amid my own ignorance, I would believe the Word. I memorized this verse in the King James:
Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. — Psalm 119:105
When the Word and my plans disagreed, I had to adjust my course. I made space for it to impose on me, and the Lord gradually gave me understanding.
Not everything needs reform. Some matters, like the deity of Christ, are settled across the whole church. But where denominations disagree, ask whether you’re following the Word or a tradition. Multiple generations of teaching a particular hermeneutic can harden into an unquestioned axiom. We must do the hard work of decoupling from how we’ve always understood something.
Why I Don’t Read Alone
If you’re astute, you might have spotted the trap. I told you to decouple from tradition and read for yourself. But if you leave it there, you’ll fall into a different trap.
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God — Colossians 3:16 (emphasis added)
You cannot understand the Scriptures correctly in isolation. I have never embraced an interpretation I didn’t first filter through other Spirit-filled believers. And if your understanding of a passage is unique, it’s probably wrong. If it’s new, it probably ain’t true.
But why? If I’ve argued that traditions can be wrong, why double back and say others’ interpretations should hedge my own? Because if you rely on yourself for final authority, you’ve only relocated the problem. The answer is one person, in two ways: the Holy Spirit.
First, He is the One who gives every ounce of spiritual understanding.
And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. — 1 Corinthians 2:13
Second, interpretation is a community effort because each believer brings life experience and the Holy Spirit to the table. His work in your brother’s life will shed light where your experience lacks, and you will bring light that he lacks. The common link is the Spirit.
We’re not just people of the Word, but also of the Spirit.
Is He a Living Person?
An unfortunate division has persisted in the Body of Christ. Some churches focus on the Word, some on the Spirit, and few embrace both. I was raised in Word churches, where the Holy Spirit was seen more as a catalyst for salvation than as a living person. Here are three actual quotes from conversations I’ve been part of.
“But if we keep the Gospel central, we don’t have to worry about any of that.”
“We need to keep the focus on the Giver of the gifts and not the gifts themselves.”
And because three is a good Baptist number of points: someone suggested we don’t have to ask the Holy Spirit to “show up” at a church service, since He’s already present in the lives of the believers attending.
The first two are jabs at the Spirit’s work. The third jabs at His personhood. The people who said these things didn’t mean to diminish Him. They love the Lord. Their theology, not their heart, is what shows.
Of course He’s a living person, you say. That’s the orthodox answer. But do you live as if He is? Theology that doesn’t change your life is just dead orthodoxy. Personhood invites relationship, and the Lord sent a Person to indwell you. Yet many seem content to stay silent toward the One who lives within.
Think about never greeting your spouse when you come home, or never responding when he or she shows you something they’ve been working on, simply because you assume they’re there since they married you. How would that leave them feeling?
Grieved.
And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. — Ephesians 4:30
I contend that grieving the Spirit is more than sinning. It is also treating Him as less than a person, presuming on His presence without acknowledging it. Sin grieves Him. So does neglect.
The Ditch on the Other Side
I can’t leave this without addressing the ditch on the other side of the road. If Word-only churches grieve the Spirit by ignoring Him, Spirit-only churches grieve Him by ignoring the Word. The Word is acknowledged but not treasured, and experiences attributed to the Spirit are seldom measured against Scripture.
I didn’t coin the term charismania, but it describes uninterpreted tongues, untested prophecies, holy laughter, and barking like dogs, all reported by sensible believers who have distanced themselves from these excesses. The Word-only churches see this, want nothing to do with it, and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
How do we remain safe from both of these ditches? I’d start with two things.
Kill the conceit that your position is the theologically serious one. In my late twenties and early thirties, I was a budding Calvinist, and I slowly became theologically conceited, which says more about me than about Reformed theology. In late 2009, I realized mid-discussion in my small group that I was evangelizing Calvinism. It frustrated a married couple and harmed our friendship. I didn’t feel conceited. I felt right. Apparently, it isn’t a huge leap from one to the other. So read scholarship beyond your own tradition. You might still disagree, but you’ll understand how they got there.
Be willing to be alone and misunderstood. You may be nudged out, not from the church, but from your tribe’s in-crowd. Embrace it. Be like John the Baptist and accept a wilderness existence. If you’re faithful to the Word and Spirit, the Lord will lead you to fruitfulness. It just takes time.
For a while, I thought I was a theological unicorn. The longer I’ve walked this road, the more people I’ve found already in this lane. The extremes are always the loudest.
Embrace Both
I’m not sure where the Grand Inquisitor’s church first decided that pragmatism would help them get along better. But when they rejected the living Christ, they chose to do church their way rather than His. Doing faith without a full embrace of both Word and Spirit is a parallel trespass. Do it your way, and you may get the same response from Jesus that the Inquisitor did.
Silence.
But a kiss, still inviting fellowship.
So we embrace the Word, and the Word says the Holy Spirit is sent from the Father to live within us; a Person with whom we should cultivate friendship. Listen to Him. Seek to please Him rather than grieve Him. We embrace the Spirit as we embrace the Word, and we trust both because, when tested (1 Thessalonians 5:21), neither will ever contradict the other.
Embrace one without the other and you’re left with dead orthodoxy: either dry and brittle (Word only) or sugary and sweet (Spirit only). Neither nourishes you or leads you to life.
A few years ago, I helped at a camp for a week. A troubled student came to me, and I gave her sound biblical counsel and prayed with her. The next morning, as I prayed, she came to mind, and I had oddly specific thoughts about things she hadn’t shared. I wrote them down, deciding that if she came to me again, I’d take it as the Lord’s permission to share them. She did. As I read, her countenance changed. I told her I had no way to know those things, but the Lord knows her, sees her, and wanted her to know He is trustworthy.
Her response confirmed it was from the Lord, because it revealed the secrets of the heart (1 Corinthians 14:24-25). That’s on the uncommon side of my experience. But ever since I purposed to be a Word-and-Spirit kind of guy, it happens from time to time.
Word and Spirit before tradition is my heartbeat. Now that I’ve tasted and seen the full embrace of both, how can I be satisfied with anything less?
This post is adapted from a chapter of a book I’m writing on this theme. More to come.
