Thinking Out Loud with Alan Shlemon - Coffee Cup Christianity

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

Alan sounds the alarm on a pop Christian culture habit called Coffee Cup Christianity. He unpacks three of its harms and explains how they are fueling biblical illiteracy.

All right, this might sound a little creepy, but I know how you read your email. Now, I promise I'm not stalking you, but I do know something that you never do when you get a message from a friend. Okay, so you never get an email, skip the first three pages, and then just read one line on the fourth page. In fact, nobody does that, right? Nobody takes that approach when they read their mail. In fact, nobody does that, right? Nobody takes that approach when they read their mail. Because by skipping the context of the email and ignoring the flow of thought, you wouldn't know what that line meant on the fourth page.

Now think about this for a moment. If it's wrong to read your friend's mail that way, why would we read God's mail that way? And the reality, of course, is that's what we do, right? We open the letter to the Philippians. Now remember, Philippians is an epistle. An epistle is a letter, right? So we open that letter. We skip chapter one. We skip chapter two. We skip chapter three. We turn to chapter four and just read verse 13. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. You know, message received, case closed, right? We're done here. So then we take that verse and we plaster it on a mug,

which basically publicizes our mistake. Now, I call this coffee cup Christianity, and I believe it's killing our biblical literacy because we've become accustomed to seeing isolated Bible verses and presuming we know what they mean. And too often, though, we are merely inserting our own meaning into a Bible verse, thereby overwriting what God was trying to tell us. Now, it's not just on coffee cups, of course, because we see these isolated verses on calendars or on walls or on phone cases or really just about anywhere that you can place text. And I think this is a sad

situation because coffee cup Christianity basically is violating one of the most basic and well-known principles of interpretation, and that is context, right? I mean, it's a principle that is not just known amongst Bible readers. I mean, many people in our culture understand that context is an important principle to consider when you're reading things. But tragically, we apply it when reading man's word, but neglect it when reading God's word. And so I want to unpack what I believe to be three dangerous problems with coffee cup Christianity. Okay, so here's the first one. Coffee cup Christianity overwrites God's intended meaning with our own. So remember that the verses before and after a Bible verse are called the context. And what they do, what the context does,

is it clarifies what the author is talking about, right? So for example, the word buck, right, B-U-C-K, means dollar if the context is about money, but the word means deer if the context is about hunting. And so notice that changing the context changes the meaning of the smaller unit of text. Now, of course, the same is true with scripture. That's why you want to first read the context of any verse before trying to understand what it means. In the Bible's case, it's the Holy Spirit, right? God himself, who has inspired not only the verse that you're trying to understand, but also the context to help you understand it. And so Coffee Cup Christianity often ignores the Spirit's inspired words, leaving a context vacuum, which we quickly fill with our own context from our own life situation.

with our own context from our own life situation. And since context drives the meaning of a verse, your own life context then might be changing the true meaning of the words of scripture, overriding what God intended to tell you. In effect, we're infusing our own meaning into scripture and granting it divine authority. Okay, so this is just, that's the first really

massive problem. Okay. Second problem with coffee cup Christianity is that it leads to missing important lessons from God. So I remember one time my, my daughter was at a Sunday school and she was taught a lesson about Jesus's parable about the night neighbor. That's what they called it, the night neighbor. This is Luke 11, 5 through 8. Now, the story is about a man who is woken at midnight and is resistant about giving his neighbor some bread when his neighbor asks for it, but eventually the man shares some of his bread. Now, if you read the parable in isolation from its context, the lesson seems obvious. Sharing is a virtue. And by the way, that was the lesson that the Sunday school lesson was trying to teach my daughter.

Be sure to share. Sharing means sharing before you're even asked, they said. But when you read the context of that parable, which by the way includes more of chapter 11, right? Luke 11 verses 1 through 4 and then 9 through 13, right? When you read this parable in context, you find out it's about Jesus' teaching on prayer. And you get a whole different lesson that emerges. And that lesson is the importance of the persistence of prayer and how God will always provide for you. And so Coffee Cup Christianity makes you miss the important lesson that the Holy Spirit was

intending to teach through the inspired words of scripture. And so the third dangerous problem that is created with Coffee Cup Christianity is that coffee cup Christianity models bad interpretive methods. So despite this obvious faulty approach to understanding the Bible, I still get a lot of people try to assure me that we can still glean valuable lessons even if we miss the point of the passage. And so, for example, with regards to that night neighbor parable that Jesus taught, they say, look, Alan, it's no big deal. Even if Jesus wasn't teaching about sharing, look, sharing is still an important lesson, right? So it's okay if we kind of still teach that lesson from that biblical passage. Now here, I can't stress this enough. I totally and vigorously disagree.

Okay. Well, look, I do agree that sharing is an important virtue. But if you want to make that point, then use a passage that specifically teaches the importance of sharing. You know, maybe 2 Corinthians 9, 7 or something like that. Okay. But it is unethical to take a text that teaches one lesson and forces it to teach a different one. Because what you're doing is you're twisting God's word and you're modeling a dangerous interpretive method for other people. In fact, if we handle

God's word in this manner, what we're doing is we're handing young believers faulty tools and then rendering them incapable of accurately handling the word of truth, right? 2 Timothy 2.15. Remember, these young believers are the most important generation because they are the next generation. We're literally short-circuiting the health of tomorrow's church, the future church, if we give young believers a license to replace God's words with their own meanings. And this is why I'm saying coffee cup Christianity needs to end. It's lazy, unethical, and dangerous. And it elevates our own meaning above God's and passes it off as divine writ. We don't read what our friends have written with such carelessness.

Let's no longer do it with what God has written.