How do you teach people how to think?

Clay asked the teens to submit questions they had about God so that he could address those topics during Youth Group. One of the questions was, "What does the Bible say about abortion?" Two nights ago, as Clay and I were dozing off, we were talking about how to respond to the question, which of course, reminded me of something I'm learning through church history.

How we respond to that question might actually be teaching the students more than what we teach them is "right." Because...in our moment of response, we can either present a set of prooftexts to support the agenda we already believe and give them the right answer--or--we can be brave enough to give the students the whole picture and teach them how to find the answers for themselves.

What I mean by, "brave enough to give students the whole picture" is this: tell them not just about the parts that say, "before you were born I knew you" and "I knit you together in your mother's womb," but also about the parts of the Bible that are more difficult...like...the part where God sends out the Plague to kill all the firstborn sons of Egypt. And then...teach them how to wade through their salvation with "fear and trembling...for it is God who works in you to will and to act, according to His good purpose." (Php 2:12b-13)

Focusing just on the list of prooftexts that support our belief is dangerous, because it means we're probably missing out on the whole picture...and we might be more attached to our own agenda than to the Lord's will. We might have even established our "biblically-based" perspective without sitting in "fear and trembling"...without taking the whole Bible into consideration...difficult questions like, "If God loves children, why does he send death to all the firstborn sons of Egypt?" In teaching students, if we just give them the "right" answer, we miss the opportunity to teach them how to wade through the complicated parts and find God in the midst of this.

Right now, I can recognize that this idea could offend some people. You might say, "But young people need to know the truth or they'll fall away!"--so let me just clarify one of my assumptions...I assume Scripture is the Word of God and worthy of teaching, but I don't think it necessarily always makes sense. And I don't necessarily think that teaching them the right answer is equivalent to teaching them the truth. We are utterly dependant on the Holy Spirit to guide our interpretation of Scripture...

Pretty much every week in Church History, we end up discussing a historical church argument...and in every controversy, we write a good, scripturally-based argument to support opposing viewpoints. Often, there's no clearly, "more Biblical," answer based just on prooftexts... Sometimes I hear people in class say, "Well, in this case, we just have to base the argument on Scripture," but unfortunately--it's not always that clear because can often find Scriptures to support two differing viewpoints. What do you do with that?

Usually, the early church ends up defending the side of the argument not so much because it's more "right," but because it's protecting some element crucial to our faith. In these cases, we ask, "If X is true, how does that contradict the nature of God as we see him in the whole context of Scripture?" Unfortunately, it seems like the current church is more convicted to lobby for their interpretations of the "right" answers.

If we just teach students the "right" answers, and not about the character of God, then there's a huge risk that the minute someone pokes holes in that "right" belief, their faith is going to crumble. We don't need to teach them to defend "right" perspectives--we need them to see and know who God is...we need to each them how to think about a question when they have one and know how to go about finding the answer...

...how do we teach them how to live out Philippians 2:12b-13: "Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose?"
...how do we teach them wade through God's mystery?