Experience vs. Scripture
Scripture, hands down!
As an illustration, consider that most of the Bible’s explicit teaching on marriage, at least in the New Testament, comes from single men: Jesus and Paul. OK, Jesus is the perfectly wise, all-knowing Logos of God through whom everything was created, so of course He has full authority on every subject. So consider Paul with me for a moment.
There is general consensus from passages such as 1 Cor 9 that the apostle Paul never married. This is the same Paul who wrote such passages as the cornerstone of a Biblical perspective on marriage: Ephesians 5:22-33. If perhaps Paul was married earlier in life, lost his wife to death, and was a widower during his Christian and apostolic years, I’ll still stand by my point. Paul’s teaching on marriage is an illustration of my point, not the proof of it.
Regardless of personal experience, Paul knew his Lord intimately, he knew the Jewish Scriptures, and he knew the fulfillment of those Scriptures in Christ. Boom, that’s a recipe for being an expert on marriage in my book. Say on the other hand we have a couple that have been married for 80 years, have stayed together, and would even claim a mostly “happy marriage”, but they don’t have a clue what their marriage has to do with Christ. Well, there may be a thing or two worth hearing and considering from their experience, but I’d rather listen to the single guy who knows his Bible deeply any day.
Experiencial wisdom is valuable if our experiences have forced us to dig harder and deeper into God’s word for answers and direction and understanding on issues we are confronting. But years of experience gained through a pagan, secular, humanistic, godless lens either needs to be redeemed by filtering all of it back through the grid of Scripture, or else thrown out in the rubbish bin.
The area of application which has prompted me to write this post is that of evangelism and discipleship strategies targeting specific sub-cultures. In particular, I’ve been compiling some articles for missionaries to Muslims lately, and certain ideas and issues repeatedly come up. Now, let me first say that any talk about “targeting” certain groups, about “strategy“, and about “effectiveness” makes me feel edgy at the outset. That aside, the question relevant to us now is: should ministry approaches be guided by insider believers within the “target” sub-culture or by outsiders who have crossed cultural boundaries to reach out to them?
Well, first I would want to stake a claim that insiders and outsiders both have unique advantages when it comes to understanding a cultural group and their needs. Insiders of course have years of experience, understanding on a deep level many nuances of their culture that outsiders will never fully appreciate. However, what is less often noted is that outsiders bring some crucial advantages of their own. In particular, they see the new culture with fresh eyes and probably in many ways without certain biases that insiders have. Just as each one of us individually finds it easier to see others’ sins while downplaying our own, cultural insiders often have blind spots to their own group’s weakness and faults (or conversely can even be overly critical and not aware of their own strengths).
On that note, let me mention that I promote much more intercultural accountability in the church. We need not just white evangelical American men holding white evangelical American men accountable to God’s word, and not just mainland Han Chinese holding mainland Han Chinese accountable, etc., etc., but we need Christ’s church in Korea to keep the American church in check, the Americans to keep the Nepalese in check, the Nepalese believers to keep the Syrian church in check, and the church of Syria to hold the Ugandan saints accountable, and the church of Uganda to expose the oversights of the Koreans.
For example, by and large I’ve seen that most American Christians don’t feel a sense of utter shock and horror to hear about a congregation spending millions of dollars to add an extension on to their already overly spacious under-used building structure, but bring in a visiting pastor from a poor African country where there is one Bible per congregation and people struggle to have enough to eat and the abomination of it all is unmistakable. Or again, by and large I’ve found that ethnic Chinese Singaporean and Malaysian Christians don’t find it utterly unthinkable to hear that a church would actually prohibit distribution of Bibles in the Malay language for fear of being known as a church that is trying to reach Muslims, whereas any outsider can clearly see the appalling hypocrisy.
So then, if insiders and outsiders both have advantages, who is ultimately more qualified to judge what a people group or sub-culture needs and what is best for them? I would argue that, on any particular given issue, it is the one — insider or out — who has the most Biblically-saturated perspective on that particular issue. The crucial qualifiers here are that it can vary on a case-by-case basis for different issues. An insider can have profound Biblical insight into his own culture in one area and glaring worldly blindspots in another area. An outsider can have penetrating Biblical exhortations for a foreign culture in one area, and shallow, naive, humanistic wisdom in other areas.
Who’s to decide which is what? In the end we must each make a choice as to what we believe to be right and act on it, and let others do the same. Each one to his own master must stand or fall (Rom 14:4). In the process, at least as for me I will continue to judge the validity of ideas not on the experiences of the one promoting them, but ruthlessly and solely based on fidelity to Scripture. When I’m 80 years old and have been married for 50 of those years (God willing) and a single 20-year old young man comes to me and says, “I’ve got something I think you need to see about marriage from the Bible,” O Lord that I would listen to him carefully. When an Asian believer comes to me and says, “Can I talk to you from the perspective of God’s word about some blindspots in the culture you spent your entire life growing up in?”, I hope that I would genuinely say, “Please do!” And I pray my brothers and sisters would do the same.