What It Means to Change the System
Mar 23rd, 2009 by Micah Tillman | 4 Comments |
I’ve been listening to a series of lectures on preaching from Reformed Theological Seminary by Tim Keller and Edmund Clowney.
Dr. Keller, in the lecture I’m listening to at the moment, is emphasizing that there are three perspectives that every sermon has to take into account: the doctrinal, the personal, and the social.
(The “tri-perspectivalism” there is from Frame and Poythress)
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He’s right to call them “perspectives.” What this means pragmatically — for Frame and Poythress — is that you can’t emphasize any one of the three without also dealing with the other two.
Each one leads you to the other two, and, therefore, shows you that you’re dealing with a whole that is beyond any one perspective.
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I’d like to add that living out the social perspective of any biblical passage simply means getting people to change their personal decisions.
What people call systems or structures are simply decisions that a bunch of people have each and all made.
What people call “groups” are a number of persons who all make the same decisions (that is, who each and all live by the same system or structure).
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In other words, systems and structures are decisions that persons make, and groups are nothing beyond the persons who are their members (seen as each making some decision or set of decisions).
So, to change a system or structure is to change the decision that a bunch of persons are each and all making.
And to change a group is to change the decision that the members of the group are each and all making.
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Everything comes down to persons and the decisions they each and all make. There is nothing to change that is larger or beyond the person and the decisions she makes.
You don’t save yourself the work of changing individual hearts by going above their heads and “changing the system.” Unless . . . well, see below.
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If the goal for the moment is simply to change some system, therefore, people should try to change the persons whose decisions get consented to by the other people who live by the system.
You change the system by changing the leader (the decision maker, the source of the decision[s] to which everyone else consents).
And since everyone else who follows the system (everyone else in the group) tends to act like sheep (simply consenting to or going along with whatever the leader decides), by changing the leader, you change the decision.
And, therefore, you change the system.
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So, changing the system requires three things.
First, you have to determine what decision you want persons to each and all stop making, and what decision you want them to each and all make instead.
Second, you have to identify the person whose decisions persons-who-live-by-the-system are likely to consent to. (I.e., you have to figure out who the leader is, and hope everyone else is sheepish.)
Third, you have to convince said person to change his/her decision from the one you don’t want, to the one you do want.
Hmmmm.
Is the idea that every single sermon ought to adress each of these perspectives?
Or is the idea that overall, each of these perspectives ought to be spoken about with some regularity?
I think I’d significantly qualify the idea that groups are nothing but there members. I think that a group becomes more than the parts that make it up, in much the same way that we could have a pile of organs and have them really be nothing but a bunch of organs, but if we group them together correctly they actually form a self-sufficient body… If we had a heart but no lungs, for example, niether of these is all that useful. With out a heart to pump blood into the lung tissue, the lungs would die. But with out the lungs to introduce oxygen into the system, the beating of the heart would be quite irrelevant as you’d be circulating useless blood.
In one sense nothing new is added by putting them together; the lung and heart are doing just exactly what they did before they were joined.
My impression is that — in practice — it’s first and foremost a tool for pastors to use to make sure they are not missing anything in the texts they’re preaching on, and its secondarily a way for the pastor to make sure that he’s/she’s not giving his/her congregation a one-sided view of God, Christ’s work, etc. (In theory, the priority is the other way around, I think. The good of the congregation comes first.)
Good metaphor with the organs and body. I agree that organs united and cooperating in the correct form are something more than the sum of their parts. I think they are “taken up” into the person, as it were.
However, I don’t think persons are parts.
Of course, if you add a supernatural aspect to the situation, I can buy the uniting of persons into something greater (i.e., the Body of Christ). Which is weird, given my antipathy to the idea in general. But that just shows you the difference between what you can learn from “reason alone” (so to speak) and what you can learn from revelation.
[...] (On the whole issue of decisions and consent as it relates to “structures,” “systems,” and “groups,” see here and here.) [...]
[...] as a guiding philosophy has forced me to rethink what “systems and structures are, what it means to “change a system,” what “groups” are, what “cultures” are, and what “institutions” [...]