Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work: The Pastoral Work of Nay-Saying: Ecclesiastes

The Pastoral Work of Nay-Saying: Ecclesiastes

Here were my quotes from the fourth chapter of Peterson's book. Again, I'm sorry I am unable to give page numbers since I'm reading this one on a kindle, but I have left the footnote numbers in to the quotes he gives so you can trace them in his book. This is from the fourth chapter only:

Under such conditions two things developed that, if unchecked, would have been (and nearly were) the death of healthy, biblical faith: overconfident wisdom and nervous apocalyptic. There is a certain typicality to both of these excesses. They are recurrent throughout the story of faith: overconfident piety, sure that it knows God's mind better than he does himself, and neurotic apocalyptic, sure that doomsday is just around the corner. Since both positions use a biblical vocabulary and have religious goals, pastors are expected to be on hand to assist in their implementation.

The river of God's revelation was no longer flowing freely -it was backing ing up from a log jam of staggering proportions. The whitewater water faith of early Israel, clean and rapid in its flow, was now collecting in pools in the clogged-up stream bed. And the waters were starting to stink from stagnation. Worse, enterprising entrepreneurs had set up shop on the banks and were bottling the polluted stuff and selling it as holy water to the tourists. Qoheleth would have none of it. He protested. He debunked.

The yes of the gospel is not spoken under the pretense that sin is not as bad as it appears to be, nor while avoiding pain, nor while sidestepping suffering. The yes spoken in the course of pastoral work is ruinously emptied of meaning if it settles for semi-sanctified boosterism. The pastor is not a cheerleader. Pastoral enthusiasm used for propagandistic ends blunts the fine edge of the divine yes. Pastors have little to learn and much to fear from the public relations industry.

There was plenty of wisdom around, but it was wisdom in the wrong place -bits and pieces of God's revelation, taken out of their original and awesome settings and arranged like bric-a-brac (easy answers and convenient miracles) in the culture. Brilliant, cadenced poetry and thunderous prose had been condensed into Reader's Digest reprints, ready to be handed out for conversation pieces. The environment was cluttered with the artifacts of religious small talk. It was the kind of thing that Saul Bellow's Augie March objected to in his mother: "It was kitchen religion and had nothing to do with the giant God of the Creation who turned back the waters and exploded Gomorrah, but it was on the side of religion."20

In such a way religion is misunderstood as a kind of technology of the supernatural: it provides the know-how to get things done when physicians give up, when counselors fail, when the economy disintegrates. If one learns to pray according to the correct formulas and has "enough faith," a miracle can be produced. But that is not what the Bible, ever, means by miracle. True, miracles are evidence of a God who does things we cannot do for ourselves. But it is not a power that is put at our disposal.

Magic and faith have one thing in common: they both deal with the supernatural. But everything else is different, for magic is an impersonal manipulation and control, a way of getting, while faith is a personal response to God, inviting him to do what he will in us, an offering of obedience to walk where he leads. We come to God not to get our way but to get his; not to acquire a means of impressing our friends with our access to power but to let him make an eternal impression on us with his salvation.

The persons with whom pastors work (and pastors themselves selves are not excepted) carry around a great deal of moral and religious baggage that is no part of the gospel at all. We work very hard at our faith; we agonize over it; we struggle with it; we grimly and determinedly set our jaws to make it through. The empty tomb is a monument against that. Persons active in religious leadership very often become patronizing to God, treating him as someone we must take care of. We think that what we do determines his effectiveness, and fail to see that that is the position of a pagan toward an idol, not a creature bowed before the Creator.