FREEDOM STATES ITS CASE
PAT BOONE

This is a letter from Pat Boone to a professor in a Church of Christ college, who published articles in the Gospel Advocate about Pat’s recent experiences. We publish it with Pat’s permission, believing that it will encourage many of our readers who, like Pat, are out on the growing edge of things and who sometimes feel lonely.—Ed.

I’ve been reading over the articles you felt it your “duty” to send to the Gospel Advocate, and I imagine to others. Brother, if I’ve learned anything from this lengthy correspondence and exchange of views with you, it is this: it is absolutely vital that each Christian find, cherish, and develop his own relationship with God that is free of undue majority pressure and unfettered by over-strong influence of other individuals. A man can’t enjoy the liberty for which Christ died if he’s afraid to study the Bible for himself and come to his own conclusions about worship and service.

If certain individual brethren, who affirm that they do not have any supernatural help, feel empowered to deny and denounce categorically the spiritual experiences of other Christians, then why should the average man waste time studying?

And more frightening, if these learned men can emphatically declare other dedicated searchers “deceived and deceiving,” “false teachers,” “unsound,” and “definitely not led by God’s Spirit”—based completely on their own superior intellectual grasp of the Scriptures—well then, the dedicated searcher would do well to put that dangerous Bible aside and just study the books and pronouncements of the learned men. It’s the only “safe” thing to do!

Otherwise if he comes to his own conclusions, and worse still, if he dares to share these thoughts and conclusions with other average, ordinary Christians—he will most certainly find himself out of step with the majority, probably discredited and refused, labeled as “heretic,” “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” “boring from within,” “deceiver,” “fallen from grace,” and eventually disfellowshipped, at least by the learned men, and perhaps through their influence by the majority! You are infallibly sure that those “obvious points” are THE “sound doctrine” that all who see it another way can summarily be judged wrong, false, displeasing to God, led by false spirits, and fit to be disfellowshipped.

The first attitude is one of love, concern, brotherly kindness, longsuffering, which I believe we can have by the leading of the Spirit. But the second attitude is one of condemnation, self-righteousness, Pharisaical legalism. Under these conditions even God’s Spirit cannot accomplish the unity referred to in Eph. 4.

I fear that the spirit of Diotrephes is abroad in the church today. This self-righteous fellow was so sure of his “preeminence” that he boldly refused to fellowship the beloved apostle John. John pictures Diotrephes as “prating against us with malicious words; and not content therewith, neither doth he himself receive the brethren, and forbiddeth them that would, and casteth them out of the church.”

John’s next words are “Beloved, follow not that which is evil, but that which is good.” In his first letter he gives some broad guidelines for fellowship and brotherhood. And John loved this man. Jesus demonstrated longsuffering, and yet he did not excuse error. He recognized man’s imperfect and finite nature. The man with the mote in his eye, the Samaritan woman at the well, the woman taken in adultery, the thief on the cross, the denial of Peter, and even doubting Thomas—all these show the compassion of Jesus.

Love, mercy, understanding, and compassion are God’s gifts to us. None of them is deserved; they are all totally unmerited. Hasn’t he given us these gifts so that we might demonstrate them to others? Jesus was perfect and so he knew exactly what constituted sin and what its appropriate punishment should be. We are not perfect, nor do we perfectly understand God’s will. We are still looking through a glass darkly. We can’t always know what constitutes sin or its just punishment. And still most of us are far less merciful, far less compassionate, and show far less understanding toward what we presume to be error than Jesus that most Christians see little point in trying to understand the Bible for themselves.

I am certain from my own study that the Lord will honor and guide the earnest seeker after truth, even if he has only average intelligence and background, limited time and little access to external scholarship. Jesus pictured us as lambs, sheep, and Himself as the Good Shepherd. I don’t find any reference to the need for sheep-dogs, yapping and nipping at the legs of the sheep to keep them in the fold. Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice.” We are pictured as grazing in open pastures, not altogether or doing the same things at the same time; not regimented, but free to roam and explore and seek higher ground, yet always listening for the call of the Master’s voice. And the sheep, when he hears the Shepherd say “Come,” he obeys, whether the others do or not. He doesn’t try to round up the others. He just obeys, and if the other have heard, so do they. They leave the worries of rounding up the “strays” to the Shepherd. There’s beauty and freedom and love and trust in the Master in that picture.

Oh, I know and I am grateful, that we human sheep have been given the opportunity of trying to help our Shepherd round up strays and keep them in the fold. And I’m grateful for minds and scholarship and lives of study and contemplation, for they are helpful. But still Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice.” I get the distinct impression that He intends to keep on leading, culling out, rounding up, chastising and rewarding Himself! He’s the head and we’re the body, and only individual members at that. He will make the judgements and give the orders and evidence His divine concern or pleasure with our efforts. So my focus should be on Him, through my own study to know Him, and not so much on the bleating of the other sheep around me.

It’s one thing to have strong, scholarly opinions, based on study and prayer, and to share them with others—and even to be concerned, vocally, when others seem to “miss the obvious point.” But it’s quite another thing to be so infallibly sure that we count others for naught, and this even with our pitiful mental equipment. We hammer away at our brothers anc judge and condemn them and their sincere beliefs as if we were infallible. Even if we were perfect like Jesus, he set a different example than the one we follow. No wonder he commanded. us to “Judge not that ye be not judged. For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.”

Honestly, in your articles for the Gospel Advocate you sound like a spiritual Sherlock Holmes! You seem to be exposing the “strategy” of a couple of spies or dupes of the Devil who have set out to “sabotage the church.” Your whole thesis is based upon a casual remark I made in the privacy of my home as to why we felt it unnecessary to make public statements about our beliefs. I explained that while we never dodged the issue, we avoided talking about it except when we were asked. This was our way of allowing the Spirit to lead, so that we would not be guilty of raising controversial issues on our own. We only sought to lift up Christ, and not simply be talking about our experiences in the Spirit or our own beliefs.

And so I hazarded the guess that since our brethren in the Church of Christ view the Holy Spirit as a controversial subject that it might be the leading of the Spirit for me to make some public statement in the light of our total experience, perhaps in book form, instead of in fragments by way of answering occasional questions.

This was all I said and it was given as a guess as to what the Spirit might do in this case. I did not say that we had received some “official pronouncement” or directive to “keep these things from the brethren,” as you charged. That we weren’t trying to keep anything from anybody, especially from the brethren, is evidenced by the fact that we were discussing these things freely with you!

(to be concluded)