TYRANNY OF THOUGHTLESSNESS

Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord.—Isa. 1:18

As I write these words our world appears to be incendiary. The news from Poland, a land of stout-hearted souls seeking freedom, is bleak. The president of Syria is threatening the lives of American leaders, an American general has been kidnaped in Italy. The Middle East is in turmoil and wars and civil strife rage from Afghanistan to El Salvador to Northern Ireland. It is not an encouraging picture, for tyranny appears to have the momentum.

Tyranny takes many forms, some being more subtle than others. Weaponry, brute force, political chicanery, economic pressure, and usurpation of power are the more obvious forms, and the history of the world, as Hegel has suggested, is the story of man’s struggle to be free of such oppression. When the prophets spoke of that glad day when men will beat their swords into plow shares and their spears into pruning hooks they were referring to victory over such tyrannies.

But some tyrannies are dangerously subtle, such as the tyranny of the majority, as Alexis de Tocqueville described the afflictions sometimes heaped upon the minority. In his Democracy in America, which was the French official’s view of this nation in the 1830’s, he warned of this subtle form of tyranny. What appears to be freedom—the rule of the majority—can actually be tyranny. Our founding fathers were aware of this, so they gave birth to a nation ruled by laws rather than by persons. But the majority can often manipulate law and heap injustice upon the minority. The way this nation has treated the Indians and the blacks, and in some respects the women, bears witness that there is no way to make freedom foolproof.

As careful as the architects of our Constitution were, they could not guarantee security from what the Christ must have had in mind when he warned Beware of men! James Madison, the father of the Constitution, was criticized for being overly cautious. One of his colleagues said to him, “Mr. Madison, you don’t seem to trust anyone but ourselves.” To which the elegant Virginian replied, “Sir, I don’t trust even ourselves!”

This must be one reason why the God of heaven put government in the church, as 1 Cor. 12:28 indicates, rather than giving us a society of believers governed by majority rule. While elders should seek to ascertain“the mind of the meeting,” as the Quakers quaintly state it, by always providing an open forum within the church, they must have the right to make the final decisions. An open forum may reveal to experienced overseers that a very small minority of the church is right and the vast majority wrong. Elders must do what is right under God, even if the entire church wants it otherwise.

On the other hand it is evident that elders sometimes become oppressive. The apostle Paul anticipated this in Acts 20:29. So the church, to whom the office of presbyter belongs, must always have the power of recall, in order to unseat the elder who would arrogate power unto himself. 1 Tim. 5:19 makes it clear that the apostles allowed that under certain circumstances elders could be brought to judgment by the congregation.

Another subtle form of tyranny that relates to all forms of oppression is the refusal or inability to think, especially to think critically and responsibly. It is noteworthy that in the context of Isa 1:18, where the Lord invites his people to reason with Him, the prophet says, “The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint” (v. 5) and the next verse says the head has no soundness in it. The people were in trouble because they were not thinking. They had head sickness as well as heart sickness. It is surely a peril of our own age, in the church as well as in the world. We may have more “educated” people in the church than ever before, but that does not mean that we are a thinking people.

One famous educator, Nicholas Murray Butler, believed that all the world’s problems could be solved if people were willing to think, but he concluded that this does not happen because thinking is such hard work. Edison reached a similar conclusion, that thinking is such hard work that most people are willing to let someone else do it for them. But it is Don Marquis that really puts it to us: If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you. This must at least be the case with those of us who do not really want the truth.

Perhaps this is what got the prophets in trouble: they made the people think. Micah, for instance, kept trying to get the people to remember what God had done. Answer me!, he would demand, trying to get a response from an unthinking people. Isaiah referred to the people as having fat hearts, heavy ears, and closed eyes! And Psa. 32:9 says, “Be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding.” It seems odd that the only thinking animal would have to be exhorted not to be like a mule. It simply would not do to suggest that our churches may be as mule-like as they are Christ-like, with or without their college degrees! A Socrates among us might say it, as he did to the ancient Greeks, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Is a church, enmeshed in the tyranny of thoughtlessness, really worth the while.

There can be no question that Jesus came to set people to thinking, and he was not all that successful, not even with his disciples, for he would say to them, “Are you also without understanding?,” and Mark (6:52) writes of even the twelve that “their hearts were hardened.” It is a compliment to the human race that the Messiah came as a teacher. It is an implication from the Creator that man can be taught, if he will but make the effort. Mark tells us that Jesus “explained everything” to his disciples, while using only parables with the masses. It was an adventure in education that ended at the cross. The church leadership understood him all too well. They murdered him because he sought to liberate the people in mind as well as heart.

I have numerous books in my library on how to think, rules of logic, and all the rest, such as Descartes’ famous essay on Rules for the Direction of the Mind. But I am not persuaded that such helps are all that necessary. Any normal person can think and think aright, if only she will. God has made us that way. Nothing is more natural than for man and woman to think. But we also have a proclivity to be lazy, mentally as well as physically. We don’t think because we don’t want to badly enough. And sometimes it hurts to think honestly and critically. While it has great rewards, such as self-respect and freedom, it also has a price tag.

While this journal makes no claim of being issued from a think tank, it can be thought of as an invitation to think—in an honest-to-goodness, down home kind of way. We are something like the inmate of a state hospital who was witness to the problem of a man at curb side changing a tire on his car. The nuts to the wheel had rolled down the gutter and the man was in a quandary as to what to do. When the inmate suggested through the iron picket fence that he might take one nut from each of his other wheels, the man responded with surprise, “How could you figure that out?” The inmate replied, “I might be crazy but I am not stupid.”

Perhaps we are crazy, some seem to think so, but we are not stupid. It does not take an Einstein to see that we in the Churches of Christ, not to mention most other denominations, have made some crucial mistakes. We only need to think, really think about the direction we have taken. For decades we have nursed the myth of being “the true, restored New Testament church,” to the exclusion of all others, the only Christians! And this myth has spawned all sorts of self-imposed hardships, such as the notion that we can’t have fellowship with anyone else, and that even in the mission field among pagans we must be rivals with other Christians.

If we will indulge in some robust self-analysis we will see others (many of whom read this journal) hanging on by their fingernails, hoping that our people will get with it and become a responsible part of the Christian world. If we lose most of our young people before they even reach college, there is a reason. If we have more people in the Church of Christ who have “had it” and attend no church than those who do attend (and this includes cities all across Texas), there is a reason why.

There is a tyranny that is doing us in, and it is rampant in the pulpit, Sunday School, and elders’ meetings—and, yes, in our publications as well. We are not thinking! The tyranny of thoughtlessness. We need some prophets like Micah and Isaiah (crazy people?) who will drag us kicking and screaming into the realities of the 20th century. Look at stricken Poland. Dare we take our Church of Christisms into such a troubled world? But we do have a message to bear, and we are a committed people. We only need to liberate ourselves from our most destructive enemy, ourselves, our own tyranny of thoughtlessness.

There is evidence that the battle has been joined. We are at war with our debilitating sectarianism. And we will win!

In the world’s broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of life,

Be not like dumb driven cattle,

Be a hero in the strife. —the Editor