Coming to scripture with a “spirit of agnosticism”
I was listening to an old favorite message from Alistair Begg earlier today: Gideon – God’s Choice. Alistair was speaking at a pastor’s conference, and the message text was Gideon’s victory over the Midianites from Judges 7. In introducing the text, Alistair made the interesting statement that it is important to come to scripture with "the spirit of agnosticism".
It’s really possible for us … that in coming to passages of scripture with which we are familiar, our very familiarity with the text prevents us from doing justice to the text. And one of the things that I’m trying to teach myself the longer I go in pastoral ministry is the necessity of coming to the text with a spirit of agnosticism. That is, not with a spirit of unbelief, but with the spirit of ‘I don’t know what this means’.
When we always come to the text believing we know what it means, we tend then not look at it with the eyes of faith, nor to look at it with the eyes of expectancy, but simply to look for the usual, familiar themes which many of us have known from our infancy. And as a result what we do is reiterate again the same kind of emphasis that we’ve heard before.
Now where those emphasis are right, then of course it is good for them to be repeated. But where they have perhaps missed something or have overemphasized something, then we do a disservice to ourselves and to our listeners, unless we come to the text with a genuine desire for God to teach us by His Spirit, so that we learning may then become teachers.
I’m one of those people of which Alistair was speaking. I’ve been blessed to grow up in the church, and over the decades, I have heard literally thousands of sermons, being in church from my infancy. It is easy for me to come to a passage of scripture with the idea that I already know what is to be gathered from it. I need to work at developing this "spirit of agnosticism", so that I can expect to learn something. I want to have a genuine desire to learn what God has for us in the text, and to not be complacent in what little I’ve been able to glean so far.
