This is the second part of a multi-part blog series on making wise decisions. In our last post we looked at the shortcomings of a belief that the Bible is all I need (a fallacy we called “biblicism”) and in this post we are going to look at the equally dangerous fallacy of spiritualism.
If we can avoid the temptation of simply reducing moral and practical wisdom to a simplistic appeal to a particular interpretation of scripture, another temptation might beset us still. This is the temptation to believe so strongly that the Holy Spirit reveals truth through our union with Christ, that we lean into a sort of hyper neo-Gnosticism rather than anything approximating Christian faith and believe whatever secret wisdom the voices reveal to us, independent of any sort of input or moderation from the scriptures or the Church.
We can call this the fallacy of spiritualism. This is the hyper-charismatic tendency to privilege the very personal experience of the “voice of the Holy Spirit” spoken to us in times of prayer and meditation. “God told me to do it” has been a phrase that has been used to justify some truly awful and factually unchristian things by people throughout history, and in our day and age it continues to be used in the same way. If the “spirit” in your head tells you things that Jesus would not, then it is not the “Holy Spirit” speaking and either another spirit (or far more likely) your own internal voice projecting your sinful desires and wants upon God as a way of justifying what you wanted to do anyway. If God’s voice always confirms the things you wanted before you started seeking him, it’s a good clue that it’s probably not God you’re listening to.
Just as we identified that a commitment to Bible-only faith is really just a Christian-esque veneer over an idolatrous belief in our own personal infallibility in interpretation and application, the same problem rears its head when we place authority in what we believe that we are hearing from the Holy Spirit absent of the agreement and support of the church or the word. And like a biblicist perspective, this is dangerous not because of the way in which it is obviously problematic, but most of all because of how plausible it all sounds.
If we’ve been in the church for any amount of time, we know that the Spirit does indeed speak to us and does for certain reveal Christ to us. He leads us and guides us in many important paths and decisions—especially in those places where the scriptures are silent. A mature believer should expect that the Holy Spirit wants to share information with them, and guide them toward ever increasing Christlikeness in both believe and behaviour. But hearing a voice say something or feeling a pull toward something is not the same as receiving revelation from God. John exhorts his young believers to test the Spirits and know if they are good, but the context of testing the Spirits is never ultimately in isolation (you might be able to get some preliminary feedback, but no more than that), it’s supposed to happen in the context of the body. The Church as the community where the Spirit dwells is the proper place to evaluate if a message is from God. It is the proper place to push the revelation through the filter of the scriptures. And if the scriptures are silent on a given issue, or subject to conflicting applications, then it is the Church’s role to join in corporate discernment with the believer to arbitrate God’s will. To do so in isolation is to ultimately give authority to yourself, and not to God. Because what you end up doing is not giving authority to God, but authority to your interpretation of an experience that may or may not be God in the end. Without congruency the scriptures and agreement from the community of faith, it is highly unlikely that you’ll be able to discern the truth of a contestable issue.
God speaks to us by his Spirit. But because he knows that we are fallible, gullible, and selfish he gives us his word, and his people to help us discern and understand his words. If a message you hear is not congruent with the scriptures or cannot be affirmed by the Church, there is a good chance that it’s not of God. Spiritualism is not the path to making wise decisions. But there is still another way in which we can avoid both biblicism and spiritualism and still get things wrong: in our next post we will examine the third fallacy, what I am calling collectivism.