Orthodoxy, Orthopraxy, and Orthoscript

Training Ground rests on three pillars of Work, Wilderness, and Worship. Work seemed to hammer its way into our consciousness every morning at 5 am when our alarms would begin to squeal one by one around the darkened room. Wilderness also seemed to demand our attention with every fishing trip and hiking excursion the enormity of the natural world onto our tiny retinas. Worship interjected its way into our lives in a very different mode. We attended the equivalent of a weekly course on hermeneutics with Dr. Paul Penley, but much of our spiritual growth came through the zeitgeist of the program.

Paul had appointed our only pre-program homework and through his assignments revealed the direction of his class for the entire summer. Our reading list included the dry Grasping God’s Word by J. Scott Duvall and the more engaging The Secret Message of Jesus by Brian McLaren. Grasping God’s Word, written as a textbook for Bible college hermeneutics classes, set the serious academic tone for the class. The author focuses on the importance of learning how to break down and understand the Bible as one would break down and understand a John Donne poem. The focus of McLaren’s book, however, is more personal than intellectual. His goal is to introduce the reader to the person and personality of Jesus. His description of Jesus as a revolutionary leader conducting a guerilla war of love behind enemy lines introduced me to an enthusiasm that previous iterations of Christianity could never conjure for me.

Paul is the kind of person that you meet and immediately understand functions on a higher intellectual plane than we young padawans. Reading his resume of precocious academic achievements only lends greater credence to his Biblical apologetics. Coming from a largely secular background, I was slightly concerned that I would begin this aspect of the program hopelessly discombobulated and only get lost from there. In some ways I did start at a disadvantage as sly comments about different pastors’ preaching styles never failed to sail ten feet over my head, but I had a steep learning curve and everyone was more than happy to catch me up to speed on any prescient concepts I may have missed by not being immersed in the Christian culture. Paul introduced me to the Emergent movement, carefully outlining the limitations as well as the radical Biblicality of some of the tenets.

I was introduced to the ideas of orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthoscript. Many conservative churches focus exclusively on the idea of orthodoxy or right ideas. Ostensibly having the right ideas will lead to the right actions, but sole focus on right ideas can often lock Christians into a struggle about being correct rather than being Christlike. Orthopraxy or right practice, on the other hand, can often gloss over important Biblical truths to focus solely on corporeal rather than spiritual realms. Paul then introduced his own Greek and Latin portmanteau of orthoscript or right story. His contention is that the Bible is that the Bible is trying to do something to us and that through study of the context we can apply its teachings with faithfulness and creativity. The Bible is trying to show us the story that God is creating on Earth and that we have been invited to become an integral part of that story. Too often we try to fit God into what we’re trying to do with our lives and instead we should be focusing on what God is doing and how we can be a part of it.

Worship was not confined to Wednesday nights, however. An affable young man named Toast that I met on one of the jobsites explained to me that everything we do should be an expression of our gratitude to God, our commitment to God’s plan, and a form of praise. I often wrestled with the spiritual concepts the most in the days and weeks later when work or wilderness would give me the physical and emotional space to process my own thoughts and emotions. One concept that would not let me go was the idea of the three stages of faith. The first stage of faith is ‘notitia’ or understanding: understanding the existence of God or the fact of sin. The second stage of faith is ‘assenus’ or mental assent: agreeing intellectually with the veracity of Biblical doctrine. These first two stages had never been an issue for me. I felt as if I was born with such an understanding and assent. The third stage was the edge of a cliff for me. The third stage is ‘fiducia’ or trust: an emotional connection with the truth previously only understood and assented to. My greatest struggle was my deficiency in personal relationship with God. I felt that God was a distant being that had little involvement in my life. Over the course of the summer I realized that one of the pillars of a real relationship is just showing up. When you have a real relationship with someone, you show up again and again even when it’s hard, even when you don’t feel like it, even when you’re upset with the other person: persistence. I learned this summer that if I keep showing up then so will God.