The Difference Between Discernment and judgement

I've been thinking a lot about this issue lately, especially in light of some recent conversations over the last few months. This was an issue I first really explored as a Charismatic when I encoutered some things said by various famous preachers that didn't jive, and I decided to really to do a thorough and detailed hard look about what the Bible says on the subject. And then later on I ran acrossed "post modern" Christians and issue came up again, and this has especially recently in light of issues of Christian morality and so on....


Basically stated the problem is: people tend to over generalize the term of "judging", as in the scripture that says "Judge not lest yee be judged" and they tend to apply it to all areas of discernment, applying church discipline etc. Far out reaching even the way the disciples who first received that instruction ever understood it to mean.


So for the week, maybe even two weeks I'm going to be writing down all the stuff I've studied and learned on this issue over the years.


INTRODUCTION

When I thought about how I should handle this topic over the last few hours, I decided to do this according to a autobiographical, developemental model. My brain basically works that way, as far as thinking back historically of what caused me to believe this and that, at this time and that. And of course "narratives" are all the rage in some circles where I use to hang out. So I'm basically taking a "Developmental model", hearkening back to my old psychology days. Where I talk about different times/ stages of developement in my life, what happened and so on...

One issue that I came to realize today is one big factor that first gave me an awareness of the need for discernment was my former background as a Lutheran. Specifically speaking my very long catechismal instruction when my parents and I joined the Wisconsin Evangelical Synod (or WELS) back in the end of the 1970s. At that time, I had a very long and ardous confirmation class (due to the fact that we lived a good 100 miles from the nearest WELs church). And at the time, as an adolescent both me and fellow student tended to get sick all of the time. Between communting and getting sick my confirmation lasted about 3 times longer than usual, which was really significant at the time; because preparing for confirmation classes really cut into my fun time! Which as a kid I naturally resented. In retrospect however I realize that my overly long catechism class was a blessing in disguise.

Here is an example of an online catechsim of my former denomination

http://www.wels.net/cgi-bin/site.pl?2617&collectionID=711&contentID=4333&shortcutID=2076


"The blessing in disguise", part, that I mentioned yesterday came from me learning unwittingly about a kind of "Common sense" philosophy about the Bible and ministry. Specifically Lutheran's realized that there was a certain ammount of "dynamic tension" in the Bible, and on various issues. They realized that there could be some complexity there, and at times a person could be in a situation where there one scripture might suggest one course of action and another a different one. So the Lutheran way was not to pick one scripture and base your decision on that but rather to consider the Bible as a whole, consider all the scriptures on the given issue. But not just that, think about other issues that are also tangental, or possibly could also affect one's policy.

So when it comes to the nature of "reality" on an issue I would say the Lutheran (as well as Orthodox etc.) view, would mirror that of the famous parable of

“Six Blind Men and An Elephant”

http://www.uiowa.edu/~cyberlaw/csl03/blindmen.html

This parable, however, would also be endorsed by other groups that I disagree with. Emergent and postmodern ones also endorse it. In my next post, (Which will be a brand new post, probably to not make overly long scrollers). I will talk about the "engineers perspective" when it comes to Truth, achomplishing objectives, setting sensible policy and so on. Because I think it is that view, when combined with such ideas like, dynamic tension, the blindmen and the elephant that sets, this view of the Bible apart from other belief systems that can have dubious credibilitity and reliability.