ken wilson online

Bob Dylan produced three albums during his openly Jesus-faith period: Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love. Somewhere along the line, something happened and Dylan went icognito with his faith. One can only imagine he overdosed on something–not Jesus most likely but something on the religious landscape burned him bad. There’s a hint, maybe in The Disease of Conceit, recorded after his out there Jesus time. It’s written in the cadence of an old tent revival and it happens to be about the occupational hazard of religion.

Old St. Paul, who suffered the disease himself, was quick to spot it in the churches he helped spawn. The Corinthians were full of it: their genuine Spirit experiences went to their head and they fancied themselves further along the divinization road than was quite justified. “Already you are full! Already you are rich! Already you are kings!” mocked Paul. Inebriated as they were with knowledge (and not of the academic, but of the charismatic experience variety) Paul warned, “Knowledge puffs up; love builds up.” And when their confidence exceeded their true knowledge he reminded them that “We know, but we know in part.”

The disease of conceit is the occupational hazard of the spiritual life as much as addiction to prescription pain killers is the occupational hazard of medicine or failure to keep one’s wick dry (as my father so charmingly put it) is the occupational hazard of pastoral ministry. The more people drink from the potent nectar of the Spirit, the more prone they are to the disorder. Every pastor blessed with a cadre of the spiritually earnest has been lathered with a face pie from time to time–opinions pronounced as absolutes, a kind of karma bounce back from the pulpiteering we engage in ourselves too often, perhaps?

Here’s the final verse of The Disease of Conceit:

There’s a whole lot of people in trouble tonight
From the disease of conceit.
Whole lot of people seeing double tonight
From the disease of conceit.
Give ya delusions of grandeur
And a evil eye
Give you idea that
You’re too good to die,
Then they bury you from your head to your feet
From the disease of conceit.

What you gotta love about Dylan is what you gotta love about Paul and Jesus. They were all aware of the disease of conceit. Why do you think most of the critique coming from Jesus of Nazareth was aimed at his own faith community? Israel was under occupation by a pagan army but you find very few diatribes against godless paganism in the teaching of Jesus and many more diatribes against the presumption, arrogance, and pride of the God-familiar. Same thing with Paul. Sure, you have warnings against paganism in Paul. The Jesus communities were imbedded in pagan cities and seemed to have a lot of it running through their own veins still. But Paul, like his master, more often used his scalpel for lancing the boils of the disease of conceit.

That’s what’s going on in the American Evangelical landscape right now, a lot of soul searching, a lot of internal critique, and a lot of reaction from within to the internal critique. Internal critique is good for the soul, even if it ruffles the feathers of the faithful. When the faithful–ourselves included–get understandably nervous with all this boil lancing, remember it is love for the genuine that’s behind all this. Love for the baby in the bathwater.

It’s especially painful, all the internal critique that is, when the external critique from the likes of Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins is on the rise. Most of the new atheism writers are critiquing Christianity. So it’s tempting to strike back at them. But that only makes us more prone to the disease of conceit. We won’t really have to worry about the new atheism until it reaches the point of engaging in it’s own internal critique. That’s the sign that a movement is on to something real.

Tags: Dylan, evangelical, Jesus, occupational hazards, Paul, religion, truth telling

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 9:20 am and is filed under advice to young pastors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.