Narrowing
God's people need to recognize the danger of a narrowed vision — a limited perspective in which parts of who God is and what he is doing in the world no longer fit within your understanding of reality.
The problem
The forces that produce narrowing do not announce themselves. They subvert doctrine and belief by retraining the instincts and behavior of God's people.
Our stated convictions do not change. We simply stop living them out, because we cannot resist a formation we cannot see.
This is a twenty-question assessment. It names what you have stopped being able to see, and what closed it down.
What gets narrowed
God's self-disclosure expands our vision. It shows us a world we could not see by observation alone. As the world's forces close that vision down, we diminish aspects of God's word without deciding to.
This is not atheism. It is a species of fearing man rather than fearing God. The fear does not feel like fear. It feels like prudence.
Three of these close down what you are able to see. The fourth reverses who is permitted to correct you.
The world's story begins to feel complete, and God's word is quietly permitted to say less. Goodness, truth, and beauty outside your own camp become inconvenient to recognize, then awkward, then unthinkable. You are not afraid of God in this. You are afraid of what your own people would say. The clearest sign is not conflict. It is the absence of conflict.
You sort Christians into the sound and the unsound by standards you did not get from Scripture. Faithfulness in another idiom stops registering as faithfulness. Stephen's opponents could not hear what God had done outside the land and outside the temple, and when they could not refute him they stopped their ears. The judgment of the tribe is nearer than the judgment of God, and it arrives sooner.
God gave Jeroboam a kingdom. Jeroboam feared for it and built calves to secure what had already been secured. He did not stop believing the promise. He stopped believing it was sufficient. Name what you are working to preserve, and ask what you are afraid would happen if you left God to keep it.
Interpretive convictions are necessary, and every community that reads Scripture together will develop them. Inversion is what happens when they climb above the text, so that the text is no longer permitted to correct the interpreter. God's order is pressed into the service of ours. A form of piety continues, and that piety is now defined by human rules. You are drawing on God's authority to serve ends God has not authorized.
The full diagnosis — three forces and two conditions — is developed at The Framework →
What you get
The assessment names the narrowing. The book works through the rival orders that produce it and the scriptural practices that widen what has closed.
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Who wrote this
The last thing
They could not refute him, so they covered their ears and rushed at him. That was not unbelief. That was a narrowed vision meeting something it could not hold, and doing the only thing left to it.
This assessment is built to tell you what you cannot see, which means it is built to be unwelcome. If it finds that nothing is costing you anything, it will not congratulate you.
You can stay narrow. Or you can let God's revealed word expand your vision, and learn to observe all that has been commanded by the one to whom all authority in heaven and on earth has been given.
Matthew 28:16–20