All the way to 11 …
“The numbers all go to 11. Look, right across the board, 11, 11, 11 and ...” Nigel Tufnel, the lead guitarist for the fictional rock band Spinal Tap, is explaining to the reporter that unlike other rock bands who only have amps that go to 10, theirs go all the way to 11. When the reporter stops and asks, “Why don't you just make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number and make that a little louder?” there is a long pause followed by “These go to 11”.
If you've never seen the movie, you really haven't missed much (with appropriate apologies to the devotees). But that quote has become for me, over time, a kind of metaphor for life. Quite apart from the fact that it describes what happens in the back seat of our car on any long family trip (I am sure that all children go to 11), it seems to capture my experience of everyday existence in 21st-century Australia.
When you've only got 10 seconds or half a paragraph to make your point, you've got to SHOUT. Everywhere I go, people seem to be shouting. They shout by being a bit more risqué than everyone else. They shout by making more outrageous claims than everyone else. They shout by dismissing out of hand the arguments of everyone else. In a world where publicity is everything, if you don't shout louder, you don't get heard.
It's all caused me to stop and reflect on whether we do any Christian shouting. I think that it is a particular temptation for preachers. For those who have to get up week by week and say something that makes it through the sleep-deprived stupor that is Sunday morning, you have to shout to be heard. You have to be outrageous. You need to make stark claims. You need to present the black and white, while leaving people no room to move.
It has been exacerbated, I think, by the trend towards globalization. When I get up to preach, I am not the most interesting preacher they have heard this week. Many people sitting there listening have heard Mark Driscoll, John Piper, Don Carson, Phillip Jensen and Willie Taylor this week already. So the pressure is on. I need to be engaging. I need to be socially aware. I need to be hard-hitting. I need to grab people and shake people and make them listen (or is this temptation only mine?).
So how does the challenge to go all the way to 11 affect me? Well I see it in a number of ways. Firstly, it comes as the temptation to present every idea as the most important idea in the Bible. Whether I am preaching on the sweet, sweet love of God displayed in the death of his one and only Son on the cross, or whether I am discussing the merits of a premillennial versus amillennial view of Revelation 20, I want to present it as the most important thing in the world.
Secondly, I experience the desire to present every idea that I have as the right one, and others as wrong. I am not saying here that there is no right and wrong that must be clearly defended. There is right and wrong, and I give great thanks for men and women around the world who cling to and proclaim uncomfortable truth. However, I know that the principle of going all the way to 11 means that if I acknowledge that I am not completely certain, or that there are merits to someone else's argument, then I have lost the day. And so I too readily dismiss other ideas.
Thirdly, and most insidiously I think, I end up wanting to do the work of the Holy Spirit. I want to take the principles and write the applications on the hearts of hearers. Instead of teaching the truth and trusting that God will challenge people in the details of their lives, I want to control how people respond. And so I make my applications the only applications. I want to tell people exactly what they must do with the truth. (Now, here, like almost everywhere else, there is the opposite problem of never acknowledging that the Scriptures have concrete things to say about the nitty-gritty of life, but I'll leave that for another day.) I see this particularly as I present my programmes, my training courses, my goals as the biblically sanctioned appropriate life for all the believers hearing my preaching!
I am sure this isn't just me. So I'd love to hear from you. Where are some other places that we experience the temptation to go all the way to 11?
