The Art of Christian Listening (Part 1 of 2)

In my blog entry a couple of months ago, Wanted: Truth and Charity, I mentioned that one of the marks of godly thought should be the willingness to listen to unbelievers and even welcome their insights. Here I want to briefly develop some of those thoughts and suggest some practical steps toward listening better. But first, in part i’d like to explain what I’m talking about when I speak of “Christian listening.”

I call this the art of Christian listening for 2 reasons.

First, I call it an art because it’s not something that we automatically learn. In fact, being that we’re sinful creatures with the natural tendency toward intellectual and moral laziness, we’ll most likely struggle with mastering the art of listening Christianly for our entire lives, that is simply to say that listening well is part of our sanctification. It’s also an art because as we improve in listening, we develop an internal sense of what we’re doing even when we’re not conscious of it. This subjective dimension of internalized skill is something that artists are quite familiar with. I’ve been cartooning since I was a child, and I couldn’t tell you what in the world I’m doing when I draw…I just draw.

Secondly, what I call the art of Christian listening is Christian because the approach which I’ll be recommending to you, which is not exactly unique in suggestions, is unique in that it is undergirded and supported by theological resources that are only familiar to the Christian worldview.

In the next post I’ll provide some suggestions for listening better and some scriptural foundations that undergird them…