A leading objective of this site is to help catalyze and articulate an authentically Christian ‘theology’ to underpin the life and work of what is increasingly being described as ‘emerging church’. The phrase ‘emerging theology’ is a little glib, but at least it establishes the connection with emerging church and it keeps in view the tentativeness and provisionality of this sort of project.
These articles were originally written a few years back under the title ‘The Naked Gospel of Jesus Christ’.
There are several reasons why the seemingly straightforward task of speaking about the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ should be problematic for the church today.
There is the much discussed challenge of postmodernism, for example. The form of Christian discourse that predominates in today’s churches evolved under the cultural and intellectual constraints of an earlier period and is ill-equipped to deal with the uncertainties and shifted values of postmodern culture. Many would argue, therefore, that if the gospel is to have any credibility within this new context, it needs to be ‘postmodernized’.
While some in the church see the need to extend the scope of Christian rhetoric, others are more concerned to safeguard the older forms of expression, motivated partly by an instinctive resistance to novelty, but also by a quite reasonable fear that the vital truths of the faith are in danger of being trampled under foot in a stampede of cultural change. This fear puts pressure on the church to preserve and reinforce the traditional Word that has been entrusted to it.
There is also the need to respond to the worldview constructed by science, which is thought by many (both inside and outside the church) to be inimical to theistic belief. The basic issue is whether there is any need or basis for traditional theological hypotheses in our explanations of the origin and functioning of the universe or of human nature. Considerable intellectual effort goes into addressing the challenge that the predominant scientific method presents to Christian faith.
Nor should we overlook the endless queue of alternative saviours with their alternative gospels who come knocking at the door of the church, hoping that someone will let them in and give them a home. They are all familiar figures: the Cynic peasant philosopher, the mystic, the magician, the zealot manqué, the apocalyptic crank, the ghostly figment of the church’s imagination, the gnostic redeemer, the displaced avatar, the guru, the ascended master…. And when they are turned away, they simply go back to the end of the queue and try their luck again. Someone needs to watch the door. Someone needs to check their credentials. Someone needs to evict the interloper who manages to get past security.
There is, however, a more fundamental question that needs to be addressed, which concerns how we manage the truthfulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Do we understand this truth well enough? Have we properly conceptualized the ‘story’ that is at the heart of Christian truth? How consistent are our criteria for determining what constitutes truth? How effective is our basic Christian discourse for communicating this truth in the world today?
These questions point us to the basic purpose of this website, which is to highlight the need for, and to stimulate, a more honest, credible and intellectually coherent expression of everyday Christian faith.
The central premise is that Christian faith is not quite in touch with reality - like a person who has become too light for the world, too insubstantial, and is in danger of floating away. Certainly, there is much that is right about the evangelical enterprise at the moment. But there is also much that is misleading and specious, much which provokes incredulity and scorn amongst those who are unwilling or unable to suspend their critical faculties.
The argument put forward in the articles in this section (by no means a new argument) is that an overhaul, perhaps a radical overhaul, is needed in the way Christians think about their faith and communicate it to the world through word and action.
A house of cards
Christianity is not a thing that we have invented or devised for ourselves. It is not the product of deliberate policy, engineered to satisfy the particular religious needs and aspirations of a modern or post-modern world. We have inherited it from ages past, a relic from a bygone era, a fragment torn from the musty, crumbling tapestry of an ancient worldview - someone else’s experiences, convictions, beliefs.
Although over the centuries it has evolved and mutated, passing through many transformations and deformations and reformations, at its core it has proved remarkably resistant to any form of modernization or revision. We inevitably come back to the elusive figure of Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth, and a corpus of ancient documents which quite consistently put forward the claim that this man, having been executed by the Romans at the age of about thirty, was raised from the dead and has become somehow the supreme definition of godhead - to use Paul’s suggestive expression, ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Col.1:15).
The absurdity of these claims and of their transmission far beyond the geographical and temporal horizons of those who first believed is not always easy for us to grasp. Christianity has been a massive and enduring feature on the landscape of world history during the last two thousand years, a towering stronghold of belief and tradition, a solid monument to our capacity for faith, to our yearning for transcendence. The impact that this religious system has had upon the world - through missionary activity, through the numerous sects that it has spawned and the ideologies that it has inspired, through the pervading influence of Christian culture, through the political and imperialist ambitions of Christian nations - is simply immeasurable. Whichever way we look, somewhere in our field of view, in the foreground, in the distance, glinting in the sunlight or casting its long shadow, is the ancient, monumental religion of Jesus Christ.
But it is easy to be misled by this historical success into thinking that the existence of Christianity is somehow inevitable, drawn into the blue-print of what it means to be human - that its validity is guaranteed by some obscure dependence upon an eternal form of things. In fact, Christianity has appeared at the same time to be a very fragile construction, not a stronghold at all but a house of cards on the verge of collapse, a tenuous and ephemeral product of the religious imagination, easily misunderstood, easily distorted into something else, easily ignored or disbelieved. While for some there lies at its heart an unchangeable Word, many others hear only a dubious story about a God who cannot be seen and events that cannot be replicated.
A severe beating
Christian truth has been mugged by the combined forces of modernity, severely beaten up, and left by the roadside to die. The fact that it has not yet finally succumbed to its injuries is attributed by many to the desperate ministrations of its adherents, not to the intrinsic health of the patient. It is an artificial and precarious life, barely viable, a worldview in a coma, entirely dependent on a belief support system that, in all kindness, should have been switched off a long time ago.
The attack has come from four directions.
i) In general terms, the defining phenomena of Christian belief - the biblical texts and the claims made regarding the resurrection, the miracles and the experience of God?have been subjected to thorough-going rationalist reappraisal. The critical method pursued is very simple. It sets out from the very reasonable presupposition that no real event or circumstance requires the premise of an interventionist, self-revealing God. The various beliefs that constitute the evidential foundation for faith, therefore, are in principle all to be explained in naturalistic terms, drawing entirely upon a non-supernatural understanding of the world and of the peculiar ways of humankind. The edifice of human knowledge does not need to be propped up by the fabrications of theology.
ii) There has been an assault on the historical credibility of the Bible. When it purports to document actual events, can it be judged accurate? Modern critical thought is by instinct comparative, and by comparing what is said with the statements of contemporary historians or the discoveries of archaeologists we should be able either to corroborate or discount the biblical witness. It is very difficult, for example, to reconcile the information provided by Luke about a census when Quirinius was governor of Syria (Luke 2:1-3) with what we know from other sources about governors in Syria or the administration of censuses in the Roman world. Since Luke had a special interest in having Jesus of Nazareth born in Bethlehem, the town of David, the suspicion inevitably arises that he concocted the story of this census in order to fulfil the Old Testament expectation that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem (cf. Matt.2:5-6). Similarly, we may ask whether internal contradictions or discrepancies prevent us from taking the affirmations and narratives of Scripture at face value. Who, for example, was the father of the carpenter Joseph? Was it Jacob, son of Matthan, son of Eleazar, as we are told in Matthew’s Gospel (Matt.1:15-16)? Or was it Heli, son of Matthat, son of Levi, as Luke informs us (Luke 3:23-24)? Or is there some obscure way in which the discrepancy can be resolved?
iii) It has become increasingly difficult for people to think that there may be only one true faith. In the old days of Christendom it was natural to believe that the religion of Jesus Christ was superior to all others. But the migration of peoples and the increase of knowledge has forced us to reconsider facile presumptions of this sort. The problem is that our religious persuasion is never purely a matter of individual conviction. It is also, often to a large degree, a product of our social environment. We do not arrive at our beliefs in solitary confinement anymore than we do our understanding of genetics or our taste in music. And as the world changes around us, so too does the world within. Take away the cultural and intellectual partitions that separate peoples and their faiths and things will lose shape, identities will begin to flow together, become confused. It can hardly be surprising, then, if the grounds for preferring one faith over another become unclear.
iv) There have been widespread misgivings - to put it mildly - about the various creedal and doctrinal formulations, the particular beliefs, that go to make up the body of traditional Christian truth. Are these things really as worthy and reasonable as we have unthinkingly assumed them to be? How plausible is an understanding of God that must be wrung through the logical mangle of trinitarian belief? How can we, in good faith, worship a God who cheerfully drowns the armies of Pharoah in the Red Sea or stands by with apparent indifference while Hutus and Tutsis go about their mutual slaughter? How can we feel comfortable with a deity whose wrath against his creatures must be appeased by the killing of an innocent victim, who arbitrarily chooses to show kindness to one segment of humanity, and proposes to despatch the remainder to eternal punishment? How, in our enlightened and egalitarian age, can we submit ourselves to a repressive patriarchal and homophobic despot? If we have grasped something of the magnitude of the universe and of the extreme insignificance and marginality of our own world, how are we to believe, as Daphne Hampson puts it, that ‘God put in an appearance on planet earth’? Indeed, what need is there at all for the hypothesis of God when there is more than enough mystery in the universe to satisfy our hunger for transcendence? Faced with questions such as these, many will look at Christianity and judge its sacred beliefs to be profoundly unreasonable and worthless.
Reactions to criticism
There is nothing new or especially modern about all this. Christian truth, in fact, has never been self-evident; the affirmations of faith, the credenda, the things to be believed, have always been subject to dispute and contradiction and ridicule. The guardians of Christian orthodoxy have sometimes been able to stifle dissent by brutality and repression or by the suffocating weight of majority opinion, but their success has always been short-lived. Ecclesiastical power has eventually waned, and the dissenters have come clamouring back. It would appear that Christian truth must always be in a state of seige, always on the defensive, always struggling to justify itself in the face of disbelief.
This state of affairs, of course, can be recast in more favourable terms, as a struggle between truth and error, light and darkness: ‘the god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the likeness of God’ (2 Cor.4:4). But that is really only a matter of perspective; and besides, I suspect that the believer is seldom entirely convinced by the rhetoric. What appears as conviction is often more like denial?not a certainty about the truth but a refusal, driven by a fundamental intellectual insecurity, to recognize the force of the objections.
The problem is not merely theoretical, a matter for debate among theologians and philosophers. It is personal, and widespread. It touches all of us. The border conflict between faith and reason is fought not only along the ideological boundary between Christianity and the world but also within the mind of each believer. The Christian mind is not impermeable; it is soaked in the sea of its culture and is conditioned by that culture to think in certain ways, accept certain assumptions, ask certain questions. Christians are all, therefore, to varying degrees, double-minded. They are forced to inhabit two conflicting mental worlds; and the mind of faith must constantly defend itself against the inevitable internal enquiries of the rationalist, secular mind. This tension is difficult to live with, and the natural inclination is to reduce it to something more manageable, to resolve the contradictions and uncertainties into a simpler form of truth. There are a number of strategies by which we might attempt to do so.
i) We might accept the greater force of the arguments against traditional Christian beliefs. If this does not lead us to abandon faith altogether, it is likely that we will look for ways to translate its antiquated forms into something more consistent with the dominant world-view. John Shelby Spong has argued that if Christianity is to survive, it must be rescued from its outmoded conceptuality. ‘Unless theological truth can be separated from pre-scientific understandings and rethought in ways consistent with our understanding of reality, the Christian faith will be reduced to one more ancient mythology that will take its place alongside the religions of Mount Olympus.’ Whatever is incompatible with our modern way of thinking must be dumped or ‘demythologized’. There is no point, and no prospect of success, in Spong?s view, in perpetuating religious beliefs that elicit only incredulity and contempt from the general population.
ii) A second strategy would be to re-centre faith around something other than the troublesome question of whether it is all true or not. Various movements, from Pietism to Pentecostalism, have made personal religious experience the determinative factor: if the experience of faith remains viable, then it does not matter too much if the intellectual framework is in an advanced state of dilapidation. Others have found sufficient reason in the life of community, in artistic expressions of religious sentiment, in ecclesiastical tradition, or in social and political activism to keep marching - nominally, at least - under the banner of Jesus Christ. Christian religion appears then to provide its own moral or social or aesthetic justification, regardless of whether the original story is credible or not.
iii) We might endeavour to save the rapidly descending balloon of evangelical faith by ditching as much unnecessary creedal ballast as possible. While some things, such as the resurrection, must be affirmed as literal truth or there would be no basket left to travel in, there is much that may be ignored or dismissed as the fantasies or misconceptions of the ancient mind - if not the virgin birth itself, then perhaps the angelic choirs or the wandering star that guided the magi to Bethlehem. This method reflects a very strong and mostly unconscious survival instinct. The various talking-heads of evangelicalism?the preachers and teachers and writers - tend to be selective in the biblical material that they draw upon. Believers all have a habit of neglecting aspects of the Bible that they dislike or have difficulty taking seriously.
iv) Lastly, there is the isolationist option, the retreat from confrontation with the forces of secularism to a place where the Christian belief system can operate relatively unhindered. The question of truth is not abandoned but it is made a closed loop within which the rules of rationality may be redefined; and in order to believe the truth you have to enter the loop. This essentially is fundamentalism - not just in the sectarian sense, but the fundamentalism that characterizes all evangelical thinking to some degree. It is easily ridiculed or maligned, but it is not in any simple sense a bad thing. It has provided a valuable defence against the erosion of Christian truth by the stormy seas of doubt. It has safeguarded the gospel and the hope of salvation - albeit in a somewhat heavy-handed and uncritical fashion. It has undoubtedly enabled and preserved the life of faith in the West.
The legitimacy of the closed system is derived ultimately from the dogmatic assertion that the Bible is God?s infallible Word. Disbelief is banished to regions of outer darkness. Whatever appears to contradict this inspired Word is the product of corrupt human reason, and is therefore by definition ill-intentioned and untrustworthy. In extreme circumstances the fundamentalist will defy all evidence and reason and simply re-affirm her conviction that this is divine truth and cannot be impugned. Generally, though, the situation can be rescued with a bit of exegetical ingenuity. So if Matthew says that Judas went and hanged himself (Matt.27:5) while according to Luke he fell headlong in a field and ‘his intestines spilled out’ (Acts 1:18), it must have been that the rope by which he hanged himself in a field broke and he fell and ruptured his body. Contrivances of this sort may not persuade everyone, but at least they save appearances.
The picture painted here is, on the whole, too bleak and too ironic if it is taken as descriptive of the general state of the church. The church is not apparently hobbled by doubt, and the majority of believers may be ignorant of, or untroubled by, the arguments of the critics. In fact, evangelical Christianity is in many ways proving itself to be remarkably resilient at the present time. In an age of extreme moral and spiritual disorientation, many are attracted by the uncomplicated and confident proclamation of a saving truth. I take that, on the whole, to be a good thing.
But this should not be allowed to obscure the fact that there remain deep-seated discrepancies and tensions that are rarely addressed openly. We are left with the impression that the church is not quite honest, not quite transparent, not quite in touch with reality - and that includes the reality of the ancient texts that are supposedly the source of the truth on which the church is founded. Although Christian life and ministry may still flourish under these conditions, the persistent habits of evasion and defensiveness impair the witness of the church and create distortions in the fabric of faith. In fact, a rather high price has been paid for the church?s peace of mind.
What are we trying to do?
There is probably a good case to be made for leaving things the way they are. Perhaps this glasshouse, this artificial domain, this bubble of Christian life and culture that has detached itself from the rest of the world, is a necessary precondition for the practical operation of the kingdom of God. If we break it down, we may only have to reconstruct it. Perhaps the gospel cannot survive without some sort of religious fence around it, to keep the wolves out and prevent the sheep from straying. Perhaps the kingdom of God cannot be that ‘worldly’ without losing its identity. These are serious considerations and we will return to them later.
For the moment, however, this seems too defeatist. The gospel arose as actual events in the real world, the world inhabited by Jews and Greeks and Romans, by polytheists, by Stoics and Epicureans, by fantasists and mystics, by rationalists, by the credulous and the sceptics. Although the events are remote from us in many ways, they purport to be historical. Should they require preferential treatment? Should we not assume, rather, that misinterpretation of the Bible, a lack of intellectual integrity, and cultural isolationism are ultimately detrimental to evangelical Christianity?
It is time to confront the inherent weaknesses of evangelical discourse, the cracks in the great bell of Christian truth, but to confront these things not on the basis of doubt and detachment but on the basis of a determined faith in Jesus Christ as - whatever it may mean exactly - the Word made flesh. Scepticism and faith have moved too far apart; a middle-ground has opened up which needs to be recovered by the believer, by the faithful and committed disciple of Jesus Christ. Evangelicalism should not be held hostage to a narrow, reclusive fundamentalist mentality. This, at the same time, may prove to be the most fitting response to the doubters and detractors.
At this juncture we should take a moment to explain as clearly as possible where we are going. We start out with the observation that the church has not always reacted well to rationalist criticism, whether that has come from outside or from within, and as a result has misrepresented the gospel, both in its teaching and in its life. Other factors contribute to this misrepresentation, having to do with our general sinfulness - our self-centredness, vanity, laziness, greed, and so on. But our focus here is on the plausibility and reasonableness of the story that the church tells. Although the heart of that story is not a product of human reason but a sovereign work of God, as soon as we open our mouths, we make, or we attempt to make, rational statements: we draw inferences, we interpret texts, we trace lines between cause and effect, we identify similarities, continuities, we simplify, we summarize, we explain, we extrapolate. We cannot avoid, therefore, the question of whether the story we tell - no matter how simple we make it - is reasonable.
Two particular matters concern us.
First, we need to reconsider the original set of instructions that generated the historical phenomenon of Christianity and which now give shape to the faith of the believer. What exactly is the gospel, the ‘good news’? What does it mean to be a ‘Christian’ - or more pointedly, what does it mean, in a scientific, postmodern, pluralistic age, to be saved? Many popular and often sensationalist books have sought in recent years to disinter what remains of the historical Jesus from the graveyard of the Gospels. But what about the message? What about the ‘good news’ that he preached? How valid is that today? What does it mean to hold to the agenda of Jesus Christ? If we listen to the voices of the critics, if we listen to the objections of those who are attracted to Christ but are put off by the unthinking mumbo-jumbo of earnest, Bible-believing Christians, if we listen to the mutterings of those within the church who love the Lord but find it increasingly difficult to swallow the whole evangelical package, we are driven to ask how well we have understood and communicated the story about the man from Nazareth.
The second matter of interest arises quite naturally at this point. Is it possible to pursue this agenda - to follow the authentic Christ - without being stupid or dishonest, without closing the loop, without retreating like scared rabbits into the dark and inaccessible underground realm of religious unreason? The argument put forward in this site is that the church needs to take more responsibility for the truthfulness or the truth-likeness of what is proclaimed. There is a need both for conviction and for candour. In part this has to do with the apologetic business of defending Christian truth against criticism, of answering the questions. But the more urgent task is that of determining the right sort of stance to take. Truth is not a function of content only; it is also a function of the person, of the means by which the content is handled and communicated. How do we deal with the cold wind of scepticism that blows around the church and in through the broken windows and open doors? How do we live the truth?
These two issues should not be separated. They interact and inform one another. If it is still necessary to ask what it means to be ‘Christian’ after two thousand years, it is because the question of truth obliges us to reconsider what we believe and the reasons for believing it. There is something inherently corruptible about the teaching that has been entrusted to the church. Any absolute and eternal truth that enters the corrosive atmosphere of human thought is in constant need of renewal and repair. We cannot afford to be complacent.
Our commitment to Christian truth at the moment relies too heavily on the authority of the evangelical magisterium - the men and women, the pastors and theologians, the writers and teachers, who run the glasshouse. There is a strong tendency to suppose that the truthfulness of Christian beliefs can somehow be guaranteed by dogmatic statements about inerrancy. The fall-back position is that a doctrine such as the virgin conception of Jesus is true because it is in Scripture and the truthfulness of Scripture is guaranteed for us by the simple fact that it is sacred text, the revealed Word of God.
This mentality needs to be abandoned. The truthfulness of a statement cannot, in the end, be dogmatically established. Although we may choose to commit ourselves to a belief in faith, that commitment does not make the belief any more or less true. We should accept, then, that the truthfulness of the doctrine depends on whether the event actually happened or not – just as we understand the truthfulness of a newspaper report to depend on the correspondence between what is written and what happened, not on assurances given to us by the newsagent or paper boy that the report is absolutely reliable. The fact that in practice we are not in a position to determine exactly how Jesus was conceived is beside the point: at issue here are the standards and methods and expectations of truthfulness that we bring to the text.
We should be wary, therefore, of treating the Bible as a privileged text, immune to the probing of rationalism. The practice of historical criticism, particularly with regard to biblical studies, has been and remains highly flawed, partly because of the limitations of knowledge, partly because of the cultural and ideological biases built into academic research. But this does not alter the fact that it is dishonest to attempt to conceal the real or apparent deficiencies of Scripture under a cloak of presumed inerrancy. It is a prerequisite of the process by which we seek to establish truth that we allow a witness to be cross-examined.
This will inevitably entail some sort of downgrading of Scripture. This is not an easy prospect for evangelicals to contemplate, but a fundamental re-evaluation of how the Bible functions as the Word of God is necessary if we wish to establish intellectual integrity. There are several problems with the privileged status that we accord Scripture.
First, we are forced to employ two different standards of rationality as we move between secular and sacred texts. We may question Josephus’ accuracy but not Luke’s. This can look very much like intellectual duplicity.
Secondly, the bright aura of sacredness around the text makes it difficult to read it properly. What began as the product of ordinary human writing – the struggle to capture thoughts, events, statements that for those involved in the process disclosed something special about the activity of the God of Israel – has been transmuted by the infallible alchemy of religion into something exceptional, something sacred, something quite distinct from ordinary human discourse, something that partakes of divinity. But we have rather different expectations of a sacred text than of ordinary human speech - and so we tend to read it differently.
Thirdly, there is the tendency for faith to centre itself around the written word as, in effect, a sacramental object (leather-bound, gilt-edged, carried ostentatiously into church) rather than around a personal God who has made himself accessible to men and women through the Spirit.
It would be more realistic and more truthful to regard the texts of the New Testament as what they actually are – a disparate and not entirely coherent collection of ancient writings, produced by the earliest followers of Jesus of Nazareth, which do not in principle escape the contingencies and limitations to which all such historical documents are subject. I would argue that such a ‘deconstructed’ view of the Bible would serve as a more reliable and effective witness to the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ than this essentially artificial conception we have of it as a dogmatically certified sacred text. Evangelical scholarship is currently in a much better position to affirm the trustworthiness of these writings as a witness to the God-filled character of the life and death of Jesus. There is less need now for the support systems of dogmatism.
An emphasis on the historicality of the Bible, and of the New Testament in particular, will require us to take much more seriously its contingency?the intimate involvement of the texts in the historical circumstances in which they were produced. This has implications at several levels. Perhaps most importantly it will mean coming to terms with the restricted historical role of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah as the nation approached a crisis of divine judgment. More generally it will necessitate a consistent endeavour to uncover the meaning of the text in the original context before attempting to read off the page a Word of God for believers today. We may find as a result that certain aspects of biblical teaching have more limited historical application than has generally been recognized. The Bible may become at first a more distant, less familiar, book, but this is only because we have begun to approach it from a different direction. In the end, it will become a more truthful book.
This must affect the way Christians think generally. Popular expressions of Christian faith need to be reoriented away from a largely ideological commitment to a set of beliefs towards an historically conceived commitment to the person of Jesus and the outworking of the kingdom of God. The current evangelical enterprise consists largely, and mostly subconsciously, in bringing about and maintaining conformity to the tenets of faith, to the exclusion of fostering a sense of direct engagement in the agenda which Jesus established. The religion of belief is substituted for the life of faith.
To approach the historical person of Jesus is to approach the question of God. There are two main issues to be addressed here. The first has to do with how we allow the historical Jesus and the historical experience of the risen Christ to mediate and shape our understanding of God. The second is more philosophical: how can we best conceptualize the revelation of God and his involvement in the world? Are the traditional ways of thinking and speaking about the ‘supernatural’ consistent with the general rationality that we employ in our domestic and professional lives? Are we forcing an unnecessary rupture in the fabric of truth? Again, the question is not primarily whether God exists and intervenes in the world but whether our discourse of divine intervention is reasonable, credible, realistic. Are we speaking about these things in a way that makes sense outside the claustrophobic glasshouse of evangelical rationality?
The same question arises with regard to the specific theory of salvation. In the unnatural environment of the glasshouse the Christian notion of salvation has evolved into a highly sophisticated myth, something not so different in style and function from the counterfeit Gnostic myths that flooded the spiritual market in the early centuries of the Christian era. I call it a ‘myth’ not because I regard it as untrue but because, like much of Christian discourse, it has become detached from both its historical and experiential referents and taken on a life of its own. A myth is a story that fails to connect with reality.
This ‘myth’ of salvation is embodied in an elaborate set of arguments and propositions, the result of centuries of abstruse theological reflection and disputation, which we may readily assent to and recite, but which we find enormously difficult to understand or explain to outsiders. I doubt that many people come to faith because they have been convinced by the logic of the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. Rather, they sign up to the doctrine, somewhat bemusedly, because they have already found some other reason to follow Christ.
Myth of this sort is not an entirely bad thing. We have to speak about things that are unseen, which cannot be empirically verified, which have their origin ultimately, we may say, in revelation. But there is an important distinction to be made?one which applies to figurative language generally – between opaque myth and transparent myth. An opaque myth obscures the reality which it purports to represent. We are expected to take its validity, its truthfulness, on trust. A transparent myth, by contrast, is much more honest about the gap that exists between what is and what is said about it. Grasping the limitations of religious language, and injecting that awareness into popular Christian discourse, will be an important part of the demolition process.
The gulf between public adherence to the tenets of evangelical faith and private doubt is too great. The problem of hypocrisy is widespread and takes many forms. It arises when the church sets for itself inappropriate and unrealistic standards for faith. When people find themselves unable to live up to these standards, they are forced either to abandon the effort altogether or to dissemble. In order to dismantle the glasshouse it will be necessary to bring the public and private dimensions of belief much closer together. We have found it too easy to keep our difficulties and doubts hidden away, whether in the depths of the individual consciousness, in our private discussions, or on our bookshelves.
This project is not intended as a theoretical critique of evangelicalism. It is an attempt to understand anew the ‘good news’ that is the legacy of the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. But the need to understand anew arises because there are, I think, serious structural flaws in the edifice of the modern evangelical mind. In this section we will attempt to identify these flaws and suggest some general corrections and adjustments that might be made to the way in which Christian truth is commonly understood and articulated.
Speaking in code
Evangelicalism has always defined itself by means of a dogmatic and highly religious rhetoric. This rhetoric appears most clearly in the various statements of faith that evangelical churches and institutions adopt. But it is not confined to doctrinal texts. The peculiar language of evangelical faith manifests itself across the spectrum from the heightened language of worship and prayer to ordinary Christian speech. Given this pervasiveness we should regard it as representative of a whole way of thinking which embodies and articulates the essential content and character of what we call ‘evangelical Christianity’. In effect, what we wish to identify here is that form of social discourse which specifically differentiates the body of committed believers from other social groups. For convenience we will refer simply to the Code, using the capitalization to mark this as the particular ‘code’ of evangelical discourse.
The Code of evangelical discourse provides the intellectual infrastructure and resources by which a person relates to the world specifically as an evangelical. We neither interpret nor address the world directly. We do so through a set of culturally determined rules of expression and argumentation. In other areas of social engagement other codes may apply, and for the most part we switch quite easily from code to code as we move, say, from the business environment to the scientific to the religious.
The Code is a matter of public commitment: its function and value are most apparent in the public sphere. Although it certainly shapes private thinking too, its influence is less secure, its role more ambiguous. A person’s private thinking may sometimes diverge quite significantly from the public discourse to which he or she professes adherence. This may simply be the means by which we cope with the peculiar stresses of maintaining the validity of the Code; it becomes very easily, however, a matter of hypocrisy.
1. What the Code does
i) It organises and prioritises ideas and values. It determines, for example, that beliefs about the resurrection of Christ are more important than beliefs about the role of women in church leadership. It sorts information into different categories - facts about the world, facts about God - and assigns different truth values to these categories. It provides the protocol, the rules and etiquette of debate, by which we negotiate different opinions. Divergent views are harmonised, brought into equilibrium; seriously deviant positions are isolated and eventually expelled.
ii) The Code provides a shared terminology, a common dialect, that gives coherence and familiarity to thought; it creates fellowship and community. This coherence also has an important emotional aspect to it. Christian rhetoric is meant not only to persuade rationally but also to move people towards repentance or love or commitment or worship.
iii) The Code maintains a set of rules for analysing and responding to intellectual difficulties. For example, it provides a set of commonplace arguments for ‘resolving’ the problem of evil.
It seems likely that the Code developed in the first place in order to bridge the gap between the believer and the primary sources of faith. This gap is itself a complex phenomenon: the forces that have driven it open are hermeneutical, doctrinal and intellectual. There is, first, the problem of understanding a religious text that originated in an antiquated and alien culture. Secondly, there is the need to reduce the complexity and historical contingency of this text to a manageable, user-friendly body of teachings. Thirdly, there is the need to resolve the intellectual problems that inevitably arise when we attempt to give an ancient religious text such as the Bible a central and authoritative position in the modern mind.
The Code, therefore, forms an interpretive structure between the mind of the believer and the text of Scripture. It provides a synthesis or synopsis of biblical truth, the end-product of the process of sound biblical interpretation. But it also becomes, inevitably, a starting-point for interpretation. We generally find ourselves immersed in evangelical discourse before we make the attempt to read the Bible, and as a result it forms the grid by which we interpret and domesticate the difficult, unfamiliar ancient text. The Code functions as a tutor - Paul might have said a ‘pedagogue’ - guiding, but at the same time controlling, our understanding of the text. Often, of course, it becomes an excuse for not reading the text at all.
2. The rules for relationships
As an extension of this mediation between the mind of the believer (and potentially of the non-believer) and the written sources of faith the Code also establishes an interface - the rhetoric and ground rules - for other significant relationships, particularly the relation of the believer to God, to other believers, and to the world.
i) The Code provides the language of worship and prayer. It generates the practical forms - the songs, the formal and informal liturgies, the methods of personal devotion, the contexts for prayer - through which we relate to God. It defines a protocol for ‘approaching the throne of God’. It contains a catalogue of appropriate emotional responses to God, warnings against false conceptions of God, criteria for determining what constitutes a valid and effective spiritual life, standard diagnoses and remedies for when the spiritual life breaks down.
ii) How Christians relate to one another is also to varying degrees a function of the Code. We may find ourselves under pressure to express sentiments with which we are not entirely comfortable using language that sounds distinctly unnatural. The Code is used to distinguish insiders from outsiders, the spiritually adept from the non-spiritual, the panjandrums and pundits of evangelicalism from the ignorant masses.
iii) The Code also mediates, finally, between the believer and the world. It interprets what we encounter around us, it answers the questions for us. It has the purpose of maintaining the plausibility of serious Christian commitment within a hostile, or at best indifferent, intellectual environment.
To some extent the Code simply provides an alternative to the prevailing rationalist discourse, an account of things that is more compatible with a theistic and biblical world-view. This alternative discourse may co-exist with rationalist discourse or it may endeavour to displace or exclude it. Creationism is a subset of the Code that aims to displace current secular explanations of cosmological and biological and anthropological origins. Other evangelicals, however, are happy to view the biblical account of creation as essentially a mythical narrative, running parallel to the scientific story, that aims to answer a different set of questions. Sometimes the Code may engage more constructively with other discourses - in the manner, for example, in which evangelical thought has drawn on popular psychology and psychotherapy on occasions. In other areas the Code remains largely silent. For example, while speculation that life might exist elsewhere in the universe plays a prominent role in secular discourses, it barely impinges on the Code.
What is wrong with the way I think?
Although other areas of life have their own distinctive discourses, the Code differs from most in that it is fundamentally at odds with the prevailing worldview. As an intellectual position it is insecure, exposed to attack on all sides from those who find the premises and claims of Christian faith either irrational or incredible. Unsurprisingly, this encourages a defensive mentality, a retreat into the closed loop of fundamentalism. Built into the code are various rationalizing strategies, defence mechanisms, which are designed to sustain it in the face of criticism. These strategies, however, can become problematic.
1. Problems of the closed loop
There is a strong reliance on the inner coherence of the Code and the emotive power of its rhetoric at the expense both of its relation to historical reality and of its engagement with other discourses and worldviews. Truth is handled almost entirely as a function of what is said, rather than as something that has to do with the relation between what is said and what actually is. Statements are judged to be correct primarily according to whether they are in agreement with other normative statements. We give up on the difficult and unsettling task of determining and articulating the inherent truthfulness of Christian beliefs, their openness to the real world of thought.
The normal procedure for rational enquiry makes truth the end-product - and generally only a provisional end-product - of a disciplined process of reasoning or experimentation. The Code, in effect, reverses the process. The believer is first told what to think. Reasoning is then permitted little more than the ancillary and emasculated function of seeking a plausible rationalization for the conclusion - a pseudo-rationality, characterized by short-cuts and evasions.
The Code turns in on itself, closing itself off from the domain of general rationality. It ceases to be subject to the checks and balances of critical thought; it becomes difficult to ask questions, difficult to probe. There is much in the Code that Christians have trouble making sense of - and probably trouble believing. But unless a convenient answer is readily available, questioning is discouraged and doubt is treated as the spiritual equivalent of the AIDS virus - the breakdown of a person’s spiritual immune system, probably as a result of spiritual promiscuity, making them a serious threat to the health of others.
The defensive mentality also means that the Code as a whole is strongly resistant to being updated. We are still attempting to navigate the world of biblical truth using a map drawn before the invention of modern cartographical techniques, before even the discovery that the world is round. But we have become so attached to this antiquarian relic that we are loathe to replace it with something more accurate. And if it means getting lost occasionally, so be it!
2. Loss of personal intellectual integrity
One symptom of the breakdown of intellectual integrity is the gap that opens up both at an individual and at an institutional level between public confidence and private doubt, between the simplistic affirmations of popular Christian culture and the hidden uncertainty and even anxiety that tend to arise when a person begins to think seriously about the grounds for faith.
People find themselves making a commitment to the evangelical enterprise for reasons other than the inherent truthfulness of Christian discourse. They believe because of a personal sense of the reality of God. They believe because of the attractiveness and support of Christian community. They believe inspite of the lack of credibility - and to maintain that belief they must suspend their critical judgment, either because they are afraid that they will bring the house of cards tumbling down, or because they fear being condemned by the ever-vigilant guardians of spiritual correctness, disqualified from ministry, ostracized from the company of the faithful. In other words, they are put under pressure to be dishonest.
This faculty of critical judgment, however, is our principal safeguard against being deceived. Admittedly, our capacity to discern the truth may be corrupted - by egotism, by prejudice, by ignorance, by the constant pressure to conform; and this may seem to justify running the Bible through the blender and spoon-feeding the believer with bland doctrinal pulp. But this is second best. We do not help the cause of truth by pretending that the difficulties are not there, or that they may be conjured away by waving the magic wand of faith. We do not bring people to spiritual maturity by suppressing the questions and doubts. In the long run, that is likely to stunt spiritual growth and engender neuroses.
A strong Code is bound to engender hypocrisy because it places much higher demands on those who are publicly committed to maintaining it. The church becomes increasingly dependent on the Code as a sort of public persona, a persona designed as much to impress (or suppress?) its members as to attract outsiders, and so the temptation arises to keep the dysfunctionality hidden away - the doubts, the moral failure, the spiritual inadequacy.
This is, in the effect, the old struggle between religion and grace. Evangelical religion has become a highly intellectualized affair, and the compulsion to conform to religiously mandated standards of behaviour has moved in an inward direction. But the basic issue is the same: we put our faith in the soundness of our discourse as a guarantee of righteousness; rather than stand naked before God, we wrap ourselves in the dogma and pieties of the Code.
3. Dissociation from the grounds of truth
The rhetoric of evangelical discourse is thoroughly biblical. Ironically, however, the prevalence and popularity of the rhetoric obscures a deeper disconnection from the literary and historical reality of the Bible. This disconnection is exacerbated by the need to reinforce the inner coherence of the Code. Coherence is generally attained at the cost of connectedness; contemporary relevance is achieved at the cost of historical reference.
The Bible is routinely misread in the interests of maintaining a semblance of consistency and orthodoxy or of artificially enhancing its credibility. While in principle evangelicalism attributes the highest authority to Scripture, in reality it is often the Code, with all its commonplace presumptions and beliefs and arguments, with its articles of faith and its four spiritual laws, with its dictionaries and commentaries, that decides how Scripture is to be read and expounded. Instead of asking, ‘What does this text actually say?’ we ask, ‘What is this text supposed to say?’ The Bible is read through the grid of post-biblical doctrinal formulations. Scripture is twisted - albeit with the best intentions - to conform to our simplistic preconceptions.
There is the further danger that we come to think that familiarity with this rhetoric and participation in these forms is the means by which the life of faith is activated. In fact, there is a strong tendency to suppose that assent to the content and rhetoric of the Code is the life of faith. Faith, in other words, is reduced to belief. What drives this reduction is the fact that belief is more concrete, more easily demonstrated, more easily verified, than faith. It is relatively simple to measure conformity to the Code, more difficult to evaluate either one’s own or another’s love or faith or truthfulness.
This has serious implications for the project of Christian discipleship, which can become little more than an exercise in cultural assimilation. Because the Code is so central to the management of Christian life, a great deal of effort goes into learning the language and mannerisms and procedures prescribed by it, and in practice this becomes a substitute for helping people either to know God or to serve God. When faith becomes problematic, the answer is sought not directly, through engagement with God, but by resorting to the Code with its rather too easy rationalization of the paradoxes of spiritual life. The assumption is that the intellectual machinery of the Code has broken down and must be repaired, not that a relationship has broken down, not that there has been an existential or spiritual failure - of trust or obedience or experience.
Finally, the Code may disconnect the mind of the believer from the world around. Either we allow our religious thinking to become compartmentalized, or we misrepresent to ourselves the seriousness of the intellectual challenge.
4. Truth is made inaccessible to outsiders
The gospel, which is a story about the accessibility of God, is made less accessible by the difficulty of entering into this closed loop of truth. The problem here is not that belief in Christ entails a radical change of thought - that is unavoidable. It is rather that the wrong kind of change is demanded, a shift not within the sphere of reality with which a person is familiar but from one sphere of reality to another. When it becomes too difficult to maintain the credibility of the Christian story within the common sphere of rationality, an artificial sphere of rationality is constructed - a glasshouse.
This allows the story to be told and believed, but to the outsider this sphere is much more akin to fantasy or fairy story than to the real world. Much contemporary criticism of Christianity is aimed at breaking down - or deconstructing - this artificial sphere, this world of make-believe truth. To many this has been shocking, as iconoclasm has always been shocking; but it has had the very salutary effect of forcing the church to reconsider the worldly relevance of the gospel, the credibility of the Christian story within the common sphere of rationality. It should not be the responsibility of the outsider to enter the loop in order to believe. It should be the responsibility of the church to relocate the gospel on the ground of everyday, secular rationalism - so that God may be made accessible. That, of course, will have some serious implications for how we tell the story.
The mathematical arguments for the existence of parallel universes are arcane in the extreme. Ordinary people can get a rough idea of how the whole thing is supposed to work, but we are certainly not in a position to judge whether, for example, the scientific ‘myth’ which describes how a whole new universe might be squeezed from a black-hole, like a child blowing a soap bubble, is true or even vaguely plausible. For the most part we may be sceptical, even incredulous, but we have come to trust scientists enough, and to distrust our common-sense conclusions about the world enough, not to dismiss these fantastic notions out of hand. Whatever the foibles and prejudices of individual proponents, we sense that such speculation merely pushes the boundaries of an entirely legitimate search for understanding.
No less arcane are the claims of astrologers that our lives are influenced by the movements of the planets against the backdrop of the constellations. Although attempts have sometimes been made to provide a scientific rationale for the superstition, the astrological myth presupposes a set of truth conditions very different from those which apply to the scientific myth of parallel universes. In the end, astrology is ‘true’ only because some people persist in claiming it to be true despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. The theory of multiple universes, on the other hand, remains in principle subject to some sort of empirical or theoretical verification (or falsification) - unless of course, it should be adopted by some religious group or other as a tenet of faith, which in all likelihood has already happened.
The question that confronts us is whether, when we assert the truthfulness of Christian beliefs, we resemble more the cosmologists or the astrologers. The point is not that Christianity ought to be provable, anymore than we should expect irrefutable empirical evidence for the existence of parallel universes. It is rather that the ‘theory’ or ‘myth’ of Christianity should be handled truthfully, with intellectual integrity, with a sense of how problematic our treasured notions appear in the cold light of unbelief - which means that we cannot bring out the big stick of dogmatic affirmation every time rational criticism comes knocking at the door.
i) Dogmatism still has to do with how things actually are. Although it is always possible to circumvent the process of validation by appeal to a transcendent authority, in the end we have to do with the same either-it-happened-or-it-didn’t reality. We may wish to affirm as a matter of revealed truth that Jesus walked on the surface of the Sea of Galilee, but that does not exempt the event from more rational forms of appraisal. No matter how miraculous it was, it still happened in the real world, was observed and talked about by real people. Faith may give us grounds and motivation for believing but it does not make the story that has been handed down to us any more or less true. Dogmatism only tends to reinforce the schizophrenia of the Christian mind-set. If the truthfulness of the story about Jesus walking on the water is taken to rest on faith, it is likely to be classified as a rather different type of event to the murder of Julius Caesar, for example, the truthfulness of which is a matter of historical and literary enquiry. These different events then tend to generate epistemologically distinct worlds, and the credibility problem looms. Again, we are not claiming that either of these events may be objectively verified. The complaint is rather that the manner in which the church commonly thinks and speaks about the facts of faith short-circuits the normal procedures of rational enquiry - by ignoring the difficulties, for example - and that this, in the end, must undermine the plausibility of the message. Ultimately the commitment to truthfulness must make us suspicious of dogmatism, however much we may be convinced that Christian truth is of an absolute and immutable nature.
ii) It is doubtful, in any case, whether the sort of dogmatism that today is used to reinforce the claims of Christian truth is endorsed by the Bible itself. There is simply not the degree of reflection upon itself that might give rise to an assertion of intrinsic authority. Truth in the Bible is relational and experiential; it is also strongly contextualized. It is determined both by the nature of the relationship of people to God, expressed particularly in terms of covenant, and by the concrete circumstances within which a statement is made. This is not to say that truth never has a propositional character, but that propositional statements are rarely made abstractly or systematically, as though such truth existed independently of the endeavour to grasp the reality of a living God in the midst of life. Propositional statements constitute a highly focused and restricted end-point in the process of interpreting and communicating what has been experienced. It is not clear that the process can be reversed so that an authentic experience of God is generated by propositional statements of truth.
iii) It is consistent with the gospel to make it available on the home ground of the unpersuaded. In a sense, perhaps, to submit Christian truth to rational enquiry is a concession to those who do not have faith, an aspect of becoming all things to all men (1 Cor.9:19-23). This is not to make either modern rationalism or postmodern irrationalism the final arbiter of truth, Christian or otherwise. Rational enquiry is not an infallible method but a dialectical process of affirmation and revision - often a very chaotic process, offering no more than provisional statements regarding the ‘truth’ of a particular state of affairs. Truth is truth. In the end, rationalism can do no more to suppress truth than faith can do to engender it.
iv) Paradoxically, dogmatism tends to encourage an intolerant and disputatious pluralism. If one group can lay down the law regarding absolute truth, so can the next. Truth must be allowed to stand some way apart from all our arguing and pontificating, like some elusive and rare creature, kept in view by our discourse, but not snared and tied down.
It is a primary objective of this work, therefore, to re-establish the intellectual credibility of evangelical discourse, to bring about a reconvergence of the public and private spheres of thought, to seek to apply consistent standards of truthfulness across the whole spectrum of thinking done by committed Christians, to ground the preached gospel in the honest and critical struggle to understand what happened in the life of Jesus.
Much of the necessary groundwork for renewal has already been laid by evangelical scholarship - in rediscovering, for example, the historicity of Jesus - but it has had very limited impact on popular discourse. The scholars are faced with a quandary. A more critical, thoughtful approach to the grounds of faith is bound to open up a gulf between scholarship and popular Christian discourse, to the extent that one will appear dangerously innovative and the other hopelessly naïve and out-of-touch. A tug-of-war will get us nowhere: the most likely outcome is that the rope will break. Scholars and evangelical intellectuals (if the term is not an oxymoron!) will have to infiltrate a complacent and facile evangelical discourse and subvert it from the inside - though no more than popular discourse will have to subvert scholarship in the interests of spiritual relevance.
It is an interesting thought-experiment to imagine what would have happened if the early Jewish Christians had been driven from Jerusalem into the desert. What if, under threat of destruction from an invading Roman army, they had concealed their writings in caves and then, like the sectarians of Qumran, had disappeared off the screen of history? And suppose that nineteen hundred years later those writings were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd boy and fell into the hands of a culture that had never known the Christian church. What would that culture make of them? We can hardly subtract the influence of Christianity from modern Western culture, even from modern secular rationalism. But this is only a thought-experiment: how would people react to these writings and their claims about a Jewish teacher called Jesus without all the intellectual baggage of the Code, without the preconception that this a definitive story about God, perhaps without much of an idea about God at all?
i) The Code regards the truthfulness of the Bible as a premise, a self-evident postulate, vouchsafed by the simple fact that this is sacred text, the Word of God, as though it carried an irrevocable and unquestionable divine imprimatur. The challenge is to strip the biblical texts of this aura of infallibility, shut down the defensive shield of dogmatism, so that the texts become again what they always have been - a collection of miscellaneous documents generated by a not entirely coherent, ancient religious tradition and by a sectarian movement in the process of breaking away from it.
ii) An appreciation of the truthfulness of Scripture must be based on, must begin with, an understanding of the place of these texts within history. This means taking into account their restricted frame of reference, the historical particularity of the issues addressed, and their inherent limitations as sources of information about what actually happened. It also means taking historical-critical scholarship seriously: we cannot legitimately talk about the events of the Bible as history without in principle making use of the same historical-critical methodologies that we apply to other ancient documents. If in the process the biblical texts acquire the status of Word of God, it is as an emergent property, inseparable from the personal discovery that there is something valid, something real, something compelling, in the project of the kingdom of God.
iii) Then, of course, it is important that a renewed reading of Scripture be allowed to reshape the tradition, revise the popular, user-friendly, standard definition of faith that provides the practical point of reference for both insiders and outsiders. Here is perhaps where the greatest need lies - for the whole of Christian life to be wrenched into a new alignment with the reality of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Not a superficial reorganization of data but a serious low-level reformatting of the hard drive!
For most purposes truth has to do with the functioning of a three-way correspondence between what is said, what is thought, and what is. This is by no means an uncomplicated epistemological model. What is thought cannot easily be communicated other than through speech; and we know what is only by thinking about things and by articulating those thoughts through speech. We should think of the model, therefore, as a pragmatic, instructive device by which we endeavour to correct certain naïve assumptions about the nature of language and construct a more reasonable, more plausible, account of things. In fact, a number of important corollaries may be drawn from the model.
i) Many of the difficulties regarding the plausibility of Christian truth arise because the relationship between speech, thought and reality has become too inflexible and mechanistic. We forget the uncertainty of speech, the inexactness of thought, and suppose that language is a more accurate and stable vehicle for truth than it really is - hence our over-dependence on the Code. Truth lies not in words alone but in the interaction between speech, thought and reality. We acquire truth not simply by reading it off the page, as a supermarket scanner reads a bar-code, but by entering into the dynamic of this interaction. This is the act of interpretation - it entails human responsibility.
ii) We encounter a particular problem when the state of affairs described belongs not to the empirical realm but to a transcendent or ideological dimension. Jesus’ death at the hands of the Romans outside Jerusalem belongs to the empirical realm. But to speak of this as an atoning death introduces an ideological element; this is a matter of theological interpretation. It is cast as a statement about reality, but this is a ‘reality’ that is virtually indistinguishable from what is thought. For the purposes of this project we will call this type of speech ‘myth’. It is the theological overlay, that interpretive layer of meaning that is superimposed on empirical reality, ordinary experience. The term is not used pejoratively. It is not intended to bring into the question the truthfulness of what is said; nor does it necessarily mean that the statement or story is to be interpreted non-literally. It simply draws attention to the fact that statements about what is invisible (‘Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father’) or unknown (‘Christ will come again’) are very different to statements (historical, personal, scientific) about normal empirical reality. Traditionally, of course, in the Christian context this sort of myth would be described as ‘revelation’. But ‘revelation’ is one of those self-authenticating terms that pre-empts the process of enquiry. By using the term ‘myth’ we emphasize that this is, at bottom, human speech about God.
iii) The instability of language appears not only at the epistemological level. It is also a problem of rhetoric. On the one hand, language may be used figuratively - that is, in a deliberately ambiguous or indirect manner. But rhetoric is more than simply the use of stylistic devices; it is also the use of argumentation. We may define argumentation quite broadly to mean the development of thought in a text - the plot of a narrative or the more logical structure of an argument.
The basic problem is that, under the influence of the Code, we expect New Testament argumentation to conform to an abstract systematic theological schema. We read according to the Code. What we overlook is the contingency of the argumentation - the rhetorical context in which the argumentation arose and which must be taken into account if it is to be properly understood. This rhetorical context has a number of different components: the historical circumstances and horizon within which the text arose, the personal situation of the writer or speaker, the role that the text played in debate or controversy.
iv) The model allows us to refocus on the what is of truth rather than the what is said. The Code becomes transparent again and we can see what lies beyond it. The myth and ideology of salvation are not made redundant, the theoretical postulate of atonement is not abandoned, but we look through these formulations and see a reality which they represent but with which they are not identical. The reality of salvation has been projected on to the glass screen of human understanding, but the image on the screen is not the reality, nor is it properly the ‘truth’. If we step to one side, we can see the gap between the Code and the reality, we can see that there is an epistemological distance between them.
Although to a large extent Christian faith must be embodied in, and mediated through, words and propositions, we should not lose sight of the dynamic, experiential, existential dimension to the gospel. Evangelical Christianity, nervous about the threat from scepticism and rationalism, too often substitutes a belief system for life. The task of maintaining the belief system becomes an end in itself, much as the regulation of the Old Testament sacrificial system became an end in itself, an inherently meritorious activity, rather than the external expression of a viable covenantal relationship. The experience of God naturally gives rise to speech about God, and it is important that this speech be accurate. Doctrine is a distillation of accurate speech about the experience of God. But it is much harder to make the process run in reverse. Doctrine does not so easily induce life, it does not so naturally generate the experience of God. The Spirit gives life, but the letter kills, no matter how accurate the letter may be.
The Code is currently a conceptual, systematic, doctrinal structure. Christianity, however, is essentially a historical and existential commitment. The Code, therefore, needs to be restructured around the historical continuity with the agenda of Jesus Christ. It needs to be structured diachronically rather than synchronically. This will entail a different rhetoric, different imagery, different priorities - a pervasive commitment to a historical, contextualized, realistic model of Christian faith.
Post-evangelicalism describes, and proposes solutions for, many of the perceived shortcomings of modern evangelical Christianity. It is of obvious interest to us, therefore, and should be evaluated in some detail. Here I will simply mention some general areas of concern regarding its relation to more traditional forms of evangelicalism.
1. In what sense does this movement intend to be post-evangelical? Post-evangelicalism is to evangelicalism what, in many respects, post-modernism is to modernism. Just as the term post-modernism fixes ‘modernism’ as a particular historical and cultural state of affairs, so ‘post-evangelicalism’ appears to fix ‘evangelicalism’ as a particular historical and cultural movement. But, of course, post-modernism is also a very ‘modern’ phenomenon: modernism necessarily updates itself; it sloughs off the old restrictive skin, and for a while appears new and original again. In a similar way, post-evangelicalism does not simply leave evangelicalism behind. It may turn out to be no more than a modish dead-end. More likely it is symptomatic of cultural and intellectual changes that post-evangelicalism itself – insofar as such a self-conscious entity exists – only imperfectly understands. But in any case, evangelicalism, as a theological commitment to the person of Jesus and to the evangel, will always be up-to-date. Post-evangelicalism, in the end, will either prove to be only a renewal of evangelicalism or it will become something else entirely.
2. Post-evangelicalism presents both a critique of evangelicalism as a stifling and immature intellectual system and an alternative epistemology, one that is very suspicious of certainties. The question is whether it can offer, or even whether it intends to offer, a coherent theological and epistemological alternative to evangelicalism. The critique has opened up a new door for many disaffected evangelicals, but on the other side of the door are many different paths and it is not clear which, if any, of these paths is the ‘right’ one. If post-evangelicalism remains true to its post-modern proclivities, then the likelihood is that there will be no correct way to represent the truth about Jesus Christ in the world.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it poses two serious problems, one theoretical, the other practical. It seems to me, first, that to be understood and communicated properly the gospel requires a coherent and shared epistemology – essentially a more or less objective and realistic grasp of the truth about Jesus Christ. At least, I think that the most appropriate response to the narrow and neurotic epistemology of modern evangelicalism is not a broadening of options but a more focused emphasis on something like historical-critical realism – not just any truth but a more open and intellectually confident approach to the truth that evangelicalism has always kept locked away in the safe of dogmatism.
Secondly, without a coherent understanding of what constitutes truth I suspect that post-evangelicalism will find it increasingly difficult to address the question of what the ‘gospel’ is and how it determines the faith and life of the church. Evangelicalism has been successful largely because it has given a rather simple and consistent answer to those questions. A post-evangelical church that outgrows that simplicity may find that it no longer has the same emotive and rhetorical resources to draw upon. That, I think, would be regrettable.
3. Building on this concern, I have some doubts about how post-evangelicalism will deal with some of the basic Christian parameters, especially those such as corporate worship, intercession, and evangelism which have been central to evangelicalism?s self-understanding. My fear is that post-evangelicalism will be so absorbed with the task of differentiating itself from evangelicalism, so focused on the spiritual needs of disaffected believers, that it will be unable to embrace these central commitments. Will post-evangelicalism ever become the big tent? Or will it remain an outpost on the fringe of things?a first-aid tent for the victims of intellectual asphyxiation?
4. ‘Post-evangelical’ as a defining concept is even less meaningful to the uninitiated than the term ‘evangelical’. That so much of the current debate revolves around these esoteric notions is indicative of the extent to which the church is preoccupied with the convoluted workings of its own digestive system. As with so many theological and ecclesiological discussions, the church has lost touch with external cultural and intellectual reality.
Michael Cooper is assistant professor of Christian Ministries in the School of Biblical and Religious Studies at Trinity International University and has begun research on the resurgence of Paganism in western society for his PhD dissertation in the Intercultural Studies Program at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Abstract
Cultural fragmentation, pluralization and globalization have raised the issue of Christian identity in fresh ways. These factors, along with the explosive growth of theologically conservative Protestantism worldwide, have prompted many to ask what it means to be “evangelical Christians.” Western evangelicalism tends to define itself in terms of the Reformation. Drawing upon the work of Alister McGrath, Kwame Bediako and Thomas Oden this essay will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of defining evangelicalism in terms of the 16th century Reformation. Then, the essay will consider the missiological implications of the issue.
Introduction
Cultural fragmentation, pluralization and globalization have raised the issue of identity in fresh ways. These factors, along with the explosive growth of theologically conservative Protestantism worldwide, have prompted many to ask what it means to be “evangelical Christians.” One religious informant coming from a Christian background describes her understanding of Christianity as practiced in the States:
When I think of the image of Jesus Christ’s message that I got over the course of my life, that worldly power doesn’t matter very much, that forgiveness and leaving judgements [sic] to God makes things easier on YOU, never mind your enemies, that it’s more important to follow the spirit of the law than its letter, that love is important, all I can think is that Christianity has come a long way from that. Christianity, at least in this country, has become judgemental [sic] and power-hungry and controlling and fear-based.
Homosexuals are going to Hell if they don’t change their ways, let’s legislate our beliefs and practices into law, drinking, dancing, card playing, and birth control are no-nos, if you’re a bad enough person you’ll go to Hell when you die, these are all positions I perceive Christianity to take these days. It’s become a fear-based religion, but I don’t think it started out that way. What happened? How did a religion that was supposed to focus on love become so “crabbed in” in spirit? And how, if judgements [sic] are supposed to be left to God, did it become so judgemental [sic]?[1]
This is not uncommon. Consider the statement by another religious informant coming from a Christian background as well:
What is Christianity today? The teachings have been replaced with fear. The fear has created anger. Christians are told not to question, but have faith. Christianity is a way of controlling the masses and was design [sic] that way from Constantine on down. I believe if people were given the opportunity to dig deeper and have access to all the Gospels and all the writing that have been considered heresy and the churches promoted it, we would be a happier and less aggressive people. And in all fairness, I see the same problem with all exclusive religions. I think if Jesus came back today he would be very disappointed in what has been developed in his name.[2]
The perception of western Christianity by non-western Christians is not unique either. The fifty delegates of the 1982 Third World Theologians’ Consultation held in Seoul correctly and graciously recognized that the western approach to theology is couched in the Enlightenment and is incapable of articulating its theology in a way that meets the needs of people living in contexts of “religious pluralism, secularism, resurgent Islam or Marxist totalitarianism.”[3] To these evangelical Third World theologians, if evangelical theology is to be efficacious it must be liberated from “captivity to the individualism and rationalism of Western theology….”[4]
The perception of western Christianity by western Christians has recognized this tension. Wilbert Shenk, Lesslie Newbigin, Oliver Davies, David Cornick, as well as others consider Western Christianity to be out of touch with the growing questions confronting post-Christian people.[5] Increasingly, Western Christianity is viewed as patriarchal, unconcerned about the environment, dichotomizing sacred and secular and as privileging reason above imagination.
Western theology has become “increasingly detached from ecclesial reality and cultural context.”[6] Western Christianity has been characterized as having an emphasis on the primacy of the male as normative for humanity. Similarly, it is characterized by its emphasis on reason at the expense of the imagination, not to mention its disregard for nature in the name of progress.[7]
This causes me to ask the question, “What is and who defines evangelical Christianity?” This essay will draw upon the work of Alister McGrath, Kwame Bediako and Thomas Oden in discussing the strengths and weaknesses of defining evangelicalism in terms of the 16th century Reformation. The conclusion will discuss the missiological implications of formulating an “evangelical identity” based upon the Reformation.
Overview of the Discussion According to McGrath, Bediako and Oden
Theology attempts to answer the questions of what and why we believe as we do. In answering those questions, theology forms the basis of who we are as Christians, or, in other words, it provides a sense of identity. That identity, while being worked out for the Christian theologically, is expressed within a cultural context. Thus, the expression of Christianity in a particular context is to some degree a result of the search for a meaningful identity that relates theology and culture. Three notable theologians approach this issue in different ways and it is to these approaches we now turn.
Alister McGrath
In 1995 Alister McGrath published Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity as a critique of the evangelical movement. The purpose of the book is to help the evangelical community be aware of strengths and weaknesses in the evangelical movement that has its roots in the Reformation. Motivated by the conviction that the movement has a continuing role to fulfill, McGrath hopes to open a dialogue in the worldwide community of evangelicalism.
McGrath’s historical overview of the movement defines it in terms of the Reformation. He believes that it is essential for today’s evangelicals to know their history in order to insure that the same mistakes made in the past will not be repeated. Hence, through historical awareness evangelicals will have a deeper appreciation for the movement’s distinctives and for the non-evangelicals attraction to it. Appealing to James I. Packer, he suggests that correct evangelical theology can only be found in the Reformation and consequently, it is this theology that will preserve evangelicalism.[8]
The rootedness of evangelicalism in the Reformation is important to McGrath because of what he sees as the fragmentation of the movement. It is the very diversity of evangelicalism that draws him to the assertion that there is a danger of losing identity and corroding doctrine. However, according to McGrath, evangelicalism is unified in six overarching convictions and it is the holding of these convictions that will assure the preservation of evangelical identity in the midst of diversity.
1. The supreme authority of Scripture as a source of knowledge of God and a guide to Christian living.
2. The majesty of Jesus Christ, both as incarnate God and Lord, and as the Savior of sinful humanity.
3. The lordship of the Holy Spirit.
4. The need for personal conversion.
5. The priority of evangelism for both individual Christians and the church as a whole.
6. The importance of the Christian community for spiritual nourishment, fellowship and growth.[9]
While these six convictions are foundational to McGrath’s understanding of evangelicalism there are variations between evangelicals. These variations occur in at least three manners. First, evangelicals differ on the emphasis of convictions. Second, the precise interpretation of the convictions is contingent on the traditions that evangelicals follow. Third, evangelicals may select additional convictions that are believed to be justified in Scripture and history.[10] These variations come as a result of the world-wide growth of evangelicalism and yet these variations contribute to the potential loss of identity.
McGrath’s answer to the potential loss of identity is summarized in his statement, “The future belongs to those who can relate the heritage of the past to the realities of the present.”[11] Therefore, an evangelical identity can be conserved and nourished as it rediscovers its roots and it is here that McGrath suggests that the New Testament and sixteenth-century Reformation are essential.[12]
Kwame Bediako
The Ghanaian theologian, Kwame Bediako, sees the value of understanding Christianity history in order to address the questions of modern Christian identity. He looks at four apologists of the Christian faith in the second century A. D. for examples of how the early church wrestled with the question of identity. In his 1992 book, which consisted of his doctoral dissertation, Theology and Identity: The Impact of Culture upon Christian Thought in the Second Century and Modern Africa Bediako suggests that the formation of theology takes place in the cultural context of Christianity’s search for self-understanding.
Bediako articulates that the Graeco-Roman culture looked at early Christianity as a superstitious sect of Judaism. As the church grew, it increasingly took on more of a Gentile character and brought Christianity to the attention of the empire. The Roman identity was deeply tied to the nation and the religion of the nation. While Judaism was to some degree tolerated in the Roman Empire, Christianity was viewed as out of step with society and more importantly as un-Roman. Consequently, Christians in the empire were looked upon as a “third race.” To Christians, however, the idea of a “third race” undermined their identity and continuity with antiquity.
By the second century, philosophy began to replace religion as the dominant aspect of the intellectual and spiritual life of the educated. The rise to prominence of philosophy suggested the need for conversion from a “lower” standard to a “higher” standard of life. Christians, considering that the Roman religion was untrue, began to see a continuity with philosophy as it posited the need for conversion. As a result, Christians hoped to reconcile philosophy with their own teaching. The conversion idea suggested by the philosophical movement of the time gave Christianity legitimacy in its confrontation of classical Paganism with a superior belief system.
Utilizing the works of Tertullian, Tatian, Justin and Clement of Alexandria, Bediako posits that Christian self-understanding began to take form in varying degrees in relation to its discontinuity and continuity with the cultural milieu of the time. Tertullian and Tatian provide an example of Christianity’s discontinuity with Graeco-Roman culture whereas Justin and Clement provide an example of its continuity.
Tertullian saw that Christianity had nothing in common with the culture. His discontinuity formula contrasted the divine revelation of Christianity with the human speculative system of Graeco-Roman culture. This is epitomized in his statement, “What has Jerusalem to do with Athens, the church with the academy?” Tatian saw Christianity’s exclusivity from culture based upon the truth of Christian tradition in contrast with the inherent error of the Greek. He demonstrated that Christianity’s antiquity in comparison to Greek philosophy gave it its own tradition and heritage apart from the Graeco-Roman culture.
Conversely, Justin was the first to attempt continuity between Christianity and Graeco-Roman culture. He saw that since Christianity had access to the illumination of the divine Word it stood in the tradition of Socrates’ true reason. Justin believed that Socrates’ true reason exposed the erroneous beliefs of Graeco-Roman religion. In this way, the conflict between truth and falsehood exemplified in Socrates’ struggle with his detractors mirrored Christianity’s struggle. Similarly, Clement of Alexandria understood Christianity as the fulfillment of Greek philosophy. In particular, he held that the philosophical ideas that were congruent with Christianity should be incorporated into its theology. Clement believed, due to the antiquity of Christianity, that Greek religion and philosophy was in actuality borrowing from Scripture.
Bediako suggests that the situation in contemporary Africa is not all that dissimilar to the situation of the Roman Empire in the second century; and he might be correct. What is compelling is his distancing of African Christianity from European Christianity. While he does not deny the impact of European Christianity on the continent, he suggests that modern missionary efforts have had a Judiazing effect on African Christianity.[13]
Thomas Oden
Thomas Oden suggests that if we are to understand Christianity’s original meaning or value, we must come once again to see it through the eyes of those who have had to struggle for it and maintain it. It is from the martyrs, saints and prophets of Christian history that we learn of the value of classical Christianity.[14] Oden proposes a paleo-orthodox theological agenda for the future of Christianity. He defines his agenda in three ways: (1) sacramentally by use of the baptismal formula, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; (2) liturgically by the celebration of the Eucharist; (3) confessionally in consensual interpretation of the Apostles’, Nicene and Athanasian creeds.[15]
Attempting to define orthodoxy in his agenda, Oden utilizes Vincent of Lérins’ (c. 431) consensual method of interpreting Scripture.[16] Vincent became known for his rule for determining orthodoxy, the Vincentian Canon. It is summarized as teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est. In utilizing the Vincentian Canon, Oden suggests that Christianity must recover the memory as defended by the Apostolic Fathers and defined by the Church Fathers during the first seven ecumenical councils. It must recover the apostolic consensus that “repeatedly challenged and transformed emerging modernities.”[17]
In his consensual approach Oden asserts that theology should not be looked at narrowly, but rather with boundaries. In fact, he believes that the rediscovery of boundaries will be the primary occupation of twenty-first century theology.[18] It is in the context of boundaries where theological reflection is best conducted. Those boundaries were initially set in the first five centuries of Christian history. To understand the doctors of the church is to understand the boundaries of consensual theology that was accepted by East and West.
Defining the boundaries of consensual theology is challenging. In the early church, heresy played a significant role in determining boundaries of orthodox theology. Theological issues, when taken to extreme, molded an understanding of what is or is not correct Apostolic Tradition that was believed everywhere by all. Etymologically, heresy is rooted in the idea of an assertive self-will. Heresy evolved from personal theological biases and offered the occasion to help define orthodoxy. It was in the context of those heresies influenced by diverse cultural presuppositions that the early church set out to assure apostolic continuity.[19] Therefore, the assertion is made that the early church attempted to anchor its theology in the Apostolic Tradition and propagated orthodoxy that was contextual and transcultural by nature.
But what seems apparently absent from Oden’s agenda is a missiological avenue for engaging culture. His agenda is primarily concentrated on recovering orthodox Christianity that was lost during modernity with the rise of Protestant liberalism, historical criticism and neo-orthodoxy. In spite of this, there is a growing interest on the part of evangelicals to return to classic Christianity as outlined by Oden’s call to the “consensual” tradition of the first millennium.[20]
In the Catholic Church itself, every care should be taken to hold fast to what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all. This is truly and properly “Catholic,” as indicated by the force and etymology of the name itself, which comprises everything truly universal. This general rule will be truly applied if we follow the principles of universality, antiquity, and consent. We do so in regard to universality if we confess that faith alone to be true which the entire Church confesses all over the world. [We do so] in regard to antiquity if we in no way deviate from those interpretations which our ancestors and fathers have manifestly proclaimed as inviolable. [We do so] in regard to consent if, in this very antiquity, we adopt the definitions and propositions of all, or almost all, the bishops and doctors.[21]
Motivated by Arianism and other influences that threatened orthodoxy, Vincent set forth the idea that correct theology is that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all. Rudolf Morris suggests that, “This principle, however, does not exclude progress or doctrinal development. But it must be progress in the proper sense of the word, and not a change.”[22] Vincent himself understood this progress as a maturing of doctrine within its own orbit rather than a creation of something different. The Vincentian Canon enjoyed centuries as a guiding principle in theological reflection.[23]
Strengths of an Evangelical Identity Based Upon the Reformation
As might be assumed based on the previous discussion, McGrath sees the strength of evangelicalism in its appeal to non-evangelicals. That appeal is the result of several indicators:
1. Failure of liberal Christianity.
2. Evangelicalism is historically orthodox Christianity.
3. Intellectual attraction to evangelicalism because it makes sense.
4. The attraction of the gospel.
5. Diversity of the evangelical church.
Bediako might suggest that evangelicalism’s missionary zeal is a strength. Granted, it was about 200 years before the missionary fervor of European Christians ignited. Nonetheless, evangelicalism is so called due to its focus upon the gospel ministry.
The solas (fides, gratia, scriptura, Christus, Deo gloria) of the Reformation would also be considered strengths. It was these ideas that offered correctives for the Catholic Church and distinguished the reformers from their detractors. The priesthood of the believers, as well, gave the reformers and those who followed the idea of personal obligation to God with personal responsibility in the ministry. In addition, the reformers confronted the culture of the day and challenged the practice of Christianizing pagan rituals.
In regards to the reformers challenge of culture, according to Van Rooy (1985), Calvin saw both a continuity and discontinuity in Christianity’s relationship to culture. Calvin’s interpretation of Romans 1 suggests that he saw a sense of deity in human minds and natural instinct. At the same time, Calvin believed that there was a gulf between what God revealed in nature and what he revealed in his Word.
Weaknesses of an Evangelical Identity Based Upon the Reformation
McGrath contemplates whether or not evangelicalism has lost its vision. He regards the impact of diversity in the movement as a potential weakness. Its diversity has highlighted the fact that evangelicalism is experiencing an identity crisis. That diversity has led evangelicalism to privatization. Due in part to the Enlightenment project and what Weber called the Protestant ethic, religion was taken out of the public realm. Faith became personal and private rather than corporate and public.
He goes on to state that the identity of evangelicalism is tied up in the West which makes it difficult to contextualize the Christian message in other cultures. He duly notes the tendency of evangelicals to insist on its traditions without regard to culture. This was played out on many occasions as evangelicalism spread from continent to continent often associated with the interests of the sending country. In a sense, Bediako is responding to this weakness as he addresses an African Christian identity based upon the second century apologist who sought a Christian self-understanding.
McGrath identifies the evangelical struggle for the meaning of spirituality as another weakness and reinforces the need for evangelicals to understand their heritage. Evangelicalism has tended to rely upon the current trends of eastern thought in order to find a suitable understanding of spirituality. While focusing attention towards the East, evangelicalism has negated its own heritage and has failed to handle the modern situation adequately. Yet, the evangelical identity proposed by McGrath is only five hundred years old. The issue confronting most continents as a result of the inability of evangelicalism to separate itself from the West and in particular from modernity is the exact issue confronting evangelicalism: Europe is searching for an identity in pre-Christian religions; Africa is searching for identity in African Traditional Religions; Latin America is searching for identity in native religions.
The weakness of the evangelical identity based upon the Reformation lies in its discontinuity with the rest of Christian history as suggested by Oden. The assertion that evangelicalism is tied to the Reformation suggests that all evangelicals everywhere should share the same convictions. This assertion simply cannot be supported since the Reformation was a response to the context of its time. Simply rooting evangelicalism in the Reformation negates the fact that evangelicals share the same history as the rest of Christendom.
Missiological Implications
As previously mentioned, the question that many people are asking around the world is the question of identity. The globalization that has resulted from the technological advancements of modernity has in one sense brought the world closer. However, in another sense it has caused people to lose a sense of connectedness with their cultures. The response has been a revitalization of the past. Oden and Bediako have picked up on this and are suggesting that Christians should look more seriously at their past as well.
McGrath believes that evangelicalism’s loss of identity is tied to a lack of historical understanding. He feels that a rediscovery of the roots of evangelicalism is key to the conservation of the movement. He reminds evangelicals that ecclesia reformata, ecclesia semper reformanda is important for this conservation. This being the case, evangelicalism should find its lost identity not only in the Reformation, but also in the history of world Christianity.
There is little doubt that evangelicalism has been attracted to modernity and that modernity has contributed to the rapid growth of evangelicalism. As evangelicalism has spread throughout the world it has encountered cultures that are extraordinarily different than the West. And yet as many have pointed out the evangelical church in the world reflects the evangelicalism of the West. While western evangelicals insist that their expression of Christianity is biblical there must also be an acknowledgement that the form of the expression is embedded in western culture.
This acknowledgement becomes increasingly important since western Christianity continues to dominate the mission world. In spite of the fact that Christianity is on the decline in general and evangelicalism in the west is not experiencing dramatic growth, Europe continues to send more missionaries than any other continent and the United States more than any single country. Yet, the majority of Christians are located in the non-Western world. Therefore, there exists a tremendous need for western evangelicals to allow evangelicalism to find its own expression in the countries where it has reached. Not all evangelical Christians have experienced the cultural context which gave birth to the Reformation and its unique expression of the faith.
As indigenous Christians are increasingly disappointed with the western expression of Christianity they are finding new ways to express their Christianity and to make it relevant for their contexts. What all this means missiologically is that evangelicalism might be experiencing a world-wide reformation. Western missionaries must not get in the way of these cultural expressions. Instead, western missionaries should take a learning posture as indigenous Christians find new ways to express a meaningful understanding of the gospel.
Christian missions must be as diverse as the people it is trying to reach. Given the diversity of the world, Christianity must rediscover its unique answer to ethnic groups. What is needed is a model of Christianity that engages ethnic identity on every level, not in order to conform the diverse identities of people to a set of religious doctrines, but understanding how the very diversity of people from different backgrounds leads to a more complete picture of humanity’s relationship to its Creator.
Bediako suggests that there are similarities between the second century cultural context and modern Africa. I would contend that there are similarities with other modern contexts as well; namely that Christianity is being worked out within specific cultural contexts with unique cultural expressions of the faith once passed down. The Reformation is one expression of how Christianity was worked out in Western Europe.
[1] Informant 1, Discussion group forum, 12 March 2003. Research being conducted by the author.
[2] Informant 2, Discussion group forum, 12 March 2003. Research being conducted by the author.
[3] Bruce Nicholls, ed., “Papers from the Third World Theologians’ Consultation, Seoul, Korea, 1982.” Evangelical Review of Theology 7, no. 1 (1983): 8-9.
[4] Ibid., 9.
[5] See Wilbert R. Shenk, “Recasting Western Theology: Impulses from the Non-Western World,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 24, no. 3 (2001); Lesslie Newbigin, “Can the West be Converted?,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research11, no. 1 (1987); Oliver Davies, “An Introduction to Celtic Spirituality,” in Celtic Spirituality, ed. Oliver Davies (New York: Paulist Press, 1999); David Cornick, “Iona, Glastonbury and Anfield: Aspects of a Common Tradition?,” Expository Times 109 (1997).
[6] Shenk, “Recasting Western Theology,” 98.
[7] Oliver Davies, “An Introduction to Celtic Spirituality,” 24.
[8] Alister McGrath, Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity, 1995), 116.
[9] Ibid., 55-56.
[10] Ibid., 85-87.
[11] Ibid., 112.
[12] Ibid., 115.
[13] Kwame Bediako, Theology and Identity: The Impact of Culture upon Christian Thought in the Second Century and Modern Africa (Oxford: Regnum Books, 1992), 251-252.
[14] Thomas C. Oden, “Classical Christianity Being Attacked by Fads,” Human Events 53, no. 30 (1993): 10.
[15] Thomas C. Oden, “So What Happens after Modernity? A Postmodern Agenda for Evangelical Theology,” in The Challenge of Postmodernism: An Evangelical Engagement 2d ed., ed. David S. Dockery (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 190.
[16] Thomas C. Oden, After Modernity … What? Agenda for Theology (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), 37.
[17] Ibid., 163.
[18] Oden, “Classical Christianity Being Attacked by Fads,” 13.
[19] Ibid., 12-13.
[20] Bradley Nassif, “New Dimensions in Eastern Orthodox Theology,” in New Dimensions in Evangelical Thought: Essays in Honor of Millard J. Erickson, ed. David S. Dockery (Grand Rapids: Intervarsity, 1998), 109.
[21] Vincent of Lérins. “Commonitorium,” translated by Rudolf Morris in The Fathers of the Church, ed. Ludwig Schopp. (New York: The Fathers of the Church, 1949), chapter 2.
[22] Rudolf E. Morris, “Vincent of Lérins: The Commonitories,” in The Fathers of the Church, ed. Ludwig Schopp (New York: The Fathers of the Church, 1949), 260.
[23] Oden, “Classical Christianity Being Attacked by Fads,” 11.
Hermeneutics is the science of the interpretation of texts. What principles of reading the Bible are appropriate for an emerging theology and how do we speak about truth in a postmodern context?
How to get at the truth
I have set out here, very briefly, what seem to me to be some of the key intellectual and practical commitments that need to be made if we are to achieve a more realistic Christian faith. The intellectual commitments are essentially matters of faith. They are an acknowledgement of the fact that Christianity has to do with a serious and real engagement with the God described in the biblical traditions and that this ‘Truth’ is not rational; it can be incorporated into Christian discourse only as a largely unargued presupposition. The practical commitments relate to the way in which the church handles the Truth that has been entrusted to it, how we ensure the ‘truthfulness’ of Christian discourse.
Each of these commitments needs in principle to be elaborated and defended, not merely abstractly but in the context of one or other of the various implicit dialogues in which we are involved. To assert, for example, that God exists brings into view a debate that is largely foreign to the biblical writings or, for that matter, to modern evangelical discourse. In relation to secular thought, however, such an assumption becomes extremely difficult, and in other contexts the claim that this God is almighty or personal introduces a different set of disagreements which are virtually impossible to resolve on any sort of rational or philosophical basis. Here, however, I only wish to outline some of the basic ideas or assumptions that underlie this work and which may not always be properly explained or justified.
1. The existence of an almighty God who interacts meaningfully and purposefully with his creation. It is appropriate to speak of a personal relationship, one of dependence and worship, with such a God.
2. A special ‘relationship’ between this God and the descendants of Abraham over a period of approximately 1400 years, out of which emerged the particular and (eschatologically) decisive option of Jesus as messiah and saviour. In accepting this, however, one must also accept that because of its historical particularism and religious favouritism this relationship is thoroughly problematic. This arrogation of a universal God, which is both religiously and philosophically offensive, cannot simply be ignored by the church: it must be part of Christian self-understanding.
3. The broad reliability of the biblical texts as a record and exposition of Israel?s experience of God. These texts I take to be generally amenable to informed scholarly interpretation, and indeed to intelligent lay interpretation given an adequate ‘historical-critical’ framework.
4. The belief that mankind, individually and corporately, is in need of ‘salvation’. This ‘salvation’ consists in the restoration of Israel as a unique people in which God dwells by his Spirit, and rather more importantly from our perspective, in the extension of membership of this people to the whole world on the basis of faith in Israel’s messiah. Salvation is through an apprehension of the grace of God and should not be allowed to degenerate into any form of ideological conditioning. What we are saved from is a fundamental (ontological) alienation from God, which manifests itself secondarily as human sinfulness.
5. The option of Jesus Christ, which has become since the resurrection in principle a universal option and which carries with it a real and final accountability. I take it to be inherently reasonable to assert, as a matter of faith, that the story about Israel’s messiah has an absolute applicability, and that in some real way all people will find that they must answer to God for their loyalties and behaviour.
1. A commitment to the Truth must be accompanied by a no less vigorous commitment to truthfulness in all respects. The evangelical church has become so sure of its grasp of ultimate Truth that in many respects it has stopped thinking. Such complacency must, in the end, undermine and bring into disrepute the Truth that the church seeks to uphold.
The concern for truthfulness covers all areas of thought and expression, but a special emphasis should be placed on how Scripture is used. On the one hand, dogmatic statements must be recognized as provisional - secondary to and contingent upon the much more complex and difficult content of Scripture. On the other, we should not allow faith to elevate Scripture above truth: faith can never make the assertions of Scripture either more or less true. Only on the basis of this sort of intellectual commitment can the larger, more controversial and offensive claims be made about the rightness of the biblical view of God and the uniqueness of Christ. The pursuit of intellectual integrity, moreover, should not be restricted to the evangelical intelligentsia; indeeed, the more pressing need at the moment is for the naked gospel of Jesus Christ to find expression in the churches. It is ordinary Christian discourse that cries out for integrity and credibility.
2. Traditional evangelicalism defines itself largely by means of its beliefs. A more appropriate self-understanding would construct itself around a lively sense of the historical and experiential reality (the practical commitment of baptism, the experience of the Spirit, the worship of God, the speaking of truth, the exercise of forgiveness, the search for unity) to which both Scripture and doctrine, in their different ways, point. The evangelical mind is too much in the grip of a stifling ideological, even mythological, commitment and needs to recover instead a sense of the reality of things.
3. A crucial requirement for reading the Bible well is that we consistently ask first what was being said to the original hearer or reader, and only once this has been established to ask in a rather critical and historically sensitive manner what is being said to us. The Bible is not a two-dimensional text from which an all-purpose, universal truth can be read by anyone at any time: it has historical depth, it is thoroughly contextualised, and this complicates things. The Christian mind must incorporate this third dimension, must reach back imaginatively to hear Jesus speak to Israel or Paul address ancient Christian communities. Dogmatism is a poor substitute for this work of the Spirit-filled, Christ-centred, imagination.
4. There must be a fundamental commitment to be able to proclaim?to learn how to proclaim?the kingdom of God with a sense of conviction and integrity. This cannot be taken for granted. Too many Christians are unable to speak about their faith because they struggle to find a way of speaking that does not sound puerile or implausible or fraudulent. The work of evangelism and apologetics has frequently been hamstrung by its reliance on irrationality and dogmatism - the hope that people will somehow come to believe despite the fact that what is said does not sound very believable. By embracing open standards of truth (and accepting the intellectual risks involved) we put ourselves in the position of being able to mount a more plausible defence of a Christ-centred worldview and a more compelling critique of secularism.
5. The church needs to develop a rhetoric that speaks both to insiders and to outsiders. The failure of the church to communicate to those on the outside is a further symptom of the loss of intellectual integrity and of the corruption of truth within evangelical thinking. Much can be done to mend the situation simply by learning to speak the truth about Christ to those who have not been innoculated with the presuppositions of evangelicalism.
6. If changes, perhaps quite deep changes, need to be made to the way in which we think and speak about our faith, this should not be to the detriment of a passionate and effective life in the Spirit. This life, this vitality, in its various manifestations, has been one of the best fruits of the modern evangelical movement. Perhaps more to the point, Christian discourse should always be prophetic, in the proper sense of the word. It arises as much from an engagement with God as from the interpretation of a text, and although modern prophecy is often either over-politicised or simply banal, I would argue that it remains a necessary part of Christian discourse. The church must find ways to speak directly from God - but this too must be done with integrity.
7. By restricting the ideological and cultural definition of evangelicalism we allow for the continuing possibility of a constructive and purposeful ecumenism. ?Evangelical? should always be a cross-denominational category, not a sectarian label; and an evangelical commitment should be open to finding Christlikeness not only across the spectrum of Christian traditions but also across the other cultural and social partitions that divide up the church.
Tim Parker
I first heard the Christian message over 20 years ago; at least that was when I was taken in by it. Little did I know it at the time, but my initial inclination was to ask legitimate questions as to the coherence and integrity, the intelligibility and
reliability of this person called Christ – my first tentative steps at doing theology. Nothing could be more central to theology proper than the posing of questions as to the nature (ontology) and veracity (epistemology) of the claims of Jesus to be a figure so important and unique that he is worthy of worship. After subsequent study along these lines, I cannot help noticing the habit of our local politicians here in Ireland to use the phrase ‘The reality is…’ (!). If this, the Incarnation, presents problems for Jews and Muslims ‘to get their heads around’, then why not also for Christians? In the setting of a college Christian Union I was taken aside by one whose Bible was well penned and shown respectfully just how Jesus’ relation to God is one of equality and not inferiority. Those few minutes were the beginning and end of my theological induction – even the non-biblical term, Trinity, was mentioned (!).
Little did I know at the time, nor subsequently at college, of the acres of print of early church debates concerning the understanding of Jesus which reached the clarity of credal statements (for example, the Nicene Creed) by the time of the 4th century. Yet there is today the analogous problem of the ‘alien’ message of God coming into a culture which is not, as then, God-moulded to receive such a strange message – today, especially, given the anti-intellectualism. It is the very newness and uniqueness of the message that requires the hearer to sweep away obstacles to belief and understanding. Special revelation, especially if one is going to base one’s life on it, demands not just assent to a few disconnected propositions but assured personal belief. Much of the point of religious reading is not just to sharpen our minds (reason) but to have a confidence in saying and doing that we would not otherwise have. Libraries become places of retreat where the shortness of time for intelligent conversation gives way to a different channel of communication! Only
while thinking and writing the last article here did I really begin to appreciate how the message of God’s love is bound up with reason, that reason is an aspect of love. Wherever we look, our thoughts are bound up with
relationships – natural, human and divine – so any notion of rationality is particularly important to the way it may help us to know God, or hinder our understanding. That brings one to the recent debates about the use of reason and the view of
postmodernism. Essentially I see the problem of postmodernism and the Christian message as one of the distrust in reason and a misunderstanding as to the place of culture under Christ – again, the latter amounting to a misuse of reason.
Reason and western culture
Goodness knows what are the acceptable criteria for rationality – not that I could begin to describe the conditions for thought in
pre-enlightenment, enlightenment and post-enlightenment periods. Since the word
postmodernism, so far as I understand, is an umbrella term, embracing all cultural spheres, and hence many different levels of meaning, the word does not fit neatly any one definition. It is more of a reactionary term, perhaps, one would say, with a distaste for the present/status quo and being reactionary – ie. without necessarily knowing how we got to the present state of affairs of dissatisfaction. So the problems to be addressed are all ones to do with (alien) Western Culture, its values, our way of life. Do we have a situation where modern culture influences the way we view God, with deleterious results, rather the case whereby God dictates cultural expression and organisation? Much resides on thinking out the doctrine of God. That is the real problem for postmodernism. To acquiesce in this is to accept pluralism, relativism, and more
besides – even anti-realism in philosophy. It is to place the religious within a
private sphere of truth. We find postmodernism in reaction to modernism, but what comes next in reaction to postmodernism? Are we not embracing the symptoms of a wider problem when using the word postmodernism instead of looking for the cause?
Dualism and culture
We can rephrase the problem as one primarily of dualism, cosmological, and epistemological
– ie. precursors to the formation of culture. To tackle the inroads of dualism is to make way for the unifying and reconciling message of the
gospel, set against a fragmentary schizoid secular, and even religious, culture. A reinvigorating of all of life, social, cultural, economic. (Here Christianity becomes a perpetual haunting of the lifestyles adopted unwittingly in our western culture). I think of the devastating attack on the American educational establishment by Allan
Bloom in ‘The Closing of the American Mind’; Melanie Philips’ provocative critique of the British educational scene in ‘All must have prizes’; Jonathan Sacks Reith lecture on ‘the Re-moralisation of discourse’; Sack’s debate about the public sphere in his ‘Future of Politics’ (compare his concern for the distortions of liberalism with modern-day illiberalism and the BBC TV program called ‘the Century of the Self’ in which the
policy-making of political parties is determined by the psychological form of focus group); the cosmological and epistemological background to the problem of disunity and fragmentation of
knowledge in the writings of Thomas Torrrance; not to mention the missionary writings of Leslie Newbigin.
The relevance of theology – going beyond the biblical text
As I asked elsewhere, how do we cope with the level of analysis and constant questioning Christ poses of us? Essentially, then, He is in the truth and we are in untruth! In the world of numbers it is rather like getting all people to appreciate, as non-engineers, the specific designs of bridges! It is not easy for the eye alone to appreciate the shape of say, a suspension bridge except on aesthetic grounds. But knowing God
also involves the language of reason, the rationality of word and number. Many of the attempts at reflection on our place in culture then could open ourselves to the fear factor, for we are in unchartered waters. If the Bible is relevant for all times and places, then the real relevance of the
biblical text is where the text leads off into the handling of theological difficulties of the present. This is surely where the biblically derived idea of repentance comes
in – the overcoming of personal weakness (sinfulness) and disinterest in the truth, his Light overcoming the darkness of fear and misunderstanding. Just as
mathematics is a wonderful language for the initiated, so too is theology. If theology is done in a repentant fashion and really open to the truth then it is an enabling subject helping us to see where we have put up arbitrary walls of division. For, after all, the message is one of wholeness, healing and reconciliation Yet even here I am reliably informed by (the writings of) Archbishop Rowan Williams that theology is really no use for helping us with problems! But this is surely not the case with a theology done with sufficient conceptual clarity as to lay bare before us difficult problems.
Repentant rethinking on cultural relations
For if Jesus represents before us the perfect vicarious human response to God, our High Priest, then the question of Who he is and the
question of ethical demands are intrinsically related. The confusions of our culture, ones of relationship, personal, social and economic, have transcendent causes residing in the very life and being of God – for he has gone through with the sharing of his very life with us. It is the eclipsing of God in Christ by our selves, a negation of his ultimate self-offering, which introduces into our thinking, the distortions of human will and subjectivity. In trying hard to work out, and do what is right in and for our culture, we act in self-justificatory ways.
I put to the test the idea that theological ways, as opposed to biblical chapter and verse treatment, has still much further to penetrate in the church. A group of local Presbyterian clergy were at a conference. In the
bookshop during an interval I asked a young clergyman whether he ever gave sermons about politics. His immediate response was that the Bible had nothing to say on the matter. This really says it all! For the whole civic realm, which we know God must care about deeply, becomes closed to Christian scrutiny and critique. On this view, all he could offer from the pulpit
for our socio-political problems was a stymied version of God’s love. No wonder, in this case,
that we try to avail of whatever help is at hand, from whatever sources.
Points of conclusion
As a result of the paucity of my experience or otherwise, I find that:
1. The active meditation on reason (God) in books can make one impatient with the ritualistic elements in Christian worship. Given the broad range and number of books available on every conceivable topic, like the feeding of any appetite, one’s boredom threshold can be considerably lowered! An eminent biblical scholar, C.E.B. Cranfield posed the question, why are we to take the Eucharist? His answer was simply that God commanded it. Unless one had been brought up in the tradition of animal sacrifice, the crudeness of the handling of the Eucharist symbols is nearly beyond belief, for me anyway.
2. By the notion of Lex orandi lex credendi, ie. the close affinity between what we believe (statement) and worship, I find a simple credal statement
as effective for the centering my thoughts on God as the introduction of a church setting.
3. The musical expression in worship is not necessarily anymore meaningful than the listening to a sermon or biblical reading.
4. Because book reading is a largely solitary activity it is easy to acquire a bit of obstinate individuality – probably one is still perceived to be slightly odd to like theology as a subject – so as pietist legalism (self-righteousness) fades into the background there is more of the ill-disciplined, ‘I shall do as I like’ feeling! This was a feeling that came rushing to the surface a while ago when I did a trial signing of a Christian dating agency. Despite the general level of education the degree of interest in theological engagement seemed terribly low. All seemed to have read the same best-sellers! I wished to ‘knock’ such apparent complacency and cliché as was written in the boxes used as selling points for the individual concerned.
5. Somehow if a lack of theological expertise is shown, one thinks that Christianity is irrelevant to life because it takes a compartmentalised view as opposed to a holistic view of life. For example, although there is nothing about GM crops in the Bible, God as the maker of all things and the one who keeps all things in existence surely has something to say on the matter.
6. In a crude sense Christianity is Christ, or at least the profession thereof. I am astonished that outside of the Church as a building it is rare to even hear the name of Christ mentioned by churchgoers. Does this reflect what I have been saying about the loss of confidence about who he is and what he has really done for us? To use the Biblical text is to follow the reference of the text to him who is its real subject, namely Christ. Christ is the essential
Schoolmaster – I like being made to think theologically as others are capable of showing me, to be tutored.
Five guiding principles in determining biblical orthodoxy
By Michael Cooper, Ph.D./ABD
Assistant Professor
Trinity International University
Deerfield, Illinois
The present discussion of postmodern theology raises a number of interesting
issues, not the least of which is the issue of a contextual theological
orthodoxy. The hallmark of evangelicalism has been its stance on the 16th
century reformation’s watchword sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola
fidei and yet postmodernity seems to threaten the very essences of
evangelicalism’s reliance upon Scripture as a source of doctrine and living.
However, is it possible that even as postmodernity threatens evangelicalism it
could broaden it as well? This essay will address five guiding principles to
ensure theological orthodoxy in a postmodern context.
Before approaching this subject one presupposition needs to be addressed. The
presupposition of a high view of Scripture is assumed. This high view of
Scripture is mitigated by three overarching principles of hermeneutics:
1. Since the Bible was written by human beings, it must be treated as any
other human communication in determining the meaning intended by the writer.2. Since Scripture is God-breathed and true in all its parts, the unity
of its teachings must be sought, and its supernatural elements recognized
and understood.3. Since Scripture is God-breathed, it is absolute in its authority for
doctrine and life. (McQuilkin 1992, 9)
Both Old and New Testaments constitute the plenary and verbal revelation of
God’s economy. The Old and New Testaments comprise a unity of understanding of
God’s intentions in human history. Critical analysis and interpretation of the
texts must not be separated. The critical analysis of the text includes, “textual
criticism, age and origin of the source, identification of authors, editors and
compilers, stylistic patterns, and the like” (Barrois 1974, 8). Similarly,
interpretation is defined as, “evaluating contents in relation to the
historical context, at determining what the source documents meant for their
contemporaries and how they were understood by later generations, at observing
the evolution, the deviations, and eventually the vanishing of traditions”
(Barrios 1974, 8).
With that presupposition in mind, the five principles under consideration
are:
1. Criteria for Determining Orthodoxy
2. The Vincentian Canon
3. The Circle of Sensibility
4. Heresy as Boundary
5. The Hermeneutical Community
Principle One: Criteria for Determining Orthodoxy
Stephen Bevans raises the issue of criteria for determining orthodoxy when
formulating contextual theologies. Utilizing the work of Schrieter, de Mosa and
Wostyn, Bevans describes five checks: First, a contextual theology must have
continuity with other theological formulations. This means that the validity of
a contextual theology rests in its consistency with contemporary and historical
theologies (Bevans 1992, 18).
Second, liturgical practices are the vehicle that moves orthodoxy to
orthopraxis. If the way we worship contradicts what we believe then the
contextual theology is not orthodox (Bevans 1992, 18). The opposite is also
true. Third, if the way we worship demonstrates what we believe then what we
believe is demonstrated by what we do. Hence, this criterion is that of
Christian orthopraxis (Bevans 1992, 19).
Fourth, a contextual theology must submit itself to verification by the
hermeneutical community. Bevans states, “Theology, even contextual theology,
is always dialogical” (1999, 19). The fifth criterion is whether or not the
contextual theology can constructively challenge other theologies. The idea here
is that authenticity of a contextual theology is measured by whether or not it
moves other theologies to reflect on “unthought of areas” (Bevans 1992, 19).
If there are so many divergent, and sometimes apparently conflicting
interpretations, how can we be sure that our understanding of our faith is
correct, that is, faithful to the Judaeo-Christian Tradition? Is it possible
to recognize the one faith in the different interpretations? Does pluralism
not become an ideology of adaptation when what is adapted or inculturated is
considered to be correct? Should we not, perhaps, re-introduce at least some
basic and universal truths, conceptually expressed and accepted as such?
(Bevans 1992, 18; quoting de Mesa and Wostyn)
These five criteria represent contemporary reflection on a historical
problem. While Bevans utilizes contemporary contextualizers of theology he
inadvertently leaves out the fact that the church has historically practiced
similar criteria for measuring orthodoxy. It is to this subject we now turn.
Principle Two: Vincentian Canon
The best attempts at formulating a biblical orthodoxy include a consensual
effort to understand the “historical continuity” of orthodox theology. At
this point, Vincent of Lérins’ (c. 431) conciliatory method of interpreting
Scripture is advanced. Vincent, a monk who lived in a monastery off the coast of
France, became known for his rule of determining orthodoxy, the Vincentian
Canon. It is summarized as teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus
creditum est.
In the Catholic [universal] Church itself, every care should be taken to
hold fast to what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all. This is
truly and properly “Catholic,” as indicated by the force and etymology
of the name itself, which comprises everything truly universal. This general
rule will be truly applied if we follow the principles of universality,
antiquity, and consent. We do so in regard to universality if we confess
that faith alone to be true which the entire Church confesses all over the
world. [We do so] in regard to antiquity if we in no way deviate from those
interpretations which our ancestors and fathers have manifestly proclaimed
as inviolable. [We do so] in regard to consent if, in this very antiquity,
we adopt the definitions and propositions of all, or almost all, the bishops
and doctors. (Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, Chapter 2)
Motivated by Arianism and other influences that threaten orthodoxy, Vincent
set forth the idea that correct theology is that which has been believed always,
everywhere and by all. Rudolf Morris suggests that, “This principle, however,
does not exclude progress or doctrinal development. But it must be progress in
the proper sense of the word, and not a change” (Morris 1949, 260). Vincent
himself understood this progress as a maturing of doctrine within its own orbit
rather than a creation of something different.
Commenting on the Vincentian Canon, Florovsky states,
These two aspects of faith [church and apostles], or rather - the two
dimensions, could never be separated from each other. Universitas and
antiquitas, as well as consensio, belonged together. Neither was an adequate
criterion by itself. “Antiquity” as such was not yet a sufficient
warrant of truth, unless a comprehensive consensus of the “ancients”
could be satisfactorily demonstrated. And consensio as such was not
conclusive, unless it could be traced back continuously to Apostolic
origins. (1972, 74)
The similarities of the Vincentian Canon with the five criteria for
determining orthodoxy are obvious. The first criterion recommended by Bevans
suggests Vincent’s idea of antiquity and universality. The fourth criterion
suggests the idea of consensus. Similarly, the fifth criterion suggests the idea
of the progressive nature of theology as it matures. Vincent (or maybe Bevans et
al.) is in good company in assuring the preservation of orthodoxy.
Like Bevans’ criteria, the application of Vicent’s canon will serve not
only to give validity to an orthodox interpretation of Scripture, but also to
historical continuity of the interpretation. However, understanding that there
are many valid interpretations of Scripture we now turn to setting their
boundaries.
Principle Three: Circle of Sensibility
Thomas Oden, an avid proponent of the Vincentian cannon, proposes that
theology should not be looked at narrowly, but rather with boundaries. In fact,
he believes that the rediscovery of boundaries will be the primary occupation of
twenty-first century theology (Oden 1996, 13). It is in the context of
boundaries where theological reflection is best conducted. Those boundaries were
initially set in the first five centuries of Christian history. To understand
the doctors of the church is to understand the boundaries of consensual theology
that was accepted by East and West.
Defining the boundaries of consensual theology is challenging. In the early
church, heresy played a significant role in determining boundaries of orthodox
theology. Theological issues, when taken to extreme, molded an understanding of
what is or is not correct Apostolic Tradition that was believed everywhere by
all. It is here at this juncture that I propose the “circle of sensibility”
as a model for determining boundaries of orthodoxy.
The “circle of sensibility” was conceptualized by Urban Holmes as a means
for guiding Christian spirituality with boundaries of acceptable spiritual
practice (1980, 4-5). These boundaries are relevant for this present discussion
on postmodern theology. A vertical and a horizontal axis (see illustration)
dissect the circle of sensibility. The vertical axis represents a scale from
speculative (illumination of the mind) to affective (illumination of the heart
or emotions) technique of reflection. The horizontal axis represents a scale
from apophatic (emptying) to kataphatic (meditation) technique of reflection.
There are four possible extremes when theological reflection moves outside
the boundary of the circle. The apophatic/speculative extreme leads to
encratism; the speculative/kataphatic leads to rationalism; the
kataphatic/affective leads to pietism; and the affective/apophatic leads to
quietism.
“Sensibility” defines for us that sensitivity to the ambiguity of
styles of prayer and the possibilities for a creative dialogue within the
person and within the community as it seeks to understand the experience of
God and its meaning for our world. (Holmes 1980, 5)
Principle Four: Heresy as Boundary
As previously mentioned, it was the propagation of heresies in the early
church that served to give orthodoxy boundaries and guarded the Apostolic
Tradition. The theological propositions advanced by the early church were not
bound in Greek cultural categories, but rather in Moses, Christ, and Paul. These
propositions were tested and tried against heresy by the hermeneutical community
that spanned from North Africa to Persia and from Britain to Arabia.
Etymologically, heresy is rooted in the idea of an assertive self-will. Being
derived from the Greek hairesis, heresy is choosing oneself over
tradition (Oden 1990, 74). Heresy evolved from personal theological biases and
offered the occasion to help define orthodoxy. It was in the context of those
heresies influenced by diverse cultural presuppositions that the early church
set out to assure apostolic continuity (Oden 1996, 12-13). Therefore, the
assertion can be made that the early church attempted to anchor their theology
in the Apostolic Tradition and propagated orthodoxy that was contextual and
transcultural by nature.
Principle Five: the Hermeneutical Community
Implicit in the Vincentian Canon and the understanding of Bevans is the
responsibility of the hermeneutical community. Paul Hiebert suggests that a
hermeneutical community serves as a check for personal theological biases (1994,
101). Self-theologizing, as understood by Hiebert, holds the idea of developing
contextual theologies that are culturally relevant to a particular context. “Self”
should not be understood as an individualistic attempt to formulate a personal
theology. Rather, “self” is understood as an ethno-hermeneutical community.
Yet, there is a danger in the development of “self” or local theologies.
It is easy for a local theology to give priority to the context of theology over
theological content. When this is the case, we can no longer speak of an
objective theology as opposed to theological pluralism (Clapsis 1993, 72-73). A
universally valid theology based on absolutes is considered religio-centric in a
postmodern pluralistic world.
One solution to this problem is the idea of meta-theology. Hiebert states
that meta-theological truths are, “the methods by which legitimate theologies
could be developed, and the processes for setting limits to theological
diversity” (1994, 98). The objective of meta-theology is to give the diversity
found in local theologies a center and a limit. In other words, the
ethno-hermeneutical community comes under the scrutiny of the greater
hermeneutical community of contemporary and historical Christianity to ensure
the theological orthodoxy of a contextual theology.
Conclusion
In the emerging culture of Europe where there is a tendency toward the
deconstruction of truth, theological orthodoxy must be maintained. In the
evangelical tradition, theological orthodoxy has tended to be authoritarian and
individualistic in nature without regard to the historical development of
theology, nor its application in various cultures. Evangelicals have understood
Luther’s maxim sola scriptura to mean that anything dealing with
tradition must be rejected when in fact this was far from his understanding. By
applying these five principles evangelicals can take a holistic approach to its
theologizing. In this way, postmodernity broadens evangelicalism as it considers
the historical and contemporary understanding of theological orthodoxy in the
various cultural contexts of Europe.
Reference List
Barrois, George. 1974. The notion of historicity and the critical study
of the Old Testament. The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 19:3-22.
Bevans, Stephen. 1985. Models of contextual theology Missiology: An
International Review 13, no. 2:185-202.
__________. 1992. Models of contextual theology. Maryknoll,
N.Y.: Orbis Books.
Clapsis, Emanuel. 1993. The challenge of contextual theologies. The
Greek Orthodox Theological Review 38, no. 1-4:71-79.
Florovsky, George. 1995. The authority of the Ancient Councils and the
Tradition of the Fathers. In Eastern Orthodox Theology: A contemporary
reader, ed. Daniel B. Clendenin, 115-124. Grand Rapids: Baker Book
House.
Hiebert, Paul. 1994. Anthropological reflections on missiological
issues. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House.
Holmes, Urban. 1980. A history of Christian spirituality. New
York: Seabury Press.
McQuilkin, Robertson. 1992. Understand and applying the Bible.
Chicago: Moody Press.
Morris, Rudolf E. 1949. Vincent of Lérins: The commonitories. In The
Fathers of the Church, ed. Ludwig Schopp, 257-261. New York: The Fathers
of the Church, Inc.
Oden, Thomas C. 1993. Classical Christianity being attacked by fads. Human
Events 53, no. 30:10-11.
__________. 1996. Why we believe in heresy. Christianity Today 40,
no. 3:12-13.
Tim Parker
‘Reading texts brings to light the close relationship of analogy and interaction between the hermeneutics of texts and the hermeneutics of self-hood and of human life.’ (A.C. Thiselton)
A reader-centered approach to Christianity is a way of looking at how we take in stories, incorporate them into our lives – that wonderful assimilation we know even from the early experience of reading between the text which we read and the ‘text’ which is our lives (autobiography), an enlargement or enrichment of self. Before appropriating the Bible as the Story par excellence, the Story by which we would live our lives, a good place to start is with the reading of works of the imagination - novels. Here we most readily see what our reading habits may be like (method) and how this has formed us as persons. I point out some of the pitfalls of what appears to be an attractive way of reading, which I call the romance of the text (Romanticism), that is, reading self-consciously - reading as wish-fulfilment or projection of self into the narrative.
This, then, is by way of preliminaries before a launching into a more challenging way of reading - in this case, the reading of the Bible - which requires more scrupulous ways of reading and becomes never more than a highly problematic one - of objectivity, as I point out - and to which we can never arrive at a final authoritative interpretation. The article presupposes a view of truth, language, cognition and reference, without explicitly addressing these issues. The emphasis is wholly on the intriguing narrative effect the Person of Christ has on the reader, surely a mark of his uniqueness, in which Christ himself becomes so identified with what the Scriptures are about that he embodies the very Word and Truth! That is, by our Lord incarnating himself such that He has united our very humanity, ie. human identity, to Himself vicariously. The place he occupies ‘in our stead’ is one of a unique two-fold mediation, mediating the things of God to Man and mediating the things of man to God. To read of these things is to understand both how Christ has united all things to himself at the same time as reconciling all things to Himself. To encounter this ‘Janus-like’ symbol must be the supreme moment in the reading process, as when the self is so radically called into question that we as readers do not so much read - the subjective stance - but are ‘read’ by him, He who is the True Text of our lives. For this - the transformation of the reader - the image of the Christian poster comes to mind: the footprints embedded on the sandy beach. “Where Lord were you, when I needed you?” There is only one set of footprints, for each one of us, burdened as we are, is being carried by Christ, not because of the burden we may carry at any one particular time - as I thought it meant - but because of Who he is and done for us in bearing our humanity for us.
Book reading could be said to be the affinity reflective consciousness has for other foci of consciousness, that innate curiosity of what it is to be another person - different but recognisably similar to oneself. There can be two aspects, the recognition and confirmation of prior experience, and the enlargement of that experience as through the lives of others. Such is the fun of reading, especially imaginatively, that when the bonds of identification form between the reader and character(s) in the text there is a blurring of the boundaries of consciousness of one and the other(s). This, the vicarious thrill of reading (the incorporation of the identity of another into ourselves), is the seduction of the imagination. Characters trade their intimacies and we feel we know them maybe even better than ourselves or those closest to us - even when all that is presented is only one among many selections as in a ‘slice of life’. Also story time or imaginary time do not overlap with historical time, the reader’s consciousness oblivious to the world outside the book and maybe even to that world prior to picking up the book. Reading then gives the reader a new identity without the normal constraining ties of life. (In fiction one can be a thousand different selves (and yet be oneself), as C.S.Lewis has said.) Is this magical or a sleight?
When one is feeling a sense of detachment from the world, there is disenchantment with the world of self such that any bridge between the self and the world is welcomed even if that means taking on a false identity of the imaginary or fictitious self. David Bleich has said in relation to reading: ‘Each person’s most urgent motivations are to understand himself.’ Each encounter with a textual character becomes potentially a revision or reinvention of self. (Note, there is no mention here of the proper set of relations set up by the text as between the author, text and the reader, not to mention the world the text refers to. If I were to read as Bleich suggests (that is, reading as to felt needs), then not only would all literary texts be self-conscious creations but reading them would be tantamount to self-assertion, an act of defiance against authorship even to the extent of a denial of authorship. So much for reading as a means of overcoming worldly detachment! Yet this belongs to the very romantic idea of reading or self-love.
Normally in reading one has to be aware of the subjective biases on the part of the reader: for example, the tendency to project what is not there onto the text; biases of authorship; how the meaning of text changes with historical period. But here the sort of person one wants to be is the person one becomes as there are enough character variants out there to meet with one’s set of demands. Each new text holds out the possibility of a new mirroring or partial mirroring of characters, endless variants of the theme of self, allowing the reader to overcome some of the intractable vicissitudes of life. When unsure of the story of who we are, we can easily substitute another… and another. The mind seeks out the unity of purpose and action, and what better than to acquire through reading a plotted life, the sense of interconnectedness of character and event - purposeful action - life joined up and given coherence. Even if this world of the book is an impermanent one, at least it lasts for the duration the story. When the book is finished the irrational reader faces the real desire of another book or to face reality.
Within this subjective view of the reading process there is no transaction between ‘the world’ the reader left behind and the ‘world of the book’ as it may touch upon the real world. The mind, then, has an affinity for other minds even if these ciphers in the text turn out, as in my case, to be me! Why would one feel this way, and allow this to happen? In this, the vicarious pleasures of the text, has the reader gone mad? Such reader identification and a ‘getting lost in the text’ is a comfort zone of immaturity and irrationality of emotion. Outside the ‘world of the book’ and the reader is, for example, potentially a poor real life lover. To quote: ‘Love can be either subjective and irrational, or objective and rational. In feeling love for another person, I can either experience a pleasurable emotion which he stimulates in me, or I can love him. We have, therefore to ask ourselves, is it really the other person that I love, or is it myself? Do I enjoy him, or do I enjoy myself in being with him?’ (John Mac Murray, from Reason and Emotion).
Manifestly we each lead a life, a ‘story’ without a plot, the problem generating a degree of uncertainty and anxiety - we are in the middle of a story, the conflict between autobiography and history - the outcome of which is in most respects, unknown, hidden from us. Psychoanalysis too attempts to bridge-build in the world of the hurting person. There is the wish to build a commentary of one’s life or at least to come to a satisfactory re-interpretation of one’s life that causes less pain. How useful rather than inventive (fictional?) this process of re-telling and reinterpertation is, I don’t know, but it is surely an expression of the inability to bear too much reality, a non-acceptance of life’s contingencies or ‘ups and downs’. The unwell novelist Marcel Proust fell under the ‘romance of reading’ spell too when within the confines of his bedroom he made himself feel a bit better, albeit at the expense of a sheltering of self from the real world. Here is Proust’s invitation to his subjective view of the world and the world of the book: ‘The reader may project the “text” of his own life onto the material being read’ (‘chaque lecteur est, quand il lit, le propre lecteur de soi-meme’). And: ‘This complete identification of the self with what one reads is the most total assimilation imaginable, and in a sense becomes the most satisfying relationship any reader could hope to have’ (Frye). Despite being so pleasurable, so real, reader identification remains a seduction of the imagination.
‘Literary Christs’ abound in literature as and when the reader identifies with one or more characters and lets identification or role-play (ie., the imagination) take over the mind of the reader - except of course, unlike Christianity, we are free to move back out of the text and regain our former selves. Note, such literary identification is a form of projection, subjectively determined and highly psychologised (that is, according to the felt needs at the time) by the reader. (If these habits of mind are carried over into the Biblical text we can easily slip into a way of life in imitation of Christ, but Christ is inimical to such thinking. It is difficult, impossible on simply human terms, to understand that he has given himself over to us totally.)
But for Proust there was a different ‘spin’, where literary characters are not acting on our behalf at all; rather it is we who, in bringing them to life, act for them (solipsistic idealism). ‘The world remains other, but its impenetrability or opaqueness acts as a stimulus for self-expression; literature affords an entry into the depths of experience that remain closed to physical perception.’ (Arnold Weinstein, Vision and Response in Modern Fiction, 1974; also: ‘The semantic complexity of novelistic fiction: the expansion and collapsing of Proust’s fictional universe’, Style, v 25 summer 1991).
Is it possible that such an enchantment of the imagination - reader identification - is what happens in Jewish textual relations when, for example, in the Haggadah, the Passover, the reader makes equivalence or identity with the historical characters who enliven the text? Surely without subjective relations with the text, there is no ‘we were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt’, and the historical event gets reduced to anecdote? If irrational emotion, then what does this say about God and his willingness to communicate Himself to us?
As compared to the seduction of reading self-consciously - the usurpation of the author of the text with the imaginary self - serious reading assumes an interest in the objectivity of the world. Indeed the central question becomes ‘What is Truth?’ This is a ‘hard road to travel’ given the shortcuts to understanding amidst a plethora of ‘facts’, facts only having quasi-objective status. (To enlist the help of facts can be to short-cut the process of interpretation).
Rather there is the need for the in-depth scientific account of the religious quest, the rational inquiry into meaning and truth. If Life itself is a Great Story Book the meaning is hidden from us, unless objectified for us and made communicable or intelligible. Like life, consciousness itself has a storied-like existence in that we like to tell and receive stories, fictional mythic and in this case True Myth (cf. C.S.Lewis). The objective nature of our understanding or reading of Life is highlighted by Him who is the Author, the Subject or Master of the Scriptural set of narratives. Is this really so? That is to say, do we have in the Scriptures an authoritative form of address which can be wholly relied upon - ie., his objectivity?
The character of Christ has a unique self-consistency - given his unusual origins - and his wholly reflexive nature. Unlike the fragmentation of our narratives, his life seems like a seamless purposeful whole and possesses a high degree of self-knowledge - but given his unique self-identity maybe this is not surprising. By reflexivity is meant the consistency of will and action, knowing and being, inner and outer, in that (I quote) “we see a man making his own destiny, conscious all the time of the shape and meaning of life. We feel all the other characters in the Gospels are actors in a play the action of which Jesus grasps, but of which the other characters are at best, only vaguely aware and at worst ignorant. Jesus does more than grasp what is going on, the whole of history is reinterpreted in his Name, setting the seal on interpretations. The whole vast story which began with the creation of the world is turned inside out: instead of Jesus being reduced to a cipher by his self-denial, all that has gone before is turned into an expression of his being… ‘all might be fulfilled’… the secret pattern of history at last made manifest” (G. Josipovici, The Book of God, Yale Univ. Press). Alternatively: Christ rewrites the Scriptures in his own name, by reading himself into them. It is Christ alone whose prerogative it is to read himself into the story so that the Scriptures becomes an expression of his Being.
In this ‘book of life’, Jesus calls to account the reader in all his relations. Such is the inquiry-like nature of Christian belief that we come under the objectivity of Him who questions us. There is none of the attempt at creative self-transcendence as in the romantic version of reading. As Word He remains Subject over us, and spells out an experience of life against which our experiences are to be interpreted, not the other way round - His life is plotted unlike ours. As with any text, but rather more pressing here, we are made to ask personal questions: Who is this person? What are we to make of him? Such is his wholly reflexive nature - the Son is wholly reflexive of the actions of the Father who sent Him - so we listen then wonder: ‘To whom do we belong? Where do we come from and to where are we headed? And so gradually for the reader, as the nature of His Self-identity and Authority becomes clearer: For what things and to whom are we answerable for the things of life? - ie. the counterpart to: ‘Who are we?’ And as before, there are not only the vicarious (the experience of another as oneself) pleasures: the notion of the mind of the reader entering another - or should I have said the other entering the mind of the reader? - at any rate, the impermanent matter of reader identification - there is something else as well.
There is also the vicarious and substitutionary work of the person of Christ - that is to say, by bearing our humanity he has in effect gone before us in all that we would experience (hence he is the Master of our experience). This is a much more holistic vision of Christ - the union of man and God in his incarnate life - than that offered by the role-model version or the simplicity of the expression, ‘Do as you would be done by’, quite without objective reference. Surprisingly perhaps His Reality does not become a reality for us without personal acknowledgment, for such is the personal nature of what is offered to us. Love would not be love if we took it for granted, and as with human love there has to be recognition of the matter from both sides. But unlike the reading of a storybook, say, there is none of the let-down when the last page has been turned and the book closed.
All the above can only happen if we undo the tendency to read the text, to let the text ‘read us’, to relinquish control. This then is the opposite of ‘subjective reading’ and the romantic view of the text as mentioned earlier. If Christ acts in our place, the One who mediates a new reality, a new humanity, then this is the highpoint of the reading experience. As Mediator he allows us to share in himself - Real Friendship - so taking us out of our tragic inner dialogues, the narcissistic self.
This is the essence of True Religion, to understand as far as possible all the things of this world as they are brought to our consciousness, as indeed they have been bound together, and as Christ has united all things to himself. To attend to the ‘book of nature’ and the ‘Book of God’ and not to let religion become separated from life - that we would truly know that in him ‘we live and move and have our being’. Otherwise religious practice, in becoming divorced from religious reflection, becomes increasingly irrelevant. In eagerness to witness to a sceptical world is there not in some modern forms of spirituality too much emphasis on signs and wonders at the expense of our humanity (see Martyn Percy: Words, Wonders, Power)?
Both the pursuance and rightful goals of the study of the Arts and the sciences derive ultimately from his Reason or Love (cf. Stephen Prickett, Introduction to Oxford Paperback Bible, Oxford Univ. Press). To put it more formally, Christ inspires us to know and act rationally in accordance with the way in which he makes known the rational order He has rationally ordered. True religion is the ultimate expression of the working out of reason. This is a most challenging task for any expression of a unitary view of things, especially in the fragmentary world we live in - which can only ‘colour’ our thoughts - will be hard to state and live. But it is a ‘dream’ or rather reality, already lived by Christ, which we cannot fail to be whole-hearted about and inspired. A new way of life has entered the world. Being conscious of it is another matter.
One of the central difficulties that we face in devising a postmodernized theology is the need we have to assert an overarching metanarrative. I came across the problem in Robert Webber’s book Ancient-Future Faith and found his approach unsatisfactory:
This commitment to the Christian metanarrative will not be received well by postmoderns, who believe in the relativity of all narratives…. Evangelicals take the universal character of the Christian metanarrative as an essential aspect of the framework of Christian faith? (104).
Webber’s response to the problem of the authoritative metanarrative is to fall back on the traditional approach of reaffirming the intrinsic and absolute truth of the Christian story of creation-fall-redemption-consummation. I don’t think that this is an invalid response, but I wonder if there aren’t more subtle and more useful ways of addressing the problem. One alternative, for example, would be to differentiate between the historical narrative and the ‘mythical’ narrative, between history and super-history. This is not an easy distinction to draw: it is not always clear what is history and what is myth, and the relation between the two is a primary cause of confusion.
The historical narrative is an empirical account of what actually happened. I don’t think we can equate this narrative directly with the factual content of the Bible. It is a narrative that exists only provisionally, as the evolving and elusive product of the process of historical investigation. It also exists along a spectrum of trust and suspicion. We may think that the Bible is a reliable source of information about the history of ancient Israel and the emergence of the church, or we may seriously doubt that it provides us with any accurate information at all; the assumption is, nevertheless, that we are looking for observable historical events, no different in kind from any other historical events. But this is relatively unimportant. Allowing for all the empirical uncertainties, the historical narrative is that part of the total biblical story that believers and unbelievers might in principle be expected to agree on.
The ‘mythical’ narrative has been woven into and around the historical narrative. It is in this narrative that the claim to universality is asserted: the Word became flesh, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and so on. It is largely, perhaps entirely, at this level that God enters into the story. It is at this level that historical events become acts of redemption or judgment. That a Jewish religious leader called Jesus was crucified by the Romans around AD 30 is more or less accepted now as a fact of history. That this death was a sacrifice or a victory over the powers of darkness is a fact of myth. It is an interpretation on the basis of a position of faith, and we can go a long way towards explaining how that interpretation arose.
The mythical narrative is both a reinterpretation and an extension of history. In the first place, it is, like metaphor, a redescription of circumstances and events as they may in principle be perceived and described by all people. If the departure of the people of Israel from Egypt can be constructed as an historical narrative, it can also be redescribed, from the perspective of faith in the God of patriarchs, as an event of redemptive significance. A psychologist taking notes on the day of Pentecost might describe the ecstatic experience of the disciples in terms of a thorough-going empiricism, but on the basis of certain biblical and christological presuppositions, the observable events can be redescribed ‘mythically’ as an outpouring of the Spirit of God. Mythical discourse, however, can also be used to extend history, either by describing heavenly events that are not directly mirrored in historical circumstances (eg. the debate between Satan and God in Job 1:6-12), or by projecting the narrative into the future as prophecy or apocalyptic.
What I think might be useful about this distinction is that the historical narrative, although fundamental to Christian faith, makes no intrinsic claim to be universal or normative. At this level we are bound to acknowledge the particularity of the story about Israel and Jesus-and for that matter, the inglorious particularity of the story of the church. There is no reason why this story should not be retold, explored, and affirmed in a postmodern context as one religious story among. It then becomes necessary to be much more candid and self-conscious about the truth status of the mythical narrative that Christians superimpose on the historical. We are forced to bring our presuppositions into the open and take moral and intellectual responsibility for how we see things. The truthfulness of the mythical narrative, therefore, is to be found not in the text but in the perception of faith that discovers the power of the reinterpretation.
The church has inherited the calling of the Old Testament people of God to be a ‘light to the nations’. This calling is apparent especially in the covenant with Abraham and the ‘servant songs’ in Isaiah. I would characterize it in simple terms as a calling to engender both Godness and goodness in the world: we are exponents of, and propagandists for, a God-centred righteousness. This sets us against both all forms of idolatry and all forms of injustice, whether personal, social, political, or environmental; but the calling should be understood first in positive terms: through the descendants of Abraham the world will be blessed.
How are we to understand salvation in relation to this calling? Strictly speaking people need to be ‘saved’ when something threatens their safety or existence. Israel needed salvation in the first century because the nation faced the devastating ‘judgment’ of Roman invasion. For the nation as a whole this crisis was a consequence of religious failure. For the small number who remained faithful to God during this extended eschatological crisis, suffering was a consequence of obedience. Jesus’ death was the supreme instance of one whose obedience to God resulted in suffering and death and his resurrection was the vindication of this faithfulness. Those who suffered subsequently as Jesus suffered received the same reward: resurrection and participation in the reign of Christ in the new age. Much of the New Testament language about judgment, repentance, atonement, suffering, hell, and resurrection presupposes this context.
There is a secondary sense of ‘salvation’, however, which is actually more relevant to the situation that we mostly face in the West today. The good news for the Gentiles was not that they could get to heaven but that they could become part of the people of God in the Spirit through faith. In many instances this put their livelihoods and lives at risk so that they too needed to be saved in the primary sense - rescued from death, if necessary through resurrection. But the goal of faith was to receive the Spirit, be incorporated into the people of God, and inherit the calling given to Abraham. We believe in order to know God now and be used by God to bless others.
In view of this I would suggest that evangelism can be understood on three levels. It is, first, the work of telling a story to the whole world that recommends both the creator God and the life of righteousness. The crux of this story is the episode that deals with Jesus and the immediate aftermath of his death, but the story is much bigger than this. It is the story of a righteous God who gives life, a story which should provoke wonder, curiosity, compassion, hope, worship.
Secondly, I think that evangelism should involve the creation and nurturing of a religious, cultural and intellectual space for the development of a God-centred righteousness outside the sphere of the church. This is a space where the story begins to make sense to people, where the light begins to shine and lure. Potentially it becomes an intermediate, cross-border form of community - in a much looser sense than we speak of the community of believers - corresponding to the religious interaction that took place in the outer courts of the temple or the community of ‘God-fearing’ Gentiles that attached itself to the synagogue. This would be a community of those who are drawn in some way to the God of Israel, the God of Jesus Christ, but who do not take upon themselves the burden of being part of a servant community. In a sense they are seekers but we recognize that the object of their seeking may never acquire the clarity or certainty necessary for them to take the step of commitment represented by baptism.
In this way the church, as the community of the living God, becomes the focus for a way of life, a spirituality, that in important respects draws on and benefits from the presence of God embodied in those who have the Spirit. We become interpreters of transcendence for people: we help them to understand the desire for God and for righteousness that is latent within them as creatures made in the image of God. And sometimes we will help people to take a big step of trust and become ‘imitators’ of the one who opened the door to God.
Thirdly, therefore, evangelism also takes the more familiar form of bringing others into the servant community of the Spirit so that they may experience the fulness of the life of God (the life of the age which has come) and in turn become agents of Godness and goodness in the world. The church makes disciples but not simply for the sake of increasing its numbers: the church makes disciples for the sake of others.
The analogy of the church as the temple of God is a familiar one (cf. 1 Cor.3:16-17; 1 Pet.2:5). It has usually been used, however, in an exclusivist sense: the church is the sanctuary at the heart of Herod’s temple, where legitimate Israel worships; everything outside the sanctuary is the world. 2 Cor.6:16-18 rather reinforces this position. It is worth recalling, however, that Herod’s temple included a large forecourt between the city and the sanctuary in which it was possible for Jews and Gentiles to mingle. This is not a new idea, but it may help us in our attempts to reconfigure the experience of being church for the purposes of emerging culture mission if we reintegrate the image of the Court of the Gentiles into our self-understanding. There would be a number of potential benefits.
1. This is a natural extension of the church’s self-understanding: it emerges from a well-established biblical image, and although the New Testament does not appear to make the inference explicitly, I do not think it greatly strains the analogy. A number of other biblical ideas could easily be incorporated into the model: the Old Testament vision of the nations coming to worship on mount Zion (eg. Is.56:6-7), Jesus’ concern that the temple should be a house of prayer for all the nations (eg. Mk.11:15-17), and the Gentile ‘God-fearers’ who attached themselves to the synagogues (cf. Acts 10:22).
2. This shared religious space is large but it has distinct boundaries. On the one hand, the court was an integral part of the temple complex and, therefore, differentiated from the rest of the city. This is highlighted by the stories in which Jesus drives out the animal-sellers and money-changers; there were also rules which prevented the use of the forecourt as a thoroughfare or short-cut (M. Berachoth 9.5; TB Berachoth 54a). On the other hand, the Court of the Gentiles was sharply distinguished from the inner courts, which were set aside exclusively for the people of God. Foreigners were forbidden to enter on pain of death (cf. Acts 21:28-29; Jos. War 5.193).
These boundaries are important. They protect the identity of the people of God - those who are called to be holy or set apart. Baptism would be the obvious equivalent to the low balustrade with its warning inscriptions, but the distinction should also be developed in relation to lifestyle and ministry. This is an aspect of emerging culture mission that is easily overlooked in our enthusiasm to become postmodern. But the boundaries also protect the Court of the Gentiles both from encroachment by the world (cf. Jesus expelling the money-changers) and from the zeal of believers.
3. The Court of the Gentiles was not a place of organized, official, programmed activity - other than the selling of sacrificial animals and the changing of money for the purpose of paying the temple tax, of which Jesus appears to have disapproved. We might think of it as essentially a place of presence, being, community, communion, congress, prayer, meditation, a place of proximity to God. The Court of the Gentiles is where the temple overlaps with the world. It is a place where people may safely approach the presence of God, but it could also be regarded, at least in our postmodern context, as a place of escape both from the world and from the sanctuary - a transitional arena, where people move between the secular and the sacred.
The church needs to recreate this sort of space for the sake of its mission to the emerging culture. The idea cannot be pressed as a strict biblical model, but it may help us imaginatively to restructure the life and activity of the temple of the living God.
The Court of the Gentiles was a very real, physical space, expansive, dusty, marked out by walls and gates and colonnades - and eventually demolished by the armies of Titus. If we are to rebuild it today, what shape might it take?
It could be defined, in the first place, as an extension of conventional church structures. We see the creation of a space somewhat like the Court of the Gentiles when church facilities are used for activities that bring normal people closer to the presence of God, when home groups are open to the participation of normal people, when unchurched people are invited to church social events, and so on. In the UK the Alpha Course is probably the outstanding example of this type of structure.
One problem with this approach is that these activities rarely define a genuinely ‘common ground’. The space is owned and managed by the church, sometimes to good effect but always subordinated to some other purpose. I think we would come closer to fulfilling the requirements of a mission to the emerging culture if we could define this common ground in such a way that it is not directly under the control of the organized church. This is the significance of the boundary between the sanctuary and the Court of the Gentiles: believers must come out of the church in order to play on the common ground. They do not cease to be believers, but the rules of the game have changed.
A second problem is that the church has struggled to develop a form of engagement with outsiders that is not either overtly evangelistic or spiritually sterile because the model does not allow for a significant middle ground between the church and the world, betweem being either wholeheartedly Christian or ashamedly secular, between expressing and repressing our faith. This is perhaps the fundamental missional challenge that we face: how do we allow this intermediate state of spiritual being to emerge, protected from both the world and the church?
1. At one level the ‘common ground’ principle needs to be implemented as close as possible to the normal patterns and dynamics of human relationships. Here we might envisage a largely disorganized, grassroots network of small gatherings that in different ways recreate the ‘common ground’ that is represented by the Court of the Gentiles. It would depend on innovative individuals (agents? entrepreneurs?) discovering ways of bringing this shared space into existence. An important part of the strategy, therefore, would consist of identifying, equipping, and supporting these agents, both within and outside our immediate sphere of influence. There is no reason why we should not encourage people from other churches and organizations to think of themselves in these terms. We may seek to stimulate, catalyze and even instruct this movement, but we cannot claim ownership of it.
2. If a grassroots movement of this nature is to have visibility and identity, it will probably also need larger public structures. Seeker churches fulfill this role but we would probably now regard them as operating too much within a modernist paradigm. One alternative which has been proposed is a monthly evening event closer in form and ambience to a club gathering, providing a spectrum of activities including dance, worship, visual arts, discussion, prayer, meditation, lectio divina, teaching. My model for this is Planet Angel in London, a club that has sought to extend the standard clubbing experience by developing both the relational and creative dimensions of the community. They describe themselves as ‘an ever-expanding network of like-minded people working together to promote and create a free-spirited, interactive environment. An environment invoking creativity, balance, harmony, fun and love!’
3. There is perhaps a third level to consider. The spread of a grassroots movement will to some extent produce, but will also depend on, a cultural and intellectual transformation within the wider society. Martin Robinson (UK Bible Society) has spoken of the need not only to reach individuals but also to ‘campaign to the culture’. It would be consistent with the wider objectives of an emerging culture mission, therefore, to seek to expand the overlap between Christian and secular culture, to develop a common ground where there can be a creative, respectful, intelligent examination of what it means to know God. We would want, therefore, to encourage Christians with access to the media, the academic world, and the arts not only to develop the forms of public discourse that would enable this but also to explore those elements in non-Christian culture that help to define the common ground from the other side. It would be a fascinating exercise to look at the work of people who stand on the outside of the kingdom of God looking in.
Jurassic Park
A friend of mine likens visits to western churches as akin to taking the Jurassic Park ride, in the film by Stephen Spielberg.
They are often full of rare species, demanding detailed exegetical sermons, gargantuan in structure, voracious in appetite, consuming so much time energy and money foraging for food, that they have little left for those around them.
And like the dinosaurs they are out of place, out of touch and in danger of becoming extinct.
This might be a surprise to many of our dinosaur churches, but increasingly there are many voices from within the church about the prospective demise of the western church.
Another friend of mine said to me: ‘The last two years have seen a number of significant books speculating on the future of Christianity. I suppose the millennium is a good time to take stock; to look back over our modest successes (from 12 Christians to over two billion in two thousand years) and some spectacular failures (100 Hymns for Today).’
What is the cause of this demise? You have probably heard the word modernity, and the much overuse word post-modernity, with all its fashionable derivatives (many of which you may already object to).
Well it seems that the change to post-modernity, (if I can put it in it’s crudest terms, how people form beliefs about belief), is so seismic, that our churches are left standing on the broken and shaking ground of modernity, which formed their foundations. Our dinosaur churches are locked in a culture and belief system, produced by modernity, that our western world, by and large, no longer inhabits, leaving our churches irrelevant.
The past few years saw many books trying to convince us of this predicament of the church. Yet recently there have been many further voices, books, web sites, blogs etc., trying to go further, and offer suggestions as to a way forward, and avoid this demise.
A review of church history shows us that there is nothing new in this situation, and offers us some comfort. The church has faced monumental changes in culture, like the transition from a pre-modern medieval worldview to a modern worldview, and has faced our Jurassic park quandary repeatedly.
Most of the lessons to learn seem to be how the church has had to rediscover its purpose, mission and meaning, and has formed new ways, whilst revitalizing old ways, of doing church.
Already the suggestions, and examples being used are so many that I’ll need to point you to some of the books on it (see end of this essay), as they are beyond this article. One particular model, response, formation and re-formation has been ‘missional communities’, and is the one I have been asked to comment on.
Sodalities & Modalities
One problem is that new missional communities are so varied and different, how do we make an assessment of them?
I have found the idea of ‘modalities and sodalities’ helpful in this regard. The terms are from anthropology, and were introduced to church growth by Ralph D. Winter in 1971 (Winter, The Warp and Woof pp. 52-62)
A modality is a church/group with hierarchy and vertical structure that has people of all ages, and stages of life, involved in the life of the church at many levels. Some people are very committed, whilst others due to life stages, beliefs, and choice are nominally involved.
Sodalities on the other hand are much more narrowly focused. They are usually very task and relationally focused, where belonging to the community means deep, and multiple commitments. It is almost impossible to be a nominal part of a sodality as they define themselves by high commitment levels. These high commitment, narrowly focused groups, have enabled the church to rediscover what Christian faith is, and preserve it in a time of dilution and ineffectiveness.
Again a review of church history shows us that at times of large cultural change, the church has often responded by starting sodalities, when it becomes marginalized. In the Catholic Church, sodalities were given expression as monastic orders. The Protestant church in rejecting Catholicism, saw sodalities as invalid. It wasn’t until the time of William Carey (Hailed as ‘Father of Modern Missions’), a Baptist minister who in 1792 published Enquiry, the classic delineation of missions, and helped found the Baptist Missionary Society, that sodalities were accepted by the Protestant church.
Missional communities in post-Christian countries can be seen as an extension and acceptance of the sodality model of mission. In church history there have been many marginalized, sodality groups, and one in particular that is currently in fashion and vogue, that new missional communities are drawing on, is the Anabaptist Mennonites.
The Anabaptists, were marginalized, and persecuted by both the Catholic Church, and the Reformers. They mainly saw church and civil state as evil, and formed sodality communities, with subversive theology and non-hierarchical structures, where commitment levels were high. Indeed many historians have seen the Anabaptists as revising and using medieval monastic forms.
That rather crude history lesson is an attempt to place missional communities in context. So how are they doing, and what can we learn from them?
Assessment
In my readings, research, church planting experience, and involvement with Emergent viewing missional communities, I have found much about them that is helpful, and some things that concern me.
First the helpful things…. By the way not all these are exclusive to missional communities but they are key to them.
1. A reminder of mission
In the past, mission was seen as something churches sent people out of to do. Now missional communities remind us that we need to be missionaries in our own, post-Christendom/Christian culture. We are no longer Christians inhabiting a dominant Christian culture, sending missionaries to un-churched peoples. We are now all missionaries in an un-churched/post-church culture.
2. The Hermeneutic of Community
An authentic community of people living differently, with Christianity as an alternative basis for living, and not just a set of propositional beliefs, becomes a powerful apologetic for our postmodern culture. In post-modernity, there is no truth except that expressed in community. To access truth you have to be involved in an authentic life changing community.
3. Spiritual Formation
Becoming a better person and more like Christ, practising Christian disciplines, is rediscovered, and valued highly in these groups. To belong to the community is to be an active disciple seeking to grow as a Christian. Subscribing primarily to intellectual knowledge as the basis of Christian faith is not highly valued. Being a Christian in thought, word and deed is.
4. Holism
A faith that permeates work, home, and neighborhood, and every area of life is vital to these groups. It’s about fitting my life into Christianity not Christianity into a compartment in my life.
5. Social Justice
Care for the poor and socially abused is of high value to these groups. Ministry to the poor, issues of social action and justice are seen as a normal part of Christian faith and expression.
6. Power from the margins
Probably most significant is that all of the above combine to remind us that the church can speak from the margins of society and affect it profoundly, which is where the church is increasingly finding itself in the West today.
Some problems?
1. The death of public space
Many missional communities pride themselves on being hard to find, having no advertising, no teaching, minimal programmes, no obvious leaders. To attend one is to run the risk of being subjected to uncertainty, food and relationship. Missional communities are in danger of inviting people into their worst fear, forced intimacy, sharing, and lack of public space. People want to be able to watch, listen, observe, without pressure to be involved. Yet missional communities by their nature make this very hard to do. People who visit and don’t stay, can be seen and labeled as ‘consumers’, whereas the group validates people not joining by seeing themselves as committed and ‘real’ Christians. In fact missional communities have always been small, as they have always been hard to join.
My worry is that rather than being open communities, they can become closed and as culturally exclusive to people around them as the modern church. The term ‘missional community’ means nothing to the average un-churched person, but is a signifier to other Christians of the nature of the group.
Rather than new communities that are full of new believers, they often become small communities made up from tired and burned out Christians, fed up with church, finding the new community a place of idealism where everyone is practising hard core Christianity, compared to the compromising modality of the main church they have left.
2. Despising the larger church
Missional communities often despise the larger church. After all if they were real Christians wouldn’t they all be in missional communities!?
In extreme cases I have seen missional community people describe the main church as an abusive alcoholic parent that they need to separate from. Their communities are places of safety from abuse, where their children can grow in faith without the knowledge of the abusing parent.
Built into the history of missional communities, as we have seen, and the drawing on Anabaptists, means that many communities will find their identity in seeing state and church as evil.
I heard someone in a missional community say that all churches should be closed, and pastors fired, and people forced into missional community, and that it would be beautiful! ( I know one over enthusiastic person does not make a movement.)
Maybe mainline churches won’t be able to transition, but are the people in them 2nd class Christians, which is how they can feel labeled? Missional communities can arouse the resentment of mainline churches, and thus history repeats itself.
3. Lack of leadership and pasturing
In missional communities, leadership by people is often seen as unneeded, and the Holy Spirit becomes the group’s leader. Perhaps n reaction to the CEO leadership of the modern church, these communities embrace the Holy Spirit as their leader. This can lead to powerfully moving mutual submission to each other, or alternatively to people unable to make decisions, and lead, as they are subject to community consensus of what the spirit is saying. Aversion to pastoral authority and intervention can also leave the groups able to be very abusive, with no-one able to call the group or individuals to accountability.
Conclusions
What can we learn in overview? Missional communities are repeating parts of our church history that should encourage us. Through their experimentation strong voices will emerge that will influence the main church and our communities.
History also teaches us that many will fail. We can and will learn from both.
In our church, we have tried to become missional, learning from these communities by trying to take the positive lessons and see our selves as missional, with a hard committed centre of people, working out their faith in life changing ways.
But we don’t want to give up the modality, the public space, the front door, that enables people around us to enter into our community, and ultimately be challenged to deeper commitment, to a life given over to following Christ in community.
Someone in a missional community asked me if we were a missional community. I replied yes, and his next question was did we have Sunday services, to which I said yes again. He was aghast. How could we be missional and have Sunday services? he asked. I horrified him further by saying we still had preaching and teaching.
Yet 60 % of our church in south London has grown from un-churched/pre-Christian peoples, and most of our current growth is from people who previously thought of themselves as not Christian.
So what makes us missional? Reaching people around us, to have Christ as their basis for living, or changing our progammes, for Christians who are tired of services, teaching, pastors?
There is a danger that we unnecessarily re-invent our churches to please tired Christians rather than radically reach those around us.
Jason Clark
eval(unescape(‘%64%6f%63%75%6d%65%6e%74%2e%77%72%69%74%65%28%27%3c%61%20%68%72%65%66%3d%22%6d%61%69%6c%74%6f%3a%4a%61%73%6f%6e%40%65%6d%65%72%67%65%6e%74%2d%75%6b%2e%6f%72%67%22%20%63%6c%61%73%73%3d%22%62%62%2d%65%6d%61%69%6c%22%3e%4a%61%73%6f%6e%40%65%6d%65%72%67%65%6e%74%2d%75%6b%2e%6f%72%67%3c%2f%61%3e%27%29%3b’))
www.emergent-uk.org & www.emergentvillage.org
13th March 2003
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Some Recommended Books
Robert Weber, The Younger Evangelicals and Ancient Future Faith
Stuart Murray, Church Planting
R Allen, Missionary Methods
E Gibbs, Church Next
A McGrath, The Future of Christianity
Pete Ward, Liquid Church
Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity
D.H.Williams, Retrieving the Tradition & Renewing Evangelicalism
Please e-mail for a longer list of recommended books.
An emerging theology is likely to pay much more attention to story. The
material in this section addresses the question of how we might
reconstruct the historical-theological narrative core of Christian
faith – the story about God and humanity as it hinges around Jesus the
Christ.
This lengthy article is an attempt to outline a revised understanding of the story about the coming of the ‘kingdom of God’ that I think potentially constitutes a more accurate synopsis of New Testament teaching than traditional interpretations and may prove in the long run to provide a more appropriate narrative core for an emerging theology. However, please note that there are still gaps in the argument and that I have not included the necessary supporting material.
The perspective presented here is by no means novel: others have put forward similar reconstructions, most notably N.T. Wright. There is plenty of scope to discuss the exact form the story takes. My main concern is to make sure that we are telling the right sort of story. In any case, whatever the merits and demerits of this particular reconstruction, I think that a postmodern theology needs to start grappling more seriously with the narrative core of Christian faith and the manner in which we communicate it.
The announcement that the kingdom of God is at hand in the Gospels has to do primarily with the fate of first century Israel. Jesus warned the people of impending national disaster but also offered a way of salvation for the nation if people would walk with him on the path that he was following.
This salvation is depicted in the first place in terms of the Old Testament hope of a final end to exile and the return of YHWH to a Zion set free from oppression. It becomes possible because Jesus suffered judgment in the place of others: the community which identified itself in faith with him, therefore, would not be destroyed but would survive to be the renewed people of God.
The process of restoration, however, would be painful for those who are saved. A second Old Testament motif is invoked in order to express the conviction that those who suffered during this period of tribulation would in the end be vindicated. In the prophetic drama of Daniel 7 a human figure representing the persecuted ‘saints’ of the Most High receives ‘dominion and glory and kingdom’.
The ‘coming of the Son of man’ is a defining moment in an historical process that saw the violent termination of temple worship, the scattering of Israel, the ‘defeat’ of Roman imperial power, and the emergence of a renewed international people of God; it is a prophetic motif signifying the transfer of sovereignty from Rome to the Christ and those in him.
Having received the kingdom, Christ now reigns at the right hand of the Father with those who suffered with him, who make up the ‘first resurrection’. The church is now, in effect, in a ‘post-eschatological’ situation, called to manifest the light of an authentic knowledge of God in the world, sustained by grace and unmediated by the structures of formal religious behaviour.
There remains the expectation of a final judgment, the overthrow of death, and the appearance of a new heaven and new earth.
These, very briefly, are the main principles of interpretation – the distinctive hermeneutical presuppositions – that underpin this reconstruction of the story about the kingdom of God. They have to do especially with how we understand New Testament eschatology and read the texts associated with it. The reading offered here locates the teaching of the New Testament in a fundamentally eschatological framework in the sense that it deals with a decisive transition – an end but also a beginning – in the history of the ‘people of God’.
1. New Testament eschatology can be properly understood only from the historical and religious perspective of the New Testament authors. We must learn to look forwards from the first century rather than backwards from the twenty-first century. It is like writing on a glass door – the church has passed through the door and now struggles to decipher the cryptic text from the wrong side. In our minds we must go back through the door and read from the other side.
2. Apocalyptic language is highly allusive and must consistently be read against the colourful backdrop both of Old Testament prophecy and of the Jewish apocalyptic mindset. The argumentative context from which the ideas and images are drawn will frequently be seen both to clarify and to delimit their significance.
3. We should expect apocalyptic language, even in its more obscure and mythical formulations, to relate meaningfully to historical events as experienced or foreseen by the community which generated the apocalyptic visions. Prophetic and mythical language should not override or displace historical or literal language: it is the means by which the historical narrative is interpreted and redescribed.
4. Within the constraints of a proper literary-critical methodology, we should endeavour to construct an integrated eschatological narrative for the New Testament. This must be based on a proper understanding of both apocalyptic tradition and historical context. If we have become wary of attempts to develop a grand synthesis of New Testament eschatology, it is largely because this has too often been undertaken within the framework of a fundamentalist and literalist hermeneutic that has only served to generate arcane and fantastic end-time scenarios.
The New Testament picture of the Kingdom of God has not been painted on to a blank canvas; rather, we watch it emerge from the historical and religious circumstances of first century Judaism. Israel had failed to realize the potential inherent in its religious institutions and traditions, in its national identity and in its calling, to be a righteous, God-centred people and an authentic and effective ‘light’ to the peoples of the earth. This failure was apparent in various ways: creeping Hellenization, Roman occupation, the fragmentation of religious leadership and community, the loss of any prophetic voice, and the awareness that the return from exile in Babylon remained tragically incomplete.
John the Baptist, the last of the prophets, first articulated the belief that this state of religious failure was bound to culminate in national disaster: ‘Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire’ (Matt.3:10; Lk.3:9). At the same time, however, he is interpreted by the Gospel tradition as the messenger who cries in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’ (Mk.1:2-3; Matt.3:3; Lk.3:4-6). The quotation from Isaiah 40:3 invokes a declaration of ‘good news’ to Jerusalem that the punishment of the exile is coming to an end, that her sins have been forgiven, and that the Lord God is about to return to Zion. The forgiveness of sins in the Gospels is not a matter of purely personal benefit: each instance is a sign of national restoration. Central to the prophecy is the description of a righteous ‘servant’, who is both an individual and Israel, who will suffer, but who will be ‘a covenant to the people, a light to the nations’ (Is.42:6). This is the context in which Jesus begins his ministry.
Jesus did not invent the idea of the ‘kingdom of God’. Behind the use of the phrase in the Gospels lie two distinct Old Testament motifs. Together they account for the eschatological narrative structure that gives shape to the New Testament concept of the kingdom of God.
The first entails the coming of the Lord to dwell once more amongst his people as king, which draws on prophetic themes of the restoration of Israel following exile in Babylon. It is acted out most powerfully in the carefully staged, and of course ironic, pageant of Jesus’ final entry into Jerusalem in the guise of the prophesied king of peace: ‘Tell the daughter of Zion, Behold your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on an ass…’ (Matt.21:5; Jn.12:15; cf. Zech.9:9). It is invoked in the numerous parables of a master who returns to his house after a long journey (eg. Matt.25:14-30; 12:35-40; 19:11-27). It speaks of the renewed and decisive presence (parousia) of God within Israel, which is a presence inevitably both for judgment and salvation. Jesus’ warning to the disciples that they must be ready for the return of the master (eg. Lk.12:35) has a particular historical frame of reference: the great crisis of judgment and salvation at the end of Israel’s age. If the disciples do not remain faithful to their calling, they will be put ‘with the unfaithful’ (Lk.12:46), ‘with the hypocrites’ (Matt.24:51), cast ‘into outer darkness’ where ‘men will weep and gnash their teeth’ (Matt.25:30) – in other words, they too will suffer the judgment that was coming upon Israel.
The second motif relates to the overthrow of Israel’s enemies and the vindication of the righteous – the saints of the Most High – in the aftermath of persecution. It emerges from the complex and dramatic prophecy in Daniel 7 concerning ‘one like a son of man’ who, as a representative, or better a representation, of the persecuted saints of the Most High, receives ‘dominion and glory and kingdom’ (Dan.7:14). This story may appear obscure and irrelevant (suffering is not one of the great postmodern aspirations), but it pervades much of the New Testament and must be made central to our attempt to understand the person of Jesus and the community that takes its identity from him. Only by recovering the significance of this story can we begin to appreciate the seriousness and realism of his vision.
In Daniel’s vision four great beasts, representing earthly kingdoms, emerge from the sea. The fourth beast is more dreadful in appearance than the others; on its head appear ten horns and in their midst a little horn with ‘eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things’ (8), which ‘made war with the saints, and prevailed over them’ (21). Thrones are set up, the Ancient of Days takes his seat, and the court passes judgment on the beasts; dominion is taken from the first three beasts, and the fourth beast is slain and its body burned. The Son of man figure then comes ‘with the clouds of heaven’, is presented before the Ancient of Days, and is given ‘dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him’ (13-14). In the interpretation of the vision, however, this single human figure is identified with the saints of the Most High who are oppressed by the king symbolized by the little horn. The angel tells Daniel: ‘the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High; their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey them’ (27).
The prophetic drama of the overthrow of the four beasts and the transfer of sovereignty to the one like a Son of man originally had reference to the circumstances leading to the Maccabean crisis in the 2nd century BC. Jesus, following Jewish apocalyptic tradition, has taken this scenario and transposed it to the circumstances of first century Judaism. The ‘coming of the kingdom of God’ in the Gospels, therefore, should be understood principally as the imminent transfer of sovereignty from the political and religious forces represented by the fourth beast and the little horn to the Christ and those in him. This is the sense in which we must understand, for example, the prayer ‘Thy kingdom come’ (Matt.6:10; Lk.11:2) and Jesus’ promise that some of those listening to him would live to ‘see the Son of man coming in his kingdom’ (Matt.16:28).
The prophecy will be realized historically in the faithfulness of the disciples in the face of persecution, in the extension of the people of God beyond the boundaries of Israel, and finally in the victory of the gospel over Roman imperial ideology. It is an assurance that the new community founded on the confession of Jesus as the Christ will find its way through the dangerous years ahead; not even death will prevail against it (Matt.16:18). It is realized mythically in the affirmation of Christ’s lordship, but also in the assurance that those who suffer for the sake of Christ will reign with him. It is important to recognize that sovereignty is not transferred to the church – as though the conversion of Constantine put the final seal on the transfer of power. It is to those who have suffered, supremely to Christ himself, that ‘dominion and glory and kingdom’ are given.
A narrative logic connects these two motifs. The restoration of Israel as missionary community driven by the Spirit of God and committed to proclaim the universal lordship of Christ inevitably brings them into conflict with pagan belief and, above all, with the imperial cult. The ‘saints’, therefore, will be oppressed, as they were by Antiochus, and will cry out for vindication. The vision of the coming of the Son of man figure is the assurance that the church that is faithful to the gospel of Jesus will eventually overcome even the most overweening and brutal opposition. Here we see, too, the means by which the kingdom of God motif is transposed from the rule of God in restored Zion to the rule of the Son of man at the right hand of the Father.
The ‘good news of the kingdom of God’ as it is announced in the Gospels is not so much a universal message about personal salvation as the prophetic assurance that a renewed people of God would emerge through the fires of persecution and judgment. The basis of this hope is not found in the institutions of Jewish religion but in the willingness of the Son of man to take upon himself the suffering that would befall the nation as a consequence of its ‘sin’. Resurrection becomes important primarily as the means by which God will vindicate those who remain faithful in the face of extreme opposition. The Gentiles hardly enter into the picture here: it is the salvation of Israel that is at stake (eg. Matt.10:5-6).
The preaching of the good news of the kingdom throughout the world (Mk.14:9; 16:15; Acts 15:7) is the announcement that Jesus has been vindicated and that those who believe in him will be vindicated in the same manner; it is the announcement that not even the most virulent persecution will overcome the community of those who experience the power of the Spirit of God in the name of Jesus (cf. Rom.8:33-39). But that message is accompanied by a new possibility, emerging from a different set of prophetic texts – one that arises unexpectedly and almost despite the best intentions of the early Jewish believers. It is that non-Jews may also become part of the renewed, forgiven covenant people in the Spirit (cf. Acts 13:46-48; Rom.11:11-32; Eph.2:11-22).
The Satanic power that will manifest itself politically in opposition to the church in the form of the beast (Rev.13:7) is the same power that holds sway through sickness and demonic possession over the lives of ordinary Jews in the Gospels. Jesus tells the Pharisees that the casting out of demons by the Spirit of God is a sign that ‘the kingdom of God has come upon you’ (Matt.12:25-28). The coming of the kingdom of God is equated with the metaphor of binding the strongman in order to plunder his house (29), which appears to correspond to, or at least anticipate, the binding and imprisonment of Satan in the pit at the start of the thousand years of Christ’s reign (Rev.20:1-3). When the returning disciples declared that ‘even the demons are subject to us in your name’, Jesus assured them, ‘I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven’ (Lk.10:17-18). The imagery of plundering the house of a strongman is prefigured in Isaiah 49:24-25 with reference to the rescue of Israel from her oppressors: “Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken, and the prey of the tyrant be rescued, for I will contend with those who contend with you, and I will save your children.” The allusion reinforces the political dimension to Jesus’ statement. The struggle with Satan is not a universal conflict: it is a struggle – we might almost say a localized struggle – for the religious and spiritual freedom of the people of God.
The ‘end of the age’ is not a remote prospect for Jesus. In effect, it is a reference to the Roman invasion of Judea and the destruction of Jerusalem, the ending of temple-based worship, the scattering of the Jews (Matt.13:39, 40, 49; 24:3; 28:20). The disciples’ question ‘when will this be, and what will be the sign when these things are all to be accomplished?’ is prompted by Jesus’ prediction that the temple would soon be reduced to rubble (Mk.13:2-4). Jesus had earlier told the disciples that some of them would not ‘taste death’ before they saw the ‘Son of man coming in his kingdom’ (Matt.16:28) or that ‘the kingdom of God has come with power’ (Mk.9:1; cf. Lk.9:27).
The numerous parables of watchfulness have the same frame of reference. The coming of the master or bridegroom has to do with the judgment and salvation of Israel. The time of the coming is uncertain – not even Jesus knows how long they will have to wait (Mk.13:32), though he is certain that it will happen within a generation (Mk.13:30). Jesus has the same time frame in view when he instructs his followers to make disciples of all nations, assuring them that he will be with them ‘always, to the close of the age’ (Matt.28:19-20). His statement here that all authority has been given to him is also an allusion to Daniel 7:14.
The law of Moses remains operative for Jesus and for Jewish Christianity until ‘heaven and earth pass away’ and ‘all is accomplished’ (Matt.5:18; cf. Mark 13:31; Luke 21:33; Matt.24:35). In the later chapters of Isaiah, however, the creation of new heavens and a new earth (Is.66:22) is made the symbol of a far-reaching restoration of Israel and renewal of the worship of God, following judgment on a rebellious people (65:2; cf. 66:24). Salvation will be extended to the Gentiles (51:4-6), and all flesh will come to worship before the Lord (66:23). It is this watershed in salvation-history that Jesus has in mind, not the disintegration of the time-space continuum.
From the perspective of the Gentile mission there is the same awareness that ‘the form of this world is passing away’ (1 Cor.7:31), that ‘the night is far gone, the day is at hand’ (Rom.13:12). The theological problem of the delay of the parousia in the New Testament is really the historical and very urgent problem of the delay of judgment on the enemies of God’s people, which would bring an end to their suffering. The question is raised explicitly when the threat of persecution is most acute (cf. James 5:7-11; 2 Pet.3:1-10).
Understanding that Israel’s history was coming to a climax, Jesus set before the people two paths – a wide path that led to destruction; and a narrow path that led to life (Matt.7:13-14; Lk.13:24). There is an echo here of Jeremiah 21:8-10, where the ‘way of death’ culminates in the destruction of Jerusalem by the king of Babylon and the way of life is escape from the city and surrender to the Chaldeans. Perhaps Jesus had this in mind when he told the disciples in Judea to escape to the mountains before the end (Matt.24:16-18; Mk.13:14). The choice, and the division in Israel that resulted from it, is also foreshadowed in the distinction in Daniel between, on the one hand, those who ‘forsake the holy covenant’ and, on the other, ‘the people who know their God’ – the wise, who will be refined through suffering and in the end raised to ‘everlasting life’ (Dan.11:30-35; 12:2).
Jesus was in no doubt that Israel was on a course that would lead to the destruction of Jerusalem, the slaughter of a large part of the population, and the shattering of Jewish religious life. When he created havoc in the temple, he angrily cited Jeremiah 7:11: ‘Is my house, whereon my name is called, a den of robbers in your eyes?’ The context is important and Jesus meant his hearers to recall it: the verse forms part of a prophecy of judgment against Jerusalem and the temple that concludes: ‘Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, my anger and my wrath will be poured out on this place, upon man and beast, upon the trees of the field and the fruit of the ground; it will burn and not be quenched’ (20). The ‘way of life’, on the other hand, meant a radical revision of religious, social, and personal priorities and a willingness to trust that the course which Jesus was charting through opposition and suffering towards resurrection and glory was Israel’s only real hope of salvation.
The same choice appears in Paul’s preaching to the Jews in Pisidian Antioch. The forgiveness of the nation’s sins was proclaimed through Jesus – the hope of avoiding catastrophic judgment on the nation (Acts 13:38-39). But if they rejected that forgiveness, they could not expect to escape the sort of national ruin prefigured in Habakkuk 1:5-11 (Acts 13:40-41).
The images of ‘hell’ that appear in the Gospels are prophetic depictions of the coming judgment on Israel. ‘Gehenna’, as Jesus uses the term, is not a place of universal, eternal torment. Jerusalem’s notorious rubbish dump, where perpetual fire consumed the corpses of animals and criminals, has been made an image for the devastation of the city by the Romans, which is conceived not as an arbitrary historical occurrence but as a predictable act of divine judgment. The Jewish War, as Josephus graphically describes it, was the ‘hell of fire’ for a people who persistently defied God and acted unrighteously (cf. Matt.5:22, 29, 30). Jesus concludes his condemnation of the scribes and Pharisees with the warning that the judgment of gehenna ‘will come upon this generation’ and a lament over Jerusalem: ‘Behold, your house is forsaken and desolate’ (Matt.23:36-38). The fact that the judgment of gehenna is said to be ‘eternal’ or ‘unquenchable’ (Matt.18:8-9; Mk.9:43, 48) is indicative not of endless suffering but of the finality and irreversibility of the judgment. It is the fate of the nation, rather than of individuals, that is principally in view.
The parable of the weeds in the field (Matt.13:24-30, 36-43; cf. the parable of the catch of fish: Matt.13:47-50) describes not the final judgment of all humanity but the judgment of Israel at the end of the age, when the ‘righteous’ in Israel are separated from the unrighteous. Jesus concludes his explanation of the parable by saying ‘the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father’ (Matt.13:43). The allusion to Daniel 12:3 is unmistakable: ‘those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament’. What Jesus has in view is an impending national crisis, comparable to the crisis provoked by the intervention of Antiochus into Jewish religious life: unrighteous Israel will be destroyed, thrown into ‘the furnace of fire’ (Matt.13:42); but the righteous – the wise who ‘shall make many understand, though they shall fall by sword and flame, by captivity and plunder’ (Dan.11:33) – will be raised to eternal life. But this is not a final and universal resurrection. It is the hope given (perhaps exclusively) to a particular group under particular historical conditions. Being the first to suffer, Jesus is also the first to be raised to life in advance of the group of those who will be raised with him (cf. 1 Cor.15:20-23; Col.1:18).
Christ’s death at the hands of the Gentiles (Matt.20:19; Lk.18:32) is, in the first place, a death for Israel or in the place of the nation. As the Son of man figure he pre-empts the suffering of the ‘saints’ who are ‘in him’ or who belong to him. Jesus’ words in Gethsemane, ‘Let this cup pass from me’ (Matt.26:39), are a reference to the Old Testament cup of divine judgment on the people (cf. Ps.75:8; Is.51:17, 22; Jer.49:12; Lam.2:13; Ezek.23:31-34; Hab.2:16). It is not a universal judgment for a universal state of sinfulness that he faces but judgment for the particular sin of Israel’s persistent rebellion against God. But the ‘cross’ is also the means by which the separation of Jews and Gentiles is overcome: the ‘law of commandments and ordinances’, which enforced the separation, has been abolished ‘in his flesh’ (Eph.2:11-22).
We might suggest, then, that ‘Jesus’ death for us’ is effective in two particular respects. First, it is the basis for the salvation of the people of God during the eschatological crisis: Israel will not be completely annihilated by the coming judgment because Jesus has died ‘as a ransom for many’ (Matt.20:28; Mk.10:45). The disciples in Judea will be saved by fleeing to the mountains (Matt.24:16-18; Mk.13:14). Peter is conscious of the historical urgency motivating the preaching of the gospel when he exhorts the crowds on the day of Pentecost, ‘Save yourselves from this crooked generation’ (Acts 2:40). It is in this context of catastrophic judgment on Israel that he asserts, ‘And it shall be that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved’ (Acts 2:21). When later he tells the council in Jerusalem that ‘we believe that we shall be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus’ (Acts 15:11), he has in view the impending judgment on the city and the fall-out from that event for the wider Roman world: it is not Jews alone who need to be saved from the coming wrath (Acts 11:12).
Those who do not ‘survive’ the ‘birthpangs’ of the new age, who die because they have chosen to follow the same path as Jesus, will be raised with him and share in his kingdom. The leading argument of Romans 5-8 is that those who have been justified by faith and therefore have peace with God (5:1), who can expect to be saved from the wrath of God (5:9), have a hope of sharing in the glory of God through the experience of suffering (5:2-5; 8:17, 18, 29-30). But prior to this historically limited eschatological hope, justification by faith provides the basis on which people become ‘descendants’ of Abraham (4:11-13; 9:8), members of a community drawn from all the nations, who will ‘inherit the world’ (4:13). Salvation and justification are essentially corporate categories: what matters is that there continues to be a justified people of God, not that individuals are approved for entry into heaven.
The second effect of Jesus’ death for us is that it brings about the reconstitution of Israel as a people of grace rather than of law, possessing the Spirit of God, including Gentiles. Paul’s critical statement in Ephesians 2:8-9 about salvation by grace through faith and ‘not because of works’ belongs to a larger argument about the reconciliation of Gentiles to God and their incorporation into a ‘holy temple in the Lord’, which is the ‘dwelling place of God in the Spirit’ (2:21-22). This argument needs to be taken seriously. Of course, by making themselves part of the redeemed community of Israel at a time of impending distress, Gentiles also associate themselves with the oppressed saints of the Most High and have the same hope of being glorified at the coming of the Son of man. But fundamentally, they are ‘saved’ not in order to get into heaven but in order to be part of a redeemed community, where the Spirit of God is active, which experiences the life of the age that will come after the crisis (cf. Acts 13:46), from which they had previously been excluded.
Salvation in the Old Testament is a very worldly notion. It describes God’s intervention to rescue the people from a difficult or dangerous situation and restore them to wholeness: salvation is health, safety, peace, military victory, deliverance; it is the continuing well-being of the people. Only in extreme instances does salvation require rescue beyond death in the form of resurrection. The eschatological crisis that marked the transition between the old Israel and the new brought salvation as resurrection to the fore because the continuation of the community required faithfulness and steadfastness to the point of death. But we should not lose sight of the fact that salvation is the response of God to a particular set of concrete circumstances.
Most of what is said about ‘salvation’ in the New Testament, therefore, must be interpreted in relation to the eschatological watershed of the coming of the kingdom of God (the destruction of Jerusalem, the defeat of Roman imperial power, the emergence of the church) and the experience of God through the Spirit in the context of the ‘new covenant’ community. Beyond this, however, at the point when death itself is overcome (1 Cor.15:26; Rev.20:14), all people will be judged according to how they have lived their lives: ‘the dead were judged by what was written in the books, by what they had done’ (Rev.20:12). This is the final and universal judgment.
This understanding has some important implications. It may help us to resolve the tension between the principle of salvation by grace and texts such as Romans 2:6, which states that God ‘will render to every man according to his works’. Paul goes on to argue in this passage (12-16) that Gentiles who do not have the law will be judged according to conscience – not condemned out of hand because they have not believed the gospel. It may offer, therefore, a better way of settling the argument about exclusivism, at least inasmuch as exclusion from the covenant community does not equate directly with exclusion from heaven. In any case, it certainly shifts the emphasis from getting to heaven to being an effective people of God now. The church has become far too complacent about its participation in the cultured olive tree of Israel (cf. Rom.11:17-24). The argument reinforces a sense of ethical and spiritual obligation, not least for Christians: salvation simply gets the people of God to the point where they can start doing ‘good works’.
At the heart of Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God is the prediction that within a generation Israel would experience a devastating political and religious crisis. There would be a period of increasing disorder and anxiety (the eschatological ‘birthpangs’ which mark the onset of judgment and the inauguration of the messianic age) during which the disciples would find themselves persecuted, isolated, tempted by false hopes of security. 2 Thessalonians 2:3 (‘the rebellion comes first’) may suggest that Jewish revolt against Roman rule would set the chain of ‘end-time’ events in motion. The nation would be invaded; Jerusalem and its temple would be destroyed. The vivid apocalyptic language, echoing Old Testament texts, suggests both that this catastrophe would be the outworking of God’s judgment on the people and that it would constitute an irrevocable overthrow of Israel’s religious system. The destruction of Jerusalem is also prophesied, or perhaps described (depending on how we date the text), in the sequence of seven seals and seven trumpets in Revelation.
Those disciples who endure to the ‘end’ of this period of turmoil will be ‘saved’ – not least in the sense that the embryonic Jewish church will survive the war against Rome (Mk.13:13; Matt.24:13; cf. Mk.13:20). But this ‘end’ will not be reached before the gospel has been preached ‘in the whole world as a testimony to all nations’ (Matt.24:14; cf. Mk.13:10). This expectation, though commonly invoked now as a motivation for mission, must be interpreted historically: it is Jesus’ own disciples – the sect of the Nazarenes (Acts 24:5) – who will fulfil this prophecy as they bear testimony before governors and kings for the sake of Jesus (Mk.13:9-10). We must assume that, in the special and limited sense that it was intended, it has been fulfilled.
The climactic moment in the judgment on Israel is the installation of the ‘abomination of desolation’ in the holy place (Mk.13:14; Matt.24:15). The phrase originally alluded to the erection of an altar to Zeus in the temple by Antiochus Epiphanes in 167 BC, but it had become the archetypal act of desecration and readily finds fulfilment in the impiety of Titus’ soldiers, who offered sacrifices before their standards as the sanctuary burned. Paul describes the same event in the narrative of the man of lawlessness in 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4.
The cosmic disturbances that precede the coming of the Son of man (Mark 13:24-25; Lk.21:25-26; Matt.24:29) must also be interpreted in relation to the circumstances of the war against Rome. They follow on immediately after the period of extreme suffering (‘in those days’, ‘immediately’: Mk.13:24; Matt.24:29) and will take place before the generation of Jesus’ contemporaries disappears (Mk.13:30). Such language is used in the Old Testament to designate the impending crisis as a final and irrevocable act of judgment. Isaiah 34, for example, is a proclamation of God’s anger against the nations and against Edom in particular. It includes the predictions: ‘All the host of heaven shall rot away, and the skies roll up like a scroll. All their host shall fall, as leaves fall from the vine, like leaves falling from the fig tree’ (v.4). But the world is not destroyed, and in the end Edom is depicted as a wasteland overgrown with thorns and thistles, inhabited by wild animals. Israel faces the same divine judgment that it faced in the past when Judah was invaded by Nebuchadnezzar. The difference this time is that there is no accompanying promise of the literal restoration of Jerusalem and the temple.
Jesus’ ‘prophecy’ about the ‘coming of the Son of man’ is less a prediction about what will happen, a description of future events, than a statement from within the purview of Jewish apocalypticism about the fulfilment of Daniel’s vision. He does not say that the Son of man will descend bodily from heaven to earth: he means rather that the drama of Daniel 7, in which the enemy of God’s people is overthrown and kingdom given to the saints of the Most High, will be re-enacted in the course of the coming crisis of the end of the age. This will be recognized beyond the boundaries of Israel: ‘as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of man’ (Matt.24:27). Not only the high priest (Matt.26:64) but also the tribes of the earth (Matt.24:30) will ‘see’ the vindication of Jesus – ‘the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory’.
After the final disappearance of Jesus, lifted up and carried out of sight by a cloud, the disciples are told by an angel that ‘This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven’ (Acts 1:11). This is probably better understood as a reference back to Jesus’ own statement about ‘the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory’ (Lk.21:27) than as a direct echo of Daniel’s prophecy. The account of Jesus’ ‘ascension’, however, is introduced by a question posed by the disciples about the time of the restoration of the kingdom to Israel (Acts 1:6), which at least sets the coming of Jesus in the context of Israel’s immediate political and religious hopes. This is reinforced by Peter’s later statement to the Jews gathered in Solomon’s portico that heaven must receive the Christ ‘until the time for establishing all that God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old’ (3:21). The phrase ‘by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old’ is found elsewhere in the Greek Bible only at Luke 1:70, where Zechariah speaks of God redeeming his people, raising up a horn of salvation, ‘as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old’ (Luke 1:70). This cannot be a coincidence. Zechariah goes on to define this salvation as a deliverance ‘from the hand of our enemies’ so that Israel ‘might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all the days of our life’ (vv.71-75). Again, the coming of the Son of man has to do with rescue of Israel from her oppressors and the institution of a new freedom of worship and servanthood.
Paul has modified the prophetic schema of the coming of the Son of man in 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 ‘by a word of the Lord’ in order to accommodate those who had died and to reassure the Thessalonians: the Lord himself will ‘descend’ prior to the ‘coming’ in order to guarantee the participation of the dead in the re-enactment of Daniel’s vision.
Jesus’ apocalyptic vision appears not to reach beyond the destruction of Jerusalem and the establishment of the church in the Gentile world. Paul, however, foresees ‘wrath’ against both Israel and Rome (cf. Rom.2:9). The destruction of the fourth beast in Daniel’s prophecy, which appears originally to have been an allusion to Greece, is reused as an image for the defeat of imperial Rome: ‘the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence had worked the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped its image. These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulphur’ (Rev.19:20). Paul’s description of the defeat of the ‘man of lawlessness’ (2 Thess.2:8) has the same reference. The interpretive key to this difficult passage is also to be found in the later chapters of Daniel. A detailed parallelism emerges between these two apocalyptic texts which suggests that Paul envisaged an ‘end-time’ dénouement centred on Jerusalem: the religious collapse of the Jews, the resistance mounted by faithful believers and their eventual removal, and the eruption of an extreme lawlessness from the heart of Roman imperialism, culminating in the parousia of the Lord Jesus. The power that brings about the overthrow of Rome, however, is simply the ‘word of God’, the preaching of the gospel (2 Thess.2:8; Rev.19:13, 15; cf. Eph.6:17).
Jesus told his disciples that some of them would live to ‘see the Son of man coming in his kingdom’ (Matt.16:24). At the time of writing 1 Thessalonians at least, Paul expected to be alive at ‘the coming of the Lord’ (1 Thess.4:15). His recommendation that the unmarried in Corinth should remain unmarried is based on the supposition that they would soon face considerable ‘distress’: the ‘appointed time has grown very short… the form of this world is passing away’ (1 Cor.7:25-31). He writes to the church in Rome warning them that it was time to ‘wake from sleep’ for ‘salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed; the night is far gone, the day is at hand’ (Rom.13:11-12; cf. 1 Thess.5:4:11); ‘the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet’ (Rom.16:20). He tells the Philippians that ‘The Lord is at hand’ (Phil.4:5).
James urges the brethren to be patient ‘until the coming of the Lord’, for ‘the coming of the Lord is at hand…, the Judge is standing at the doors’ (James 5:7-9). The unrighteous rich, on the other hand, should ‘weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you’ (5:1). Peter writes that ‘the end of all things is at hand’ (1 Pet.4:7). The churches face a ‘fiery ordeal’ because ‘the time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God’ (1 Pet.4:12, 17). The phrase ‘household of God’ invokes the temple in Jerusalem at least as a figure for the community (cf. 1 Pet.2:5), but Peter also may have in mind the prospect of a final judgment on Jerusalem and its temple that will have repercussions for the whole Roman world. In his second letter he explicitly addresses the problem of a delay, but it is still appropriate to speak of believers as those who are ‘waiting for and hastening (being eager for) the coming of the day of God’ (2 Pet.3:12).
The writer to the Hebrews encourages his hearers not to neglect meeting together but to encourage one another, ‘all the more as you see the Day drawing near’ (Heb.10:25). A few verses later he quotes from the Septuagint translation of Habakkuk 2:3-4: ‘For yet a little while, and the coming one shall come and shall not tarry; but my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him’ (37-38).
Christ’s reign begins when the kingdom is transferred to the Son of man figure. The theme appears in Revelation 11:5: ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever.’ In 1 Corinthians 15:23 Paul argues for a separation of Christ’s resurrection from the resurrection of those who belong to him: ‘each in his own order’. Christ has been raised in advance of his ‘coming’ as the Son of man (and as the one who represents the suffering saints) to receive the kingdom. He is seated at the right hand of God, ‘far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come’ (Eph.1:20-21). He will reign ‘until he has put all his enemies under his feet’ (1 Cor.15:25; cf. Heb.2:8; 10:12-13); then he will deliver the kingdom to the Father ‘after destroying every rule and every authority and power’ (1 Cor.15:24).
There is an important strand of teaching that relates to the situation of those who suffer because of Christ during the period of upheaval that marked the end of the age. This group will not merely experience resurrection but will participate actively in the reign of the resurrected Christ. This is prefigured in Daniel’s vision, in which it is the oppressed saints of the Most High who receive ‘dominion and glory and kingdom’ (Dan.7:14). The idea appears most clearly in Jesus’ promise that in the kingdom, or in the ‘new world’, those who continue with his in his trials will also be assigned a kingdom and will ‘sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel’ (Lk.22:28-30; cf. Matt.19:28). It may be implicit in the beatitude: ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt.5:10). In response to aggression from the Jews Paul urged the new converts in Asia Minor to continue in the faith, saying that ‘through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God’ (Acts 14:22). He assures the Thessalonian believers that by their suffering they are ‘made worthy of the kingdom of God’ (2 Thess.1:5). At the coming of the Son of man those whose hearts are ‘unblamable in holiness’ (1 Thess.3:13) will be presented, as the saints of the Most High were presented in Daniel 7, before God: the dead in Christ will have been raised, the living snatched up ‘in the clouds’, to be with Christ at his coming (1 Thess.4:15-17) and to receive the kingdom with him. In Romans 8:17 Paul makes it clear that those who will be ‘fellow heirs with Christ’, who will inherit the same kingdom, are those who will ‘suffer with him’. He also differentiates between the resurrection of Christ, ‘the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep’, and the resurrection ‘at his coming’ (the Son of man motif) of those who belong to Christ’ (1 Cor.15:23).
Peter assures the ‘exiles of the Dispersion’ that they have the hope of an imperishable inheritance. For a little while they will have to ‘suffer various trials’, but because Christ was raised from the dead, they can be certain that a salvation will be ‘revealed in the last time’, at ‘the revelation of Jesus Christ’ (1 Pet.1:3-7). Those who endure the ‘fiery ordeal’ that will come upon them will ‘obtain the unfading crown of glory’ when the chief Shepherd is manifested (1 Pet.4:12-14; 5:4; cf. 5:8-10). It is in the context of opposition, reviling and persecution that the hope of resurrection and glory in the near future becomes operative: the ‘revelation of Jesus Christ’ will bring their sufferings to an end and they will obtain ‘the salvation of your souls’ (1:9). The same thought may lie behind Hebrews 2:10: ‘For it was fitting that [God]… in bringing many sons to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through suffering’ (cf. 6:11-12; 12:1-4; 13:12-14).
The idea that those who suffer will share in Christ’s heavenly reign is given greater clarity in Revelation by the distinction between a first and second resurrection. The first resurrection follows the overthrow of ‘Babylon the great’ (18:2), which is Rome, the revelation of the Word of God (19:11-16; cf. 2 Thess.1:7-8; 2:8), the defeat of the beast and false prophet (19:17-21), both of which are closely associated with Rome’s demonic hostility towards the people of God, and the imprisonment of Satan in the ‘abyss’ for a thousand years. At this point those who did not worship the beast, who were killed ‘for their testimony to Jesus and for the word of God’, are raised to life and reign with Christ for a thousand years (20:4-6). The second resurrection of all the dead takes place at the end of this period (20:12-15).
This realignment of the apocalyptic narratives of the New Testament along a coherent and immediate historical axis leads us to suggest that the church now finds itself, in effect, in a post-eschatological situation. The apocalyptically conceived crisis that dominates so much of New Testament teaching is behind us: the age of temple-based worship has come to an end, those who suffered with Christ now reign with him, a renewed, international people of God has emerged, the beast which opposed the people of God, while paradoxically being an instrument of divine judgment, has been overthrown, and the satanic power that inspired it has been curtailed. We don’t have a lot of complicated end-time events to worry about.
There are indications in Paul that the church will have an existence after the ‘end of the age’. He speaks, for example, of a ‘Day’ that will test the work of those who have built upon the foundation of Jesus Christ. If the work survives the ‘fire’, the builder will receive a reward; if it is burned up, he will ‘suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire’ (1 Cor. 3:14-15). The implication would appear to be that, whatever may become of the builder, the church that is properly built on the foundation of Jesus Christ will continue to exist after the eschatological crisis. Indeed, the whole point of constructing it from incombustible materials is to ensure that it will survive. In Ephesians 2:4-7 he explains that believers have been made alive with Christ, raised up to sit with him in the heavenly places so that ‘in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus’.
In a post-eschatological reading of the Bible there is at least a shift of emphasis from asserting an overarching metanarrative towards a rediscovery of the role of the historical community in mission. On the one hand, the biblical narrative, even in its most highly ‘mythicized’ aspects, is seen to have a much closer relation to a particular historical context. On the other, we are presented with a more open-ended perspective on the future. The thousand years of Revelation 20 is not an indefinite period of time: eventually Satan will be released from the pit and the final cosmic dénouement will be set in motion. But the expectation of an imminent end, and the attitude of unworldliness that accompanies it, has been relocated in the past. The church has moved beyond that crisis: the persecution that threatened the church of Jesus Christ with annihilation has come to an end, an international community of believers has been established across the Roman world, sovereignty has been transferred from the demonically inspired imperial power of Rome to Christ: ‘Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death’ (Rev. 12:9-11).
So what can we now say about the mission of the church? The command to ‘make disciples of all nations’ (Mat. 28:19) belongs in principle to the period of eschatological transition and to the same historical context as the earlier statement: ‘this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come’ (Matt. 24:14). The command is given in order to ensure that they there will be a renewed people of God in the post-eschatological world. Certainly that people needs to be sustained throughout the coming ages, but the emphasis now should be on being – being effectively – the people of God in the world rather than on saving souls.
There is likely to be a recovery of Old Testament patterns of religious life and mission. Forms of discipleship devised to enable the church to function during periods of crisis may give way to more settled, creative, life-affirming modes of being God-centred. The promise to Abraham that all the nations will be blessed through him and Isaiah’s image of Israel as a light to the nations (Is. 42:6; 49:6; 60:3) will become central. The church will exemplify a God-centred righteousness (cf. Matt. 5:14) and will be the means by which people discover for themselves the possibilities of forgiveness and life in the Spirit (cf. Gal. 3:8-9). The church is the servant who will bring ‘justice to the nations’, who will be a ‘covenant to the people’, who will ‘open the eyes that are blind’, who will ‘bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness’ (Is. 42:1, 6-7), and who will challenge the prevailing paganism of the world – the stories, myths and ideologies that exclude the living God (Is. 43:10-12). The church will be ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light’ (1 Pet. 2:9).
1 Corinthians 15:24-28 may suggest that during this period of Christ’s reign at the right hand of the Father his enemies are progressively subjugated. It is also worth noting how frequently the New Testament emphasizes the requirement of ‘good works’ (cf. Matt. 5:16; Eph. 2:10; Tit. 2:14; Heb. 10:24). Broadly speaking, a post-eschatological church will adopt a this-worldly orientation: the vision is of a community permeated with the presence of God, functioning as a sign of that reality, as a catalyst for goodness and integrity in the world, and as a reservoir of grace at the heart of mankind’s social and creative endeavour.
If a recovery of Old Testament patterns of religious life brings into focus the church’s responsibility to be an authentic and effective ‘light to the nations’, we should also expect to find a renewed interest in ‘prosperity’. This, of course, needs to be properly understood. The main point to be made here is that if we have in some sense (not absolutely) moved beyond the eschatological crisis that was so determinative for the teaching of Jesus and the early church, we may find that there is less need to cling to ideals of austerity and self-denial. In the New Testament there are two fundamental problems with wealth: one is that it was seen to be a major factor in the drift towards injustice (eg. the rich man and Lazarus: Lk.16:19-31); the other is that wealth was likely to keep people from following Jesus (eg. the rich young ruler: Matt.19:21-22; Mk.10:21-22; Lk.18:22-23). Although these problems remain, we must take into account two things. First, we cannot pretend that we face anything like the level of insecurity and uncertainty that made the possession of wealth problematic for the early disciples. Secondly, there are no good reasons for thinking that the renewal of the covenant excluded a renewal of material life. Outside of the eschatological context, and with the law now written on the hearts of the people rather than on tablets of stone, the dynamic of prosperity becomes a significant aspect of life in the Spirit.
Prosperity, however, is never an end in itself and must be dissociated from greed. Prosperity is more than, and may be other than, wealth: it is shalom, wholeness, the well-being of an individual or community reconciled to the creator. No less importantly, if we receive from God, we are under obligation to give.
Paul speaks of the end of all things in 1 Corinthians 15:24-28. When all Christ’s enemies – ‘every rule and every authority and power’, including death – have been subjugated, the kingdom will be delivered to God the Father, ‘that God may be everything to everyone’. According to Revelation, at the end of the thousand years of Christ’s reign Satan will be freed from his prison. He will gather the ‘nations which are at the four corners of the earth’ to fight against the ‘saints and the beloved city’. The threat is quickly dealt with: the armies are consumed by fire from heaven and the devil is thrown into the lake of fire and sulphur (20:7-10).
At this point there is a final judgment: the dead are judged according to what is written in the books. Those whose names are not found in the book of life are thrown in the lake of fire, which is the second death. Death and Hades are also thrown into the lake of fire (20:11-15). Then John describes the new heaven and the new earth and the new Jerusalem descending ‘out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband’. The dwelling of God is in the midst of humanity; there will be no more suffering and death; the glory and honour of the nations will be brought into the city; and the leaves of the trees of life that grow either side of the river that flows from the city will be for the healing of the nations (21:1-22:5)
The synoptic Gospels tell a story which for the most part has no direct significance for the bulk of humanity. It is a Jewish story; and in an important sense these writings are better seen as a coda to the Old Testament than as an overture to the New. Taken on their own terms, the Gospels present the argument that the grand religious experiment of the Mosaic covenant reached its culmination in the person of Jesus the Messiah. Simply put, in the manner of the Old Testament prophets Jesus set before the nation, which regarded itself as a unique ‘people of God’, an ultimate choice: a wide gate that would lead to destruction, or a narrow gate that would lead to life (Matt.7:13-14). It is debatable whether the writers of the New Testament show any direct knowledge of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70; but it is clear that Jesus expected the judgment upon Israel to be realized through a catastrophe of this nature. The gate which leads to life, on the other hand, was in some sense Jesus himself, who called men and women to follow him, who would be ‘king of the Jews’ - a kingship that would radically redefine what it meant to belong to the people of the god whom the Jews called YHWH.
In all of this, however, Jesus hardly looks beyond either the boundaries of Israel or the future horizon of the historical crisis. He is Israel’s Messiah. To understand the Gospels properly we must first strip away all that we have come to know about the universal faith which takes Jesus as its cornerstone. We must not read the Gospels as though they were addressed to us, even though the shadowy figures who have been given credit for writing them certainly meant these accounts to be read by Gentiles as well as Jews. We must, to the limited extent open to us, imagine ourselves to be Jews living in Palestine under Roman occupation during the early decades of the first century, entirely preoccupied with our own destiny.
The narrowness and exclusivism of Jesus’ ministry are unmistakable. The chief theme of the nativity stories is that he would be ‘king of the Jews’, the one who would ‘save his people from their sins’ (Matt.1:21; cf. Luke 2:11). When the devout old man Simeon, who ‘was waiting for the consolation of Israel’, came across Joseph and Mary in the Temple, he prophesied: ‘This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel…’ (Luke 2:34). The prophetess Anna ‘gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem’ (Luke 2:38). There is nothing in this of the universal theme of God becoming flesh: the significance of the unnatural aspect of Jesus’ birth is not that he was God incarnate but that he was Israel’s Messiah.
The Jewishness not just of the man Jesus but of his whole mission also becomes apparent as soon as we disburden ourselves of our Christian consciousness. His baptism was an identification with repentant Israel. Issues relating to the significance and purpose of the Jewish law dominated his teaching. His healing ministry was confined quite deliberately to Israel. He told a desperate Canaanite woman who begged him to heal her demon-possessed daughter, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,’ and argued that it was not right to ‘take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs’ (Matt.15:24, 26). Impressed by her faith he restored the girl, and this may anticipate later developments; but we cannot miss the point that Jesus imposed strict boundaries to his ministry. ‘Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans,’ he instructed the twelve when he sent them out. ‘Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel’ (Matt.10:5-6). If later they are ‘brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles’ (v.18), that will be a consequence of their mission to Israel, not because they have been preaching to the Gentiles. We must take the historical and geographical constraints seriously when Jesus solemnly says, ‘I tell you the truth, you will not finish going through the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes’ (v.23). The message they are to preach is that ‘the kingdom of heaven is near’ (v.7); and this must be understood fundamentally as a matter of Jewish concern. We should not attempt to make Israel a world in microcosm.
The horizon of the future is also limited: Jesus barely looks beyond the impending destruction of Jerusalem and the inauguration of a mission beyond the borders of Israel. What he foresees in the Olivet discourse is not the end of the world but the end of an age defined by worship in the temple in Jerusalem - and with that the end of the hope that salvation will emanate from Zion. This rather unorthodox contention will have to be defended at some point, but for now we may outline the course of events envisaged. During a period of mounting turmoil the followers of Jesus will face opposition and persecution from the Jews (Mark 13:9-13; Luke 21:12-19; Matt.24:9-13). God’s judgment upon Israel will be executed through the agency of the Roman army, who will besiege the city (Luke 21:20), then desecrate and destroy the temple (Mark 13:14; Matt.24:15). At this point believers in Judea are urged to flee to the mountains while they have the chance (Mark 13:14-16; Luke 21:21-22; Matt.24:16-18); they should not allow themselves to be deceived by false messiahs and prophets who hold at the hope of a spurious salvation (Mark 13:21-22; Matt.24:23-24). In conjunction with these events the Son of man will be revealed, not as a localized presence (Matt.24:26), but among the nations, through the proclamation of the gospel (Matt.24:14): many will recognize that the one who was pierced has received glory and sovereignty from God (Mark 13:26; Luke 21:27; Matt.24:30). As a result a new people will be gathered from the ends of the earth (Mark 13:27; Matt.24:31). All this will take place, Jesus makes quite clear, within a generation (Mark 13:30; Luke 21:32; Matt.24:34).
Jesus’ disciples are differentiated not from unbelievers but from the Gentiles (Matt.5:47; 6:7, 32; 18:17; 20:25-26; cf. Mark 10:42; Luke 22:25). In keeping with Old Testament ideas of the eschatological pilgrimage of the nations to Zion, the Gentiles appear as spectators, witnesses to the glory of Israel’s Messiah; the magi come from the East to pay homage. Simeon sees in Jesus the salvation which God ‘has prepared in the sight of all people, a light for revelation to the Gentiles’ (Luke 2:30-31). The Gentiles may in various ways benefit from the coming of Jesus, but this is still Israel’s salvation - it is ‘for glory to your people Israel’ (v.32). This is almost entirely Israel-centred. Prior to the resurrection the idea of a Gentile church existed at best only on the periphery of Jesus’ thinking: the gospel would be preached to all nations, but without any clear objective in view (Mark 13:10; 14:9; Matt.24:14). It was not immediately obvious to the disciples after the resurrection that they should be preaching the gospel to Gentiles.