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.
AbstractCultural 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.
IntroductionCultural 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 OdenTheology 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 McGrathIn 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 BediakoThe 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 OdenThomas 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 ReformationAs 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 ReformationMcGrath 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 ImplicationsAs 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 cultureGoodness 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 cultureWe 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 textAs 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 relationsFor 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