The Awfully Big Adventure of being a Traditional Christian

Society is changing. That is a truism because that is what society does. Hairstyles and fashions come and go – one generation’s cutting edge is another generation’s ridiculous. Ideas and philosophies wax and wane in the same way: perhaps in longer cycles, but with just as finite a life span as a mullet or crepe shoes. 

 

I think it was William Inge who said, “Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.” Despite this wisdom from the good Dean, the church has always had at least a wing that has been determined to cosy up to the latest wave of

fashionable thought. 

In fact, society, even at its most Christian-influenced, is always going to be in tension with the church. In its thought-life it will be in conflict with God’s revelation. The swirling and apparently chaotic currents of politics and human thought can be summed up as “the heathen raging and the peoples imagining a vain thing” – a superficially confused and meaningless roar of white noise that in reality has one thread running through it – opposition to God and his Messiah. The church’s role is to provide a prophetic voice that challenges society in that rebellion. 

Charles Finney

When the church – or parts of it – capitulate to the zeitgeist philosophically and ethically, the church loses any possibility of maintaining that prophetic role. This has happened time after time, in one way or another. The grafting in of imperial power structures and pagan practices into the church through and after Constantine emasculated us for centuries. The Protestant Reformation both benefitted from and was compromised by Renaissance humanism and the political and personal desire of kings and princes to loosen the authority of the Roman see. Finney’s methodologically driven individualistic Arminianism fitted just too neatly into the new American Dream where the salesman was king.  And many churches failed to see that 

Churchmen with Nazi leaders 

the hopes of German renewal offered by the National Socialists in the 30s were utterly incompatible with the gospel; their compromise has damaged the impact of some denominations to this day. 

In all of these cases, I think the church would have claimed to be culturally relevant, to be moving with the times, to be at the cutting edge, to be maintaining its prophetic voice. And in every case we can now discern, with hindsight, the damage that was done and the weaknesses that were left. 

Over the last decade the pace of change in the West feels as if it has picked up. Ideology which was creeping in through the humanities departments of the universities when I was an undergraduate is now quite suddenly dominant. As a Biology undergraduate at the turn of the 80s I lived in a staunchly Modern world. The heroes were Dawkins and Maynard-Smith – and if as a Christian with qualms about evolution you found them to be villains, you knew exactly what weapons you needed to fight them. But right back then, very strange things were being said by my friends studying sociology and social anthropology which I simply couldn’t get a handle on. Truth is all relative?? What is true in one culture is not true in another? The meaning of  a book is defined by the reader, not the author?? Frankly, it seemed crazy, utterly stupid, nonsense. I was a thoroughly Modern man. (And still, to be honest, feel most comfortable when the discussion is controlled by those presuppositions.)

John Maynard Smith

But it is that Postmodern, relativist stream which now dominates our society, our culture, our media. Dawkins is a dinosaur, a representative of a bygone age. I’d still watch his teeth, but he is by no means a great force. No, the big issue is the dominance of the Relative. We are no longer modern, we are post-modern.  

And the church, of course, is tempted to buy into that. Given that society is ever less patient with absolutism and certainty, it is not hard to sense the potential “benefit” of running with that. In a world which rejects any idea of an overarching metanarrative, the church now says it’s wrong to see such an overarching narrative even in the Bible itself. In a world where sexuality has been utterly privatised, with behaviour and identity infinitely malleable, the church says that sexual/gender inclusion has always been central to the gospel when properly understood. In a world where everything must be affirmed, where all must have prizes, where negativity is the only negative, the church says that the gospel is one of self-realisation, that ultimately God's Love utterly dissolves every barrier, and that there is no hell to flee, because all will ultimately be gathered home. 

And, of course, such belief is always put forward as being brave and bold. Those who espouse the new approach are always ‘cutting edge’. They are always ‘reaching those the traditional church has failed’, they are ‘making a safe space for questioning people’, they are touching the lives of those who have been mistreated or marginalised by more restrictive forms. Traditional Christianity, on the other hand, is seen as staid, closed-minded, boring, harsh, irrelevant – a cause of the problems we face, not their solution. 

I want to challenge this. I want to challenge it because the post-modern wave will pass in its turn, and the church that has embraced it so passionately will be left a widower once again. But I also want to challenge it because it is nonsense. It is not the traditional stream of orthodox Christianity that is spineless, boring and unadventurous. The exact opposite is the case. 

There is nothing so boring and predictable and ultimately self-indulgent as “Christianity” when it ends up simply absorbing the zeitgeist, and not least because the church never does it as well as the world. But also because in the name of boldness, the church becomes just another yes-man, the culture’s parrot, squawking along to the current trend. It’s all so predictable! And tragically, the world finds it laughable – do you remember Not the Nine O’clock news and the CofE Satanists sketch? 

 

By contrast, standing for classic doctrinal orthodoxy, for belief in the inspiration and authority of scripture, for the uniqueness of Jesus in his person and work, for the reality of the future justice that he will bring when he returns, for a view of sexuality and marriage that has come to be hated and even outlawed, for the absolute need each of us has of personal regeneration, transformation through the direct working in us of the Spirit of God – believing and proclaiming such things is actually very scary. It requires real courage.  

We are entering a time in which it is very easy to imagine Christian pastors being reported to the police by members of their own congregations for things said in the pulpit. There is a great deal of hate and malevolence in our supposedly tolerant culture and, be assured, it will drive massive wedges into the church too. At such a time, thinking and speaking classic doctrine and classic morality takes a lot of nerve. And faith. 

The challenge is on. I have blown it in the past, destroying my ministry through spiritual coolness and moral failure. I don’t want to blow it again, through simply chickening out. I don’t have a public preaching ministry any more, but I know I must do what I can, which is write and agitate. Will you join the movement? :-) 

Terry Heyward on A Chralaig

The Salvation Army and the church in the West as a whole need adventurers. It needs bold compassionate people who will speak the truth in love.  People for whom the gracious welcome of a gospel-driven church is authentic and Christ-like. They do not deny the reality of sin, nor put grace and the challenge to repent into a false opposition. They know that Jesus tackled the would-be stoners of the adulterous woman ruthlessly, and spoke to her in firm kindness, “Go, and sin no more.”  That is Christ-shaped, bold grace. It is scary, because it offends both pharisaic-church and worldly-church, but it is good. So good.

The church needs people who will resist the incursion of the spirit of the age. People who will say No to making the gospel easier to believe, because they know that the gospel is always impossible to believe anyway. People who will not confuse resistance to the spirit of the age with simple conservatism, mind you, still less a hankering after the spirit of the previous age. (Vague, amorphous, viciously tolerant postmodernity is not necessarily any worse overall than spiky, proud, pushy modernity – it just has different points of weakness and rebellion.) 

The church needs prophets. It needs to learn again to raise its voice in gospel proclamation. I do not see Elijah on Carmel making a safe space for spiritual exploration, I do not hear Paul in Athens affirming the whole variety of spiritual experience. And I don’t imagine that the married monk of Wittenberg, or Wesley at Bristol, or Booth in Whitechapel were a particularly cosy listen. If the church is to proclaim the Living God and his Son, sent to save us, it will not be or feel particularly safe. I’m sorry folks, but we need to be a bit less Michael Mcintyre, and a bit more Stewart Lee.

John Wesley preaching

The church – in my own context the Salvation Army – needs leaders who will be brave and bold regarding the doctrines and moral positions of the church. Clearly, leading an international movement of this size is an appalling responsibility and an impossible challenge. The fact of our interaction with government and social services makes this no easier – arguably it makes fatal compromise almost inevitable. I do not envy the leaders’ role! But it is right to place the challenge – doctrinal incoherence and moral equivocation will not take the movement forward, and nor are they loving. Allowing the teaching of positions that directly contradict (for instance) doctrine 11 may seem gracious and kind, but actually it betrays every supporter who gives towards the army’s ministry in the expectation that the doctrines will be upheld. The dream of an “inclusive church” which refuses to call out sexual sin is very cruel and unloving towards the person who struggles with particular temptations and has the right to expect the church to give support in that struggle. Failing to call to repentance is not loving – it is a dereliction of duty that hurts people, now and eternally. 

We are in an adventure, folks, and it is going to be a wild ride. The bold path, the daring, courageous way ahead, clings to the line of God’s truth while every wind of changing culture tries to blow us off course. We will stick to the eternally relevant word even as fellow Christians scorn our “irrelevance". We will not be traditional for the sake of it – we long to see more light shining from the Word – but we do not see any light at all where the Word itself is despised. 

G K Chesterton

I do not follow Chesterton in every last detail of this famous piece from his book Orthodoxy, but the overall argument is stunning, and we need to recover it: 

 

…it is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, anyone can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. The smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean, and the lion of ancestral pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten forests of the north. Of these theological equalisations I have to speak afterwards. Here it is enough to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless.

  

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom--that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

The church of the new start

I was up North a couple of weekends ago and met an old friend, a Baptist pastor. We got talking about my tangled spiritual (and unspiritual) journey over the past six years and I said to him that I had found myself at home in the Salvation Army simply because here I have found a community that genuinely accepts and offers a new start to a wrecked life. He said, "You couldn't make a better recommendation of any church than that."

I want to be careful; my experience of the SA is not wide; I dare say that maybe not all corps and communities are equally grace-driven. Nor am I saying that such attitudes of acceptance are unique to the Army; the very friend I was speaking to has been consistently full of grace over the years. 

But I do think that a "new start to the wretched" is built into the Sally's DNA in a special way. What applies to the addicted and the down and out applies to the disgraced pastor too. I am not talking about being coddled (how William Booth hated "coddling"!) or pushed into being something I shouldn't be. I am talking about acceptance. 

I know what it is to be accepted on paper, but to be looked on as a weird pariah. I know how the "fruit of repentance" that people are looking for needs to be long term after a long term sin. I know that those who know me personally, who sat under my ministry, or whom I have hurt most, will never see me the same way again. I know that there are deep issues. 

But I also know that the coolish shoulder is not limited to those I have hurt personally. The honest testimony of what has happened is enough to repel some, while others fling their arms wide. And I have found a lot of wide-armed welcome in TSA. 

All churches need to look hard at their foundation in grace. I have written before about the current tendency to see grace as an almost spineless acceptance which doesn't challenge to change. Real grace ain't spineless - but it is real and not just a concept on paper. As my son said in a previous discussion on grace, quoting a recent preacher at his church, talking about the parable of the Prodigal Son:

"I think there's lots of theological reasons why people don't come to church today, but could it maybe be this one as well: that too many people out there - they bump into the older brother before they get to the Father. Maybe that could be the reason."

The Salvation Army is at a crossroads. Never has the question of its identity been more acute. Its ecclesiastical eccentricities, its public perception as a charity, its mixed-source funding, its internal theological tensions, its particular stress under the external pressures of a postmodern, multicultural world - all of these things impact TSA in a special way as we approach the Army's 150th anniversary. 

It is easy to moan and criticise at such a time. But this new boy is thankful for the grace and new start that he has found here. Grace that comes from the Cross, grace that accepts, grace that embraces, grace that helps you to "go, and sin no more."

May that model of grace, as we find it in Jesus Christ, be the foundation and keystone for the next 150 years of the Sally Army. 

A religious four year old and the problem of maintaining Grace.

A young lady of 4, a relative of mine, has a fairly high opinion of her moral standing. In the light of the frequent tantrums displayed by her sister (Terrible 2) she believes herself to be perfect. Along with this lack of acknowledged guilt goes more. She is religious. 

Their mother was recently reading to the girls: the story of Jesus welcoming the little children. She asked 4 and Terrible 2 if they thought that Jesus checked on who was good or naughty before he welcomed them. Clear and firm came the reply from 4: "Yes."  

She has never been taught that. That concept has come entirely from inside herself. It is as much an early manifestation of a toddler's original sin as disobedience, greed, selfishness or lying. She is religious, in the sense that she innately sees acceptance by God as being based on merit, that we are able in some way to make the grade, and (miniature Pharisee that she is) that she is one of those who would be welcomed. 

The incident got me thinking. Grace is such an amazing thing, but it is also alien to our basic human, proud, sinful mindset. As such, it is always under attack, from one direction or another. In the first place, the simple fact of unconditional acceptance at the point of entry into Christianity is so different to our inborn religiosity that it is always hard to maintain.

If Jesus receives us just as we are, then he leaves no room for our natural tendency to oneupmanship in general and especially for oneupmanship as we come to him. In fact, such a moral pecking order will hold us back from ever really coming - if I think that God would accept me more easily than my little sister, then I haven't really understood what his acceptance means and I have never really run to him. Tragically, the church is full of replicas of the four year old - glad they have made the grade. They make the world want to spew. (Interestingly, such decent religiosity apparently makes Jesus want to spew too.)  

Jesus doesn't ask what we are like before he welcomes us. That is grace. You come as you are, and you don't need to look at yourself and how bad you are (or how "good" you are), still less at anyone else, but only to him. 

But the church also faces another challenge to grace. Having welcomed us in simple acceptance, the idea is around that Jesus never asks us about our lives or lifestyle, and that he certainly never asks us to change anything at all. And that is not the case. 

Grace is the open welcome to those who have done wrong, treating us lavishly with unmerited kindness and mercy. It does not deny or even ignore the fact of our wrongdoing - rather it pays the price for it. It is that costliness of acceptance, that fact that grace is free to the sinner but bloody expensive to the Giver, that challenges me to look at my forgiven wrongdoing and be determined and delighted to change. There is to be no hard examination of myself at point of entry, as if my goodness or badness could alter my possibility of acceptance, but, once arrived, the fact of being accepted, and being accepted through the Cross, shines a light onto and into my life like never before: I see my sin in a dreadful new way, and I find I must change.

Grace accepts me as I am - but it doesn't leave me as I am. It challenges me to the core - my pride, my selfishness, my deceit, my greed, my perversion, my lack of love and honour to my Creator.

Of course that process of gracious acceptance, challenge and change, is not linear. If it were, we would certainly end up with a vicious pecking order firmly entrenched among all who have come to Jesus: "I've made more progress than her...!" But it is a circle. I come to Christ... am accepted... grace challenges my bad stuff... I try to change... see how bad my bad stuff really is... and come to Christ afresh for the unconditional acceptance which is my only hope. Because of that cycle, a Christian is never more than a heartbeat away from coming to Jesus empty handed. Break the circle, start to pride yourself on your "progress", and you will find yourself back in religion with a much loved four year old.

 

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Jesus calls us to come to him. Not because we are good, but because even the feeling of being good enough to come (or to not need to come!) is a symptom of our bankruptcy. So come and receive his forgiveness. 

You will never be the same again.