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.

A whole library of books?

"The Bible is not a book, but a whole library of books."

In recent years it has become more and more common to say that the Bible is not a single book, but a whole library of books. This assertion is sometimes put as if it were a new insight, and it is put strongly, combatively, as if it were very important, crucial to the battle for Christianity in the post modern world. 

At the heart of the assertion is the idea that the Bible speaks with many voices that are to some degree in disagreement with each other.  Human authorship in its diversity leads inevitably to discordant voices, especially given the cultural, linguistic, chronological and geographical spread involved. 

The immediate effect of this is that the authority of any part of the scriptures can be waved away relatively easily. Not long ago, in a paper aimed at showing, say, that Romans 1 had nothing to say regarding modern homosexual relationships, attention was paid to the exact Greek words used and their interpretation. Now, with an acceptance that Jesus and Paul have essentially different messages, it is sufficient to classify the latter as the author of some "letters from 2000 years ago" and ditch him without further debate. If this is true of the Pauline corpus, how much more so of the older Testament...

The first thing that can be said about all this is that an awareness of diversity within Scripture isn't actually new at all. All careful students of the Bible, from Chrysostom to Calvin and up to the present, have observed that diversity of genre, cultural background and theological emphasis of the various writings. Indeed, good exegesis has been in large part precisely the struggle to interpret scripture in a way that does justice to its historical and diverse nature. It was understood that God had spoken through history in a progressive way and in diversified forms - a conviction that perhaps had its roots in Heb 1:1? - and that respect for that diversity was an essential key to hearing his voice. 

If there was a sea change in the thinking about the nature of scripture, it wasn't particularly recent. It was in the 19th century that scholars began to teach the human authorship of the Bible  in a way which downplayed or denied the divine element. It was in that period that the idea of incompatible theologies, of discordant voices, of irreconcilable differences between texts began to come in. Although lone voices had said some of these things before, the 19th century saw a new acceptability and broader consensus, at least in the universities, that scripture must be read in a way that effectively ruled out looking for a common thread of truth from a self-consistent God. Human authorship, not divine, became the sole principle governing interpretation. 

The recent development has been that such thinking has started to come into parts of the church which have been regarded as evangelical, and some of which still wish to regard themselves and be regarded as evangelical. That is new. It is part of a trend that has been going on for a while, with the goalposts continuously on the move, but this element represents a further stage of the outcropping of 19th century liberalism into mainstream, evangelical church life.  

This is a disaster. It would be hard to overstate the corrosive, poisonous effects of such a line of thought. It is destructive of Christian Faith at its very heart, makes preaching all but impossible, and leaves the church adrift on the chaotic cross-currents of postmodernity. Or, to put it another way, it is the intellectual leaders' desire to appease and to live happily with the postmodern world that is stealing the bread of heaven from the mouth of the congregations of believers. 

It doesn't square with Jesus' attitude to Scripture. 

If we allow that the gospel narratives paint in any way a coherent and authoritative picture of Jesus, then we have to take on board his attitude to the OT scriptures if we want to be his disciples.  (I am aware that there is a school of thought which denies any such coherence or historical authenticity to the gospels, but if we can't believe in that Jesus, then there is no Jesus who we can believe in and Christianity slips through our fingers completely.) 

One repeated motif of the gospels is Jesus' self-awareness as both being and achieving the fulfilment of the scriptures. Although at times it is the gospel narrator who sees an event happening "in fulfilment", at others the idea is put on Jesus' own lips. Perhaps the classic passage is Luke 24, where the resurrection is explained as being the fulfilment of Jesus' own words (6-8) but also as fulfilment of the OT scriptures. These are classically, Jewishly, classified into their three great divisions - Moses/Torah, Prophets and Psalms/Writings.  

Jesus sees those divisions as speaking with a united voice, and he sees himself as the subject of their message. He does not give a hint that Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms have different voices, or that they are of unequal value, or that one part speaks of him but others don't. He affirms that all the sections - indeed, "all the Scriptures" v27 cf. 45 - speak of him. In fact, in the light of v45 we can arguably go further - for Jesus and then for his disciples, to understand the scriptures is precisely to understand how, with one voice, they speak of him. 

Undergirding this understanding is the awareness that behind the human authors, in all their diversity of content, culture, genre and style, is a single Author, who reveals himself in a coherent, self-consistent and progressive way through the writings of many human authors. When Jesus speaks of the "Word of God" in Luke 11:28, whatever Christological resonances we may be tempted to find, our primary understanding must be that, like any Jew of his time, he is referring to the scriptures and to the  the Torah specifically. 

Such an attitude continues through from Jesus into the rest of the NT. For Jesus, "what Scripture says, God says" and his followers show the same attitude. To take just one example: the interplay of "authorship awareness" in Hebrews 3 and 4 is well-known. Here "it is said", "David said", "the Holy Spirit says" and "God spoke" swirl around one another in reference to the same texts. There is no felt clash between human authorship, in its historically conditioned singularity, and divine authorship, in its overarching coherence. 

The point is that Christian faith, being the faith that is centred on the person, words and work of Jesus, includes at its heart his own attitude to the OT scriptures. For Jesus to describe the OT as "a library of books" with a denial of a singular, overarching Authorship is simply impossible to imagine. This view parts company with Christian Faith because it parts company with Jesus himself. 

This "library of books" attitude to the Bible is more pervasive now than at any time I can remember. Its effects are all around us, even in the lips and in the behaviour of believers who might hesitate to articulate it directly. The impact can be seen in various, interlinked ways. 

1) With regard to the Bible itself, we are distanced from the weight of the text. 

The authority of scripture may still be affirmed in our Doctrines, but in practice it is now wholly absent. This is a direct outworking of this view - if the Bible has no one voice, no one message, then it really has nothing to say to us that we have to hear and heed, trust and obey. Any part can be set off against any other part, and we have become the final arbiters, ruling over the text and deciding what we want to obey. 

2) With regard to God, we have never been freer to shift our understanding of who he is.

I remember a young woman in Brazil telling me that her God was "fofinho" - fluffy and cuddly. That kind of view of God now pervades the church and even its candidates for ministry. The God who is "consuming fire" can be marginalised and then lost completely, for the texts that speak in that way are surely contradicted somewhere else! With a multi-voiced Bible we have a voiceless Bible, and we are free to redefine God in whatever way we like. Not for nothing did Don Carson title his great book on postmodernism in the church, "The Gagging of God" - a self-contradictory, multi-voiced book gives no voice to the Lord at all. Suddenly "God" is sounding strikingly similar to the rest of the flood of politically corrected, social-media-ready material. The God of scripture has been silenced, to be replaced by the filtered, sickly-sweet quotes from meme-gurus. 

3) With regard to ourselves, it makes us arrogant and intellectually lazy

The traditional task of the Christian teacher/preacher was a challenging one. The Bible is a complex book, and its interpretation is hard work. Our calling to that hard work began in faith, as we receive Christ and receive his understanding of the way the Scriptures speak of him. Believing that all Scripture is God-breathed and that it is able to make us wise for salvation in Jesus is a matter of faith, of course, but having taken that step of faith, hard, humble work lies ahead as we attempt to sit under the text and work out how it is speaking of him. Down through the centuries preachers and believing scholars can testify to the sweat and satisfaction of toiling at the Bible, and finding, in fellowship with great exegetes who have gone before, that there really is one message, one coherent Voice, one Subject, one Speaker.  

But now, we don't need to do that any more. We are at liberty to ignore - simply never read or refer to - whole swathes of the Bible that are deemed sub-christian. Our work is now easy, for all we have to do is regurgitate the attitudes of the politically corrected gospel week on week and never be disturbed or disturb anyone with tougher or more uncomfortable passages. 

What claims to be a movement driven by intellectual honesty ends up being the exact reverse. It is the excuse for not grappling with the book of God. And it is far more honest to say, "I don't fully understand this section" than to take on the lofty tones of the "scholar" and tell your congregation that a passage has nothing to say to us for it has nothing to do with Jesus or his message. The former way is humble ignorance; the latter is the height of arrogance. 

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We need a return to the Bible. To the Bible as a book that - yes - is complex and historically, culturally, geographically and humanly diverse, but which is also One Book for it comes from One God and speaks of One Saviour. And we need to rediscover that united text not as an intellectual curiosity but as the unique bearer of the Message which calls us to faith and obedience to Jesus Christ. May God help us!