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 Awkwardness of God in a Postmodern Generation

We read Ex 4:18-26 this morning. I was very struck by the sheer awkwardness of the passage.
 

God hardens Pharaoh’s heart. This begins a whole sequence of active-passive-active statements about Pharaoh’s heart: God hardened it, it was hardened, Pharaoh hardened his heart. But this is where the sequence begins: I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go.
 
God tries to kill Moses. Having delivered him from threat of death as a baby, having preserved him through youth in Pharaoh’s court and middle age as a shepherd, having called him to be the Deliverer and argued him through two chapters into readiness to serve, the Lord now tries to kill him.
 
This passage confronts us with a very untame God. In an age where the church is desperately concerned to show that it is cool and in tune with all that is contemporary, Exodus 4 is a bombshell. Or an embarrassment. 

Of course, there have been plenty of discussions over the years about the various elements in the passage, the relationships between the verbal forms describing the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, the reason why the Lord tried to kill Moses - there are explanations, there are theologisings. But it is so good to just drop all of that for a moment and feel the shock of the text itself and be confronted by the inexplicable and awkward God of the Bible.
 
Exodus 4 is not alone, of course. It just happens to be what we read together today. But chapter after chapter of the Bible reveals a God who cannot be accommodated easily into our postmodern non-framework. Postmodernism appears to be very accommodating, very free-flowing and laid back. In fact, it is very quick to spit out anything definite, and the God of the Biblical text leaves it gagging. It is hardly surprising that in such a time, the church is desperate to re-position itself away from proclamation of this awkward book, so as to find some position of comfort.

Yesterday I happened to reread Matthew Parris' 2003 article on gay bishops, via David Robertson's blog. For me the wonder of the piece is not particularly the content on that specific issue, but the grasp Parris has of the nature of revealed religion. He writes: 

““Inclusive”, “moderate” or “sensible” Christianity is inching its way up a philosophical cul-de-sac. The Church stands for revealed truth and divine inspiration or it stands for nothing. Belief grounded in everyday experience alone is not belief. The attempt, sustained since the Reformation, to establish the truth of Christianity on the rock of human observation of our own natures and of the world around us runs right against what the Bible teaches from the moment Moses beheld a burning bush in the Egyptian desert to the point when Jesus rises from the dead in His sepulchre. Stripped of the supernatural, the Church is on a losing wicket.”

This atheist understands better than many in the church what Christianity really is. And that applies as much in the SA as it does in any other church.

In all manifestations of the Church in the West, we are under pressure. The awkwardness of revealed religion, the sheer, confrontational nature of God, of his standards, of his historical work in Christ, and of his Future - all of this is in total collision with our present culture. We feel the pressure, and we squirm. We are embarrassed by God, so we reinvent him in our postmodern image. In the process we part company with the tradition of our church, with the great stream of Christian faith, and, most frighteningly, with the Real God himself.

We want to be user-friendly, we want to be winsome, we want to speak in a way that post-moderns understand. But in the process we pressure ourselves NOT to talk about God in the way Exodus 4 does. If we are forced to, we go swiftly into apologetic mode - and not in the classic sense of argument for the truth, but in the sense of apologising for what God is like. More often than not, we simply avoid passages that make us feel this way. And in the long term we end up avoiding real interaction with the Bible altogether. This process is visible in our conversation, our postings on social media, and especially in our meetings.

We want our meetings to be happy, upbeat and winsome. We are frightened of disturbing people, and probably don’t like being disturbed very much ourselves. Church, we think, should be about comfort, not disturbance.

We so need meetings, we need scripture readings, we need preaching, that confront us with the authentic, disturbing God of scripture. Our tendency to domesticate God by watering down, explaining away, smoothing rough edges with our theologising, our avoidance of difficulties - our tendency to tame the God of the Bible needs to be blown away by the power of Word and Spirit.  We need to hear a Word which leaves us solemn and shaken to the core.

Listening recently to some old recordings of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, I was struck by the manner in which he said the word ‘God’. Some of his language is dated, his manner is noticeably 1940s/50s, but the intense seriousness overall and sense of almost explosive power in that particular word is still arresting. Here is preaching that makes you sit up and take notice, that startles, that alarms, that confronts, that perturbs. Here is preaching that makes you feel uncomfortable before it makes you glad. Here is preaching that DOES deal with objections and counter arguments, but not by putting God in the dock, on trial for his awkwardnesses and worse, but by genuinely bringing us to the bar of eternal realities.

When did you last hear a sermon that shook you with the immediate presence and power of God in his word? When were you last confronted with the bigness, holiness, awkwardness, frighteningness of the Living God? When did a sermon last deal with moral issues in a way which boldly confronted the prevailing mind-set? When did preaching last convict you of sin and of your need? When was Jesus Christ crucified last put before your eyes as the only hope any of us have?
 
‘He who marries the spirit of this age will be a widower in the next.’ We can go further: as the Salvation Army parts company with the Bible and embraces the spirit of the age, so the church itself will die.

And as we return to prayer and preaching that sets forth a big view of our awesome, holy, powerful, gracious and loving God, so the church will live and grow.

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If I can quote from William Booth's greatest contemporary, it is worth reading and pondering this excerpt from what is known as Charles Spurgeon's “Own Funeral Sermon”. He actually preached it a few years before his death, but Mrs Spurgeon herself felt that it was a most suitable eulogy. He had preached on “For David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell on sleep.”—Acts 13:36. Amongst other things he said:

People talk nowadays about Zeitgeist, a German expression which need frighten nobody; and one of the papers says, “Spurgeon does not know whether there is such a thing.”

Well, whether he knows anything about Zeitgeist or not, he is not to serve this generation by yielding to any of its notions or ideas which are contrary to the Word of the Lord.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is not only for one generation, it is for all generations. It is the faith which needed to be only “once for all delivered to the saints”; it was given stereotyped as it always is to be. It cannot change because it has been given of God, and is therefore perfect; to change it would be to make it imperfect. It cannot change because it has been given to answer for ever the same purpose, namely, to save sinners from going down to the pit, and to fit them for going to heaven.

That man serves his generation best who is not caught by every new current of opinion, but stands firmly by the truth of God, which is a solid, immovable rock.

But to serve our own generation in the sense of being a slave to it, its vassal, and its valet—let those who care to do so go into such bondage and slavery if they will.

Do you know what such a course involves? If any young man here shall begin to preach the doctrine and the thought of the age, within the next ten years, perhaps within the next ten months, he will have to eat his own words, and begin his work all over again. When he has got into the new style, and is beginning to serve the present world, he will within a short time have to contradict himself again, for this age, like every other, is “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

But if you begin with God’s Word, and pray God the Holy Ghost to reveal it to you till you really know it, then, if you are spared to teach for the next fifty years, your testimony at the close will not contradict your testimony at the beginning. You will ripen in experience; you will expand in your apprehension of the truth; you will become more clear in your utterance; but it will be the same truth all along.*

Is it not a grand thing to build up, from the beginning of life to the end of it, the same gospel? But to set up opinions to knock them down again, as though they were ninepins, is a poor business for any servant of Christ.

David did not, in that way serve his own generation; he was the master of his age, and not its slave. I would urge every Christian man to rise to his true dignity, and be a blessing to those amongst whom he lives, as David was. Christ “hath made us kings and priests unto God his Father”; it is not meet that we should cringe before the spirit of the age, or lick the dust whereon “advanced thinkers” have chosen to tread.

Beloved, see to this; and learn the distinction between serving your own generation and being a slave to it.


 * It is salutary to compare this with the currently popular saying, widely though doubtfully attributed to Thomas Merton, “If the you of five years ago doesn’t consider the you of today a heretic, you are not growing spiritually.”    


The full text of the Spurgeon sermon can be found at
 http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/2243.htm

FGM, Political Correctness and the BBC

Orla Guerin reported on today's conviction of an Egyptian Doctor for his involvement in Female Genital Mutilation. As part of her coverage of the background to the case, she said: 

"Campaigners say that ending the mutilation of young girls is also dependent on persuading families to abandon a long-held tradition, which many believe - wrongly - is a religious duty."

What on earth does she know? That word "wrongly" is ignorant and arrogant and driven by an agenda which makes no real effort to engage with what any actual people really understand by religious duty.

In the circles in which I was brought up, religious duty could include not having a cooked lunch or kicking a ball on a Sunday, singing three hymns in a service rather than four, or wearing a dark suit to the beach. Nowadays, I tend to think that all of those concepts of "duty" were wrong,  in the sense of being without any basis in the Scriptures. The people were mistaken in their sense of duty, but they were sincere, and I think that really only an insider who understands their culture and submits to the same scriptures is qualified to make any judgement as to the religious necessity or not of their "duty". 

Around the world the variety of "religious duty" is extraordinary. Dietary oddities, taboos and commitments, every kind of bodily mutilation - nothing is surprising. Some great cruelties are practised as religious duties, whole social systems have been raised up on the foundation of a religious world-view - life is religion for most of the world, most of the time. 

The Western world, as exemplified by David Cameron, Orla Guerin and her BBC colleagues, is stuck up a creek without a paddle. The commitment is to say that all religions are helpful, loving and positive, and that nasty stuff, from machine-gunned journalists to genitally-mutilated girls, does not therefore have any root in religion. This politically correct orthodoxy necessitates the kind of nonsense contained in that word "wrongly" - religion = good, FGM = bad, therefore FGM is not a religious duty. 

What cannot be allowed, cannot be contemplated, cannot be countenanced or breathed, is that some religion is false and nasty and destructive and bad. FGM is horrid, it is wrong, it is cruel. And for some sincere people, it is a duty that genuinely flows from their faith. 

Their faith is wrong. 

The need of the hour

You need a reason to start a blog at this time of verbal cacophony. We are surrounded by a storm of words, more than ever before - anyone can write an article, publish it, see it read, shared, tweeted and retweeted. Controversy and argument, radical idea and reactionary answer are the stuff of life. We align ourselves a dozen times a day - we like, we share, we comment, we refute.

This is the case in general conversation, but also within the church. Exactly the same patterns of divisive argument, of side-taking, of aggressive stances, lack of patience, kindness, self-control pervade in our discussions. 

I don't want to write a simply controversial and argumentative blog. I know that topical and provocative articles generate a lot of hits, but I want to be content to write without pretension to greatness, for whoever may happen to find a few words useful. 

And I think that the need of the hour is to hear Christian truth spoken quietly. To refamiliarise with the basic biblical message, the Bible's main themes. This may at times be prompted by a topical or current theme - last week's atrocity in Paris, for instance. And to state Christian truth is hardly to avoid controversy, in this day and age! But my starting place and basic mentality is to talk about Jesus and his love. 

I have not lost my courage or withdrawn from battle. It is my conviction that the only reason why anyone gives houseroom to so much of the wave of trendy, deconstructionalist, totally-committed-to-vagueness material currently popular, in the SA in particular, is simply unfamiliarity with the Gospel. The gurus of postmodernism have entered the church and found that no one knows enough Bible to spot what is actually poison. They have found seats and tables to sit at and a chance to even make a bob or two. 

And only the real Jesus will have the guts to oppose them. And only his gospel of grace will have the truth-power to throw them out. The church needs to be filled again with truth on fire, with the message of the Cross.