Loving the church

If we love Christ, we must love the church.  But how?

The main way in which we are called to love the church is in love towards the members of the particular congregation to which we belong.  (This is obviously to take for granted the very first act of love towards the church, which is to join yourself to a particular congregation!)  That means practical care, and spiritual care - not one without the other!  And spiritual care includes the duty to pray for one another, to encourage one another, and, yes, to rebuke one another where necessary.  All of this is part of love.  We are called to love each member of the church, not because they are lovely, but for the sake of the Lord Jesus, to whom they are united just as we are by faith and the Holy Spirit.  That includes the awkward ones, the ones who wind you up something chronic, and the ones from whom you can expect little return.  That is the calling.

Although this is the front line of love, the place where our love for the church is most tested, I want to suggest that it is not the whole of the duty.  We are to love the members of the church, but the church is more than a group of individuals.  The church is a body, the body of Christ; and that body is manifest both in individual congregations and in the whole of the church throughout space and time.

To love the church as body is to love the church in the things that it does corporately - to love worship, to love the preaching of the word, to love the sacraments, yes, even to love business meetings.  And in the same way that loving an individual does not mean popping into their life when you feel like it, to love the body of the church means to be committed to coming together, not to give up meeting together.  And in the same way that loving an individual does not mean just loving the things about them that you find lovely, to love the body of the church means to participate in those activities that you personally find less attractive, to sing the songs you don't like, to turn up to the prayer meetings that you really struggle with.

And to love the body as it is catholic, that is to say, as it extends throughout time and space, is to love the church in all its messy history and all its messy present.  Not, of course, to love every detail of that history, or that present; there is much sin there.  But to love the church, despite its brokenness and, often, wickedness; to see the church, despite those things, as it is loved by the Lord Jesus.  In practice, to lift our eyes beyond the confines of our own congregation and denomination, and to love the church as it exists in traditions which seem alien to us; to lift our eyes beyond the boundaries of our own culture, and to love the church as it exists in languages and forms which are foreign to us; to lift our eyes beyond our time, and to love the church as it stands in history as the monument to God's faithfulness and constant grace.  To learn from ancient and alien forms, to sing the old hymns and the new songs and the songs from far away.  To consciously stand in union and communion with those who have gone before on the road and those who walk the same road in very different places.

"As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones,

in whom is all my delight."

He has spoken

I'm re-reading a bit of John Owen at the moment (On the true nature of a gospel church - volume XVI of his Works, for those following along at home).  Owen is very definitely of his era: a scholastic theologian, meaning that he pushes for precision in every point and is very careful in his analysis; in particular, he milks the Scriptures for every drop of truth he can see in them, and works hard to bring those truths into relation with one another.  It sometimes makes for tedious reading (okay, okay, John - you've made your point), but I basically like it.  There is something in the scholastic instinct which to my mind honours God, by seeking the coherence of his words and works.  "Fear of scholasticism is the mark of a false prophet", as Barth remarks in CD I/1.

Behind Owen's rigour there lies the conviction that God has spoken, and still speaks through the Scriptures; and therefore whatever question is raised in the church it is to the Scriptures that we ought to turn.

I think we've lost that conviction a little bit, or perhaps a lot depending on what circles you move in.  My guess is that it happened like this, although I freely admit I've made no effort to check whether history maps on to this analysis.

In the olden days (that is to say, the 16th and 17th centuries), the three convictions that (1) God has something to say on all points of Christian doctrine, that (2) it is in principle possible with the aid of the Spirit to hear what he says from Scripture, and that (3) it is our absolute duty to listen to, trust, and obey God in every detail of what he says led to the long confessional documents that characterise that era.  These confessions reflect a belief that God has something clear and certain to say about, for example, the extent of the atonement, the precise mode of church government, the proper administration of baptism (to whom, when and how), even the role of the civil magistrate and the limits of state power.  They are, as I mentioned long documents.

The failure to come to a consensus on many of these points in Protestantism, with the multiplication of church associations and the writing of ever more lengthy doctrinal statements, undermined over time the central convictions.  Of course no Protestant - no Christian! - could easily sell out point 3: we certainly have to hear and obey God in everything he says.  But convictions 1 and 2 begin to waver, or at least to function less vitally in the church: perhaps God has not spoken to every detail, perhaps it is not possible for us to reliably read off every detail of what he has said from Scripture.  Of course some theological positions were never committed to these assumptions - to be an episcopalian, for example, you have to assume that the church is given wide latitude to form its own church government, and that means assuming that God has not given direction on the matter (or at least, that he has not done so in Scripture).

Modern evangelicalism is characterised by, amongst other things, its desire to bring Christians who are committed to the Bible together.  This is often achieved by drawing a dividing line through theological issues, splitting them into primary and secondary.  The aim of this division was not, originally, to undermine the claim that God speaks into all sorts of doctrinal questions; the aim was to clarify which doctrines came so close to the heart of the gospel message that to distort or abandon them was to ruin the church's faith and witness.  Those doctrines are classified as primary.  Others, judged less close to the heart of the matter, were judged secondary.  We can talk and argue about them, but we shouldn't divide over them, at least not completely.  (Everyone accepts that practically it is difficult to run a church without agreeing on, for example, who are the proper subjects of baptism; but congregations which disagree on this could still co-operate in mission organisations and local outreach, for example).

This is helpful and commendable; nobody wants to go back to the divisiveness of early modern confessionalism, I hope.  But I suspect that over time it has undermined further our already wobbly convictions.  If we're working with these people, worshipping with these people, it becomes harder to think that their disagreement with us over 'secondary' issues is a matter of them not hearing properly what God says on the topics in question.  It is easier to say that God has not spoken, or at least that he does not speak clearly, on these subjects.  That gives us latitude to fudge them without any sense of disobedience on our part, or any apprehension that our good co-evangelical friends are disobedient.  But this naturally leads to the idea that these 'secondary issues' don't really matter: if they did, God would speak clearly on them.  So rather than work hard (and scholastically) to hear God, we shrug and let everyone go his own way on these things.

The fundamental problem here is that we have stopped listening to God.  That means, in practice, that we are doing what lies in us to prevent the Lord Jesus from governing his church.  (Thankfully, what lies in us is really not very much).  Out of fear of awkward chats, and a disinclination to work hard, think carefully, and be precise, we have done our best to shut out the voice of God.

But he has spoken, and because he has spoken he is speaking; and no topic is beyond the scope of his sovereign speech.  Might it not be better to try to hear and obey him?  If it leads to us having to acknowledge frankly that we think others, whilst we see them as in many ways faithful brothers and sisters, have failed to hear and obey - would that be the end of the world?  And might it not even be helpful if it exposes us to the same sort of critique from them?  Might we not together expect to hear God speak more clearly as we mutually rebuke and exhort each other?

I hope for a future with more scholasticism in this sense, more rigour, more fiery theological debate between people who acknowledge one another to belong to Christ's faithful.  I hope for a future in which God's word rules God's people.  I hope for a future in which the Lion's roar is heard clearly again.

Good without God

The Guardian offers a (fairly bland) editorial on what it will mean to be a society in which people increasingly don't believe in God.  They don't really offer an answer, content instead to raise the question: "if organised mainstream Christianity is on the way out, what will replace it?"

I want to make two observations on the editorial, and point out one major error which runs through a lot of humanist and soft-atheist argument.

The first observation is that the Guardian, and others of this ilk, are noticing something which believers have actually been well aware of for a couple of generations at least: namely, that Christian observance and belief is dropping off, in fact has dropped off a cliff.  The editorial observes that "more than half of all British people now say that they have no religion; about two-fifths are Christians of one sort or another; 9% are Muslims."  The phrase which I have italicised is frankly very generous, and can only be reached through allowing a person's religious outlook to be defined entirely by their own self-identification.  Actually, those of us who believe and practice orthodox Christianity have known for some time that the real figure is much lower.  Some have estimated more like 3%.  This may be news to the Guardian, but it has been our reality for ages.

The second observation is that 'organised mainstream Christianity' may well be dying out, if by that is meant the liberal, compromised religion of cultural Christianity and traditional observance.  Far from that being of concern to orthodox Christians, the collapse of this horrible perversion of Christ's religion is in many ways welcome.  Yes, the disappearance of basic knowledge makes mission harder work, and the loss of moral consensus and community cohesion is painful, but on the other hand, it clarifies things.  Where the gospel is still preached, according to the Scriptures, it still works to bring new life and to gather God's people in; God isn't dependent on the structures of cultural Christianity to do his work.

The massive falsehood in the editorial is tucked away in the middle.  We are told that "theology and morality are only tenuously related."  This is so because "habits of kindness, decency and tolerance come from practice rather than belief."  This is demonstrable nonsense.  It depends on the naive Enlightenment view that morality is self-evident, that people simply using their reason unaided will be able to discern in the world a 'right' way to act, and will then be able to follow it.  It assumes a universal moral code, which people can just pick up by thinking right.  The editors of the Guardian should know better; they should have read their Nietzsche more attentively.

In fact, ethical systems and beliefs are particular, not universal, and are grounded in particular beliefs about reality.  You can mask this with bland talk about kindness, decency, and tolerance; but it gets much more difficult when you get into specifics.  We are morally obliged to care particularly for the weak and the helpless.  I guess the average Guardian reader agrees.  But is this a universal moral intuition?  It is not!  It is the ethical corollary of the theological belief in the dignity and sanctity of human life, derived from its Creator.  This belief burst onto the scene historically with Christian revelation and has not been arrived at in any other way.  If it seemed to the Founding Fathers of the American republic that these truths were "self-evident", they only showed thereby that they were steeped in Christian doctrine - without even realising the extent to which their moral intuition was determined by this framework.  More honest and percipient philosophers today - such as Luc Ferry - admit that they do in fact want to continue to hold ethical positions which are specifically derived from Christian belief without the accompanying beliefs themselves, and moreover admit that this is as yet something for which they have failed to derive a convincing reason.

The flipside of this falsehood at the heart of the Guardian's editorial is the assumption that religion basically only exists to make us good.  Can we not, in fact, be good without God?  How can people not see that this question cannot be answered without resolving the question 'what does it mean to be good?'  And one cannot begin to answer this question without dealing with the question of what reality is like.  If there is no God, then it may be possible to be good without God; although I am not convinced that a sound and compelling account can be given of what 'goodness' means in that worldview.  On some versions of theism, and most versions of deism, it may also be possible to be good without God.

But if the Christian revelation is actually true - that is to say, if God the Son really walked among us, died on a Roman cross, and rose to eat breakfast with his disciples - then goodness is inherently wrapped up in relationship with God.  In that case, one cannot be good without God, because being good is not merely about ethical behaviours ("habits of kindness, decency and tolerance") but about bowing before the Creator, accepting his Lordship - and most of all accepting his grace.  Because of course the point of the Christian religion is not to provide you with an ethical system to help you to be good, but to provide you with a Saviour to bring you to God.

Why I am a Christian

There are lots of ways you could tell this story, of course, with the emphasis falling in different places.  There are plenty of circumstantial factors that would have to be borne in mind - pre-eminent among them the fact that I was born into and raised within a family where the Christian faith was sincerely believed and seriously practised - and I'm sure many people would want to reduce the whole answer to the sum of circumstances like that.  For myself, I could also give an 'upper storey' account of why I am a Christian, pointing to the agency of the Holy Spirit enabling my agency in belief - an account which would, of course, only be plausible for those who were also operating with a commitment to Christian faith.

But this is the account of the middle storey, the account of what reasons I could give for being a Christian.  If somebody were to ask me why I believed, and of course people do ask just that, this is the answer I would give.

Incidentally, for me faith is not a thing that comes easily.  I know that for some people it does, and over time my attitude toward that has changed.  For a long time I tended to think that those who seemed to have an implicit trust in God were just being naive.  I was a bit patronising about it, to be honest: they don't seem to have wrestled with the hard questions at all, how can that be genuine faith?  (The implication being that my own belief was somehow more valid for being more complicated).  Well, I repent.  Simple, straightforward faith is a great and glorious gift of God, and not to be despised.  Perhaps rather to be envied.  But that's not where I am or have ever been.  I walk somewhere on the border of Christianity and atheism, and I'm thankful that I've typically kept to the faith-full side of the border.  But why?

There are three reasons, basically.  The first and most foundational is that I am convinced that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead.  At first this simply meant that I found the testimony to this event convincing: I read the accounts and I thought the witnesses seemed sincere, in a position to know the truth (or otherwise) of what they were saying, and ready to venture a great deal on this testimony (their lives, in fact).  I was struck by the lack of art or manufacture about the various strands of testimony to the resurrection.  Even the inconsistencies struck me as evidence of truthfulness; nobody inventing a story would do it that way.  When I have doubts about aspects of Christian faith, I circle back around to the resurrection: I don't see how it can be explained away, and everything else rests on it.

Of huge help to me in thinking about the resurrection more thoroughly was Tom Wright's book The Resurrection of the Son of God.  Wright sets the testimony to the resurrection within its context, showing that this wasn't something anyone - Jewish or pagan - was expecting, and yet that it did in the end  fit within the Jewish story, as the fulfillment of the ancient hopes and promises.  It's a really big book, but if you're serious about thinking through whether this really happened - and what it would mean if it did - this is the place to go.

The second reason is basically this from C.S. Lewis:  “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it, I see everything else.” In other words, putting the resurrection of Jesus in its place at the centre of my view of the world causes everything else to make sense. In particular, I know of no other worldview, religion, or philosophy which enables and encourages me to be a human person, and to take my humanity and personhood seriously, in its glory and its limitations. The world is a confusing and often dark place, and human thinking about the world is a muddle. Contemporary culture seems to be elevating that muddle to a position of unassailable orthodoxy. But I keep wondering - can you live as if this were true? Can you really live as if you were a meaningless blip in a meaningless universe? With Jesus, I find that the world, and my life, and indeed the very darkness and muddle, receive a powerful explanation. It's like the sun rose, or someone turned the lights on.

The third reason is that this morning, like almost every morning, I spent some time speaking with God and listening to him speak to me. Which is to say, I am a Christian because I know (relationally) the God who made the universe.

I'd be interested to hear why you are, or are not, a Christian. Let me know.