Outstanding questions

 As the Covid crisis enters what I guess we all hope will be its final act, I have various outstanding questions which I think need answering or at least exploring fairly urgently.  Here are some of the questions relating to churches and Christians in particular.

1. How should we think of our relationship with the state?  The big question is to what extent the state has a right to intervene in various areas of life, including the corporate worship of the church.  The acute version of the question is about when it becomes right to disobey or actively resist the instructions of the state.  To my mind, a great deal of the interaction on the big question has been naive about the state and its role, assuming that the state is basically and normally a force for good.  I am no libertarian - I believe in the necessity of a strong state - but biblically and theologically I think we need to consider the vision of the beastly state in Revelation 13, or the animalistic states of Daniel, or just the basic fact that the climactic encounter between God and the human state ends up with a weak Pilate signing off on the execution of the Messiah.  It is no coincidence, incidentally, that many passages to do with the state belong to the apocalyptic genre, where the human world is unmasked and its deeper spiritual dynamics are exposed (and is not Pilate the very picture of the unmasked state as he stands face to face with the Lord?)  In the big picture, the state is at best an ambiguous force.

How we answer the big-picture version of the question has, of course, an impact on how we view the acute version.  It has been depressing to me to see how often Christian leaders have reached instantly to Romans 13 as if the few verses there on obedience to the state constituted everything that Holy Scripture had to say on the subject; as if thinking theologically about the role of government just meant reiterating the content of these verses.  It isn't so.  Of course it has been generally recognised that there are instances where we ought to disobey: the two most commonly cited would be if the state asks us to sin, and if the state becomes a persecutor of the church.  But this is so narrow.  To me this represents the interests of a sect, not of a group of people who see themselves as the firstfruits of a new humanity.  It basically winds up being 'I'm all right, Jack', on a grand ecclesiastical scale.  The church should always stand up for the human over against the merely political.

2. What is gathered worship all about?  The general impression I've got is that the majority of us don't know.  We can get sermons online, we can meet up with fellow Christians for encouragement in the park; what are we really missing?  It seems clear that for the majority of Christians in the UK right now there is a view of the Christian life which begins with the individual, and sees church as a helpful add on.  This is not the historic Christian vision.  For historic Christianity (whether Roman, Orthodox, Lutheran, or Reformed) the corporate and sacramental life of the church comes first, and the individual enters into that life.  Viewed from that perspective, the suspension of corporate worship and of the sacraments becomes rather more tragic.  I wonder whether opposition to lockdown - especially the prolongation of lockdown - has been stiffer amongst those who hold to the historic Christian orthodoxy than it has amongst the majority of evangelicals.  I think so.

Coupled to this, I've noticed that Christians who disapprove of churches meeting illegally (on which, see question 3) often start their criticism with some variation of the phrase 'I'm looking forward to being with my church community as much as the next person...' as if church were essentially about human community.  Don't get me wrong, clearly a church is a human community, and the relational aspect is important.  But do we really just gather on a Sunday to be with people, to share common interests, to participate in shared traditions on a purely human level?  The vertical dimension in all this seems to have gone missing completely, and instead of the church, where Christ is offered from pulpit and table and his people are lifted up in the Spirit to be together with him as they offer their praises, we're left with a club, the Jesus Club.  I am not keen to be a member.

3. How can we disagree well?  I realise I've been rather strident above, and that might cut against my third point.  Oh well.  I am not one of those who thinks that disagreeing well means endless fudge and a desperate effort not to offend anyone.  There are those who can speak in mild tones about things they think are crucially important; I'm afraid I am not one of those people.  But there is one particular instance of disagreement which I have in mind: the public critique of people who are trying to follow their Lord.  If a church in good conscience, and after due consideration, thinks that the dominical command to gather together trumps the current regulations from HMG - by all means argue with them, by all means say they are wrong.  But at the same time, you ought to be saying: I commend these brothers and sisters for seeking to be faithful.  Rather too much of the response I have seen seems to have been intended to distance ourselves from those we fear the world may look on with disapprobation.  That's not right, surely?  Shouldn't we disagree robustly with orthodox believers whilst still being clear that we are with them, even if it damages our reputation in the eyes of the world?

4.  Speaking of reputation, I believe there is an ongoing question along the lines of: how do we bear witness?  My suspicion is that we have got used to a model of commending the gospel by being good neighbours and good citizens; I think that lies behind a lot of the critique levelled against churches meeting despite regulation to the contrary.  And of course, this is a genuine strand in the New Testament.  We are to be good neighbours and good citizens.  But the NT also points to the fact that no matter how good we are in this regard, we will still have a poor reputation, because we follow Christ.  It wasn't possible in the ancient world to decline to worship the pagan gods and still be regarded as a good citizen.  You had to choose.  I think the time of choice is upon us.  You can't be regarded as a good neighbour or good citizen and hold orthodox Christian teaching on sexuality, for example, or a host of other ethical issues.  But more fundamentally than that, you can't bear witness without being weird, without pointing to a whole different value system.  I was trying to express something about that in this post about worship.  I've tried to sum it up on Twitter: the difference between reputation management and witness is that the former requires us to do what the world expects, whilst the latter requires us to expect a new world.

Those are my big four questions.  I don't think we've collectively got answers to them.  As Covid-tide draws to a close over the next six months, I wonder whether we shouldn't pay some attention before the next crisis hits.

Standing on our own ground

There has been a bit of mostly good-natured debate amongst Christians around how churches ought to react to lockdown restrictions recently.  There are those who feel very strongly that churches should be open, and have lobbied for this; there are those who feel very strongly that churches should be acting for the common good and closing for the sake of public health.  I guess I've made it clear I'm with the former, but that's not what this particular post is about.  I want to make some wider observations about how we make these sorts of arguments and what that means for our engagement with the world.

A line which I've seen a number of variations on is this: 'of course, I believe that church services are more important than pubs or shops, but I don't expect the Government or society at large to agree with me'.  Sometimes this line comes from a place of resignation - we simply cannot expect people who do not acknowledge Christ to take Christian positions, so why bother?  But more often I think it is driven by strategy - it doesn't make sense, strategically, to advance arguments and positions which are so thoroughly grounded in a uniquely Christian perspective that they will simply be rejected out of hand by those who don't share that perspective.

Evidence that this strategy is being pursued can be found in the sorts of public presentations church leaders make.  In general, there is a great effort to persuade people that we are good for society - that we do a lot of social work, that we are essential to support people's spiritual and emotional health, and even that we contribute indirectly to the economy.  This is all a strategic effort to set out the worth of churches and Christianity in terms which the non-Christian world is more likely to understand and accept.

I have two concerns about this approach.  The first is that I think it is disingenuous.  The reason Christians value churches and Christianity is not because these things are beneficial to society.  We value Christianity because we think it is the absolute truth about the universe and the way of redemption.  We value church because here is the gathered community of the redeemed, here is the preached Word which gives us life, and here is the Table at which we feed on Christ.  I think we are in danger of presenting an untruth, or at least performing a bait and switch: trying to persuade society to let us meet or whatever on the grounds that we run food banks, and then when given freedom putting most of our efforts into preaching sermons.

The second, and deeper, concern is that we divide ourselves.  In general, people think they're just moving on to this ground - this perceived shared ground of common values - in order to make a strategic argument, whilst in our hearts maintaining the priority of Christian truth.  But I don't think we can internally stand on the ground of the gospel whilst externally occupying a different position for strategic reasons - or at least I don't think we can keep it up.  A stance taken up for reasons of strategic engagement is likely to become our ultimate stance before long.  It seems to me, for example, that we can trace the descent of someone like Steve Chalke into heresy from an initial commitment to a place of strategic engagement - certainly the first hint I saw of his declension revolved around changing our doctrine of sin to fit better with an understanding of human nature which played better in development circles.

I think we are better to stand on our own ground, even if it means not being understood; better to lose the argument than to lose our souls.  This is not an argument for obscurantism - we ought to try to translate and contextualise our message, but at the end of the day we still need to be sure that it still is our message.  In the public sphere, we ought not to be scrambling to occupy come sort of common ground; we ought to be saying with the Psalmist 'pay homage to the Son or he will be angry'.