Cultural Christians and Christianised Culture

As the census rolls around again, the usual kerfuffle kicks off around the question asking people about their religion.  And no doubt in the aftermath, as the results are made public, there will be the usual hand-wringing about the decreasing proportion of people in the UK who identify themselves as Christian.  What we are seeing is the continued, and now quite rapid, evaporation of the remaining influence of Christendom; the residual notion of a 'Christian country' is more or less gone, and the default option in the census box-ticking exercise is no longer 'Church of England'.

Christian responses here vary.  For many believers, it is a jolly good thing that nominal Christianity is fast disappearing.  It helps to draw clear lines.  It means that people are no longer kidding themselves that they are Christians when they hold no Christian beliefs and show no signs of personal faith in Christ.  For many Christians, mere cultural Christianity has long been seen as a buffer against the real thing; people are inoculated with a weak form of Christian belief, reduced usually to some naff songs from the 70s and a belief that people ought to love one another in some vague way, via school assemblies, and this makes them less responsive to the real thing.  They think they are already in.  The loss of cultural Christianity clears away one barrier to evangelism, which is that people think they already know our message and are either already onboard (despite their lack of belief, practice, or other commitment) or have already sampled enough to know they don't want to take this ride.  In one sense, fewer people ticking the 'Christian' box(es) on the census just reflects reality, and it's always helpful for people to see reality.

On the other hand, many Christians will see the decline in the numbers of people identifying with Christianity as an almost entirely negative thing.  From this perspective, the decline in nominal Christianity goes along with the decline in respect for ethical norms derived from the Christian gospel.  The loss of a general, even if rather vague, sense of accountability to God is to be bemoaned.  Children are raised in a culture which actively promotes, or worse just assumes, a completely different worldview.  The ignorance of the Scriptures, unimaginable even a couple of generations ago, makes communicating the gospel intelligibly that much more difficult.  The loss of a Christianised culture makes the normalisation of such horrific practices as in utero infanticide inevitable.  It threatens the undermining of values which would be considered important even by non-Christians, who haven't yet read Dominion and so don't know that those values derive from Christianity.

These two responses are not, strictly speaking, incompatible.  However, I reckon people lean heavily one way or the other.  I have flip-flopped, but at the moment I'm coming down on the latter perspective.

In Bonhoeffer's terms, I think those who are glad to see the end of cultural Christianity are thinking in terms of ultimate things - that is to say, salvation and eternal life.  Will a vague nominal Christianity help anyone ultimately?  Nope.  Will church-going as a mere cultural phenomenon in and of itself save souls?  Nope.  A Christian ethic?  Nope.  In ultimate terms, cultural Christianity is useless and possibly worse than useless if it allows people to delude themselves.

But what about penultimate things?  Don't they matter at all?  What Bonhoeffer saw, which I think some of our contemporaries are missing, is that ultimate and penultimate are related, and the relation between them is not entirely one-way.  For those who are pleased at, or at least indifferent to, the end of cultural Christianity, the ethical challenges and cultural issues thrown up by that loss (penultimate problems) and only to be dealt with by evangelism and conversion (ultimate solutions) - you can't, after all, expect non-Christians to live as Christians.  But the traffic doesn't all flow that way.  Making the penultimate suited to the ultimate - trying as much as possible to make the ordinary stuff of life and society conform to God's Kingdom - is the way in which we prepare the way of the Lord.

So what then?  The culture war again?

I used to feel that this was unwise, and we were better off staying out of it.  More recently I've tended to think that we're in it whether we like it or not, and all we can do is try to navigate it well.  I think that many of those Christian leaders I see trying to stay out of the culture war have essentially privatised the faith, and made God's laws the rules for the dwindling Christian club rather than the absolutes which govern and direct a human life well lived.

Most of all, I think the answer is more church, and better church.  Church which carries with it a 'thick' Christian culture, not just an hour of light worship or intellectual stimulation on a Sunday.  (I wonder if there is another dividing line here: between those who see the great need as more action at the edges of the church, in evangelism and mission, and those who see the great need as renewal at the centre of the church, in liturgy and worship).  I think we as Christians need to realise more and more how much we are isolated in our culture; we need to feel less at home here.  For the sake of the culture, we need to repudiate the culture.  For the sake of the world, we need to be those who don't love the world or the things of the world.

Secularism and the Sabbath

I preached on the Fourth Commandment yesterday - you can get the video and audio online if you feel so inclined.  As I prepared the sermon, I was struck by how little I've heard about the Sabbath in recent years, and how truncated a view of Sabbath has been presented in what I have heard.  As far as I recall, most of the teaching I've heard on the Sabbath has gone along these lines: as Christians we're definitely not obliged to keep the Sabbath anymore; but the Commandment is still useful for us, because it enshrines the wisdom of taking time off and rest; so it's not in force as a Commandment per se, but it definitely still holds as a piece of advice (from the Creator, so properly wise advice which you ignore at your peril) about the limits of humanity and how to avoid burnout.

But the Sabbath can't be primarily about the need for human rest, for a couple of reasons.  One is that the model for Sabbath is God's rest.  It is God's rest into which the people are to enter by keeping Sabbath, the rest which we see at the end of the first creation account in Genesis.  God was not weary; God was not in danger of burn out.  Neither, in fact, did God entirely cease his activity (or the creation he had so recently called into being would have collapsed back into nothingness).  If the Sabbath is modelled on God's rest, it cannot be primarily addressing the problem of human exhaustion.  Then again, to make the Sabbath primarily about human rest ignores the positive content of the Sabbath - it was to be a sacred assembly, a day holy to the Lord.  It had positive content, not just negative.  Not just stopping work, but seeking worship.

So here's the thing.  I think we've secularised the Sabbath.  I don't think we should be observing a Jewish Sabbath; I do think the New Testament changes things.  (Listen to the sermon if you're curious to know how).  But what the NT doesn't do is remove the God-centred, worship-centred vision for human life which is presented to Israel.  To enter into God's rest is not merely to cease working; it is to be in God's presence, to worship, to delight in God.  I wonder if we react so much to the Roman emphasis on holy places, holy days etc. that we end up removing part of the biblical emphasis.  I wonder if we might be well advised to desecularise our Sabbath.

True truth

If evangelicals know anything about themselves, it is that they are the truth people.  Evangelicals have fought the good fight against the postmodern assault on the very concept of truth.  They have enlisted cheerfully in the struggle against relativism.  They have contended for the truth in battle after battle.

But I wonder if in the midst of all the battles, we've neglected to fight the war.

I've expressed concern before about the number of evangelicals who responded to the restrictions on public worship by saying that we could not expect HMG to understand the importance of worship.  We, of course, believe that worship is important, but we shouldn't try to make that case to secular authorities; those who don't share our worldview will not be open to persuasion.  Similar arguments are sometimes expressed around ethical issues - of course we as Christians hold that position, but there is no point trying to argue this publicly, and certainly not to attempt to legislate (even in matters of life and death).  It is not to be expected that non-Christians will behave like Christians.

In each case, you seem to end up saying: this is objectively true, but I wouldn't expect anyone to be able to see that, nor would I consider it worthwhile contending for it.  Of course we would contend for it within the church - if there were those in our churches who thought that worship was unimportant, or that abortion was fine, or whatever, we would certainly argue, and we would do so on the grounds of truth.  God's truth is true regardless of our opinions.  But that doesn't seem to hold in the world outside the church.

Stepping back, it seems to me that something has gone wrong with our concept of truth.

We believe in objective truth, but it seems like that objective truth is private, only true for believers.  I understand the logic, I think - given the interconnectedness of truth claims, we are unlikely to persuade people of second order things if they don't share our commitments to high level truths about reality.  Sure.  But when we don't think it's even worth advancing those truth claims, or publicly stating them, what is happening?  Has our 'objective' truth actually become objective truth only within the church, and not in the world at large?

Is the gap between 'we can't expect non-Christians to believe this' and 'I have my truth and you have yours' all that big?

It seems to me they're practically the same.  The upshot of both positions is that I hold my truth claims without any expectation that they will be shared.  I worry that they are psychologically the same.  How long can you hold a belief that this claim is both true and important, and yet not to be advanced universally, without slipping into relativism?  And I can't for the life of me see any ethical difference.  If we allow people to pursue false beliefs about issues of human goodness and flourishing without a protest, because we can't see why we should hold non-Christians to Christian standards, how does our stated belief in objective truth help those who suffer as a result?

If the truth is true, it is true everywhere and for everyone.  If the standards of righteousness and goodness revealed in Scripture are from God, they are universal.  If we won't make the claim, are we really the truth people anymore?

Austere worship

Preaching on the Second and Third Commandments yesterday - no to idols, no to taking the Lord's name in vain - I'm struck by the austerity of Israelite worship.  It must have been striking to the pagans as well.  No images of gods, no gorgeous statues.  Beauty, of course, and craftsmanship on display at the temple.  But no gorgeous shrines scattered throughout the land.  No imaginative myths, no constant development of the cultus.  It is a narrow way, the way of Israelite worship: a way defined by what God has revealed of himself and his will, not open to human interpretation or tweaking or addition.

In our culture of 'I like to think of God as...' there is a need to stress this again.  God has shown us himself.  We have his image - the one and only authorised image - in the Lord Jesus Christ.  We are baptised into his name, the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and our whole lives are to be lived as conscious bearers of that name.  Worship is not an imaginative exercise in that sense, but an exercise in following in the path the Lord has laid out for us.

I don't think this austerity means no beauty.  I am in favour of beautiful church buildings, beautiful liturgies, beautiful hymns.  In fact, I think those things are required, since God has revealed himself to us as beautiful!  But there is always going to be a necessary strain of iconoclasm to Christian worship: as we receive God's word, we are involved in demolishing whatever idols, whatever false conceptions of God, have gained a foothold in our minds and purifying our thoughts of him.  The same should be true in our worship: constantly reforming, to guard us against accretions and idolatries and blasphemies which will always be a threat and to some extent a presence.

It is a narrow way, but it is the way that leads to (because it first leads from) the true God.  If we want a god of our imagining, we can afford to be creative in how we think of him and how we worship him; if we want God, the true self-existent God, we follow his way and ruthlessly reject any paths to left and right.