But the Christian affirmation is not simply that love ought to be the last word about life, but that, despite all appearances, it is...It is frankly incredible unless the love revealed in Jesus is indeed the nature of ultimate reality, unless he is a window through the surface of things into God. Christianity stands or falls by revelation, by Christ as the disclosure of the final truth not merely about human nature but about all nature and all reality. The Christian's faith cannot rest in the capacities of man. The Christian's faith is in Christ as the revelation, the laying bare, of the very heart and and being of ultimate reality.
Our impasse is primarily an intellectual one: 'It does not immediately or directly affect Christian faith or Christian worship or the conduct of the Christian life. God is still at work. The old formulas continue to be used: they serve in worship, the comprise pictorial imagery useful for meditation, and they mark the continuity of our faith and devotion with that of our Christian ancestors. They preserve what may be meaningless to one generation but meaningful to the next. Our search is fides quaerens intellectum: and so long as they search can and does continue, the insufficiency of our theology need not affect Christian faith or conduct or worship'.
Without the constant discipline of theological thought, asking what we really mean by the symbols, purging out the dead myths, and being utterly honest before God with ourselves and the world, the Church can quickly become obscurantist and its faith and conduct and worship increasingly formal and hollow.
That Christianity should be equated in the public mind, inside as well as outside the Church, with 'organized religion' merely shows how far we have departed from the New Testament. For the last thing the Church exists to be is an organization for the religious. Its charter is to be the servant to the world. I would see much more hope for the Church if it was organized not to defend the interests of religion against the inroads of the state but to equip Christians by the quality and power of its community life, to enter with their 'secret discipline' into all the exhilarating, and dangerous, secular strivings of our day, there to follow and to find the workings of God.
For the true radical is not the man who wants to root out the tares from the wheat so as to make the Church perfect: it is only too easy on these lines to reform the church into a walled garden. The true radical is the man who continually subjects the Church to the judgement of the Kingdom, to the claims of God in the increasingly non-religious world which the Church exists to serve.
'There are times when we can never meet the future with sufficient elasticity fo mind, especially if we are locked in the contemporary systems of thought. We can do worse than remember a principle which both gives us a firm Rock and leaves us maximum elasticity for our minds: the principle: Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted'. Herbert Butterfield.
The basic commitment to Christ may have been in the past-and may be for most of us still-buttressed and fortified by many lesser commitments-to a particular projection of God, a particular 'myth' fo the Incarnation, a particular code of morals, a particular pattern of religion. Without the buttresses it may look as if all would collapse. Nevertheless, we must beware of clinging to the buttresses instead of to Christ. And still more must we beware of insisting on the buttresses as the way to Christ. For to growing numbers in our generation they are barriers rather than supports.
No comments:
Post a Comment