In my copy of the New Testament I underline passages which take my fancy. Nearly all of them are about the deceitfulness of the cares of this world and of riches, about how concupiscence and vanity separate us from God, about glorying in tribulation which brings patience, experience and hope, about the flesh lusting against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh, these being contrary to one another so that we cannot do the things that we would do, and so on. It is difficult to think of any sentiments which would be more intrinsically unsympathetic in most clerical circles. They are, I should say, about the most unpopular sentences it is possible to utter today; at religious gatherings they cause malaise and irritation; on radio and television panels derision and incredulity. When I use them I am often accused of insincerity or affectation, so rooted are the opposite assumptions - that by caring about the world we shall make it better, that we must aim collectively to get richer in order to get happier and happier, that the unrestrained satisfaction of our earthly hopes and desires is the way to physical, mental and spiritual contentment.
In the face of the otherworldliness which I still unfashionably find in the Gospels, as far as I am concerned the whole edifice of twentieth-century materialism - and the utopian hopes that go therewith - falls flat on it face. One is delivered from the myth of progress. The terrible vision of a Scandinavian-American paradise, with longer lives, more and better aphrodisiacs and more leisure and amenities for all, dissolves into nightmare, awaking from which one advances gingerly upon the sublime truth that to live it is necessary to die, that a life can only be kept by being lost - propositions which strike contemporary minds as pessimistic, but which seem to me optimistic to the point of insanity, implying as they do, that it is possible for mere man, with his brief life and stunted vision, to aspire after a universal understanding and a universal love. Is this being a Christian?
Showing posts with label church. Show all posts
Showing posts with label church. Show all posts
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Monday, March 11, 2013
Recasting the Mould (contd)
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.
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.
Monday, January 14, 2013
A Lost Generation-A Lost Witness
There is no singular explanation for the decline of the church. But when the church loses its voice, it loses its legitimacy.
And that is what happened in Nazi Germany when the church settled for co-existence with the Nazi state. In the wake of that moral failure, is it any surprise that many in Germany and the rest of Europe see no need for the church. If it was irrelevant then (and in many cases complicit), it seems even more irrelevant now. When the church can't speak out against tyranny, then it has no ability to say "follow me". It is an impostor, a white washed tomb. This applies at an institutional level with obvious exceptions at the individual level (eg. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sophie Scholl and countless others).
I think there is at least one related parallel today. Specifically, the evangelical movement's immersion in politics. It is hard to serve as a witness to Jesus Christ when shallow political sloganeering implies some form of heaven-on-earth through government. This denigrates the sovereignty of Jesus Christ and erects an idol that will inevitably fall.
The sooner, the better.
And that is what happened in Nazi Germany when the church settled for co-existence with the Nazi state. In the wake of that moral failure, is it any surprise that many in Germany and the rest of Europe see no need for the church. If it was irrelevant then (and in many cases complicit), it seems even more irrelevant now. When the church can't speak out against tyranny, then it has no ability to say "follow me". It is an impostor, a white washed tomb. This applies at an institutional level with obvious exceptions at the individual level (eg. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sophie Scholl and countless others).
I think there is at least one related parallel today. Specifically, the evangelical movement's immersion in politics. It is hard to serve as a witness to Jesus Christ when shallow political sloganeering implies some form of heaven-on-earth through government. This denigrates the sovereignty of Jesus Christ and erects an idol that will inevitably fall.
The sooner, the better.
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