Pastor Mark Moore, of Providence Community Church in Plano, Texas, is a friend that I met about five years ago on a retreat in Colorado. Recently, we connected again through Facebook and then his reading of my book, Your Church Is To Small. Then last week we shared a long telephone conversation that led me to read his blogs and visit his church site online with real interest. (I look forward to spending time with Mark in 2012, especially since I hope to launch a cohort group in the Dallas area.) As I perused Mark's church site I came across one of the best descriptions of the role of right doctrine that I have read. I share it here because I believe it fosters the very kind of thinking that I continually encourage you (and your mission) to embrace.
As a church we want to be characterized by believing the gospel. Believingis meant to convey a continuous, ongoing commitment to the gospel--living in the reality that Jesus is the reigning Lord and we are citizens of his kingdom.
Confessional vs. Functional
We believe there is a significant difference between confessional Christianity and functional Christianity.
Confessional Christianity is typically measured by whether or not I believe the right things. In America, 94% of the population confess belief in God. Furthermore, 42% of Americans claim to be born again Christians and of those, 71% confess that they are "absolutely committed" to the Christian faith.
However, the Barna Group reports that in spiritual surveys conducted in 2006, four themes emerged time and again. Two of them were:
People do not have an accurate view of themselves when it comes to spirituality.
If people's faith is objectively measured against a biblical standard of how faith is to be practiced, Americans are spiritually lukewarm.
This begs the question, is true Christianity only to be measured by what I believe, or also by how I live?
Functional Christianity is when your confession impacts your way of life -- you are functioning in accordance with your confession that Jesus is Lord. If Jesus is the reigning Lord of heaven and earth, then discipleship (true Christianity) is measured not simply by what I believe, but by how I live my life in relation to the rule of Jesus. In other words, the gospel should impact every area of my life.
Check out Providence at: http://www.providencecommunity.com
I am sometimes asked, “Are you a Reformed theologian?” This post is a brief attempt to give an honest (and simple) answer to this question.
First, this question infers that I am a theologian. The answer to this part of the question is both yes and no. Every Christian is a theologian in some sense, either a good one or a bad one. If you think about your faith, in this case the Christian faith, then you are a Christian theologian. There are trained and untrained theologians. There are lay theologians, teaching theologians, writing theologians, etc. I do formally teach theology but I am not a professional writing theologian who has been highly trained an academic doctoral context for this noble purpose. I have limitations and freely admit it.
The great danger I see here is twofold. Untrained theologians can become rather self-confident because they have read a few “old” books, listened to their favorite teachers, and then strongly adopted what they believe to be true Christian theology. When they do this to the exclusion of all other Christian thought it then divides and creates real harm inside the church. It even impacts our mission before the world as well. In my estimation both Calvinists and Arminians, to use one evangelical example, are guilty of this problem. It is so easy, if you have adopted one side or the other in this centuries old debate, to read only your side favorably and then label the other side negatively. When this is done serious reflection and continued growth is often the great loser.
Trained theologians are sometimes guilty of a very different problem. They sometimes show an almost complete disdain for non-professional theologians. (There are wonderful exceptions to this tendency!) What we all need to keep in mind here is the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Pastors and professional teachers of theology should be especially careful to see their theological work as “service to the whole body.” They are not engaging in a profession apart from the catholic church.
Second, the question I’ve put to myself (because others have done it for me as well) is this: “Am I truly Reformed?” The answer to this is again a qualified yes and no. This will require a careful answer.
If being Reformed means that I accept one or more of the great confession(s) from the 16th century, say the Westminster or the Belgic, as the final word on biblical theology then the answer is a strong no. While I have affirmed the “Three Forms of Unity,” and serve as an ordained minister of Word and Sacrament in the Reformed Church in America, this does not mean that I agree with every word of these fallible human confessions. I find a broad agreement with them for sure but I am not required to hold them without exception. Even the most conservative Reformed denominations allow “exceptions” for elders and ministers.
The problem I am getting is best stated by a friend who left an independent church many years ago and said to me, upon joining a very conservative Reformed church, “In the Westminster Confession I have found the most nearly perfect expression of faith ever penned. I need no more theology than what I have found here.” That is not only a wrong way to use a creed but it is not truly Reformed.
If being Reformed means that I am “young and restless” then I am neither. I am 62 and no longer restless about life or theology. I find this recent emphasis, which has grown in some conservative circles, to be unhelpful to the greater goal of missional-ecumenism. It puts up old barriers and thereby destroys relationships with people who are deemed “wrong” about a wide range of ways to frame the faith. I believe a more ancient-future faith paradigm is faithful to the overall witness of Scripture. In such a paradigm we can use and respect ancient creeds but we can also look to the future with faith and hope as we continue to think and confess the Christian faith in every unique circumstance.
Yes, I am a Reformed Protestant Christian. But I am first, above all else, a Christ follower who loves the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. This means that Reformed, at least for me, is a modifier of my Protestantism, informing my view of the church and its faith in my own context. It seems to me that the proper priority of these commitments is both missional and ecumenical. Some think this type of confession is ludicrous. I believe their confidence is too deeply rooted in their presuppositions about creeds and traditions. I also believe that their personal sense of how certain they are about their own theological system and tradition is a sign of their overconfidence in human systematizing. I love this tradition but I do not hold it in this way. I follow the post-Reformation statement, which no one is sure where it came from originally: “Reformed and always reforming.” I hold this view because this is how I believe we can and do perceive truth in our present state.
My own denomination (Reformed Church in America) recently began the process of adding a fourth doctrinal statement to the three major creeds/catechisms from the Reformation era. I refer to The Belhar Confession. This modern confession comes from South Africa. It deals with modern concerns about racism and systemic forms of sin in the church and culture. The consideration of adoption created a huge stir in Reformed Church settings. It barely passed after a long process of adoption. A few other groups have looked at it, but chosen not to take action. Many conservative Reformed Christians simply do not like Belhar. The two primary arguments made against it, so far as I can tell, go as follows: (1) It does not rise to the same level of doctrinal maturity and wholeness as our past standards and thus it is not, strictly speaking, a creed. (2) It implicitly opens the door to approving homosexual practice since the principal South African author of Belhar now approves homosexual practice. It is argued that by approving it we are adopting a creed that will in itself make it easier to embrace this change too. Without a long explanation about these two points I find the first argument seriously worth consideration while I find the second weak and deeply rooted in fear and false logic.
My point in bringing up The Belhar Confession is that the oldest Reformed denomination in America is now in the process of formally adding this twentieth century creed to its historic standards. This says something important about what the word Reformed really means, at least to one family of Reformed Christians with whom I share fellowship. A Reformed church and theologian is thus never to become static. Let me express this more fully.
I believe we do need new creeds. We don’t need them every few years, or decades, but now and then history calls for new ways of expressing the faith in the context the church confesses the faith and serves the gospel. The Christian faith can never be adequately captured by, or expressed in, one creed for all time. This means that even the ancient creeds, which are given prominence by the whole church, are not infallible. We can and should continue to think, grow and reflect upon biblical truth within our own culture and context. This requires good theology, not a rote recitation of a human creed as an infallible instrument that defines the faith once for all time.
We must remember that confessing the faith is always an ongoing process, one that must be carefully related to the missional situation in which we find ourselves at the moment. I can think of many illustrations of this point but none is more relevant to the last century than the German Church situation in the 1930s and the need for The Barmen Declaration. This short and impressive doctrinal statement challenged Nazism through the simple power of the gospel of Jesus in a very challenging context. This statement of simple faith, written when dark clouds of judgment loomed, was a masterful Reformed response to the times.
Thus I conclude: I am a Reformed theologian in the truest and best sense of this word. I believe the historical creeds and confessions have given us great and important insights that should be preserved going forward. But I also believe that the precise form of our confession and apologetic for the faith must continue to change. This is not relativism. It is most assuredly not liberal or conservative in the way we often carelessly use these terms to undermine real discussion and growth. What this is, in my humble view, is an expression of true confidence in both Word and Spirit. God alone will lead us forward in faith, hope and love. My Reformed faith can embrace deep mystery, engage with all parts of the Christian church and thereby seek the unity of the whole church in love. It can do this because this Reformed faith can engage in continuing dialog with the goal of unity in mission kept before us as we move into a future under God’s providence. This kind of Reformed theology is being done the world over by great minds and hearts. But many conservatives in America fear this kind of Reformed theology very deeply. In my understanding this fear is rooted in cultural constructs that create profound emotional discomfort. This is never in the best interest of Reformed theology or true faith, hope and love—the marks of the type of Christian faith that serves Jesus and his mission holistically.
I am particularly grateful that Wheaton College embraced the complete equality of women on their faculty many decades ago. (Wheaton was born in the time of anti-slavery and has always been an activist school in its robust evangelicalism.) I am even more grateful that this inclusion of women includes the Bible and Theology Department, a place where women are often rejected by conservative schools. Happily, women hold important teaching positions alongside their male peers at Wheaton. One such person is Dr. Beth Jones, author of The Marks of His Wounds: Gender Politics and Bodily Resurrection (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Touched by a Vampire: Discovering the Hidden Messages in the Twilight Saga (Multnomah Books, 2009).
Beth Felker Jones, who holds a Ph.D. from Duke University, is married and has four children. She is a busy mom besides being a teacher of Bible and theology at Wheaton. Her husband is a United Methodist minister. On the college web site Jones writes the following about her life and work: “John Calvin wrote that ‘All right knowledge of God is born of obedience.’ It is my privilege to serve at Wheaton College as a teacher of theology and to explore what may be known of God when the Spirit leads us to obey. The more I learn about the Christian faith, the more I am stunned by the beauty of what God has done and is doing through Jesus Christ. My goal as a teacher is to help students see that beauty in ways they may never have glimpsed before. That work of teaching is strengthened by researching and writing about the beauty of the gospel spread through time and space.”
Jones was recently asked to speak about her teaching role in the Wheaton Alumni. She said that she wanted all her students to understand how doctrine works in the everyday world. She says: “Perhaps the most important thing I want my students to recognize about Christian theology is that it matters for Christian life. The study of doctrine is life giving, a fruitful way of connecting to the truth that is in God” (Wheaton Alumni, Autumn, 2011, 60).
Jones noted that deep within the evangelical impulse is a populism that drives us to share the gospel with the whole world. This populism pushes us to share the gospel in terms that most people can understand. It urges us to speak to people where they are and to witness to the transforming power of Jesus in ordinary lives and situations.
Jones expresses a deep concern that we have separated academic theology from vocation, or divine calling, in everyday life. This is a profound concern of mine and of this daily blog.
The evangelical tradition has always opted for engagement with the culture over against the temptation to separate from culture. For this reason it understands wisdom in a nuanced way. While St. Paul speaks about the foolishness of human wisdom in 1 Corinthians “it is never wisdom that God destroys, but only the wisdom of the world” (italics in original, Wheaton Alumni, Autumn, 2011, 60).
Upon discovering the considerable gifts of her undergraduate students Dr. Jones sees them all using theology as they give their lives to Christ and his church. Only a few will become professional theologians but, she adds, “I expect them all to be engaged in the theological work of making doctrine work in the world” (Wheaton Alumni, 60).
In the recent debates about hell, stirred by the book Love Wins and the various blogs, articles and books now written in response to Rob Bell, I have heard many rather ridiculous arguments and statements on every side of this debate. At some point I may say more but there is one argument I want to take up today that I’ve heard all my life and find completely lacking in biblical evidence.
The argument goes like this—if people are lost eternally without consciously knowing and hearing about Jesus then if we remove this doctrinal point, namely that they must “hear” or they will burn in hell forever, we destroy the/a primary motive for our doing evangelism. My point here is not to open Pandora’s Box about the destiny of the un-evangelized but rather to ask a simple question: “Is this motive about saving people from hell who have not heard really a necessary and biblically given motive for evangelism?” So far as I can tell it is not.
To ask the question in another way, “Why should we take evangelism seriously?”
1. Because of the commission Christ gave to his church; that is the mandate he gave to all of us as members of the body of Christ. Matthew 28:18-20 says this commission is rooted in the “authority” of Jesus. The primary reason the church ought to go and make disciples is because Jesus told us to do so. If we love Jesus then we want to do what he tells us to do. If that is not motive enough something is desperately wrong in our understanding of Jesus and his love.
Evangelism is not the last step in making disciples but rather the first. We cannot “make disciples” unless people hear the good news and believe it. Jesus calls people us all into life-transforming relationship with him and his followers (i.e. the church). He does this through a message that must be shared (preached/proclaimed) with people. Simply put, Jesus tells us directly and indirectly that the church is to spread the good news. But note carefully—it is the church holistically that spreads the good news. Not every single Christian is an evangelist. But every single Christian shares in the work of evangelism as part of the mission of Jesus, namely by being a vital part of his church on earth. This is at the heart of a missional understanding of the church and the Trinity.
2. If we keep this gospel message to ourselves then we fail to share the most power life-giving message that brings meaning to life now through forgiveness and positive hope for eternity to come. Is sharing this news an act of love? How does the love of Christ actually inform our personal and collective actions in this regard?
3. Playing off number two above I believe one of the most loving things that we can ever do, if not the most loving, is to share this good news with needy and broken people. There are many things that we can and should do so that we truly love our neighbors as we love ourselves but for the Christian evangelism has to be very high on the list of things we do when we love our neighbor.
We should collectively and personally ask God to give us a passion for the spiritual welfare of others. We should pray for a longing to extend his kingdom (reign of grace) into the lives of all people everywhere. This starts right where you and I live. And it extends to all people everywhere according to the New Testament (cf. Revelation 5:6-10).
The desire of God’s heart is to seek and to find the lost, as we saw yesterday. We act in accord with God’s seeking heart when we join him in seeking for the lost. This is THE motive for evangelism. And if understood and correctly taught it will motivate people to evangelism.
But where, I must ask again, does hell come into this picture? Jesus warned about judgment and hell for sure but nowhere can I find him telling his disciples “You must now go tell everyone this message or they will die and go to hell because you failed to do this work.” This is a huge deduction. It is a powerful leap from one category to another. It is common but it needs to be challenged.
I have personally known two missionaries who went overseas to preach the gospel driven by this sense of obligation that they had to go or they would answer for those who perished without them going and warning them about hell. They spoke graphically of multitudes plunging into hell unless they went and preached. It was convicting stuff when I was a young minister. But I’ve always wondered about this appeal, especially the logic and motive behind what they appealed to in these stories.
Sadly, both these missionaries left the field and their wives. Both gave up the mission and quit. I’ve lost track of them both.
I am not saying they quit their mission because they believed this way about hell as a motive for doing evangelism but it makes me wonder. I am sure of this—you cannot sustain, at least in a healthy emotional and spiritual way, the logic and fear bound up with this kind of appeal. It is not plainly biblical and it is clearly not healthy.
More than twenty years ago an evangelical professor of theology at Hillsdale College, Dr. Michael Bauman (photo), decided to interview some of Europe’s leading theologians. He selected Anglican, Reformed, Lutheran, Orthodox and Catholic thinkers. He sought out eleven people because he thought they had in them the unmistakable marks of having lived a truly theological existence. The theologians included Hendrikus Berkhof, Alister McGrath, Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Bishop Kallistos Ware, Sister Benedicta Ward, Thomas Torrance, Gareth Moore, John Macquarrie, Bishop Graham Leonard and Dorothee Sölle.
This excellent small book, now available only from out-of-print sources, was titled Roundtable: Conversations with European Theologians. As I was recently going through my library to purge several thousand books I re-discovered this little book of only 142-pages. I found it so immensely interesting that I decided not to part with it quite yet.
Michael Bauman suggests that evangelicals are often extremely insular when it comes to doing theology. We are far more likely to read authors that we already know and agree with. If we do not know a writer, or think that we should not trust him/her for any reason, we generally avoid them. We do not relish listening to people who challenge our beliefs. I consider this one of the biggest marks against modern evangelical life and practice.
Bauman articulates my own thoughts well when he says, “But if we feed only on versions happening to be in favor with our own small coterie of evangelical theologians, we doubtless shall miss a great deal that would have made us better thinkers, better theologians, indeed better people” (13). Bauman sought out these eleven theologians in order to glean something from their wisdom and to gather their own pious reflections upon the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Some of the theologians he interviewed struggled for decades to bring the Christian gospel, and its manifold implications, to bear upon all that we think and do as Christians possessed with an active, inquiring mind. While Bauman’s interviews reveal answers that I do not share, at least in some instances, but they all show that the particular person being interviewed has been deeply touched by both human life and the divine.
The first theologian interviewed, at least in the order of the book itself, was Bishop Kallistos Ware. Kallistos Ware is now Metropolitan Ware, one of the world’s great Orthodox scholars and a serious ecumenist, something not overly common in the world of Orthodoxy. I have had the joy of reading a great deal of Ware’s excellent work. His two books on Orthodox theology and history are the best you can read from an English/American perspective. I have also enjoyed meeting Metropolitan Ware and hearing him speak on several different occasions.
In each of Bauman’s interviews the theologian was asked to “describe God.” Ware answered that God is above all Trinity. This is how we understand divine love, in and through Trinity. He then adds:
I deeply regret the way in which the Trinity is passed over in so much Christian thinking today. Karl Rahner [Roman Catholic] rightly observed that one could remove the references to the Trinity from most contemporary books on Christian theology and their arguments would remain unaltered. All too many Christians today are simply monotheists, not Trinitarians. One of the most important tasks of the Orthodox Church in the inter-Christian dialogue of our time is to stress the centrality of the doctrine of the Trinity, not as a piece of abstract speculation, but as an expression of practical theology that can make a huge difference to your and me personally. In all our struggles for human rights, for justice, for the abolition of oppression, we are active in the name of the Trinity (20)!
This underscores once again why ecumenism matters so profoundly. By listening to the whole church there is so much to learn that will only add strength and bulk to your own life and thought as a Christian.
I referred a few days ago to the dangers of labels; conservative and liberal. I believe we live in a time when labels have less meaning than ever. I am just not sure what a person means by the use of these labels, especially with regard to the Christian faith. Let me explain.
If being a conservative means that one takes the creeds and the core of the Christian faith with all seriousness, and really believes the truth claims of the historic faith are essential to right confession and life, than count me as a conservative. I wish to conserve the ancient faith. But, and this is important, that faith is not conservative in terms of many modern issues we face that require us to think and grow as believers.
If being a liberal means that one has an openness to the sciences, to new ideas about solving persistent problems, to different ways of seeing the world and the church then I am a liberal. If liberal means that you take a suspicious view of the Bible’s integrity and truthfulness or that you think what the church rightly believes is unimportant then I am most definitely not a liberal. If liberal means you believe the gospel has implications for public life and for human flourishing, and by this understanding you means that it speaks directly and powerfully to issues of justice and poverty, then I am a liberal.
The devil, as the old saying goes, is always in the details. This is why I find the labels unhelpful, if not seriously misleading.
Over the course of my life I have shared ministry with all kinds of ministers and churches. Some would be called liberal and some conservative. I have often been pleasantly surprised. In some conservative churches I have found leaders, and some of the people, who are not fighting about “young earth creationism” or ludicrously literal views of Scripture. In some liberal mainline churches I have been pleasantly surprised to discover a deep love for the gospel and a clear preaching of grace, faith and new life. I have no doubt, for example, that some of those who embrace a view of same-sex marriage are not otherwise liberal in the essential articles of Christian faith. At the same time I’ve discovered conservative Christians who are morally opposed to same-sex marriage, as I am, but who are far more charitable and open to homosexual people as their neighbors than some who attend liberal churches. I learned a great deal about this whole business of faith and fear growing up in the racist South. In fact, this is where I first learned that these labels fail to help move people along a path to greater faithfulness to Jesus as Lord.
What I think we need today, more than ever, is a Christian faith that is biblical and confessional, while it is also flexible and open to the world around us. One could call this “contextualizing” but even this word has all kinds of baggage.
People look around and ask, “What kind of church is this?” The answer will have a lot to do with the church and her future mission.
A major obstacle to what I am writing about is abstract theology. Through abstract theology, taught in seminaries for well over a hundred years now, we have created battle lines that are now blurry and not so helpful. This development is unfortunate. N. T. Wright understands this when he writes:
The early creeds and the baptismal confessions which partly underlay them, were not little pieces of abstract theologizing to satisfy the curious intellect, but symbols which functioned as such, badges which marked out this community from others in terms of the god in whom they believed. From the start, Christian creeds were not so much a matter of “faith seeking understanding” as “community seeking definition” – and finding it in that which was believed about the true god . . .
Christian “theology,” then, was born and nurtured in the context of faith, worship, baptism and Eucharist, and came to expression through the need to mark out the community which worshipped this god from communities that worshipped others (The New Testament and the People of God, 368).
It is a rare gift to be in a community of Christians who genuinely seek to balance biblical and ancient faith with open-mindedness to truth which comes from sources other than the Bible and the church. While Christians should hold highest esteem for the Bible, as God’s Holy Word, they should not equate everything that is true with the Bible. The Bible guides us to the faith which saves and to wisdom in making choices that God desires for our well-being. But it is not the only word we have about truth. Forgetting this has landed more than a few conservatives in a place they need not be. And forgetting that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God has landed liberals in any even more precarious place at times.
One of my favorite persons is Steve Brown. He also does one of my favorite radio programs called Steve Brown Etc. Brown also teaches on Key Life, a fifteen-minute syndicated radio show heard around the country on around 300 radio stations and on the Internet, on which Brown teaches about grace and the Christian life. The show often ends with Brown's tag line, "You think about that. Amen." Key Life also distributes audio recordings and writings by Brown and is based in Maitland, Florida. Steve formerly taught at Reformed Theological Seminary and is the author of numerous books. The first time I heard Steve, many years ago, I was deeply disturbed. He preached grace so wonderfully that I dared not believe this could be true. His happy and affecting style disarmed me but I had my doubts about him. Later I met him and saw the man for what he is – a Christ follower who is free and filled with grace.
Love him or hate him, Steve Brown always draws a crowd. Over the past 22 years, as founder and president of Key Life Network, Steve's unique blend of orthodoxy and controversy, humor and profundity, and a refusal to play religious games, has attracted some interesting folks. Steve Brown Etc. is a place where you can hang out with Steve "and the rest" and experience radical freedom, infectious joy and maybe even a bit of surprising faithfulness.
Last Friday I did a show with Steve, on the Steve Brown Etc. Broadcast, titled: “Religion: Sickness or Cure?” You can hear the entire broadcast here. Steve is one fantastic, happy and soulful guy. If you’ve never heard the show try it. You might get hooked and want to listen to more. I download the podcasts and listen often myself. I am never bored by Steve in the least. You ought to know him and listen to him.
I believe the greatest theological need in our time, along side the theological idea of what I’ve called missional-ecuemnism, is the recovery of a Christ-centered theological perspective. We desperately need a Christological theology!
Our theology is often centered on perspectives that are rooted in a number of good biblical themes but lack Christ. There is nothing more central to the biblical story of redemption than Christ. He is all. Paul, in perhaps the greatest hymn in all the Bible says:
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather made himself nothing, by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human being, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death – even death on a cross. Therefore, God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:6-11).
A Christological theology embraces the commands to love God and our neighbor. Behind these commandments are not rules (law) but divine self-sacrifice, a sacrifice that binds together the entire enterprise we call theology. And the self-sacrificial character of Jesus means the trinitarian nature of God does not leave us at the whim of an arbitrary God. He rescues, will rescue and must rescue all who cannot rescue themselves and call upon him. Understanding God as self-giving in Christ is not an abstract theology of the attributes but rather an accessible theology of the cross and the resurrection. The cross reflects, contains and embodies the trinitarian mystery of the eternal self-giving Father who begets the Son and gives procession to the Spirit. In the words of one theologian: “Christology shares in the reality of who God is (theology) and reveals it” (cf. Matthew 11:25-30).
Further, a Christological theology does not detract from our doctrine of God but rather opens it up to the fuller reality that God’s intentions are inherent in his divine essence. Simply put, this means that God does what he does because of who He (God) is.
Much of Westminster-type Calvinism, especially of the sort that majors on the divine decrees as central to theology, fails at this precise point. It gives the Christian a view of God that is detached from God’s self-sacrificing nature and thus the center of his revelation, Jesus Christ. When I grasped this focus my life and my preaching were profoundly altered. I believe many neo-conservative Reformed Christians desperately need this richer, deeper and more Christ-centered perspective.
N. T. Wright captured this so well in his book, The Climax of the Covenant (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1991, 83-84). He wrote:
The real humiliation of the incarnation and the cross is that one who was himself God, and who never during the whole process stopped being God, could embrace such a vocation. The real theological emphasis of the hymn [Philippians 2], therefore, is not simply a new view of Jesus. It is a new understanding of God. Against age-old attempts of human beings to make God in their own (arrogant, self-glorifying image) image, God reveals the truth about what it meant to be God. Underneath this is the conclusion, all-important in present Christological debate: incarnation and even crucifixion are to be seen as appropriate vehicles for the dynamic self-revelation of God (italics are Wright’s).
I believe Wright’s short sentence that this is a “new understanding of God” is at the heart of the Christian revelation. Jesus revealed the Father as he had never been revealed and now in the full light of his glory we see the heart and mind of God as never before. Let us lay hold of this truth and go forward into deeper and better theology in our personal thinking and in the community life of the whole church.
While I concur that postmodernism has brought about some insights to faith that are welcome there is a huge danger that many younger Christians do not see here. Does faith properly require definition or do we make it up as we go along?
It should be noted, as a bedrock premise of all speaking about God and Scripture, that faith requires more than emotions, aesthetic ideas or empty words. Faith is not about words but about reality. But the God who is has revealed himself and given us his name, as we saw yesterday, reveals himself in and through words, or speech. The God who reveals himself has revealed his being and thoughts in words. Faith is, therefore, about reality and reality is rooted in truth claims that come by words.
For this reason the church has always defined faith and non-faith, if you please. This is, the church has reasoned, Christian faith and this is not Christian faith. This has been done in condensed formulas that we call creeds. These creeds developed over some time as the church sought to contemplate, express, learn and celebrate her knowledge of God in Christ. In order to live out the reality of the faith we must know what our faith is and is not. This is how the creeds serve us (as Christians in community) so wonderfully.
Think about it this way – without fixed forms the content of faith would soon dissipate. The Bible is surely subject to interpretation and no one has the last word on that interpretation. But the form of our faith is here fixed in an authoritative way. The early church believed this and sought to express what they believed the apostles had taught them. This is why the oldest creed is called “The Apostles’ Creed.” It was not written by the apostles but it summarized in short form what was confessed by believers in their baptism and the church in their corporate life.
The church attached great significance to definite affirmations and statements of faith. The precise wording was sometimes hard to achieve but leaders worked hard to get it right, at least in terms of their own culture and context. We can do no less if we are to remain faithful to the “faith once for all delivered to the saints.”
But are the creeds important today? I believe they are very important. Even when we translate the faith into a new culture, or a new postmodern context, the creeds help us preserve the essentials of Christian faith and practice. Why is this so important? Because there is a common faith which is the foundation for the church’s true unity in Christ.
Because so many refuse to confess the paleo-orthodoxy of the ancient church they are cut adrift to make things up as they go along. This leads, over time, to the loss of those essential elements of the faith that make us one over all the ages.
Recent Comments