What I understand of Jesus and what he has revealed to me through his Spirit, his Word and his Church is that he calls me into relationship with him, with his people, and that out of those relationships I am called to serve him in the world. It is not about gimmicks and programs and lists. Faith at its core is all about relationship.
So for me, the question I pose to someone else is not, “Did they follow certain steps in getting to a faith in Jesus”, but do they at this time have a dynamic (which means living and growing) relationship with Jesus. They can’t have that relationship with Jesus unless they trust/believe in him. And if they have that relationship, then Jesus is working in their lives. He may or may not call on me to come alongside them and help them grow in their relationship with him, just as they would surely help me grow. At the minimum I am called to bear witness in word and deed to everyone I encounter that Jesus is the Christ.
I have met many people who had already encountered Jesus, but who could not articulate that encounter in words that are politically correct to other Believers. And yet their faith is more real than some of those who speak with the tongues of angels and yet lack that vibrancy of relationship that cannot merely be intellectualized or processed.
The book of Acts is a funny book, funny because it is used by all of us Restorationists of all stripes who want the Church to get back to its roots, its essentials, as we understand it. But at the same time, as much as it points to those essentials, the book refuses to be trimmed to fit our specific agendas, leaving this or that odd thing to hang out blowing in the wind and making us uncomfortable. (In this, Acts is no different from the Bible as a whole.)
I think of that time when Peter was at the Gentile Cornelius’ house. It was an awkward visit, what with all those forbidden foods and uncircumcised heathen around. And then on top of that, as Peter was explaining the Gospel to those who were gathered, the Holy Spirit came on them. Now Peter’s team knew this for sure because these people started speaking in tongues and that could only happen if it was of the Spirit. So Peter recognized that if they had the power of God, which was demonstrated by the tongues speaking, they were obviously now believers. He didn’t go through some silly exercise to make sure they did believe. He simply ordered that they be baptized in water as it was clear they were now Believers.
More often than not, the Holy Spirit doesn’t follow procedures as we understand them. Because they are not important other than as a guide to us. I ask you, if the Holy Spirit doesn’t think them that important, then why do we? Did the Holy Spirit make a mistake or get ahead of Himself?
The important thing at that moment was that these people had had a revelation of Jesus as the Christ and so the Holy Spirit proceeded to make sure the Circumcised believers understood that uncircumcised, pork-eating Gentiles could believe in Jesus without being circumcised, giving up pork, praying the sinner’s prayer or even being baptized in water. In fact, they didn’t even wait for Peter to finish or give an invitation or for the organ to start playing.
What also strikes me about this story is that Peter was simply bearing witness of who Jesus is. Take a look at what we have of Peter’s speech. It is a very simple, very straightforward declaration of who Jesus is and what he has done. Cornelius, a Roman Centurion, was not totally ignorant of the stories about Jesus and he certainly was somewhat familiar with the Jewish faith, being what the Jews called a God-fearing Gentile. So maybe what Peter said would have been different in another context, as Paul’s message was on the day he spoke in Athens. It helps to understand your audience and where they are coming from.
But the point is that Peter got right to the point. It was about Jesus. Not lifestyle. Not creeds or doctrines. Certainly not procedures. As Peter spoke, the people believed in the One of whom he was speaking and the rest took care of itself. Procedures can be helpful for those who are insecure. But they never dictate to God how He should operate in a given situation.
2009-09-30
2009-09-23
Absolute Essentials – VIII
So I ask you, what things in faith are so absolute that without them your faith crumbles? What is the unshakeable foundation of your faith?
This week I have connected with a wide variety of Christians, people who believe in Jesus and who all believe that this Jesus is our God and Lord. Some of these Believers call themselves Pentecostals or Charismatics. Others are Evangelicals who hold to a (slightly) different understanding of the workings of the Spirit in our lives. For some, the doctrine of eternal security is as essential as “tongues as the initial evidence” is for the Pentecostals in my corner. And I have one friend who celebrates her Evangelical faith in the pageantry of the Catholic tradition. For another friend, the day of worship is Saturday. For still others, no one day is different from any other.
Some Christian friends champion conservative social and political causes. Other Christian friends champion peace and justice issues which put them to the “left” of many of their fellow Believers. I even have a few Believer friends who are still members of the Communist party.
Some Christians have a creed of 5 or 16 or 24 points. Other Christians say their only creed is the Bible (and how they interpret it, of course).
Most of us can get beyond these basic differences to the point that we can see these other people in heaven someday, albeit in a different part of heaven. We joke, a bit awkwardly, about this and cling to what we know, trusting that we are right and that somehow the other person will come into the fuller light.
But I wonder at that. Don’t we all need to come into the fuller light? Isn’t that what the walk of faith is all about, never assuming we have arrived, always moving forward, pursuing truth to the nth degree? Why do we compare ourselves with each other as if we have arrived more than they have, instead of urging each other on with the truth that maybe, just maybe, God speaks to each of us and we have much to learn from one another and, of course, from God?
I think about my own faith. What is the foundation on which it rests? Is it a faith that is safe only if scientific inquiry and discovery is kept at bay? Is it a faith that is secure only if politically correct thought and speech is maintained? Is it a faith that is sound only if protected from contact with the world?
Can my faith survive if evolutionary theory is advanced as a scientific model for understanding the natural world? I wonder, does my faith require exactly 2 million children of Jacob exiting from Egypt through the Red Sea? What if God works in my friend differently than He has in me – does that make one of us suspect? I’m sorry if these questions unnerve you. I ask such questions because long, long ago I discovered that my faith was not based on either these questions or their answers.
I do believe that there are some essentials to the Christian faith, the defining line being what you do with Jesus – is he or is he not the Christ, our risen Lord, and the revealer of God to us? I do believe that Jesus has given us the Holy Spirit of God as a guide and as the One who empowers us to trust and obey God. I do believe that the Scriptures as we have them today are trustworthy and are useful, as the Apostle Paul says, for “teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” And I do believe Jesus has provided the Community of Faith – the Church – to strengthen us in our faith and to help us fulfill our destiny in Christ.
Start there and hang on to that core and you won’t go wrong, no matter what questions come up.
What I’ve been saying is not meant to be an exhaustive study of what is truth. Nor does it mean that other Believers will necessarily agree with me or that I am not a true Believer if they don’t. It only means that the Word, the Spirit and the Church all point to Jesus Christ as the center of our faith, on which everything else rests. And that all too often we worry about things which are not of real concern.
Which is more important, that our children close their ears to evolutionary teaching or that they open their eyes to Jesus? Which is more important, that we keep our nation and our churches free of gays and abortionists or that we point everyone, including them, to Jesus? Which is more important, that Christians vote a certain party line or that they ask themselves what Jesus wants them to do at this moment in time? In the end, simple as it sounds, Jesus defines my faith.
This week I have connected with a wide variety of Christians, people who believe in Jesus and who all believe that this Jesus is our God and Lord. Some of these Believers call themselves Pentecostals or Charismatics. Others are Evangelicals who hold to a (slightly) different understanding of the workings of the Spirit in our lives. For some, the doctrine of eternal security is as essential as “tongues as the initial evidence” is for the Pentecostals in my corner. And I have one friend who celebrates her Evangelical faith in the pageantry of the Catholic tradition. For another friend, the day of worship is Saturday. For still others, no one day is different from any other.
Some Christian friends champion conservative social and political causes. Other Christian friends champion peace and justice issues which put them to the “left” of many of their fellow Believers. I even have a few Believer friends who are still members of the Communist party.
Some Christians have a creed of 5 or 16 or 24 points. Other Christians say their only creed is the Bible (and how they interpret it, of course).
Most of us can get beyond these basic differences to the point that we can see these other people in heaven someday, albeit in a different part of heaven. We joke, a bit awkwardly, about this and cling to what we know, trusting that we are right and that somehow the other person will come into the fuller light.
But I wonder at that. Don’t we all need to come into the fuller light? Isn’t that what the walk of faith is all about, never assuming we have arrived, always moving forward, pursuing truth to the nth degree? Why do we compare ourselves with each other as if we have arrived more than they have, instead of urging each other on with the truth that maybe, just maybe, God speaks to each of us and we have much to learn from one another and, of course, from God?
I think about my own faith. What is the foundation on which it rests? Is it a faith that is safe only if scientific inquiry and discovery is kept at bay? Is it a faith that is secure only if politically correct thought and speech is maintained? Is it a faith that is sound only if protected from contact with the world?
Can my faith survive if evolutionary theory is advanced as a scientific model for understanding the natural world? I wonder, does my faith require exactly 2 million children of Jacob exiting from Egypt through the Red Sea? What if God works in my friend differently than He has in me – does that make one of us suspect? I’m sorry if these questions unnerve you. I ask such questions because long, long ago I discovered that my faith was not based on either these questions or their answers.
I do believe that there are some essentials to the Christian faith, the defining line being what you do with Jesus – is he or is he not the Christ, our risen Lord, and the revealer of God to us? I do believe that Jesus has given us the Holy Spirit of God as a guide and as the One who empowers us to trust and obey God. I do believe that the Scriptures as we have them today are trustworthy and are useful, as the Apostle Paul says, for “teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” And I do believe Jesus has provided the Community of Faith – the Church – to strengthen us in our faith and to help us fulfill our destiny in Christ.
Start there and hang on to that core and you won’t go wrong, no matter what questions come up.
What I’ve been saying is not meant to be an exhaustive study of what is truth. Nor does it mean that other Believers will necessarily agree with me or that I am not a true Believer if they don’t. It only means that the Word, the Spirit and the Church all point to Jesus Christ as the center of our faith, on which everything else rests. And that all too often we worry about things which are not of real concern.
Which is more important, that our children close their ears to evolutionary teaching or that they open their eyes to Jesus? Which is more important, that we keep our nation and our churches free of gays and abortionists or that we point everyone, including them, to Jesus? Which is more important, that Christians vote a certain party line or that they ask themselves what Jesus wants them to do at this moment in time? In the end, simple as it sounds, Jesus defines my faith.
2009-09-16
Absolute Essentials – VII
Won’t people lose their faith if they ask too many questions? If they start examining what people who think differently have come up with?
How fragile, I ask, do we think our Christian faith is? That it cannot stand to be examined? That it can’t face the challenge of exposure and confrontation?
Are we afraid of the answers we might find? Or are we afraid that we won’t be able to find our way back to our uncomplicated childlike faith that made it all seem so simple?
The New Testament writers talked about this. They were concerned that the believers in their day would settle for the uncomplicated “milk of the Word” as they called it, that these infantile believers would want to remain small in their understanding of God. So these giants of the Faith challenged this small-mindedness and urged their readers to exercise their faith to its limits.
My father-in-law worked for Boeing for many years, building airplanes. When my kids were younger, they would check out the type of plane they were flying on for they knew Grandpa would ask them what kind of plane it was. Chances were it was a plane he had had a part in building.
He told them how they tested those planes. How they put them through the most rigorous of ordeals. If the plane could stand up to the most intense winds engineers could produce, it would survive anything in the natural it would face in its lifetime of flying. My kids never feared to fly, trusting the plane builder they knew.
Recently one of my sons was learning how to drive. He asked why the speedometer went up to 140 miles an hour if you weren’t supposed to drive any faster than half that. Out of my only slightly deeper understanding of such things, I told him that if the car was going to do 70 well, then it would need to have a limit far beyond 70.
Such is the nature of our faith. This faith, which is in the One who can contain all the known and unknown universes in the palm of His anthropomorphically pictured hand, should be able to be put to the most stringent of tests. What kind of a god would be afraid of any questions posed by the most advanced of (mere) mortal minds?
Since coming back to America, I’ve been surprised at how some American Believers often hang on to the puniest of faiths. They are afraid of the challenges that might come to their children in public schools. They are afraid of the confusion that might come because they discover there are Believers who think slightly different from them. They are afraid. For them, faith is so fragile, it must be sheltered at all costs.
This is not the robust faith of the 1st Century. Nor is it the robust faith I saw in the lives of friends in China. And to clarify the point, this is not the robust faith that is also very much alive and well in America, in spite of what sometimes appears to be the case.
That robust faith is evident in my son and daughter who joined in a Day of Silence at their public high school on their own initiative, not afraid of what others – Believers or not – might think. For them, the Day is not about affirming certain lifestyles, it is about saying that no one should be put down for any reason, not even homosexuality, and they were willing to remain silent the whole day as a testimony of their faith in Jesus Christ.
That robust faith is evident in my friends who risk joining causes deemed questionable because they are not causes sanctioned by their religious or political authorities even though these causes ring true in my friends’ understanding of the Scriptures. Since when is championing the cause of the poor or of peace or of justice or of equality evidence of a skewed faith?
That robust faith is evident whenever Believers sincerely question what they think they already know to make sure they are not missing something more of God. I think of the Apostle Peter. All the Believers were so sure that Moses had it right when he said "No!" to certain types of food. Looking back from modern Gentile Christian America, such ideas seem ludicrous, but they were no more silly to Peter and his fellow believers than our modern sensitivities are to us.
When that blanket with all the forbidden foods came down from heaven, it was God’s invitation to question everything they held true in order to pursue truth. This is the kind of faith I long for. It is the only kind worth calling faith.
How fragile, I ask, do we think our Christian faith is? That it cannot stand to be examined? That it can’t face the challenge of exposure and confrontation?
Are we afraid of the answers we might find? Or are we afraid that we won’t be able to find our way back to our uncomplicated childlike faith that made it all seem so simple?
The New Testament writers talked about this. They were concerned that the believers in their day would settle for the uncomplicated “milk of the Word” as they called it, that these infantile believers would want to remain small in their understanding of God. So these giants of the Faith challenged this small-mindedness and urged their readers to exercise their faith to its limits.
My father-in-law worked for Boeing for many years, building airplanes. When my kids were younger, they would check out the type of plane they were flying on for they knew Grandpa would ask them what kind of plane it was. Chances were it was a plane he had had a part in building.
He told them how they tested those planes. How they put them through the most rigorous of ordeals. If the plane could stand up to the most intense winds engineers could produce, it would survive anything in the natural it would face in its lifetime of flying. My kids never feared to fly, trusting the plane builder they knew.
Recently one of my sons was learning how to drive. He asked why the speedometer went up to 140 miles an hour if you weren’t supposed to drive any faster than half that. Out of my only slightly deeper understanding of such things, I told him that if the car was going to do 70 well, then it would need to have a limit far beyond 70.
Such is the nature of our faith. This faith, which is in the One who can contain all the known and unknown universes in the palm of His anthropomorphically pictured hand, should be able to be put to the most stringent of tests. What kind of a god would be afraid of any questions posed by the most advanced of (mere) mortal minds?
Since coming back to America, I’ve been surprised at how some American Believers often hang on to the puniest of faiths. They are afraid of the challenges that might come to their children in public schools. They are afraid of the confusion that might come because they discover there are Believers who think slightly different from them. They are afraid. For them, faith is so fragile, it must be sheltered at all costs.
This is not the robust faith of the 1st Century. Nor is it the robust faith I saw in the lives of friends in China. And to clarify the point, this is not the robust faith that is also very much alive and well in America, in spite of what sometimes appears to be the case.
That robust faith is evident in my son and daughter who joined in a Day of Silence at their public high school on their own initiative, not afraid of what others – Believers or not – might think. For them, the Day is not about affirming certain lifestyles, it is about saying that no one should be put down for any reason, not even homosexuality, and they were willing to remain silent the whole day as a testimony of their faith in Jesus Christ.
That robust faith is evident in my friends who risk joining causes deemed questionable because they are not causes sanctioned by their religious or political authorities even though these causes ring true in my friends’ understanding of the Scriptures. Since when is championing the cause of the poor or of peace or of justice or of equality evidence of a skewed faith?
That robust faith is evident whenever Believers sincerely question what they think they already know to make sure they are not missing something more of God. I think of the Apostle Peter. All the Believers were so sure that Moses had it right when he said "No!" to certain types of food. Looking back from modern Gentile Christian America, such ideas seem ludicrous, but they were no more silly to Peter and his fellow believers than our modern sensitivities are to us.
When that blanket with all the forbidden foods came down from heaven, it was God’s invitation to question everything they held true in order to pursue truth. This is the kind of faith I long for. It is the only kind worth calling faith.
2009-09-09
Absolute Essentials – VI
What does it mean to be a Believer in the 21st Century in Portland, Oregon, USA? [Happens to be when and where I live.] What shapes my faith? Obviously, the Word of God does. I am what they call a person of the Book. And I study that Book both for what it can tell me about what was intended for the original audiences and for how it is to be applied or contextualized in my own modern world.
Such study takes skill. It is fascinating that the Word can speak to the simplest of minds, whether untrained or untrainable. Jesus’ parables, understood by the unlearned and simple-minded, were nonsense to the wise and scholarly. And yet, the Apostle Paul says it is necessary for us, as we are able, to be trained to correctly discern the Word. To learn how to hear the Scriptures as they spoke to those first hearers. To learn how to hear it for ourselves in our own context. Ignorance is no excuse under the law or before God.
So we study not only the Word itself, but also the history and cultures out of which it came so that we can better understand the Word. And we study our own world and cultures and ourselves so that we can better understand how to apply that Word.
Such skill is not achieved in a vacuum. It comes through being connected with the larger Community of Faith. No generation of believers has ever been so blessed by such interconnectedness, both with other contemporary Believers around the globe and with resources that can put us in touch with generations dating back into the dim past.
Much of this connectivity we owe, surprisingly, to secular and non-Christian scholars who help us shed light on the original texts and contexts, as well as on our own contemporary world and ourselves. We do ourselves and our world a great disservice when we dismiss those outside of the Faith as having nothing to contribute to the conversation about faith. Jesus recognized greater faith in a Roman Centurion than in all of the people of Faith in his day.
We not only learn our skills in Community. We execute those skills in Community. We practice our faith in the midst of a great cloud of witnesses, to borrow a word picture from the ancient writer of the Book of Hebrews. A company of witnesses made all the stronger for its human and cultural diversity today and its human, cultural, and historical diversity through the ages.
Can we not hear individually and directly from God? Most definitely yes. Then why do we need all this other stuff? Because we are not God. We are human and fallen human at that. And because revelation is relational. God speaks to us directly by and through His Spirit, but He also chooses to speak to us through His Community of Faith and through His Word again by that same Holy Spirit.
A skill we learn as we “study to show ourselves approved, rightly dividing the word of truth” is to ask questions and to question. Many Believers are afraid of questions. Odd then that all restorationist movements from before Luther and Calvin on down to the more recent Adventists and Campbellites and Pentecostals and Charismatics have all gained their blazes of insight precisely through raising questions and doubting what was then understood.
As with the pigs in Animal Farm, the reformers become more close-minded than the original masters once they have reformed themselves into power. Some argue that now we have all the understanding we need – now that we have the written Word or the Holy Spirit (the emphasis depending on which restorationist strain you claim). So, they imply, we don’t need to have any more doubts or ask any more questions. But such close-mindedness has more in common with the rankest of unbelievers than it does with sincere seekers.
Only those who continue to hunger and thirst and ask and question and doubt and wrestle will be satisfied. For a static relationship – whether with God or man – is a dead one. God, who is infinite, invites us to know Him and what we discover is there is no end to knowing Him. Just when we think we’ve cornered the market on revelation and understanding, we discover that there is far more that we don’t know about God than we do.
Some say we don’t need to probe all that, that we have eternity to explore, that in this life it is best to remain safe in limited understanding. But such Limiters confuse God with a rock. God is a Being, a person. He is dynamic, deep and vast and He invites us to plunge in and never give up knowing Him more and more. That infinite God is the One I long to worship.
Such study takes skill. It is fascinating that the Word can speak to the simplest of minds, whether untrained or untrainable. Jesus’ parables, understood by the unlearned and simple-minded, were nonsense to the wise and scholarly. And yet, the Apostle Paul says it is necessary for us, as we are able, to be trained to correctly discern the Word. To learn how to hear the Scriptures as they spoke to those first hearers. To learn how to hear it for ourselves in our own context. Ignorance is no excuse under the law or before God.
So we study not only the Word itself, but also the history and cultures out of which it came so that we can better understand the Word. And we study our own world and cultures and ourselves so that we can better understand how to apply that Word.
Such skill is not achieved in a vacuum. It comes through being connected with the larger Community of Faith. No generation of believers has ever been so blessed by such interconnectedness, both with other contemporary Believers around the globe and with resources that can put us in touch with generations dating back into the dim past.
Much of this connectivity we owe, surprisingly, to secular and non-Christian scholars who help us shed light on the original texts and contexts, as well as on our own contemporary world and ourselves. We do ourselves and our world a great disservice when we dismiss those outside of the Faith as having nothing to contribute to the conversation about faith. Jesus recognized greater faith in a Roman Centurion than in all of the people of Faith in his day.
We not only learn our skills in Community. We execute those skills in Community. We practice our faith in the midst of a great cloud of witnesses, to borrow a word picture from the ancient writer of the Book of Hebrews. A company of witnesses made all the stronger for its human and cultural diversity today and its human, cultural, and historical diversity through the ages.
Can we not hear individually and directly from God? Most definitely yes. Then why do we need all this other stuff? Because we are not God. We are human and fallen human at that. And because revelation is relational. God speaks to us directly by and through His Spirit, but He also chooses to speak to us through His Community of Faith and through His Word again by that same Holy Spirit.
A skill we learn as we “study to show ourselves approved, rightly dividing the word of truth” is to ask questions and to question. Many Believers are afraid of questions. Odd then that all restorationist movements from before Luther and Calvin on down to the more recent Adventists and Campbellites and Pentecostals and Charismatics have all gained their blazes of insight precisely through raising questions and doubting what was then understood.
As with the pigs in Animal Farm, the reformers become more close-minded than the original masters once they have reformed themselves into power. Some argue that now we have all the understanding we need – now that we have the written Word or the Holy Spirit (the emphasis depending on which restorationist strain you claim). So, they imply, we don’t need to have any more doubts or ask any more questions. But such close-mindedness has more in common with the rankest of unbelievers than it does with sincere seekers.
Only those who continue to hunger and thirst and ask and question and doubt and wrestle will be satisfied. For a static relationship – whether with God or man – is a dead one. God, who is infinite, invites us to know Him and what we discover is there is no end to knowing Him. Just when we think we’ve cornered the market on revelation and understanding, we discover that there is far more that we don’t know about God than we do.
Some say we don’t need to probe all that, that we have eternity to explore, that in this life it is best to remain safe in limited understanding. But such Limiters confuse God with a rock. God is a Being, a person. He is dynamic, deep and vast and He invites us to plunge in and never give up knowing Him more and more. That infinite God is the One I long to worship.
2009-09-02
Absolute Essentials – V
I am what is called a Restorationist in the sense that I like to get back to what was originally intended as far as the practice of faith is concerned. For me, that means looking at what Jesus originally intended when teaching his disciples or what the book of Genesis is trying to tell us about what God intended in the Creation before the fall. What did this or that passage in Scripture mean to those who first heard it?
Sometimes a restorationist approach leads to something idiosyncratic like those signs in front of some 60-year-old church buildings in 100-year-old towns that read, “Founded A.D. 33”. There is no way for us to go back before the Fall to what God intended in Creation. We cannot get back to innocence in the Garden of Eden any more than we can return lock, stock and barrel to the culture of First Century A.D. Palestine. So I am also what is called a Contextualizer, meaning someone who tries to take the original intent and put it into a context that makes sense in the present.
Sometimes when reading Jesus, you hear him say something like “I didn’t come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it” and you wonder if Moses would actually recognize what Jesus was doing any more than Peter and Paul would recognize our modern Christian communities. Even so, Jesus calls us to follow his example in taking what was written long ago and applying it to the present.
But we can’t approach Scripture with the same authoritative analysis as Jesus did. He obvious had an inside track we don’t have, being the Word Himself and all. Which is why, he said when he was on earth, that he was leaving us the Holy Spirit as our guide. And not only the Spirit, but also the Community of Faith otherwise called the Church. And the Word. Jesus was/is the Word, come in bodily form. But what he then provided for us is the written Word, something we can carry around with us.
Now we didn’t get that Word just by having it drop out of the sky all King Jamesish and such. No, it took about 30-70 years to get written by human authors and then another couple of centuries first for the Jewish leaders to settle on what the Old Testament looked like and then for the Christian leaders to settle on what the New Testament looked like. And it is that very set of books that says that the Holy Spirit helps us understand what the this Book of Books is trying to tell us.
So it is through the triple combination of Spirit, Community and Word that we have a guide to find out what God really meant way back then. And we have the same Spirit, Community and Word as our guide to help us understand how we contextualize that meaning into our own world and culture.
Travel just about anywhere in the world – go through what tourists call “culture shock” and all – and you will be less “shocked” than if you travel back in time 2,000 years to Galilee and walk alongside of Peter, James, and John. And yet, the Book we ascribe to as our foundational articles of faith – I’m talking about the Bible here – speaks to us out of that dim and culturally distant past.
The Community of Faith – the Church Universal – goes back just about as far. When we all get to heaven and start hanging out with other Believers around the Pearly Gates, we will probably be quite taken aback by how diverse a lot we all are. And that diversity is reflected as highly variegated in how we worship and live out our lives as people of faith.
Any 21st Century American Evangelical who thinks he or she would have no problem jumping into a gathering of the New Testament church in its opening days in post-Pentecost Jerusalem is in for some real surprises. We may think we are closer to Peter, Paul and Mary of the 1st Century than we are to some obscure monks in the 11th, but it only takes a generation or two in human time to open a very wide gap.
So when Believers bemoan changes in the church and how the church is adapting to culture, they don’t understand that this has been a necessary part of the walk of faith from the very beginning. In fact, it is a struggle that Believers of all ages and places have grappled with from Abel and Enoch on down to you and me. This is in part what we mean by walking by faith.
Sometimes a restorationist approach leads to something idiosyncratic like those signs in front of some 60-year-old church buildings in 100-year-old towns that read, “Founded A.D. 33”. There is no way for us to go back before the Fall to what God intended in Creation. We cannot get back to innocence in the Garden of Eden any more than we can return lock, stock and barrel to the culture of First Century A.D. Palestine. So I am also what is called a Contextualizer, meaning someone who tries to take the original intent and put it into a context that makes sense in the present.
Sometimes when reading Jesus, you hear him say something like “I didn’t come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it” and you wonder if Moses would actually recognize what Jesus was doing any more than Peter and Paul would recognize our modern Christian communities. Even so, Jesus calls us to follow his example in taking what was written long ago and applying it to the present.
But we can’t approach Scripture with the same authoritative analysis as Jesus did. He obvious had an inside track we don’t have, being the Word Himself and all. Which is why, he said when he was on earth, that he was leaving us the Holy Spirit as our guide. And not only the Spirit, but also the Community of Faith otherwise called the Church. And the Word. Jesus was/is the Word, come in bodily form. But what he then provided for us is the written Word, something we can carry around with us.
Now we didn’t get that Word just by having it drop out of the sky all King Jamesish and such. No, it took about 30-70 years to get written by human authors and then another couple of centuries first for the Jewish leaders to settle on what the Old Testament looked like and then for the Christian leaders to settle on what the New Testament looked like. And it is that very set of books that says that the Holy Spirit helps us understand what the this Book of Books is trying to tell us.
So it is through the triple combination of Spirit, Community and Word that we have a guide to find out what God really meant way back then. And we have the same Spirit, Community and Word as our guide to help us understand how we contextualize that meaning into our own world and culture.
Travel just about anywhere in the world – go through what tourists call “culture shock” and all – and you will be less “shocked” than if you travel back in time 2,000 years to Galilee and walk alongside of Peter, James, and John. And yet, the Book we ascribe to as our foundational articles of faith – I’m talking about the Bible here – speaks to us out of that dim and culturally distant past.
The Community of Faith – the Church Universal – goes back just about as far. When we all get to heaven and start hanging out with other Believers around the Pearly Gates, we will probably be quite taken aback by how diverse a lot we all are. And that diversity is reflected as highly variegated in how we worship and live out our lives as people of faith.
Any 21st Century American Evangelical who thinks he or she would have no problem jumping into a gathering of the New Testament church in its opening days in post-Pentecost Jerusalem is in for some real surprises. We may think we are closer to Peter, Paul and Mary of the 1st Century than we are to some obscure monks in the 11th, but it only takes a generation or two in human time to open a very wide gap.
So when Believers bemoan changes in the church and how the church is adapting to culture, they don’t understand that this has been a necessary part of the walk of faith from the very beginning. In fact, it is a struggle that Believers of all ages and places have grappled with from Abel and Enoch on down to you and me. This is in part what we mean by walking by faith.
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