Confronting
Current Issues
On
the 2000th
anniversary of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, Son of Joseph and
Mary, Son of God, I stood with my wife and children in a magnificent
plaza outside St Peters Church in the Vatican and gave thanks to God.
To many people, the Vatican is one of the most sacred places in
Christendom, a formidable collection of artistic and architectural
masterpieces, of which the greatest is St Peter's Basilica, with its
double colonnade and a circular piazza in front and bordered by
palaces and gardens. Roman Catholics believe the church, one of the
largest religious edifices in the world, is erected over the tomb of
St Peter the Apostle.
Faith
in action
However,
as studied the architecture I was not giving thanks for visible
expressions of tradition. Nor for the history of institutional
churches or the universal stretch of the world Christian movement. I
was thinking about how the church had survived the onslaughts of
Rome, Islam, godless capitalism, fascism and godless communism and
had outgrown and outlasted them all; so much so that the largest
congregation in the world today is the single greatest challenge to
moribund state socialism in China. I reflected on the prostituting
effects of the renaissance, relativism, higher criticism and secular
humanism that sought, in their various ways, to extinguish faith and
gave thanks that the message of salvation that Jesus brought to the
world, the way he opened up for us to come back to God and life
continues to touch the hearts and lives of millions.
In
the heartland of the largest denomination of Christendom, as I met
and talked to young people from around the world who had come to the
Vatican to help Christians of all persuasions to celebrate the Year
of Jubilee, I praised God for the transforming power of the message
and electrifying power of the person of Jesus. No Muslim Imam, Hindu
avatar, new age Master or guru had this influence. The church that
Christ is building is bigger than any of us thinks or imagines.
Bigger than our cathedrals, our para-church movements, our house
churches, synods, conferences or church constitutions. Bigger than
our parochialism and particularistic differences. HE is bigger than
us all.
Having
said that, I continue to be challenged by the need to drill down from
the big picture to the needs and questions of individuals. The
church is not an amorphous mass, but a combination of hundreds of
millions of ordinary people, each of whom confronts needs, problems,
challenges, issues and hard work in following the life and teachings
on one life we believe is worth following and emulating because He
was, and is, God. How do we make the big picture fit into the tiny
canvass of the individual? If faith is to work, it must speak to
peoples’ circumstances, fears, doubts and life goals.
Salt
and light
A
few years ago my wife and I hosted a group in our home involving
friends interested in tackling some of the issues facing Christians
in the modern era. We were concerned that the church’s
response tended either to overlook these issues or to have no answer
simple enough for people to embrace. We believed that, if we are
called by Jesus to be salt and light in our community (Matthew
5:13-14) we need to have reasoned and Biblical responses,
unimpeachable in terms of truth but transparent to the average
Christian believer and intellectually sound. What started out as a
defined series of discussions centred on John Stott’s popular
book, “Issues Facing Christians Today” turned into a
marathon session spanning several years. Each time we exhausted our
list of topics we would identify new ones. We learned that there is
no real issue confronting us today for which the Bible does not have
clear answers. Unlike books such as the Koran, the Baghavat Gita or
the Veda, the Bible demonstrates its relevance in terms of equipping
the modern Christian with unambiguous information, guidance, precept
and precedent to know how to live, even if some of the topics were
not specifically addressed in the text, because the issues did not
exist in Jesus’ day.
If
the church in the 21st
Century is to remain relevant it needs to have answers to modern
questions. We cannot be self-indulgent and assume non-Christians are
straining to ask questions for which we are suggesting answers,
instead of the converse. If we do so, we run the risk of
perpetuating the concept of narrow Christian sub-cultures, groups
that exist of and for themselves, having a good time but ignorant of
the fact that nobody else is really listening to what they have to
say. If we are to be people of influence in places of influence we
have to have clear answers to global warming, conservation,
biodiversity, armed conflict, economic inequalities, debt, poverty,
development, aid, human rights, human responsibility, work,
unemployment, industrial relations, racial issues, AIDS, divorce,
human fertilisation, gene technology, ethics, relativism, justice,
capital punishment, equality, sexual issues, euthanasia, marriage and
other forms of human relationship and so on. Christians who know
what they are talking about in these areas need to speak to the
issues as we confront them. The wisdom of God is able to give us
sound guidance.
We
need to be able to address challenges and changes in education,
government, science, health and politics from a Biblical perspective
and give an answer for “the hope that lies within us (1 Peter
3:13). If we cannot do so, we will be labelled obscurantists,
troglodytes, irrelevant, out-of-date, out-of-touch and not worth
listening to. Incidentally, that charge was never levelled at Jesus.
People who met Jesus always listened to what he had to say. Whether
they agreed or disagreed, they could not remain indifferent. We
cannot afford to be isolationist and separated, catering only for
those within our own ranks, fearful that if we put our heads above
the trench we will be attacked and not have a suitable defence
strategy. The Holy Spirit has come to help us develop effective and
compelling responses to the non-Christian world.
Responding
to the questions people pose
Reasonable
people continue to ask the church why belief in God is rational and
why He is real to us; why the church believes its message is
inherently relevant today; what God can do for them; why, if God is
powerful, evil exists in the world; whether God still performs
miracles that science cannot explain; why Christians believe they
have the monopoly on truth (even though Christians frequently believe
different things); how we can be certain the Bible is true, accurate
and reliable, why there are “so many hypocrites in the church”;
where the world is heading; why we believe our God is the right one;
why we believe at all (when so many people simply do not care); why
we believe in the creation story in the face of questions about
evolution; and why we are dogmatic when most people are ethically
relative.. Some want to know why, if God is love, He would send men
and women to Hell; why all roads do not necessarily lead to Heaven
for good people; how they can have an assurance they are safe for
eternity. Some are bound by stereotypes, assuming all the church is
after is their money and not appreciating why Christians get involved
in social movements and politics.
The
responses we give to these questions are often subjective; God is
real to us because of the nature of our life experiences, not because
we have argued all of the propositions. Revelation is not always
objective. For example, Muslim friends who became Christians because
Jesus appeared to them in dreams and visions cannot quantify their
experiences in terms others do not feel. However, if we rely too
much on our subjective experiences we are no better equipped to
answer the reasonable demands of non-Christians that we give an
account for what we believe, and why.
We
all face barriers in providing adequate responses. One example is how
we use the Bible to explain what we believe. In today’s world,
we are far removed from the original authors and readers of the
Bible. We are removed linguistically – people in the Old
Testament spoke Hebrew; some spoke Chaldean. New Testament
Christians spoke Greek, Latin and (some of them) Aramaic. I have
been in Aramaic-speaking villages in Syria, but I don’t know
any Christians who do so. Few of us have the training to study the
oldest surviving manuscripts and read the Scriptures in their
original languages. We face geographical barriers; accounts
mentioned throughout the Scriptures made sense to those familiar with
rivers, mountains, towns and landmarks that are foreign to us. We
are thousands of years removed from the events of the Bible, so our
understanding of people and events recorded is simplistic.
Our
societies, economies and political structures are different from
those in the days of the Bible. Much is made, in the West, of our
Judeo-Christian heritage, but that does not imply that our political
or justice systems are quintessentially Biblical. Our systems do not
provide ready insights into life and values in Biblical times. Our
cultures have accreted to our Christian tradition events and values
that have nothing whatsoever to do with original revelation. We are
culturally removed; we live in a “post-modern” society,
with Western values; customs and relationships in the Bible are often
foreign to us. We are even different in religious terms. Our
culture is generally not familiar with Jewish, Greek or Roman
traditions, religious laws, feasts or types. Our appreciation of the
simplest of Jesus’ parables is restricted by our lack of
understanding of the times in which he lived. Major tenets of some
denominations and cults have been constructed on misunderstandings of
verses in the Bible. We are all exposed to poor teaching, based on
faulty exegesis (understanding the context in which the Bible was
written; to whom it was written, when and why) – or no exegesis
at all.
Truth
remains
God’s
truth never fails. The solution lies in defining what we believe and
about revelation and truth, and why. Truth does not reside in our
denominational structure. If it were, we would all run the risk of
our faith eventually being absorbed in political cultures and
accommodated to secularist viewpoints. Who we are and what we
believe must ultimately be deeply informed by Christ and the
transforming effect His word has in our lives.
Let
me put it another way. At the height of the Cold War I encountered a
group of Romanian and Bulgarian Christians at a meeting in Munich.
When I relayed to them the extent to which Christians in the West
prayed for them, that they would have the strength to maintain faith
in the face of communist cadres and ideology, they countered by
saying that Christians in Eastern Europe regularly interceded for
believers in the West. They explained that those living under the
shadow of the Iron Curtain knew what they believed and had counted
the cost of following Christ. They were concerned believers in the
West were in danger of being blinded by freedom and capitalism and
becoming apathetic, indifferent and ineffectual in their testimonies,
because they lacked definition and clarity about how they should
live.
It
is paramount that we have Biblical responses for an unbelieving
world, but not lose sight of what it means to be Christians in the
first place: Christo-centric and faith-based in our life purpose,
convinced in our hearts that we know whom we have believed and are
fully persuaded that He is able to keep us (2 Timothy 1:12; Jude 24).