The unrespectability of our religion

I was transcribing some of my old journals this morning, and came across what I had written when I was 19 in response to reading about Leon Bloy.

When I got home I finished reading Leon Bloy and marvelled at his faith and devotion. He had been prepared to live nearly all his life in poverty -- nay, in destitution -- for the sake of Jesus.

Like Clement of Alexandria, like St Francis of Assisi, he gave up all for love. "How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God." The beatniks are looking for what St Francis was looking for; they are after the absolute values of God rather than the relative values of this world. "A saintly clergy means a virtuous people; a virtuous clergy means a respectable people; a respectable clergy means a godless people."

Christians must never become respectable. Respectability is the curse of true religion. The slavish following of convention and the mediocrity it leads to, or springs from, are the enemy of all true Christianity. People become indistinguishable, they merge into the mass of the respectable, conventional mass of unthinking semi-morons that people this globe; they have no variety, and variety is the spice of life. They are tasteless, "and if the salt hath lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?" Most Christians do not take their faith at all seriously -- in one sense -- they are prepared to live with it, but only just. They will not live for their faith, and certainly will not die for it. Saints were too unconventional, too unrespectable, to be imitated. People pay lip service to the examples of the saints, But if anyone should try to follow their example he is denounced, and they say, "Religion is a good thing, but that is taking it too far." The person against whom such an accusation is levelled has probably just begun to take religion at all seriously. Christians are a lot of hypocrites people say, but if they try not to be hypocrites, then they are fanatics. The unrespectability of our religion! (Journal entry: 17 August 1960)

That was over 40 years ago. I had been introduced to Leon Bloy by Brother Roger, of the Anglican Community of the Resurrection. Bloy's ideas were more than 60 years old then, and yet they seemed equally relevant to the 1960s. And now I keep reading about similar ideas in emerging church circles, including such things as urban monasticism. I look back at and cringe a little at the teenage arrogance, and wonder if our generation turned out any better than those we so self-righteously denounced.

Things have not changed much since then, it seems. A recent survey shows that most Christians in many countries see themselves first of all as citizens of this world rather than as citizens of the kingdom of God. Our citizenship is in heaven, says St Paul, but most have other gods. This is perhaps not so surprising in Russia, where atheism was the official state-sponsored religion for two generations, but it is a little more disturbing in other countries.

There also seems to be an anomaly in the case of the USA, where a higher proportion said that they saw themselves as Christians first, and citizens of their country second. But I wonder -- I suspect that many of those who said that would respond to their country's recent wars of aggression in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq by saying "My country, right or wrong".

Gnosticism, neognosticism and Orthodoxy

A couple of days ago I caught glimpses of a TV programme on Leonardo da Vinci. It had to do with a picture of two babies kissing, and whether it was by him, and if so, whether it showed that he was influenced by Gnosticism. I didn't follow the arguments closely as I was doing something else at the time, but it reminded me that there seems to be a growing interest in gnosticism in the media, and I got the impression that the people who made that TV programme thought that gnosticism was cool, and wouldn't it be cool if it could be shown that Leonardo da Vinci was influenced by gnosticism.

Now I'm no fundi on gnosticism, and I'm not particularly interested in it, but I do find it interesting that there seems to be a social tendency, at least in the West, towards a greater interest in gnosticism.

Some 45 years ago I wrote to my cousin and quoted something from the Nag Hammadi documents, which recorded as a saying of Jesus, "Lift the stone and thou shalt find me; cleave the wood and I am there." My cousin, who was going through a rather puritanical Baptist phase, wrote back asking if those were gnostic documents, and implying that if they were, there could be nothing good about the saying. There seemed to be a great prejudice against anything that might possibly be tainted by gnosticism.

Now the prejudice seems to be the other way. If it's gnostic, it must be good. Leonardo da Vinci was a great genius, but if he was a gnostic, his genius must be greater still.

As I said, I make no claim to be a fundi on gnosticism, so I defer to the opinion of one who is an acknowledged expert, Elaine Pagels. And I think she got it right in her description of the difference between gnosticism and Orthodox Christianity, and why Orthodox Christianity rejected gnosticism:

Orthodox Christians were concerned - far more than gnostics - with their relationships with other people. If gnostics insisted that humanity's original experience of evil involved internal emotional distress, the orthodox dissented. Recalling the story of Adam and Eve, they explained that humanity discovered evil in human violation of the natural order, itself essentially "good." The orthodox interpreted evil (kakia) primarily in terms of violence against others (thus giving the moral connotation of the term). They revised the Mosaic code, which prohibits physical violation of others - murder, stealing, adultery - in terms of Jesus' prohibitions against even mental and emotional violence - anger, lust, hatred.

Agreeing that human suffering derives from human guilt, orthodox Christians affirmed the natural order. Earth's plains, deserts, seas, mountains, stars and trees form an appropriate home for humanity. As part of that "good" creation, the orthodox recognised the processes of human biology: they tended to trust and affirm sexuality (at least in marriage), procreation and human development. The orthodox Christian saw Christ not as one who leads souls out of this world into enlightenment, but as "fullness of God" come down into human experience - into bodily experience - to sacralize it (Pagels 1981:174).

Now, on the fifth day of Christmas, one tends to think of the relationship between God and the material world, and that God so loved the material world as to take human flesh and enter it as a man. This is a stumbling block to Jews, folly to the Greeks and blasphemy to Muslims. But it's what Christians believe.

Pagels did not get everything right in her book. She had some strange ideas about some of the details, such as Orthodox Christian views of St Mary Magdalene (one of the Myrrh-bearing women and Equal-to-the-Apostles, according to the Orthodox). But she got the big picture right on the difference between Orthodoxy and Gnosticism.

Orthodox Christianity, unlike gnosticism, is characterised by ubuntu, humanity.

Christ is born -- glorify Him!
Christ is in our midst -- He is and always shall be.

Syncretism in Western Christianity

On 14 December 2006 a number of Christian bloggers have agreed to post something about syncretism and Western Christianity. Here are links to those who have agreed to do so.

• Phil Wyman on "Syncretism in the Evangelical Church: The Consumerism of the Altar Call and the Sinner's Prayer"
• Sally's Journey on "Time out from Tinsel"
• Matt Stone on Family Values
• Steve Hayes with an interesting turn about on where we find syncretism!
• Mike Crockett on Church and Culture: a double-edged sword
• Carl Nystedt on Syncretism: Pros and Cons
• Billy Calderwood's Swimming in Divine Chaos
• John Smulo's Blog
• John Morehead's Musings

My own contribution is based on an article I wrote a few years ago, Deconstructing Sundkler: Bethesda AICs and syncretism.

Bengt Sundkler, the Swedish missiologist, was an expert on African independent churches, but in the very act of accusing the Zionists of being unbiblical and syncretist, he betrayed his own syncretism. Instead of using the Bible to demonstrate his contention that the Zionists were unbiblical, Sundkler used Western Enlightenment rationalism and Freud.

Emerging/Missional divide

Wow, I only recently learned that there was an "emerging church" (as opposed to the Church emerging from wherever it has been hiding), and now I discover (from Ecelctic Itchings) that there is an Emerging/Missional divide!

The problem with Western theology is that it's so hard to keep up. By the time you discover what a new theological trend is actually about, it's already split into rival factions, and you have to discover what they stand for.

I've seen the term "missional" associated with the "emerging church" movement, but I assumed that it simply meant the church in mission -- and the definition of "missional church" is pretty standard, and seems to support my original assumption. But no, it seems that it's now something else, and well on its way to becoming estblished as a rival movement, or a spin-off or something.

Tags: theology, theological language, Christianity & culture, gospel and our culture, missiology, emerging church, missional church

More light on the emerging church?

Preparing for the Post-Christendom Era -- a little more light on this "emerging church" thing?

Father Jake takes a look at "Post-Christendom", and refers to the Christian tradition in the Western world. It's an important qualification, but I'm not sure that the qualification is made clearly enough. Is "post-Christendom" the same as "postmodernity", or is it merely a part of it?

I feel the same unease as I felt when discussing Lesslie Newbigin's "The gospel and our culture" idea a few years ago at a missiological conference. What is "our" culture, and who are "we"? The proponents of the "gospel and our culture" movement seemed to be making a lot of assumptions that they were reluctant to state or examine at all. And there seems to be the same thing in this "emerging church" discussion -- perhaps it is just a new term for the Lesslie Newbigin thing, which "emerged" while I wasn't looking.

The first question it raises is "What is the Western world?"

Is it the geographical region of Western Europe and North America?

Or is it cultural, rather than geographical?

And since much of the world is multicultural nowadays, perhaps it might be better to speak in terms of postmodernity rather than postchristendom.

Or it might be better to talk in terms of Huntington's "civilizations", though deven there I can identify with at least three -- Orthodox, African and Western.

Technorati tags: theology, clash of civilizations, emerging church, gospel and our culture, missiology, postmodernity