The Christian Imagination

Great post over at InternetMonk.

I’ll quote what he quotes, cause it’s an awesome quote that resonates with my heart.

“Now - here is my secret:
I tell it to you with an openness of heart
that I doubt I shall ever achieve again,
so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words.
My secret is that I need God –
that I am sick and can no longer make it alone.
I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving;
to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness;
to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love”

- Life After God, Douglas Coupland, (p. 359)

The post itself looks at Mark 3 and focuses on Jesus choosing the disciples.
“It’s plain to me that Jesus chose the apostles because they were teachable. As stubborn, ignorant, parochial, tribal, petty, selfish and slow to learn as they were, they were still more teachable than the religious establishment.”

Ouch. You know, we Christians try so hard to get it right at times. We forget that the Pharisees were very devout and were doing all they could to help Israel continue to survive and to avoid the syncretic religion (mixing Baalism and early Judaism) that was a key factor in why God ceased to protect and bless Israel. The thing is, they were the leaders. They had the influence. It would have been perfectly logical for Jesus to align himself with them. Instead, he aligned himself with people who were largely poor, illiterate, powerless, and without influence. He spent time with people who were untrustworthy (such as tax collectors) and sinful (such as whores), who the society had already passed judgment on, who the CHURCH had already passed judgment on. Yet, it was these same people who recognized their need. It was these people who were willing to follow. The Pharisees…they already had all the answers…what use did they have for the Son of God? Or for that matter, God?

One of the recent stories heard throughout the blogosphere is how Willow Creek Community Church, the church started by Bill Hybels that essentially started the seeker-sensitive church movement, is, um, going deeper and focusing more on mature believers. From this article:

He spoke about the high levels of dissatisfaction mature believer have with churches. Drawing from the 200 churches and the 57,000 people that have taken the survey, he said that most people are leaving the church because they’re not being challenged enough.

“Anonymity is not the driving value for seeker services anymore,” says Hawkins. “We’ve taken anonymity and shot it in the head. It’s dead. Gone.” In the past Willow believed that seekers didn’t want large doses of the Bible or deep worship music. They didn’t want to be challenged. Now their seeker-sensitive services are loaded with worship music, prayer, Scripture readings, and more challenging teaching from the Bible.

In the larger REVEAL survey taken by 200 churches, people were asked what they want most from their church. Three of the top four responses were:
1. Help me understand the Bible in greater depth
2. Help me develop a closer personal relationship with Christ
3. Challenge me to grow and take the next step in my faith

Some point out that Willow Creek is still being market-driven in it’s approach. In this case, though, it’s interesting to see what the market is asking for: depth of understanding, depth of relationship with God, and to be challenged.

I’ve been a part of different types of churches with different types of church services. I’ve been in Pentecostal services that would scare almost any visitor off. I’ve been churches where I’ve felt the presence of God during the service. I’ve been in churches that are very much seeker sensitive. For the seeker sensitive approach to work, there has to be another layer where real relationships and commitment can happen, and I’ve seen churches do this effectively. However, I’ve also seen people grow disillusioned when the church system and philosophy becomes the end all, be all.

In pondering the whole church service thing, I sometimes wonder if experiencing God in a service, and really feeling the power of God, is a good way to go. I mean, if we believe in a supernatural God, can’t He work in people’s hearts as we worship him? And I’m using worship in a broad sense here. I wonder if we discount what God can do in our midst. Probably.

My current church meets in a large coffee house. We are surrounded by brick walls and art. The music portion of our service is different each week. It isn’t showy, is contemporary, is often stripped down. The sermons are not theatric, if anything they are subdued, authentic, honest. And there is depth, lots of depth, hard questions, and some hard answers. Several years ago, sermons were mostly topical. Now our sermons are from books of the Bible. And when you don’t skip over the hard passages, it makes for some very interesting sermons. The Bible is full of uncomfortable topics, not just to non-Christians, but to Christians. Our church has grown once we stopped trying to make it grow and just preached the Bible. There are still things that can be better, but I’m thinking there’s something to survey results. I think people are tired of simple answers, shows, and plastic. They want depth. Or maybe it’s just that they need it.

The United States, if you think about it, has never been much for tradition. This shouldn’t be surprising, with the influence the Enlightenment and other ideologies have had on this country. Our founding fathers, while recognizing their roots, sought to separate ourselves in many ways from our largely British heritage, to be independent. Many different cultures ended up converging on the United States, the so-called melting pot. Some retained their culture for awhile, others lost it due to acculturation. Now, we have what is known as a pop culture, the culture of what is popular, with a number of subcultures within.

The church itself has a number of subcultures. Even the evangelical subculture has its subcultures. Then there are the cultural traditions within certain denominations, which are considered traditional churches. The word ‘tradition’ is problematic. For instance, the word is used 7 times in the New Testament, 6 by Jesus, all in a negative tone.

The word tradition comes from the Latin word traditio which means “to hand down” or “to hand over.” Tradition provides a story, a context, for the next generation. It is a grounding force. In a day when we have thrown out tradition as something antiquated, we are left with the story of the moment. Whether we are more free without tradition is debatable.

Really, it depends what we mean by tradition, and how it influences us. Tradition as history is always important, to know where we come from. Tradition as a system of how we do things can be either good or bad. In a business, for instance, a certain process may be questioned. If we know the reason for that ‘tradition’ we will often come to one of two conclusions: it makes a lot of sense, or it is now pointless. I’ve seen both.

When talking about traditional churches, what, exactly, is a traditional church? Are they really traditional? Perhaps in the sense that they have more of a historical tradition than many other churches and have music or litergy from long ago. There’s something powerful about singing a song that Martin Luther sang, or having communion with St. Augustine. There’s also something strange, to me, when a cultural tradition from a few hundred years ago is seen as somehow more ‘right’ or ‘holy.’ Also, traditional church denominations tend to have a history biased towards their founder and their followers. Yet, there is also something to be said for not forgeting the past, and remembering.

Christianity has a rich, rich tradition of literature, if we’d take the time to look for it, including a fair amount BEFORE the Reformation. It’s scary to think how we neglect it. I’ll be talking about some of that literature in future posts.

The late Francis Schaeffer, in one of his books, had the audacity to suggest that it wasn’t so much that America’s forefathers were Christian, but that they had a world view highly influenced by Biblical thought. They were also highly influenced by the Age of Enlightenment.

I agree with Schaeffer. There were a number of our founders who were Christian. However, not all were as Christian as we think they are, and some weren’t really Christian at all. Some of them believed in a measure of Biblical truth, and the idea of a God, but nothing more. Further, being a Christian and basing ideas on Christian thought doesn’t mean they were ‘right’ in every instance. There are dangers to the idea of Manifest Destiny, after all.

The Enlightenment heavily influenced Western culture, and what is now known as the United States. We owe the philosophy a great deal for the good it has produced. But it is a man-made philosophy, and not all of its effects have been good. The tragedy is how seamlessly we’ve incorporated some aspects of Englightenment thought into Christian thought, to the point where we think they are one and the same.

From the Wikipedia article:

Enlightenment thinkers believed that systematic thinking might be applied to all areas of human activity, and carried into the governmental sphere, in their explorations of the individual, society and the state. Its leaders believed they could lead their states to progress after a long period of tradition, irrationality, superstition, and tyranny which they imputed to the Middle Ages.

The continent of Europe had been ravaged by religious wars in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. When political stability had been restored, notably after the Peace of Westphalia and the English Civil War, an intellectual upheaval overturned the accepted belief that mysticism and revelation are the primary sources of knowledge and wisdom.

The Age of Reason sought to establish axiomatic philosophy and absolutism as foundations for knowledge and stability. Epistemology, in the writings of Michel de Montaigne and René Descartes, was based on extreme skepticism and inquiry into the nature of “knowledge.” The goal of a philosophy based on self-evident axioms reached its height with Baruch (Benedictus de) Spinoza’s Ethics, which expounded a pantheistic view of the universe where God and Nature were one. This idea then became central to the Enlightenment from Newton through to Jefferson.

Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States were also influenced by Enlightenment-era ideas, particularly in the religious sphere (deism).

The Enlightenment occupies a central role in the justification for the movement known as modernism…The modern movement points to reductionism and rationality as crucial aspects of Enlightenment thinking, of which it is the heir, as opposed to irrationality and emotionalism.

The Enlightenment is held to be the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality of freedom, democracy and reason as primary values of society. This view argues that the establishment of a contractual basis of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism, the scientific method, religious tolerance, and the organization of states into self-governing republics through democratic means. In this view, the tendency of the philosophes in particular to apply rationality to every problem is considered the essential change. From this point on, thinkers and writers were held to be free to pursue the truth in whatever form, without the threat of sanction for violating established ideas.

With the end of the Second World War and the rise of post-modernity, these same features came to be regarded as liabilities - excessive specialization, failure to heed traditional wisdom or provide for unintended consequences, and the romanticization of Enlightenment figures - such as the Founding Fathers of the United States, prompted a backlash against both Science and Enlightenment based dogma in general…In their book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote a critique of what they perceived as the contradictions of Enlightenment thought: Enlightenment was seen as being at once liberatory and (through the domination of instrumental rationality) tending towards totalitarianism.