The Christian Failure of Nerve
"History ended at Chalcedon.” These were the words of a Coptic Orthodox priest whose PowerPoint presentation on his church had come to an abrupt but timely end. Because I thought I’d need to cut him off so that our tour group could move on to lunch. He was serious.
As far as he was concerned the driving forces of church history were resolved when heresy was finally and fully defined and vanquished by the creeds. As importantly the order of the church set forth by God was fully established. After that all that remained was a faithful reiteration of what had come before.
From a comparative standpoint his was exactly the same position held by the Salafi movements in Islam that seek a recovery of and return to the time of the “rightly guided” caliphs. And you hear echoes of this in contemporary Protestant movements. A sure sign is when they see the ordination of women not as a result of progress but as an act of recovery of the practice of the early church. Hindus (think of the modern Vedanta movement reiterating the Brahmanic synthesis formed in the face of Buddhism) have similar impulses. So do Buddhists.
These movements are not strictly scripturalists. They all recognize that their understandings of scripture either don’t provide enough information to resolve every potential conflict, or actually contain unresolved conflicts. Think, for example, of how both “presbyterian” and “episcopal” (and other) structures of congregational and church leadership are found in the New Testament. Or of the dualist and non-dualists aspects of Vedas.
As a result these movements posit a golden age when these conflicts were resolved and the full-orbed truth was known. They believe in a period of a few generations beyond the founding in which God’s continued presence guided the Church, or the Umma, or the Brahmans to both fully clarify all possible disputes and their resolution, and to set in place a mechanism for enforcing and passing on those decisions.
None of these movements imagine that there will never be conflicts. They just believe that all such conflicts can be located within ancient discourses and thus resolved by reiteration of ancient solutions. There will be nothing new under the sun, or at least their sun.
Now I can’t speak for Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists although I’ve spend considerable time studying them. But I do think as a Christian that I need to point out that this approach to being Christian seems to represent a failure of nerve. Indeed, it is possibly a failure to grasp the meaning of incarnation.
When I read the New Testament I marvel at just how little Jesus gave the apostles to go on when it came to continuing his mission of announcing God’s Reign, and witnessing to him as the Christ. Apart from appointing Peter to some kind of special leadership role he gave the disciples no clue as to how to organize his growing number of followers, and all the evidence of the New Testament is that organization was pretty ad hoc for a generation or more. And then the church adopted thoroughly non-universal cultural forms from Rome.
And what about messaging? Well the apostles had his words and deeds. These clearly located his message within the world of concerns of the Jewish people (at least as understood by the apostles) as one would expect. And as they moved into the Graeco-Roman world the apostles translated this message into culturally relevant terms. Yet the gospel deposited with the apostles and transposed into another local cultural key didn’t even realize its universal claims locally.
The Jewish tradition of the rabbis, that closest to the teaching of Jesus, didn’t recognize itself and its concerns in the teaching of Jesus and the apostles any more than it could make sense of their idiosyncratic interpretation of the law and the prophets. And the Greek cultural tradition? Well it is useful to observe that it could as easily serve Islam seven centuries after Christ, and indeed nascent modern secularity, as it did the gospel of Christ. And it could as easily be critiqued by the penetrating philosophical traditions of Asia.
Put in other words (and contra Pope Benedict’s assertions) God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ didn’t affirm the privileged position of the intersection of Judaism with the Graeco-Roman world of Jesus time and the generations that followed for comprehending God’s relationship with humanity. And contra those pious books on church history we read in seminary, the Roman Empire with its excellent roads and relatively uniform administration was not somehow the perfect moment in social history to facilitate the expansion of the Gospel message.
But if God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ in a particular time and place does not affirm the universal possibilities of the West, what does it affirm? I think it affirms the hard limits of all human conceptualizations of what it means for God’s Reign and Rule to be present in the world.
When we say that Jesus was a Jew we affirm a central hermeneutical fact necessary to interpret his words. But we also recognize that as a Jewish man he couldn’t be “everyman” and inhabit all cultural worlds and all of God’s stories among humankind. (That is the particular heresy claimed of Ramakrishna by the Vedanta Hindus, and an examination of his claims is useful for clarifying what Christians do not claim of Christ.)
It would belong to the Church of Jesus Christ, animated and led by his Spirit to inhabit those worlds, learning as it went, to learn what the gospel is to be in those worlds.
So whether we cling to the universal claims of Rome or those more modern claims of Edinburgh, Berlin, Paris, and Boston (i.e. those of “progressive” Christians) I think we have lost our nerve. We’ve tied our ship to a dock in an imagined cultural Gondwana long after the continents have begun to drift apart. We’re trying to navigate by staying along the coastline when only by sailing beyond sight of land and watching the stars will take us to the places God has commanded us to go.
We are, to use a more Biblical image, reiterating the sin of Babel. And that, perhaps, is why God appears to have said, "Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” Because only then will we become obedient to God's command.
As far as he was concerned the driving forces of church history were resolved when heresy was finally and fully defined and vanquished by the creeds. As importantly the order of the church set forth by God was fully established. After that all that remained was a faithful reiteration of what had come before.
From a comparative standpoint his was exactly the same position held by the Salafi movements in Islam that seek a recovery of and return to the time of the “rightly guided” caliphs. And you hear echoes of this in contemporary Protestant movements. A sure sign is when they see the ordination of women not as a result of progress but as an act of recovery of the practice of the early church. Hindus (think of the modern Vedanta movement reiterating the Brahmanic synthesis formed in the face of Buddhism) have similar impulses. So do Buddhists.
These movements are not strictly scripturalists. They all recognize that their understandings of scripture either don’t provide enough information to resolve every potential conflict, or actually contain unresolved conflicts. Think, for example, of how both “presbyterian” and “episcopal” (and other) structures of congregational and church leadership are found in the New Testament. Or of the dualist and non-dualists aspects of Vedas.
As a result these movements posit a golden age when these conflicts were resolved and the full-orbed truth was known. They believe in a period of a few generations beyond the founding in which God’s continued presence guided the Church, or the Umma, or the Brahmans to both fully clarify all possible disputes and their resolution, and to set in place a mechanism for enforcing and passing on those decisions.
None of these movements imagine that there will never be conflicts. They just believe that all such conflicts can be located within ancient discourses and thus resolved by reiteration of ancient solutions. There will be nothing new under the sun, or at least their sun.
Now I can’t speak for Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists although I’ve spend considerable time studying them. But I do think as a Christian that I need to point out that this approach to being Christian seems to represent a failure of nerve. Indeed, it is possibly a failure to grasp the meaning of incarnation.
When I read the New Testament I marvel at just how little Jesus gave the apostles to go on when it came to continuing his mission of announcing God’s Reign, and witnessing to him as the Christ. Apart from appointing Peter to some kind of special leadership role he gave the disciples no clue as to how to organize his growing number of followers, and all the evidence of the New Testament is that organization was pretty ad hoc for a generation or more. And then the church adopted thoroughly non-universal cultural forms from Rome.
And what about messaging? Well the apostles had his words and deeds. These clearly located his message within the world of concerns of the Jewish people (at least as understood by the apostles) as one would expect. And as they moved into the Graeco-Roman world the apostles translated this message into culturally relevant terms. Yet the gospel deposited with the apostles and transposed into another local cultural key didn’t even realize its universal claims locally.
The Jewish tradition of the rabbis, that closest to the teaching of Jesus, didn’t recognize itself and its concerns in the teaching of Jesus and the apostles any more than it could make sense of their idiosyncratic interpretation of the law and the prophets. And the Greek cultural tradition? Well it is useful to observe that it could as easily serve Islam seven centuries after Christ, and indeed nascent modern secularity, as it did the gospel of Christ. And it could as easily be critiqued by the penetrating philosophical traditions of Asia.
Put in other words (and contra Pope Benedict’s assertions) God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ didn’t affirm the privileged position of the intersection of Judaism with the Graeco-Roman world of Jesus time and the generations that followed for comprehending God’s relationship with humanity. And contra those pious books on church history we read in seminary, the Roman Empire with its excellent roads and relatively uniform administration was not somehow the perfect moment in social history to facilitate the expansion of the Gospel message.
But if God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ in a particular time and place does not affirm the universal possibilities of the West, what does it affirm? I think it affirms the hard limits of all human conceptualizations of what it means for God’s Reign and Rule to be present in the world.
When we say that Jesus was a Jew we affirm a central hermeneutical fact necessary to interpret his words. But we also recognize that as a Jewish man he couldn’t be “everyman” and inhabit all cultural worlds and all of God’s stories among humankind. (That is the particular heresy claimed of Ramakrishna by the Vedanta Hindus, and an examination of his claims is useful for clarifying what Christians do not claim of Christ.)
It would belong to the Church of Jesus Christ, animated and led by his Spirit to inhabit those worlds, learning as it went, to learn what the gospel is to be in those worlds.
So whether we cling to the universal claims of Rome or those more modern claims of Edinburgh, Berlin, Paris, and Boston (i.e. those of “progressive” Christians) I think we have lost our nerve. We’ve tied our ship to a dock in an imagined cultural Gondwana long after the continents have begun to drift apart. We’re trying to navigate by staying along the coastline when only by sailing beyond sight of land and watching the stars will take us to the places God has commanded us to go.
We are, to use a more Biblical image, reiterating the sin of Babel. And that, perhaps, is why God appears to have said, "Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” Because only then will we become obedient to God's command.
This is so deep that it hits not only nerves, but bares the bones of imposing human controls too, where God imposes none. "Love one another as I have loved you" is not as rosy as one might like it to be, as many with mission-minded hearts and zeal for the Great Commission have come to know.
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