It is possible to evade a multitude of sorrows by the cultivation of an insignificant life. Indeed, if it be a man’s ambition to avoid the troubles of life, the recipe is perfectly simple — let him shed his ambitions in every direction, let him cut the wings of every soaring purpose, and let him assiduously cultivate a little life, with the fewest correspondences and relations.
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if you want to get through the world with the smallest trouble you must reduce yourself to the smallest compass.
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Tiny souls can dodge through life; bigger souls are blocked on every side. As soon, therefore, as a man begins to enlarge his life, his resistances are multiplied. Let a man tear out of his soul the petty selfish purpose and enthrone a world purpose, the Christ purpose, and his sufferings will be increased on every side.

– J. H. Jowett

(From the sermon The School of Calvary.)

Schaeffer was the first Christian leader who taught me to weep over the world instead of judging it.
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Instead of shaking our heads at a depressing, dark, abstract work of art, the true Christian reaction should be to weep for the lost person who created it. Schaeffer was a rare Christian leader who advocated understanding and empathizing with non-Christians instead of taking issue with them.

The normal human reaction is to hate what we don’t understand. This is the stuff of prejudice and the cause of hate crimes and escalating social evil. It is much more Christ-like to identify with those we don’t understand—to discover why people do what they do, because we care about them, even if they are our ideological enemies.

Jesus asked us to love our enemies. Part of loving is learning to understand. 

All art involves an intimate union between form and content.
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In Christianity, the content — the gospel of salvation through Christ — is mediated through the form of the church. The perennial temptation for Christians is to believe that the message can be detached from the community of believers in that message. But the content of faith is precisely that we are members of one body, that Christ is made manifest in our coming together in faith.

Interestingly, this seems to be one aspect that L’Abri shares with Alpha — people are invited to come and discuss; with a key component being that they will not be preached at. (I guess that another aspect is community — reports from both frequently cite the community aspect as significant, perhaps even key. This raises interesting questions about whether profession should preceed inclusion in community, which I know have been debated elsewhere, but that is another story…)

It seems to me that, via Alpha, we are very good at taking this approach with people exploring Christianity from the outside or perhaps those who are looking at the basics, but we are less able to maintain this within the core church community. Experience suggests that we can quickly become uncomfortable when people ask hard questions and are often quick to give them the ‘right answer’ without properly listening or engaging. If we are not careful, people asking questions can feel excluded — asking the ‘wrong’ questions can make you feel like an outsider (again), as if simply by asking you have become suspect.

I might have been happy to accept this comes from a few select experiences in my life. But, the article on L’Abri suggests that part of the attraction, even for Christians, is that it remains a place where you can go and discuss with a freedom not always found elsewhere.

My concern is that people have different approaches to belief. For some, perhaps, doctrine comes easy; for others it takes more to make it ones own. We must be careful not to shape our communities so that only the first approach is accepted. We need to make space for those who take the longer route to work things out, re-question, re-examine, etc. without condemnation. We need to accept that these people are just as genuine in their following of Jesus. They are not (necessarily) trying to escape doctrines that they don’t like, nor does questioning of something mean that they don’t understand (which can sometimes be the implication). In many cases, they may simply need to go for a Jacob-like wrestling to come to terms with this aspect of belief and to work it in more deeply. It may even be the case that they are going for more depth than others need. And maybe that depth will produce benefit for the church community in the end.

I guess the key is that we must be slow to judge and quick to accept. Sometimes, when I read Paul on law & grace I wonder if we don’t use doctrine like the Law — a measure of who is in & who is out. The question then is: is it by getting your doctrine 100% pure that you were saved or was it by grace? Not that I am saying that doctrine is unimportant, just that we need to have grace for those in our communities who are wrestling. After all, Paul was insistent that true doctrine is taught, but also had the freedom to say ‘if any of you see this differently, the Holy Spirit will make it clear to you’ – not ‘if any of you see this differently pull yourselves together’.

It worth remembering that the purpose of doctrine is to take us on the right path and lead us on in our walk, not to decide if we are ‘sound’ or not. I wonder if a serious wrestling with doctrine has the potential to takes us onwards in a way that simple assent cannot always do. At least for some people.

So, I guess I’m asking that we give people space and conversation in their questioning; that we don’t jump to correction and judgement. But, also that we don’t immediately assume that the questioner is immature or ignorant. It is likely that these responses will not give the aid required.

[As an aside, I remember a friend suggesting that teaching in New Testament times was less the preach-from-the-pulpit that we envisage and more closer to mentoring/discipling. So, perhaps when we think of true doctrine being taught, we need to envisage a far more relational transference, not simply a list of truths laid out, but a working through together. A path that take into account the learners difficulties and struggles.]

The on-going thought is how we display the truth through the way we act when disagreeing. We noted that the modern view point focussed primarily on knowledge. If you take that as the key to everything, then there are limited constraints in the way you treat those who disagree with you. You primary goal is to ensure that they, and your listeners, end up with the correct knowledge in the heads at the end of the debate. So, the approach is not as important as the end result and there is no inherent need to take care and be respectful along the way. (I know, this is exaggerating and there are other constraints, but you get the point.)

On the other hand, if performance of the truth also matters, then the way we argue is as important as getting the information across. I guess we’re saying ‘the medium is the message’ in a conversational way as well as in a purely media sense. We need to be sure that our performance in the face of disagreement is honouring the the truth we follow.

An obliquely related point that has intrigued me for a long time: both Francis Schaeffer and Richard Dawkins(*) abandoned debates as a vehicle for their respective apologetics. For both, it seems that the problem with debates is the possibility of winning the argument, while losing, or having no impact on, the person…

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(*) I realised after writing this that Dawkins has done debating of some sort recently. I was thinking of the story — I think in the introduction to ‘The Blink Watchmaker’ — where he debated someone on creationism, then found out that they didn’t believe in the position that they were defending. This apparently made him disillusioned with the whole debating process. My understanding is that he found he wasn’t really in a position to persuade others of his position, but was simply taking part in a sophisticated game. Possibly now that he is debating genuine opponents in a way that spreads his message, his view has altered.

… a theological account of created beauty will return repreatedly to the Holy Spirit as the one who realizes now in our midst what has been achieved in he Son, thus anticipating the future. … A Christian account of created beauty is thus charged with promise. It is not chiefy determined by a sense of a paradise lost but of a glory still to appear, the old beauty remade and transfigured, the beauty of the future that has already been embodied in Christ … Here there is much to be said for the ancient wisdom of Basil the Great … for whom the Holy Spirit “perfects” creation, enabling it to flourish in anticipation of the final future.

The key component I want to play with is that the prime model for Christians is not reversion to a past paradise or resuscitation of what we think has been lost, but new creation and resurrection.

So, in our interaction with our surrounding culture and society, our principal goal should not be to to recover the ‘good old days’, or to stop the rot by taking it back to its roots, but to push forward to new things. The new may have continuity with the old, but we are not aiming to go back in time.

For me this meshes with Hauerwas and Willimon’s point in Resident Aliens — they suggest we should act as an alternative community because playing by the wider rules of society compromises our message. I think what I’m saying is a time-orientation equivalent — we mustn’t become so associated with our culture that we want to go back to its glory days; instead we are to looking to a alternative future — redeemed and transformed.

This doesn’t mean we dump things that are important, but that we think about them in fresh ways. So, perhaps as an example we could say that we don’t promote marriage/family because it has been the stable basis for our great society (which is sometimes the impression given), but because the freedom of commitment is true liberation, etc. and this can be an agent of liberating transformation toward a new future. (This is off the top of my head, so it’s not exactly thought out completely…)

Another application for the general theme is worldviews — typically descriptions of a Christian worldview will focus on creation. But we must be cautious that we don’t just look back. We know that the future is a transformed creation not simply a reversion. God is not acting simply to take things back to ‘how they were meant to be’, but on to ‘how He intends them to be’. (Although the past may give indications for the future.) Revelation gives a picture of new creation as something more than that described in Genesis 1-2. Our worldview must reflect this reality.

[Footnote: I am wary that this matches my personal inclination, so I could be reading what I prefer into things. But then, if you don't like it maybe you are doing the same thing?]

It’s not always clear to me what people mean by this term — it seems to expand and contract depending on the individual’s views. I’m going to take it roughly to mean things that could be expressed in a Powerpoint bullet.

The existence, importance, etc. of propositional truth seems to be lurking a lot in post-modern/emergent discussions. I think you have to start by saying that of course propositional truth has value. Even the oft-quoted Uncertainty Principle and Godel’s incompleteness theorems are expressed propositionally and in a very precise way. So, we have to take propositions seriously.

On the other had, I wonder if, in many cases, propositions just doesn’t get us as far as we think they do. Let’s take an example: the statement ‘God exists’. Seems like a simple proposition, either true or not. But immediately we are lead to the question ‘What do you mean by God?’ OK, that’s not the end of the world — we could start to flesh things out with other propositions, like ‘God is love’. But, then I have to ask how good a grasp I, as a less-than-perfect human, have on love. And so on. And so on. Before you know it, I think I’m going to end up at ‘In the beginning …’ and find myself having to tell the whole story.

I think we have to be careful thinking that we can abstract propositions out of the Bible, without retaining the whole of the story. Otherwise, you have the danger of ending up with something that doesn’t match the source any longer, if not in our minds, then in the minds of those listening. And we have to realise that you can’t pick up a phrase or two on their own without the entire text coming with them. Like a bowl of spaghetti — you might try to pick out one piece, but you soon find that you have no choice but to go for the entire tangled mass.

I guess it was easier when we lived in a society that had an essentially common background. When you said ‘God exists’, etc. you could be reasonably sure that the people listen had something approximately similar in mind. But when the culture starts to fracture, it becomes less easy. Suddenly, you can’t rely on the assumed common ground and the propositions have to give way to other expressions, like re-telling stories.

You also have to be sure you listen carefully to make sure you have the common ground right. But that is a post for another day…

I started pondering about the problem of personal debt, so lets use that as a thought experiment. If we are in any way touching a cross-section of society, we have to expect that people are going to come into the with substantial personal debt. What do we do about this?

Well, we can go for debt counceling. This is important and I have nothing to say against it. (I have friends who do a great job in this area.) But… is it really radical? Does it show the disruptive approach of the gospel? In the view of Resident Aliens — is it an approach that depends on people believing that Jesus has come and changed everything? I don’t think it goes that far.

Perhaps a step in the right direction is this — if you are debt-ridden in our church, we will provide interest-free loans to enable to you to be free.

Perhaps a further step is this — if you are debt-ridden in our church then we will pay off your debts.

After all, don’t we follow someone who proclaimed freedom for captives – in a culture where many captives are their due to debt. Don’t we follow a book that instituted the startling concept of a Jubilee year, where all debts are written off? Can we think in smaller terms?

I know, ‘risk’, ‘taken advantage of’, ‘doesn’t make sense in our culture’. But isn’t that the point? Again, following the gist of Resident Aliens — if we only do ‘sensible things’ (from the perspective of our culture), then what difference is our belief making?