Learning to Live in the Spirit in Our European Home
Learning to Live in the Spirit
in Our European Home
he year 1992 is the year of the Single European Market. But our
hope for Europe, surely, is that it should not be just a marketplace. It must be a home. And it will not be a home unless it rediscovers
what made it a spiritual and cultural reality -namely the Christian
gospel. Without Christianity, Europe is merely a peninsula of Asia.
How can we learn to live together in the power of the Spirit who is
the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of Jesus? It is very difficult.
We can get help from those who have experiences of other cultures. I listened recently to a cultural anthropologist who has worked mainly in India, but who has now turned his attention to our modern Western culture. He identified the unique character of this culture as follows: in "modern" Western culture the world is seen as divided into a public realm of "facts" that everybody "knows" and a private world of "values" that people may or may not believe in. The English writer C. P. Snow has written a book entitled The Two Cultures that expresses the same point. The division is visible on the campus of the university in the division between the science faculty and the faculties of arts and humanities. In the former we deal with "facts," about which you can be right or wrong. Here everyone is expected to agree about the "facts"; they are not matters for personal opinion. In the other half of the campus it is different. I cannot tell you that your "values" are wrong; you are free to choose what values appeal to you.
Congress of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Missionarischer Arbeit, EKD, Hannover 1992.
This way of relating belief to knowledge operated in European thought through four hundred, perhaps seven hundred, years until it was challenged at that great intellectual turning point when the work of Aristotle became available in Latin. It is important to remember that Aristotle came into European thought through the work of Muslim theologians and philosophers. In the great ferment of thought that this set in motion, it fell to St. Thomas Aquinas to reformulate Christian teaching in the light of this new way of thinking. The result was a completely different way of relating faith and knowledge from that of Augustine. In the great work of St. Thomas we find in Book I rational proofs of the existence of God. Here is knowledge that is accessible to reason without the aid of faith or revelation. In Book IV we learn of those things that cannot be known by reason alone but that depend on faith-the Incarnation, the Trinity, the Atonement. This dichotomy between what are matters of knowledge and what are matters of faith has remained with Europe ever since and is (as we all know) operative today.
But the "knowledge" is insecure. Skeptical arguments can be mounted against the "proofs" for the existence of God. Moreover, with hindsight, we can see that the "God" whose existence was proved was not the Blessed Trinity. In fact this "God" looks remarkably like a synthesis of the Prime Mover of Aristotle with the Allah of the Qur'an. Why is it that when you say the word "God" in the ears of an average western European, he immediately thinks not of the Blessed Trinity but of a solitary monad only vaguely related to the name of Jesus?
I want to suggest that in our concern to communicate the gospel to our European home, we can regard the postmodernists as allies up to a certain point. It is the simple truth that all human beliefs about the world are rooted in particular histories. Human thought is not disembodied; it is part of human history. All of it is historically and culturally conditioned. There is no supracultural truth. But this does not mean that there is no such thing as truth. It does not mean that we abandon the claim to know the truth. Among all the stories that human beings tell about themselves and the world, there could be a true story. No logic requires us to deny this possibility. And this, of course, is what the Christian Church confesses. We believe and confess that there is a true story that gives the clue to the meaning of the whole human and cosmic story, because God has chosen a people to be the bearer of the meaning of the whole story. This is the story the Bible tells, with its center in the incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our task is to tell this story. To tell the story and live by the story is what it means to be the Christian Church.
But before I go on to develop the implications of this, we must pause to look at one problem. It is the deep division that exists among us about the authority of the Bible. I refer to the division between those who label each other as "fundamentalist" and "liberal." If you have followed my argument so far, you will readily see that this split is simply a surface manifestation of the deeper split in our culture between what we call "facts" and what we call "values." If the spectacles we wear (supplied freely to all through our educational system) cause us to see "facts" and "values" as two quite different things, then we shall ask, "Is the Bible a book of facts or a book about values?" It must be either one or the other. And so we have on the one hand those who treat the Bible as a book of certain and indisputable facts such as we imagine a textbook of physics to be. There is no room for human subjectivity, no room for the influence of human culture, no room for the human subject. And we have on the other hand those who see the Bible as part of the history of religious experience. It is all subjective. Human religious experience is infinitely various, and the Bible can only represent a very small sample of this vast variety. Parts of it may be "meaningful" for me; I can neglect the rest.
What both these points of view have in common is that they relieve me of personal responsibility. The true understanding of the Bible is that it tells the story of which my life is a part, the story of God's tireless, loving, wrathful, inexhaustible patience with the human family, and of our unbelief, blindness, disobedience. To accept this story as the truth of the human story (and so of my story) commits me personally to a life of discernment and obedience in the new circumstances of each day. When I accept this as the true story and begin to live within the story that the Bible tells as my own story, then the Bible becomes the spectacles through which I see the world. I do not examine the Bible through the spectacles provided by our "modern" culture; I begin to see the world (the "modern" world) through the spectacles that the Bible provides.
Of course we live among people who tell other stories -the story of "civilization," with Columbus as a hero; the Marxist story; the Muslim story. We are all in the midst of the story and none of us has seen the end. Till then, we walk by faith, not by "indubitable knowledge." There is no other way for human beings to walk. We have no superior standpoint from which we could demonstrate that ours is the true story. But we can point to one feature of our story that is unique. All the other stories look to an end within history. They look to the intrahistorical triumph of their cause. They are therefore inherently imperialist. The Church has sometimes acted in precisely that imperialistic way, but that is to betray her gospel. What is unique about the Christian story is that its crucial turning point is the event of Calvary and Easter, when we learn that the triumph of God is an event beyond history that gives meaning to all history. This means that we can always be at the same time realistic and hopeful. We can face, as Amos and Jeremiah did, the most shattering disaster for the visible cause of God, and yet continue to act in confident hope because we know that the real victory has already been won.
Of course the story will always be treated with skepticism and disbelief. That has always been so. What can make it credible is the existence of communities of people, local congregations, who believe it, celebrate it, live by it, act on it in the world. And for that we need pastors who believe it, live by it, and allow the Bible to shape the way they see the world. And we need Christians who learn to see the world through the spectacles of the Bible. Here I would like to speak of my own experience. I more and more find the precious part of each day to be the thirty or forty minutes I spend each morning before breakfast with the Bible. All the rest of the day I am bombarded with the stories that the world is telling about itself. I am more and more skeptical about these stories. As I take time to immerse myself in the story that the Bible tells, my vision is cleared and I see things in another way. I see the day that lies ahead in its place in God's story. I can then go into the unpredictable happenings of the day knowing that I will not be lost. When Europe is filled with congregations of believing people who are learning to live by the true story, then Europe will indeed be not just a common market, but a common home.