3 Conservative & Radical
Conservative & Radical The second unnecessary polarization in the contemporary church is between conservatives and radi cals. We must begin by defining these terms. By conservatives we are referring to people who are determined to conserve or preserve the past and are therefore resistant to change. By radicals we are referring to people who are in rebellion against what is inherited from the past and therefore are agitating for change.
In 1968 I attended as an "adviser" the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches at Uppsala in Sweden. I discovered on arrival that we were all immediately categorized, especially in the newspaper which was published daily. We were either rather scornfully dismissed as conservative, reactionary, status quo, stuck-in-the-mud traditionalists, or enthu-
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siastically embraced as reforming, revolutionary radicals! But this is a ludicrous categorization. Every balanced Christian should have a foot in both camps.
Let me now define more precisely in what sense every Christian should be both a conservative and a radical.
Every Christian should be conservative because the whole church is called by God to conserve his revelation, to "guard the deposit," to "contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God's holy people" (see
1 Timothy 6:20; 2 Timothy 1:14; Jude 3). The church's task is not to keep inventing new gospels, new theologies, new moralities and new Christianities, but rather to be a faithful guardian of the one and only eternal gospel.
For the self-revelation of God has reached its completion in his Son Jesus Christ and in the apostolic witness to Christ preserved in the New Testament. It cannot be altered in any way, whether by addition or by modification. It is changeless in truth and authority.
The authors of the book Growing into Union expressed this point with forcefulness:
The Church's first task is to keep the good news intact. It is better to speak of the habit of mind which this calling requires as "conservationist" rather than "conservative," for the latter word
Bal anced Christianity can easily suggest an antiquarian addiction to what is old for its own sake and a blanket resistance to new thinking, and this is not what we are talking about at all. Antiquarianism and obscurantism are vices of the Christian mind, but Conservationism is among its virtues.1
Some Christians, however, do not limit their conservatism to their biblical theology. For the fact is that they are conservative by temperament. They are therefore conservative in their politics and in their social outlook, in their lifestyle, dress-style, hairstyle, beard-style and every other kind of style you care to mention! They are not just stuck in the mud; the mud has set like concrete. Change of every kind is anathema to them. They are like the English duke who during his student days at Cambridge University remarked, "Any change at any time for any reason is to be deplored!"
Their favorite slogan is, "As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen!"
Radicals, on the other hand, ask awkward questions of the Establishment. They regard no tradition, no convention and no institution (however ancient) as sacrosanct. They reverence no sacred cows. On the contrary, radicals are prepared to subject everything inherited from the past to critical scrutiny.
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And their scrutiny often leads them to want thoroughgoing reform, even revolution (though not, if they are Christians, by violence).
Radicals recognize the rapidity with which the world scene is changing today. They do not feel particularly threatened by it nor is their first instinct to behave like King Canute and try to arrest the rising tide of change. Alvin Toffler defines "future shock," the expression he invented as a parallel to "culture shock," in these terms: "Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future. It may well be the most important disease of tomorrow."2 But radicals are not shocked by it.
Knowing that change is inevitable, they welcome it and adjust to it. They even sometimes initiate it.
It appears then, at first sight, that conservatives and radicals are in opposition to one another and that we cannot help polarizing on this issue. But this is not so.
It is not sufficiently understood that our Lord Jesus Christ was at one and the same time a conservative and a radical, although in different spheres. There is no question that he was conservative in his attitude to the Scripture. "Scripture cannot be set aside," he said.
"I have not come to abolish [the Law and the Prophets] but to fulfill them." Again, "not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear
Bal anced Christianity from the Law until everything is accomplished" (John 10:35; Matthew 5:17-18). One of Jesus' chief complaints against contemporary Jewish leaders concerned their disrespect for Old Testament Scripture and their lack of a true submission to its divine authority.
But Jesus may also be truly described as a radical.
He was a keen, fearless critic of the Jewish Establishment, not only because of their insufficient loyalty to God's Word but also because of their exaggerated loyalty to their own human traditions. Jesus had the temerity to sweep away centuries of inherited tradition ("the tradition of the elders") in order that God's Word might again be seen and obeyed (Mark
7:1-13). He was also daring in his breaches of social convention. He insisted on caring for those sections of the community which were normally despised. He spoke to women in public, which in his day was not done. He invited children to come to him, although in Roman society unwanted children were commonly
"exposed" or dumped, and his own disciples took it for granted that he would not want to be bothered with them. He allowed prostitutes to touch him
(Pharisees recoiled from them in horror) and himself actually touched an untouchable leper (Pharisees threw stones at them to make them keep their distance). In these and other ways Jesus refused to be
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bound by human custom; his mind and conscience were bound by God's Word alone.
Thus Jesus was a unique combination of the conservative and the radical, conservative toward
Scripture and radical in his scrutiny (his biblical scrutiny) of everything else.
Now the disciple is not above his teacher, as Jesus often said. So if Jesus could combine radicalism with conservatism so can we who claim to follow him.
Indeed, we must if we would be loyal to him. There is an urgent need for more RCs to emerge in the church, standing now not for Roman Catholics but for Radical
Conservatives, and a need for evangelical Christians to develop a more critical discernment between what may not be changed and what may and even must.
Let me give an example of what may not be changed. It was customary in former days for the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Apostles' Creed to be painted on the east wall of many
English churches for everybody to see and read. In one village church the lettering had faded, and a local decorator was engaged to touch up the paint where necessary. In due course, so the story goes, the church council was startled by the ambiguity of the account submitted to them. Being before the age of decimali zation, it read as follows:
Bal anced Christianity To repairing the Lord's Prayer . . . . . . . . 10s To three new Commandments . . . . . . . 12s
To making a completely new Creed . . . 17s 6d On the other hand, although we have no authority to alter either the creed or the commandments which God has revealed, yet (as Leighton Ford rightly said at the 1969 American Congress on Evangelism in Minneapolis) "God is not tied to seventeenth-century
English, nor to eighteenth-century hymns, nor to nineteenth-century architecture, nor to twentiethcentury clichés," nor (one might add) to much else besides. Although he himself never changes, nor does his revelation, yet he is also a God on the move, ever calling his people out to fresh and adventurous enterprises.
More particularly, we all need to discern more clearly between Scripture and culture. For Scripture is the eternal, unchanging Word of God. But culture is an amalgam of ecclesiastical tradition, social convention and artistic creativity. Whatever "authority" culture may have is derived only from church and community. It cannot claim an immunity to criticism or reform. On the contrary, culture changes from age to age and from place to place. Moreover, we Christians, who say we desire to live under the authority of
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God's Word, should subject our own contemporary culture to continuous biblical scrutiny. Far from resenting or resisting cultural change, we should be in the forefront of those who propose and work for its progressive modification in order to make it more truly expressive of the dignity of humanity and more pleasing to the God who created us.
On a visit to the United States I was impressed by a group of students I met at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. They had come from a variety of different backgrounds but found themselves united in their commitment to biblical
Christianity, in their disenchantment with much contemporary American Christianity and in their resolve to discover a radical application of biblical Christianity to the big issues of the day. So they coalesced into a study and prayer group out of which grew the People's Christian Coalition, whose organ was The Post-American (now called Sojourners). Its first issue in February, 1971, depicted on the front cover the Lord Jesus, thorn-crowned, handcuffed and draped with the Stars and Stripes. Some thought the picture bordered on blasphemy. But I did not share this reaction. Rather it was a genuine expression of their concern for the honor of Christ. Jim Wallis voiced this in his editorial:
Bal anced Christianity The offense of established religion is the proclamation and practice of a caricature of Christianity so inculturated, domesticated and lifeless that our generation easily and naturally rejects it.
. . . We find that the American church is in captivity to the values and lifestyle of our culture.
. . . The American captivity of the church has resulted in the disastrous equation of the American way of life with the Christian way of life.
Exactly the same could be said of the cultural expression of Christianity in other parts of the world. It is a major problem in many churches of the Third
World, which were planted by missions from Europe and North America and are now seeking their own indigenous identity. They are faced with two cultural problems. The first concerns native or tribal culture, perhaps especially in Africa. National Christian leaders recognize that whereas some traditional African customs reflect their pagan origins and are incompatible with Christian faith, love and righteousness, others not only are morally and spiritually harmless but can actually be subjected to the lordship of Christ and contribute to the enrichment of life.
The second problem concerns the alien culture (whether European or American) which all too often
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was imported into the Third World along with the gospel. It is partly because this cultural invasion has seemed to many an affront to their own national dignity that the cry has arisen to "get rid of the white man's religion." Of course the cry is mistaken. For Christianity belongs neither to the white man nor to any other group of men. Jesus Christ is Lord of every race, country and age without any discrimination.
Nevertheless, it is right for Africans, Asians and Latin Americans to seek to develop their own indigenous expressions of Christian truth and life. René Padilla made an eloquent appeal for this at the International
Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne in July, 1974, when he castigated what he called "culture
Christianity."
So Christian leaders of younger churches need great wisdom to discern not just between national and imported cultures but also between what in both cultures is honoring to Christ and what is dis honoring, between what is valuable and what is worthless. They also need courage to retain the one and to reject the other.
European Christianity, too, whose roots reach back nearly two thousand years, is deeply embedded in the culture of the centuries. It is not without significance that we can talk about Lutheranism, Anglicanism,
Bal anced Christianity Presbyterianism, Methodism and even Brethrenism.
Each is a traditional or cultural form of historic Christianity. That form colors not only our doctrinal formularies, but our liturgy (or nonliturgy) and music, our church buildings and their decor, the respective roles of clergy and laity in the church, our printing and publicity, our pastoral and evangelistic methods, in fact everything we do as churches. And all of it should be subjected to regular, critical, biblical investigation.
So when we resist change, whether in church or society, we need to ask whether in reality it is Scripture we are defending (as it is our custom stoutly to insist) or rather some cherished tradition of the ecclesiastical elders or of our cultural heritage. This is not to say that all traditions, simply because they are traditional, must at all costs be swept away. Uncritical iconoclasm is as stupid as uncritical conservatism, and is sometimes more dangerous. What I am emphasizing is that no tradition may be invested with a kind of diplomatic immunity to examination. No special privilege may be claimed for it.
When, on the other hand, we agitate for change, we need to be clear that it is not Scripture against which we are rebelling, but some unbiblical tradition which is therefore open to reform. If it is unbiblical in the sense of being clearly contrary to Scripture, then we
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should tackle it courageously and work hard for its abolition. If it is unbiblical in the sense of being not required by Scripture, then we must at least keep it under critical review.
More often than most of us know or care to admit, we invest our cultural ideas and practices with an authority, truth and timelessness which belong to Scripture alone. They form part of our security. When they are threatened, we feel threatened. So we play safe and vigorously defend them.
At other times we pay too little attention to the authority of Scripture and treat God's Word as if we can set it aside as easily as we can the opinions and traditions of men. Then we prove ourselves worldly Christians who have so thoroughly absorbed the secular world's antiauthority that we are not prepared even to live under the authority of God and of his Word by which he rules his people.
Contemporary Christians are called to walk this tightrope. We are neither to resist all change nor to agitate for total change. Further, even in matters which are open to change because Scripture gives this liberty, we are not to be mindless iconoclasts. Christians who believe in the God of history and in the activity of the Holy Spirit in past periods of church history can take no delight in change simply for change's sake. Some-
Bal anced Christianity times, as Jesus said, "the old is better" (Luke 5:39) because it has stood the test of time. We must also be sensitive to the conservatism of the older generation of Christians; they cannot easily accustom themselves to change, but can more easily be hurt and disturbed by it. What we are called to is a wise discernment, informed by a biblical perspective, so that we are appreciative of the legacy of the past and responsive to the mood of the present. Only then can we apply to all culture (in church and in society) a radical biblical criticism and seek to change what under God we believe could be changed for the better.
The Church of England reformers of the sixteenth century understood this principle well, at least in its application to ecclesiastical reform. In the small print at the beginning of the Book of Common Prayer there is a foreword titled "Of Ceremonies, why some be abolished and some retained." It was included in the first reformed Prayer Book of 1549 and was probably composed by Archbishop Cranmer himself.
He complains that in this our time the minds of men are so diverse that some think it is a great matter of conscience to depart from a piece of the least of their
Ceremonies, they be so addicted to their old
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customs; and again, on the other side, some be so new-fangled that they would innovate all things and so despise the old, that nothing can like [please] them but that is new.
Similarly, the preface, which explains the principles governing the revision of the Prayer Book in 1662, begins, "It hath been the wisdom of the Church of England, ever since the first compiling of her
Publick Liturgy, to keep the mean between the two extremes, of too much stiffness in refusing, and of too much easiness in admitting, any variation from it." May God give us this same wisdom today, and may he also give us the courage to apply it not only to ecclesiastical affairs but in the social, ethical and political arenas as well.
Perhaps I can express myself in biological terms by saying that we need both Christian gadflies to sting and harry us into action for change and also Christian watchdogs who will bark loud and long if we show any signs of compromising biblical truth. Neither gadflies nor watchdogs are easy companions to live with. Nor do they find each other's company congenial. Yet the gadflies must not sting the watchdogs, nor must the watchdogs eat up the gadflies. They must learn to coexist in God's church and to fulfill their respective
Bal anced Christianity roles by concentrating their attention on us, the generality of God's people, who badly need the ministry of both.
Having warned of the dangers of both too much change and too little, let me conclude this section by saying that the greater danger (at least among evangelicals) is to mistake culture for Scripture, to be too conservative and traditionalist, to be blind to those things in church and society which displease God and should therefore displease us, to dig our heels and our toes deep into the status quo and to resist firmly that most uncomfortable of all experiences, change.