Series introduction The Contemporary Christian – the then and the now
The expression ‘the contemporary Christian’ strikes many as a contradiction in terms. Isn’t Christianity an antique relic from the remote past, irrelevant to people in today’s world?
My purpose in this series is to show that there is such a thing as ‘contemporary Christianity’ – not something newfangled, but original, historic, orthodox, biblical Christianity, sensitively related to the modern world.
Christianity: both historical and contemporary
We begin by reaffirming that Christianity is a historical religion. Of course, every religion arose in a particular historical context. Christianity, however, makes an especially strong claim to be historical because it rests not only on a historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, but on certain historical events which involved him, especially his birth, death and resurrection. There is a common thread here with the Judaism from which Christianity sprang. The Old Testament presents God not only as ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’, but also as the God of the covenant which he made with Abraham, and then renewed with Isaac and Jacob. Again, he is not only ‘the God of Moses’, but is also seen as the Redeemer responsible for the exodus, who went on to renew the covenant yet again at Mount Sinai.
Christians are forever tethered in heart and mind to these decisive, historical events of the past. We are constantly encouraged in the Bible to look back to them with thankfulness. Indeed, God deliberately made provision for his people to recall his saving actions on a regular basis. Supremely, the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion enables us to call the atoning death of Christ regularly to mind, and so bring the past into the present.
But the problem is that Christianity’s foundational events took place such a long time ago. I had a conversation with two brothers some years ago – students who told me they had turned away from the faith of their parents. One was now an agnostic, the other an atheist. I asked why. Did they no longer believe in the truth of Christianity? No, their dilemma was not whether Christianity was true, but whether it was relevant. How could it be? Christianity, they went on, was a primitive, Palestinian religion from long ago. So what on earth did it have to offer them, living in the exciting modern world?
This view of Christianity is widespread. The world has changed dramatically since Jesus’ day, and goes on changing with ever more bewildering speed. People reject the gospel, not necessarily because they think it false, but because it no longer resonates with them.
In response to this we need to be clear about the basic Christian conviction that God continues to speak through what he has spoken. His Word is not a prehistoric fossil, but a living message for the contemporary world. Even granted the historical particularities of the Bible and the immense complexities of the modern world, there is still a fundamental correspondence between them. God’s Word remains a lamp to our feet and a light for our path.
At the same time, our dilemma remains. Can Christianity both retain its authentic identity and demonstrate its relevance?
The desire to present Jesus in a way that appeals to our own generation is obviously right. This was the preoccupation of the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer while in prison during World War 2: ‘What is bothering me incessantly,’ he wrote, ‘is the question . . . who Christ really is for us today?’ It is a difficult question. In answering it, the church has tended in every generation to develop images of Christ which deviate from the portrait painted by the New Testament authors.
Attempting to modernize Jesus
Here are some of the church’s many attempts to present a contemporary picture of Christ, some of which have been more successful than others in remaining loyal to the original.
I think first of Jesus the ascetic who inspired generations of monks and hermits. He was much like John the Baptist, for he too dressed in a camel’s hair cloak, wore sandals or went barefoot, and munched locusts with evident relish. But it would be hard to reconcile this portrait with his contemporaries’ criticism that he was a party-goer who ‘came eating and drinking’.
Then there was Jesus the pale Galilean. The apostate emperor Julian tried to reinstate Rome’s pagan gods after Constantine had replaced them with the worship of Christ, and is reported as having said on his deathbed in ad 363, ‘You have conquered, O Galilean.’ His words were popularized by the nineteenth-century poet Swinburne:
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean;
The world has grown grey from thy breath.
This image of Jesus was perpetuated in medieval art and stained glass, with a heavenly halo and a colourless complexion, eyes lifted to the sky and feet never quite touching the ground.
In contrast to the presentations of Jesus as weak, suffering and defeated, there was Jesus the cosmic Christ, much loved by the Byzantine church leaders. They depicted him as the King of kings and Lord of lords, the creator and ruler of the universe. Yet, exalted high above all things, glorified and reigning, he seemed aloof from the real world, and even from his own humanity, as revealed in the incarnation and the cross.
At the opposite end of the theological spectrum, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century deists of the Enlightenment constructed in their own image Jesus the teacher of common sense, entirely human and not divine at all. The most dramatic example is the work of Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States from 1801 to 1809. Rejecting the supernatural as incompatible with reason, he produced his own edition of the Gospels, in which all miracles and mysteries were systematically eliminated. What is left is a guide to a merely human moral teacher.
In the twentieth century we were presented with a wide range of options. Two of the best known owe their popularity to musicals. There is Jesus the clown of Godspell, who spends his time singing and dancing, and thus captures something of the gaiety of Jesus, but hardly takes his mission seriously. Somewhat similar is Jesus Christ Superstar, the disillusioned celebrity who once thought he knew who he was, but in Gethsemane was no longer sure.
The late President of Cuba, Fidel Castro, frequently referred to Jesus as ‘a great revolutionary’, and there have been many attempts to portray him as Jesus the freedom fighter, the urban guerrilla, the first-century Che Guevara, with black beard and flashing eyes, whose most characteristic gesture was to overthrow the tables of the moneychangers and to drive them out of the temple with a whip.
These different portraits illustrate the recurring tendency to update Christ in line with current fashions. It began in the apostolic age, with Paul needing to warn of false teachers who were preaching ‘a Jesus other than the Jesus we [apostles] preached’. Each succeeding generation tends to read back into him its own ideas and hopes, and create him in its own image.
Their motive is right (to paint a contemporary portrait of Jesus), but the result is always distorted (as the portrait is unauthentic). The challenge before us is to present Jesus to our generation in ways that are both accurate and appealing.
Calling for double listening
The main reason for every betrayal of the authentic Jesus is that we pay too much attention to contemporary trends and too little to God’s Word. The thirst for relevance becomes so demanding that we feel we have to give in to it, whatever the cost. We become slaves to the latest fad, prepared to sacrifice truth on the altar of modernity. The quest for relevance degenerates into a lust for popularity. For the opposite extreme to irrelevance is accommodation, a feeble-minded, unprincipled surrender to the spirit of the time.
God’s people live in a world which can be actively hostile. We are constantly exposed to the pressure to conform.
Thank God, however, that there have always been those who have stood firm, sometimes alone, and refused to compromise. I think of Jeremiah in the sixth century bc, and Paul in his day (‘everyone . . . has deserted me’), Athanasius in the fourth century and Luther in the sixteenth.
In our own day we too need to resolve to present the biblical gospel in such a way as to speak to modern dilemmas, fears and frustrations, but with equal determination not to compromise it in so doing. Some stumbling-blocks are intrinsic to the original gospel and cannot be eliminated or soft-pedalled in order to make it easier to accept. The gospel contains some features so alien to modern thought that it will always appear foolish, however hard we strive to show that it is ‘true and reasonable’. The cross will always be an assault on human self-righteousness and a challenge to human self-indulgence. Its ‘scandal’ (stumbling-block) simply cannot be removed. The church speaks most authentically not when it has become indistinguishable from the world around us, but when its distinctive light shines most brightly.
However keen we are to communicate God’s Word to others, we must be faithful to that Word and, if necessary, be prepared to suffer for it. God’s word to Ezekiel encourages us: ‘Do not be afraid of them . . . You must speak my words to them, whether they listen or fail to listen, for they are rebellious.’ Our calling is to be faithful and relevant, not merely trendy.
How then can we develop a Christian mind which is both shaped by the truths of historic, biblical Christianity and also fully immersed in the realities of the contemporary world? We have to begin with a double refusal. We refuse to become either so absorbed in the Word that we escape into it and fail to let it confront the world, or so absorbed in the world that we conform to it and fail to subject it to the judgment of the Word.
In place of this double refusal, we are called to double listening. We need to listen to the Word of God with expectancy and humility, ready for God perhaps to confront us with a word that may be disturbing and uninvited. And we must also listen to the world around us. The voices we hear may take the form of shrill and strident protest. There will also be the anguished cries of those who are suffering, and the pain, doubt, anger, alienation and even despair of those who are at odds with God. We listen to the Word with humble reverence, anxious to understand it, and resolved to believe and obey what we come to understand. We listen to the world with critical alertness, anxious to understand it too, and resolved not necessarily to believe and obey it, but to sympathize with it and to seek grace to discover how the gospel relates to it.
Everybody finds listening difficult. But are Christians sometimes less good at listening than others? We can learn from the so-called ‘comforters’ in the Old Testament book of Job. They began well. When they heard about Job’s troubles, they came to visit him and, seeing how great his sufferings were, said nothing to him for a whole week. If only they had continued as they began, and kept their mouths shut! Instead, they trotted out their conventional view – that every sinner suffers for his or her own sins – in the most insensitive way. They did not really listen to what Job had to say. They merely repeated their own thoughtless and heartless claptrap, until in the end God stepped in and rebuked them for having misrepresented him.
We need to cultivate ‘double listening’, the ability to listen to two voices at the same time – the voice of God through the Bible and the voices of men and women around us. These voices will often contradict one another, but our purpose in listening to them both is to discover how they relate to each other. Double listening is indispensable to Christian discipleship and to Christian mission.
It is only through this discipline of double listening that it is possible to become a ‘contemporary Christian’. We bring ‘historical’ and ‘contemporary’ together as we learn to apply the Word to the world, proclaiming good news which is both true and new.
To put it in a nutshell, we live in the ‘now’ in the light of the ‘then’.