Things are extremely hectic. We have 104 volunteers in the village. It is really an interesting challenge to keep ten-twelve groups in materials and supplies, scheduled and organized, not to mention keeping track of what is going on in Pearlington.
I spent the weekend in Chattanooga. I had a couple of business matters to attend, more on that later. It was rainy the whole weekend and I had to build a hand railing on my lower deck landing in the rain. Still haven't rented my house, and I'm getting antsy about that. It is hard sometimes to abide and wait on events.
I had a couple folks ask me about my last few blog entries. I know three or so entries ago I was pretty harsh on some issues.
My opinion hasn't really changed, but during the interim I had to write a scholarship essay for Columbia Theological Seminary on my convictions on an important issue for the church and how the church might respond. (I received notification today I have been accepted there. Now I've succeeded in making my life difficult because I have to decide between three very good seminaries.)
I'm wandering but the blog entries and the scholarship essay really reflect on the title of this blog (from I Peter 2:11-12 and some commentary by Professor Lewis Donelson at Austin PTS.) It has some good ideas but I wrote it fast and it has a few semantic or logical holes.
Here is the essay:
What are your convictions about one significant issue facing the church and/or society?
Church, Culture and Values: Can Christian Realism be saved?
One significant issue facing the church has challenged it perhaps since shortly after its inception; the study, understanding and instruction of Holy Scripture and confessions to form a doctrine of Christian living in a dynamic (changing and seductive) culture. It is a particular issue in our western world since the post-world war II era. Karl Barth, one of the “Christian realists” of the mid 20th Century, in Dogmatics in Outline defines dogmatics, the church’s proclamation to the world, by a question: “What are we to think and say?”
His definition follows from the idea that interpretation of Holy Scripture and Confessions arises not from an absolute inspiration of “(religious) truth,” but rather from a spiritual measure of the church at work in the world that is always liable to some error and subject to refinement and correction in the light of experience and growth. He further formulates three “public languages” of that church proclamation:
(1) The formal language of the church evinced in our Sunday worship,
(2) The common language of the World, by which I understand to mean that we speak publically to the “sick” or “evil” attitudes of the World,
(3) And finally the most important, the language of our public actions in the World.
The Christian realists (see for example, Heather Warren, Theologians of a New World Order) forged a Christ-centered world-view to manifest church proclamation in the early to middle of the last century. This was a reaction to the Social Gospel of the previous century. The realist’s doctrine of activism is based on acknowledging individual sin and pragmatic personal action, and they extended it to include manipulation of the state to advance Christianity.
Warren quotes R. Niebuhr (p51), “…because social groups are more selfish than individuals, society must use coercion – that violates the ethics appropriate for the individuals - to restrain the destructive egoism of races, classes, and nations.” This thinking led them to rationalize the use of the state to promulgate “just” actions up to and including intended assassination of world leaders such as Hitler. These realists were instrumental in bringing the United States into war with Germany.
Seventy-seven years later we are surrounded by a material society that begs us to buy and has a growing scientific understanding of the world that challenges traditional belief - all more or less a consequence of those Christian realists. We have churches that offer gyms, evening self-development programs and the like, usually under the rationale that once we get people into the church building we may develop them as members. At times a primary consideration of the sermon and conversation appear aimed to avoid “ruffling feathers.”
An outside observer, for example, a follower of Islam or even a Christian living in Africa, might conclude a goodly portion of the culture of the Western World has supplanted or seduced our own dogma. In a candid moment, we might acknowledge that our post-WWII Western culture has embraced an increasingly high economic status for us and principal preoccupation with it as a cultural substitution for Christian dogma grounded in care for the widow, orphan and alien in our land.
On the other hand the explosion in the post-WWII era of scientific knowledge of the world and technical capability to manipulate it has caused some in our reformed church to react to use the state to promulgate belief. They follow R. Niebuhr’s idea in the previous paragraph but have abandoned Barth’s caution to remember that our understanding of Scripture is “ liable to some error and subject to refinement and correction in the light of experience and growth.”
The result is an unhealthy (to our reformed tradition) reactionary response of the church to use church and state government to proscribe certain behaviors as being objectionable to belief and remove individual choice to think and decide. Some recent examples are homosexuality and church, reproductive choices, genetic manipulation, and the advance of neuroscience to reveal mental processes of personality, love, morality and spirituality (Science, “Neuroscience and the Soul, vol. 323, 27 Feb 2009, p1168)
How might the church make a faithful response to that issue?
Many of us appear to have lost the sense of Matthew 16:24-27; 19:16-26, 22:35-48 and 25: 31-46, if not also our fundamental faith in our earliest creed, “I believe in God…” It does little good to call for individual action and use Barth’s three languages of Christian proclamation if we fail to understand our limited knowledge of the world in the here and now and acknowledge our fallen nature at all personal levels. Christianity needs a living document as its doctrine. How do we save, or recast, the valuable elements of “postmodern” Christianity into a functional Realism?
Bart’s thinking is a persuasive tool. A living doctrine for Christian practice can only be had through investigation and exposition of the Holy Scripture in the context of understanding the world of here and now that we live. The church in its worship and teaching can lead members to contextual understanding of its essential tenets. A vital step for saving the church may rest on its response to materialism and the challenges posed by advances in science and engineering human health and reproduction, weaponry and knowledge.
Consider current scientific astronomical observations that show clear evidence of star systems with planetary orbiting bodies. What will be the reaction and implication on our thinking of the literal authority of the Scriptures if sentient beings come to be known on one such system?
Church leaders need to have a deeper understanding of the science and technology that increasingly benefit, threaten and shape our world and thought, and create social inequities in application. Thereby, we may effectively call the church to interpret Scripture and our confessions meaningfully in the context of here and now (in time).
In this way, the church can refocus on Barth’s recipe of Christian dogmatics as the response of the faithful to interpret theologically the empirical observation of the world (science if you will have it). Programs such as Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, understood in scriptural context, offer a very powerful experience of giving of self to help the afflicted, the poor and the widow.
For many people this creates a healthy dissonance with our materialism. It is tempting to see returning volunteers as glowing embers of zeal that will stoke the remnant of the church that survives these troubled times.
In other words, the Church should help both reactionary and “post-modern” cultural elements manifest the essence of the dogma of the church that calls for acts that reflect being with God (Westminster Shorter Catechism Q #1)
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