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07 August 2007
Churchianity. (Managing the tension between faith and culture in the Body of Christ.)
I have to admit to plagiarizing the title from Joy Davidman Lewis’ ‘Smoke on the Mountain.’ My conscience thus clear, let’s get started.
‘A personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.’ Carried on horseback by circuit riders a century ago, projected by Power-Point by Campus Crusade today, this simplest of creeds stands as the very foundation of Evangelical Christianity. Easily understood and easily shared, this phrase has introduced countless men and women to the Love of their lives. It is the merest of Christianities, ideal for introducing one individual to the person of Jesus Christ. There is, of course, a slight snag. You see, when a bunch of individuals have personal relationships with Christ, they start to have a corporate relationship with Christ too. A perspective optimized to win individual souls to Christ may find itself struggling with the intricacies of Christians trying to live in community. So Evangelicals’ greatest strength is also our greatest weakness; what we gain in Evangelism, we lose in Ecclesiology. And culture is more an Ecclesial question than one of Evangelism.
People and Peoples.
‘I am not African. Africa is in me, but I cannot return.
I am not taína. Taíno is in me, but there is no way back.
I am not European. Europe lives in me, but I have no home there.
I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish.
I was born at the crossroads
and I am whole.’
- Aurora Levins-Morales, ‘Child of the Americas.’
A Puerto-Rican Jew born in America, this poet speaks of being a hundred things all at once. She partakes in many identities, yet she cannot be entirely captured by any of them. In this simple truth, she speaks for all of us. Each of us encompass many things, but we are rarely encompassed by any one of them. I exist on many levels. I am a man. I am an American. I am a soldier. I am a human being. I am a hundred things. Some are insignificant. I am tall. Some are central. I am a son of I AM. All these things are true of me, and all at once. I am all of them together. Yet, even together, they are not all of me. I am a member of many communities, but I must first exist in order to exist in any communities. So there must be levels of existence.
Scripture confirms this conclusion. It is clear that God covenants with individuals, such as with Abraham (of course, that individual became a people in the course of that covenant.) God also covenants with nations, as the Old Testament unquestionably proves. And ultimately, He covenants with all of humanity. Genesis speaks to this, as does Revelation. Let us delineate our levels accordingly: individual, defined by the person themselves; corporate, the person in a community of culture; and universal, the person as a member of the human race. So now we have levels, but levels do not tell us what to do, nor where to start. For those answers, let’s turn to some wise council. With a Belfast accent.
C.S. Lewis, in his essay ‘Christianity and Culture,’ argues for the primacy of individuals vice cultures. (Please hold on the deconstructivist scalpels until you hear his argument. Or at least read ‘Bulverism’ first.) It has everything to do with permanence. A man lives, at most, eleven decades. A culture lives on anywhere from centuries to millennia. If this world is all that there is, then culture must logically be primary. Christianity, though, teaches that individuals live on forever. And if this is true, then the individual must be primary. It is St. Augustine, not Carthage, that goes to heaven. We must start at the person, and from there move to the culture and the universal. Even intuitively, this checks; many who are the first to point out the injustices perpetrated by humanity are the last to do anything about the injustices they perpetrate themselves. There are already enough demagogues who preach systemic ethics and practice little personal ethics. (Lewis again, ‘The Dangers of National Repentance.’) The plank in your own eye and all of that. Of course, the verse doesn’t stop there, and neither should we. ‘And then you can see clearly to remove the speck of dust from your brother’s eye.’ We are to work for social justice, but we must first pursue the justice that is closest and hardest, treating others as we would want to be treated. But I digress.
We must begin with the individual. But we cannot end there. St. Augustine goes to heaven, but he still goes as a Carthaginian. On some level, St. Augustine brings the best of Carthage (or Hippo) with him to heaven. Together with the other Carthaginian believers, they represent Carthage amongst every tribe and every tongue. There is a primacy of individuals, but it is not an exclusive primacy. We are all Ezekiel’s wheels within wheels. And salvation history plays out on every level upon which we exist.
Stories that you can’t read are just gibberish and music that you can’t understand is just noise. So we must learn to hear all the chords to understand the symphony. The individual may be the easiest to understand, as the boundaries of the identity are objectively definable and fixed in space and time. Individually, I am two hundred pounds of water and tissue. I can immediately identify where I begin and end. I can look at my outstretched fingertips and say ‘I go this far and no farther.’ My fingers are part of me. The keys upon which I am typing are not part of me. Like most people, I figured this one out before my first birthday and haven’t looked back. My identity as part of the universal is a bit more esoteric, but still one I feel as if I can nail down. Really, that one is pretty objective and fixed as well (generally only redefined in the ugliest of actions. Like Dred Scott. Or Roe.) My physiology and psyche are undeniably human. I think human thoughts and feel human feelings, and in doing so I am able to relate to other humans. Every cell of my body contains Adenine and Cytosine wrapped around each other in a uniquely human pattern, and all of those cells together are immediately recognizable to another person as a human being. While I may not exhaustively understand what it is to be myself individually or as a member of the universal, I can at least recognize the boundaries of those identities. I cannot say the same for my identity as a member of cultures. Corporate identity is written in grays, not in black and white, (even when it is defined as black or white.)
Cultural identities are the hardest for us to wrap our minds around, because it is the hardest to define. And this is why we have so many problems understanding each other: few of us even understand ourselves. Most cultural identities seem imposed on group members from within and without. You find yourself drafted without ever really being asked, people kind of assume your allegiances and run with the assumption. To try to make sense out of chaos, we write pasts-that-never-were that tell us who we are now and why. Unfortunately, we are fallen storytellers, and our stories reflect our fallenness. Many of our mythologies are simply fairy-tales to shield us from the scary complexity of the physics of a fallen world. We try to draw clear lines, generally where we are and always have been the righteous, the trespassed against, the ones-who-are-not-to-blame. And in our gerrymandered pasts, we forget the simple truth that for every time we have been hurt, we have hurt others. We live in a cascade of brokenness that reaches all the way back to the garden, and all of our identities are thus broken.
This is the challenge of cultures. There are a thousand fault-lines, and they change entirely based on context. The boundaries seem to always come down to some fuzzy definition along some mostly arbitrary distinction. The axis of the division is rarely objective, and the point of sundering along that axis is equally relative. It is who and what someone identifies with, and who and what others decide that someone should be identified with, and even those two things wrapped around each other. Americans, at least domestically, tend to see culture as an issue of race and ethnicity. But even that is hard to define… something that shows up conclusively in voting patterns cannot be defined concretely in any objective terms. There isn’t a critical concentration of melanin that predestines someone to think or act a certain way. Between contexts, the point of sundering changes; someone who is considered black in the United States may be considered white in Brazil. Economics is another fault-line, but there is no critical net worth which causes one to move from one group into another. In fact, the relationship may even be reversed at times: the nouveau riche may be ostracized from the rich-culture, while an old money blueblood, deeply in debt, may still retain their membership. Geography? It changes. The inextricably Irish Celts lived in the Carpathians in Alexander the Great’s day. Nobody’s really, truly indigenous anywhere on this side of the fall. Language? A third of the Knesset speaks Russian as their native tongue. Culture changes at every level: look at the rivalry between schools, and you will find that in each school there are punk rawkers, band geeks, jocks and preppies. Their fault-line is music, but where is the critical MP3 that moves you from one group to another? The military is almost an artificial ethnicity, almost impenetrable to an outsider, but just below the surface there are fault-lines between services: zoomies, grunts, squids and jarheads. There are always lines, but the lines are generally arbitrary. And even their gradations are relative.
There is, of course, one fault-line we haven’t discussed yet. Religion. The height of a tree has much to do with the soil in which it is planted. Plant a tree in shallow, sandy soil, and its growth will forever be stunted. Plant a tree in deep, rich soil, and its branches will reach the sky. There are few soils deeper than religion. (It can be a rocky soil as well.) It should not surprise us, then, that the identities that grow from that soil are thick and strong. I think of Orthodox churches in America. Almost invariably, next to any round-domed church, there is a cultural center of the corresponding people group. Be it Greeks, Ukrainians, or Armenians, culture is built upon a bedrock of religion. This is, of course, not confined to our Orthodox brethren. For Irish and Italian immigrants, Catholic churches served as a fortress to the beleaguered identity. And for Korean immigrants, Evangelical churches with services in Hangul served as a touchstone for identity. Synagogues have been the heart of Jewish Diaspora culture for two millennia; throughout a sixth of the world, Muezzinin broadcast culture from Minarets with their calls to noontime prayers. And lest we think ourselves immune, the ATL would be hardly recognizable without the hundreds of churches (and thousands of billboard advertisements.) I can hardly imagine a Colorado Springs without Focus on the Family, New Life Church or Glen Eyrie. There is undeniably an American Christian-ese culture, a unique religion-based identity that is not necessarily synonymous with the Christian faith. This is not a bad thing. Challenges are not necessarily bad. But they are challenges.
Growing up Christian-ese. It is remarkably easy to mistake your expression of something for a universal expression of that same thing. Especially when you haven’t encountered any different expressions of that thing. I think of Lucy Pevensee’s first meeting with Tumnus the Fawn in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Assuming that a handshake is a universal expression of greeting, she offers him her hand. And he stands there perplexed. Tumnus, of course, was well acquainted with the concept of greeting. He just didn’t see any reason that grabbing someone’s hand should have anything to do with it. Conversely, Lucy probably would have never realized the difference between a handshake and a greeting were it not for the fawn’s puzzled response. Fortunately, Lucy and Tumnus both find the goodwill and trust to understand each others’ expressions of greeting, and they are able to move from there into friendship (except for the slight complication of Tumnus kidnapping Lucy to deliver her to certain death at the hands of the White Witch. But that works itself out.)
In childhood, all the dichotomies are pretty straightforward. You go to church, church is good. Jesus is good. Jesus is associated with church. And church looks a certain way, meets at a certain time, and plays a certain type of music. You just assume these things are synonymous, because you don’t really see anything to challenge those assumptions. Truth is coherent, and A equals B equals C. Automatically, you start to build a framework for understanding your world. As you leave the comfort of the familiar, you find yourself in the middle of a complicated, chaotic universe. In the midst of that chaos, the structures do exactly what they are designed to do: bring order out of chaos. So we come back to our dichotomies. Christians talk a certain way, using words like ‘youth group,’ ‘saved,’ and ‘praise music.’ People who don’t talk that way aren’t Christians. So when you meet the kid who calls himself Catholic, you aren’t surprised to find that he doesn’t talk much about Jesus. Nor are you surprised that he spends his weekends getting drunk. Of course, you also probably don’t notice the other kid who wears a crucifix, the shy one who quietly prays every day before eating his school lunch. And until someone drives a eighteen-wheeler through your assumptions, you probably won’t even realize you have them. (In academic-ese, I think its called disturbing frameworks. I like the Big Rig picture better.)
Mine was nowhere near so dramatic. In college, I took a fascinating class on the History of Christianity. Though the subject matter was interesting, the most memorable aspect of the class was the teacher. If you’ve ever heard a pilot talk about their aircraft, it is something like a parent talking about their kid. They know all the facts, all the numbers, but it is deeper than that. It’s almost like the aircraft is a part of them. And this is how this man taught that class. He certainly knew the issues, the numbers and places, but it was deeper. It was like he was talking about his family. Really, nothing up to this point would have been particularly surprising… there were a good number of Christian professors at my college. But this professor happened to be a Lebanese Eastern Rite Catholic (and a Pave Low driver to boot.) Talking to him after nearly every class, I came to one inescapable conclusion. It wasn’t any specific doctrinal point, but he more than knew what he was talking about. Nor was it any Christian catchphrase. He didn’t really use any of those. But unmistakably, undeniably, this man loved the same Jesus that I loved. This was obviously inconvenient for my framework. Looking back, I was a bit like Lucy, realizing that there is a difference between a handshake and a greeting. A realization grew from between the cracks in my framework: Evangelical religiosity isn’t the same thing as knowing Jesus.
Denis de Rougemount tells us that love ceases to be a devil when it ceases to be a god. The same is true of cultures. There are a lot of good things about Evangelical culture. I deeply appreciate the passion in praise music, the way that we emphasize intimacy with God, the simplicity of our message. But that culture cannot be a god. It would, of course, not be a novel mistake. The Pharisees were given a perfect law upon which to build a perfect culture. Their mistake was when they made that law into a god; it was then they became devils. At the very heart of idolatry is the idea of a controllable god. And so it was there: the Sanhedrin pulled the levers and cables behind the image of the law they had constructed. It all came down to control, to pride. If they had ever found the humility to bow before the Lawgiver, they would have found Him far greater than the Wizard of Oz they had fashioned. We are no different.
When people want to hurt each other, they generally fashion some plowshare from their identity into a sword. Intellect, power and wit are all readily sharpened. And sometimes, they actually look you in the eye as they draw swords. When Christians want to be vicious to each other, we rarely allow ourselves the frankness of the profane. We usually invoke some sort of divine license. We turn the weapons of our churches, our authority and our theology against each other when we want to draw blood. Consider how many PKs ran and never looked back. Consider how many petty disagreements between elders have shattered churches. Consider how many unreached people we have turned off with our inability to be vulnerable and real. Our wars of pride have created more casualties than we care to consider.
Pride is the death of all things. It is at the heart of all discord, at the heart of every sundering. We are all undoubtedly too familiar with the ugliness of individual pride. And we should be familiar with the universal pride of humanity, blaming God for all the things that are our fault, refusing to thank Him for all the privileges we enjoy. That pride will get uglier before it is finally broken. (I hope not to be around for that chapter of history.) But there is a pride in cultures as well. Circumcision was an honor God gave to His people. It was intended to be an external expression of a circumcision of the heart. But without that true circumcision, the physical expression is absolutely worthless. Without an obedient heart, circumcision no more makes me a son of Abraham than an appendectomy makes me a son of Buddha. When circumcision became a god, it became a devil; those who worship it became, in Paul’s words, mutilators of the flesh. The Pharisees prided themselves on being children of Abraham. But Abraham was a child of God. When they got those two things out of order, they lost both. Their pride in the trappings of Abraham sundered them from Abraham and God. It is not merely an Old Testament problem. Pride has sundered the church at thousand times. A millennium ago, Eastern and Western Christians decided that they cared more about being Eastern or Western than they cared about being Christians. Fighting over the trappings of Peter, they abandoned both Peter and the God he loved. In the same way, our pride in the trappings of Jonathan Edwards sunders us from both that great saint and his God.
Culture becomes a devil when it becomes a god. But when it loses both the divine and diabolical, it becomes what it was originally intended to be: a gift. All identity is given to us as a gift, intended to adorn our reflection of Christ. Therefore, it only can fall into place when placed beneath our identity in Christ. The Church is simply many identities in Christ gathered together in fellowship. In that fellowship, there is transcendence, but the rule still holds. Individually and corporately, our identities are only beautiful when they reflect Him.
Churches vs. the Church. Circumcision does not a Jew make. But it certainly does make one easier to identify (at least in the first century equivalent of gym class.) Likewise, a Jesus Fish does not a Christian make. But it definitely makes one easier to spot in traffic. We’ll skip the whole anthropology discussion on ritual, totems and the like, but suffice it to say that every culture finds their own way to express the deep magic. The ritual deepens the experience of the deep magic, bathing it in the richness of space and time. Still, the magic and the ritual are not the same. Experience the magic outside the ritual, and you may miss out on some of the fullness, but try to practice the ritual outside of the magic and you will miss out on the entirety of both. Better to be a uncircumcised God-fearing Greek than to be a Pharisee of Pharisees and not know Him at all. Of course, better still to be a Pharisee of Pharisees and be head over heels in love with Him.
Theologians speak of a mystical communion amongst believers, a community between Christians that transcends the tangible. There is a deep magic that transforms a group of strangers infinitely estranged in their depravity into brothers and sisters bound together by the blood of Christ. As Abraham’s obedience is manifested in circumcision, this mystical communion between Christians is manifested in the visible church. There is a very real and very important dispute over whether that manifestation is rightly expressed in organic spontaneity or in sacramental hierarchy. Either way, though, that manifestation is undeniably real, made up of real people with real issues and real preferences. Complete with all the problems those things bring; redeemed people are still people.
Paul the Christian doesn’t look that much different from Saul the Pharisee (unless he somehow became taller falling off his horse.) After his conversion, he probably still liked the same kinds of foods and wore the same kind of tunic. He probably had much of the same personality quirks, as Barnabas clearly discovered. But something happens to Saul on the road to Damascus when he becomes Paul the Apostle. In the same way, something happens to a crowd of Ephesians when they become the Church in Ephesus. In the mystery of redemption, God gives us new names. Saul becomes Paul, a man becomes a Christian, a crowd becomes a Church. We live between our two names, the one that is passing away, and the one that awaits us. And in this is a tension.
I am a Christian, yet Christianity is not me. I am captured by Christ, He is not captured by me. When I get these things out of order, I become an idolater. Here is the paradox of the two names: Pursue the Name of Christ, and you will find your own name. Pursue your own name, and you will find neither. The same is true of cultures. There is undoubtedly an American Christianity, but Christianity is not American. Nor Roman. Humanity was created in the Image of God. We were made to be mirrors. Looking in a mirror, you focus on the image a mirror reflects, not the mirror itself. Focusing on the mirror itself, you only see smudges and cracks, the things that are least mirror-like about it. Focusing on the reflected image, you see both the mirror itself and the reflection. Still, even if you focus on the right Image, you have to clean off the smudges from time to time.
Remember back to the eighteen-wheeler disturbing our frameworks. The impulse to change usually starts with the still, small voice. Of course, if you don’t listen to that voice, it usually gets louder. We’re back to the tension… the old name tenaciously resisting change, the new name continuing its inexorable conquest. Paul tells us about the war between the old man and the new. The better angels of our natures, the speech goes. How telling that speech was written while this nation was at war with itself. What is true within each of us is true of all of us together. A culture sometimes follows the whispers of its collective conscience. More often than not, though, it takes men with megaphones. Often, those men are the ones who hear the whispers the loudest.
I think of the old monastics. Departing from the distractions of society, they tuned their ears to that whisper. They were the artillery, preserving society with their prayers from far behind the front lines. In the same way, the Old Testament prophets went into the wilderness to hear the words they would shout in the streets. In many ways, American Evangelicals live in the legacy of the Puritans. They, too, sought to preserve their church by retreating into the wilderness. When the holiness of their society was threatened, they withdrew into cities on a hill. These cities were intended to shine as examples of Godly society, inspiring the larger society back to holiness. Over the course of four centuries, Evangelicals have in this way maintained doctrine in the absence of a centralized decision-making body. There is a certain secessionist impulse to it, but it is not necessarily schismatic. (And even when it is, remember that the seditious colonists came back across the ocean two centuries later to save Britannia in her hour of greatest need. Catholics and Evangelicals owe more to each other than either side cares to admit.) To be holy is to be set apart. So from Plymouth Rock to L’Abri, we have set ourselves apart to find holiness.
A nation set apart. It is not a new idea in Salvation History. God calls Abram out of Iraq to father a great nation in a strange land. The Chosen People Israel, a holy nation built upon the Holy Law. The Law of Love completes the chord. God calls His chosen from all peoples, setting them apart as His own. Yet, even a people set apart sometimes need to be called back. This is the function of the prophets. They are set apart themselves to call their people back, sacrificing their own comfort to disturb the comfortable culture of their people. Elijah goes into the waterless wastes and John feasts on locusts and honey in the wilderness. But many who depart into silence come back with loudspeakers. So Elijah meets the prophets of Baal with words of fire, and Athanasius meets the acolytes of Arius with words no less fiery. The king Josiah rejoicing in his rediscovery of the Scriptures, calls his people back to the simplicity of God‘s intimacy. Martin Luther, rediscovering the Scriptures himself, chooses to confront the comfortably corrupt churchian culture of his day. There will always be those who challenge the culture of the church. We need to make room for them.
There will always be the Joseph Smiths, as well. Pelagius, Sun Myung Moon, any of a hundred names, there will always be prophets of newer, better Christianities. Without the pesky Christ part. I can’t imagine a man saying to his siblings, ’we all have different conceptions of who our father really is, but the only thing that really matters is that we all have faith in him.’ Family is not a esoteric concept. A man cannot be the son of many fathers. In the same way, as we enter into fellowship within the church we must ensure that we have the same Father, that we love the same Jesus. This is the function of the creeds. A line drawn with the blood of Christ, the creeds stake out the bounds of His family. Still, within a family, each child has a unique and distinctive relationship with their father.
So we return to churches and churchianities. The Church invisible, the mystical communion of believers, becomes manifest when those believers gather together in fellowship. They become the visible churches, and they are all as unique as the believers that comprise them. The Church in Corinth is made of Corinthians, and it has a undeniably Corinthian flavor. But they are not just Corinthians… they are Christian Corinthians. They have become a sub-culture. Accordingly, over time they will find ways to express that distinction, be it in rituals, practices, or customs. Like circumcision, these things are gifts to the local believers, physical expressions of the deep truths of their faith. Together, these become Corinthian churchianity, the culture built up around a local manifestation of the Christian religion.
Oops. We just said the r-word. What about ‘not a religion but a relationship?’ One word may mean two entirely different things to two different people. That word certainly does. We Evangelicals are ever distrustful of religiosity. Appropriately so, considering many of our backgrounds. For many of us, all we ever knew of religion was a suffocating set of spare rituals (props to Cross Movement) that gets in the way of knowing Jesus. It should not be surprising that we don’t look back on it fondly after we’ve actually met Him. To us, religion is the picture of the Tower of Babel: man trying to climb to divinity through his own strength and wit. A bunch of men make up rules, and they put them together into a religion, which in turn gives birth to a god. Like any idolatry, that god simply allows men to worship themselves. They end up right back where they started: nowhere. We don’t like religion. Given our definition of religion, we shouldn’t.
Ours is not the only definition, though. Consider a married couple. The way the story’s supposed to go, they meet, they fall in love, they get married, and they build a life together. If you believe the movies, the best parts are the ones leading up to the ‘ever after.’ If you ask an actual couple, though, they will most likely tell you that the most challenging and rewarding parts of their relationship were after that point. Who can forget Aragorn and Arwen’s reunion atop Gondor? But a reunion does not make a marriage. I’m sure that ten years hence they would have long since found more consistent ways to enjoy their relationship. Perhaps they read together before they go to bed, perhaps a visit back to Rivendell from time to time. Certain things become important over time as you build a relationship. This is just as true in our relationship with God, individually and corporately. You fall in love with God, you enter into relationship with him, and over time you learn to express that relationship in consistent ways. This is true religion. It is a third-order thing: the Church universal manifests in the local church, which in turn manifests their fellowship with these churchianities. And each church’s churchianities are as different as just as each couple’s love rituals.
It all comes back to Liberty in Christ. I think back to the Old Law. You did not adapt God to your culture, you adapted your culture to God. The way you did so was inscribed quite inflexibly on stone tablets. You don’t get to vote on it. If you love God, you will follow the Torah, and the Torah tells you not to eat pork. And, by the way, the Torah is written in Hebrew. So if you really want to understand God, you should learn Hebrew. And you cant understand a language without understanding its culture, so you really should learn Hebrew culture while you‘re at it. I just don‘t see the Sanhedrin sponsoring an Old Testament version of Wycliffe (Septuagint aside, of course.)
When the New Law comes, Jesus changes everything. The Jewish Carpenter Y’Shua Ben-Yosef Min Natz’rati more than understood the Torah in its linguistic and cultural context. The Word completed the words of Moses, giving them to every tribe and every tongue. Jesus showed up in one culture to redeem all cultures. Y’Shua, Jesus, Isus, Iesu, Jésuchristo, Yesua, or Isa, each Name is equally beautiful. As the sheet unfolds in Peter’s dream, the seed planted with the Court of the Gentiles bursts into full bloom. Every person and every culture is invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb just as they are. The invitation reads: ‘Come in your rags, and I will give you royal robes. Come by grace, through faith, and I will transform you. Come as Jews and Greeks, mystics and philosophers, fishermen and lawyers, and I will show you who you are in Me.’
It is for freedom that He has set us free, and He sets us free to pursue Him. Redemption’s song is free-form, a hundred different harmonies dancing around one Melody. He sets us free to write it. Augustine tells us to have charity and do as we will. Seek Him first, and He will guide your steps. So eat pork or don’t eat pork. Consume food sacrificed to idols or don’t. Drink or abstain from drinking. But whatever you do, do it for the glory of God. So one group of Christians partakes in the fruit of the vine, as Christ did at Cana. Another group of Christians, seeing only drunkenness and debauchery around them, chooses to abstain. Praise God. Both are right. A catacomb Christian is baptized by immersion in the Jordan River. A medieval Christian is sprinkled as he proclaims his allegiance to the cross. And a twenty-first century believer tells the world that he loves Jesus in the waters of Destin beach. Praise God for the gift of Baptism. Trust Him to know the hearts of those who practice it.
Liberty in Christ gives us the freedom to love God in any cultural context. So the first-century Christian wife wears a headscarf and lives in fidelity. And the modern Christian wife wears a wedding ring and lives in fidelity. God, our Lover, gifts each of us with special times and places with Him. A song, a story, a sunset, whatever it is He gives it to us to express intimacy. ‘This is this place I have made just for you.’ He does the same with churches. Circumcision to the people who would best understand it. Priests that choose to become like Paul. Praise music with electric guitars and drums. These are all gifts, specifically tailored to who we are culturally in Him. We cannot confuse these gifts with necessities. A first-century Syrian church service should look different from an contemporary suburban American church. Identity in Christ comes in many colors.
Created Equal vs. Actually Equivalent. There is a not insignificant counterpoint to all this multi-culti stuff. In the ancient world, people went to war with whatever weapons were at hand. One man shows up with a mace, another with a broadsword, a third with a dagger. Inevitably, any formation disintegrated into a brawl upon first contact with an enemy. Alexander the Great changed all of that. Standardizing the weapons of the Macedonian army, he formed his men into Phalanxes. Each man’s shield would interlock with the next, and the formation would move as one. Wave after wave of enemies would break upon their spears like water upon rocks. Perhaps we should do the same. Use one Bible translation. One language. One liturgy. Create a culture-neutral Christianity and rid ourselves of the problems of cultures. (Unfortunately, a culture-neutral Christianity would have to be made up of culture-neutral people, and I don’t know any.)
Like anything else, the Phalanx was eventually surpassed. It was overcome by a diversity of weaponry, the very thing it initially overcame. Heavy cavalry could easily outflank the monolithic formation, cracking it open. Infantry would then charge into the formation and tear it apart. Combined arms tactics were born. Pikemen, horsemen, archers, swordsmen, and musketeers, no army would ever again exclusively use one weapon. Still, there is all the difference in the world between a integrated medieval force and an archaic band of brawlers. Each pikeman moves as one with the other pikemen, each archer shoots as one with the other archers, each cavalryman charges alongside the rest of the cavalry. The unity of expression within each branch is matched by a unity of purpose amongst the entire army. The commanding general matches the unique strengths of each group against the weaknesses of their enemy. God has made us in diversity for a reason. The fisherman, the canon lawyer, and the Greek, the Synoptic Gospels are richer for being told from different perspectives.
There is an opposite and complimentary mistake. If culture is such a great thing, then all churchianties must be equally valid. Cultural relativism in a Christian guise, complete with all the same errors. Here’s a simple mathematical truth: whatever is relative is also absolute. Imagine two points on a graph. They are a certain relative distance from each other. Yet both are a fixed absolute distance from the origin.
In the same way, there are valid and necessary critiques of cultures. You just need to make sure you’re starting at the Origin when you make them.
It is a question of categories. Consider a forty year old man versus a four year old child. They are equal in terms of their humanity. Both are undeniably human, and over the course of their lives, both will achieve an equality in totality. But they are not equal right now. So the forty year old can vote and the four year old can’t. Appropriately so; I shudder to think of Teletubbies in Congress. When the forty year old was a child, he couldn’t vote either. When the child becomes forty year old, he will most likely continue to exclude four year olds from the body politic. The system’s justice is in the equality of totalities: equity within categories, not equality between categories. (For all you academics out there, I still don’t like Rawls. Here‘s why.)
Morality is a tough question in a fallen world. Humanity lives in depravity. The perfect light of God’s perfect law has long since been dimmed in our hearts. Within or between categories, there is no guarantee that someone with a corrupt sense of justice will ever accept a just rule as such. In order to anchor any system of morality, we must appeal to a perfect sense of justice. None of us have it. Such justice has to come down from Sinai in the hands of Moses. Or from heaven in the arms of Mary.
The Word of Life gives us words to live by. The Creator is the Lawgiver. He gives us every good and perfect gift, and He gives us the Law. So the Law is perfect, for a Perfect Creator creates in perfection. It is we who fall short. Even here is the question of categories and individuals. Humanity was created to be perfect, yet every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve chooses to fall short of that perfection. Still, even amongst sinners there are gradations. Both Adolf Hitler and John Paul the Second were carefully crafted in the womb by a loving Creator. Only a fool would argue for any actual equivalency between the two. Hitler stands as a testament to the magnitude of the fall. John Paul II stands as a testament to the redemptive power of Christ. Both are sinners, but only one chose grace. They are both creations, but only one was a new creation.
In the same way, each culture is created for perfection, and each falls short of it. In terms of categories, every culture is equivalent. Each is entirely fallen and each is completely redeemable. I imagine that a perfectly redeemed Aztec culture would have brought something beautiful and irreplaceable to the Kingdom, just as the perfectly redeemed Jewish culture of prophecy. But the streets of Tenochtitlan, wet with the heart-blood of sacrificed slaves, are in no way the same as the streets of the City of David, where freed slaves dance in the Year of Jubilee. There are distinctions within categories, and individual cultures in actual terms can be better or worse.
The same is true for Christian cultures. Consider the Book of Revelation. Each church is called to perfection, each church falls short. Each is redeemed by the Blood of Christ. Nonetheless, the Angel has a very different message for each of them. One is commended for their faith, another chastised for leaving their first love. Though we all need His grace, we should strive for His perfection. The culture of corruption and indulgences is a far cry from the catacomb churches of the first century. There are better and worse churchianties. We should seek the better.
Salt and Light. We return to Schaeffer’s immemorial question: how, then, should we live? Perhaps the answer is not as hard as we make it. At the very least, we should know Whom to ask. ‘You are the light of the world.’ In the days of the Apostles, there were Gentiles who chose to draw near to the culture of Judaism. Perhaps the Justice of the Law, perhaps the passion of the Psalms, perhaps the mercy of the Sacrifices, something drew these God-Fearing Greeks to the temple. There was light in the corporate life of those who dwelt in the old sacraments, and that light drew these men to God. The eighth chapter of Matthew tells of a Centurion who cared greatly for the Synagogue. Without knowledge of Jewish customs, I doubt he would have sought out a young Jewish street preacher to heal his servant. The culture of Messiah prepared him to understand and embrace Messiah. A culture cannot introduce you to Christ. But it can certainly can prepare you to meet Him.
‘A city on a hill cannot be hidden. In the same way, no man takes a light and puts it under a bushel. Instead, he puts it on its stand, and it gives light to the whole house.’ By its very definition, a city on a hill is set apart from the rest of the world. But a city is not a fortress. A city invites people in, while a fortress keeps people out. Culture has always kept people out as well as in. It has always been the invisible wall around communities. Walls are not always bad. Ancient cities built walls to guard against marauders and thieves. We face marauding neo-orthodoxies and thieving political agendas. Still, the walls of a city have many doors, while a fortress has only a very few. The doors of a city are closed only in extreme circumstances, while the gates of a fortress are rarely open. We cannot hide our city behind ever deepening fortifications. The walls of our churchianities must have many doors.
‘In the same way let your light shine before men, that they will see your good works and praise your Father in Heaven.’ As Evangelicals, we are well aware of the relationship between our walk and our witness. We know that we may be the only Jesus that many of our friends will ever see, and the way we live may either draw them to Him or turn them off forever. We are certainly called to be a light to the darkness. We are also called to be a light to other lights. The verse says ‘let your light shine before men,’ not just ‘before the world’ or ‘before the unreached.’ Our walk is no less a witness to the Body as it is to the world. Righteousness begets righteousness, and our righteousness strengthens our brothers and sisters. Righteousness begets reconciliation as well, for children who resemble their Father also look like each other. Thus, the best way to work for unity in the Body is for each part to chase hard after God. Light is light, regardless of hue. The brighter we shine, the easier it will be for us to recognize each other.
Christ’s command applies to all of us, not just each of us. Our corporate witness is just as important as our individual witness. ‘They will know we are Christians by our love,’ the song goes. Do they? How can a family that hates each other preach love to the world? ‘And if you greet only your brothers, how are you different from anyone else? Even the pagans do that…’ If we cannot achieve even this minimal level of human loyalty, how can we possibly love those who hate us or pray for those who persecute us? We have to start realizing we’re family. Brothers are not brothers because they see eye to eye, nor because they do things the same way. They are brothers solely because they have the same Father. The blood of Christ flows through all of our veins, and binds us together. We would do well to remember that. We’ve spilled far too much of that Most Precious Blood opening each other’s veins in our intramural vendettas already.
Neither one person nor one culture can hope to encompass all of Elohim‘s song. We must learn to reconcile all of our different movements within His symphony. We must sharpen each other, as iron sharpens iron, inspiring each other toward holiness. And we must learn not to break fellowship, even as He stretches us. It is a question of wineskins. Older vintages may be better, but new wine cannot be put into old wineskins. The new wine ages as the old wine is consumed. Both the new and old wines are good wine, for all bad wine is thrown out into the street. Praise God that there are many kinds of good wine. May we find joy in all of them.
E Pluribus Plurum. (The Church in multiculturalism.) ‘The Church in Ephesus.’ It sounds pretty straightforward. If you are a Christian in Ephesus, you are part of the Church in Ephesus. I mean, most of the people in Ephesus understood what it meant to be an Ephesian. They spoke the language, lived the culture, took part in the collective economic life of the town. But what if you didn’t? What of a Centurion from Cordova who comes to Christ? He speaks a soldier’s Latin (one that would eventually become Spanish,) his culture is Roman, and his paycheck comes from Caesar. Does he belong to the Church in Ephesus? What of a believing merchant from Thessalonica, just passing through on his way to Antioch? He is undoubtedly Thessalonian: is he not of the Church in Thessalonica? How many days would he have to live in Ephesus before his church membership changed? Perhaps he himself becomes the Church in Thessalonica in Ephesus. Perhaps it is not as straightforward as it sounds.
I don’t have any good answers. I just don’t think it should be that big a problem. Diaspora culture complicates things, certainly. But we must remember that Christianity itself is a Diaspora culture, a remnant born out of the Synagogues of Jewish Diaspora culture. Now we have the echoes of the colonial experience, the tidal wave of globalization, and economies sundered by technology into a hundred professional sub-cultures. So now we have a thousand diasporas. We are Black, White, Asian, Latino, HAPA, Arabs, Armenian, Greek, Jewish, upper-class, middle-class, lower-class, Westerners, Southerners, Northerners, IT professionals, professors, plumbers and soldiers, and a thousand other categories. Where does one church begin and another end? It would take a smarter man than I to draw those lines. I just don’t think we have to. Let the lines happen on their own. We just need to remember that we are family in His Blood.
Dr. Martin Luther King once said that it was a shame that Sunday morning was the most segregated time of the week in America. This begs a huge question: what do we do about it? One on hand, we could take the ostrich approach. Ignore it, hope it goes away. We’ll all just be the same kind of Christians (which will incidentally, given weighted averages and all, look a lot like the current majority Christians.) On the other hand, we could make culture a central focus of each ministry, where racial reconciliation seminars replace discipleship and evangelism at every Christian conference. The first answer is foolish, for race was given to us as irrevocably as any other gift of God. The second answer is equally foolish, for when one gift starts to displace all others, it begins to become an idol. What, then, is the third answer? Run as hard as you can after God, and then look beside you for someone running just as hard after Him (yes, kids, its not just for spouse-finding anymore.) Each church should pursue God’s best with all of their heart. And they should keep their eyes open for others who are doing likewise. Unity in the Body must start with Unity in the Spirit.
What does this look like? I’m not quite sure. I just think we could afford to show each other a little more grace. Going back to our Early Church Example, I could imagine a church plant from Rome to the Imperial administrators in Damascus. I would imagine that church would look a lot more Roman than the rest of the Syrian Church. I don’t see why this should be a problem, provided they didn’t break fellowship with the rest of the believers in Syria. So if InterVarsity wants to have LaFe, then praise God. And if the Southern Baptists want to keep a geographical region in their name, then praise God. If the a cop’s kid experiences the presence of God through loud music, simple chords and straightforward messages, then praise God. And if a genuflecting Northeasterner experiences His presence through an ancient liturgy with an intricate homily, then praise God. Praise music and the Eucharist were both given as gifts from God. We would be better served by rejoicing in both than by arguing over which one is better. We should break bread, not break fellowship.
Perhaps this is itself an answer. A hundred Diaspora churches, all in fellowship. A hundred churches, each so in love with God that one cannot tell where one ends and the next begins. A place where the Assemblies of God pray alongside the Armenian Orthodox, where Jesuits and military Chaplains break bread together, where the Veritas Forum and Focus on the Family rejoice in each other’s successes. We have always had our tales of two cities. Rome and Constantinople, London or Avignon, now it is Cambridge and Colorado Springs. We have forgotten that we are all in Diaspora. Our homeland is neither Colorado nor Massachusetts nor Italy nor anywhere else in this world. Our homeland was Eden. Our Lord has promised to bring us back home. Until then we are refugees.
There are differences between us. There always have been. There always will be. And there are supposed to be. Still, there is a tension between us. Only trust can bridge that gap. I understand in no uncertain terms that a Christian academic might have difficulty seeing how a Christian soldier could in good faith head into Iraq. And I understand in no uncertain terms how a Christian soldier might have difficulty seeing how a Christian academic could in good faith advocate divestiture from Israel. Perhaps if we started with trust, we might get somewhere. I suppose things were simpler when the household of Abraham was a hereditary family. Now, Father Abraham has many sons, and most of them are adopted. This is the challenge of the New Law: believers from every tribe and every tongue must together become one nation.
We have a long way to go. We need to at least know where to start. There may be a clash of cultures, but I’ve never met a culture. I’ve only met people. In the same way, Heaven will have every tribe and every tongue, yet heaven is not populated by tribes nor tongues, but by people. So we must start with people. We must encounter each others first as brothers and sisters in Christ. He must be the foundation, and we must build with the mortar of fellowship. When we begin to understand each other’s love for Jesus, we will build the trust to deal with these larger issues. Every reconciliation between groups starts with a thousand reconciliations between people. We have to start by realizing we’re family.
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