The Book
I am still trying to write Church®: A Disenfranchised Christian's View of Ecclesia Americanus. Really. Every time someone emails me and asks "if the book has been published yet" or ever better, "where can I purchase the book mentioned in your blog", I feel so stupid. But I am trying. I've recently renewed my interest due to an email conversation from a friend. Here's an obviously unedited excerpt from the intro:

E.Stanley Jones insightfully warned that the Church which “marries itself to the present age will find itself a widow in the next”. Jones may not have realized that the Church message always marries itself to the present age. This is a hard concept for modernized Christians to grasp.

The present Church has embraced the Modern Age—even though at first we violently rejected it.[1] In Modernism we made our beliefs rational, and more
than that we believed they were right. We have so embraced the temptation
of thinking that we are somehow more enlightened than those in the past that we pridefully discount the possibility of our own short-comings and need for change.[2] In embracing the age, we have also embraced timely but unnecessary baggage with it. Now that we are possibly entering into a new age, we are sifting through the baggage to (hopefully) find what is still necessary and useful, and tossing out the rest. The difficult aspect of this deconstruction is that most of it has been meaningful in some way. It’s kind of like Spring housecleaning, with all the tortured, sentimental choices about whether to keep the old Jr. High love-notes or not.

The truth is that the Christian message is fluid. If we are to communicate with changing cultures and localities, then our message and our beliefs must change as well. Actually, there is no must to it…our message and beliefs do change and our only "must" is that we accept this reality and learn to operate within it. If our culture’s basic philosophies and understandings of reality are changing, our beliefs are changing as well. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that God changes. I’m saying that we change along with our culture, and the way we both percieve and communicate God changes. Part of the tension felt by the Church today is that we are mourning more than just the loss of the Modern Age, but also in some sense a loss of our message.

[1] Just think of Copernicus and
Galileo’s struggle.
[2] Think about this…one of the
shortcomings of the Modern Age is that to counter the challenges made by
scientific rationalists who were critical of the Christian faith, we have
created our own rationalistic attempts to explain things that previously had
simply been considered mysteries or “foolishness to the world”. For
example, we have argued that the stories of the Bible are actually rational and
scientific. Imagine explaining rationally how the chariots of fire
witnessed by Elisha and his servant! The Modern Church has had
a hard time leaving things to mystery and wonder by simply saying, “We don’t
know.”

Thoughts?

posted by Jimmy at 11:01 PM | |