Two Questions

My wife has rightly chastised me for focusing too much on the personal wounds which have led me to disillusionment with the present state of Evangelicalism. It is probably quite self-indulgent, and perhaps boring to some. I felt it necessary as background, my experience is something I cannot escape and something that has driven me to think, reason, pray and search. But ultimately I must turn a corner and move in a positive direction. There is a bottom line in all this.

I have been seeing the same trend for a quarter of a century toward subjective and individualistic expressions of Christian faith and have tried as a local church member to sound the alarm. As a rule my pleas have usually not been well comprehended, at other times they have been dismissed or ignored as mere "intellectual" concerns, not related to real life, as if ideas about right and wrong and truth are not "real".

We, as Christians, cannot speak to either individuals or the culture at large with any sort of moral authority if Christianity is merely another human opinion or warm experience that merely makes us feel better. For years I complained in frustration as the secular society ridiculed Christian faith as "personal/subjective" opinion and thus casually dismissed efforts to roll back laws which allowed the killing of pre-born infants and hurtled toward infanticide. I got the sense many in the church did not understand the root causes of what was happening.

Then it became clear why. Evangelicals had, by and large, accepted the very premise I was battling against. Their faith was in fact, exactly as described, a personal, subjective experience that led to an individual opinion about what was true for them. The Bible has been intentionally advertised in many evangelical circles as "love letters" to each individual to be interpreted according to his or her own needs and, as a result, not according to objective criteria of grammar, context or common understanding.

If it seems I exaggerate, consider that today only one-fourth to one-third of adults in evangelical churches believe in absolute truth and only ten per cent of teens. If truth is not absolute and objective, it is by definition relative and subjective. A casual look at the lyrics of many, if not most, of the "worship" choruses flooding the Christian music market reveals that most express feelings of closeness to "God" or a need for an experience, as opposed to affirmation of the timeless truths of the historic faith.

In recent years, many in the "emergent" church movement have swallowed theories of radical post-modernism uncritically and welcomed the idea that Christianity is one worldview among many and some even suggest it is an act of "violence" or even "terrorism" to suggest Christianity has a claim to absolute truth. Hence Christianity becomes one more opinion in a talk show saturated society, where truth is determined by who can purchase time on the airwaves and package the product most strategically.

What then is the answer? It begins with reframing the essential question.

Protestants and Evangelicals, seeking a source of authority have traditionally asked "what does scripture say?" They do so as a habitual reaction against the authoritarian misteps of the medieval Roman Church. But the result has been endless competition about how to interpret scripture. Fragmentation, division, denominationalism and in the end, despair of any hope of unity in the "universal" church is the state of affairs today.

Catholics and Orthodox, in seeking a final authority ask instead "what does the church teach?" This is a question forged in historic battles against heresy in the early centuries of the church and is repeated in the face of the endless fragmentation of Protestantism. But the result has been an inability to self-correct when tradition has strayed beyond the confines of clear texts of Scripture.

But there is a third way, suggested by Vincent of Lerins and echoed by Thomas Oden. That is to ask not one question but two, and in a particular order. The Reformers were correct in asking first, "what does Scripture say", but to counter the individualism of the age and restore our connection to the church of history, we must ask a second question, "how has the whole church understood that authoritative body of scripture across the centuries?"

By grounding the church in the first question, we avoid the tendency to allow "tradition" to stray into unsupportable areas. But by seriously considering the second, we may avoid and perhaps even roll back much of the fragmentation that has plagued the western church for half a millennium.

But this has implications many evangelicals will not welcome and Catholics and Orthodox will also find difficult to accept as well. Evangelicals will have to abandon the practice of reinventing the Christianity with every twist and turn of culture. This will have a significant impact on how evangelicals worship, on how they approach theology, eschatology, and to a certain extent, evangelism and discipleship. Catholics and Orthodox would need to reconsider the cherished belief that what the Roman or Eastern church teaches today is necessarily equivalent to what the church has always taught, to entertain the notion that like the Jewish teachers and priests of Jesus' day, at least some cherished traditions may be of men and not necessarily of God.

In short, humility is needed. Dialog is mere monologue if one assumes a conclusion before the discussion begins. Such a dialog grounds truth not in rationalism or individualism, nor does it ground truth merely in ecclesiastical authority. Truth, instead, is grounded in the revelation of Scripture, understood and affirmed by millions of believers across twenty centuries and across a multitude of cultures. Such truth is not a mere opinion. Nor is it an authoritarian decree. It's source is supernatural, attested to by the reliability of scripture itself and the historicity of the incarnation and the cross, but also attested to by the common threads of understanding that have transcended all the debates, battles, human foibles, historical circumstances of two millennia. Such truth is summarized in the Apostles Creed, Nicene Creed and Athanasian Creed, but is also affirmed again and again in the faith statements of many, many church and parachurch organizations. And on questions that still divide, a path toward consensus may still one day become apparent.

Francis Schaeffer correctly noted that the central question of the age was one of epistemology, how we know what we know. He correctly identified that autonomous human reason was insufficient and that irrational mysticism was even worse. He identified revelation as the ultimate point of reference which enables us to make sense of God's world. I once despaired that so few understood. And even Schaeffer mourned over the disunity of the Protestant "church before the watching world". I despaired even more when radical postmodern theorists tore down not only rationalism, but rationality as well.

But Thomas Oden, by pointing to Vincent of Lerins, has pointed a way forward. Humility, based in scripture, but dedicated to listening to ALL of church history and not merely the faction we happen to be a part of at the moment, can lead us forward.