So the younger generations don’t attend church?
Maybe that’s because they see the church as the “new atheists” charge, having blind faith, which is often articulated in these terms:
• An all-powerful deity controls everything, even calamities and evils – which he could eliminate but chooses not to for inscrutable reasons. He once drowned everyone on earth, except for a family of eight, as punishment for sin.
• Jesus was God on earth, performing miracles (such as walking on water) to show his divine power.
• As the glorified Christ he now rules the world (despite appearances), but only Christians are destined for heaven.
• His church is triumphant and militant; its mission is to convert everyone, regardless of their quality of faith – Jew or Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist – into Christians.
Such matters are learned uncritically and stick in the popular mind, reinforced by the strident fundamentalism of televangelists. I think there are two reasons for this distortion. One is the shift in the meaning of “faith,” the other is lack of biblical interpretation.
What does “faith” mean? We must distinguish it from “belief.” The modern meaning of having faith is “believing certain things to be true.” The stress falls on creeds, a series of affirmations to which we give credence. But this is a very modern way of thinking. The 18th-century Enlightenment made everything intellectual and rational, including belief. Hence the search for proofs of divine existence, something the Bible never thought of. To determine one’s faith by beliefs is an appeal to reason – principal Walter Bryden of Knox College, Toronto, used to lament the ascendancy of what he called “rational orthodoxy.”
The original meaning of belief was trusting yourself completely to someone. “Believing” was akin to the old word “beloving” – an active way of life rather than right doctrine. What came first was not articles of faith but discipleship. This did not necessarily involve the heavy Christology of the great creeds of the first six centuries – indeed creeds were not to be taken literally, as we tend to now (you didn’t sign them, you sang them).
Classical theology acknowledged that we can’t know much about God, whose essence is hidden, incomprehensible (a favourite term) to mere human intellects. Augustine: “If you understand it, it’s not God.”
The Bible’s many names for God are similes or metaphors – God is like a shepherd, a rock, a father, a mother, etc. Each name must be qualified to get at the higher truth it signifies. The positive alone tends to idolize God, turning names into real attributes.
God is greater than we can conceive and the Bible’s names help us rise above everything earthly to meditate on the transcendent Mystery.
“God” has many names but, beyond them all, remains anonymous. The privileged name in the New Testament is that of Jesus the Christ, and even that is subordinate to God (e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:28). And exactly just how Jesus fulfilled the messianic role was open to various interpretations in the early church, before the creeds solidified it by defining him as eternally divine, equal with Father and Spirit. Throughout church history, theologians were reluctant to admit that God can suffer. The Crucified became the Glorified; a “theology of glory” came to displace the original “theology of the cross.”
Faith in the Christ was not a question of a formal set of propositions, as in our modern understanding of the creed, but “the practice of the presence of God,” that is, of the Crucified. Thus a community of the faithful gathered for worship (of the indefinable God) and practiced works of love and justice (Kingdom acts) without demanding uniformity on exactly how the fact of Christ was understood.
Must we take the doctrines that cause so much trouble today – creation, original sin, Noah’s flood, virgin birth, miracles of nature, bodily resurrection-ascension – literally, that is, as history? Can they be understood in non-literal ways? The gospels are not history but witness and argument. John Calvin was fond of the term “improper” to describe our God-talk, for in the Bible “God walks softly as with a mother step” and “prattles (balbutit) to us” in a sort of baby talk.
As to biblical authority, our failure to honour the insights of interpretation has created a laity who are fundamentalists by default. How can we read scripture, with its various kinds of literature, aright if we don’t recognize the need for interpretation? And how can we interpret if we have not been given the tools? (Our clergy can hardly do this in 20 minutes weekly.) The true scripture is the interpreted scripture: “a text without context becomes pretext for prooftext.” The classic view was a fourfold interpretation: literal (i.e. literary), allegorical, moral and mystical.
Not only our younger generations but also many who still attend church have legitimate doctrinal doubts. Surrounded by high-tech hype of New Age, world religions, cosmic possibilities, self-help – no wonder our simple narrative preaching does not turn folks on. If there is still a “famine for the Word of God” as Jeremiah said, let’s make sure it’s the authentic Word for today and not a hangover from modernity with its trust in reason and “systematic” theology. The reformers taught theology indirectly – they interpreted scripture and commented on such theological “topics” as arose from the texts. So we must beware of making theology into a system that lacks life. Christian faith is more than mere belief, and scripture is more than meets the eye.
