LAODICEANS

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

I have two communication maxims. Anglicans can say less longer than anyone in Christendom. And if three differrent people listen to something you said or read something you wrote and emerge with three different interpretations of your meaning, you are an abysmally awful communicator.

Both of these were recently illustrated by an address Rowan Williams gave in the Diocese of Guildford. Dr. Williams grappled with two particularly difficult Biblical passages for modern Christian liberals, John 14:5-6 and Acts 4:8-12:

"And so out of these two powerful and heavily-charged texts comes the classic Christian conviction: what we encounter in Jesus Christ is simply the truth. It is the truth about God and the truth about humanity. Not living into that truth and accepting it, has consequences because this is the last word about God and God’s creation. So we speak of the finality of Christ. There’s nothing more to know. Or we speak of the uniqueness of Christ. No one apart from Jesus of Nazareth expresses the truth like this.

"That is what is so problematic for so many people in our world today. It’s not just a question about people of other faiths (though it’s partly that). It’s also a question about how we in general communicate what we believe, and about what we believe God is doing in the world. And in the last forty years or so, the problems around the classical interpretation of these texts have been more and more highlighted. They fall into three broad groups, and in the first part of what I’m going to say I just want to look at the kinds of objection that have been raised to those classical interpretations of the texts."

The first one is obvious. What if some poor person somewhere never heard the message of the Gospel?

"The first difficulty is moral. What kind of God is it who makes salvation or eternal life dependent on what’s always going to be a rather chancy matter? What about all those people who never had a chance of hearing about Jesus? What about all those who have heard about Jesus but have not understood or waited to find out? What about the generations before Jesus? What about the whole realm of non-Christian culture untouched for centuries by the Christian gospel? Can we believe in a just God who — in effect — punishes people for not being in the right place at the right time? This is a moral objection based on the character of the God we say we believe in.

"This, of course, is precisely the motivation that has fueled the careers of men like Billy Graham. This is also what sends men and women into organizations like the Open-Air Mission, sends others out on other missionary endeavors where they may even lay down their lives in the Master’s service and sends still others to parks and street corners to make complete fools of themselves. "

So that those who haven’t heard the Gospel hear it.

And since Jesus Himself was rejected while He walked the Earth, all we can do is proclaim what we know. Whether men and women accept what we tell them is up to God.

"If you claim that Christ is the final truth about God and the universe, doesn’t that give you a perfect excuse for trying to shut up anyone who says different? Isn’t this part of the justification for crusading and colonialism and wicked things like that? Isn’t it a recipe for contempt towards a large part of the human race? Doesn’t it simply enshrine with a theological surround or mount, prejudices about the superiority of our culture?"

Leave aside Dr. Williams’ crude dig at “colonialism”(most British colonies were business ventures) for the moment and consider this. Some people think that Jonathan Edwards’ celebrated sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God was an appalling bit of Puritan hellfire and brimstone.

I don’t and here’s why. Suppose you were out some place with family and friends when you suddenly noticed your kids running full-speed toward the edge of a cliff. A cliff that you knew dropped 500 feet and ended in jagged rocks.

Would you calmly and quietly address your children, urging them to stop? Or would you scream at your kids at the top of your lungs? Thought so.

If you seriously believed that Hell was a real place or condition, would you not use every device you could to keep everyone you loved or even didn’t love away from it? Because if you wouldn’t, you don’t seriously believe in Hell.

Similarly, if you claim to believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life and that no one comes to the Father except through Him, would you not rather insist upon that point even at the risk of “offending” those who don’t accept it? Because if you wouldn’t…

"And that connects with the third group of objections and difficulties which you could call philosophical. Every truth is spoken in the terms of its own culture and its own times. What could we possibly mean by saying that truth expressed in the Middle East two thousand years ago was a truth applicable to everybody, everywhere? Wouldn’t this be to lift our claims right out of the realm of ordinary human conversation to claim something inhuman and actually indefensible and unsustainable?"

No. 2+2=4 was true 2,000 years ago and is still true now. If we say that we believe that the incarnate Son of the living God died to pay for the sins of the whole world 2,000 years ago, it must still be true since I know of nothing that has superseded it. And quite frankly, explains Dr. Williams, there are quite a few people nowadays who are just not down with that.

"In one form or another, those are the great objections that have been mounted to traditional Christian doctrine in recent decades. In one form or another you will probably hear them among the ordinary people with whom you converse about the faith. These are ordinary people who are not particularly easy or relaxed about the idea that there might be a truth beyond all change. These are also people who are uneasy about the perception that believing in absolute truth necessarily makes you a bigot and intolerant and exclusive towards those of other convictions. In other words, belief in the uniqueness or finality of Christ in the way it’s usually been understood is something that sits very badly indeed not just with a plural society (whatever that means) but with a society that regards itself as liberal or democratic."

So what should Christians do about it?

And if we’re to commend the Christian faith in our own social and cultural context

Oh for the love of…2+2=4 unless “our own social and cultural context” demands that 2+2=7? Is truth true or is it not? Dr. Williams, we Christians are to commend the Christian faith. Period!!

"We need to be very sure what we’re commending and how to meet some of these objections. It’s possible of course that you may feel the objections don’t need to be met and the answer is to give up on the uniqueness or finality of Jesus Christ. For reasons I’ll try to explain a bit later, I don’t think that’s a very sensible or useful strategy."

Well, that’s good to know. Dr Williams continues.

"What the New Testament does not say is, ‘unless you hold the following propositions to be true there is no life for you’. What it does say is, ‘without a vital relationship with Jesus Christ who is the word of God made flesh, you will not become what you were made to be. You will not live into the fullness of your human destiny.’ And it’s this claim — not so much about unique truth in a form of words but about unique relationship with Jesus — which I want to explore a little with you.

"‘No one comes to the Father except through me’, says Jesus. In other words if you are to be reconciled as a son or daughter with the God that Jesus calls ‘Father’ then it is in association with him and in walking his way that that becomes a reality: walking his way, not just having the right ideas about him, not even just repeating what he says, but following him. Then if we turn to Acts put into slightly plainer English, what Peter is saying to the authorities in Jerusalem is something like this: ‘If you are to find life and healing, you must turn towards the one you rejected and despised; because there is no name on which you can call for rescue, except the name of the one you crucified’. I emphasize the word ‘you’ there. Peter is not preaching in the abstract. He is saying to those who crucified Jesus, ‘If you want to be rescued from the trap in which you have locked yourself, the only name on which you may call for rescue is the name of the one you killed.’ And that is the conversion or repentance he asks for.

"Now I say this about the texts before us not to try and evacuate them of the meaning that has traditionally been given, but to note how both of them in their different way are presented as a challenge to change your life. What is the way to the Father? The Father cannot be shown as an object in the sky - something you can point to. The Father is discovered as you walk with Jesus towards cross and resurrection, and the challenge in Acts is the challenge, ‘turn towards the one you have rejected and there you will find your hope’. The difficulty comes when we try and translate those ‘challenge’ statements into abstract and general statements; when we turn them into third person rather than first and second person statements. There lies a great deal of our difficulty, I would say.

"But of course they do pre-suppose third-person statements of a kind. And both those biblical texts with which I began take for granted something like this: we are in fact deprived of the knowledge that could lead to life as human beings, and we are in fact locked in patterns of destructive behaviour. We need as a matter of fact, rescue. We need to be set free to be what we were created to be - and we were created to be something in particular. We were created to be sons and daughters of the heavenly Father. So part of the New Testament claim is actually that there’s something about human beings which is true universally; an orientation, a magnetic ‘drawing-towards’ the source of all things, and a capacity to relate to the source of all things, not simply as someone who obeys or thinks, but as someone who is related intimately and intensely; like a child to a father. That’s what human beings are made for. That is where the deepest springs of our humanity are to be found. We are designed for that relationship because in that relationship we become free. We become free to be ourselves, free to love the God who made us and who has saved us, free to echo and imitate the self-giving love of that God in our life day after day. That’s what we’re for.

"And that depends in believing that God in God’s own self is already a pattern of loving relationship: the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit. There is for all eternity a place for us to stand. There is not only the Father, but the Son and the Spirit. We can step into the stream of the divine life by clutching on to Christ and being held there by the Spirit. And this is a reminder – once again – that to grow into what we were designed to be, is not something in our hands depending on our actions or on our ideas. It is something which the eternal Son and the eternal Spirit bring about as a gift."

I have no argument with any of that. Then Dr. Williams begins channelling Katharine Jefferts Schori.

"That, I believe, is what the New Testament is claiming. And the questions that it puts to us are questions not only about the position of Christianity in relation to other religions, but a question about whether we believe there is something that is true in, and for, all human beings. Or do human beings have different needs and different destinies? Ought we to be saying that what is good for this group is not good for that group? Ought we to be saying that to be a child of God is fine for some people but not for others? Put in those terms, the first of the problems that I started by identifying, looks slightly different. The unfairness is not in God arbitrarily deciding that if you don’t believe that, you’re out. Unfairness would be not trying to share that human possibility as broadly as possible. It would be unfair if there were somehow no access at all to that mysterious truth of our own being. And if we emphasize the work of the Son and the Holy Spirit in this, rather than human effort alone, we may well understand that what we see of people’s relationship to Jesus and the Father isn’t necessarily all that’s going on. There is a truth about human beings. God has revealed it in Jesus Christ and revealed himself in that action. That’s what we know. And how those who don’t encounter that mystery explicitly and directly, are related to Jesus and the Father, we can’t know and we’d better not pretend that we do. The unfairness would be in saying that there is no access for some at all, or in saying that we don’t have to bother to share."

So is Jesus the way, the truth and the life or isn’t He? Damned if Rowan Williams knows.

"But you can also see perhaps how the second, the ‘political’ objection, might look different. If we’re speaking about the action of God through the Son and the Spirit to bring about a relationship to the Father then clearly how that is culturally expressed – the words and the forms that it finds – are not of themselves what make a difference. And this mystery of growing into human fulfillment and fruition through the Son and the Spirit is not something that can be enforced by human power. It belongs to the act of God. The more you believe that God really is God, the less you believe God needs to be protected by human beings from the consequences of his own recklessness. And so you may find yourself emerging with a more critical attitude to human power and local culture and cultural superiority. You may find that there’s more critical edge if you take something more like the classical belief. But at the very least, if you truly believe that what the New Testament is talking about is a living relationship with Jesus in the Spirit brought about by the gift of God, you will look a little bit skeptically at any claim that this or that cultural or political force can guarantee it. That would be to put humanity where God belongs.

"And that again may help us a little bit with the philosophical objection. What’s being claimed is not that there is an absolutely sacred form of words that tells us everything we need to know, guaranteed and stamped from heaven and sent down to earth. It is to say that there is something about human nature which is beyond change and negotiation; something about the way we are as humans. Complete relativism about human beings is not actually something that can be sustained. It’s not something any of us assumes. We don’t in fact talk as though it were alright for some races to be discriminated against or for some people to be tortured. We assume that there is a solid, human foundation of dignity. We assume that what’s good for me and for my neighbour is at the very least going to look quite similar at the end of the day, whatever cultural and local differences there are.

"So, ‘uniqueness’ and ‘finality’: we believe as Christians that because of Jesus Christ a new phase in human history – not just the history of the Middle East or of Europe – has opened. There is now a community representing on earth the new creation, a restored humanity. There is now on earth a community which proclaims God’s will for universal reconciliation and God’s presence in and among us leading us towards full humanity. That is something which happens as a result of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. Uniqueness, yes, in the sense that this ‘turning of a historical epoch’, this induction of a new historical moment, can only happen because of the one event and the narratives around it. And finality? Christians have claimed and will still claim that when you have realized God calls you simply as human being, into that relationship of intimacy which is enjoyed by Jesus and which in Jesus reflects the eternal intimacy of the different moments and persons in the being of God, then you understand something about God which cannot be replaced or supplemented. The finality lies in the recognition that now there is something you cannot forget about God and humanity, and that you cannot correct as if it were simply an interesting theory about God and humanity."

But we can still have interfaith encounters and stuff.

"Does this then create problems for dialogue and learning? Does it make us intolerant? Does it commit us to saying, ‘…and everybody else is going to hell’? First, in true dialogue with people of different faiths or convictions we expect to learn something: we expect to be different as a result of the encounter. We don’t as a rule expect to change our minds. We come with conviction and gratitude and confidence, but it’s the confidence that I believe allows us to embark on these encounters hoping that we may learn. That is not to change our conviction, but to learn. And I think it works a bit like this. When we sit alongside the Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, we expect to see in their humanity something that challenges and enlarges ours. We expect to receive something from their humanity as a gift to ours. It’s a famous and much-quoted statement in the Qur’an that God did not elect to make everybody the same. God has made us to learn in dialogue. And to say that I have learned from a Buddhist or a Muslim about God or humanity is not to compromise where I began. Because the infinite truth that is in the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit is not a matter which can be exhausted by one set of formulae or one set of practices. I may emerge from my dialogue as confident as I have ever been about the Trinitarian nature of God and the finality of Jesus, and yet say that I’ve learned something I never dreamed of, and that my discipleship is enriched in gratitude and respect."

Let’s see. I claim to believe that Jesus is the only way home to God. And yet, I have something to “learn” from someone who claims that He is only one of many paths to God. Makes sense.

"In short and in conclusion, belief in the uniqueness and finality of Jesus Christ – for all the assaults made upon it in the modern age – remains for the Christian a way of speaking about hope for the entire human family."

A way?

"And because it’s that, we are bound to say something about it. We are very rightly suspicious of proselytism, of manipulative, bullying, insensitive approaches to people of other faiths which treat them as if they knew nothing, as if we had nothing to learn and as if the tradition of their reflection and imagination were of no interest to us or God."

Like Billy Graham?

"But God save us also from the nervousness about our own conviction which doesn’t allow us to say that we speak about Jesus because we believe he matters. We believe he matters because we believe that in him human beings find their peace. Their destinies converge and their dignities are fully honoured. And all the work that we as Christians want to do for the sake of convergent human destiny and fullness of human dignity has its root in that conviction that there is no boundary around Jesus – that what he is and does and says and suffers is in principle liberatingly relevant to every human being; past, present and future.

"The challenge is partly re-connecting our christology (what we say about Jesus and the Trinity) with our anthropology (our sense of what belongs properly to human beings); and rightly understood, I think that the belief in Jesus’ uniqueness and finality allows us to do this. And, rightly understood, I believe it also allows us to encounter both the religious and the non-religious other with the generous desire to share, and the humble desire to learn, and the patience to let God work out his purpose as is best in his eyes."

I have a request. After reading Dr. Williams’ piece, does anybody know if Rowan Williams considers Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth and the life or not? Because I’m pretty much completely stumped.