Breaking out of Nostalgia

First addressed to a small group of ministers on 14 Sept 2010.

Ecclesiastes 7:8-10

The end of a matter is better than its beginning,and patience is better than pride. Do not be quickly provoked in your spirit,for anger resides in the lap of fools.

Do not say, “Why were the old days better than these?” For it is not wise to ask such questions.

One of the most important issues I think we need to face is the debilitating addiction to nostalgia in our churches.

The modern environment and the nostalgia trap

I believe we need to realise that we are in a new situation somewhat similar to the first two centuries of the Christian faith but also with many unique features.

The established denominations are deeply discredited in Europe because of their association with Nationalism, Imperialism and reactionary politics. Their reaction has been to embrace a relativistic liberalism rather than reform themselves. The “unestablished” denominations have made themselves irrelevant by retreating into ,firstly, otherworldly pietism and, secondly, a kind of “customer centred” churchmanship.

The above paragraph is a huge simplification and somewhat overstated but I am attempting to tell you how I see things. I believe our main opponent is NOT a dominant Islam – even less, post-modern philosophy – but a dominant secularism.

The main problem for the churches (by which I mean, of course, congregations) is that our people have lost the confidence to witness and the pastors/theologians often are not putting forward a cogent and reasonable statement of the Gospel which makes sense in a secularised world.

The man of lawlessness

I believe this was predicted in scripture 2 Thess 2:1-12. The man of sin who denies any and every God or authority above himself. This is the ruling Spirit in Europe. The restraining influence of public religion (Roman – first pagan and then Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Reformed etc.) has been taken away. The signs and wonders of modern magic (technology) mean that these things might be appreciated aesthetically but not taken seriously. Holy books and traditions, vestments, ceremonies consecrated objects and buildings, are all relativized. What matters is power, money, freedom, prosperity, health and peace.

If you want a longer (hopefully clearer) reading of the “man of sin” click here.

Incidentally, the Moslem hatred of western values stems from recognising that modernity will undermine their closed societies. Their aggression is based on the challenge to Islamic certainties. While I am not a prophet I believe that system will collapse rather than triumph. Catholicism makes similar imperial claims and had a much more powerful command structure and propaganda machine but is no longer taken seriously in the world of power politics.

I believe the USA is similar to Europe but I am no expert. There is much more church going but there seems to be a huge split between religion and practice there. In other words, the churches provide little more than a sense of blessing to secularized people. This may just be my mistaken impression.

The culture of dread

There is a climate of fear and foreboding around. A sense of the future as dystopia rather than utopia. There are probably many reasons for this.

The more people have, the more they are frightened of losing it. We are so safe and secure but people FEEL insecure. The measurable indicators are generally positive but people feel negative.

These things have been analysed by many commentators.

I just want to point out that it is not just Christians who indulge in flights of nostalgia. You find Nostalgia dominating the right wing press, the green movement, and many others beside. The “Tea Party” in the USA harks back to the simpler days of frontier life in the USA. Islamic fundamentalism is nostalgic for the “glories” of 1000 years ago. Most religious revival movements – e.g. Hinduism in India, Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Tibet – and most others are exercises in nostalgia.  Nationalism obviously gnaws at the same bone – Nazi’s, Putin’s Russia – huge sales of “alternative imperial histories”, China – resurrection of the Middle Kingdom.

So what is to be done?

Firstly, nostalgia is useless. There is no going back to an Anglican, Presbyterian or other reformed protestantism regaining it’s power over the population. As the spiritual heirs of anabaptism we should have no part in the nostalgia for the “stitch-up” of the Elizabethan church settlement which we find in so many christians – even free church people.

We in the free churches have other ways of disappearing back into “Old Time Religion” too. We hang on to the methods, songs and slogans of bygone eras and pray that God would bless them again and we forget that most of them were novelties and innovations in the day of their power. Now they are stale and weary.

When we pray for spiritual revival we are often asking for God to take us back to the 18th century or the London of Spurgeon’s day. So much Christian discourse today is the language of recovery (getting back to a previous state of affairs).

My interest in the book of Revelation has shown me that most evangelicals prefer a non-historical reading of the book. Either the circular and repetitive interpretations which see the writer going over the same ground seven to ten times or the futurist readings which see the clock of history frozen until the rapture or some other event sets it ticking. These two schools of interpretation seem opposite but they are not. They are both anti-historical with regard to the present.

Our business is to be subversive. “Tearing down strongholds” 2 Cor 10:3-5. I know this verse is in the context of church discipline but it is about rooting out pagan or sub-christian beliefs. Our preaching and witnessing has to attack these things head on with the Gospel. There are Pastors and preachers doing this in the Western world but not nearly enough. This is why so many of our people do not know how to witness.

The early believers won the argument on four levels:

1. experience – they KNEW God,
2. community – the love and loyalty of believers was a great sign that the Kingdom of God was near,
3. rationality – their Gospel made more sense than paganism,
4. hope – the general resurrection, the forgiveness of sin and the world to come loomed large.

Revelation 12:11 They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.

My ambition is to see churches like this planted and growing.

Arguments over Creationism, Sabbaths, philosophy, spirituality and fine points of doctrine or practice must not get in the way of the main thing. How do we build Christ-centred, sacrificing churches?

1. Experiencing God.
   This is God’s initiative. I have one suggestion:
   Fasting.
   From food. From work. From diversion. From entertainment. From sexual relations.You may ask why I do not mention prayer. In my experience it only works when I pray for others but not myself. So get others to pray for you.
2. Community.
   I think we are all aware of this challenge. Mobility has weakened the bonds of fellowship in our churches. I used to think the answer was the “Local Church” but this has become meaningless when people move so often. One answer is long pastorates but I need helpful suggestions with this.
3. Rationality.
   This problem has been racking evangelicalism ever since rise of Deism in 17^th c. We have a revealed faith. In Scripture and in Christ. Yet we also claim that it can be reconciled with reality because it is the only revealed religion which is also true. So we need always to demonstrate that the propositions we are building our lives on conform to reality. I think we are backing ourselves into corners with some of our thinking – presupositionalism and foundationalism – both of which lead to the idea that there is little contact between the rationality of the regenerate and unregenerate and can be like inhabiting a parallel universe. I think Lloyd-Jones book on authority is too simplistic on this too.
4. Hope.
   Life is largely driven by hope. I am heartened by the renewed emphasis on resurrection in a lot of recent teaching. Yet sloppy talk about heaven and hell is still common. But things are much better than they were. The power of a strong hope is better understood. Not just the hope of personal bodily resurrection but the hope of a renewed creation and a world ruled by justice and righteousness. BUT so many christians still don’t get it.

   And it is not yet a strong part of our witness.

So many of my brothers are so busy they do not have time to meditate or consider how to engage this new situation. It is tempting to blame the present and wish the past back into existence. But we are in the centre of God’s historical purpose. We do not look back to the Garden of Eden – We look forward to the City of God.

The Post Modern revival of Creationism

I have been really shaken by the way so many brothers in ministry have embraced Creationism.

It seems they feel justified in rejecting virtually all Geology, Astronomy and much of Biology on “presuppositional” grounds. Since they believe science is ruled by atheistic (i.e. naturalistic) assumptions they feel no shame in teaching a simple and wooden Bible literalism which over-rides all these others ways of finding truth.

They have a radical doctrine of the fall of man which concludes that all human effort to understand our environment is so sinful that it is bound to be guilty and wrong. Natural philosophy (science) and speculative philosophy are denounced as projects of “autonomous man” – that hopelessly wicked brute who will concoct and embrace any lie which enables him to contradict the literal meaning of Bible texts.

This arrogance does not befit the Christian. Did not John Calvin (and the ancient fathers before him) teach us about divine “accommodation”. That if God did not stoop to our level in the scriptures we could understand nothing of him? That we only see through a glass darkly.

It is true that when Calvin said God “lisps” he was referring to anthropomorphic Bible language about the Divine Being (Link Here). But since God also understood the immensity of creation through Time and Space and the complexity of its structure is it not clear that He used similar “Baby Talk” when teaching of creation? When scripture says “He also made the stars” it gives no clue that there are hundreds of thousands of galaxies each of which contains a million stars (typically) around which orbit an unknown and unknowable number of worlds.

The separation of earth and sea depends on plate techtonics working over time spans we cannot conceive without which this globe would be under a mile of water. But God has left it to us to work out the details.

In the same way, the making of Adam from earth (the same earth from which the animals sprang a day earlier) tells us that we share an earthy nature with them but that unlike them the breath of God has been given to us in a special way – Genesis 2:7. Modern Biology may have related us so closely to the animals that it makes some Christians uncomfortable but it seems God’s word has given us the main gist in an amazing brevity.

How could scripture have given a summary of what we now know through Science without becoming a tortuously complicated set of documents? The great message of redemption through Christ would have been buried in a vast divinely inspired encyclopaedia! Copying by hand would have taken a longer time than cathedral-building. And since, to this day, scientists are very aware how little we still know I guess a scientifically accurate Bible would need to be bigger still.

Actually, Creationism is characterised by a guilty “autonomy”. The third law of thermodynamics and all sorts of sample data are twisted. Only men who “know” they are right are capable of the special pleading and selective reporting of these people. Check out the patient work of talkorigins.org or Christians in Science who try to call people back to their senses and away from idealistic philosophy pretending to be either Bible Study or Science.

I fear so much of this patient work is wasted. Creationists are post-moderns. Like all the other sects they interpret the universe from their own vantage point. They deny that unbelievers are capable of finding or recognising truth. They inhabit an island of knowledge cut off from a mainland of sinful pseudo-knowledge which the rest of us inhabit.

Christians like myself who claim both to trust scripture and believe in an Old Earth, big bang cosmology and biological evolution are anomalies who are best seen as closet unbelievers or dupes of the system.

I note that many 19th c. calvinists had no great problem with Old Earth geology and early evolutionism because they had a world-view which included a strong providence, a real but limited natural theology and the doctrine of scriptural accommodation. Why are we abandoning that wisdom now?