Confidence in the Gospel - Alison Morgan
Recently we got a map and put little stickers all over it so
that we could see where ReSource has worked over the last 3 years. We
did know we’ve been working hard, but even so the results
surprised us. We have worked in 23 dioceses, facilitated 28 deanery or
regional gatherings, spoken at 15 conferences and engaged with more
parishes than there was space to mark. We now know why we are tired;
but what have we learned?
For me it’s been a fascinating process, after years given
primarily to writing and ministry in a single parish. What is the issue
the church finds most difficult today? Tim Sledge put his finger on it
as we ate sandwiches together in Northampton. It’s
confidence. We live in a culture which dents and knocks our confidence
as Christians. And so “does this stuff really
work?” is probably the question most ordinary Christians in
this country would like to have a convincing answer to. It’s
expressed in different ways; but whether people are saying help us to
know how to pray for healing, or to find ways of developing our
mission, or to deepen our relationship with God, or to encourage our
people, what they really mean is perhaps just this: can we actually
have confidence in this ancient faith of ours? Do we really have
something which people out there need and want – or not?
Why is it so hard to keep our spirits up? Well, there’s the
issue of declining congregations. There’s the scientific
fundamentalism of Richard Dawkins. There’s the pressure of
Islam and the threat of faith-based terrorism, fenced round with the
secularist call for us to unite around a shared belief in nothing, a
position held up as the epitomy of maturity and tolerance. And
there’s the picknmix world of enticing alternative
spiritualities, most of which demand no time-consuming commitment and
threaten nothing more dangerous than the risk of ridicule.
But maybe there’s a deeper cause too. Maybe it’s
something to do with where we are at as a society. Every person in
every culture has to come up with the answers to two basic questions:
how do we know things, and how do we make sense of them? Those answers
form a worldview, one which most people never examine, but which they
live by nonetheless. But we are living in an extraordinary time of
philosophical and cultural change. It’s very confusing; like
living through an earthquake, standing on the shifting tectonic plates
of different ways of doing things
.
Now most people don’t realise this, because they are busy at
the gym or doing the shopping or sitting in a traffic jam. But
historically our culture is founded on two quite different worldviews.
The first was the Hebrew worldview. It offers faith-based answers. We
know things through revelation; in the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God. What we know, we know because
God tells us; and he tells us through story. The scriptures tell the
story of the relationship between man and God in the context of a
bigger story which runs from the creation of the world in time to its
recreation in eternity. Jesus is made known through story, and we find
meaning for our lives through finding our own part in that story.
The problem with the Hebrew worldview is that whilst it gives good
answers to the question about purpose – my purpose is my part
in the story – it gives bad answers to the question about
knowledge. Attempts to understand the world we live in from within this
revelation-based epistemological framework led to controversy and
ultimately rejection – revelation does not help us to
understand the rings of Saturn or the laws of gravity. And so from
about the 13th century we turned to a different worldview: that of the
Greeks. Medieval scholars pored in excitement over the newly translated
works of Aristotle. Galileo and Darwin and Freud followed in the
footsteps of Archimedes, Euclid and Pythagoras in seeking to understand
reality by thinking about it rather than by trusting in it; and a new,
scientific worldview was born. It’s one which has brought
astonishing advances in our ability to understand and manipulate the
world we live in. But its disadvantage is that it has nothing at all to
say to us about purpose. The result: journalist Clifford Longley
comments:
"Having constructed a
society of unprecedented sophistication, convenience and prosperity,
nobody can remember what it was supposed to be for. Just enjoying it
does not seem to be enough. Indeed enjoyment as an end in itself
quickly turns to ashes in the mouth. Not only is it boringly bland. It
is even more boringly purposeless. There is more to human life than
comfort, entertainment and the avoidance of suffering."[1]
Or, as Chinese philosopher T Carver Yu puts it, we now live in a
society of technological optimism and literary despair.[2]
It’s been said that we are the only people in the whole of
history to have supposed that a mechanistic and individualistic
understanding of life offers the way to become fulfilled and whole
persons.[3] And so in our frustration we are beginning to look beyond
our scientific worldview, beginning again to ask the questions about
purpose and story and our own place in it. The problem is, we
can’t wind the clock back. The Hebrew worldview now seems
ancient and outmoded. Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins, along with
others, have tried to extend the boundaries of science beyond the
‘how’ questions into the ‘why’
questions – but while their science is presumably impeccable,
their philosophy or theology is laughably amateur. Science is a lousy
vehicle for meaning, however hard you try; and a lousy vehicle
therefore for matters of the human soul.
Where does this leave us as a society, as we try to fit a revealed
faith into a scientific straitjacket which leaves no room for our
souls? Perhaps in what has been called a ‘cultural
millenopause’,[4] in something of a crisis of purpose, where
people engage in a resurgence of spirituality and ask renewed questions
about the source and nature of human happiness, but direct scarcely a
backward glance towards Jesus – who after all is the story
before yesterday.
And yet only 3 weeks ago I had a conversation with Dawn. Dawn had gone
to the city centre to do her Easter shopping, and had found herself
caught up in Leicester’s reenactment of the Passion of
Christ. Gazing at Jesus on the cross, Dawn’s life changed.
Suddenly aware that this Jesus was speaking to her, demanding a
response, she found someone to pray with and committed her life to him.
And then, she said, she was left standing there wondering why on earth
she’d thought she needed to do all this shopping, to buy all
these things she didn’t need.
A week after that I met Lydia, this time in a village on the shores of
Lake Malawi. Could we pray for her, she asked. She had been unable to
sleep since the sudden death of her brother a year before, and as she
prepared the food for the SOMA conference we were leading she wondered
if maybe here lay an answer to her need. Lydia too committed her life
to Christ. The next morning, 70 conference delegates found themselves
without breakfast; for Lydia was fast asleep.
Neither Dawn nor Lydia had, I imagine, given much thought to the rival
merits of the Hebrew and Greek world views. And yet both had responded
to Jesus, aware that their life lacked the settled peace they craved.
Maybe it is open to us not to wind the clock back so much as to offer a
new way of thinking about life, one based neither on revelation nor on
scientific expertise, but simply on relationship. It’s been
comparatively easy for us, as the church, to offer a culturally
compatible social gospel which ruffled no secularist feathers but
stopped short of bringing people into the kind of relationship with
Jesus which Dawn and Lydia have found. It’s not been too hard
either to offer a doctrinally correct gospel in which we believe all
the right things with a fashionable scientific exactitude - but Dawn
and Lydia have often found it rather hard to connect with. Is there
another way?
Well, philosopher Michael Polanyi has suggested there is. He points out
that we cannot know things outside a fiduciary framework –
that there is no such thing as an ‘objective’
understanding, however much Dawkins may like to claim that there is.[5]
Knowledge comes, as Einstein said, not in a vacuum of objectivity but
as a hypothesis – one you have to commit yourself to in order
to test it out, to see if it holds up. The claim that it can be arrived
at objectively, without some prior assumption which acts as a
foundation, is false.
And that takes us back to the word ‘confidence’
with which we began. The word confidence means ‘with
faith’ – con-fid-ence. The true basis of confidence
is not optimism, hope, or carefully cultivated certitude, but
relationship – relationship with one in whom we have faith,
in whom we can trust. How do we know things, and how do we make sense
of them? Well, perhaps best of all in relationship, with God as first
of all with our own parents. In relationship with one who said he was
God, one who is both the writer of the story and the creator of the
universe; a relationship which is made possible only through the
presence in our lives of the Holy Spirit, sent to make us alive in ways
we were not alive before – as Dawn and Lydia have found.
‘The time is ripe for a redefinition of the faith’,
John Drane has suggested. Jesus stands outside both the worldviews we
have inherited, offering us not primarily a part in the history of a
people, or an understanding of the created world, but a personal
relationship which will change our very being, and draw us into a
completely new place. ‘If ever there was a time to rediscover
Jesus the Messiah, it is now’, Frost and Hirsch suggest.
‘It is possible that the story of Jesus may find a hearing
once more, if it can be cleansed of its institutional accretions and
retold in simplicity and honesty’, Michael Riddell writes.
‘Jesus emerged from the interviews with a good
reputation’, Nick Spencer reports from a series of
discussions with people outside the Church.[6] Christianity is a
person. He’s a person who, when you meet him, offers you the
sudden realisation that you no longer need to buy all that stuff, or to
toss and turn in your bed at night. Why should we have confidence in
this good news we share? Well, because it makes a difference. It
actually works.
[1] Quoted in Roy McCloughry, Living in the presence of the future, IVP 2001, p 32.
[2] Truth and authentichHumanity, Dr Carver T Yu, www.gospel-culture.org.uk.
[3] John Drane, The McDonaldization of the Church – spirituality,
creativity and the future of the Church, DLT 2000, p 20.
[4] Gerard Kelly, Get a grip on the future without losing your hold on the past, Monarch 1999.
[5] Michael Polanyi, Personal knowledge, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1958.
[6] Frost & Hirsch, The Shaping of things to come, Hendrikson
Publishers 2003, p 113; Michael Riddell, Threshold of the future, SPCK
1998, p 115; Nick Spencer, Beyond the fringe – researching a
spiritual age, LICC 2005, p 19.
