“Britain’s most dynamic churches are evangelical congregations whose conservative moral values are directly at odds with the liberal consensus.”
This was the observation of Times columnist James Marriott in a fascinating comment column in yesterday’s edition. Entitled JD Vance shows the future of Christianity, he goes on to argue that the conservative Catholicism of Donald Trump’s running-mate is a countercultural form of dissent.
I don’t know much about Marriott apart from him being one of “the millennial intellectuals. He does not seem to have any particular religious affiliation , which makes his commentary more thought-provoking.
Essentially he is arguing that Vance — the first millennial to appear on an American presidential ticket — practises, as a RC convert, a faith which stands against the liberal consensus, a faith which sets him apart.
Marriott points out that Vance belongs to the first generation in American history for whom church attendance is an anomaly, not the norm. No longer is church attendance a defining feature of being American. In fact, as he observes, the US is now far advanced down the path of European-style secularisation.
Furthermore he argues that the forms of Christianity that are fading fastest are those that have most conscientiously adapted themselves to 21st-century mores. For the church to try to adapt to popular culture, he would argue, is a recipe for disaster.
Here I recall the classic quote from the 19th century, American evangelist, J. Wilbur Chapman: “It is not the ship in the water but the water in the ship that sinks it. So it is not the Christian in the world but the world in the Christian that constitutes the danger.”
Marriott surprisingly makes a similar point but from a different vantage point: “The forms of Christianity best adapted to a secular future are probably the most distinctive and uncompromising.” In other words for a church to grow, it needs to go against the flow of popular culture.
And so the challenge for anyone who would follow Christ is how to engage with the world along with its secular operating system, to be in the world but not of the world.
Here we have much to thank the late John Stott for his teaching on double listening. What we need, he claimed, is a Christian mind that’s “shaped by the truths of historic, biblical Christianity and also fully immersed in the realities of the contemporary world.”
Here he argues for a double refusal. First, we refuse to escape from the world. We must not become so absorbed in our Bible study that the Word never comes into contact with the world. We refuse to retreat into a Christian ghetto. And secondly, we refuse to conform to the world, to accept uncritically the views of writers like James Marriott!
In the words of the apostle Paul (as translated by J B Phillips), we refuse “to let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within.” And God speaks to us directly, heart to heart, in Jesus, his living Word through the word of scripture.
The danger here is that we fail to judge the world by God’s word and instead judge the word by the world’s standards. There the water gets into the boat.
So to quote Stott: “We listen to the Word with humble reverence, anxious to understand it, and resolved to believe and obey what we come to understand.”
But at the same time: “We listen to the world with critical alertness, anxious to understand it too, and resolve not necessarily to believe and obey it, but to sympathize with it and to seek grace to discover how the gospel relates to it.”
Here we have to be alert to the danger of trying to be relevant at the cost of downplaying or even – heaven forbid – side-lining the cross. For fundamentally it is the “word of the cross” which is at the heart of our faith while being foolish, even abhorrent to contemporary cultures.
I’m currently re-reading Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, for me a truly remarkable book. (Buy or borrow a copy). Here she writes: “The scandalous “word of the cross” is not a human word. It is the Spirit-empowered presence of God in the preaching of the crucified One.”
For when we speak the cross, we are speaking the very power of God, the very essence of our faith. Again to quote Rutledge: “To summarize, then: the crucifixion is the touchstone of Christian authenticity, the unique feature by which everything else, including the resurrection, is given its true significance.”
Essentially it is the cross of Jesus – “a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23) - which makes us counter-cultural, to go against the flow.
And so Jesus calls us to take up our cross and so follow him, the Lord of glory before whom every knee shall bow. Okay we will face ridicule or rejection, we will be dismissed as intolerant or irrelevant. That’s par for the course – but it is the only course we may take.
But as we bend down to shoulder our cross, we are realizing the very presence of God, the God whom the world longs to know, the God who has resolved to heal and restore his broken creation.
And we walk against the crowd.
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