Zeal For Truth

Cultures are identified by their stories, and the Church is a culture. It follows that they Church too is defined by her story. But what is that story?

-Peter J. Leithart, Against Christianity

If you were to spend some time in a Christian Church today, would you be able to discover what their story is from the preaching you hear? More often then not, Christian preaching disregards the story. This happens in one of two ways:

First, the story is told, but only as a means to draw out abstract theoretical considerations.  What happened is therefore of far less importance then the abstractions that can be drawn out of it an universally applied to the Church.

Second,  the story is not told, and instead what is offered as preaching is not anything drawn from the Christian story, but from the stories of the world around us.  Pop psychology, self-help, and the latest in cultural trends become the message delivered to the people.

Is it any surprise then that we have a generation of Christians who either are full of only theoretical knowledge, or Christians who are nothing other then moralists? But these two things are only the way the story is disregarded, we should before going any further, answer Dr. Leithart’s question about what our story is.

The answer should be obvious, and every Christian knows it, they just simply don’t understand what it means.  The story, the Church’s story, is our history.  Beginning in the beginning, through the Old and New Testaments, through the early Church, the medieval period, the Reformation, the revivals, and right to today.  Unfortunately, the Church has not only forgotten it’s history, but has actively sought to at best limit the importance given to it, and at worse repudiate it.  All that is allowed to be discussed as the history of the church is what can be found in the scriptures from the death of Christ onwards.

The Old Testament is nice for children’s stories that offer good morals (which shows just how little these stories are stripped of what they actually say and are made into abstracts), but is really the history of the Jews.  After the New Testament the Church began to go bad very fast so we can learn very little from it.  The Reformation was a great period in Church history, but lets keep with the slogans we have inherited from it and understand them outside of any context.  Revivals are great, but let us not study the First Great Awakening.  I once read some of “Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God” and it’s obviously not what the Church needs today.  No, lets keep with what we have today, let us remember no more past Billy Graham.  We have the truth, and it’s unchangeable so why worry about the past anyway?

This view has set the Church adrift.  We are swept along with whatever currents come our way because although we may have a a solid ground under the waves in the form of scripture, we have no way to anchor to it anymore.

Stories have the ability to anchor to something. They connect us, and bind us to something, yet more then that they conform us to it.  By reading the Church’s stories, we learn what it is to live the life of someone following after God.  Although abstract theological knowledge has it’s place,  it cannot, in practice, conform us to anything.  We may learn what we are to do in general, but stories show us, in specific instances, how God’s people in the past dealt with how to live out their faith.

Christians today can deal in the abstraction, in the theoretical,  but put them into flesh and blood situations and they no longer know what to do.  No one has trained them how to act as Christians, how to follow after Christ in practice.  That is the job of stories, they show us what we can be, what we should be.  They show the failures we may have, and the successes that are possible.

More then that, if the Church has lost it’s own stories, it must seek new ones out.  Every culture, every institution, needs something to conform to; it needs stories to remember who it is.  The Church, in giving up it’s own stories, has embraced the world’s stories.  Secular humanism is the story that has crept into the Church.  Our stories allowed us to speak to all issues of society; politics, medicine, finance, religion…etc.  Today, with the stories we appropriated into the church we can speak only on religion.

This is the tragedy of modernity for the Church.  We’ve embraced the story of it, and by doing so have relegated us to observer, occasional commentator, but mostly leftover appendage trying to find something, anything but our own story, to rally around.  The Church must re-discover it’s history, it’s story.  It needs to look again at the Old Testament, and take seriously the people and stories in it.  It needs to look at it’s glorious, and sometimes not-so-glorious, history and rally around it.  Hold it up as what it means to follow after Christ, learn from it, and use it as boundaries to keep us walking on the same path we have for all of history.

The Church must become radical again.  We must cast off the philosophical positions that was not just pushed on us, but often readily embraced.  We need to begin once again work out the implications of the gospel (that is the announcement that Jesus is Lord, that He has begun to set up His Kingdom and will allow no rival one) and begin to apply it to all areas of our lives.  Only then will the world take note of the Church, only then will the world will realize the power of Christ, only then will the world see the threat that the Church posses to it.