Why is that so challenging? It is challenging because our faith ties us to specific truths from the past. Those truths must be clinged to if we are to maintain our ties with that past and our faith. At the same time, the world has been constantly changing since the time period from which those truths came from. Those changing times sometimes changes how the truths we hold must be lived out in the world.
For us religiously conservative Christians, we have often held to the truths of our faith in ways that seem to deny or dismiss the changes that have occurred in the world. Why would we deny or dismiss those changes? Because those changes demand that we do some things differently from what our past seems to have taught us. And we have fear that if we make too many changes, we will separate ourselves from the basic truths of our past.
So many of us religiously conservative Christians have relied too heavily on what a select number of past Christians have done and taught to both understand and respond to an ever changing world. And though such a response has not cut us off from the past, it has all too often cut us off from the present and being able to evangelize others.
This counter-productive approach to living in the present is part of the subject that Jeff Christopherson (click here for a very brief bio) wrote about in a recent Christianity Today article. Christopherson wrote about how we are to carry out the Christian missions today and his suggestion would not only address how we should carry out our missions, it addresses the challenges we religiously conservative Christians face in life.
But not only does Christopherson's article (click here for the article) help us in facing today's challenges, it shows a certain degree of self-awareness that many of us religiously conservative Christians have lacked. The key statements of Christopherson's article follow:
But the instinct to turn inward and backward is always a dead end. It's an instinct driven by fear, not by love. It's a selfishness that rallies its tribe toward a provincial self-preservation of its rights, not a missionary force that sacrifices its rights for a greater spiritual harvest. Inwards and backwards is the defensive position of a losing cause.
When identifies the instinct of the religiously conservative Christian as being inwards and backwards, he is talking about our over reliance on select sources from the past to understand and respond to today's world. The inward instinct refers to the heroes and teachers we choose to measure the world by. The backwards instinct refers to the time periods from which we choose our heroes. They are all past time periods. And here, he is not only referring to Biblical sources, he is referring to the heroes we choose from Church history.
For Calvinists like me, those heroes would tend to include John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, the Westminster Divines, and so forth. For others, Martin Luther and those who contributed to the Augsburg Confession. Of course Augustine would be included by Catholics, those from the Reformed community, and conservative Lutherans.
Of course there are select heroes who might even come from the 20th century. But for the most part, those heroes of ours on whom we would refer to as our spiritual Jedi Masters come from a more distant past.
In contrast to looking inwards and backwards, Christopherson seems vague on the solution. For he says that to look inwards and backwards is to live in fear while the solution of looking forwards and outwards is to live in love. And to a point, he is absolutely correct. But what is missing is a lack of precision when referring to what it means to look forwards and outwards. Thus when he says the following, I'm afraid that his statements have already raised too many red flags that would prevent many religiously conservative Christians from benefiting from the great observations he has made about us religiously conservative Christians:
As I look at the challenges facing the church, I'm increasingly skeptical that our well-worn categories of liberalism and conservatism are a helpful distinction to describe faithfulness to Christ. This is the path marked by some in generations prior. The terminology and methodology that distinguished this path once seemed clear, but now it’s obscured by false dichotomies, harsh assumptions, critical stereotypes, and defunct methods. And this division that is splitting the world's political landscape has pervasive influence on the modern church.
Now if the liberalism and conservatism distinction refers strictly to political ideologies and parties, I would fully agree. But if the distinction also includes liberal and conservative theologies, then I have to object. I have to object because too much of theological liberalism denies the basic tenets of religiously conservative Christianity. And to deny those tenets is to cut ourselves off from the past, from the faith.
Christopherson's article provides an excellent mirror in which many of us religiously conservative Christians should stare into. We need to become more self-aware of our over reliance on the past. But I think he would do better if instead of seeming to offer an exclusive-or choice between looking inwards and backwards vs looking forwards and outwards, he would challenge us to do both by balancing our looking inwards and backwards with looking forwards and outwards. For the problem that has plagued many of us religiously conservative Christians has always been an over reliance on learning from the select heroes from the past, not a reliance on them per se.
We religiously conservative Christians will always need to look somewhat inward and backwards. That is because it is looking inwards and backwards that keeps us anchored to the truths of our faith. And thus looking inwards and backwards helps prevent us from separating ourselves from the truth. We simply need to balance that inwards and backwards gaze with one that also looks forwards and outwards. Balancing those two approaches can prove to be very difficult. But it is the only way for us religiously conservative Christians to meet the challenge of remaining faithful while being able to share the Gospel in an ever changing world.
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