I had a very enjoyable time last Sunday with a group in Soest, in the Netherlands, called Oase at the invitation of Johan ter Beek. The first session consisted of an exploration of the question: What is the gospel and what is our hope? The second looked at the praxis of an Emerging Church: What does it take to re-imagine the church for the future? What follows here is a developed version of the first talk. Johan has provided a synopsis of the whole thing in Dutch on his blog.
The ‘gospel’ story
The modern gospel has been reduced in many respects to a quasi-gnostic formula for personal salvation - not absolutely and not always to bad effect, but it constitutes an inadequate basis for the renewal of the church after modernity and after Christendom. I suggested that we need to understand ’gospel’ not so much as a singular, one-size-fits-all message but as a series of contextual announcements made prophetically - that is, as a matter of divine address under particular circumstances - to Israel and to the world.
The archetypal ’good news’ is Isaiah’s proclamation to the exiles that the end of their punishment is in sight, that YHWH is about to act sovereignly to deliver his people from captivity (Is. 52:7). In the New Testament we have at least three distinct phases to the announcement of ’good news’, all of which are addressed publicly to a community or society.
Jesus’ analogous proclamation to Israel that God will soon act as king to judge a rebellious and stiff-necked nation and re-establish his own reign over his people; Paul’s proclamation to the nations, in accordance with Isaiah’s eschatological programme, that God has made Jesus ’Son of God’ in defiance of the pretensions of Greek-Roman paganism and has appointed him as judge of this idolatrous and unjust culture; and the good news that ’Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus’ (Eph. 3:6-7).
By relocating the term ’gospel’ in this eschatological narrative we bring to the fore the concrete historical existence of a people formed and re-formed by the prophetically interpreted experience of God. The death, resurrection and vindication of Jesus, which to my mind is essentially the story of the Son of man, lies at the heart of this narrative, for two reasons: i) the faithfulness of Jesus is the means by which the ’family’ of Abraham is saved from the destruction prescribed by the Law because of sin; and ii) the resurrection introduces a realistic hope of a final renewal of all creation that comes to be embodied in the life of the people through the Spirit of renewal. It is then out of this existence as God’s new creation in Christ that the church is called to restate prophetically a ’good news’ for our own world.
That announcement will be determined by the formative biblical narrative; but if it is to be genuinely prophetic, it will also have to take into account the actual reality of the church’s existence in the world - let’s say, the Western world. What does it mean for this people to exist in the world in its present confused and unstable condition, battered by the conflict with rationalism, disoriented by the collapse of Christendom, struggling to recover a sense of identity and purpose, anxious to reformulate a future hope for itself and for the world in a way that has substance and integrity?
The multi-coloured big picture
The following overly complex diagram is similar to others I have posted recently. If it smacks of old-style, abstruse, dispensationalist schematizations of salvation-history, I apologize. The difference, I think, lies essentially in the fact that that it is descriptive rather than prescriptive - that it does attempt to superimpose an idealized, divinely plotted time-chart on history, but simply highlights some basic patterns that emerge from scripture and which may help us to understand the present existence of the church a little more clearly. Don’t get too hung up on it.
The undulating black line roughly indicates the biblical story
of the creator God, who creates and re-creates, bringing into existence
a people for his own possession which recovers the original
creational blessing of Genesis 1:28 and transmits it to the nations and
cultures of the
earth.
The green vertical stripes represent salient moments of creational renewal. The original creation of the man and the woman in Genesis 1 is repeated when Noah and his family are blessed and told to be fruitful and multiply following the destruction of the flood. After the act of proto-imperial defiance represented by the building of the tower of Babel, creation is renewed in microcosm with the seminal promise to Abraham that God would bless his descendants, that he would make them fruitful and multiply them, and that they would take possession of the land that he would give them. Isaiah conceives of the return from exile in re-creational terms, but within the biblical narrative as a whole this serves more as a prefiguring of the renewal of the people of God in Christ. The last green stripe represents the ultimate hope, expressed in Revelation 21-22, that all of creation will be made new, an event anticipated both actually and prophetically in the existence of the people of God as new creation redeemed from the macrocosm. But the current emphasis in emerging theologies on new creation language may also suggest that the motif is peculiarly applicable to the journey from Christendom to a post-Christendom paradigm.
The ’new creation’ that is the family of Abraham eventually becomes a nation. Indeed, the demand of the elders of Israel that Samuel should ’appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations’ (1 Sam. 8:5) signifies the explicit adoption of a ’national’ or ’nation-like’ template (the first blue patch) by which the microcosm of Israel would organize itself and determine its boundaries and its relation to other nations: ’there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles’ (8:19-20). Then in a similarly ambiguous way, having emerged from the dangerous conflict with Rome, the church adopted an ’imperial template’ (the second blue patch) in order to give necessary social and political expression to its existence as an international community under Christ - the one who by virtue of his faithful suffering had recently displaced Caesar as king of the all the earth.
If the imperial Christendom paradigm has now disintegrated, it seems to me that what we call the emerging church is an expression of a broad quest for a new template or paradigm (the yellow patch) that will give shape to a people that has become in Christ not merely a people for God’s own possession but a tangible sign of the eventual overthrow of all evil and death and the re-making of heaven and earth. Of course, this is a thoroughly Western and largely Protestant perspective. It may be that the future of Christianity lies not in a marginalized post-Christendom Western church but in a transplanted Christendom, flourishing in the fertile spiritual soil of the developing world. My suspicion, however, is that sooner or later the imported Western model will prove itself incapable of answering the hard questions posed by post-colonialism - much as the church in the West is struggling to find an adequate response to the challenge of postmodernism.
Finally, the red patches in the diagram signify periods of difficult transition for the people of God - what Alan Hirsch would call periods of liminality. First, the sojourn in Egypt, the exodus, and the wanderings through the wilderness comprise a journey that Israel had to make before the descendants of Abraham could become a creational microcosm in possession of the land that had been promised to them. Secondly, I think that New Testament theology for the most part addresses the question of how this people is to make the transition from the doomed paradigm of national Israel under conditions of imperial oppression to a victory and vindication that are prefigured in the vision of the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven. Thirdly, the cultural and intellectual fortress of Christendom has now been reduced to rubble by the rampaging armies of secularism, leaving the church to find its way through a modern wilderness once again in search of new home.
What that new home will look like remains to be seen. What appears to be emerging is a much more organic, networked, fluid, creative, interactive, conversational, militant, subversive template for giving social and intellectual form to the creational microcosm. In the second session we looked at some ways of re-imagining the life and activity of the microcosm: we might see ourselves as story-tellers, priests, lovers or gardeners, for example. But the main point I wanted to get across was that just as Paul sought to build communities that would survive the testing of an imminent day of fire (1 Cor. 3:10-15), so it is our challenge specifically to construct communities that will survive the collapse of Christendom and re-imagine a new future.
