Recently in Christianity Category

We are moving from an age of belief to an age of the Spirit. We are open to the Spirit and pray for the work and power of the Spirit. 

An Age of the Spirit doesn't mean laissez faire anything goes spirituality. Nor does it mean Charismatic Christianity with speaking in tongues, prayer languages, prophecy, and ecstatic worship (although it may include all of these - and will include these for some). But it does mean a step away from modern rationalist materialism and proposition centered faith. Even more importantly, it means breaking free of our view that body and soul, flesh and spirit are separate and separable entities - we need a fully embodied Christianity focused on God and on His work, His presence, and His mission; isn't this, after all, what true religion and for that matter biblical Christianity is?

Today I would like to put up an excerpt from Tom Wright - from a lecture that he gave at Calvin College in January of 2007 - on Space, Time, and Sacraments. (You can download both lectures and the q&a sessions from the link, his homily on Luke 24 is also well worth listening to.) The excerpt I would like to consider is 45 minutes into the second lecture, Sacraments and New Creation and runs about 4 minutes.

As you read (or listen to) the excerpt I would like to focus on the following question:

What is the significance of sacrament, particularly the Lord's Supper, in our worship and our faith? Do we need the sacramental life of the church as part of our mission to follow God and participate in His mission?

Today's post wraps up our brief series on Harvey Cox's new book The Future of Faith. The last several chapters of the book, and in fact various passages throughout the book,  present some of Cox's thoughts on the future of faith - and more specifically his hopes for the future of the Christian faith. Today I would like to focus our discussion on the future.

Cox notes - as have many others - that the future of the church is moving out of the western world, into Latin America, Africa, and the East.  While churches stand empty in Europe, the faith is flourishing and growing elsewhere. Notably charismatic forms of the faith are growing fastest.

The bottom line seems to be that faith is relevant for life in many parts of the world and that the Christian faith in particular meets a very real need.  Faith simply is not relevant in much of the secular west. But in the global South ... liberation theology and the power of people in small house church groups play an enormous role.  Faith flourishes when it is not micromanaged from the top, but grows from the bottom through the power of the Spirit.

Lets look at a bit of what Cox has to say:

First, for centuries Christians have claimed that the Holy Spirit is just as divine as the other members of the Trinity. But in reality, the Spirit has most often been ignored or else feared as too unpredictable. It "blows where it will," as the Gospel of John (3:8) says, and is therefore too mercurial to contain. But some of the liveliest Christian movements in the world today are precisely the ones that celebrate this volatile expression of the divine. ... By far the fastest growth in Christianity, especially among the deprived and destitute, is occurring among people like the Pentecostals, who stress a direct experience of the Spirit. It is almost as though the Spirit, muted and muffled for centuries, is breaking its silence and staging a delayed "return of the repressed." (p. 9-10)

Are we entering an Age of the Spirit? And if so, is this a good thing?

The central portion of Harvey Cox's new book The Future of Faith lays out the New Perspective on The Church - which is no longer new. It is broad brush summarized as follows:

Jesus taught and enacted a kingdom vision.

His immediate followers were committed to this vision

Paul's disavowal of the necessity to submit to Jerusalem demonstrates that it was Spirit driven

At its core the movement was a rebellion against human, particularly Roman, empire in favor of what could be - Kingdom of God

The diversity of texts found at Nag Hammadi among others demonstrate that belief in the early church was not uniform

The Gospel of Thomas is as old and as faithful as any of the four in the NT

Luke in Luke-Acts was setting forth a Christian epic to compete with the Aeneid and other epics

This community (ekklesia = gathering with political undertones) became distorted into a hierarchical church emphasizing beliefs and authority

→ The distortion is apparent as early as the first epistle of Clement (ca. 92 AD)

→ The distortion develops through Tertullian and Origin and Cyprian 

→ The distortion crystallized with Roman favor and Constantine

The council at Nicaea, far from being a sober and Spirit led occasion marked the end of the beginning. The transition was complete.

Meanwhile the Christian bishops went on debating the fine points of theology, Now they argued over what homoousious really meant and the nature of Mary's relationship to God and Christ. They composed more creeds and excommunicated more people. After the fall of Rome in 476, the ensuing centuries toll a dismal story if the repeated failure of using creeds and excommunications to achieve any result, except for further rancor. (p. 108)

So here is a question to ponder:

Which parts of Cox's perspective on the Church ring true - and which parts don't? How would you tell the story?

David Bentley Hart, a historian of ideas, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies , examines "faith and reason" to provide historical context for what has happened with New Atheists. The New Atheists, he contends, propagate a myth in telling the story of (Western) civilization. Namely, that the Age of Faith was an age of superstition and the Age of Reason one of enlightenment, and the former is to be applauded for putting the former into the past. In fact, if all were so reasonable, our society would be improved. Hart thinks this is nonsense in a number of ways.

How often do we hear the story that the medieval age was the "dark" ages? That the "dark" ages ended when classical civilization was rediscovered in the Italian renaissance? That the church was to blame for that age being "dark"? Can we not see that when the Faith was growing, it was committed more to the Faith than to Plato and Aristotle? But that during that same time folks like Boethius in the West was doing what he could to keep the classics alive? That during this time the East was absorbing and reading the greats of Western civilization? And who is to say that the classics were always humane?

In chp 6 he takes on Jonathan Kirsch one more time, and Kirsch is a much-published critic of the Bible and history and religion. Kirsch is not match for Hart when it comes to comprehending the history of the Church. Kirsch describes the "Dark Ages" as do other myth-makers: "an era of obscurantism, stagnation, and terror in the service of true belief" (49). 

Here is a fascinating new Barna study.

How true is this to your experience? (Any suggestions about how to measure "orthodox biblical response"?)

"On all 9 of the belief statements tested, attenders of large churches were more likely than those engaged in a small or mid-sized congregation to give an orthodox biblical response - e.g., the Bible is totally accurate in all the principles it teaches, Satan is not merely symbolic but exists, Jesus led a sinless life, God is the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the world who still rules the universe, etc."

Religious Beliefs of Protestants, by Congregational Size
(N=1,334)

Belief description*	1-100**	101-200	201-499	500-999	1000+
Bible is totally accurate in all the principles it teaches	60%	63%	70%	67%	75%
Have personal responsibility to tell others your beliefs	41	44	47	53	61
Your religious faith is very important in your life	82	83	90	88	90
Satan/devil is a living being not just a symbol of evil	30	29	36	38	51
A good person cannot earn a place in Heaven	33	39	47	48	55
On earth Jesus Christ did not commit sins, like other people	49	50	59	65	74
God is the omnipotent, omniscient creator who rules all	81	81	86	86	90
Born again Christian (see definition below)	63	64	69	81	75
Evangelical Christian (see definition below)	9	11	21	24	25
Number of respondents in this subgroup	547	306	247	120	114

* these are descriptions of the actual survey questions, not the wording of the questions actually used in the research.
** Adult attendance on an average weekend

I got this letter last Friday, July 3d, as a comment on a post and I want to post it today to generate a conversation. What is your advice?Dear Scot,I'm not a Christian and don't intend becoming one. However, my...

Mark Noll, in his new and paradigm-challenging book, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith, argues that American Christianity's influence in world Christianity cannot be explained adequately by the colonialism theory. Instead, he argues...

I don't know if you have heard this, but many have charged missionaries with colonialism and with connecting the gospel to consumerism, mass communication, materiaism, individualism, and capitalism that damages native cultures.  In Mark Noll's new book, The New...

Does counting missionaries help? In Mark Noll's new book, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith, the implication is that counting tells us some important things: the prominence of Protestant missionaries and the especially...

It is common to make two claims today: 1. That the Church in Europe is in a steady decline and heading toward distinction extinction. The dearth of births to Christians -- Italy's birth rate is at 1.28 while 2.1...

Mark Noll, professor at Notre Dame and America's foremost church historian (or at least close), has a new book called The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith, and the book explores how American Christianity...