Photo by Christiane Zwerg/Digital Vision
In a well-known Monty Python sketch, an English gentleman is sold a dead parrot and tries to return it to the pet shop from which it was purchased 30 minutes earlier. When presented with the evidence – a stiff corpse nailed to a wooden perch – the store clerk famously replies: “It’s not dead, it’s just resting!”
If mainline Protestantism in Canada is not dead, it’s certainly on life support, and not just resting. Most Canadians, young and old, don’t attend church even though they believe in God. The reasons are varied and complex and it may be that some find the church’s theology hopelessly conservative and outdated. But it’s also possible that they stay away because they don’t see the point. What’s on offer in many mainline Protestant churches today is a form of liberal or progressive Christianity that’s difficult to distinguish from the values of a secular age.
Why should anyone worship a God who is impotent and irrelevant in daily life, distant and mysterious and unknowable, a benign and benevolent deity who really can’t do much to help? Why should you entrust your life to Jesus if he’s only a spiritual teacher who offers inspiring insights but not salvation? If human beings are basically good and just need a little encouragement and education, there are, quite frankly, much better places to find that help than your local church. Why be part of a faith community that offers little meaning for life and little hope in death? The nominal form of culture-Christianity that one finds in many mainline Protestant churches is friendly enough but it offers little power for transformation.
Walter Bryden saw this clearly 80 years ago. He wrote equally against rational orthodoxy (fundamentalism) and rational idealism (liberalism) which bedevilled the church of his day. Both, he argued, reduced the gospel to western forms of Enlightenment reason. As a result, the church is confronted with the choice between affirming divine doctrine or experiencing divine mystery. Fundamentalism pushes the church in the direction of sectarianism; liberalism allows it to drift towards secularism.
The first looks for certainty in doc-trinal propositions; the other dismisses doctrine in favour of universal human ideals. In their place, Bryden proposed what Yale theologian Hans Frei would later name “a generous orthodoxy,”
neither fundamentalist nor liberal (for his recent book, Brian McLaren borrowed the title from Frei). Bishop Tom Wright calls it Simply Christian.
A generous orthodoxy resists both obscurantism and relativism. It teaches that God is known not because we search God out but because God has revealed Godself in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word, fully human and fully divine. The Christian church confesses that human life will be transformed not because we can make things better but because God has acted decisively in the life, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. Our response to what God has done is faith.
Holistic faith is the way of the head, heart and hands. It involves doctrine, devotion, and discipleship. The creeds (credo – “I believe”) were said, sung, signed (sometimes with blood, sweat and tears), and studied. Calvin defined faith as “a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” (Institutes 3.2.7)
We would do well to learn about this kind of faith from our sisters and brothers in the majority world, especially those who have come to live among us from the global south. They offer a robust and joyful form of Christianity that appeals to people of all classes (not just the bourgeois middle class) and their churches are growing. They tell us that a good dose of gospel teaching stiffens the ecclesial spine. They experience their faith and they expect costly discipleship. They look at us and they know that accommodating the Christian faith to its cultured despisers is a western strategy that has failed.
The American writer John Updike said, “Faith is a force of will whereby a Christian defines himself against the temptations of an age. Each age presents its own competing philosophies … Skepticism and mockery surrounded the first apostles … Christ risen was no more embraced by Paul and his listeners than by modern skeptics. The stumbling blocks have never dissolved. The scandal has never lessened.”
By trying to lessen the scandal for the past 100 years, Canadian Protestants have sown the wind; we may now be reaping the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7). Scripture reminds us that God’s Spirit will not always strive with us (Genesis 6:3). If we insist on revising the faith according to our own interests we will be in danger of cutting ourselves off from the catholic tradition and the church universal. Confessing Jesus as Lord and Christ in a secular age is not fundamentalism; it is simply Christian.
Thanks Dr. Vissers. I appreciate your contending for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. But is it fair to label everyone who looks to God’s Word for propositional truths as a fundamentalist? Surely evangelicals as relatively diverse as say, the original Princeton theologians, J.I. Packer, & the late Mariano Di Gangi deserve better? Actually I’m sure most mainline folks including PCCers would consider these men to be fundamentalists — which is very sad indeed. Of course the Bible contains much more than propositional truths but certainly no less. It’s rare and refreshing to hear someone in these pages sounding a warning about the dangers of theological liberalism. But do you honestly believe that neo-orthodoxy can revive our dying mainline churches?
[Reply]
Thanks for your response Sonny. I don’t think I was labeling everyone who understands revelation in terms of propositional truth as fundamentalist; rather, I was suggesting that those who reduce revelation to propositional truth alone are in danger of a reductionism that tends toward fundamentalism. To my mind, most evangelicals in the Reformed tradition today – including my friends Packer and the late Mariano Di Gangi – have and had a broader and deeper understanding of revelation.
I only use the term fundamentalism today because it seems necessary to do so in response to others. It has come to mean something entirely different from its original usage and it’s meaning has now become relativized. It has come to refer to a religious mindset ( a religious-sociological category) rather than a set of beliefs (a theological category). In theological discourse the term should probably be mothballed.
In terms of the renewal of the church, I don’t think any theology can renew the church; only God through the Spirit can do so. However, I do think that a theology which bears witness to a robust vision of the triune God of grace is more hopeful and likely to contribute to the renewal of the church. That’s not, in my mind, neo-orthodoxy, which has been tried and found wanting. It is however, what I argued for in my article – a thoughtful and generous orthodoxy; a living faith rather than a dead rationalistic orthodoxy on the one hand, or a vague humanistic spirituality on the other.
[Reply]