Os Guinness: Prophetic Untimeliness

A challenge to the idol of relevance

 

Baker Books 2003                                                                                                                            AJM Nov 04

 

An excellent short book on how to resist the tides of cultural conformity.

Introduction

It’s sad to say that rarely has the church seen so many of its leaders solemnly presenting the faith in public in so many weak, trite, foolish, disastrous, and even disloyal ways as today… How on earth have we Christians become so irrelevant when we have tried so hard to be relevant?.. Never have Christians pursued relevance more strenuously; never have Christians been more irrelevant. 11-12

The gospel itself is relevant – ‘because it addresses the human condition appropriately, pertinently, and effectively as nothing else has, does, or can – in generation after generation, culture after culture, and life after life’. 13 It is the world’s first truly universal religion, and the Christian faith is the most diverse society on earth.

By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without a matching commitment to faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance. Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant. 15.

Coleridge: ‘the great majority of men live like bats, but in twilight, and know and feel the philosophy of their ages only by its reflections and refractions’. 17 We have information, but not understanding – ‘homo-up-to-datum’ (Boorstin) is a dunce.

We must become untimely people, a term taken from Nietzsche, who saw that independent thinkers are always out of step with the conventional wisdom of their generation. The thinkers of today are caught in fashion and conformity. Independent thinkers are the thinkers of tomorrow, at home not in this age but elsewhere.

Prophecy – in many Christian circles prophecy is shorthand for uncheckable charismatic hunches, or for any left-wing radical critique of the status quo – need to distinguish Prophets from prophets. Capital P Prophets, eg Isaiah, Jeremiah, hear direct words from God. Little p prophets are those who interpret their life and times from a biblical perspective but do not presume the authority and infallibility of the Prophets. 21.

 

I : The tool that turned into a tyrant

 

1. Faces of the sinister god

 

The clock. Invented c.1400. It now characterises the difference between modern and traditional cultures; modernism would not have been possible without it. Filipinos: ‘Westerners are people with gods on their wrists’. The modern view of time is as clock time. Features:

·         Precision – we can now measure anywhere and everywhere in the universe; instead of the daily rhythm of time we have one which depends on calculation and is measured not in days but in seconds. And this is how we live.

·         Coordination – precise time makes it possible for society to be far more complex, with appointments and communications and computers to make everything interconnect.

·         Pressure – this is the one we are aware of; clock time drives us. Fielding in 1751 was the first to say that time is money; now we seek quality time, use every second even in our leisure time, eat fast food.

 

 

2. The tyrannies of time

 

Words are handles or labels that we stick on reality; the way we say things shapes the way we see things. So it is with time; it began to influence thought. So people began to see the universe as clockwork in C17th. The ‘uncivilised’ are now thought to be behind (earlier it was outside). ‘Progress’ is to do with time. Any change is progress. Gibbon: ‘it may be safely presumed that no people, unless the force of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarisms… We may therefore acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion that every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race.’ 42. And then the Reign of Terror which killed him; and the Holocaust…

 

II : Shorn of our secret strength

 

3. Impossible stances

 

The church must be both for the world and against the world – a dual stance which must be carefully maintained. When we do, we have the power to both transform and renew culture. When we don’t, we become corrupt and decline. Of all the cultures the church has lived in, the modern world is the most powerful, pervasive, and pressurizing. The exploding churches in Asia, Africa and Lat America are largely premodern; what is happening there is astonishing, but they have not gone through the firey trial of modernity that has devastated the church in Europe and has destroyed faith in the US.

 

There are 3 stances we have traditionally taken towards the modern world; none is easy in the modern context:

  1. ‘cognitive and cultural resistance’ (Peter Berger) – few modern Christians are prepared to do this; evangelicals and fundamentalists have embraced the modern world with a passion unrivaled in history, esp in US. Scripture: ‘flee the world’
  2. ‘cognitive and cultural negotiation’ – attempt to pursue a stance of continuous discernment. But in the modern world it is hard to do this as fast as the swirling currents of information and events demand. Scripture: ‘be transformed by the renewal of your mind’
  3. ‘cognitive and cultural adaptation’ – scripture ‘A Jew to the Jews, a gentile to the gentiles’: search for relevance. But relevance topples into surrender, through 4 steps:

*        assumption – sth in modern thought is assumed superior to Christian thought

*        abandonment – everything wh does not fit with it is cast aside

*        adaptation – sth new is assumed, sth old is abandoned, everything else is adapted

*        assimilation – outcome is that everything is absorbed by the modern assumptions

Understand the dominant thought of the day and you understand the infatuations of liberalism, for theology follows philosophy as a tail follows a dog.. 62. WCC 1966: ‘the world must set the agenda for the Church’.

‘A great part of the evangelical community has transferred authority from Sola Scriptura to Sola Cultura.’ 65

 

4. Siren calls to captivity

 

Alexander the Great: ‘the Persians would always be slaves, because they did not know how to pronounce the word No.’ 69 In US in particular, mimicking modernity in Christian language is the best that many Christian thinkers have been able to muster for some time.

Three forms of cultural captivity:

  1. Conformity, eg to democracy : but the voice of the people is no more infallible than the voice of kings, presidents or religious leaders
  2. Popularity – the power of approval. We look for it in the shifting sands of public opinion, in what we do, buy, think.
  3. Fashionability – a distorted relevance that slips into trendiness. We become trivial, promise more than we deliver, suffer from burn-out, become false experts, cave in to what we know is wrong.

 

III : Restoring the Archimedean Point

 

5. The price of faithfulness

 

For any Christians who would speak out today in a time of the church’s deepening cultural captivity, prophetic untimeliness carries a clear cost:

 

*        Misfits in an ill-fitting world : a sense of maladjustment. The man/woman who lives by faith does not fit in. Praised prophets are mostly dead prophets.

*        A sense of impatience : frustration at the blocking of the purposes of God

*        A sense of failure – having a calling which does not see fulfilment

 

6. Escaping cultural captivity

 

How do we do it?

1. Developing an awareness of the unfashionable – by wrestling with difficlt truths, seeking to present the Christian message as sth distinct from one’s own ideas. By pursuing a radical obedience – not to credal confession, but to the call of Jesus. Eg Bonhoeffer.

2. Appreciating the historical, which is the best way to have a counterperspective on our own day. Knowing how to use history to judge the present; history provides a deeper knowledge of our humanity than does science. Read old books as well as new ones.

3. Attention to the eternal. Simone Weil: to be always relevant, you have to say things which are eternal. The church will always spring back, because it has the seeds of renewal built into it, in a way for example that communism didn’t. The seeds are sin – the church’s doctrine of its own failure – and scripture – the church has a judgement that transcends history.

 

Conclusion

 

We cannot arrest time through nostalgia. Or through the idea of an endless cycle in which things will spin back right again. Or through our world’s favourite method: better time management and improved efficiency – which leads only to an even faster pace of life and greater pressures.

 

Redeeming time:

 

*        The secret is to be untimely : to go forward, we must always go back. 99% of what we know about the future is the past.

*        Resistance thinkers alone are fresh and creative; progressives prove stagnant.

*        We can redeem time only through the one who is the redeemer of everything. Time isn’t money; money is time. We spend our time in making money, in spending money, in hoarding money – time is our currency, and all the money in the world can’t give us an extra second.