Living by truth in a changing world

Alison Morgan

 

If you preach the gospel in all its aspects with the exception of the issues which deal specifically with your time, you are not preaching the gospel at all.         (Martin Luther)

 

We live in a changing world. In many ways it is an exciting world; but it’s also an uncertain world, a world in which old patterns and ways of doing things are breaking down. It brings us to something of a crisis; but also offers us an immense opportunity.

 

Jesus was born into a world which was very different from ours. And yet it had in common with ours, and with all other cultures, the fact that it was built on a set of assumptions, a subconscious but universally held network of beliefs about life and how to make sense of it. Jesus marched into that world with a freshness of vision which so undermined those assumptions that it got him crucified. Speaking out against the religious establishment, breaking all the social rules, undermining the political status quo, and displaying an authority over the created world and the spiritual realm which had never been seen before, Jesus gave one person after another the opportunity to break free from a straitjacket of false solutions and reconnect with the living reality of God himself. And then he died, bequeathing his ministry to his followers, and sending the Holy Spirit to help and empower them as they in turn sought to rescue people from a culture of death and bring them back into relationship with the living God.

 

A culture is like a story

 

In a way, a culture is like a story, whose task is to make sense of what it means to be human. The story has its own inner rules, its own plot, its own characters. But somehow the story is disjointed. Everyone in the story is trying hard to make it work; but at bottom it just isn’t a very good story, and they know it. Because of this, every so often a society will change the story. The gospel comes into each culture like a fact which interrupts the story and exposes its weaknesses: it brings good news, the news that there is another way, a way which not only makes real sense of human experience, but carries us beyond it to God himself.

 

It is in this tension between gospel and culture, fact and story, that we find the key to the effectiveness or otherwise of the church in any given period. History shows that vibrant periods in the life of the church have come when the truth has been spoken perceptively into a particular culture; and that conversely, atrophy has come when the gospel has been allowed to degenerate into formulae and practices which fail to connect with the real issues of the day. We live in a culture which is rewriting its story. The future of the church in this country depends on how we handle the transition.

 

The postmodern story

                                      

Many people have written perceptively about the change from a ‘modern’ culture to a ‘postmodern’ one. But at its simplest, we may say that the thinking on which modernism was built takes its starting point from a single sentence written by one man in the year 1637. The sentence was I think, therefore I am, and its author was the French philosopher Renė Descartes. Descartes was trying to answer the fundamental question ‘how do we know things?’, and he concluded that the only reliable source of knowledge was human reason. All human thinking in the West since then has been based on this assumption, and great advances have been made in our understanding and handling of the world we live in as a result.

 

And yet we abuse our material achievements if we look to them to meet the inner needs of our souls. There is within the human spirit an irrepressible awareness that this world is not all there is, that existence has dimensions beyond the material, that parts of our makeup cannot be rationally defined and objectively catered for. We have come to realise that we are not connected to something we need to be connected with if we are to be fully alive.  

 

And so postmodernity rebels against rationality. Postmodernity no longer says I think, therefore I am, for all this thinking has turned out to be, in terms of personal fulfilment, rather fruitless and restrictive. In our personal lives we now prefer a more DIY approach in which truth is created rather than discovered, and in which we build our own values and identities from the variety of choices and experiences available to us. I feel, therefore I am, is perhaps a more accurate slogan for our new world. It’s a world in which people have little time for the institutional. It’s a world which demands freedom and rejects responsibility, and yet a world also which knows a high degree of pain as it discovers that the bonds which restricted the old society were also the ones that held it together.

 

Some principles for cultural engagement

 

How are we to express the fact of the gospel into this new story? As we look back to the New Testament, we find three principles:

 

      Language is important

 

We cannot rely on yesterday’s articulation of the gospel: we must find ways of speaking it in words that make sense today. I still remember being told that I needed to repent of my sins, and wondering firstly what those two words meant, since I had never used either, and secondly what it had got to do with the question I was asking, which was about the meaning of life. Study of the New Testament shows that from the beginning the gospel had to be expressed in language its hearers could understand. So in Athens Paul quotes from the Greek poets and points to the altar of the unknown god; in Lystra he heals a cripple and invites his hearers to consider the power of God the creator; in the synagogue of Psidian Antioch he points to Jesus as the fulfilment of the scriptures; and in Ephesus he runs lunchtime classes in the school of philosophy. The message does not change; but the way in which it is expresssed must do so.

 

      Assumptions are important

 

Each cultural story is founded on certain key assumptions about where fulfilment is to be found. And yet so often those assumptions are false. If we want people to understand what the good news means for them, we must learn to identify the commonly shared beliefs which are holding them back. Many of these concern the nature of Christianity itself – that the gospel is about living a moral life, or what you do on Sundays. Others concern assessments of what matters in life – individual freedom, the right to self-determination, material wealth, career success, social recognition, having a good time. Others are about the nature of reality itself – that it is arbitrary, incoherent and meaningless, that truth is relative, experience everything. None of these things is true, and it is our job to say so. The gospel stands to a culture as the masterkey to a house: the key will open all the doors, but different doors are locked at different times. We need to make sure we are unlocking the locked ones.

 

      Example is important

 

We live in a world in which authenticity is in high demand. It is not enough to live by belief and by habit; the postmodern world is interested in experience. This gives us an enormous opportunity to put our faith into practice, to strengthen the emotional and spiritual dimensions of our relationship with God, to rediscover a sense of mystery, to deepen our experience of prayer, to explore what it means to live as Christians in the world. Jesus offered everyone he met an alternative way of living, a way that would bring a freedom and a fullness of life not accessible by other means. The early church saw itself as the community of those who had embraced this alternative way of living – they were known as followers of ‘The Way’. It is open to us to do the same. We must be willing to allow ourselves to be formed by the Holy Spirit into living communities of people committed to one another and to God, ready to reach out to those around us. We will find, in this age of fragmentation and isolation, that God is much bigger and more relevant than we had realised.

 

Living by truth in a changing world…

 

What does it mean to live by truth in a changing world? I think it means trying to recover the wild refusal of Jesus to do anything merely because it was expected. It means re-examining everything that we do and asking ourselves why we are doing it. It means accepting that in a diverse world there are no simple answers, no blueprints to follow, but an immense opportunity to listen and to learn. It means asking deep questions of ourselves, questions to do not just with what the church does but with what it is. It means opening ourselves once more to the unexpected and liberating power of the Holy Spirit who alone can guide us through this process. And it means embracing the enormous opportunity our changing world offers us to rediscover what it means to be, together, followers of the Way.

 

 

 

This article was first published in Cell UK magazine, August 2004. See www.celluk.org.uk.

Alison Morgan - The Wild Gospel : bringing truth to life was published by Monarch, September 2004.

 

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