Christianity is Changing
Change is inimical (not favorable or hostile) to many in our world. It is difficult to accept change in our circumstances or our life. Moving, death, estrangement from those we previously loved and cherished, a new job, economic conditions, health issues, political situations, all of these and many more examples create fear and tension. We adapt quickly to the status quo and wish to remain there.
Change is part of life, yet we seek ways to avoid it or ameliorate it or stop it from happening altogether. Those who study change and its effects have noted that too much change causes undue stress, but too little change also causes stress.
We are made to change, created to experience change. The universe itself is constantly changing. In physics, quantum mechanics observes change taking place all the time at every level of the universe. People change too. We grow from infant to old age and note all the changes in between. As a species we have changed. We evolved from single celled organisms to become the dominant species on the planet. In short, life is all about change and adaptation.
Theology too changes as does the church. Christianity is a religion of change. There has never been a period in the 2,000 years of church history where some change was not occurring. Dip into any century, era or epoch, and one finds some thinker, theologian, nun, monk, priest or lay person who is reconsidering the gospel.
Yet is it not the case that Scripture says, “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8)?
If Jesus does not change why is it that theology and church seem to constantly change?
Like the speed of light in Einstein’s theory of relativity, Jesus has been Christianity’s single bearing, that which everything else could be measured against and by. Jesus is the singularity of all Christian reality. So why do we expect our theology to remain unchanging? Why do we seek some form of absolute, whether in a book or a creed or a dogma or a theology?
Our problem is that we have failed to recognize that our understanding of Jesus is always changing. One cannot read the many studies of Jesus written in the past 300 years and not be aware of two tendencies. The first was pointed out by Albert Schweitzer: we have a tendency to make Jesus in our own cultural image. The ‘liberal lives of Jesus’ of 19th century German biblical scholarship all looked suspiciously like the bourgeois citizen with rarified ethical ideals. There is another tendency we have though when it comes to Jesus. We tend to subordinate Jesus to our vision or understanding of ‘God.’ We first define God, and then we fit Jesus into that understanding rather than the other way around. We no longer let Jesus change our view of God. When we do this we are fitting a large round peg in a tiny square hole. It just won’t work. Our theologies reflect this problem, and our lives reflect our theologies, our beliefs about God. So we tame Jesus, we domesticate him, we bring him into the orb of our religious paradigm and seek to absorb him, to make him harmless. This, I submit, is the biggest crisis that faces Christianity today
Christmas, therefore, is our antidote. Christmas is the time we stop all of our theological speculating and allow ourselves to STOP! Stop trying to make Jesus fit into our world and recognize that God in Christ, by becoming flesh has fit us into God’s world. The old debates from the 16th-19th centuries about whether the finite could contain the infinite (finitum capax infiniti) are completely reversed for infinity has been revealed to contain the finite (infinitum capax finiti). The baby in the manger is the APOCALYPTIC recovery of the creation. The Christ-child is God’s rescue operation. This is where Word becomes flesh and all flesh is reconciled and transformed. From that day forth, flesh will no longer remain stuck in the status quo of its sin, its violence, its rivalrous behavior, its tendency to create dualisms, in groups and out groups, for in this child, all flesh is redeemed and transformed
Christmas is about change, the hope of change, the hope for change. This is why we have four weeks to prepare: for it is our GOD who is coming to us. And he shall be called ‘Emmanuel.’ This God comes to us, to be with us and for us, not against us and over us, but under us as a servant, with us as a friend, and in us as a beneficent transforming teacher and power. This is why we celebrate Jesus’ birth!
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