Christianity is Changing
The gospel has been an intellectual movement for 2,000 years. When the second century Greek speaking philosophers and apologists heard and received the gospel, they immediately sought to understand it in terms of their cultures. In one way they sought about embedding the gospel in their culture by comparing it to the great Greek tradition of philosophy and mythology. Like yeast being placed in a ball of dough, these Christian intellectuals inserted the good news of God right into the hearts of their cultures.
For 2,000 this yeast has been doing its work. The dough has risen and the cat, or should I say the victim, is out of the bag.
One of the things we see the early church wrestling with is how to understand the relation of the Christian story in relation to other stories. The big story was Jewish and so the early Christians turned to that story in the Jewish scriptures. However, their cultures also had stories and soon it would be Plato and Homer who provided part of their back stories. In Egypt it would have been the Pharaohs, and in a city accustomed to a great tradition of education, with an enormous library with over half a million scrolls, Alexandria would be the birthplace of the Christian catechumenate.
So the early Fathers in wrestling with their cultures were asking the questions of their cultures and providing answers in the light of what was presupposed in those cultures. Some of the answers that sufficed for them are no longer able to suffice for us. We simply cannot ignore the fact that a lot has changed in our world from the world in which they lived. Simply saying Irenaeus believed this or Athanasius believed that or I can prove such and such a doctrine was believed by the early fathers simply does not carry the weight of authority it has been given. As long as we continue to think that the early church was more pristine than that of our own time or that somehow closer to the source meant more original, we do an historical injustice to these figures.
Some theological moves that they made have been very influential on subsequent Christian history. In a sense we remain enthralled to the questions posed to them and with their solutions. Let me offer one example. In seeking to understand the relation of the church to the Jewish people, the early fathers made one theological move that has haunted Christianity for the past 1900 years, and I am not talking about the problem of mixing the logos of the gospel with the logos of Greek philosophy.
I am speaking about the beginnings, the seeds of Christian anti-Semitism. The early fathers took a dispensational slant with regard to history. The last in the sequence was always the best. Thus the new could trump the old. Christianity superseded Judaism, the Church trumped Israel as the people of God, the scriptures of the Jews became the scriptures of the church (the Septuagint). God had replaced Israel or as some might say today “God was doing a new thing.” This theological way of parsing out God’s activities in human history is not just theory; it had an awful praxis: Jewish persecution by Christianity through the Middle Ages and coming to the ugliest of full fruit in the Shoah of 1933-1945.
When these early fathers were seeking to understand God they always had the history of the Jewish people with them for they were, according to the Apostle Paul (and Tom Wright!), embedded in Judaism. Wherever the Christian gospel was told, it was told in light of the Old Testament. Many who study the history of ideas and the development and history of the scientific tradition recognize and affirm the great role Christianity has had on shaping the intellectual ideas of the West (and indeed the world). We have always been an intellectual religion, a religion about changing ideas (which is very different than the idea of controlling people). The integration of Jewish and the Christian scriptural tradition in various second-fifth century cultures has altered human history. As Rene Girard notes, the gospel is the controlling element in human history now.
But as happens with intellectual traditions they become well…intellectual. When that happens, intellectual traditions tend to become the purview of an elite few, with a very specialized language of its own. When the gospel story which was told in the lectionary on a three year cycle stopped being preached and instead the pulpit became the place where the intelligentsia held forth, of course there was going to be a reaction.
In Antiquity and through the Middle Ages lay people turn to superstition; in the monasteries where the pulse of daily prayers were a 24/7 reminder of God, some to turned to the exquisite mysticism of the contemplation of the Crucified Christ and God’s love. In the 16th century a reaction to this intellectual stifling of the Gospel, the Anabaptists sought to recover what they believed was essential: a form of piety that lived out the ethic in the Sermon on the Mount. That century also saw the rise of the spiritualists, those who, now long forgotten, had visions and revelations that didn’t amount to much. The 17th century saw the reaction to intellectualizing the gospel with Pietism in Halle with Jakob Spener and its influence on both the European churches and education for the ministry. Thankfully although Wesley thought highly of the new birth experience, he was also educated and appreciated the work that God gives to the mind to do.
In America we also had our share of anti-intellectual movements. Popular revival movements of the 18th and 19th centuries, tent meetings and the conservative controversies with the Continental inspired liberals, holiness movements galore throughout the US, the rise of Fundamentalism around the time of the First Great War, these all show that anti-intellectualism has been around a long, long time. It is as much a part of our western heritage as intellectualism.
My argument with the intellectual tradition is not that it has been too intellectual; I say it has not been intellectual enough. A true intellectual movement does not remain in the clouds of exalted discourse and six syllable words; it comes back to earth, to the real people of the work-a-day world and shares with them in language they can understand, what they have learned that day. And they have a conversation.
But even anti-intellectuals like to remain in the clouds, only theirs are the clouds of the supernatural, the mystical, the experiential. One does not need an education to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ in the spiritual realm. One just needs an open ‘heart.’ From this position they are able to criticize the intellectual tradition. If the intellectuals could claim they understood God’s work on earth through reason and PhDs, the anti-intellectuals could claim they had PhDs in how God works in heaven.
Now the early Pentecostal movement had two emphases: holiness and proof of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. They also had a third which I will tell you about in a moment. The emphasis on holiness and holiness codes combined with theological fundamentalism gave rise to an extraordinarily legalistic Christianity. The modern reaction to that found in the so-called ‘grace’ movement (although it really hasn’t gotten that far yet) is what brings me to my post today. The grace movement is also struggling with the relationship of intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. I have sought to help as many of the young leaders of this movement that I know beyond this impasse. It is not a matter of either/or. It is a matter of living with the paradoxes and antinomies, having discarded the modern quest for certainty. It is the ability to have convictions held lightly, but convictions nonetheless.
A full-orbed Christian movement demands the best intellectual rigor and the most robust spirituality, but it also requires a deeply penetrating and culturally critical ethic. Remember I told you that the Pentecostals had a third element that was important to them? In the beginning, Pentecostalism was a peace church according to Pentecostal historian Paul Alexander. When they surrendered that, when they joined American Empire, the second blessing movement sold their heritage for a bowl of porridge.
My critique all along of the modern charismatic world is informed by these reflections on the history of intellectualism and anti-intellectualism and conspiring with Empire. I would not tell an anti-intellectual to be intellectual or an intellectual to become anti-intellectual. You cannot ever reason a person from one side to the other.
The gospel calls us to be neither intellectuals nor anti-intellectuals. It calls us to a life of discipleship that is oriented to peacemaking, forgiveness and love. It calls us to love God with all our mind and all our heart. It calls to cast aside all us/them distinctions, and it calls us to value life more than anything else and to value the lives of others over our own. It calls us specifically to non-violent resistance and non-retaliation. Where this piece is missing, the heart is ripped right out of the gospel. This is where the rubber meets the ground for me. This is where the rubber met the ground in the Temptation narratives, in Caesarea Philippi, Gethsemane and on Calvary.
I say you can be the brightest bulb in the chandelier but if you are not committed to follow Jesus down the via dolorosa, you are not his disciple. I say you can have the most spectacular visions and the grandest of prophecies, you can speak and sing with angelic voice, but if you are not on board as a peacemaker and lover of enemies you are not a disciple of Jesus.
As a species we don’t have a long time to make the change from violence to non-violence. The church needs to model it first to the world. That is our calling, and that is how God changes the world.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In