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Will your non-negotiables stand the test of time?
by Shawn Smucker
June 17, 2010 | Faith, House friends, Life | no responses
[Shawn Smucker is a friend of The House who, along with his wife Maile, has decided to experiment living for a year without television. His complete story can be found at shawnsmucker.com. --ed.]
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I recently read this passage that compared C.S. Lewis’s considerations to the modern church:
“The modern worldview, including the modern version of Christianity… bears ominous resemblances to the medieval worldview that Lewis so crisply described, the worldview that was celebrated and embodied in the medieval cathedral. The ornateness, grand construction, and sheer size of medieval cathedrals mirrored the complexity and expansiveness of the medieval worldview itself. However, both the cathedrals and the worldview they expressed reached a point where they permitted no new development and where they threatened to collapse under their own weight…Ironically, the very stone buildings that expressed the belief that their medieval version of Christendom would last forever now mock that belief because today, when we visit them in Europe, they seem to us like museums – or mausoleums…”
It’s true, you know – the complexity of the medieval worldview was intense. Nearly 100% of Christians today would be apostates or heretics if dropped into the medieval time period, either by an insistence that the earth is not the point around which all else revolves or, simpler still, because of the clothes that we wear or don’t wear.
Let me say this again – these views of the world or the clothes that we wear would not have placed us in a fringe denomination. They would have made us anti-Christian; in the eyes of a medieval Christian, we would be going straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Believing the sun was the center of the solar system, or a woman’s simple choice to wear pants, would not have led to suspicious looks in church or angry blog comments – it would probably have led to death at the stake.
In the early days of the church, someone who ate food like shrimp or pork would be unclean. Someone who continued to eat these foods would have been deemed “living in sin” (to use our modern day verbiage) and excommunicated. Then Peter had a dream. “Dig in, Peter,” God said. “If I say it’s acceptable, then it’s acceptable.”
I’m not sure that we can fully understand how sinfully repugnant these unclean foods would have seemed to Peter. What a massive transition in the trajectory of the church’s understanding of sin and living in community!
Not much longer after this came the great circumcision debate. And again, a deeply entrenched law of Moses is put to the side in favor of unity and freedom from an unnecessary burden.
This line of thought leads me to wonder – what lifestyles, or “Christian” practices that we deem non-negotiable will seem like ludicrous, “unnecessary burdens” to future generations of the church? Lest you misunderstand me, I am not talking about those first tier orthodoxies as defined in the Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds that define what it means to be Christian. I am talking about the second-tier doctrines that divide Christianity rather than unify it.
Will future generations wonder how so many Christians of the early 21st century came up with the idea that “getting saved” began and ended with the simple recitation of a few words, or a raised hand in response to a question? And that going to hell was a natural result of not having said those specific words?
Will they wonder about our fixation with sexual sin while we were quite content gorging ourselves at all-you-can-eat buffets and watching four hours of junk on television every day?
The more I thought about this, though, the more I realized we will not get it right. We cannot possibly extricate ourselves far enough from our culture and our understanding of religion to view these matters in perfect subjectivity. I don’t think God would want us to. I think the ongoing dialogue keeps us alive in Christ and constantly seeking the Spirit. In fact those who are grappling with these issues today–the answers they eventually come up with will once again be challenged by Christians after them who must again recontextualize God’s redeeming work in their cultural millieu.
Perhaps our uncertainty is a good thing if it keeps us pursuing Christ in his fullness.
So maybe the most applicable lesson is what comes next: the challenge to discuss these matters in love, to treat one another with respect, to practice humility and constantly view others as better than ourselves.
Can we, like the earliest fathers of our tradition did in Acts, take on the attitude that “it seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay no greater burden on you than these requirements”?
Can we, like the earliest fathers of our tradition, meet together, and then come into unity on those things fundamental to the living out of our faith?
How can we practice a more fruits-of-the-Spirit-filled debate, operating in “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control”?
Photo credit: banlon1964
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