I ended the last blog post by speaking of people whose discomfort with the Christian gospel was far deeper and of a more fundamental sort than simply the idea that it put them at loggerheads with those they love, respect, or whose approval they covet. These are people who, for the most part, were raised in a Christian home, found aspects of Christian ritual, music, liturgy, or service to the neighbor, social, useful, or personally fulfilling, but who in large part despised the religious vision from which these expressions of culture grew. Far from cherishing the history of Israel, the apostles, the early church, and the Scriptures that grew out of them as God’s definitive revelation in history, these people viewed the particular claims of Christian faith as positive impediments to religious belief that affects salvation and promotes authentic human flourishing. Far from seeing the holy scriptures or the history of God’s chosen people as God’s self -disclosure and so things of inestimable worth, such people saw the Bible and that history as primarily human things. They viewed the scriptures as remembrances of a more primitive people, as likely to be the bearers of evil as good, a mixed bag of spiritual stones from which a few gems might be gleaned by people with more refined modern perspectives, but much of which was merely human ballast to be discarded as quickly as possible.
These are the sorts of people who write books with titles like Why Christianity Must Change or Die. For some of these people, the hostility to the historic faith goes even deeper, and they view a great majority of the traditional Christian teachings, both doctrinal and moral, as positive impediments to human progress, “a wellspring of oppression and injustice beyond measure” in the words of one former bishop in my own previous denomination… I am here paraphrasing, but paraphrasing accurately, and I certainly heard the same sentiment expressed regularly by the professoriate on the seminary campus that was supposed to prepare me for the public proclamation of “the faith delivered once for all to the saints.” What we have to understand, such people tell us, is that the Bible is an old book, full of poetry and pious myth, written by long -dead superstitious heterosexual men. The authority in things religious for these cultured despisers of classical Christianity is not the Bible, or even Christian tradition, but always some other ideology or worldview.
Such people have appeared throughout Christian history from both the right and the left, but they are always to be feared; they are from the outset dishonest dealers. Rather than go down the street, hang their own shingle and offer their ideas for consideration in the religious marketplace, as so many have done before them, they continue to abide in the Church, sometimes even occupying positions of authority within her, but using their influence to dilute, undermine, and in the worst cases, even subvert her teachings. For such people, the Church is a purely human institution, whose cultural momentum is a useful energy to tap in the service of cultural, political, and spiritual goals completely foreign to Christianity and the Bible itself. In my experience, such people are true believers in whatever alternative religious vision motivates them. As such, they feel justified in taking these steps, their own self-righteousness either blinding them to the basic dishonesty of their practices or justifying it in the service of their newly-defined “greater good.”
For some people, the receipt in their weekly paycheck of funds donated by traditional “Bible-believing” Christians was a positive victory, for they were going to employ those resources for the undoing of the very mission for which they were donated. For them, Malcolm X’s famous edict, “by any means necessary,” is the guiding principle. As one of my now-deceased seminary professors proudly declared at a meeting I attended, “I practice guerrilla theology.”
I could go on, but there’s little point. Humanity is creative in the ways of sin, and nowhere more so than when we believe we are acting in the cause of righteousness. As I believe Chesterton once noted, there are a thousand ways to fall down, but only one way to stand up straight. We are all sinners, myself most of all. And what is true of all of us is that we do not natively see the world right. None of us is equipped by our experience, no matter how vivid or heartfelt, to correctly interpret the data we receive in this life.
And interpret we must, for whatever information we collect, whether from books, life experience, or our own thoughts and emotions, none of it substantiates itself. The significance of any of the knowledge we believe we have accumulated in this life can only be known when we see how that information fits into the bigger picture.
We need God’s revealed perspective to make sense of our lives, because God alone can see that bigger picture. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. He was before all of our data. All of the data we collect exists only by His grace, and He will be after all of our data has turned to dust or swallowed up in the collapse of our physical universe. Like the man born blind in the Gospel of John, we need God to open our eyes with the pure light of His divine knowledge. God needs to heal our native infirmity, so that we can begin to see the world as He sees it.
If God has revealed Himself, we would be fools to ignore this revelation. If He has not, we are like children playing a game of blind man’s bluff where everybody—not just the person designated as “it”—is blindfolded. We keep following the evidence of our senses, but even when we stumble upon something, convinced it must be true, we can never know for certain if it is.
As the author of this podcast, I believe that God has revealed Himself. I believe that through the history of Israel, the person of Jesus Christ and later the apostles, God has shown Himself to us, has revealed Himself in a way that helps us to make sense of all the other seemingly conflicting data that surround us in this life. Christians throughout the ages, despite our many differences, have clearly seen the same thing, have had our eyes partially and imperfectly opened—but opened nonetheless—in the same way by the same Lord, though we each now see Him from a slightly different angle. While it is certainly true that there are differences apparent between the letters of Paul, James, John and Peter in the New Testament and even among the Gospels of Israel, themselves, these differences amount to but differences in detail and emphasis, not substance and essentials.
As the ministries of people like J. Werner Wallace demonstrate, when examined using the kinds of scientific tools that lawyers use in a court of law to determine whether a witness is telling the truth or not, what emerges from the Bible is a picture of many witnesses relaying their own account of the same great historic events, events leading up to, surrounding, and flowing from the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
Consequently, there has been, from the beginning, a broad consensus among Christians of every stripe in every era about who God is and what He requires of us. In the year 434, Vincent of Lerins famously referred to this broad accord in teaching when he insisted that in the Church, the gold standard was to proclaim that which has been believed “everywhere, always, and by all.” This consensus fidelium, or faithful consensus, has guided the Church for almost 2,000 years, and in order to avoid some of the Reformation-era controversies between Roman Catholics and Protestants, this consensus is what some Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox scholars have agreed to calling “the Great Tradition” of Christian teaching in order to distinguish it from the traditions of less significance and about which there is justifiable dispute.
The purpose of this blog is to help educate people about what the content of that Great Tradition is so that they may praise God all the more fervently for it. The late Harold Bloom believed that the real religion of America throughout her history has been Gnosticism, a fact he rejoiced in because he considered himself a Gnostic. But Gnosticism in any of its many forms is actually a Christian heresy. It is a falling away from the teaching of the actual witnesses of Christ embodied in the Scriptures and into what seems to be more appealing or even more logical to our darkened intellects. Heresy is in fact error, and while error is something to work at eliminating in every aspect of our lives, it is especially important to do so when we are speaking about the things of God where the knowledge we acquire affects the very state of our souls.
Does this seem a bit overblown and unrealistic? Does putting the case about understanding the truth of historic Christian teaching in this way seem a bit melodramatic? It should not. While I do not claim that any person will be saved by the purity of their doctrine, I do believe it is the mission of the Church to ensure that the fullness of God’s revelation to us continues to be taught and preached, so that wherever we are in our spiritual journey, biblical understanding, or even lack thereof, we have the opportunity to learn or return to that truth.
This blog is not about forcing anyone to believe anything. It is about ensuring what one ancient prayer of the Church calls “the pure light of God’s divine knowledge,” given to humanity in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth and preserved for us in the Holy Scriptures and the unbroken testimony of the Church for nearly 2 ,000 years continues to be the gold standard of the Church’s proclamation. It is about making sure that this continues to be available so that any who wish to turn to it and be illumined may do so. It is about helping those who are already on the path become more discerning about who are the authentic—and inauthentic—preachers and teachers of God’s Word.
This is why I chose The Faith Conservationist as my title for this podcast. In the realm of natural ecology, a conservationist is someone who sees something unique, something precious, something of inestimable value that is threatened and tries to preserve it against that threat. Sometimes, the threat comes from basically good people who do not realize the unintended consequences of their otherwise noble endeavors, like when a person building homes for families tries to build in an area inhabited by endangered species. Sometimes, though, the threat comes from genuine villains, people who either care for nothing but their own narrow agenda, or who actively despise the natural treasures the conservationists seek to protect.
People who pose the first kind of threat are often the conservationists’ best allies once they become aware of how their actions unintentionally imperil a beautiful, valuable, and irreplaceable thing. The great strides that the ecology movement has made amongst the middle class since my childhood involvement in the American society demonstrate that, for most well -intentioned people, truthful information is persuasive. In the case of people who are small-minded or hostile, what is needed to conserve the cherished object is allies who are aware of the great value of what is being jeopardized and will form a united front to prevent the rogues from despoiling what can never be restored.
In either case, the dissemination of true information is the conservationist’s best weapon. I believe the Christian Gospel is just such a precious resource, and as deserving of our conserving energies as any baby seal or stretch of rainforest. Indeed, it is the pearl of great price that puts in perspective all our earthly conservation efforts, rendering their work intelligible, making it more than just the futile labor of one of the one percent of species produced by the earth that have managed to avoid extinction.
This is why in the weeks and months ahead, I will endeavor to put into plain words the historic doctrinal and moral teachings of the Christian faith and investigate their ongoing significance for us today. I hope to demonstrate that all of these teachings are firmly grounded in the historical reality of God’s interaction with the people of Israel, the Church, and all humanity, preeminently through the person of Jesus himself. I will explore what most Christians have meant throughout history when we have spoken of the authority of Scripture, and I will explain in everyday language the most important things Christians proclaim about who God is, what He has done, and what He is doing now. I will also trace the outlines of the most common theological errors, or heresies, that well-meaning Christians have fallen into throughout history, and detail for you ways in which these errors are poking their heads up again in our midst.
I plan to use the hot button issues that prompted me to initiate this blog as jumping off points for my discussions, but the topics covered here will not be limited to them.
I beg for your prayers as I begin this sensitive but I believe vital work for our parish. Pray that the Lord may illumine my mind as I research and write. Pray that I speak only what is pleasing to God. Pray that God may use my words to build up people in faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.
Pray also that my own sins might not become a stumbling block to this work. Please pray for me and know that I am praying for you, for the church and for the world. May we together see the day of our Lord and hear addressed to us on that day the words we all so long to hear; “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
Glory to you, O Christ.