A Deeper Christian Faith

Campbell

• Verlag: Wipf and Stock
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781498281652
• Thema: Théologie et religion
• Thema: Religion

Many Christians today do not have the confidence to state the most important, commonly held beliefs and practices of historic Christian communities. The appearance of large-scale and fundamental inconsistencies between Christian groups remains an obstacle to Christian commitment for persons outside of traditional Christian churches. The purpose of this book and coordinated video and audio series is to enable Christians to enunciate with confidence the most central and most common beliefs and practices of traditional Christian communities by learning some of the deeper historic traditions of Christian faith.

Chapter 1: Introduction

הביטו אל-צור חצבתם ואל-מקבת בור נקרתם

הביטו אל-אברהם אביכם ואל-שרה תחוללכם

Look to the rock from which you were hewn

and to the quarry from which you were dug

Look to Abraham your father

and to Sarah who bore you

Isaiah 51:1–2 (nrsv)

I want to invite you to a deeper Christian faith, a faith that has come down to us through the centuries. This is for Christians who want to “look to the rock from which [they] were hewn,” who want to explore the deeper roots of their faith, roots that extend back to our heritage in Judaism, roots in the primitive Christian gospel, in the New Testament writings, in the witness of early Christian saints and martyrs, and in the witness of countless women and men through the ages who professed their faith in Christ, formed families and communities in the faith, and bore witness to Christ in acts of holy service and justice.

If you’re convinced that nothing important happened in Christian faith between the time of the New Testament and the time when your own church was founded, this is probably not for you. If you’re willing to allow that the Holy Spirit might have been active in Christian churches through the ages, this might be for you. If you’re convinced that only your denomination or only your congregation represents the true Christian faith, this is probably not for you. If you want to learn something about the faith we share with other Christians, this is for you.

This is about the faith we share with other Christians. About a third of the earth’s people today identify themselves as members of Christian churches.8 That’s more than two billion people presently divided into a huge variety of Christian communities throughout the world. How can we describe the faith we share with other Christians, given the breadth and diversity of Christian groups today? Big subject. Little book. I know. What I hope to offer here is an account of the depth of Christian beliefs and practices formally affirmed by most Christian communities through the ages, expressed in commonly used ancient texts, reflected in common worship practices, grounded in careful conversations between Christian communities over the last century.

My approach was inspired by a book I received as a gift in my senior year of high school, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (1952). There are some aspects of Lewis’s book that I can’t emulate. Mere Christianity begins with an argument for the existence of God, and I feel bad about the fact that I never have really comprehended it. I trudged dutifully through the chapters that presented Lewis’s argument for the existence of God.9 I had a counter-argument to everything he came up with. Didn’t get it. Still don’t. I admit that I wake up as an atheist some Monday mornings. I am usually over it after a couple of cups of coffee, but I can’t help you figure out how to believe in God. I can’t figure it out myself. I’m a doubter. I’m a worshiper. Have some coffee.

What I have always liked about C. S. Lewis’s book is its account of common Christian beliefs and practices: that’s what he meant by “mere Christianity.”10 I originally called this project Common Christianity, reflecting Lewis’s title. Lewis wrote Mere Christianity at the zenith of twentieth-century optimism about Christian unity. He arrived at his conclusions about common Christian beliefs and practices partly by intuition, partly by his immense knowledge of medieval European culture, and partly by running his stuff about common beliefs by Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Methodist clergymen. Originally a series of radio talks that aired during the Second World War, the book was published in 1952, four years after the organizational meeting of the World Council of Churches. Lewis was not directly in touch with leaders of the movement for Christian unity that we call the ecumenical movement. But he imbibed the ecumenical spirit of the age and he thought he could write something up, run it by four clergymen of different denominations, and then present readers with the essence of common Christian beliefs and practices. He did a good job of that.

We do not live in such an age. The twentieth century’s optimism for Christian unity has long since faded. The ecumenical movement now appears to many of our contemporaries as a Christian expression of a particular era in western culture that valued Modernist visions of global unity, stripped of their moorings in traditional cultures, in art and architecture and music and political organization. That vision is now deeply suspect and likely to be seen as a relic of a bygone era even as ugly buildings in the “International Style” grow increasingly decrepit. Some of the most obvious expressions of that era, like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, have altogether disappeared. Others persist, like the United Nations and the World Bank, but today these groups project more the aura of staid institutional structures than that of vibrant and popular movements for human progress.

Theologians and historians today speak readily of multiple and divergent “christianities,” presupposing or stating as a dogmatic principle that there are not and have never been common Christian practices and beliefs except perhaps at the most superficial level.11 So this isn’t going to be as easy today as C. S. Lewis imagined it to be in the 1940s.

Surveying an expansive vista of Christian communities to discern the depth of beliefs and practices shared through the ages has one surprising advantage. The counterintuitive fact is that the larger the range of communities studied, the smaller the list of beliefs, teachings, and practices held in common between them. If we only consider what is common to Methodist and Presbyterian churches, the list of common material will be pretty big despite conventional arguments between Methodists and Presbyterians on issues like predestination. Add churches of the Baptist and Catholic families into the mix, and the list of common beliefs and practices grows smaller, not larger.

Not only do I want to consider a wide range of communities that exist today, I also want to consider Christian communities through the centuries, from the New Testament to the present time. This limits common material even further. Some might say it’s impossible to state common beliefs and practices over so wide a breadth of Christian communities and across such a wide expanse of time. But the proof is in the pudding, so I consider a wide range of Christian communities here and I focus on a relatively short list of common beliefs and practices shared between them. Even if it’s small, I argue that there is a significant core of beliefs and practices handed down through the centuries and expressed today in the confessions, the liturgies, and the texts used by Christian communities.

Discerning Common Christian Beliefs and Practices 1: The Confessions of Christian Communities

So how do we know that particular beliefs and practices really are held in common between Christian communities? In the first place, we should pay attention to common (shared) Christian beliefs and practices, beliefs and practices formally affirmed or “confessed” by bodies of Christians. In Christian parlance and as a translation of a biblical term, “to confess” means “to say something together.” This is not your average “saying something.” This means saying something in common in a serious or solemn manner.12

Sometimes English translations of the Bible, and especially of the ambiguous English word “you,” obscure the sense of common confession. Consider three words in I Corinthians 15:3 that amount to six words as translated in English. These words are conventionally translated “For I handed on to you…” But the problem is that the word translated “you” in this verse is plural, not singular. In the English dialect I grew up with, we would say “y’all” for the plural rather than “you,” and the translation “I handed on to y’all…” more accurately conv...