JoyaTeemer: Protected "Half Empty, Half Full" ([edit=sysop] (indefinite) [move=sysop] (indefinite))

2010-06-09T20:13:31Z

Protected "Half Empty, Half Full" ([edit=sysop] (indefinite) [move=sysop] (indefinite))

← Older revision

Revision as of 20:13, 9 June 2010

JoyaTeemer: Created page with '{{info}} ''Is world Christianity on the up, or on the way out? The answer might depend on what kind of person you are.'' The 300th anniversary of a Christian publication afford...'

2010-05-20T19:13:40Z

Created page with '{{info}} ''Is world Christianity on the up, or on the way out? The answer might depend on what kind of person you are.'' The 300th anniversary of a Christian publication afford...'

New page

{{info}}

''Is world Christianity on the up, or on the way out? The answer might depend on what kind of person you are.''

The 300th anniversary of a Christian
publication affords us an opportunity
to reflect on how things are
going in the world of Western confessional
Christianity. Accurate assessment is not
easy, partly because most of the observers—
you and I!—temperamentally lean either
toward seeing the glass half empty, or seeing
the glass half full. List for the ‘half empty’
folk some of the gains of the last half-century—
for instance, the rise in serious
Christian publications, the commitment to
excellence in expository ministry in several
quarters, renewed evangelism among postmodern
biblical illiterates, evangelical seminaries
and theological colleges that are
numerically and theologically strong—and
they will immediately mention the decline in
church attendance in most Western countries,
the marginalization of Christian ethics
in our culture, the rise of biblical illiteracy,
the multiplication of aggressive homosexuality,
and the anti-Christian cast of many
voices in the media and the courts. Begin
with the negative phenomena, and the ‘half
full’ types will list all the ways in which the
grace of God is transparently manifest. So
how should thoughtful Christians who want
to escape mere sloganeering polarities think
about these things?

Permit me six brief reflections.

1. This is not an exclusively Western
problem. Everywhere in the world, Christians
are tempted by extreme interpretations.
‘Half full’ voices tell observers how fast
Christianity is growing in sub-Saharan
black Africa, much faster than Islam; ‘half
empty’ voices in the same area remind us
how much syncretism still persists in
African ‘Christianity’, and how few competent
Bible teachers there are to stabilize the
church: much could be swept away in
another generation. ‘Half full’ voices watch
the rapid growth of some form of evangelicalism
in Latin America and China; ‘half
empty’ voices note how much of it is ‘name
it and claim it’ triumphalism in the former,
and how much of it is poorly taught and
with minimal access to good books and
teachers in the latter. ‘Half full’ observers
comment on the rapid growth of the church
in the most populous Muslim country, viz.
Indonesia, and observe that there are more
Iranian Christians today than at any time in
the past thousand years; ‘half empty’ commentators
draw attention to two million
martyrs in southern Sudan, to systematic
oppression in Saudi Arabia, to the multiplication
of states that are adopting Shariah.
Similar polarities are universal.

2. Although the identification of trends
can be pastorally useful, it is often a disreputable
business. Telling the future by extrapolating
present trends presupposes that
present trends will continue, whereas ''no''
trend continues indefinitely. The mayor of
the fastest growing small town in America
recently commented that “if present trends
continue” every person in America will live
in his town by 2086. Mathematically, he
was telling the truth; on the other hand, the
mere datum should not be allowed to raise
serious fears in our minds, because transparently
this current trend will ''not'' continue.
We control so very little; we foresee things
only a little distance ahead, with our accuracy
falling off exponentially as we project
years ahead instead of months, or decades
ahead instead of years. Only God is the Lord
of the future: read and re-read Isaiah 40ff.

3. Appeals to history are often equally
slippery. The ‘half empty’ folk think of history
as the good old days, whose glistening
triumphs expose our desperate bankruptcy;
the ‘half full’ people are inclined either to
read history with a rosy hue (just as they
read the present with a rosy hue) or to list all
the weaknesses and failures of the past so as
to provide a foil for recent triumphs. To the
one, the Middle Ages were a time of intellectual
solidarity behind a unified Christian
vision, and producing giants like Thomas
Aquinas; to the other, the Middle Ages were
the dark ages, when life was brutish and
short, indulgences multiplied, and the
church produced a monster like Pope
Innocent III. To the one, the nineteenth
century produced heroic missionaries; to
the other, these missionaries too often could
not distinguish preaching the gospel and
mandating Western culture. To the one,
serious thinkers produced magisterial
works of theology; to the other, the theology
was much too indebted to unrecognized
philosophical assumptions and scholastic
arguments, while today’s Christians are
becoming sensitized to the priorities of biblical
theology. This list could be extended
almost indefinitely.

4. Another factor, an important theological
factor, must not be ignored. So often
God reverses the trends in surprising and
unforeseen ways. When the Italian Fascists
swept into Ethiopia and the missionaries
were expelled, the church was pathetically
small, weak and unstable. A dozen years
later, the church had multiplied unbelievably.
When Mao-Zedong expelled missionaries
from China, there were about one
million ‘Christians’ (interpreting the term
generously). It was easy to read the political
developments with deep pessimism: the
glass was half empty. Who would have predicted
that a half-century later even conservative
estimates place the number of Chinese
believers at about 75 million? The rise
(again!) of militant Islam can be seen as a
dangerous and depressing development.
But who knows? God may use this in unpredictable
ways to bring about the conversion
of millions Even the rise of secularism,
philosophical materialism, and postmodern
ethics in the West may, in the Lord’s mercy,
be the dark hour before reformation.
Certainly it is becoming easier to see who is
a Christian, in biblical terms, and who is
not. We cannot know if the end of these
trends will be massive judgment in our
time, or glorious reformation. In the
strange but delightful calculus the Lord so
often deploys, the weak become strong, the
strong become weak. In some ways, the
signs of strength and growth amongst us
are at least as dangerous,
potentially speaking, as the
weaknesses, moral decay, and
drift, for we easily fall into
over-confidence, self-reliance,
even arrogance.

5. What is at issue, then, is
attitude. If the events and the
trends through which we are
living are not transparent predictors
of the future, not only because of
their inherent complexity but also because
our sovereign God loves to overturn our pretensions,
the difference between ‘half
empty’ believers and ‘half full’ believers
turns as much on personal attitude as on
anything else. Here the advice of Tim Keller
is percipient: For the Christian, optimism is
naive, but pessimism is atheistic. Optimism
is naive primarily because we believe what
the Bible says about sin and about fallen
human nature, but also because we read
history. We have just come through the
bloodiest century in human history. It takes
a pathetic naiveté to imagine there is any
good reason to suppose that the twenty-first
century will be less bloody. But pessimism
is atheistic. It forgets that God is sovereign,
that there can be no degrees of difficulty
with Omnipotence, that the Lord Jesus has
promised, “I will build my church”.

6. What we need constantly are prophetic
voices from the centre. In every generation,
powerful voices emerge on one faddish
front or another, pulling the church this way
or that, offering ‘the’ solution, demanding
some sort of complete makeover. Some cry
that the sky is falling and that there is a
danger of being left behind; others insist
that the gospel is not only old but old-fashioned
and needs to be jazzed up with either
a higher number of miracles or at least
with an intellectual structure that sounds
progressive, perhaps even ''avant garde''. ‘Half
empty’ Christians will be tempted to circle
the wagons and become defensive: the end
is nigh. ‘Half full’ Christians will be tempted
to read the tea leaves provided by the latest
sociological analysis and re-shape the
church to adapt to the new grid. It is far
from easy to sound prophetic from the
centre when there are so many siren attractions
on the fringes. But while we listen
with pained realism to the reports of sin and
decay, and while we learn what we can from
the methods and insights of successive
waves of pragmatists, what drives us is the
gospel of Jesus Christ. Let God be true, and
every man a liar. We refuse to be pessimists
or optimists. Ignoring the temptations of
‘half empty’ moanings and of ‘half full’ bubbliness,
we preach Christ and him crucified,
and trust the One who reigns until he has
put all his enemies under his feet.

Half Empty, Half Full - Revision history

JoyaTeemer: Protected "Half Empty, Half Full" ([edit=sysop] (indefinite) [move=sysop] (indefinite))

JoyaTeemer: Created page with '{{info}} ''Is world Christianity on the up, or on the way out? The answer might depend on what kind of person you are.'' The 300th anniversary of a Christian publication afford...'