sufficient grace

I was struck by a comment from Rick Warren.  He was apparently being interviewed on ABC, repeating some nonsense about his principled objection to "same sex marriage".  He was asked about the prospect of his church adapting its views, as wider culture changes.  His response:

WARREN: Actually, history shows that when the church accommodates culture, it weakens it. This is why there is a very weak church in Europe today. It’s almost non-existent in many areas.

Now, that is hard to defend - and shows a staggering lack of self-awareness.  But the striking sentence is the middle one.  The implication is that strength is good and weakness is bad.  But I'm just not sure that that is a Kingdom principle.  Of course, context is all-important.  But in general, I'm not sure that the message of Christ is about a need to be strong, powerful, or influential.  St. Paul was assured that God's strength was made perfect in his weakness; he said that God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.

All this is a little reminiscent of the view of a certain man from Seattle who bemoaned Great Britain's lack of famous bible teachers.

Oh the irony.  If we have a business model of church, with franchises spread around the country (or the world), then fame, strength, and influence will be all-important.  But might there not be a chance, just a little one, that this is the embrace of wider culture, precisely the thing Warren complains about?  The Kingdom is different from that.  It's summed up by a man at the end of himself, hung on a cross. 

feeling unapologetic

Some spam in my mailbox asks if I'm Fed up with being told that Christianity is a fairy-tale?  Premier Christian Radio is evidently hosting an event on Reasons to Believe, with catchy talks on topics like God & Science: Cosmic Reasons to Believe in Christ.  I confess to having more than a little sympathy with the fairy-tale side of the house.  Not because I think that Christian faith is as useful today as the story of Snow White, but if anything quite the contrary.  There are rather too many Christians whose pitch seems to have the implicit sub-title "Fairy tales you can believe in".  Traditional apologetics seems to be busy answering all the wrong questions.

A new book by Richard Beck apparently brings a related perspective.  Richard writes a good blog, so I'm hopeful of a good book - when it eventually hits these shores.  He writes

The goal of this book is to answer a question: Why do people believe in God? More specifically, this book is aimed at answering a particular form of this question, a nuance that emerged in the modern period through the work of thinkers such as Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and, of particular importance for this book, Sigmund Freud. The shift in emphasis in “the God question” occasioned by these thinkers has rendered much of Christian theology and apologetics effectively useless in addressing many contemporary criticisms of religious faith. The playing field has shifted. And a new kind of apologetics is needed.

And that opening line makes for an interesting question.  Not one best tackled by rehearsing the tenets of mediaeval metaphysics.  Dawkins poetically and accurately observes that believing in God  is as rational as believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster (with all his noodly appendages).   Well, it's accurate in one particular form of rationality - but the notable, gaping hole in the argument is that there are a large number of people who do believe in God (generally involuntarily, as I discussed previously), and for a large number of these, that belief leads to action of one kind or another.  Notwithstanding the adherent of the Jedi creed who had a place on Channel 4's 4thought.tv slot, I don't think that the church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has any active communicants.  The interesting, rational, testable bit of Christian Faith is the impact it has upon the lives of its adherents - and the impact (for good or ill) which they have on the rest of the world.

If objective truth exists, it does so independently of the democratic will  Things can be true even if no one believes them, and having two billion adherents does not necessarily validate a belief system.  However, things done in the name of Christ have a substantial impact on the world today, and for that reason alone, his followers need to be taken seriously.  Moreover, they need to take themselves seriously, since it is surely by clinging to the outdated (and the already falsified) that the central message of Christ is obscured, and worse.

I can think of many reasons for the life of faith - and I don't think they need apology in either sense of the word.  I think I'd find the Rollins school of faith and philosophy the source of some better questions (if only I understood him better) - with his current blog title to believe is human; to doubt, divine.