Apologetics and Action

Recently I read three Christian books responding to the Corona pandemic: John Lennox, Where is God in a Coronavirus World?; John Piper, Coronavirus and Christ; Tom Wright, God and the pandemic. Here are my thoughts.

Lennox is a classic evidentialist, following C. S. Lewis’s example, trying to justify the works of God to men, explaining why God’s goodness is not compromised by the existence of (natural) evil. Piper, is a no-holds-barred Calvinist preacher, asserting truth, not trying to prove anything. He follows a presuppositionalist approach, by which any attempt to justify God in the courts of human reason would be to replace God with another supreme value – our Reason. Wright implicitly critiques both of their approaches, and expounds a kingdom-based apologetic, deriving from his general theological approach – the decisive event is the coming of the Kingdom in Christ, who invites us to participate with him in the eschatological task of bringing in that kingdom within history - rather than any casuistic attempt to explain away evil. Lennox is saying: please don’t dislike us, we’re not all that bad. Piper (like Milwall FC) says: nobody likes us, and we don’t care. Wright takes the stance of the patrician COE ecclesiarch. Me? I’m the guy in the local church, muddling through, who doesn’t really understand what’s happening.

Of the three, I’d probably give Lennox to a non-christian, or a believer genuinely troubled by these questions. Piper and Wright are better suited to a Christian looking for a prompt towards practical action. Here, however, there is a difference. Piper remains within the stock evangelical individualism, of personal gospel proclamation, despite a minor theme of mercy ministries. Wright, a retired Anglican Bishop, exemplifies the amillenialist tendency to discount disaster, and assume that somehow the church has a responsibility for managing the (fallen) world, a standard Christendom trope, rather than being a world-denying alternative minoritarian counter-community. My approach in these blogs, is that of Contextual Theology (albeit within an Evangelical commitment to Scriptural authority), seeking to reflect on what is going on, but without any overall agenda – hence my preference for the bittiness (if not bitterness) of blogging as a style.

But all these books, and my blog, are just words. In a recent online seminar from The London Project, our break-out group discussed the issue of cultural context. In a post-Christendom culture, aren’t people simply deaf to our message? Christianity is perceived as outdated, passé; tried and found wanting. Unlike the early church, in a pre-christian culture, where it was something new, untried. In this reading, copying Paul’s strategy, for example in Athens (Acts 17) will not work. However, while I accept the general Christendom critique, I do think Paul’s Athenian approach is valid today. The Greeks probably perceived Jesus-followers as a Jewish sect, which they were; hence as something already known, and dismissed as an even smaller part of a deviant, irrelevant, minority. But it was this sect which held the seeds of something radically new, and which got a (kind of) reception.

For us, the question is how to recover this edge? Os Guiness (Fool’s Talk) writes that people aren’t asking questions anymore. Our task is to therefore awaken curiosity. John Milbank says we need to defamiliarise the message (The Word Made Strange). Graham Tomlin states the church must provoke a reaction (The Provocative Church). All imply we need a ‘practical apologetics’, to build credibility for our message even before we open our mouths. For this we need to build the three-fold strategy of ‘words, works and wonders’: alongside preaching the word, the practice of social action and neighbourly love, with the expectation of miraculous interventions in answer to prayer. These latter two then provide evidence for the reality of the kingdom’s inbreaking presence.

The key difference in Pre- and Post-Christendom eras, is the question of power. We live in a day when the church’s power-mongering has been shown, firstly to be disastrously oppressive, and secondly (more importantly) as anti-kingdom. Relevant here is G. K. Chesterton’s classic article, The Five Deaths of the Faith, demonstrating that each prediction of the church’s demise was proved false, as each supposedly terminal stage was succeeded by a revival in spiritual vigour. Of course, he was writing about the Roman Catholic Church in particular, and hence applicable to the post-christendom predicament, since even anti-Christendom, Anabaptist, congregations are seen through the lens derived from the historical inheritance. But his general point remains. We can’t write off the church.

It does, however, entail taking a longer time perspective than more recent movement are capable of. Catholicism measures its prospects in centuries; tendencies, like missional church or emerging church, can only do so in decades at best, because that is how long they’ve existed. While the tendency of older ecclesial bodies may be to discount the importance of localised crises, that of contemporary movements may be to panic in face of temporary developments. As Alan Roxburgh comments though, sometimes Chicken Licken may be correct, and the sky may really be falling in (The Sky Is Falling!?! Leaders Lost in Transition).

What Chesterton does intuit, however is that the church does not progress linearly through history, as we can see in Scripture; but in a story of ups and downs and loops, of recessions and recoveries, regressions and resurgences, as the church loses spiritual vigour and is revived by the Spirit. For all our (necessary) initiatives, it is actually God who assures the future of the church (Mt. 16.18). Robert Sarah recommends that we do not look for any ‘new programme’ (The Day is now far spent), but depend on the work of the Spirit, in the age-old work of the gospel.