The colours of their eyes were fading
From Brian Walsh & Syliva Keesmaat’s Colossians Remixed:
Imaginary interlocuter: When you put it that way, I can begin to see your point. Of the friends of mine who have abandoned Christian faith, very few of them stopped believing in Christ because of intellectual problems with the Bible or because they were seduced by some other worldview or belief system. Rather, they tend to abandon Christian faith because of the irrelevance, judgmentalism, internal dissension and lack of compassion they experience within the Christian community. Rather than finding the church to be the community that most deeply encouraged them in their struggles, they lost heart in their discouragement and lost their faith in the process. Rather than experiencing the church as the site of the most profound hospitality, love and acceptance, they felt excluded because of their doubts and struggles.
Walsh & Keesmaat: This is our point. What makes the argument that is alternative to the gospel plausible? Is it the internal consistency of the argument? Is it its scientific verifiability? Its political and economic power? No, what makes an argument that is alternative to the gospel plausible is the implausibility of the Christian community itself.
When the church fails to be a listening community, attentive to the cries of the poor, then the gospel is implausible and alternative social philosophies take on an air of plausibility. When the church becomes a site of bitter enmity while the world is spinning ever more quickly into war and violence, then the gospel is not only implausible, it is an embarrassment. In the face of such failures to be a community that embodies the truth that came to save the world, it is no wonder that alternative visions become more plausible to us.
8 responses to “The colours of their eyes were fading”
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Yes, that it precisely the point. Which is why, though they do have a place, the use of creeds and confessions to exhaust the meaning of ‘the truth’ is entirely wrong-headed. For the church to be “pillar and foundation of the truth” is not for it to hold official statements in abstraction, but for it to be the living (and, dying) body of Christ, for the sake of the world and in manifestation of God’s faithfulness.
It is not for nothing that so many people have the intuition that there should be a fourth ‘mark of the church’ – its character and practical witness.
aye
Always had a faint problem with the “I would be a christian but the church sucks…” story.
Consider; I am a member of the church, part of the body of Christ, bought with a price, by Grace washed in the blood of the Lamb, cleansed of my sins, saved from my deserved exile and eternal separation from my creator by the Grace of Almighty, Eternal God who loved me from before the creation of the world. I love Him.
But, I am going to disbelive all of that because other people in my church are stupid, foolish, dumb, disagree with my version of the truth……..etc etc.
This does not seem plausible to me.
I feel that the real reason I toss out my church membership/belief/faith relates to a confidence that I do not need salvation. If I do not need to be saved then I can wander away fron the church quite easily. I am not going to abandon her if I know that I am a sinner standing in the need of a Saviour and that He has made the church His Body. The church is a collection of the recipients of Grace, a collection of extremely needy people. One of the diffrences between the church member and the worldling is that we know we need help. I feel that a lack of a sense of sin is that which allows church members to wander off.
This is not to say that the stupidity, superficiality, arrogance and smugness we at times all display is not a huge burden to other members of our community. This is not to say that those negative features are not a stain, a blot on the church and are in fact dishonouring to God.
However, I feel that to use our co-religionist’s lack of sanctification as the reason for my not loving God is to blame others when a look in the mirror may be more helpful.
it seems quite plausible to me.
i recollect a passage by the Apostle John which talks about how people would recognize the followers of Jesus because they loved each other. A little later on in dealing with the question of how one can know one belongs to the people of god (in 1 John – an interestingly dissimilar approach from the CoD) you find the qualifier is not knowledge of cleansing of sins, saved from exile etc. but of love.
i also recollect a passage which might be in matthew about how by their works you shall know them etc.
it reminds me a little of the three things Paul mentions: faith, hope and love. knowledge doesn’t feature as strongly there as it does in later Protestant traditions. in Protestant history it seems often faith has been broken apart and reconstituted as knowledge and this I think is a mistake. Faith (as with hope and love) is a far more risky and foolish (not to mention impossible) venture into the unknown. (which is why salvation is worked out with fear and trembling rather than the certainty of knowledge)
and none of these three things mean nearly as much as they could without a strong community in which people can grow and develop.
that people (particularly more religious people) wither and die without such a community seems rather unsurprising to me.
About 5 years ago one of the passages D refers to began to impress upon me the great difference between our (conservative protestant) justifications for a split & fractured church, and what our Lord actually prayed for. When I realised that such a weighty matter as the recognition of God’s Christ is laid on our shoulders, and that therefore God expects us to be capable of providing that recognition, I began to wonder what Christ meant by ‘unity’, which he saw as foundational to the recognition. And so I began to seriously question what my church meant by unity, and why we saw it as a utopian pipe dream. And there began my re-evaluation of our use of creeds and confessions as the necessary ground of unity.
And so, that’s why I agree with the quote, and why I think Hans’ response assumes too much about how a person comes to recognise (and see their need of) the Christ that is the truth of God.
Here it is, Jesus praying to God before going to the cross:
Why should a gospel substantially founded on the concept of humans being sinful be rendered “implausible” by evidence that human beings are sinful? Just a thought.
The essence of the concept of “saved by grace” is that God grants grace to people we would not give it to. And the church is full of people like that. Which indicates that the church is indeed made up of those God has called. But why would God call THEM, you may ask? So they can come within the community where grace is given and received between the members, thereby enabling them to grow towards maturity in Christ. So while the church doesn’t display much of the grace of God in action sometimes, the mere fact it exists at all is a sign that God has accepted sinners in spite of themselves. Which is not to deny that the church’s witness to the world is not all it should be, but it does mean we can say to those who reject the church (whether or not they profess Christian faith) that it’s not up to us to choose who belongs to it, and if it was up to us, would any of us be chosen to belong by the rest if they were doing the choosing instead of God?
I agree. The mere fact of the survival of our own, young communion in NZ is a sign of Grace.