Diary of a Theologian

Someone was writing about her trip to Greenland. She had wanted to go to an out-of-the way place, “off the beaten track,” as the trite phrase puts it. Google that and you get, among other things, Greenland. The problem is, as soon as a place “off the beaten track” is discovered, the path to it quickly becomes quite beaten indeed. She wrote of her cruise ship docking at a coastal town. A few thousand people lived there; Greenland has a tiny population. Let’s say there were 5,000 people in the town. More than a thousand were on her ship, disembarking for a few hours.

Imagine the disruption to the local life. Imagine also the difference in the visitors’ experience. For a few hours, they became a huge percentage of the people in that town. They saw things; they spent money; they got back on the ship.

It has happened all over the world. In an old novel you might read of someone visiting Paris and going to see the Mona Lisa. He might stand there, pondering it, almost meditating, for several minutes—largely alone. Now (I’m told) the crowds are thick. Raise your cellphone in the air, snap, and move on.

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When things become popular, they are changed by the crowds who come. This has happened to Christianity, time and again. Before A.D. 312, the Christian faith had no official protection; after that, it was a tolerated religion in the Roman empire. The change happened to make it easier to become or remain a Christian; there were no longer persecutions for being a Christian, and the old social discouragements had gone away. The result, of course, was a lot more people “in church,” while at the same time they were there on much easier terms. Although there is nothing good about persecution in itself, one could still imagine people longing for the “old days” when to be a Christian was more serious and sometimes dangerous.

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We may be going through the opposite in America. With amazing rapidity, the proportion of our fellow citizens who call themselves Christian has dropped from about 90% to about 60%. There is just a lot less cultural approval of Christians. The drop can be attributed, and is, to many different things. To my mind, American culture as a whole tends to see Christianity as “behind the times.” Culture has eagerly accepted many things that Christianity has hesitated over. You can talk about this in terms of civil rights, or of scientific advances, or of various matters of sexuality. Western culture believes in what one wag has named “Progress Theology,” a conviction that things are moving ineluctably in a certain direction and everyone needs to get on board. This Progress Theology, however, is hardly biblical.

As culture provides fewer incentives to be known as a Christian, fewer people are. One result of this reversal may turn out to be greater Christian clarity about what it means to be Christian. We will have a stronger sense of how we live in a dialectic with culture, sometimes in alignment, sometimes out of step. Consequently, we will need to articulate more clearly what are the truths of Christian faith, including Trinity and the Incarnation and the consequences of living with sin in a fallen world. (That, by the way, is the principal strike against Progress Theology. If the times are fallen, it might be prophetic rather than retrograde to be “behind the times”!). Above all, we will need urgently to unpack and champion the dignity of human beings as God’s image.

Admittedly, it must have felt better to be in a church in the 1950s with exploding Sunday schools and cultural prestige and the “God Box” on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But, friends, in our times right now, there is no shortage of exciting things that God has for us to do. We may become, as it were, a religious Greenland, an off-the-beaten-track place that people will be newly interested in.

Christianity expands and declines, again and again, through history. May we be bold and faithful in the time before us!

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Out & About: September 14 the Good Books & Good Talk seminars resume. Our first discussion will be on Nicolas Diat’s lovely account of his visits to various French monasteries, A Time to Die. Monks preserve older understandings of caring for each other at the end of life—and of what happens at the moment of death and thereafter. I highly recommend this book to everyone, even if you cannot join the conversation that Sunday, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral.

The subsequent seminars will be Oct. 19 on Dr. Wortle’s School by Anthony Trollope, and Nov. 9 on Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot.

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On the Web: Recently for the Living Church Covenant page, I wrote about the unity of the two great commandments (to love God and to love neighbor). It’s one of those great questions that can stick with you for decades. What was new to me this time in thinking about them, is that we can see them united in God himself. God wants us to love him—which he makes possible by becoming our neighbor. Here’s how I concluded the column:

“The fourth and final thought comes from the Good Samaritan story. There was a man beaten, robbed, left for dead on the side of the road. Some people pass him by; one man, a Samaritan, stops. Although this story was prompted by the lawyer’s question (‘Who is my neighbor?’) Jesus ends the story with a different question. He asks, ‘Who proved himself a neighbor?’ By making this significant change, Jesus directs us not to ponder who is our neighbor but ‘How can I be neighbor, how can I prove myself a neighbor?’ A further question we might ask is, ‘Who has done this? Who, in human history, has proven himself a neighbor?’

“God did not ask himself, ‘Who is my neighbor?’ God did not try to figure out who was his neighbor. He couldn’t—the creator has no neighbors; only creatures have neighbors. But he did set himself the task of proving himself a neighbor to us.

“[And so] it happened: God arranged it that he would come over beside us. He arranged to put healing oil on our wounds. He made provision for our care. He went away, but he promised to return. On the lips of Jesus, the Good Samaritan story (in addition to all the other things it is about) is about Jesus himself, God in the flesh, God who has pulled up beside us.

 “By becoming the neighbor, God loved us and made it possible for us to love him and to love our neighbor. And when he returns, he will be our neighbor forever.”

You can read the whole thing here: https://livingchurch.org/covenant/90964/