Relatively Religious

By Peter Brain

An introductory chapter remarks on the similarities between the organisational life of the church as institution through the centuries and the way this reflects its social and cultural context.
Chapter 1 considers the risk of attaching the adjective ‘Christian’ to any culture and explores what is culture-specific and what is essential in Christianity.
Chapter 2 reviews the trap into which Christianity fell during the first centuries of assuming that orthodoxy was what mattered and that deviation from the truth (defined as doctrine) was a breach of faith. The current Pope’s campaign against ‘dehellenisation’ is addressed.
Chapter 3 reflects on the perennial danger of assuming that doctrine can be articulated at one time for all time, that Christians must be ‘on message’. Some past dissenters from this approach are described.
Chapters 4 and 5 open up the two-fold basis for belief in God as trust (i.e. relational), namely the notion of a creator and the experience of the spirit. The folly of creationists and the shallowness of much ‘spirituality’ are discussed.
Chapter 6 rehearses the story of Jesus of Nazareth and examines how God is revealed in him and how Christianity depends on an ongoing relationship of believers with him.
Chapter 7 explores human failure to live ‘like Jesus’ and how the often misunderstood idea of forgiveness can help us to do so afresh. An after-note examines the parallels among world faiths on the subject.
Chapter 8 takes seriously the question ‘what would Jesus do?’ as a guide to ethics and affirms a diversity of Christian practice to be as valid as a diversity of doctrinal statements or liturgy. The issues of abortion and women’s ministry are discussed.
Chapter 9 returns to an appreciation of contemporary (western) culture and the need for discernment amid so much change, with a defence of such ‘relativism’. How diverse can Christian doctrine and practice be? How can followers of Jesus change without losing their identity? The prospect of life beyond death is discussed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Brain
• Release date: Apr 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476027265

Peter Brain

Peter Brain is a retired minister of the United Reformed Church in Britain He has served in Birmingham, Liverpool, London and Manchester including ten years as General Assembly Secretary for Church and Society and eight years as a Synod Moderator. Please send comments to him: mailto:[e-mail]

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Relatively

Religious

by Peter Brain

Copyright 2012 Peter Brain

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It is my conviction that much of what is being advocated or rejected as Christianity today is too often the Christianity of yesterday, uncritically assumed to be the Christianity of tomorrow also. Because we can discern the adaptation of this religion to its contemporary context in each age (- dare we call this 'evolution'!) it would be doubly tragic if in today’s world, where change is the zeitgeist, Christian faith in the living God should be undermined by its most vociferous advocates and denied the opportunity to change appropriately, just at the time when it is being undermined or openly attacked by its vociferous opponents.

INTRODUCTION

Though I did not quite grasp it at the time my personal introduction to the approach which I am exploring here was back in 1971 when I was on the staff of Carrs Lane Church, a city centre Congregational Church in Birmingham. At our monthly Church Meeting the debate that evening, October 28, was rather special: should we as a local Congregational church join the new United Reformed Church which was to be formed the following year? By chance on the very same evening the House of Commons was debating and deciding whether the United Kingdom should join the (then) European Common Market. Both votes were overwhelmingly in favour, though ours did not make the headlines!

That coincidence remains memorable. The emotions and arguments were strangely similar. As well as the obvious opportunity to join a larger and arguably more influential unit there was the anxiety that this pointed down the road towards greater uniformity. Opponents feared the loss of cherished independence and the hand-over of power to distant bureaucrats, even church ones.

As it turned out the formation of the United Reformed Church was the high-water mark of ‘organisational ecumenism’. Subsequent proposals for visible church unity have all failed, though there are still many Christians who would subscribe to this vision. At that time some people had a similar dream of some kind of United States of Europe, in which the federal whole would be significantly greater than the sum of the parts, but this has faded and disappeared for several reasons and has been replaced, as in the churches, by the language of co-operation and partnership, especially bi-lateral partnerships within the wider whole.

This similarity is only the latest example of the fascinating linkage and curious parallels between the changing life of the Christian Church and of wider society over the centuries. Much of the outward visible life and practice of the Christian Church (in all its manifestations of churches and denominations) has been determined in each generation and in contrasting situations by the surrounding culture. This has been the case from the beginning until now. Incidentally, culture in this context does not mean the high culture of the arts and literature but more mundanely ‘how we do things round here’¹. In the words of David Deeks, former General Secretary of the Methodist Church, ‘Culture’ is about what is taken for granted, what is intuitively known, the general expectations in an organisation of how things are intended to be done.

From early on there were clear parallels in matters of outward organisation and governance. In the 4th century Church organisation was shaped by Constantine’s first moves to establish Christianity as an official religion of the empire; more about him later. It followed from this imperial initiative that the position of the bishop of Rome, already prominent, was consolidated into what became the ruling papacy, for no other obvious reason than the pre-eminence of Rome as the capital city - all roads led there, after all. This move to a single figure-head took place irrespective of the intrinsic qualities or abilities of the Roman incumbent bishop. It was natural to reflect the contemporary power structure.

Then a little later the division between eastern and western Christian traditions mirrored the political split between the declining status of Rome and the new eastern capital of Constantinople. It was that city, rather than Jerusalem for example, or another strong centre of Christianity in the east, which became and remains the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch, even today as Istanbul.

The implications of the church reflecting surrounding culture showed up blatantly in the style of life and manner of jurisdiction of both Pope and Patriarch which could hardly avoid becoming imperial in style, given such a political and cultural context. And this is indeed how it turned out, to the point of being imperialistic in some cases. Thus it was that a top-down approach to church governance became the norm, despite strong warnings against this within the recorded teaching of Jesus². In this imperial context there emerged the Church’s equivalent of the Provincial Governor or pro-consul, known as a bishop (the word means ‘overseer’) whose role was to promulgate and enforce the will of the Pope and deal, sometimes roughly, with dissidents, as the Emperor’s secular pro-consuls did. This is how empires work. The episcopal purple derives from that age of empire, as do some episcopal attitudes! The top-down approach to church governance which mirrored the 4th century model of the provincial governor or pro-consul became part of the structure of the Church to the point of being required for Christians to this day in episcopal traditions. But it was only adopted because in those days that was how things were done in ‘the world’.

What we call the Reformation, a range of movements over a few countries and centuries, is another good example of the Church adapting to the shifting zeitgeist. This massive upheaval in church life was a feature of – and not the cause of - the broad Renaissance of European societies which was happening over the same few centuries. Rising levels of education, coupled with new technologies such as printing and even the possibility of inter-continental travel, changed the shape of political governance and the culture of society for ever. The life of the Church evolved to match. The Reformation did not trigger the Renaissance but was rather one element of it, reflecting several of its emphases. The revival of interest in ancient philosophy and science led Christians to re-examine their own ancient texts - for example Martin Luther re-reading Paul's letter to the Romans - with devastating results.

Organisationally the phenomenon of national churches which arose as part of the Reformation was a reflection of the consolidation of European nation states with a growing competitive edge. Thus we have the Church of England emerging to endorse the secular political power of a monarchy which was seeking spiritual justification for its new nationalism. The subtle distinctions between the various types of church (denominations) arising at the Reformation is more a reflection of their national or local cultures than anything else, even if religious changes provided additional justification for political change. It's no exaggeration to point out that France and Spain and Ireland changed least politically at that time while Germany and England and Holland changed most; this is reflected in the degree of change in their churches. By contrast the continuation of relatively monolithic economic and political systems in the east (including the Muslim Ottomans) was mirrored in the life and practice of the Orthodox churches which scarcely changed at all. Such an interpretation does not imply criticism of the sincerity and personal faith of national or church leaders. But it demonstrates how the visible church is the product of the times and how readily the cultural manifestations of church life at a critical moment of change become part of the core in subsequent generations.

Towards the modern era, as the Renaissance evolved into the Enlightenment through western Europe and its colonies, competition and what became capitalism was the order of the day. The new nation states were themselves encouraging internal diversity of thought and practice for economic and social reasons, and their governance was necessarily becoming more political in the partisan sense. Reflecting this trend we see the emergence of many independent congregations, who styled themselves local churches. This movement, which (to cut a very long story short) in the 16th and 17th centuries eventually became the Non-conformist ‘Free Church’ tradition, was itself a spin-off from the exciting new possibilities born of the social, economic and cultural Renaissance and from a passionate desire that social change would be for the better and for all citizens. This dream lives on. Some of these congregations were organised into ‘denominations’ of Independents (Congregationalists), Presbyterians and Baptists, asserting their rights in the ‘free world’ which people were now beginning to dream the world might become, a new world order where freedom was increasingly interpreted as equality. Many took these ideals across the seas to America.

Inevitably such claims and movements were fiercely resisted by those in power, including those who resisted on behalf of a dominant Church; the resources of religion were deployed in support of all sides.

Was it the more democratic strand of Reformation Christianity embodied in the national Church of Scotland which sustained a heightened sense of popular nationalism, or did this conciliar (Presbyterian) form of church governance itself catch on because of a political instinct which derives sovereignty from ‘the people’ rather than from above? I suspect it was actually the latter.

During recent centuries, on the back of frustration with current conditions and quickened by the new aspirations of the times, there was born a struggle for a ‘better’ (meaning a more equal) world which has ebbed and flowed in the churches, as in society, until the present day. The slow yet inexorable spread of ideas and visions of social and political change (‘progress’) was as much underpinned by Christian claims as was the resistance to such dangerous notions. The chapels and their weeknight meetings may have been the places where these visions were encouraged but, despite claims that the Labour Party owed more to Methodism than Marx, they and their progressive preachers were reflecting and not inventing the underlying trend.

It is embarrassingly obvious that the organisation and governance of these Free Churches, especially in the employment of ministers, reflected the approach of contemporary businessmen who dominated the new cultural scene and set the tone for civic as for religious life. They structured ‘their’ local churches on business lines, using models drawn from their weekday lives, with members (= shareholders) led by deacons (= Board of Management) employing a minister. This was their instinct and their culture (‘the way we do things round here’). This pseudo-democratic ecclesiology has survived, and been sometimes dangerously beatified, into the present. On many occasions even as late as the 1950’s it was not unknown for a Baptist, Congregationalist or even a Methodist minister to wait weeks for his stipend payment because the offertory was low or the local treasurer too busy. But it was the growing sense of injustice