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A Vital Question
When is Christianity Seen in its Greatest Purity, Power and Effectiveness in the World?
In Matthew 5.14-16 Jesus says, “You are the light of the world…… Let your light shine before men that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”
In this statement from the famous and foundational Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes it clear that his true followers are the ‘light of the world’. What evangelicals find disconcerting is that, here at least, the nature of the light they are commanded to shine, and the thing that will draw men to God, is what Jesus simply and without hesitation calls ‘good deeds’. It has nothing at all to do with the salvation formulas of ‘coming to and believing in Christ’ as preached by later Christian evangelists.
The world is changing. Attitudes of governments and other religions towards traditional Christian ‘overseas’ missionary evangelist work are hardening. While it will take some years yet before most countries will be closed to overt missionary proselytising, the writing is on the wall. It is also very clear that while in western countries the numbers of people hungering for a real spirituality is growing rapidly, these same people are very resistant to attempts to ‘convert’ them into a religious box of any type, be that Christian, New Age or any group which claims that ‘we alone have the truth’.
This is, of course, causing major concern and heartburn among many evangelicals. Their great fear is that if these restrictions and resistances to Christian evangelism continue then, horror of horrors, they will be reduced to only being able to do ‘good works’! Such a fear lays bare one of the most deep-seated and long standing evangelical misunderstandings concerning what Jesus actually taught about how we live in right relationship with God and what constitutes the ‘good news’ he commanded us to take into all the world.
Most evangelicals view the growing resistance to traditional evangelistic efforts and theology as inspired by Satan, and yet another sure sign of the increasing sin of the ‘end times’. I want to propose what I firmly believe is a far more likely reason that the doors to this type of missionary endeavour are closing.
Note: What follows is a ‘thought provoker’ only. For a full discussion on this topic see our Inclusive Christianity article: The Broadness of Salvation
A Thought Provoker
Seriously consider the possibility that it is God, and not Satan, who is behind this relentless change! Could it be that this is one of his main means of not only getting the attention of the Christian church but of forcing it to radically re-examine traditional understandings in two crucial areas: what it is that lies at the heart of the ‘good news’, and what is the truest understanding of Jesus’ teaching on how a person lives in right relationship with God.
Throughout the two thousand years of its existence, Christianity has had an abysmal record of labelling as satanic what history has later clearly shown to have been God at work! I well remember how large sections of the evangelical church in the 1960s and 1970s initially at least declared the then fledgling charismatic movement to be the direct deceiving work of Satan and his demonic forces. It seems that every generation of Christians has had to fight some battle in which God’s ‘new thing’ is roundly denounced as ‘from Satan’ by at least a section of the Church. So why not now, and why not on this issue? At very least, this chronic propensity to mistake the ongoing renewing work of God for the devil’s handiwork should cause us all to be very slow to reject out of hand new thoughts on old issues. Remember the wise words of the Jewish Rabbi Gamaliel to those Jews opposed to the early Christian movement, “But if this is of God, you will not be able to stop [it]. You might even be found fighting against God.”
In Luke 10.25-37 Jesus unequivocally states that the keeping of the Great Commandment, ‘Love the Lord you God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind and your neighbour as yourself,’ would ensure that a person would inherit eternal life. “Do this and you will live,” are his exact words.
Such radical simplicity was immensely threatening to the established Jewish religious system of the day. Why? Because over the years the religious hierarchy had made the pathway to ‘salvation’ incredibly complex. The power of the temple and its vast array of detailed rules and regulations, plus the financially costly sacrificial system, all conspired to make sure that the Church of the day held the power of eternal life and death over people. Refuse to follow all the prescribed mind bogglingly complex rules, regulations and sacrificial requirements and the Jewish church assured you that you would live outside of God’s favour and spend eternity in hell. Sound familiar?
In his answer to the lawyer, Jesus in this one statement dropped an ‘atomic bomb’ into the midst of hundreds of years of accumulated ecclesiastical baggage and cut to the heart of what the Great Commandment taught – a simple yet radically costly way of living in right relationship with God and one another that seemed to need no Torah, no priesthood, no temple and seemingly no sacrificial system either.
As if this wasn’t enough, his ensuing story about the ‘good Samaritan’ would have hit like atomic explosion number two. It could not have failed to scandalise the Jewish establishment at least as much as his initial comment. In this famous story Jesus makes his hero a man from the despised Samaritan sect. The Jews regarded Samaritans as too heretical to have any relationship with God. They were, in Jewish minds, undoubtedly under divine wrath. Yet Jesus, by the clearest possible inference, makes it abundantly plain that the Samaritan in his story, heretic though he might be according to correct Jewish doctrine, was nevertheless living in a state of ‘eternal life’, in evangelical terminology a ‘saved soul’.
Clearly, and this is important, Jesus did believe that the Samaritans held significantly mistaken ideas. His remarks to the Samaritan woman he met at the well point to this (see John 4.22). Yet Jesus did not see false doctrine as any barrier to her establishing a real relationship with God. While he mentions to her some of the Samaritans’ wrong understandings, he in no way makes their correction a prerequisite of her coming to God in a fuller way. In fact, her incorrect doctrine appears to have been a complete non-issue with Jesus as far as ‘getting it right with God’ went.
This was in total contrast to how the Jews saw right relationship with God being established. It is also in total contrast to how evangelical Christianity’s salvation formulas say one ‘gets saved’.
Quite simply, no Christian following the traditional evangelical salvation formulas could or would ever have told the lawyer in Luke 10.27-28 what Jesus told him. In fact, to an evangelical the very thought of saying that ‘eternal life’ can result from responses that require no belief in and commitment to Jesus Christ could only be seen as rank heresy! Yet here and in several other places in the synoptic gospels Jesus puts no ‘believe in me’ clause into the requirements for eternal life.
This starkly illustrates the fact that, in at least as far as Christ’s synoptic salvation teachings go, the evangelical church propagates a view of salvation quite different from the most early and reliable recorded teachings of their founder.
How did this come about?
The very short answer is that over the centuries this, the greatest of all the commands of God, has been seen as too Jewish and quietly forgotten. It has been replaced by an insistence on correct Christology and an absolute need for a person to knowingly ‘accept and believe in Jesus’. Ironically, it is no longer good enough even for a person to believe in God and seek to do his will. If that person doesn’t also dot the i’s and cross the t’s of correct understanding of who Christ is and his work on the cross, then we deem them to be a ‘still unsaved soul’.
While undoubtedly this view has been the orthodox interpretation of salvation since the time of the Apostles Peter and Paul, it is clearly not what Jesus taught as recorded in the earliest extant and most reliable records of his life and teaching, namely the synoptic gospels Mark, Matthew and Luke. Rather, it results from the Church’s virtual ignoring of the synoptic salvation teachings, and its formulation of a salvation theology based exclusively on the very different ideas expressed by Paul and the much later writings of John.
It is time we in the evangelical church opened our synoptic gospels again and allowed them to become for the first time the source and touchstone of a new view of ‘living in Divine relationship’ – a view that will more accurately reflect what Jesus the Christ actually taught.
Another thought provoker
Christianity shows forth the Kingdom of God and the ‘good news’ in its most pure, powerful and effective form when it acts in the world with the practical love and compassion of Jesus Christ, and free of hidden agendas based, to a large degree, on conversion to Christianity of the recipients of those good deeds.
Strange though it may seem, the ‘no hidden agenda’ model is ultimately more powerful in drawing people to ask about the God who inspires such selfless giving than the model which uses ‘good works’ as a thinly veiled front for overt evangelism. While those responding may be fewer in number, the survival rate and genuineness of commitment of those who, inspired by the selfless agendaless model, find the way of Christ is likely to be much higher.
The more that works of compassion are simply a bait to cover the fish hook and real motive of conversion to Christianity, the more polluted, powerless and ineffective the actions become. The light which should have shone brightly into the world will have become veiled and dim.
The Power of Christian Compassion in the World
When I observe the way the different Christian-based humanitarian organisations like World Vision, Tear Fund, Christian World Service and many others, act in the world in terms of seeking to respond with the love of Jesus to the oppressed and poor, I find myself deeply moved, encouraged and immensely proud to be counted among the followers of Christ. Furthermore, I am convinced that out of all the world’s religions it is Christianity which responds best to those in need. It stands out as a shining example of a selfless and costly long-term giving of time, money and energy by many talented dedicated people in service to the world.
In recent years I have moved in circles where I meet people on a faith journey that could be described as ‘alternative spirituality’. Many of them, often for good reason, are very critical and uptight about Christians and the Church, especially the evangelical/pentecostal variety.
While some of their criticisms are sound and some are not, there is one thing that, when I mention it, always diffuses at least some of the strong negative attitudes and helps bring critics into a more positive and balanced view of Christianity. That thing is Christianity’s truly amazing record of consistent costly service. I point out to them the following:
1. The vast sums of money that flow out of Christian churches and from individual Christians into the aid agencies and local charities of the world.
2. The fact that many, if not most, of these aid agencies are birthed from the womb of individual Christians’ personal commitment to Jesus Christ and the love and selflessness that this inspires.
The huge numbers of often highly trained Christian health, agricultural and engineering professionals, along with their support personnel, who have turned their backs on highly paid jobs in this comfortable western world to dedicate their lives to those in need, often serving for years for virtually no salary to speak of in dangerous places and debilitating climates.
My final point, which usually leaves my hearers nodding in agreement as the truth of the above facts sink in is this (and I usually say it with passion): “If the Christian dollars, personnel and humanitarian organisations they serve were suddenly taken away, then a substantial proportion of the worldwide humanitarian work would collapse overnight.” It is facts like this which help people to see that large numbers of Christians are neither as arrogant nor as irrelevant as they imagine.
The Point of All This?
Christianity’s most powerful advertisement in the world, the thing which has always earned the greatest respect, and the thing which in fact opens people up to want to know what it is that inspires such loving costly compassion is, as Jesus said it would be, their agendaless ‘good works’. It is not the usual ‘evangelism’ based on arguments designed to convince people how right we are and how deceived they are. Why do we bother with such evangelism? We all know that it simply does not work. It simply causes people to retreat and put up their defences, just as we ourselves do when someone attempts to convert us to anything!
Remember, it is not the ranting tele-evangelists and door knockers who cause people to enquire after God.
This ‘wordless way of loving action’ is, without doubt, the purest and most powerful form of ‘going into all the world and preaching the gospel’. This is, and always has been, the truest heart of the ‘good news’. This is what the Kingdom of God is all about. It is about radical disciples going into the world to do the sorts of things done by the likes of Saint Francis, Mother Teresa, the Salvation Army, World Vision, Tear Fund and countless others, and in doing so earning the respect of the world, just as Jesus predicted.
This is what opens people the world over up to consider living their lives doing God’s will. This is what causes God’s will to come on earth as it is in heaven. This is what we are supposed to teach people that being a disciple of Christ is all about. It is to be people who see clearly that their greatest purpose is to demonstrate, in whatever circumstances life offers them, the love and heart motivated goodness inspired by God and his Christ.
By Bruce Puddle
www.ists-spiritualschool.org
From section: Christian Controversies
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