Give an account of your faith that makes sense
So, what do we suppose to have happened all those years ago, and how and why do Christians want to claim it is relevant to our lives today …?
These are questions that have long preoccupied me. Nothing seemed to matter more – and for years I was unable to let them alone. I read and read in order to find an answer that satisfied me. I did eventually. And that answer, though in some sense there all along, was not where I had initially expected. I want to spare you the trouble of having to go on the same tortuous route – and make available to you the kind of presentation of the Gospel I wish someone had given me when I first began to enquire. Over the following chapters, I propose such a presentation, together with responses to serious questions arising, and evaluation of alternative approaches.
You will no doubt want to know where am I coming from … my church background, that is to say.
I have been a Christian for many years. Like many of my tribe here in England, I sit ‘in the pews’ of an Evangelical Anglican church. By which I mean that I do not hold a role in the leadership of the church, and have never done so – beyond teaching in the Sunday school, and co-ordinating one of the many ‘house groups’.
For the benefit of any Americans among my readers, ‘Anglican’ here doesn’t signify much. It’s the national church, after all. ‘Evangelical’ means pretty much what it means for you … only the decline of non-Evangelical churches in the UK has been such that, if you’re serious enough about your faith to want your kids to have the experience of growing up in a Christian community, you are likely to face a choice between one ‘Evangelical’ church and another – unless you live somewhere like London or Oxford. The alternative is sharing an ancient and drafty edifice with a bunch of octogenarians (no disrespect).
Things weren’t always that way. The church I was bought up in during the seventies wasn’t particularly Evangelical – even if some of its most active members were (the youth leaders, for example). Nowadays, islands of Christian community still surviving the rising tides of secularism are increasingly likely to fly an Evangelical flag – with leaders who attribute their relative numerical preponderance over any other churches out there to their refusal to sell out on issues held to distinguish them from ‘liberals’.
There is a predictable corollary of this general situation – though one of which our leadership sadly shows little awareness: the growing presence in the Evangelical pews of a laity hailing from an ever-widening range of denominational backgrounds and allegiances, the ox, as it were, grazing with the young lion.
I count myself among this ambivalent group.
There are aspects of Evangelicalism I have come to embrace as the best legacy of the biblical Christian faith I have known since teenage years. The notion, for a start, that the reality of the Christian faith is something practiced in and by ecclesial community. This has always distinguished Evangelical Anglicanism from the vague ‘C of E’ of the majority, now long since lost to secularism. By the latter, of course, I mean those who, back in the old days, claimed broadly Christian ‘values’ as a kind of birth right, doing religious marriages and funerals, while feeling no particular need to belong to any close-knit ‘religious’ organization.
I also embrace strongly the idea – at least in principle – that as a practising ecclesial community we have a duty to extend the blessing we have received to the world at large, and that such outreach requires, above all, an account of the propositional basis of our Christian faith. I am tempted to think that in this second point, at least, I am a real Evangelical.
However, it is precisely here that I reach the nub of what I have to say in this essay.
Yes, I am too evangelical not to feel the obligation to offer the world an account of my faith. Yet I have a problem. I simply cannot share the presentation of Christian theological basics which goes with the territory of Evangelicalism. That, as everybody knows, is the doctrine of ‘penal substitution’ – the idea that the sacrifice of Jesus is overwhelmingly a matter of funding God’s forgiveness. From the moment I first received this doctrine from the lips of my Evangelical youth leaders back in the seventies, it made no sense to me.
If you feel the same way, then please keep reading.
I have since encountered – sadly, not in popular tracts, but theology books – what I now believe to be an entirely adequate – dare I say? – more orthodox, alternative to that doctrine. I am amused to observe that, though absent from our mission sermons, Evangelical tracts or popular Evangelical literature, this version of our faith seems implied in the eucharistic prayers of Common Worship, which, as Anglicans, we are authorized to use, but, as Evangelical Anglicans, we sometimes omit from our services of communion. There we discover elements of a different doctrine, of which the main points will be discussed in subsequent chapters. I do not understand why this alternative – trinitarian and eucharistic – presentation of the Christian basics should be so ill-adapted to the requirements of an Evangelical tract or mission sermon. But it appears to be totally unavailable to Evangelicalism.
All of this presents a serious dilemma for someone like me who believes that our evangelical witness is best pursued as a church community.
I am aware that I will probably appear to be exaggerating the role of intellectual understanding. I emphatically do not believe intellectual understanding to be the ‘be all and end all’; nor would I still be sitting in the pews of an Evangelical church if I did. Nor do I wish in any way to be questioning the authenticity of the Christian reality we are living together as an Evangelical community. What is at issue in this piece is no more (and no less) than the account we give of the propositional basis of that shared Christian reality – something with which Evangelicals, of all people, have reason to be concerned.
Still, the intellect has its importance. How much? I guess that, as individual Christians, we would want to be capable of making a good enough showing. Good enough, at best, to get someone over the bar of their initial incredulity. At all events, we would not want to say anything to discredit our faith in their eyes.
Now I can just about imagine that even penal substitution, delivered to the right audience by someone who really believed in it, might be reckoned a ‘good enough’ account. Certainly, I do not, for a moment, mean to suggest that Christians who employ it have failed in their personal grasp of the Christian faith. Maybe changes in our culture have caused its deficiencies to show up in the eyes of our current generation, as they would not have done in the past. At all events, for ambivalent Evangelicals like me, the traditional account of our faith, beloved of Evangelicalism, falls woefully short even by the relatively modest criterion of ‘good enough’. We would not want to give our children so obviously disadvantageous – not to say distorted – impression of the living reality we hold dear. We are therefore sadly condemned to ploughing our own evangelical furrows.
So, why not go elsewhere, you may be asking? Why not abandon your present Evangelical allegiance, if the Christianity of our eucharistic prayers – the theology I personally discovered in the work of Dix, Schmemann, De Lubac, Balthasar, Bouyer etc.(1) – is common property of the rest of the church, but unavailable to Evangelicalism?
The problem is, as I strain my eyes towards the distant – and now increasingly faint – reality of ‘Christianity-beyond-Evangelicalism’, I am not aware of any popular distillations of such theology emanating from other quarters. Recent years have seen the case for a non-Evangelical theology of sacrifice aimed at seminarians (by Hans Boersma and Eugene Schlesinger, for example). However, the field of popular Christian outreach seems to have been left entirely in the hands of the likes of Nicki Gumbel with his Alpha. To my knowledge, no very cogent concise presentation of the Christian faith has emerged – certainly not in the form of popular literature and tracts.
This piece is an attempt to remedy this situation.