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The Originality, Uniqueness and Freshness of Revelation

10th Sunday : 9 June 2013  : Galatians 1: 11-19

Charles Gore, as we found out in the Caversham lectures last week, was a kind of latter day prophet, who ushered in the third and the greatest phase of the Oxford movement. But then prophecy was something he was particularly interested in, especially in what he saw as the uniqueness of prophetic religion in Israel. Surely no human agency could have cooked up this extraordinary pull your socks up message to the children of Israel, requiring them to live at a far higher ethical level, both nationally and individually, than any of the other nations of the earth. No Jewish brains trust on how to live the good life could have come up with this astringent prescription for repentance, reform and ethical renewal. What the prophets preached was a message that had come from outside the national experience, in fact from outside any human sourcing. And that in turn was a kind of argument for the existence of God, for whom else could have invented this remarkable invitation to live in accordance with the law written on your hearts?

This challenge is presented in a different way as Paul writes to the new church in Galatia, urging them to live by a Torah free gospel. Jesus wasn’t just an incident in the history of Israel – he is the centre and the fulcrum on which the history of Israel turns, in fact the history of the entire world, and that means that new Christian believers don’t need to live by the prescriptions of the Jewish law. The good life consists of life lived out at a new depth with God, and you find out how to do that by the promptings of the Spirit on your awakened conscience. As one of the prophets had put it, God will give you a heart transplant of a beating heart filled with love that instinctively knows what is the right thing to do, rather than a stony heart that does only as much and no more than the rules require.

But for Paul’s message to get through to an audience not inclined to listen he must present his credentials in an attention getting manner. He does this by pointing to the unique source of what he has to say. "The Good News I preached is not a human message that I was given by men, it is something I learnt only through a revelation of Jesus Christ." Like the prophets of Israel his message has come from outside. It isn’t just a good idea thought up by him. It has been revealed by the source of genuine revelation. Paul even presents his earliest autobiographical details in a way which is reminiscent of the prophet Jeremiah, "Then God, who had specially chosen me while I was still in my mother’s womb, called me through his grace and chose to reveal his Son in me, so that I might preach the Good News about him to the pagans."

There is a strand of opinion within the Church today that says when you use the word God you are using a cipher for the deepest ethical promptings of the human race. The Ian Harris column in the ODT is an influential expressor of this erroneous point of view. What matters about religion is living a good life, and there is a kind of collective unconscious collection point of all the best ethical strivings of the human race that can be accessed when you tune in to a religious tradition. But the source of this wisdom for good living is ourselves – we thought it up. One cant help noticing at the same time that the kind of ethical values being presented for our approval is more a reflection of what matters to the individualised liberal bourgeoisie culture of western modernity, rather than say the collective values of indigenous people, or the transcendent orientation of Islam.

The other way this kind of thinking comes at us is over issues of cultural adaptation, such as gay marriage. The argument is that since the era of the enlightenment in the 18th century, when we threw over superstition, and started thinking rationally and scientifically, we started out on a series of emancipationist projects. First we freed the slaves, then we emancipated women, then we liberalised the divorce laws, then we recognised the rights of indigenous people, now the final frontier is giving gay, lesbian, and transgender people full equality and equal rights in our marriage laws. Of course many of these were good things to do, and for sure the era of the enlightenment brought gains to the human race. But where it gets interesting is the argument that the Church should take its moral bearings from every emancipationist agenda that society presents to it, even when they originated from people who are far from a gospel perspective.

The trouble with this get with the programme kind of way of ordering our life is that we let go of the perspective that Christianity has a unique and original source of ethical inspiration. Its followers are called to a high standard of Christian existence that is distinctive and different to that which obtains in its surrounding culture and society. And sometimes what seems obvious and in tune with the values of the day is opposed to what God wants for his people.

There are churches that have made cultural adaptation to progressive causes in our society their number one agenda. Their fate is instructive.

In the historic core of the original city of Nelson there are four attractive churches pretty much in a straight line at two block intervals, the Baptist, the Methodist, the Presbyterian, the Catholic. What has over 150 years of history done to them?

The Baptist church is more or less holding its own, pushing a strong family based programme. The Methodist Church isn’t used for worship anymore, and has been sold to a prominent local family to be used as a social and cultural meeting point at their discretion. The Presbyterian congregation is down to such a small number that they meet in the hall out the back, and so their large, attractive Church gently moulders way. The Catholic Church is well attended and thriving, despite all the worldwide media publicity about the problems of that Church.

The lesson is clear – those churches that have stuck to their knitting, that remain focussed on the fact that they are in the salvation business are doing ok. It is also because they remain aware of the Divine origins of the distinctive way of life to which they have been called. Whereas those churches that have become a pale reflection of various modish progressive causes are rapidly fading away.

I want to be fair and clear about this. All churches must make various kinds of adaptations to their surrounding societies and cultures; otherwise they could not productively interact with them, and would become strange little sectarian groups. And sometimes the world has led the Church in useful and sensible changes. But the yardstick by which the Church should assess whether it should make a major reordering of its life is – what does God want of us, rather than how can we catch up with the latest bright idea.

And the reason for that is the place from which I started. There is originality, uniqueness, and a freshness about the Divine revelation that launched the Church, and that stands guard over our lives as Christians. It lights up and changes the perspective from which we can assess any human dilemma.

A Catholic priest, who was helpful to me in my early Christian walk, once said to me – the question is how come 2,000 years after the Christ event it seems to have had so little impact on the world’s affairs. To which I would now reply, that is because the human race is so adept at blunting, deadening, and toning down the deep down freshness and strikingness of all that God does. It is up to us within the household of faith to turn to the mirror, rub the condensation and the dust off, and say, "aha, I now see who and what you made me to be, and how you want me to become that."