What place does theology have in the local church in a pluralist age?

by the Revd Paul Blackham

It is the local church as the local community of Christ’s Body, living out His life, that is the true centre for theology in a pluralist age.

Theology – that is, thinking through the Bible – is way too important to be based in any Bible Colleges. The proper place for theology must be the local church, the place it is always understood to exist within the Bible. There are no Bible Colleges in the Bible.

It is interesting that the great theologians of the first five hundred years of the church were all active members of local churches, either ordained or not. For the next thousand years most of the theologians were monks of one kind or another, having very little to do with local church life. After the Reformation there was a period when the great theologians were ordinary members of the local churches again, both ordained and lay. However, for the past 200 years, theology has tended to retreat once more into the monasteries – this time in the form of theological faculties and Bible colleges. However, we are the theologians – we who live out the Faith in the place it is supposed to be – right in the world. The local church is the only proper venue for evangelical theology.

So, how are we to pursue theology in the local church in a pluralist age?

If we are to answer a question like this we must, of course, turn to the Bible, which naturally has a great deal to say about theology in a pluralist age.

1 Kings 18:15-21 1 Kings 22:51 – 2Kings 1:4 Luke 11:14-23.

1 Kings 18:15-21: The casual reader might imagine that this was a regional, culture-bound contest between the followers of a strange, long-dead pagan religion and early monotheists. However, this would be a gross misunderstanding of the size and scale and contemporary relevance of Elijah’s contest.

1 Kings 22:51 – 2 Kings 1:4 is a help to the reader who is a little slow on the up-take. Here Baal is given his fuller name, Baal-Zebub and he is pitted against the Angel of the LORD. The object of the faith of Israel is once again presented – will they trust in Baal-Zebub or in the Angel of the LORD? Elijah demonstrates once again the absolute power of the Angel of the LORD over Baal.

Luke 11 is the simplest version of what we have learned in the OT. The contest between Baal/Baalzebub and the Angel of the LORD is the perennial contest between Christ and Satan which Genesis 3:15 set up for us as perhaps the central story-line of the whole Bible.

This is most important for our interaction with other religions. This is not like an in-house disagreement between two different factions of the Corinthian Church. Islam, for example, is the worship of another god, a god who claims to be the object of faith for salvation. The gods of the New Age and Hinduism utterly refuse the exclusive claims of Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son of God. In John 8 Jesus confronts the best case scenario for human religion – ethical, zealous, “Biblical” monotheists. YET, Jesus dismisses such people as being utterly ignorant of the actual Living God of Abraham.

The Bible has a great deal to say about being a Christian in a pluralist age. In fact, the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation assumes that the Church in every generation will be living in a pluralist society. The Bible constantly equips us for just such a situation.

But, if the fundamental nature of the relationship between Christ and the human religions is so stark and divided, how can the Church of Jesus Christ set out His gospel in the world? How is the world to know that Christ is the Truth and all the others are lies?

The mission of the Church takes place in a world that has changed significantly compared to a hundred years ago. For most Christians in the world today, the truth of Christianity does not have the same external supports as it once had. The move in world spirituality is away from established, institutional religion to ad hoc individual spirituality – or else into politicised fundamentalism. This new world offers both challenges and opportunities for the gospel – and an awareness of these issues may help us to perform our mission more usefully.

The Scripture we must study is Acts 17:10-34.

Paul is grieved by the paganism and idolatry of Athens. He knows that they are very religious [or better superstitious] yet he is in no way encouraged by this. Their religion is not a first step on the road to truth but a headlong flight away from the truth — an attempt to drown out the truth of Jesus Christ. He takes their altar more seriously than they did, letting them know very clearly that their philosophical and religious quests have left them with a complete ignorance of the One True and Living God.

So, Paul has to begin at very first principles, giving them a summary of the teaching of the Old Testament — beginning with creation and the descent of the human race from Adam, through the inadequacy of all man-made temples, drawn from Solomon’s prayer in 2 Chronicles 6:18ff, to the sovereignty of the LORD over all the world, to the ease with which He may be found, and ending with the gospel call to the whole world and the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. Paul’s mission was to a religious market-place where there were hundreds of other philosophical and religious products on offer. He had nothing to offer other then the gospel itself — yet because of his great confidence in the gospel he stood before the academics of Athens and set out the gospel over against everything they believed.

The world of the first century Mediterranean is very much like the world of the 21st century. Just as the world was defined by pre-Christian paganism, so our world is best described as pre-Christian and pagan. The word ‘god’ could refer to any number of possible candidates in that first century world — Zeus, Diana of the Ephesians, Odin, Ra etc. Today it is the same. Whenever a person uses the word ‘god’ it could refer to any number of objects of worship. Some of these have a specific name — e.g. Allah — whereas for others the exact nature of who they are referring to by the word god only becomes clear as we engage in discussion. The average western pagan will use the word god to refer to some kind of philosophically defined Unitarian being who is behind most of the world religions. This god is difficult to define more precisely because hardly anybody bothers with him or it in any meaningful way.

The word “god” has almost no meaning today, just as in the first century. It seems to mean something like — what you most believe in, but it does not refer to any god in particular. A question like do you believe in god? has no substance at all. It all depends on what god they believe in. Everybody has some kind of god and it goes without saying that they believe in him/it/her. The Christian is increasingly marked out as one who believes in the God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the God who is revealed only in Jesus Christ.

These truths are important for every generation of Christian, but they have especial importance for the Church in the post-modern world, because any attempt to treat the word god as having any universal significance is doomed to failure and confusion.

So, let’s begin by offering a quick outline of the postmodern world, before examining the gospel in relation to it.

If we are to understand what postmodernism is, then we must know what modernism was or is. It has become traditional to distinguish between modernism and modernity. Modernity is sometimes taken to be simply the collection of new technologies that have so radically changed the world. Thus, information technology, global communications, the internal combustion engine, capitalist economics and democracy are all taken to be the marks of modernity. Whereas a belief in the power of this kind of progress is modernism.

However, we need to be cautious about this kind of analysis. The origins of modernity/modernism go back a lot further than the last century.

The word “modern” comes from the Latin word “modo” – meaning “now”. It was first used in 1127 by the builder of the basilica of St Denis in Paris to refer to the new style of architecture – it was “modern”, belonging to the present rather than the past. In one sense that has always been at the heart of modernism/modernity – the belief that better things lie in rejecting the past and charting a new course into the future. The word “progress” lies at the very heart of modernism/modernity.

The period of modernism in art and philosophy refers to the period at the beginning of the 20th century when artists and thinkers took hold of these ideas of progress and the new world that progress had brought about. The visual arts are a good way of seeing how this happened.

With the invention of the camera the ability to accurately depict something on canvas was suddenly rendered obsolete. The camera could provide a much higher degree of mere representation than any painter can. So, the modernist artists moved the visual arts into depicting what the camera could not depict – ideas, feelings, philosophies, impressions.

The philosophy of progress, that humanity can guarantee its own better future through progress, ran into serious trouble in the first half of the 20th century, particularly in the two World Wars. The great modern civilisations of Europe for all their progress had fallen into the most horrific violence and bloodshed. The great products of progress had not produced a more healthy and peaceful society, but a society in which death and destruction could be delivered in ever more efficient and terrible ways.

This was made even worse during and after the Second World War when the great progressive philosophies of fascism and communism led to great suffering and tyranny. The idea of progress was no longer so obviously optimistic – it had a much darker side to it. The brave new future had a long dark shadow over it.

If the movement called modernism became something that suddenly seemed to belong to an earlier age, then it was inevitable that a new movement called postmodernism had to come about. Initially, then, postmodernism was a movement within art and architecture, yet it has come to stand for the whole cultural shift that happened during the 20th century.

So, if that is the history of the terms modernism and postmodernism what are the cultural features of postmodernism?

Modernism was based on the idea of progress because western culture had such a strong sense of confidence in what it was doing. The heart of what it was doing centred on the idea of truth. Truth was the centre-piece of the modern age. Science was the Most Holy Temple of Truth and the scientists were its priests. However, postmodernism is marked by a deep crisis in this matter of truth.

Looked at in the positive light of modernism science was all about dispersing the clouds of darkness and superstition. But looked at from the the negative light of postmodernism science was all about repression and power. Other view-points, view-points that would not conform to the traditions of the scientific method, were silenced by the scientific quest. Science had not only produced medicine and flush toilets, it had also produced weapons of mass destruction, global pollution and dehumanized lifestyles. The great philosophies of the modern age had not only produced ideals of democracy and human rights, but they had also produced communism, fascism, unjust economic systems, dysfunctional families and disintegrated societies.

Modernism had ignored the outsider and the minority in the interests of progress for the majority. Postmodernism has reacted against that and focuses on the outsider and the minority, the different and the unconventional. For the modernist, all differences of belief could be resolved by the neutral referee of careful, critical investigation. For the postmodernist, differences are fundamental and necessary, because the way we investigate the truth is itself a product of what we already believe – there is no way to get neutral, objective truth. We cannot escape our beliefs, our basic differences, our different starting points. Each person sees the world differently and any attempt to force everybody to see it the same way is not about truth, but power. If everybody’s view of the world flows out of their own beliefs, then any claim to universal truth is an attempt by one person or one community of people to force their opinion on everybody else. It is an exercise of power rather than a question of truth.

So, the postmodern world is one in which the fundamental ideas about truth that had shaped western culture for 2,500 years have been replaced with a new paradigm. Truth is seen as relative – dependent on the background and experiences and personality of each person.

This is why telling a person that they are wrong and need to believe something else is always seen as personally offensive. When truth was still seen as something neutral then it was possible to disagree about the truth without any personal animosity. However, if each person’s view of the truth depends on their own individual beliefs and experiences, then a disagreement about truth is inevitably a personality clash.

In this culture, communication is no longer based on truth telling – because there are no universal truths to tell. Now, communication is based on image and feeling, form rather than content. MTV on cable and satellite TV is one of the purest forms of postmodernism. There is no story, no narrative, no argument, no propositions, no truth. There is only image, impression, sound, and feeling. Each image is quickly replaced with another. The music videos have no context and no real meaning — their only purpose is to provide a background for the music.

Pop culture has replaced objective truth as the global common ground. TV and films, computer games, fast food outlets, Coke, the Internet and the music industry have all formed a new unifying centre around which the world community can find some common ground. Pokemon unites children around the world more effectively than any ideology that humanity has ever invented. There is no truth to any of these things, but there is a common experience and this is worth so much more to the postmodern world.

So, where does this put evangelism? If we are by definition truth-tellers, how do we operate in a world where truth has no meaning anymore? How are we to bring the clarity that Elijah and Paul brought to their respective situations? How can we show so clearly that Jesus is the true God and not the other contenders?

The modernist approach to evangelism built its case upon the idea of evidence that could be neutrally assessed and evaluated. The classic model for evangelism in that age was the law court, where evidence is provided to prove the truth of the gospel. That approach has less and less relevance.

50 years ago if a typical westerner was confronted with the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the big argument was about the possibility of such a thing ever occuring. Could a person really come back from the dead? How can this be reconciled with a scientific view of the world? Didn’t the disciples just make it all up? However, today, although there are still some remants of that modernist mentality, by and large people do not find the idea of somebody coming back from the dead so hard to believe. That kind of thing happens in films and TV all the time. The world is seen as a much more mysterious place in which lots of weird things happen — crop circles, UFOs, magic, ghosts and astrology are at the centre of popular culture. The big question that the postmodern pagan has concerning the resurrection of Jesus Christ is SO WHAT? What has a weird event of 2,000 years ago got to do with me? What difference does it make? The world is full of weird and mysterious events, why should that one be of such great importance? There could be all kinds of explanations for the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and the Christian explanation is just one of many.

That is the great challenge of a postmodern and pluralist world. Why is the Christian view worth believing? In so many ways it runs against the culture. It has an image of being tied to old and repressive lifestyles. It refuses to acknowledge the right of each person to live as they want to live. It is based on the idea of authority — the authority of a God who controls everything and everybody. This is radically unpopular in a postmodern culture.

On the other hand, there are some real advantages of sharing the gospel in a postmodern world.

In the old days of modernism, religion was not taken very seriously. Religion was seen as something for superstitious and weak people. It was seen as primitive and irrelevant, belonging to a pre-scientific world. However, in the postmodern world religion is very fashionable. It is easy for people to talk about it. Everybody has some kind of religious beliefs. Although most of these beliefs are a form of New Age spirituality, usually revolving around the idea that reality is found through looking within myself and discovering that I am god, yet talking about religion is much easier today than at any time in the 20th century. Religious experience is a common theme in films, TV and all popular culture. The old-style atheistic materialist, who doesn’t believe in anything that hasn’t been scientifically demonstrated, has a very poor image. They are seen as narrow and unbalanced. The rounded or authentic person is seen as one who is comfortable with all the religions and lifestyles of the world.

So, how can we share the gospel in such a world?

What matters much more than the quality of my argument is the quality of my life. If arguments have been devalued, testimony has been revalued. In modernism the individual arguing for the gospel was not really very important. All that matter was the strength of the argument. In a postmodern and pluralist culture, much more important than the strength of my argument is the credibility that the person has through their lifestyle and manner.

If the Christian is known for being understanding and compassionate, their words will be listened to – but, if they are known for being aggressive and argumentative, their words will be discounted no matter how clever they are. Of course, we cannot fake genuine compassion – and nothing is so fake as fake compassion. The postmodern world has a nose for the fake, even if it goes along with it.

This can only be excellent news for the Christian evangelist. The whole of the Biblical approach to evangelism orbits around the testimony of Christian living. God’s way of sharing the gospel is always shown in action.

We see this throughout the Bible. In the Old Testament we see how the nation of Israel was to live out the gospel so that the surrounding nations could see what it looked like and be converted.

In the New Testament we see this time after time. In John 17 Jesus bases His evangelistic hopes on the love that the Christians will show to each other. Throughout 1 Peter the constant message is that the Church is a priesthood, showing the gospel through the way it lives.

This same truth is stated in Titus by Paul – Titus 2:9-10 [but see also verses 1-8].

Even though we are faced with an emerging culture in which the idea of truth is so weak, yet the gospel is under no threat from this. In many ways it takes us back to the basic principles of evangelism in the Bible. Word and work, life and lip must always go together.

Yet, of most importance is our understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit. Today it is more clear to us than ever that a person will never believe the gospel unless the Holy Spirit convinces them of it. We can provide no objective reasons for the absolute truth of the Bible – every argument we provide can easily be dismissed as just my opinion. Postmodernism has forced us to realise much more clearly that clever argument can never make a person into a Christian. If the great need is for authentic and consistent Christian lives, then we are thrown back onto the grace and power of God.

If no-one will ever believe the Bible because of arguments in its favour, then we call out for the convincing work of the Spirit with renewed urgency.

The Revd Paul Blackham is an assistant minister at All Saints’ Langham Place in London. This is the text of a presentation he gave at Ridley College.