Continuing Testament?

In material recently produced by the United Church of Christ’s God Is Still Speaking campaign we have started to use a new phrase to characterize what we believe.  These materials say that we are a church of “continuing testament.”  That is perhaps a more theologically serious way of saying God is still speaking, something we have been saying for several years now.  We cannot expect the materials the church produces for mass consumption to take the time to consider seriously what the phrase “continuing testament” might mean.  They are after all marketing materials not serious theological treatises, but if our denomination is going to use that term it is important for us that we do consider seriously what “continuing testament” means.  As I’ve said elsewhere, one concern I have about the UCC today is that we tend to throw provocative phrases around without sufficiently serious consideration of what they mean and of what their limitations might be.  What does the phrase “continuing testament” mean?  What might some of its limitations be?  Those are questions that require our serious consideration and discernment.

One of the new videos that the denomination has produced begins by referring to the testaments of people named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  It then asks what other testaments God might be revealing today.  This reference to the Gospels of the New Testament is a significant contribution to our consideration of the meaning of continuing testament.  It grounds the UCC’s understanding of continuing testament in the New Testament.  It grounds the UCC’s understanding of continuing testament in the witness to the meaning of Jesus Christ that we find in our faith’s foundational documents.  Indeed, the root meaning of the word testament is witness.  It derives from the Latin testari, to be a witness.  In the legal world we say that a “witness” gives “testimony,” that is, a witness makes a testament.  In some churches we hear the call “can I get a witness?!,” meaning can I get someone to testify to the truth of something that has been said or to their faith in Jesus Christ.  When we say, then, that we are a church of continuing testament we are saying that we believe that our witness to the truth of Jesus Christ is as valid for our time as the witness of the New Testament was for the people and the times in which it was written.  Yet we also say that our witness is grounded in that witness; and I hope, at least, that we are saying that our witness to Jesus Christ is not foundationally different from that witness.

The entire God Is Still Speaking campaign that the UCC has been conducting for several years now has a Pentecostalist ring to it.  Pentecostalism is that variety of Christianity which emphasizes the way in which God the Holy Spirit touches each individual believer.  In Pentecostalism each believer is, or at least can be, touched directly by the Holy Spirit and moved in new ways, often in the way of speaking in tongues.  Pentecostal Christianity tends to be very emotional Christianity.  It’s services can be noisy and unscripted.  It is very much a faith of the heart more than a faith of the head.  It is, in short, a Christianity very different from that of the UCC and its predecessor denominations.  Most of us good Calvinists (for that is what most if not quite all of the UCC tradition is) get very uncomfortable with the emotionalism of the Pentecostalists.  Yet we are adopting an identity that sounds to many quite Pentecostal.  One Sunday after the God Is Still Speaking campaign began a few years ago a couple visited our church in Monroe.  They identified themselves as Pentecostal Christians, and they were intrigued by our God Is Still Speaking banner in front of the church.  It spoke to them.  They worshipped with us that day—and never came back.  We aren’t true Pentecostalists, but the phrases God Is Still Speaking and continuing testament have a definite touch of Pentecostalism in them.

There is a danger in Pentecostalism.  There is, of course, a danger in all theology, for theology dares to deal with ultimate things, so that statement is not an attack on Pentecostalism.  It merely states a truth about Pentecostalism and all theology.  The danger in Pentecostalism is that people can believe that they are being moved by the Holy Spirit in ways that are idiosyncratic, and they can believe that they are being moved by the Holy Spirit in ways that are un-Biblical.  That is, people can respond to what they believe to be the moving of the Holy Spirit in ways that are not tested by the Biblical testimony or by the testimony of the Christian tradition.  Notions that are merely personal preferences or prejudices can easily be attributed to the Holy Spirit, which is usually not a healthy thing for the church or for the individual’s spiritual life. 

Christian Fundamentalists have long been aware of this danger in Pentecostalism.  Fundamentalism is suspicious of Pentecostalism.  Fundamentalist and Pentecostalist Christians often don’t get along well at all, this despite the fact that most Pentecostalists are in practice every bit as much strict Biblical literalists as are the Fundamentalists.  The Fundamentalists resist the danger of Pentecostalism by retreating into a rigid Biblicism that asserts that God’s revelation to humanity stopped when the Bible went to press, that God has nothing more to say than is said in the Bible.  And of course they ignore the danger in their own approach, the danger of making Christianity unbelievable, stagnant, out of touch, and irrelevant in an ever-changing world.

The statement that the UCC is a church of continuing testament has a Pentecostalist ring to it, and it raises in the context of the UCC the danger that inheres in Pentecostalism.  That is, it raises a very serious theological question:  What is the relationship of what we claim is a continuing testament to the New Testament?  To put it another way, is “the still-speaking God” saying anything radically different from what we find in the Bible?  These are important questions, but before we address them we need to address another more fundamental question that the claim of a continuing testament raises.  That question is:  Is the testament, that is, the witness, to Jesus Christ that we find in the New Testament somehow inadequate?  Does it need to be altered or supplemented in some fundamental way? 

I am convinced that the only authentic Christian answer to that question is no.  The witness to Jesus Christ that we find in the New Testament is adequate.  It is more than adequate.  It is sufficient for us, it is sufficient for our spiritual needs.  It is the witness in which the faith of Christians has been grounded for two thousand years, across a vast span of time, across a vast variety of cultures.  It has sustained Christians in times of cultural decline and widespread ignorance.  It has sustained Christians  through the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution.  It has proven its vitality in good times and in bad.  It has proven its vitality with people who have understood it literally and with those of us who understand it mythically.  It is sufficient.  It is much more than sufficient.  It is the foundation of our faith.  Christianity is simply inconceivable without it.

Which, of course, raises yet another question.  (Another truth about theology, and one that it’s easy enough to find very irritating, if that every answer it gives raises new questions.)  If the witness to Jesus Christ that we find in the New Testament is, as I contend, not only adequate but is the very foundation of our faith, is there anything left for the “still-speaking God” to say to us Christians?  If the original testament to Jesus Christ that we find in the Bible is sufficient, is there any need for a continuing testament?  Or does the original testament render any continuing testament superfluous at best and pernicious at worst? 

My answer to those questions is loud and clear:  Yes, there is more for the still-speaking God to say.  There is a need for a continuing testament.  No, the original testament does not render a continuing testament superfluous at best and pernicious at worst.  We must, however, understand quite precisely how any continuing testament fits with the original testament and just what it is that God is saying today.  We talked above about how the original testament to Jesus Christ has proved its vitality across cultures and across the ages.  It has done that, I think we Christians can say, because the Holy Spirit, that is, God present, active, and speaking in the world, has always been speaking to people across the ages and across cultures.  Led by the Holy Spirit Christians have time and again found new truth in the original Christian testament.  Led by the Holy Spirit Christians have found the truth that was needed for them and their time in that original testament.  Led by the Holy Spirit Christians have found hope, comfort, and courage for their time and their place in our original testament to Jesus Christ, the New Testament of the Christian Bible.  The truth is that God has never stopped speaking to Christians (or to anyone else who will listen in whatever faith tradition, although our concern here is only with the Christian tradition).  The still speaking God, then, isn’t so much saying anything radically new as God is leading us today, as God has always led God’s people, to find truth for us and for our time in our foundational witness to Jesus Christ.  The still speaking God is not contradicting that witness.  Rather, God is leading us to find renewed truth, or previously ignored truth, in that original witness.

What is that renewed or ignored truth to which the still speaking God is leading us?  What is the continuing testament that we are discovering and proclaiming?  There are many layers to the answers to those questions.  I suppose that you could see my book Liberating Christianity as an exploration of that continuing testament, although I don’t use that term in the book.  It seems clear, however, that the UCC has one thing in particular in mind when it says that God is still speaking and that we are a church of continuing testament.  The truth  to which the UCC is witnessing, to which the still speaking God has led us in this time and place, is that the old Christian way of exclusion of people based solely on who God created them to be as human beings is not God’s truth.  The continuing witness to Jesus Christ that we proclaim today is that the old prejudices that functioned to deny God’s grace for some people are false, even when they find some isolated textual support in the Bible.  The continuing witness, the continuing testament, to Jesus Christ that we proclaim today is, among other things, that grace trumps legalism every single time.  That God’s grace is universal and unconditional.  That all are welcome at God’s table regardless of gender, race, sexual identity, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, or any other thing about their particular humanity. 

That continuing testament is solidly grounded in the original testament.  It is grounded in the way Jesus, in the original Christian testament, welcomes the outcast and includes the excluded.  It is grounded in St. Paul’s concept of grace.  The UCC’s emphasis on God’s extravagant welcome isn’t novel.  We didn’t make it up.  It is a new emphasis in an old faith.  It is a continuing testament, not a break with the original Christian testament.  In that emphasis we hear God still speaking, but we don’t hear God saying anything inconsistent with the original testament.  Rather, we hear God leading us to bring out a part of that original testament that has been too long ignored or denied and that has special meaning for our time and our place.  It is, I believe, in that sense that we are a church of continuing testament.  In that sense we have a message of vital importance for our time and place, a message that is solidly grounded in the original Christian testament and that brings that testament alive again in today’s world.

On the Incarnation of Christ

            In my blog post "On Constantinian Christianity" immediately below I quote with general approval a passage on Christian nonviolence and the relationship of Christianity to the state by Philip Gulley, from his book If the Church Were Christian.  In that helpful if imperfect book Gulley critiques several of the fundamental ways in which Christianity has lost its center and become inaccessible to sensitive, discerning people today.  That book is a constructive contribution to the discussion of what is needed if Christianity is to survive.  There is, however, one thesis in the book with which I profoundly disagree, and it is that disagreement that I wish to develop here.

Gulley contends that one of the ways in which the church today is not Christian is that it sees Jesus Christ as divine.  It sees Jesus Christ as the incarnation in human form of God or, in more precise theological language, of the Son or the Logos of God.  Gulley considers the ancient Christian doctrine of the Incarnation (in this piece “incarnation” is a generic term while “Incarnation” refers specifically to the Incarnation in Jesus Christ) to be un-Christian because the historical person Jesus of Nazareth almost certainly did not understand himself to be an incarnation of God.  I accept as correct the contention that Jesus did not see himself as divine.  As an historical matter it is highly unlikely that Jesus saw himself as the Word of God made flesh.  He most probably saw himself as a Jewish prophet in the tradition of the great eighth century prophets Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, and Amos.  He gave new voice to their call for justice, to their prophetic declaration that God desires from us not proper worship but proper living, not sacrifice but justice for the poor, the vulnerable, and the outcast.  He proclaimed not himself but the imminence of the Kingdom of God, that earthly reign characterized by the justice of which the ancient prophets spoke.  I take all of that as correct, and I am sure Gulley would agree.

Nevertheless I cling to the Incarnation, and I think that some understanding of the truth that the doctrine of the Incarnation tries to express, if not necessarily the classical form of the doctrine itself with its concepts taken from Hellenistic philosophy, is vital for Christianity.  It is what distinguishes Christianity from the other world religions, in particular from Judaism and Islam.  Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong about Judaism or Islam.  The Christian way is not necessarily superior to their ways for everyone; but the Christian way is different, and it is largely our understanding of Incarnation that makes Christianity different.  What then is that truth that the doctrine of the Incarnation tries to express?

It is that Christians see much more than a man in Jesus of Nazareth.  It is that we experience him, and Christians have experienced him from his time to ours, as embodying the presence and the will of God in a way that is not only different in degree from the way any other human embodies that presence and that will but different in kind.  It is unique.  Christians see God in him in a way unlike how we see God in any other person.  The classical creeds use obscure terminology to express this truth.  They say he is homoousios, of one substance, with God the Father.  They say that he has two natures—physis—in one person—prosopon.  They are saying in the language of their time that in the human being Jesus of Nazareth we see God.  That is the truth that the doctrine of the Incarnation tries to express.

 It is no wonder that people today flee from the language of the ancient creeds as fast as they can.  The average citizen may have argued intelligently and passionately about those terms in the fourth century, as a famous quote from the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 says they did.  No one does today.  No one even understands those terms today.  The pitched battles of the fourth century over whether Jesus was homoousios with the Father or only homooisios (of similar substance) strike us today as absurd.  That the language of the creeds is obscure to us at best does not mean, however, that the truth that that language is trying to express is no longer valid.  It certainly doesn’t mean that that truth is obscure or absurd.  It isn’t.  It is central to the way in which we Christians find our way to God in and through Jesus Christ.  It expresses the truth that when we Christians follow Jesus we experience ourselves as following so much more than a man.  We experience ourselves as following nothing less than God in human form.  It expresses the truth that the way Jesus taught us is much more than the way of a man, however good a man he may have been.  It expresses the truth that in the way of Jesus we Christians see the way of God.

One reason why so many people today have trouble accepting the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is that, however much we may claim that we do not take the Bible literally, we are out of the habit of symbolic thinking.  We have lost the art of symbolic thinking.  Without even being aware of it we automatically understand statements, even theological statements like the doctrine of the Incarnation, literally, that is, factually.  When we hear someone confess that God the Son became human in the person of Jesus of Nazareth we immediately try to understand that confession as fact, and as fact we can’t make it make sense.  We immediately try to understand the Incarnation as physical reality, and as physical reality we can’t make it make sense.  If we can get ourselves at long last to understand statements like the statement of the doctrine of the Incarnation as symbolic most of the difficulty we have in accepting them falls away.  A symbol is a thing or a word, or in the case of the doctrine of the Incarnation a concept, that uses the things of ordinary experience, in this case words, to point beyond itself to a transcendent reality to which it can point but which it cannot capture, cannot define.  The statement “God the Son became human in Jesus of Nazareth” is not a literal, factual statement, it is a symbolic one.  It expresses a spiritual truth not a physical one.  There is no point in trying to figure out the mechanics of it for it is not a mechanical statement. 

The question to ask of the doctrine of the Incarnation is not “did it happen” but “what does it mean?”  What is the transcendent truth to which that statement points?  That transcendent truth is that for us Christians God comes to us in and through the person of Jesus Christ.  We Christians know God in and through Jesus Christ.  Jesus Christ presents us Christians with as full a revelation of the nature of God as our human minds can possibly comprehend. 

True symbols always point to and preserve mystery.  How it is that God comes to us through Jesus Christ remains a mystery, but the symbol of the Incarnation both preserves that mystery and expresses the truth in the mystery.  It invites us not to understand it cognitively but to enter into it spiritually.  It invites us not to explain it but to celebrate it, not to parse it logically but to live into it.  We are to approach it not with logic but with wonder, not with rational inquiry but with awe.  We are not to dissect it but to worship God in and through it.  If we can do that we just might feel its spiritual power.  We just might feel God reaching out for us through it and find ourselves using it to reach back to God, to make our connection with God in it.  As a factual statement the Incarnation is an impossibility.  As a symbolic statement it has the power to save us, to heal us, and to make us whole.

There remains of course Gulley’s objection that the Incarnation is not how Jesus understood himself.  We have already conceded that this is almost certainly true.  The question we have to ask is:  Does it matter?  To put it another way, Is the meaning that Jesus has for the Christians who came after him, and for us, limited by what he himself understood?  Or again, Is it necessary that Jesus have understood himself to be the Son of God Incarnate in order for him to be the Son of God Incarnate for us?  It should be clear by now that my answer to those questions is and must be no, it doesn’t matter, the meaning Jesus has for us is not limited by what he himself understood.  For modern people so deeply steeped in the notion that the only truth is factual truth that may be a difficult answer to accept, so let me try to explain.

Religious symbols are usually grounded in some historical fact.  The founding figures of most of the world’s great religions were real, historical people.  The Buddha, Lao Tzu (probably or at least possibly), Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were all real people who lived real human lives.  The stories people tell about them and the ways people understand them are grounded in those real human lives.  What the adherents of the religions that follow them say about them isn’t pulled out of thin air, it begins with historical fact.  But religion isn’t about fact, it is about meaning.  The meaning of any religion lies not in the facts about the religion’s founding figure.  Rather, it arises out of the encounter of the founding figure’s followers with, at first, the founding figure himself, then with the significance they continue to find in the founding figure’s story and teachings as time continues past the life of the founding figure.  A tradition develops that began with the founding figure but that grows and evolves as the tradition’s adherents continue to experience more and more meaning in the tradition and in its founding figure.  That meaning arises not out of the founding figure and his words alone but out of the experience of the community that looks to him as its founder. 

The best example we can give of this process is the Christian Gospels.  It is commonplace among scholars that the Gospels are grounded in some historical fact; but the purpose and function of the Gospels is not to record historical fact.  The Gospels contain some historical fact, but mostly they contain a witness to the experience of Jesus in certain early Christian communities, with his story, and with his teachings.  The Gospels use story form, that is, they use myth, to speak not merely of the facts about Jesus but about the meaning of Jesus for them and their communities.  The earliest of the Gospels was written, by conservative estimates, more than thirty years after Jesus’ death.  In the years that passed between Jesus’ death and the writing of the Gospels, Christian communities had had decades of experience living with Jesus and his message.  They had had decades of experience worshipping God in and through him.  He had acquired great meaning for them, meaning that quite possibly he didn’t have for himself during his lifetime.  The purpose and function of the Gospels is to express that meaning, not to give historical facts.  They are not a journalistic product of the time of Jesus.  They are a faith confession from a time decades later.  The meaning found in them is not and cannot be limited to what the historical person Jesus of Nazareth thought about himself.  As his followers continued to experience the reality of him after his death his meaning evolved.  It grew.  His followers so felt the presence of God in him that they began to speak of him as the very incarnation of God.  He became the incarnation of God—for them, whether he was that for himself or not.  The meaning that arose from their encounter with him was that he was nothing less than God Incarnate.  That is true quite regardless of what Jesus himself may have thought.

So unlike Gulley I am not prepared to abandon the ancient Christian doctrine of the Incarnation.  For me it is indispensible to the meaning of the Christian faith.  Without it Jesus’ teachings are just the teachings of a good man, and there have been many good men with great moral teachings in human history.  Without it Jesus’ death on the cross is just the death of another good person executed because the powers could not tolerate his truth telling, and many good people have been executed because the powers could not tolerate their truth telling.  As any of you who have read Liberating Christianity know, I do not believe that the Incarnation is necessary in the way the classical theory of atonement says that it was necessary.  I do believe that it is necessary to Christianity nonetheless.  Gulley’s book If the Church Were Christian has much to recommend it.  On this one point, however, I believe Gulley has gotten it wrong.

On Constantinian Christianity

In his book If the Church Were Christian Philip Gulley has a brief but instructive section on the relationship between Christianity and the state, focusing on the vital issue of Christian nonviolence.  He writes:

I’m no longer surprised by my fellow Christians’ support of war.  Indeed, some of the most strident voices for military force emanate from Christian quarters.  This, I believe, is the inevitable consequence of an institution that has grown so fond of force and power that it doesn’t hesitate to recommend it to others.  Additionally, the church has so closely identified itself with the nation that it has lost its prophetic voice and witness, conferring God’s blessing to the most immoral undertakings.

It was not always so.  For the first several hundred years of the church, Christians believed the ethic of Jesus called them to love and redeem their enemies, not kill them.  But what appeared to be a blessing became their undoing.  The emperor Constantine was favorably disposed toward Christians, and they now had a stake in his rule and forsook pacifism to perpetuate their position of privilege.  So began the uneasy alliance between state and church, which exists to this day, where allegiance to the former almost always compromises the integrity of the latter.  To be an American Christian is to hold dual citizenship, forever feeling the tension between the push of country and the pull of discipleship.

Philip Gulley, If the Church Were Christian, Rediscovering the Values of Jesus, HarperOne, 2010, pp. 148-49

This brief and overly simplified statement raises an issue of vital importance to Christianity today.  It isn’t a perfect statement of the issue.  For example, I’m afraid that Gulley overstates the extent to which most American Christians feel “the tension between the push of country and the pull of discipleship.”  In my experience most of them feel no tension at all between the demands of country and the demands of faith.  And there are Christian groups, including at least to some extent my own United Church of Christ, that have not entirely lost their prophetic voice.  Nonetheless, Gulley raises an important issue, one to which Christians pay far too little attention.

That issue is the consequences of the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire by the emperor Constantine and his successors in the fourth century CE.  Gulley is absolutely correct when he says that allegiance to the state almost always compromises the integrity of the church and when he says that that compromise began with that establishment of Christianity as the official state religion of the Roman Empire.  The ways in which Christianity was changed and debased by the Constantinian compromise, the compromise with earthly values that made it possible for Christianity to become and to remain established as the official religion of the Roman Empire, are complex and multifaceted; and understanding that compromise is essential if we are to understand the issues facing Christianity today and if Christianity is to have a future.  That compromise involved at least the following issues.

First of all, the church compromised Jesus’ ethic of nonviolence by adopting the un-Christian doctrine of the just war, a doctrine developed to allow Christians to fight to defend the now supposedly Christian Roman Empire.  Beyond that, the church shifted its focus from Jesus’ project of establishing God’s reign of peace and justice in this world to getting people into heaven in the next, a shift that benefited the ruling powers of the world that the church now served by diverting the attention of the poor and oppressed off of their plight in this life onto some kind of hope for some other life.  It abandoned Jesus’ revolutionary ethic of inclusion, justice, and peace that time and time again stood the ways and expectations of the world on their heads.  In doing so the church became the ultraconservative prop of the existing power structures rather than a prophetic voice of God’s justice and peace.  It changed from a movement of the people organized into house churches into an institutional structure that, in its Roman Catholic form, mimics that of the Roman Empire, with an Emperor-Pope at the top, a Curia-Senate below him, and regional administrators called bishops answerable not to the people but to the central government in Rome.  It even took on the pomp and splendor of the Roman Empire, spurning the poverty, simplicity, and humility of the way of Jesus in favor of all the trappings of wealth and power that it learned from the Roman imperial government.  It is difficult to imagine anything farther from the way of Jesus than the imperial pomp and ceremony of the Vatican. 

The Orthodox Churches are guilty of many of the same vices.  Perhaps even more than in the west they threw their lot in with the worldly governments of the places in which they operated.  The Russian Orthodox Church, for example, was, during the Imperial period, a primary buttress of autocracy, that oppressive form of governance that distorted Russian life for centuries and made possible (if not inevitable) the abomination that was Soviet Communism.  The Protestant Reformation in the west addressed some of these non-Christian adaptations to empire, but certainly not all of them.  Most Protestant churches other than the historic peace churches (Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren etc.) have drunk the Cool-Ade of just war theory every bit as much as their Catholic and Orthodox sisters.  They too have seen their primary objective as getting people into heaven rather than building the Realm of God on earth.  In Europe they too made their bed with the ruling authorities; and they were only too happy to throw their support and, as they supposed, God’s blessing to the imperial schemes of secular governments, becoming in the process themselves instruments of cultural and religious imperialism.

It is no wonder that so many sensitive and discerning people today leave the Christian church or never have anything to do with it in the first place.  The salvation of Christianity, if one is possible at all, lies not in contemporary styles of worship and warehouse churches that do everything they can not to look like churches, for those are superficial changes that repackage to old, compromised Christianity in a worldly shell that is itself only more compromise with the culture of the world.  Christianity’s salvation, if one is possible at all, lies in reclaiming the way of Jesus, the way of assertive, creative, nonviolent resistance to evil, the way of justice, the way of inclusion, the way of compassion, the way of grace.  In a world addicted to power and violence that way of Jesus is needed now more than ever.  That way (which many follow and advocate outside of Christianity, for while it is Jesus' way it is not exclusively Jesus' way) may even be humanity’s only hope of saving itself from itself, as John Dominic Crossan contends.  The Christian church is a compromised messenger of that way, compromised by all of the concessions it has made to empire in order to maintain a position of privilege and power; but it is the only messenger of that way that we Christians have.  The future of Christianity, if it has one, lies in its pre-Constantinian past.  Not in slavish imitation of that past, which after all occurred in a cultural-linguistic world so different from ours as to be almost beyond comprehension to modern people, but in reclaiming the values of Jesus and proclaiming them to our world.  Proclaiming them in ways that speak to our world without watering them down to placate the world.  Proclaiming them in ways that give people today hope for this life and for this world and the courage to work to make that hope a reality.  Let’s get on with it.