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.