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    • Not in Vain: 1 Corinthians Devotional
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That Happy Certainty - Gospel | Culture | Planting
Culture

Know Your Ocean (or Keller on Why It's Not as Simple as Saying We're Swimming in Post-Modern Waters)

There was a time when it was very chic to announce that we’re living in post-modern times, and that modernity’s rule of reason had been toppled by the empire of experience.

photo-1438029071396-1e831a7fa6d8From a Christian perspective, this reading could often be accompanied with a call for the Church to move on from dealing with the evangelistic question of evidence, and instead get our game on and start creating tangible religious experiences. 

However, in a little text-box towards the end of his very impressive Center Church, minister and church-planter Tim Keller questions this commonly stated analysis. Keller tends to have a lot of very perceptive things to say, so I’m inclined to listen in here. Is it really as simple as saying we live in an age of post-modernity, and why does it matter anyway?

Keller observes:

“…[I]t is probably more accurate to say we now live in a climate of late modernity, since the main principle of modernity was the autonomy of the individual and personal freedom over the claims of tradition, religion, family, and community.” (Center Church, 381, my italics).

Now, ok, on the surface this could look like scruples over semantics. But I reckon there’s something in this.

Keller’s point is that if we over-emphasise the “post-” bit of post-modern, then we won’t necessarily see the connection between our culture as it is today, and Western culture as it was earlier in the twentieth-century (and even way before that). Rather than a complete rejection of one worldview for another, Keller suggests the transition we’ve witnessed is better described as an intensification.

And at the heart of this intensified continuity is the persistent trend of over-turning any authority outside of the self. Elsewhere, Keller has put it like this:

The underlying thread that ties all this together is the inconceivability of a moral order based on an authority more fundamental than one’s own reason or experience. That was the founding principle of the Enlightenment, and that is the cornerstone of the most recent generation. So how can we say the Enlightenment is over?

On one level it’s vital to be aware of this just for ourselves. If there are going to be currents at work in the waters around us, then it’s important to be conscious of them rather than naive to their effect.

But here I want to consider how hearing this note of continuity particularly shapes us as we consider the Church’s mission.

Or to put it another way: knowing the currents of the ocean better, how do we then try and swim?

photo-1443527216320-7e744084f5a7I’d love your input, but here are three spin-off thoughts for starters.

1. Two of the characteristics often attributed to the “post-modern age” are an openness to spirituality held alongside a frustration with organised religion. Indeed, I’ve written previously on some of the striking apologetic opportunities of a cultural re-focusing on ‘spirituality’.

However, Keller’s point highlights that we’d be naive to embrace these emphases without examining their underlying presuppositions regarding authority. Late-modernity means that, though we might sense that people are “hungry,” we should also wonder and engage with what kind of god such people are hungry for.

2. We also can’t get away from the question of the ethics of authority. This is right at the heart of objections to the ‘pre-modern’ perspective of ‘traditional religion’. And so, ultimately, this objection needs to be engaged with: How can one hold to a God who is all-powerful and yet is still all-loving? Is authority intrinsically evil and corrupt? Are we answering these questions?

The history of the Christian church is littered with examples of religious authority becoming a mask for abusive power plays. Consequently our society will also be littered with those who bear the scars of this abuse. However, I’m convinced that seeing a God who comes to give himself in love is a persistent stone in the shoe of those who feel an authoritative God can be dismissed as a despot. Though Jesus makes big claims on our lives, he demonstrates he can be trusted. His love is genuine because its been shown in action.

3. Keller’s observation also impacts how we speak into the narratives of freedom in our culture. I recently heard my Bishop, James Newcombe (+Carlisle) speak on Christian discipleship. He made the point that the nature of our cultural landscape means there’s a pressing need to teach the true meaning of freedom. Again, as above, often the nature of freedom is equated with the rejection of all human authority outside of one’s self. The proper goal of human development then becomes autonomy, and so the ‘content’ of human freedom becomes choice and ‘self-actualisation’. God is consequently left to play the part of a kill-joy, either out to spoil our fun or, worse still, shackling us with dangerous propositions and truth-claims.

And so we need to speak into these narratives and question the notion that freedom is essentially found in the self, as if we could be our own saviours. An ancient Anglican prayer gives us a good starting point here when it captures relating to the God of the Bible as knowing One “whose service is perfect freedom”.

—

What do you think? Is Keller’s point fair? What are the implications for mission and ministry?

—

If you want to explore this more, there’s a single footnote on p. 383 of Center Church where Keller lists some key writers who draw out this continuity between modernity and late-modernity, in particular the works of Zygmunt Bauman, Ed Docx and Luc Ferry, amongst others.

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November 10, 2015by Robin Ham
Christian life

When did you last pray like this? (or How to Blow up your horizon with the apostle Paul…)

When I’m feeling my own prayerlessness, one of the Bible passages that will often both convict and awaken me is the apostle Paul’s prayer at the start of his letter to the Ephesians. Thankfully I was given cause to dwell there again last week. It’s a corker. Take a look:

For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe.  (Ephesians 1:15-19, NIV)

Naturally it’s always encouraging to hear someone has been praying for you. But Paul goes a step beyond that because he tells these churches precisely what he’s been praying for them. When was the last time someone told you that? And that’s where things get surprising. In fact, it blows most of my usual prayer requests out of the water. At its heart it’s a prayer for a greater knowledge of God. As the translation above puts it, Paul prays that the Ephesians would “know God better”. Paul reveals that his priority for the Ephesians is they’d know God better and, crucially, that he is dependent upon God for that knowledge. As Tim Keller says in his recent book on prayer:

It seems that the apostle [Paul] does not see prayer as merely a way to get things from God but as a way to get more of God himself.

Of course, we’re often used to thinking about knowledge in purely factual terms. And I suppose sometimes we can be tempted to think about Christianity purely in that way too, as if it were all about gathering up Bible trivia. Don’t get me wrong. Knowing God is factual in one sense, in that we need to know who the one true God is, what he is like, and what he has done. You flick through the Bible and there’s a huge emphasis on knowing God truly, and holding firmly to that true knowledge. False-teaching and fashioning a god in your own image is a real possibility, if we’re to take the Bible writers seriously. And so if our knowledge of God isn’t grounded in his revelation in the Scriptures, then we’re simply playing with fire. But Paul specifically asks God that “the eyes of your hearts may be enlightened…”, not merely our brain cells. It’s more than knowing about God.

This knowing is relational and spiritual. The Bible is a relational book. After all, we call it God’s word because it is God communicating with us, and by nature communication is relational. The goal of relational knowledge can never be storing up facts, notebooks and folders as an end in themselves. Instead it’s the same as any relationship: the fruit of relational knowledge is responding accordingly to the person we’re knowing, be that in love, trust, obedience, following, listening, etc. In fact you see that in Ephesians itself: two of the big verbs that follow the emphasis on knowing (ch. 1-3) are walking and standing (ch. 4-6). Evidently knowing God and his plans is meant to take shape in a changed life.

Do you ever have that experience where, now and again, you read a book that shakes you up to the extent that everything seems different. Don Carson’s ‘A Call to Spiritual Reformation’ was one of those books for me. It must have been back around 2005 when I first read it with a mate. We’d order heavily sweetened mochas in Durham coffee shops and wrestle with Paul’s prayers. But reading these verses again from Ephesians brought to mind Carson’s challenging introductory chapter where he makes a case for why our most pressing need is a deeper knowledge of God:
…There is a sense in which these urgent needs are merely symptomatic of a far more serious lack. The one thing we most urgently need in Western Christendom is a deeper knowledge of God. We need to know God better.
When it comes to knowing God, we are a culture of the spiritually stunted. So much of our religion is packaged to address our felt needs—and these are almost uniformly anchored in our pursuit of our own happiness and fulfillment. God simply becomes the Great Being who, potentially at least, meets our needs and fulfills our aspirations. We think rather little of what he is like, what he expects of us, what he seeks in us. We are not captured by his holiness and his love; his thoughts and words capture too little of our imagination, too little of our discourse, too few of our priorities.
In the biblical view of things, a deeper knowledge of God brings with it massive improvement in the other areas mentioned: purity, integrity, evangelistic effectiveness, better study of Scripture, improved private and corporate worship, and much more. But if we seek these things without passionately desiring a deeper knowledge of God, we are selfishly running after God’s blessings without running after him.
(D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation, 15-16.
So here’s to praying big prayers that are hungry for a deeper knowledge of God. Here’s to longing that those we love and share fellowship with are growing in their knowledge of God. And here’s to depending on God as the only one who can open the ‘eyes of our hearts’.

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July 13, 2015by Robin Ham
Theology, Ministry

Why bother with Theological Education?: The Best Possible Gift

Full-time theological education is a costly thing. Costly because it will often mean a geographical switch, including moving house and saying goodbye to much-loved friends and family. Costly because it will probably mean leaving behind the particular church you were involved with and at least pressing pause on the ministry opportunities you were part of there. Costly because it literally costs money, and at the end of the day someone’s got to foot that bill, whether it be a church organisation, supporters, or the individual concerned.

So, is it worth those costs?

As has been noted here, it seems there’s a bit of a trend at the moment for answering ‘no’. For a start, part-time, non-residential training is a whole lot cheaper. That means this issue is something the Church of England is particularly weighing up. But such ‘mixed-mode’ training also allows you to be part-time, perhaps working with a church for 3 or 4 days a week, which can seem like a benefit. It also allows you to remain in the same place, again, something that has plus-points. And obviously different people will have different circumstances, meaning that for some ‘mixed-mode’ forms are the only reasonable option. But does the mode of training impact upon its effectiveness? And as this helpful post on the CofE’s latest workings asks, how are we defining effectiveness anyway?

There’s also a trend of seeing one’s ‘time at college’ as not really about the training itself, and more just an opportunity to be involved in the ministry opportunities of the particular town or city the college happens to be in. I guess this is rooted in a scepticism or distrust of ‘theology’, but it also seems to smack a bit of arrogance and short-sightedness. Certainly I couldn’t imagine being ‘ready’ without the training I’m being given.

So given all this, why bother really investing in theological education?

Being about 80% of the way through a three year full-time spell at theological college, I’m already so glad this has been part of my training. I’m so glad that the Church of England generously funded me for two years, and I’m so glad that a bunch of friends and Trusts backed me from their own pockets so that I could stay for this third year.

Why? Well, I think the video below goes some way to explain and, in short, it’s because the end goal isn’t about me.

I’d spent two years on a church-based ministry training scheme (which was excellent) and three years working in a junior staff role for another church (again, a great experience and learning curve), but I’d still not swap these past three years, full-time at Oak Hill, for anything else. Being able to set time aside to think, to learn, to grow… to be formed, it has been a massive privilege.

But ultimately this privilege is not for my sake, there’s a much more worthy matter at heart: stewardship – seeking to be the best possible gift for the sake of the church…

You can read the accompanying document, featuring Don Carson, Tim Keller and others, here.

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January 16, 2015by Robin Ham
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About Me

 

Hello, my name is Robin. Welcome to That Happy Certainty, where I write and collate on Christianity, culture, and ministry. I’m based in Barrow-in-Furness in South Cumbria, England, where I serve a church family called St Paul’s Barrow, recently merged together from two existing churches, St Paul’s Church and Grace Church Barrow.

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“If we could be fully persuaded that we are in the good grace of God, that our sins are forgiven, that we have the Spirit of Christ, that we are the beloved children of God, we would be ever so happy and grateful to God. But because we often fear and doubt we cannot come to that happy certainty.”
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