The Wilderness Way #32

I can still remember the thrill I experienced as a sophomore in college reading the famous words of Paul Tillich in his sermon “You Are Accepted.” “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. . . . Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now, perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!’ If that happens to us, we experience grace.”[1] The refreshing breeze of Tillich’s re-conceptualization of grace was (and to a real degree still is) a healing balm. Yet for me it was only half a decade later that another great theologian, Albert Cook Outler, pointed out that there was no mention or explicit reference to Christ in that sermon.

Tillich’s great statement and healing message spoke to a largely Christendom culture. It spoke to a time and a people with a Christian memory and history (however twisted and however vague). A working knowledge of Christ and his atoning work could be assumed. God’s grace is ever real and always present but now is the later time to which Tillich only vaguely referred. Sixty-two years later, the source now needs to be named and known.

Furthermore, the Enlightenment presuppositions on which many of us were theologically raised on are now being challenged. The challenge is far deeper than the common liberal/conservative divide. Terms like liberal and conservative are borrowed from the political spectrum and carry little real authenticity for deeper theological thought. Progressive verses fundamentalism hardly does justice to the tighter battle over what is truth. Rather, the terms are more often used to caricature one’s opponents than shed the light of life on our modern malaise.

Leslie Newbigin summarized Enlightenment theological assumptions succinctly in his early challenge to the intellectual status quo. “We are familiar with the kind of liberal theology so characteristic of the later nineteenth and the twentieth centuries in which the boundaries of what is possible to believe were firmly fixed by the axioms of the Enlightenment, in which it was taken for granted that the modern scientific worldview provides the only reliable account of how things really are and that the Bible has to be understood only in terms of that account. This required a reconstruction of biblical history on the lines of modern historical science. It required the elimination of miracle. It dictated that while the crucifixion of Jesus could be accepted as a fact of real history, his resurrection was a psychological experience of the disciples.”[2]

Reading Newbigin’s summary one cannot help but hear the Apostle Paul’s comment as if in intentional challenge. “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.”[3]

Such traditional Enlightenment thought has reduced religion to mere opinion in the eyes of many. Truth is sundered from reality. Instinctively we know this will not do. More thoughtfully, we are challenged to reconstruct Christian doctrine for such a time as this. It is at this ancient/modern crossroads that we may rediscover the power of orthodoxy. Presciently Thomas Oden in The Rebirth of Orthodoxy comments: “Orthodoxy persists, despite all contrary predictions, because it is more cross-culturally agile than modern multiculturalism, because God’s sovereign grace provides the basis of its durability, because God does not leave himself without witness in the world, because the weakness of the pilgrim community in time attests the communion of saints over generations is divinely guarded and guaranteed.”[4]

[1] Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, pp. 161-162

[2] Leslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, p. 45

[3] I Corinthians 15:14

[4] Thomas C. Oden, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New life in Christianity, pp. 69-70

By: Bishop Mike Lowry On 2/26/2010

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