A writer was telling me what worried him most about the church in America today: “It’s the Constantinian temptation.” He predicts that the manifest corruption and disorder of our society will provoke a strong counterreaction, maybe even a theocratic power grab. In the rise of the Religious Right he sees evidence that Christians are already compromising their witness in the quest for political power.
The same day, another writer had called to pitch an article about what was most drastically wrong with the church: a steadily growing indifference to theology. I asked him how he had arrived at that diagnosis, and he referred me to a book by a prominent evangelical theologian.
Neither of these concerns strikes me as valid in the terms presented–that is, as the defining problem of the church in our time. In fact, I believe they are wildly mistaken. But both are founded on an intuition of a malaise that is truly pervasive: a chronic forgetfulness about who we are and where we are going.
By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God (Heb. 11:8-10).
As Christians we are strangers in a strange land, always in danger of confusing the City of Man with the City of God. But the strangeness goes even deeper: it is in our very nature as human beings, body and soul. We are creatures of this earth, clearly, and yet just as clearly something more. “Now we know,” Paul writes,
that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed in our heavenly dwelling. . . . Now it is God who made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come (2 Cor. 5:1-2, 5).
We know all this, just as Paul says, but we forget. We are so busy: taking children to soccer practice and flute lessons, shoveling snow, paying bills, contemplating the prospect–melancholy or absurd, depending on your temperament–of a choice between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole.
Not only do we forget, but also we’re vulnerable to rival accounts of our nature, especially those that come bearing the prestige of science. Made for a purpose? Nonsense. Souls, heavenly dwellings? Really now, off the record, of course, you don’t believe . . .
What we need, then, is writing that reminds us who we are. One such piece in the current issue of B&C is the essay on shame by Melvin Hugen and Neal Plantinga. If, with Aristotle, we define our peculiar kind as the animal that laughs, we might with equal rightness define ourselves as the animal that feels shame.
In “Lost in the Cosmos,” Walker Percy–an acute observer of human strangeness–reported the results of a poll asking people what they feared most: “A majority of respondents agreed in ranking one fear above all others, above fear of sickness, accidents, crime, war, even death. It is the fear of speaking before a group, stage fright.” It is, in other words, the fear of being shamed.
It’s noteworthy that Hugen and Plantinga’s first example of the power of shame involves a physical deformity. To be made aware of our bodies often provokes discomfort. Am I my body? And when the body seriously breaks down, such questions become urgent indeed. In “Our Bodies, Our Stories,” Philip Yancey talks with doctor-writers Diane Komp and Richard Selzer, who have looked long and deep inside the machinery of life.
When you split a man’s skull with an ax, what happens to the self that transacted business from his now-lifeless frame? In “A Martyr Who Lives,” Larry Woiwode tells a story that could be framed thus: “Who Killed Aleksandr Menn?” But that puzzle doesn’t finally count. The mystery that matters, Woiwode reminds us, is in these words of Jesus: “I am he who lives and was dead; and behold, I am alive forevermore.”
Good news, amazing news, the best news we could get. And yet unsettling, because it leaves us unsettled: not in possession of that unimaginable “eternal house” promised to us, and not at home here, either.
– John Wilson, Managing Editor
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review
Volume 2, No. 2, Page 5
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