To Move Ahead or Dig In?

There are risks in living in a new age, but disaster looms for those trying to live in a past age.

Late last year the Church of England’s General Synod was presented with a petition asking for the restoration of the King James Bible and of the Book of Common Prayer in the ordinary services of worship in the church. The petition was signed by 600 people who have been described as the “most powerful, distinguished and talented men and women in England.” Their petition, it was said, “hit back at the linguistic and liturgical Philistines who, they believe, have debased the sacred rituals of the Church of England.” The petition came from people concerned that the worship of the church be carried on in the best way possible. But it is interesting that it was supported by atheists and agnostics who had no great interest in the church’s worship. It was welcomed in the daily press by conservatives like the Daily Telegraph and by more liberal organs like the Guardian.

Part of the problem that called forth the petition is the nature of the new forms of service in the Church of England. These are beloved by some, but they have been the target of a good deal of criticism by others. They put the services into idiomatic modern English and take notice of recent advances in our knowledge of liturgical texts and of liturgy generally. But many have found them “soft on sin” and undistinguished.

Professor David Martin, of the London School of Economics, holds that the language of the new services is “Neither ancient nor modern, elevated nor interestingly vulgar. It falls between every possible stool; it is a kind of soft-handed Christianity that doesn’t declare itself.”

All of which raises the important question, “What are we to do about modernizing services and translations?” There is something conservative about most of us and we do not like change. We want things to be done in the old way to which we have become accustomed.

There is more than prejudice and reluctance to change about this. The values of the past are not to be discarded lightly. When a form of worship, for example, has commended itself to generations of worshipers, it ought not to be discarded until we are sure that its replacement preserves the essential values it enshrines. When a translation of the Bible has won the hearts of many and proved its ability to convey the truth of God, we should be slow to say that it has outlived its usefulness.

A generation like ours tends to be impatient with the old. We are sold on the idea of progress. We are so impressed with the wonders of technology and the advances of modern knowledge in a variety of fields that we tend to think that only what is modern is of any great value. In the face of such attitudes it must be insisted upon that a right conservatism is not simply to be tolerated, it is necessary. Without it we would all too readily discard what is valuable from the past as well as what has served its purpose.

Moreover, it is well that we resist change—at least up to a point. Without such resistance we would continually swing from the old to the new and back again so that there would be no continuity. New gains would never be consolidated.

But side by side with this we must recognize the need to be radical. There must always be changes made in new situations. While the old has its values, there are times when what is new is necessary if the needs of a new generation are to be met.

Take worship. It is true that there are values in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as in every ancient formulation. There are powerful words that are traditionally used, as at times like birth, marriage, and death. There are evocative phrases we use so naturally when we approach God in the normal Sunday services of the church.

But if we are going to refuse all change, saying “Wisdom perished in 1662,” we are going to fail our own generation. There are new people and new needs. The problem of the church in every generation is to meet those new needs of new people without forfeiting the values in its heritage from the past. To live in the past is to fail the people in the present. Many of the younger generation easily get lost in the “thees” and the “thous” of the older versions, in the endings in “est” and “eth,” and much more. Our language in worship and in the reading of Scripture must bear them in mind.

And there is another important consideration. It is the duty of every generation to make the faith relevant to the needs of that generation. This does not mean playing fast and loose with the essentials. The necessary conservatism comes in here. The essence of the faith is not subject to adaptation; otherwise, what we have is not Christianity but some other religion. But the expression of the faith is another matter. This generation has the responsibility equally with every other generation to tell its contemporaries what Christianity means in terms they can understand. And that includes worshiping in a way that is meaningful, and reading the Bible in what was once called words “understanded of the people.”

It is worth reflecting that the word “radical” derives from a Latin term meaning “root.” A radical in the strict sense is one who goes to the root of the matter. In this sense evangelicals must always be radicals. Again and again we must go back to our roots. But plants grow from the roots and what the roots supply. So we apply what we find in our roots to the needs of our day. We do not simply bury our heads in the sand.

We reflect that our Master refused to go along with a hidebound conservativism. There was a conservative party in his day, the Pharisees; but he rarely sided with them. He accepted as fully as any that the ancient Scripture was authoritative. But he saw that the traditional attitude to it had prevented some of his contemporaries from seeing its real meaning. He pointed out that Scripture testified of him (John 5:39). And when he spoke of the man who simply says, “The old is good” (Luke 5:39), he was not commending him: he was castigating him for refusing even to consider the new.

There are always risks in living in a new age. But there is disaster in trying to live in a past age. It is necessary that we conserve the values of the past. I for one am happy to have the King James Version and I rejoice in the way it speaks to me. But I recognize also that we need our New International Version, our New American Standard Version, and much more. We need the past. But we need the present also.

It is always easy to dig in our heels and refuse to be budged from the comfortable past with those values we appreciate so well. It is not particularly difficult to see ourselves as radical, open to the best insights of our day. We are called on to do something much more difficult and important: combine the two.

Leon Morris is principal of Ridley College, Victoria, Australia.

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