Christian Comprehensiveness

by D. Ray Heisey

The writer to the Hebrews develops one major argument throughout his epistle. His argument is this: There is a kind of tide drifting you away from Christ; therefore, be careful to keep on due course.

In his analysis of this drift, the writer suggests at least four causes, one being formalism. The community to which he was writing, located probably near Rome, had been observing the forms of religion so long that the forms were becoming ends in themselves. Another cause was familiarity with religious facts. The community had grown sluggish; they had made Jesus Christ dull. A third cause was a combination of persecution and disillusionment. A storm had snapped their moorings and they had dragged their anchors. Rome had reversed its position toward Christians and some were persecuted and some were losing heart and hope in regard to the parousia. A fourth cause was complacency. Formalism, familiarity, and disappointment all tumbled together. Spiritual stagnation was inevitable. The community had an arrested development of Christian faith. It was staying static.

I don’t think I need to spend much time suggesting the contemporaneousness of this analysis of Hebrews for our religious situation today. We hear no end of opinions about the state of Christianity and the organized church. It would appear, however, that there are four major answers people are giving. I would like to examine these responses and then show how remarkably they correspond to the correctives which the writer to the Hebrews offered.

First, there are the Christian radicals who say the church is sick and what it needs to do is to break with its theological past and its institutional life.[1] The spokesmen for this point of view are numerous. Let me cite four of the many who could be quoted. In 1963, J. A. T. Robinson’s book HONEST TO GOD[2] called into question many of the basic assumptions which Christians had held for years. “The first thing we must be ready to let go,” he said, “is our image of God himself.” The death of God theology became very popular.

In 1965, Harvey Cox’s THE SECULAR CITY claimed that “we must learn… to speak of God in a secular fashion and find a non-religious interpretation of biblical concepts. It will do no good to cling to our religious versions of Christianity in the hope that one day religion will once again be back.” It is disappearing forever, he said, and that means we can now let go and immerse ourselves “in the new world of the secular city.”[3]

The next year, 1966, Joseph Fletcher published SITUATION ETHICS: THE NEW MORALITY. This book was called “racy,” “blood-chilling,” “a watershed in the history of moral theology,” and “another example of the rebellion of fallen man against his creator.” In any moral decision, Fletcher argued, the key question is: “What does God’s love demand of me in this particular situation?” It was hailed as “a manifesto of individual freedom and individual responsibility, elaborated within an ethic of love, which extricates modern man from rigid, archaic rules and codes.”[4]

In 1967, Robert Jenson, in his book, A RELIGION AGAINST ITSELF, said that there seem to be more and more people who believe in Christ and yet wish there were some way of believing other than being religious. He called our supernaturalism fraudulent, and continued:

The religious mimicry of our congregations, the rhetoric of our denominations, the theologies of our Sunday schools, the pseudo-divine personifications of our economic ideologies together with the bloody war-liturgies of their worship, the Sunday-morning-radio “Spark of the divine in every man,” Sallman’s Jesus and “My God and I” share one common feature: they all make one sick, and in exactly the same way that celluloid carnations and “lifetime” Christmas trees make one sick. They are unmistakably phony.[5]

The Radical Christianity response to the sickness of the church is similar to the response of student rebels in our colleges and universities. There is the growing conviction that the existing institutions, as now constituted—whether the university, the church, or the political party—cannot effectively adapt to the urgent needs of the contemporary situation. The only alternative is to abandon them. A matrix of frustration and anguish is producing a community committed to radical changes.

A second way of responding to the diagnosis is this. The chinch is sick but what we need to do is not break with the past but go back to it —to the faith once delivered to the saints. We need to renounce the modern attempts to make Christ relevant and stop allowing the church to be shaped so much by the world’s mold. Leon Sutch, pastor of the Epworth Methodist Church in Elgin, Ill., puts it this way:

On the theological right are those who would retreat into the past, by a resurgence of fundamentalism. Affronted by the church’s involvement in civil rights, the war on poverty and peace movements, and afraid of the rapid change of events around them, many laymen find this retreat a near-perfect solution to their problems. It arouses warm memories of childhood, absolves them from responsibility for the world, reassures them that God is just where he was yesterday.[6]

In a recent book called, RELEVANCE: THE ROLE OF CHRISTIAITY IN THE 20th CENTURY, Richard Halverson says, “Because humanity’s problem is congenital sin in the human heart—there is only one solution.. What is the answer to this broken world?… The Bible answer, the intelligent answer; the one adequate answer, can be summed up in a word, ‘reconciliation’ … Jesus Christ knew that war and death were due to a malignancy in the human heart which could be cured only by His own sacrifice on the cross. He entered ,history and determined a course that ultimately took him to the cross to solve this root problem once and for all—forever.”[7]

A third way of responding to the sickness of the church is … the church isn’t sick, the critics are simply using the wrong criteria for judging.[8] They tend to think of the church as merely one among all the other causes, institutions, and idealisms. When the word “cause” is used to describe Christianity, it reduces the church to everything else we think about as a cause. So, we are inclined to think, says Paul Holmer of Yale Divinity School, that the church too “lives by money, thrives with planning, prospers with clever and brainy people, needs widespread support to get its work done, and, above all, needs to progress and to change with the age.”[9]

Most movements or causes can be judged by results. Are they accomplishing anything? Are Negroes in Alabama voting? Is open housing in Cleveland a reality? Is the war in Vietnam de-escalating? Is the draft law being changed? Are students being placed on faculty committees and given a voice in building curriculum? These are legitimate questions for members of human causes designed to bring immediate results.

But then we tend to use the results theory with the church. Are we growing numerically? How many new members did the church have last year? How much increase was there in the budget? Such questions mean we are thinking of the church as any other cause. It is like a business. There is, of course, a place for recognizing the similarities between the church and other institutions. But differences are much more important. Again, Paul Holmer says:

The strangeness of the churches is safeguarded best when it is realized that one does not live so much for the harvest as one does for the quality of the sowing. To believe in God is to be able to conceive of the whole of life as a time of sowing, and reaping is left to others and even eternity and God. 

By itself, this willingness to postpone the harvest stretches the concept of cause all out of shape. The church is not one more cause on parity with others. Instead, it is the house and people of the Lord, a place and vocation for the people of Grid. But, it is always sowing, seldom reaping; always building, never done. One has to get used to thinking about it in its own terms, otherwise one is invariably thinking wrongly about it.[10]

You remember that when the 70 returned to Jesus with joy because they had achieved results in his name, he quickly corrected their distorted view. He said, “Don’t rejoice about this, but rather because your names are written in heaven—because you are in a new relationship.”

Now, of course, this new relationship will provide the motive for action and behavior appropriate to the new status. But the church is not a community that can be judged sick or healthy merely on the same terms as any other cause.

There is a fourth way of responding to the sickness of the church. If the church is sick, don’t despair, for the characteristic mode of the church’s existence is death and resurrection.[11]

Judaism was completed with the coming of Christianity. The old had to die that the new could live. The body of Jesus had to die that the spirit of Christ could live everywhere. Medieval Romanism was dying and the Reformed church grew out of it in new life. In our day we see evidence of dying taking place and newness of life coming forth. William A. Visser ’t Hooft has written, “Again and again the Church needs to be protected against the downward pull of its own life by which it becomes an end in itself and ceases to be the obedient servant of its Lord.”[12]

This view claims that the church as the body of Christ is called upon to suffer the same fate as the physical body of its Lord.

It cannot be the aim of the church (says John Cantelon) to increase its community, its prestige or influence in the world; it must be the aim of the church to be obedient. God may increase the size of the church, or he may decrease it. In any case the church must live by the evangelical law that he who would save his life will lose it and he who loses his life for the sake of Christ will find it. This means that the church as well as the individual Christian, must expect to find renewal only when it learns to give life for the life of the world.[13]

Just as the church, at the very heart of its worship, is celebrating the death and resurrection of Christ, so the church at the very heart of its work, is practicing death and resurrection in obedience to its Lord. If the church seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, then maybe it is because something We are holding on to needs to die. Perhaps a shakedown is in order. Perhaps one of the root causes is “the theological failure of the church to provide a Christian dynamic at the lay level.” Where are the Keith Millers in our congregations? Is anyone out there in the pews getting “the taste of new wine”? Or are they serving on too many committees, planning too many programs, attending too many meetings, spending too much time keeping the wheels of the machinery moving? These are the questions raised legitimately by the fourth group of respondents. The rhythm of death and resurrection—this is the cycle of all life, the pattern of existence of all organic bodies, the very meaning of the church.

The point being made here is that no one has a cornel’ on the truth. There is a kernel of truth in each of the four answers we’ve considered. We need the comprehensiveness of Christ who “saved what was valuable in what he destroyed and destroyed nothing where it was desirable rather to fulfill than to destroy.”[14] He was forever pulling surprises on those disciples who thought they had things figured out, who thought they knew the kind of kingdom he was building. I was talking with a pastor several weeks ago who said that he was the only “evangelical” in his town’s ministerium. The others won’t associate because they don’t approve of what the so-called liberals are doing.

The reason people hold opposing views and beliefs is not so much that truth is absolute, but that truth takes different forms there is ideal truth and then there is actual or empirical truth. Also, truth has a certain incomprehensibility about it—a quality of infinity. Can any man presume to think that his finite mind comprehends the infinity of God’s truth? Then, too, persons themselves have different temperaments, tastes, interests, and impulses which cause opposing views. Also, language is restrictive. It can only show one side of truth, by a figure or image. It cannot convey any truth whole or by literal embodiment. These are all important reasons why we have differing views of spiritual truth.[15]

If we can agree that no one has all the truth, the important question, it seems to me, is: Are we seeking to know the truth lodged in these opposing views? The comprehensive spirit ascends to a higher position and encompasses whatever truth makes the extremes sacred to their proponents.

Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians was that Christ should dwell in their hearts and that they should be so rooted in love that they would have the power to comprehend that Greek word means to grasp, seize, take hold of with all the people of God the breadth and length and height and depth of that love.

I said that the writer’s argument was that the Christian community was in danger of drifting away from Christ. This brings us to the correctives which the writer to the Hebrews offered. Observe that he didn’t have just one simple antidote. He told those second generation Christians, who had drifted into religious formalism, that they needed to rediscover religion—or better yet—rediscover God for themselves. Religious forms, he said, don’t have a hold over you. It seems to me, that at the heart of it, this is precisely what the Christian radicals are saying. Those in the conservative-evangelical tradition, I think, haven’t taken the radicals seriously enough. They tend to write them off, saying, after all, anyone who would advocate that “God is dead” can’t have anything to offer. But have we tried to see what they mean? We do need to break with certain accumulated trappings of religion. God does need to be interpreted in the thought patterns and language forms of the contemporary generation. God himself doesn’t change, but our concepts of him, and of the ways He works, do. And :if this interpretation is done seriously and authentically, Christians may find themselves staying more securely on due course.

The writer to the Hebrews told those Christians in the second place that their overfamiliarity with religious facts could be corrected by re-exploring the wonders of their faith. He tried to show them the romance of doctrine. He described Jesus as the Brightness of God’s glory and the express image of his person. The emphasis of Christian evangelicals on supernaturalism is a needed one. The secular Christians need to re-explore the exciting aspects of Bethlehem, calvary, and the rolled-away stone and their supernatural meanings if their emphasis is going to remain balanced. But if the Christian radical takes his here-and-now too seriously, I think the fundamentalist takes his doctrinal fundamentals too seriously at the expense of the here-and-now.

For example, I think it’s possible to oversimplify by saying, as Halverson does, that sin is the root of all the social ills and the world’s problems. But remember that Jesus said of the blind man, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.”

The third cause of drifting—persecution and disillusionment—the writer says may be corrected by exercising patience and faith, believing that God is at work after all. This is the word of the Christian idealists in our day. The church, engaged in a time of sowing, is a different kind of community. When a pastor gets discouraged with results and is persecuted with an identity crisis, when parishioners wonder whether all their efforts are worth it, they need to remember that the church isn’t just another cause. It is God at work.

The fourth cause of drifting away—complacency—must be answered, says the writer, with an admonition to spiritual growth and maturity. There isn’t any such thing as a “finished” Christian. Knowing Christ is not knowledge of a static kind. Here I see a correlation with the truth that the Christian renewalists offer. They are saying that a fuller development necessarily involves renewal—renewal by the process of continuing death and resurrection.

The responses to the condition of the church are varied, The writer to the Hebrews offered several which find their parallel in our day. I ask in closing, Are our eyes open to seeing truth where we’re not accustomed to seeing truth? Are our ears tuned to hearing truth when there is no instinct for hearing truth from that direction?

Leaving the times and the seasons to God, looking beyond ourselves and our own religious and provincial boundaries, let us enlarge the freedom of our faith and the comprehensiveness of our spirit, becoming full-grown men, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.

Notes

1. Leon Sutch, “Essay on the Church,” Reflections: A Journal of Opinion at Yale Divinity School, 66 (January, 1969), 5.
2. J. A. T. Robinson, Honest To God (Philadelphia, 1963).
3. Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York, 1965), p. 4.
4. Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Philadelphia, 1966), back cover.
5. Robert Jenson, A Religion Against Itself (Richmond, 1967), pp. 13-14.
6. Sutch, p. 5.
7. Richard Halverson, Relevances: The Role of Christianity in the Twentieth Century (Waco, Texas, 1968), pp. 85, 46, 22–23.
8. See Paul Holmer, “On Criticizing the Church,” Reflection, 66 (January, 1969).
9. Ibid., p. 3.
10. Ibid.
11. John Cantelon, A Protestant Approach to the Campus Ministry (Philadelphia, 1964), p. 109.
12. Quoted in Cantelon, p. 109.
13. Ibid., p. 110.
14. Horace Bashnell, “Christian Comprehensiveness,” in H. Shelton Smith (eel.), Horace Bushnell (New York, 1965), p. 109. This article by Bushnell supplied much of the impetus for the present discussion.
15. See Bushnell, pp. 110 ff.