Do Christians Understand What It Means To Be Christian?

Perhaps there is no finer expression of the 'deep' issue at stake in the You Know What macro/meta debate going on in global and local Anglicanism, and other churches at this time than the following two comments made here yesterday:

"If you will allow a quotation from 'Anglican Taonga', Peter, in which your own writing features, I would like to post here a comment by the Kiwi writer, Imogen de la Bere, a Lay Anglican living in England, who also has an article in the same edition. Here she comments on the Church v Society, today:

"I sometimes think Christianity has been too successful for the good of the church. The universal acceptance of human rights is effectively a global and secular working out of the Christian agenda, and consequently, what we have to offer is less startling.

Secular society has so completely embraced the Christian ethic that we have less to set us apart. It is commonly accepted that each individual is valuable and his or her person-hood is sacrosanct.

Ironically the church now lags behind liberal society. It’s as if we laid down the path, showed it to the world, and they have sprinted ahead of us." 

I think this statement, succinct as it is, might fairly sum up a valid view of how the Church today is not coping with the advance of civil society, on matters of justice and freedom consonant with the Good News of the Gospel."

Thus Ron Smith (and Imogen de la Bere) give expression to a fine argument with a potentially overwhelming conclusion for the You Know What debate, that history (at least in the Western, post-Christendom world) has moved into a state of mature Christian fullness (while the church has lost its way and become, relative to that state, a little less than Christian). Let's say this argument is valid. Then Christians have no considerable amount of repenting to do: we have lost touch with the will of God, acted in ways to quench the Spirit of God, and tried to stop our own fervent prayer, "Your kingdom come" from being answered.

I don't think Ron or Imogen would mind if I wondered aloud (as someone not expert on the history of ideas) whether this is not a version of Hegelianism?

To which comment above, Bryden Black responds,

"Imogen de la Bere is indeed putting her finger upon a most important thing Ron. Yet both you and she also fail to notice an equally important aspect of this entire development of an idea and its effective practice.

As an initial aside firstly - which nonetheless is absolutely basic. The “Christian agenda” has as its premise the understanding of God and so of Reality, and notably human reality in the “image” of that God, to be Triune. As Walter Kasper sums it up: “The need was to reflect upon the data of Scripture and tradition and to break away from the one-sidedly essentialist thinking of Greek philosophy and into a personalist thinking ... laying the foundation of a new type of thought.”

It is this notion of personhood which has become part and parcel of our general understanding of the human. There is however another, absolutely crucial factor to consider, one which again has its roots in theology - or in this case, an a-theology. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll root it in the 17th C, and the sowing of the seeds of what became the Enlightenment in the following century. In a word: autonomy.

When the notion of human personhood is allied to the notion of human autonomy, then we have frankly a bastard child of the Christian faith and the Christian agenda. Failure to appreciate this (mostly, by western Christians who are quite simply immersed in this cultural pond water, ‘naturally and obviously’) is by and large the cause of much confusion in the Church today. And it behoves us to adhere to Rom 12:1-2 in as profound a manner as possible. Otherwise the Church will be captured by the father of lies, and know only slavery again."

What is Bryden putting his theological finger on? It is the question of what it means to be a human person, with special reference to what authority or governing idea(s) shape that understanding. (About which, see here). His underlying argument is that this is a prior question to the question of human rights. Human rights, after all, apply to humans and there is sound logic in asking first who or what 'humans' are to which 'rights' apply.

An implication of what Bryden is arguing is that there is no brave new post-Christendom world which turns out to be the fulfilment of the Christian vision. Hegel's Spirit controlling history is the spirit of humanity rather than the Spirit of God, and a fallen humanity at that, which has crucially taken a wrong turning in its self-understanding. A wrong turning, precisely, because we have sought 'self-understanding' of ourselves rather than God's understanding of ourselves.

One interesting (and, OK, provocative) aside here is to note that Ron and Bryden cannot both be correct. Paradoxically they are united on this point: the implication of each one's argument is that there are Christians around the world who do not understand what it means to be Christian.

POSTSCRIPT

You be the judge!

Here is history being made in the 21st century. It involves men and women, the powerful and the powerless. Does it epitomise the Hegelian divine spirit at work in the world as the divine will for humanity is worked out through history (more rapidly, note, than the church itself has been able to keep up with)? Or bog standard sinners, in this case instruments in the service of imperial oppression, familiar subjects in terms of the Bible's account of the state of the world?