Recently a member of the church from which I retired called to invite my wife and me to her 100th birthday celebration at the church. Initially concerned about returning so soon, we were honored to be asked and agreed to attend.
At the gathering I told several people I had started a blog, Climbing the Walls, the name a riff on one church member’s warning to me about retirement, that “in six months you’ll be climbing the walls.”
Despite my insistence that I actually enjoy retirement, some were not entirely convinced. Several, in fact, offered suggestions as to what I might do with all the time on my hands.
It reminded me of a scene from the 60’s film, The Graduate, where Dustin Hoffman’s character, as honored guest at a party, is inundated with advice as to what he might do with the rest of his life. In this particular scene one of his parents’ friends sidles up to him and says, as if imparting the wisdom of the ages, “I have one word for you. Plastics!”
But as I say, I’m really rather content with retirement. Among other things, it’s freed me to pursue my studies, something I wasn’t able to do to the extent I’d like. In some respects, I picked up where I left off years ago.
As a case in point, I recently reread a book I’d originally completed in 1987. I couldn’t believe how much I’d missed the first time around. I got so much more out of it this time. This suggests, in part, how much we change and grow as human beings. A very different person read it the second time through.
But while retirement has been good, there’s one area that’s decidedly amiss. Which is to say that I’ve been quite content Monday thru Saturday. Sundays, however, have been a different matter altogether.
I miss leading worship, not least preaching. I miss singing in the choir. But most of all, I miss my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. Both Linda and I do.
This is not to say we haven’t been attending church every Sunday. We have. But it’s been frustrating. In our continuing search for a new church home, we decided to experience a variety of different churches and traditions.
In some ways this has been good. After years in the pulpit, it’s enlightening to see church from a laymen’s perspective. It’s interesting to observe, for instance, how one is greeted, or not.
But most of all, its been fascinating to see what informs a church’s practices. There are all kinds of theological perspectives out there, ones that so far have left me disappointed. In fact, I feel a bit like a fish out of water – or a boat stranded onshore.
What I’ve seen are opposite extremes. In the mainline churches we’ve attended, there seems an all-too easy conformity with what passes for high culture. No serious attempt is made to counter what the people in the pews have come to believe and expect. There’s a measure of self-satisfied complacency that absorbs the gospel as it might an evening watching Netflix.
To this point, while attending a clergy symposium years ago, an astute colleague got up and said, “When I read the Bible, I’m continually surprised. But nothing the United Church of Christ says ever surprises me.” In other words, the mainline churches don’t tend to confront the easy assumptions of “high-minded” contemporary thought, even while employing countercultural language.
Often one is lectured on social engagement, though mostly the armchair variety. This approach tends to flatter its hearers by assuring them of their culturally-approved moral sensitivity, if not superiority.
The problem, in part, has to do with how we interpret the Bible, Christianity’s guiding document, its touchstone. Too often it’s perceived as a laudable archeological relic expressive of ancient belief, one we today must redefine and reinterpret in light of its historical and cultural context.
In this the text necessarily loses much of its independent, life-altering character. It no longer speaks for itself as timeless, revealed truth relating to the human condition and its existential pursuit of truth and the good life. It is now merely a time-conditioned, provisional testament to a distant past.
Rather than a check on cultural creep, the often-unconscious biases and prejudices of the present, it is subsumed by it, forced to serve its ever-changing and insistent demands.
If the Bible must conform to our understanding of life, it necessarily ends up saying nothing other than we want it to say. Which, when you stop to think about it, isn’t all that interesting, and certainly not enough to roust anyone out of bed on a Sunday morning.
Another problem closely associated with this is the mainline church’s obsession with partisan politics. The gospel, we are told, must be relevant. And yet, ironically, being relevant is precisely what the church ought not to do.
Christianity is revealed knowledge, as opposed to that obtained by human reason. And one essential characteristic of revelation is that it stands outside the limits of human experience. Once encountered, it re-orders our perception of what is true, and what ultimately is relevant. If we force biblical faith to do our culture’s bidding, it will serve only our transitory projects and fit into our utilitarian purposes. This the gospel should never do.
On the other extreme, the more conservative or evangelical churches present their own set of problems. One of the strengths of its approach, however, is that it takes scripture and faith seriously, as opposed to something that merely confirms our ever-changing, socially-conditioned ethos. It provides, ideally, if not always in practice, a check on such things.
Here the biblical witness is invited into serious dialogue with contemporary assumptions. This, in my view, accounts for the relative strength of evangelical churches in our day. People are longing for something other than the “tyranny of the now.”
The difficulty with this approach, however, was captured best for me in a pithy comment one of my former professors, Paul Holmer, once made in a debate with Carl Henry, a reknowned evangelical scholar.
“The problem I have with your theology,” Prof. Holmer said, “is that it puts the truth too easily on the lips of too many.”
Perhaps I should explain. I once had a conversation with a college friend’s parents shortly after I had begun divinity school. They were dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalists. As I proffered my understanding of the gospel around their kitchen table, I could see they were not all that impressed. In fact, they periodically would shake their heads in knowing disapproval, albeit politely.
Looking back, I’m probably a lot closer today to their point of view than I was back then (with fairly notable differences notwithstanding). In fact, my earlier views are almost an embarrassment to me today.
But God wasn’t through with me (then or now). As I matured and grew in the Spirit, as I pursued my faith with intentionality, I came to understand and eventually accept certain things I previously rejected.
The point is that genuine “knowing,” as Socrates pointed out, involves change and growth. Just parroting big truths doesn’t make one wise. Though it’s not necessarily a bad start.
My earlier example of rereading that book after some 30 years is instructive. When I first read it, I perceived its power. But today it has far greater force. What changed? Hint: it wasn’t the book.
In the end, it seems the church landscape in America today is unhappily bifurcated, if not schizophrenic. What seems missing is what at one time was common to mainline churches: a sense of continuity with the earliest foundations of Christianity, combined with a reforming spirit that engages all cultural, historic change through the lens of those very same foundations.