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Introduction:
Evangelicalism
Derek Poole
Comment:
Ourselves Alone
Alwyn Thomson
From
the Director
David Porter
A
World of Difference
Alwyn Thomson
What
is an Evangelical Catholic?
Paddy Monaghan
Decommissioning
the Heart
David Bruce
Evangelical
Catholics
T. Gordon Hills
Sorting
out the Family
David Montgomery
Do
They Know Us by Our Love?
John Ortberg
Loyalist
Speak
Robert Dunlop
Book
Reviews
Alwyn Thomson
DECOMISSIONING
THE HEART
Reflections from a Prayer Walk
On the 11th July this year, I went for a walk. It was about 11.00pm, and I decided to walk around those parts of our home town of Lisburn closest to where we live. I wanted to pray for my community. There had already been confrontations in Belfast and Portadown between the residents of predominantly nationalist areas, and the Orange marchers who wanted to parade through. In a small, directionless, emotional way, I felt that by praying specifically for a peaceful marching day, some good might come to Lisburn. The 11th July is a special night of celebration for many in our community. However as I walked the sombre streets it seemed that parts of the town were completely ablaze.
What is it that makes us evangelicals? It might be said that it is our understanding of the Bible - that it is true and trustworthy, inspired and authoritative. Some might say it is our convictions about the cross - that there, Jesus Christ died as our substitute, taking our sins upon himself in legal satisfaction of the just requirements of God's law. Others might say it's because we don't drink, we don't dance and we don't surrender. What is it that defines us as evangelicals in Ulster today?
As I walked towards the edge of the Old Warren estate in Lisburn, I saw a group of three men approaching me in the opposite direction - at least they were more or less approaching me - sometimes they were, sometimes they weren't. They were singing at the top of the voice "We won't be mastered by no Fenian b______" placing, with considerable skill borne of years of practice, the musical emphasis on the last word of each line. They swayed this way and that, arms around each other's shoulders, until they saw me coming. The hairs on the back of my neck began to stand up as the first one, and then his friends swept across to my side of the street and headed straight for me. "Oh no!" I thought, (good evangelical to the core) "I am going to have to speak to these people."
Evangelicalism in Ulster is different from Ulster evangelicalism. That is to say, it has not always been as it is today. Before partition, and especially in the first half of the last century, evangelicalism here was diverse in political outlook. That has been less the case in recent generations, and certainly the all-important perception from outside, and particularly in the South of Ireland, is that evangelicalism and unionism march in step. Interestingly, as new evangelical movements and churches have emerged over the last twenty years, many of them have displayed a profound suspicion of this state of affairs, and are more politically ambivalent than has been the case in recent history.
As they swayed their way towards me in the semi-darkness, I could smell their breath from fifteen feet - a happy cocktail of ketchup and Carlsberg. I thought to myself, "You have three options here; 1. Say and do what most sensible people in these circumstances would say and do - i.e. nothing. In fact, pretend they aren't there. Look over the hedge as if you are inspecting the double-glazing in the houses along the street. 2. No holds barred compromise. Look them straight in the eye and bluff. Shout "Wey hey lads! No Surrender!" Even throw in a drunken stagger as if to say, "I don't condemn you - I'm just the same as you are." 3. Witness to them - verbally. None of this pious stuff about your life being the only Bible they will ever read. They need it straight between the eyes. This is their only opportunity. Don't blow it. They came closer.
I want to suggest four ways in which we Ulster evangelicals have been influenced beyond our basic trust in the Bible. Four ways in which evangelicals in N. Ireland have been prone to affirm the norms of our culture, rather than challenge these norms when they evidently fall short of God's standards.
The first influence is individualism. JC Ryle once said, "The Bible knows nothing of individual religion". When a person comes to faith in Jesus Christ, they are incorporated into a Body. They are engineered into a Building. They are meticulously prepared to be a Bride. To be a lone Christian is a contradiction in terms - when Paul enthused the Ephesian Christians to do battle against the principalities and powers (Eph.6:10ff) - he addressed them together as a church, not as individuals. Much further back in the purposes of God, when God addressed the problem of his sinning, compromised creation, he did not look to individuals to bear witness for him, but a people. His expectations were invested in a holy nation composed of millions of followers.
Evangelicals in N. Ireland have been prone to affirm the norms of culture...For many evangelicals, this is difficult territory. We are children of our age, and have been affected by the inexorable drive towards individualism, which has been the flavour of the era of those thinkers who have moulded us. In 1610 the mathematician/philosopher Rene Descartes led us on the first leg of our journey away from Judeo-Christian values in this regard. "I think, therefore I am", he said. In this one short sentence, the rationale which lay behind the foundations of the Christian faith was undermined. Descartes insisted that it is our ability to reason which defines us. Suddenly, humanity rather than God became the fixed point around which everything else revolves. The basis of human dignity and worth is no longer what God has made in his image from above, but what we have conceived about ourselves from within. He broke the mould, and others were quick to follow. Soon, the idea of human sinfulness was under attack. Jean Jacques Rousseau's (1712-1778) "Social Contract" begins with his best known words: "Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains." What is it that chains us? A sinful nature, from which we can be released by the grace of a loving God? Not at all - but rather the social circumstances of our upbringing and nurture, which by the power of reason the individual may conquer. To Rousseau, humanity was good, experience was good, and individuality was good. Another century on and John Stewart Mill created an entire system of morality based on self-interest. The goal of society as he saw it was to give the greatest pleasure to the greatest number - society as a concept only exists as the sum of individuals pursuing their own personal pleasure.
In our own day, the people who shape the thinking of our generation have been essentially individualists. Margaret Thatcher insisted in 1982 "There is no such thing as society" - and taught the individual in us all that it is our responsibility to create our own welfare. The basis of welfare is wealth creation, and this is up to the entrepreneur (as the ultimate individual) to achieve. This is the American dream - the creation of economic independence. It is the foundation of modern capitalism and the reason why most people go to work each morning.
We evangelicals have found it easy to slot in here. Simply put, we have come to believe in Christianity as a religion of the individual. That is the way we preach it. Invite Jesus into your heart as your own and personal saviour. We hold that our personal walk with God is more important than the faithfulness of the Church to the values of the kingdom. That our personal witness to our neighbour matters more than the corporate witness of the body of Christ to the world. That individual conversion to Christ is the central strategy of God in the world, above any hopes God might have of transformed communities. This is not to negate the importance and necessity of individual conversion, and of course it is true that God lovingly deals with us as individuals, but it is to affirm the individual as part of the whole.
Our mission field is coming down the streets toward us. It is dressed in July orange and August green.Standing in the street, my mind flashed back to another walk on another 11th night when I had seen the naked face of sectarianism around a bonfire. Irish tricolours burned with the rubbish of discarded pallets and Chinese take away containers. A child, no more than seven or eight years old danced round the fire, denouncing the Pope as if that particular Polish churchman had personally visited his street and kicked the door in. With childlike movements he incanted adult hatreds with astonishing vocabulary. His mind was already made up, and had been brutalised by the pornography of the images placed there by his mentors. Now, on this day, I saw the results of this nurture as, like a scene from High Noon, I faced the three friends, hooting their derision, barely supporting each other in a vertical position. Still they came towards me.
Secondly, there is dualism. The dualism I am thinking of here is that which separates the sacred and the secular. According to this view there is part of life which is essentially of God, and another part which is not. It is an old error, found in the earliest centuries of the Church, and formulated most clearly in the heresy of Manichaeism which taught in the third century AD that the flesh was essentially evil. It was therefore necessary to subdue the flesh if holiness could ever be attained - and this led to a variety of ascetic practices, few of which were of any great benefit. The foundational problem here is that there is no biblical evidence to uphold the notion that the world is divided in this way, rather the reverse. All of creation fell with Adam, and now groans for the appearance of the second Adam.
A Church of Scotland minister was being interviewed for the position of temporary pastor in an American Presbyterian Church some years ago. A well-meaning elder asked him how he managed his spiritual life in relation to his life in the world. "I don't have a life in the world" was his startling, but biblical answer. He wasn't saying that he didn't go shopping with his wife or go to the movies with his children. However, he was right to insist that as a child of God his life was entirely spiritual. In other words, he went shopping and preached the word and watched movies as unto the Lord. He was a Christian shopper, rather than a shopper who happened to be a Christian.
We Ulster evangelicals have to ask ourselves, "Are we Christian citizens, or citizens who happen to be Christians?" Does our faith apply to the totality of our lives, or not? If we compartmentalise to allow the Christian parts to flourish on their own while looking at our daily work, social relationships, political concerns etc. as "secular" activity, then we are dualists, and have succumbed to the spirit of the age. We have closed off the public sections of our lives to Christ.
In the darkness, the glow of the 11th night bonfires seemed threatening. Say nothing? Compromise? Witness to them? What should I do? What could I do? What would I do? In the event, when they were about ten paces away, they turned down a side alleyway, and the decision was taken out of my hands.
Our mission field as evangelicals is coming down the street towards us. It is dressed in July orange, and it is dressed in August green. It is drunk and it is sober. It is hostile and it is open and what it needs is Jesus. To my shame, I heaved a middle-class sigh of relief as those men avoided contact with me.
Thirdly, the forces of polemical fundamentalism have shaped us. I am using the word "fundamentalism" here, not in the sense used by James Packer in his important book, "Fundamentalism and the Word of God" (1958), but in its original sense coined by American Baptist, Curtis Lee Laws in 1920. Laws and the many who followed after him was a militant anti-modernist, determined to resist the influence of higher criticism as a means of approaching the Bible. This was a genuine threat to orthodox Christian belief, and the fundamentalists opposed it at a time of great vulnerability. It was also, co-incidentally, the time of partition in Ireland.
It is fair to say that fundamentalism was the dominant flavour of evangelicalism here and in North America until after the Second World War. JN Darby and the dispensationalism he taught within the Brethren movement provided the popular theological muscle fundamentalism required. One of the central tenets of dispensationalism is the ruin of the Church in this period of history before the kingdom actually comes. Ultimately true believers will be raptured out of the world to meet their Lord in the air. This idea that the Church was essentially corrupt led fundamentalism (in the 1930's) down the road of separatism - many independent congregations and denominations were founded. It was militantly anti-denominational, and especially anti Roman Catholic. By the Second World War, a large group was emerging which was unhappy with this separatist approach. Led by Carl Henry and others (later, John Stott) they at first called themselves neo-evangelicals and (by the 1950s) simply evangelicals. In Ulster, separatist fundamentalism has always been significant - and was strengthened by the strongly anti-Catholic rhetoric which was part and parcel of its proclamation. It wasn't hard for people who came from a strongly unionist tradition, to find on their conversion through the revivalism of the 20's and 30s, their already established prejudices against nationalists given theological justification. Their Romanism and their nationalism qualified them as "the enemy".
Watching the three revellers lurch away from me, I felt a deep sadness mixed with a personal sense of relief. It was the sadness of self-knowledge. I had compromised Christ in my heart just as surely as if I had pretended to be drunk and shouted "No surrender" at the top of my voice. Why? Because I am not sure that I know the kind of Jesus who lives in my heart. I have made him in my own image. I do not feel his burdens or shed his tears over this particular Jerusalem. I don't care as he cares.
Evangelicals are happier being curators of ancient traditions than creators of radical new models of Kingdom living.Fourthly, we have identified politics with faith. Evangelicalism has not been the force for difference Christ intended it to be in the world. There have been noble exceptions of course - but in general, evangelicals, once established within a culture, are happier being the friends of the powerful than the champions of the weak. Happier cultivating godless Presidents than establishing Godly precedents. Happier being curators of ancient traditions than creators of radical new models of Kingdom living. It is not unusual to find evangelicals propping up corrupt dictatorships, just as it is more usual to find radical liberals at the forefront of the call for change. Given this scenario, is it so surprising that the record of we evangelicals in Ulster has been so patchy?
Pushing open the gate of my own home after midnight, I stood outside for a time and wondered, "What difference does my living here really make?" In my personal journey with Christ I have sought to let go of all that is incompatible with his nature and will - not least the crude identification of my personal politics with biblical faith. (How absurd and arrogant it is to assume that the Lord of glory is a political sympathiser of mine, and that he wants what I want for the future of this island!) That's an important admission for me to make, but it is a necessary one if the decommissioning of my sectarian heart of stone is to be replaced with a heart of flesh. Perhaps that transformation might make all the difference in the world.
David Bruce is an ordained minister with the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. He is Director of Scripture Union in N. Ireland and a member of ECONI's Steering Group.
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