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Hot Topic #3 LET US PRAY Let the words of my mouth
and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our
strength and our redeemer. Amen. These days I am more than
a little wary of the question, “Are you a Christian?” It is what we used to
refer to as a loaded question. That’s question that isn’t asked to get an
answer, but to begin a dialogue, and sometimes an argument. I can’t remember
ever answering it without getting a follow up question. “Are you born
again?” I might be asked or, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your
personal Lord and Savior?” The follow-up questions
are a problem because they assume that the questioner and I share a common
vision of the world. Unfortunately that is seldom the case that those who
ask, “Are you a Christian” live in the same theological universe which I
have come to inhabit. Now, before I am
misunderstood too much, let me explain. I do not believe that my
understanding of the world, my theology, or my faith are superior to that of
the questioner. It is not, in my mind, a question of right or wrong, heaven
or hell, salvation of damnation. The analogy I like best is
music. The questioner loves rap music and I love bluegrass. There is nothing
wrong with rap music or with bluegrass. One is not better music than the
other, it is a preference. God loves all kinds of music. And God loves
people who love all kinds of music. However, a discussion about the best
sort of music is going to be approached very differently by a rapper and a
fiddler. My problem is that the
definition of Christian doesn’t make any distinctions between
different musical tastes. The definition is so broad that it includes not
only rappers and fiddlers but drummers, organists, oboists, pan flutists and
Theremin players. That is why I propose a
narrow definition of Christian? It is because the term means so
little and tells us almost nothing about the person who bears it. In our
society, a Christian is anyone who says they are a Christian. That doesn’t
mean very much today, but at one time it was a death sentence. In the first century of
the church, calling oneself a Christian was an invitation to arrest.
Christians were thought to be a treasonous political party. One of the early
Christian martyrs, St. Ignatius of Antioch facing execution, wrote;
“Let me not merely be called “Christian” but found one.” Now, that is a definition
with which I could live. It is a definition that has some teeth to it.
Ignatius said, in effect, do not judge me on my words alone but on the life
I have lived and now give up because of my faith. That is pretty gutsy. Being identified as a
Christian doesn’t have a similar edge today. Peter Gomes, whom you know I
admire greatly, is the Preacher at Memorial Church at Harvard College. Peter
is a wonderful combination of elements we don’t usually see together. He is
a Christian minister, a university professor, a black man born into
comfortable upper middle class New England society, a political conservative
who prayed at President Ronald Regan’s inauguration, and a gay man. In an
interview he was asked how it was to carry all these identities. He
responded:
"I resented being characterized by my race or place of origin. The
only thing I would want to be characterized by is the fact that I am a
Christian," Then Gomes continued. "But that seems to be of very low account
in this culture." The first followers of
Jesus did not call themselves Christian. They referred to one another as
brethren, disciples, or believers. It was probably the
Romans, perhaps in Antioch, who begin to use the term Christian to identify
that troublesome group who were neither Jews not pagans, but needed to be
watched carefully. One problem with the name
“Christian” is that it misunderstood the identity of the founder of our
faith. In addition to the name, Jesus, early followers added the Hebrew
title messiah, which, translated into Greek is Christ. Our
founder was Jesus Christ, or Jesus the Christ, messiah. The Romans,
misunderstanding the title, treated Christ as Jesus’ second name. Rather
than calling the followers of Jesus, Jesusarians,
or something to that effect, they called them Christians. Over the years the
name stuck and members of the church began to use it to identify themselves. In those early days, it
was pretty easy to define a Christian. A Christian was a follower of Jesus
who was a member of the church. Keep that in mind because
I think it is a good definition. A Christian is: 1) a follower of Jesus who
is 2) a member of the church. Since that time, a lively
battle has raged over the definition of Christian. The main point of
contention is whether we identify Christianity primarily in terms of
believing or of loving? Today, to some extent, that question divides the
more evangelical and the more liberal branches of the Christian community. Evangelical Christianity
would probably agree with J.I. Packer in his best selling book, Knowing
God, who answers the question, what is a Christian?
He is a man who acknowledges and lives under the word of God. He
submits without reserve to the word of God written in ‘the Scripture of
truth’, believing the teaching, trusting the promises, following the
commands. His eyes are to the God of the Bible as his Father, and the Christ
of the Bible as his Savior. He will tell you, if you ask him, the word of
God has both convinced him of sin and assured him of forgiveness. His
conscience, like Luther’s, is captive to the word of God, and he aspires,
like the psalmist, to have his whole life brought into line with it.
. . . He is an independent fellow, for he uses the word of God
as a touchstone by which to test the various views that are put to him, and
he will not touch anything which he is not sure that Scripture sanctions.[1] The term Christian
is defined by the authority accepted by the people doing the defining. For
most Evangelicals that authority would be the Bible and they would generally
define a Christian as one who has accepted Jesus Christ as their personal
Lord and Savior. For Roman Catholics the
source of authority is the Holy Roman Catholic Church and its head, the
Bishop of Rome, the Pope. A Catholic definition is simple: A Christian is
someone who has been baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. Our tradition,
particularly the Congregational portion of it, is not comfortable with
defining ultimate authority either with the Bible (because we understand
that it must be interpreted) or the hierarchical church (because we have
come to question authority too far removed from the community of believers.)
As Alistair Mason has
written, for Congregationalists “ . . . the normative unit of the
Christian life is neither the individual, nor the diocese, nor the
national or international church but the congregation.“[2] The source of authority in
this church is you. There is a catch, however. This congregation is called
together in meeting to be informed by the Word of God and the theology of
the church. In other words, the authority you possess is most acutely
present when we gather with openness to God’s Holy Spirit. Our denominational
ancestors in New England gathered themselves in congregational meetings long
ago to come to grips with the critical definition of who was and who was not
a Christian. When the Pilgrims and
Puritans came to New England in the early 1600's, most of them had been
baptized and included in the membership of the Church of England. In the new
Congregational churches they adopted the requirement of a “narrative of
conversion” for full membership. Most men and women were willing to give
testimony to the working of the Holy Spirit in their lives and were accepted
into full membership. These parents of the first
generation were entitled to have their children baptized in the expectation
that these children, growing up in the church, would themselves experience
conversion and be admitted to full membership. Full membership included the
reception of the Lord’s Supper and voting in congregational meetings. At
that time there was little difference between the meeting of the church and
the town meeting so membership was very desirable. The problem was that many
of the second generation, as they came of age, failed to experience
conversion, or at least to identify something in their religious awareness
that compared with what their parents claimed. More problematic, they were
beginning to have children, the grandchildren of the original settlers, and
there was no provision for baptism of these infants. As church membership
declined and babies multiplied, the church faced a serious dilemma in the
middle of the seventeenth century. What was the church to do. Could it
baptize these babies of parents who were not full members of the church or
would such a practice compromise the purity of the church? If the church
continued to dwindle, it would die. Arguing this point, Pastor
Jonathan Mitchel wrote:
"The Lord hath not set up Churches only that a few old Christians may
keep one another warm while they live, and then carry away the Church into
the cold grave with them when they dye: no, but that they might, with all
the care, and with all the obligations, and Advantages to that care that may
be, nurse up still successively another Generation of Subjects to Christ
that may stand up in his Kingdome when they are gone, that so he might have
a People and Kingdome successively continued to him from one Generation to
another,"
[3] The solution proposed in
1662 was the Half-Way Covenant. It provided that all second generation
parents who had been baptized but were not full members of the church
(because they had not experienced conversion) could present their children
for baptism. This meant that second-generation-baptized-parents were granted
a half-way membership in the church which allowed them to receive baptism
for their children, but not communion or voting privileges. Some more liberal
ministers also allowed these parents and other non-members who regularly
attended church to receive communion, believing that offering the sacrament
would provide a means of grace which may lead to the conversion of these
people. For our early
congregational sisters and brothers, being a Christian consisted of 1) an
experience of conversion and 2) membership in a local congregation. I would suggest that this
continues to be the most helpful definition even today. This is the sense of
Adrian Hastings writing in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought.
He determines that:
The criterion of Christianity, and indeed the only one, seems to be
acceptance of Jesus as Christ, signifying Master, Lord, Savior or Word of
God. Christianity, however, is more than a matter of individual commitment.
From the start it included the sense of belonging to a public community,
fellowship, or church, the body of Christ.
[4] My narrow definition of
Christian would be,: “One who has chosen to follow Jesus Christ and has
become part of a Christian community.” Clearly this leaves out
some people who are followers of Jesus but belong to no community of Christ.
And it leaves out some who are members of the church but who have not
consciously committed themselves to being disciples of Jesus the Christ. I have no desire to deny
anyone’s claim that they are Christian. I would like to suggest that these
criterion are helpful because they provide some clarity in a very confused
world. A Christian is one who has chosen to follow Jesus Christ and has
become part of a Christian community. To take anything away from
this definition would diminish the historical meaning of the term Christian.
To add anything to it would deny the experience and faith of large sections
of the Christian community. So that’s my sermon, two
points: A Christian is one who has chosen to follow Jesus Christ and has
become part of a Christian community. It is offered not to challenge other
opinions but to inspire discussion with them. Amen. NOTES:
[1].
J.I. Packer, Knowing God, Intervarsity Press, 1993, p.104
[2].
Alistair Mason, The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought,
“Congregationalism” Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 129
[3].
Jonathan Mitchel defending the "half-way"
measures, quoted in Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints, 138.
http://www.etss.edu/hts/hts5/notes6.htm
[4].
Adrian Hastings, The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought,
“Christianity” Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 113
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