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PROPHETIC UNTIMELINESS A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance Os Guinness Baker, 2003, 119 pp. |
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Guinness is always thought provoking. In this book he rebukes the church for
caving in to the cultural pressures of time and relevance. “How have we Christians become so irrelevant when we have
tried so hard to be relevant?”
“Rarely has the church seen so many of its leaders solemnly presenting
the faith in public in so many weak, trite, foolish, disastrous, and even
disloyal ways as today.” “How can we
do better in a day that is hungry for a word from God?” (11) “Our challenging task is to be like David himself, who was
said to ‘serve God’s purpose in his generation.’” (12) “Relevance is at the very heart of the gospel of Jesus and
is the secret of the church’s power down through history.” “In itself the good news of Jesus is
utterly relevant or it is not the good news it claims to be.” (13) “The church is largely irrelevant to Western affairs at a
supremely important moment. For today
the forces of globalization unleashed by the West are simultaneously
stimulating other civilizations (such as the Chinese, Indian, and Islamic)
into life while undermining the authority of Western beliefs in the West
itself.” (14) “By our uncritical
pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless
chase after relevance without a matching commitment to faithfulness, we have
become not only unfaithful but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to
redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than
are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority
and our relevance. Our crying need is
to be faithful as well as relevant.” (15) “It is time to challenge the idol of relevance, to work
out what it means to be faithful as well as relevant, and so to become truly
relevant without ever ending up as trendy, trivial, and unfaithful.” (15) “How are we to be wise and understanding, not simply
well-informed with a surplus of facts and figures?” “How are we to be always timely, never trendy?” (18) Answer: Regain the
courage of ‘prophetic untimeliness’ and develop the art of ‘resistance
thinking’ and so become followers of Jesus….” (19) Resistance thinking is “a way of thinking that balances
the pursuit of relevance on the one hand with a tenacious awareness of those
elements of the Christian message that don’t fit in with any contemporary age
on the other.” It is “a way of
relevance with faithfulness.” (20) The clock is the source of our time pressures and our view
of the present and future.
“Westerners are people with gods on their wrists” (Filipino saying)
“Westerners have watches but no time. Africans have time but no watches.” (28) Three features of the modern clock shape our
thinking. (31-33)
“Time is the ultimate credit card; speed is the universal
style of spending.” “Jam-packed
eventfulness is a necessity and attention deficit disorder a common
condition.” (35) Tyrannies of Time Our view of time has the power of labeling or defining
reality. The way we say things shapes
the way we see things. For example,
“The uncivilized are no longer beyond in terms of space but behind in terms
of time.” Progress almost always
refers to time. Words also smuggle in
evaluation in the guise of description.
Progress describes advance but it also implies “good.” Reactionary (to progress) implies
“bad.” (37-9) Our view of time imposes a presumptive bias for
change. “Our modern words about time
have a preference and a bias, but the preference is left unstated and the
bias unargued.” (41) Any kind of
change qualifies as “progress.” The
present is privileged over the past and the future is privileged over the
present. (44) “Incessant change plays havoc with our categories and our
conclusions. Settled convictions,
assured judgments, long-held beliefs, age-old traditions, newly trumpeted
discoveries, and radical new fashions are all swept away without ceremony in
the tornado of change that is modern time.”
“We face a harvest of ironies and unintended consequences.” (44) “A vital secret of the church’s power and glory in history
lies in its calling to be ‘against the world, for the world.’” “The Christian
faith is simultaneously both world-affirming and world-denying. When the church is weak or careless in
maintaining this dual stance, it leads directly to cowardice and corruption,
decadence and decline. But when the
church is faithful, it lies at the core of her power to transform and renew
culture.” (49) “Of all the cultures the church has lived in, the modern
world is the most powerful, the most pervasive, and the most
pressurizing. And it has done more
damage to Christian integrity and effectiveness than all the persecutors of
the church in history.” (51) “Few Christians are willing to think or live decisively
‘not of’ it.” (52) “Evangelicals and
fundamentalists have embraced the modern world with a passion unrivaled in
history.” (53) In the new evangelicalism “therapeutic self-concern
overshadows knowing God, spirituality displaces theology, … marketing
triumphs over mission, …concerns for power and relevance are more obvious
than concern for piety and faithfulness, talk of reinventing the church has
replaced prayer for revival, and the characteristic evangelical passion for
the missionary enterprise is overpowered by the all-consuming drive to
sustain the multiple business empires of the booming evangelical
subculture.” (54) “Many evangelicals are blind to the sea change because
they know only the present and have little sense of history, even their
own.” (54) “Fear of one extreme is cited to excuse the collapse into
another. ‘Thank God,’ our new evangelicals say, ‘that we have escaped from
the ‘do’s and don’ts’ and ‘no-nos’ of the narrow worldliness of the previous generation.” But the pitfalls of legalism are not the
urgent danger of today. We are pretty
much at the other end of the spectrum. (55) “Uncritical adaptation reaches so far out for relevance
that it “ends up toppling over into surrender to the modern world, therefore
becoming unfaithful to Christ.” (57)
This happens when:
“A great part of the evangelical community has made a
historic shift. It has transferred
authority from Sola Scriptura (by Scripture alone) to Sola Cultura
(by culture alone).” (65) “Independent thinking, protest, refusal, resistance, and
the courage to say no are all essential to the vigilance that sees
something is wrong and is willing to stand up and take action.” There is little appetite for such a
sustained struggle. (69-70) “Our deepest necessity is to be shaped by our faith rather
than by the pushes and pulls of this world.” (71) The siren calls are public opinion, popularity,
fashionability, fascination with the future, and relevance. “For us the power of public opinion is the most dangerous
because it is today’s danger.” (72) “Whereas our grandfathers and grandmothers lived as if
they had swallowed gyroscopes, we think and act as if we have swallowed
Gallup polls. Our thinking is all too
easily ‘group thinking’—that which is shaped by a desire for concurrence
rather than by critical thought.”
“For when truth’s importance decays, independent thinking, debate, and
disagreements decay too.” (73) “Relevance is not the problem but rather a distorted
relevance that slips into trendiness, triviality, and transience.” (75) “The past is dry, dusty, and remote…. The future rushes
toward us gleaming and bright.”
“Everything Christian from worship to evangelism must be fresh, new,
up-to-date, attuned, appealing, seeker-sensitive, audience-friendly, and
relentlessly relevant, relevant, relevant.” (76) “Much Christian pursuit of timeliness has become
trivial.” “Many Christian leaders
have become trendy.” “Evangelicals
were once known as ‘the serious people.’
It is sad to note that today many evangelicals are the most
superficial of religious believers—lightweight in thinking, gossamer-thin in
theology, and avid proponents of spirituality-lite in terms of preaching and
responses to life.” (77) “He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a
widower.” (78) History’s unheeded messengers (Jeremiah, John the Baptist,
Winston Churchill, etc.) have common virtues: “discernment of the times;
courage to repudiate powerful interests and fashion; perseverance in the face
of daunting odds; seasoned wisdom born of a sense of history and their
nation’s place in it; and—supremely with the Hebrew prophets—a note of
authority in their message born of its transcendent source.” (85) Speaking out carries costs: ·
A sense of maladjustment (Praised prophets are
mostly dead.) ·
A sense of impatience (frustration that God’s
forward purposes are obstructed) ·
A sense of failure (which is only to be expected) So how do we react?
“”Our ‘failures’ may be his success.
Our ‘setbacks’ may prove his turning points. Our ‘disasters’ may turn
out to be his triumphs.” “So every
day our work is like a prayer. And
every day we give back all we can of God’s gifts to him—with love, and trust,
and hope.” (94) How do we escape cultural captivity and arrive at a true
perspective? “We are all more
culturally shortsighted than we realize.”
(95) 1. Be aware of the unfashionable.
Wrestle with the truths that are unpopular. Be challenged by the difficult. Face up to those elements in original Christianity that are
personally obscure or repulsive. “Early twenty-first—century evangelicalism mimics popular
culture as closely and successfully as anyone could ever hope to while still
getting away with it. In each case
the end result is not only a betrayal of the faith but a hapless impotence
before the very audience the church was out to impress.” “Evangelicals … are
increasingly syncretistic rather than exclusive and discriminating.” (98) Exercise radical obedience (like Bonhoeffer). “The cross of Jesus runs crosswise to all
our human ways of thinking.” (100) 2. Appreciate the historical.
“History is essential for our knowledge of ourselves as human beings.”
(102) “The further back you can look,
the further forward you can see.”
Read old books. Read
biographies. “It is essential that we
rise above the limitations of being children of our own age.” “The past is the greatest source of
corrective wisdom….” (105) 3. Pay attention to the eternal.
“To be always relevant, you have to say things which are eternal.”
(quoting Simone Weil) (105) “Nothing
is finally relevant except in relation to the true and the eternal. “Only truth and eternity give relevance to
‘relevance.’” (106) “In his written
and living Word we are given truth from outside our situation, truth that
throws light on our little lives and our little world.” (107) “God is always bigger than our misunderstandings of
him. However distorted and inadequate
our views may be, it only takes the real Word to speak to wake up the church
and the world.” (109) “Attention to the eternal assumes and requires the
practice of the spiritual disciplines today—to cultivate the spiritual habits
of the heart and learn to do as second nature what we cannot do as
first. And above all, we need to
practice the presence of God and to pursue the reality of knowing God.” (112) “Only the repeated touch of the timeless will keep us
truly timely.” (112) “To go forward, the church must always first go back. “In a world obsessed with change and
progress, progressives will always prove stagnant while resistance thinkers
will be fresh and creative.”
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