Renewal

by Neil Richardson.

Tom Stuckey has rightly asked: ‘Does Methodism have a future?’, urging that we recover both our capacity to think theologically, and – inseparable from that – a renewed experience of the Bible’s power and life-giving authority. I agree, and suggest three vital scriptural components.

We need to recover the depth and realism of the Psalms. We haven’t used them enough in our devotions or our public worship. Their majestic backcloth, the omnipotent providence of God, can nourish our faith and renew our hope in a time of ecological and political crises. For example,

‘Your word is everlasting, Lord;
It is firmly fixed in heaven.
Your faithfulness endures for all generations.
And the earth you have established stands firm.’ (Psalm 119.89-91)

The Psalmist goes on: ‘for all things serve you’. Great Christian historians and scientists have written powerfully of the God who is the supreme opportunist, working in and through all things.

Another psalm is equally powerful:

‘Hearer of prayer, to you everyone should come.
Evil deeds are too heavy for me;
Only you can wipe out our offences.’ (Psalm 65.2-3)

This psalm, like many, anticipates Jesus, ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’ (John 1.29), and the Father so ready to hear our prayers (e.g. Luke 11.5ff).

There is a further reason why we need the Psalms: they are uncompromisingly realistic about the state of the world, including its atheism, injustice and the oppression of the poor. Selections from the Psalms in some modern hymnbooks mistakenly omit these themes; the Church today would be more alert and better equipped to face contemporary atheisms and injustice if we had not neglected the Old Testament and especially the Psalms.

Something similar might be said about the letters of St Paul. We neglect him to our great impoverishment. We have spent too much time arguing about theories of the atonement, whereas Paul majors on what has been called ‘the living significance of the death of Jesus’; ‘the cross reveals its meaning as it takes shape in the experience of believers.’ [1]

We need the full range of Paul’s letters. (We tend to ‘cherry-pick’). That range includes Paul’s vulnerable humanity, and – I now incline to think – his universalist perspective, not to be confused with the dogma of ‘universalism’, which is likely to encourage ‘remaining in sin that grace may abound’ (Romans 6.1). What Paul says about ‘wrath’ should be warning enough – the dire consequences of our practical atheism and idolatries (Romans 1.18-32). Divine wrath – an important theme in Old and New Testament alike -is best understood as an all-enveloping Darkness, (a capital ‘D’ might help to make the connection and contrast with the Aaronic blessing of Numbers 6.24-6).

We need far more, too, from Paul’s three longest letters. It is so valuable that we have 1 and 2 Corinthians: what kind of a church was this!? Squabbles, divisions, appalling lapses by individual members, a tumultuous relationship with their founding apostle… the list of Corinthian problems could go on. They dragged their feet over Paul’s collection; there were tensions and differences over how they should relate to the secular world… And all this in our canon (measuring-rod) of Scripture!

And so, all too briefly, to my third choice from Scripture: the Gospel of John, sadly mangled by the Revised Common Lectionary. I single out for mention John’s deep affinity with Paul: our relationship with the living God, Father Son and Holy Spirit, especially focused in John 14-17. ‘Abiding in Christ’ and in His love is so central to our Christian faith and experience; but do we give it the attention it deserves?

There is another theme in John overlooked, or even denied, in the heyday of redaction criticism, when, rightly, we were encouraged to ‘listen for the different voices of Scripture’ (Principal Sam Chadwick of Cliff College). But we can mishear a distinctive voice of Scripture. John and his community were not, as many of us used to think, entirely sectarian in their outlook. That may be a strand, but it’s not the overall picture. John’s language often has two layers of meaning, and so, I think, here is often two-dimensional, and so it is with two key references to ‘His own’ i.e. God’s and Christ’s ‘in the world’, (John 1.11 and 13.1). Alongside these verses we must place two others: ‘God so loved the world’ (3.16) and 12.32, when Jesus is ‘lifted up’ (again, two-dimensional in its meaning), He ‘will draw all people to Himself’.

The future of Methodism in Britain has never seemed more uncertain. Something similar might be said about the future of the planet. But three hallmarks of a faithful Church in dark times are these: a hopeful, joyful searching of the Scriptures; a perseverance (a key NT word) in prayer; and, first and last, a love rooted in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The power, scope and deep humanness of that love flow from the very heart of God. This is why Christianity, first and last, is a faith of thankfulness, joy and love, its bedrock the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. God is love, and the ‘legacy’ of Jesus is this: ‘Love one another as I have loved you’, where ‘one another’ embraces the entire human race and the planet entrusted to us. The cross of Jesus is the magnet and the seal.

Theology Everywhere is in a transitional period at present, so we are posting articles occasionally rather than weekly. See the moderator’s message at the end of this article for more information – The church may close, but Christ is Risen!

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[1] Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, (Eerdmans, 2015), p9.