MetaCatholic

The debate following the Ann Holmes Redding story has prompted a number of posts (see, for example here, here and here) moving the discussion about Christianity and other faiths onto different territory. In a recent post Iyov has further developed his views in relation especially to Messianic Jews.

At the same time Chris Tilling has started discussing universalism,  and David Congdon has posted a listing of the last two years’ discussions on universalism.

There is some room for synergy and interaction between these two questions, and I hope to interact again with this later. For now, I simply set out some of the points that tend to approximate to what I think (and that’s as tentative as it gets).

I’m an “almost universalist”. That is, I hope God will, and believe God can bring all that he has made to a complete perfection, and looking at this renewed creation finally see that it is very good. I am unable to state this dogmatically, at present, because I see theologically, the potential that God has withdrawn his absolute will to create space for our free will.

(I also think we have to take seriously a long biblical tradition of prophetic warning which receives some of its strongest expressions in the gospel sayings of Jesus, even when that stands alongside some very theological passages affirming a perfect consummation. How those two relate is something I am hoping to be helped with in my thinking by some of the posts I noted above.)

So what does that do for any kind of evangelism, never mind the issue of evangelising people of other faiths? I think that it removes any sense of breathless urgency from it. Salvation depends on what God does in Christ, not on what the church does or I do now. Then evangelism is about sharing, in real relationships, through a common life, and in various social, charitable and political activities, a vision of what truth, human potential, and the world’s future might be shaped by what we understand to be God’s loving purposes as refracted through Christ.

When I find myself in conversation with friends of any religion or none, I do not expect my conversation to revolve around any kind of “Do you know Jesus?” question. I do expect that from time to time questions of truth, faith, meaning and ethics may arise amongst the normal talk, laughter, worry, pleasure, sorrow, food, drink, film-watching, walks, jokes, pain and aimless nonsense that form the stuff of many and varied friendships. Then I hope to speak as I see it.

There are more formal dialogues and processes than these “stuff of life” relationships. It seems to me that if we enter into these seeing others as some kind of “evangelism fodder”, not only are they dead before they start, but that we have left behind any of that real engagement with people that seems to figure so highly in Jesus’ relationships.

I think the lessons of history, whether of Christian persecution of Jews, or crusades against Islam, should chasten us in how we speak of what we believe with friends of those faiths, and in any formal dialogues or processes involving Jewish or Muslim participants.

But equally, I think we must say that our vision of life before God, as seen in and experienced through Christ, is a universal vision. I respect Iyov’s view that Jews can see Christ as God’s way of reaching out to Gentiles, and see it as a very positive way of Jewish thought engaging with Jesus. I cannot, I think, accept it as the right view for Christians, for whom Jesus remains the Messiah, an understanding reached by a Jesus-experience-shaped reading of the Jewish Scriptures. Christians are, I think, compelled to hold to the specific locus of the incarnate, crucified and risen man from Nazareth as the universal sources and revelation of salvation, by whatever mysterious means God will work that out.

I do not think that means we target Jews for proselytism. In fact, I don’t think we should target any groups. You can’t have a relationship with targets, except a deadly one. But I do think that all possibilities are open in real dialogue. That may mean a Jewish person (or an atheist, or a Muslim) will end up persuading me that my vision of life through Christ is wrong. I don’t expect it to. It may mean I will persuade them that vision of life in Christ is right, though they won’t expect that to happen either.

But if neither of those changes happen, we will still be about forging real relationships and respectful dialogues that are rooted in common humanity as much as in different visions, and what we share is bound up with who we are. And hopefully, even if neither of us changes our views on such key matters, in knowing each other we will have something better than if we had not forged these relationships. Believing what we do is part of who we are. Sharing those beliefs is part of sharing who we are. Holding back from that says as much about the shallowness of the relationship as forcing them on one another.

The almost-universalism I mentioned seems to me to not only a realistic hope, but one that enables us to actually form real relationships across traditional boundaries of faith or no-faith, that are not burdened with the guilt of “evangelistic” duty, that are not deformed by treating people as targets, but that are full of trust in the friendship of God, and so allow a fuller trust in the friendship of people.

I’d like to thank April DeConick for responding to this post. As a result I want to clarify a couple of issues.

I note that recently she used her blog to correct what she saw as serious misrepresentations by Nick Perrin of what she had written.  Like all authors, she has an investment not only in expressing herself with historical accuracy, but with clarity, and she does not wish to be misrepresented.

It is with misrepresentation, wilful and accidental, that I am fundamentally concerned, and that brings with it not, as she implies, adjusting one’s work to suit the audience, but being very careful with the presentation of one’s work, in order to minimize misuse by audiences. This applies as much to those who work with the canonical gospels as the non-canonicals.

What I am arguing is that the media-led culture we live in is historically gullible, and does not readily distinguish between first, second and third century, or the diverse reconstructions historians make. This media culture is also prone to conspiracy theories, in which something recently discovered is assumed to be more true than something “everyone knows”. Scholars write, then, in a context where the phrase “early Christian views” is heard indiscriminately, and where people have a predisposition to believe the non-official. So I think people will use DeConick’s work (among others) to say things she is not saying. I note, for example, that one of her regular commenters believes that the key to early Christianity was revealed with the help of a UFO, and seems to think (from his comments) that her work can help support such a theory. I would expect this level of misrepresentation to concern any scholar, even if they ultimately have no control over it.

What I am arguing for is that scholars need to write in awareness of the uses to which their work is put, and not least in awareness of the “temptation” that accounts that “unmask the truth” of Christian origins by presenting “an alternative Jesus” will gain better publicity by the way in which they fit easily into the modern media’s “controversy” and “conspiracy” narratives.

in part, I think this is what accounts for the ways in which some more conservative scholars have negatively engaged April DeConick’s work, and that of others who write on the non-canonical scriptures, and creates the impression of unease. Their own views – “NT account of Jesus largely reliable” are not news, and get no attention outside the church, if anywhere. They perceive media power to lie with those advancing alternative constructions, and so they ratchet up the rhetoric as a result of their perceived powerlessness to attract media attention.