BLOG 10/8/14. OUR INDEBTEDNESS TO THE PASSING ‘CHRISTENDOM’ ERA
I promised at the conclusion of my last blog to remind you, that in the midst of my critiques,… of our indebtedness to the Christendom era which existed from about the 4th-5th centuries until fairly recently. As we move into the post-Christian era with its built-in aversion to so much of the Christian faith, and the ‘anti-bodies’ it has built up to resist it, … those of us who are looking for those effective and creative paradigms of how we live out the communal dimensions of God’s New Creation in such unknown territory … must never forget that we do, actually stand on the shoulders of centuries of other believers in Christ from many traditions, who like us have sought to be faithful (“aliens and exiles”) in the cultural setting into which they were born into.
The emerging generational culture, which is being so formed by the social media/Face Book culture, seems not to have much of a proclivity for history, or where we came from. Yet even Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the wizards of Silicon Valley know they are debtors to the legacy of Ohm, Faraday, Franklin, Edison and so many others. We do take so much for granted.
In 1975 I found myself a participant, with a small group of evangelical Protestants, as the invited guests of members of the Vatican staff, and the Roman Catholic Curia in Rome. It was an unusual meeting because neither we, nor our Vatican hosts had ever had any significant conversations with each other. We were there under very unique circumstances to discuss the topics of evangelism, and also the ministry of the laity in the workplace, in the aftermath of Vatican II. Here I was, a card-carrying Reformed Protestant with all of my anti-Catholic baggage being the recipient of their hospitality. In addition to our mostly fruitful discussions over those two weeks, there had also been planned for us some side trips. Being with our hosts in the Catacombs of Priscilla and concelebrating with them the Eucharist in one of those underground chapels where our early Christian forebears had worshiped and done remarkable frescoes on the walls and ceilings reminded me that I was heir of the faithfulness of those who had endured horrible dangers and persecutions in order to assure that there would be the witness of God’s love for us in Christ communicated to the generations which followed. We were taken to Subiaco, and to the cave where St. Benedict had his vision of Christ and so launched a preaching order within the church. We also were taken to Assisi, the birthplace of St. Francis. Francis is still a figure who fascinates us (I sit next to a small statue of him in my garden-patio).
And being a missiologist by design, I am always aware of those many giants in the church’s attempts to be faithful to the mission of God in heralding his ‘gospel of the kingdom’ to every ethnic group in the world. There were Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier in the middle ages. Then there are my Roman Catholic heroes in Latin America: Bartolomé de las Casas, and more recently of the martyr Archbishop Caesar Romero. These were all Roman Catholic. But the list is infinite. We will never know, this side of glory, all of those stories. We can be armchair critics of how the missionaries went to India and China with the colonializing British Empire—but they went, and they sowed the seeds of the gospel. Through the fire of the Communist revolution and it ‘cultural revolution’ the church they initiated in China went underground and is now, arguably, largest Christian church in the world.
I am not all that familiar with the Eastern/Russian Orthodox traditions, but I know that over the centuries it was a witness to Jesus in its culture. During the whole Soviet era, when the church was outlawed, the Orthodox Church and the despised Baptist churches were the ‘gospel incarnate’ in the Soviet Union, so that when the Soviet empire fell, it was the Orthodox priests leading the parades with their vestments and crosses celebrating that deliverance. Even more, it turns out that the true evangelists in that era were the Christian grandmothers, who passed along the gospel to children and grandchildren. It is all the story of the shoulders upon which I, and we, stand. We are debtors. But that’s just the beginning. There is more to come. Stand by …
