Glenn+

A couple of years back, Cathy and I were visiting family in the Bay Area and as we drove from SF Airport north into the city of San Francisco, I noticed a big banner in front of a United Methodist church, “Doctrine divides – Love unites”.  I thought, “how messed up is that?!”  New agey/PC liberal simple think at work.   This kind of forced dichotomy is most prevelant and most ridiculous.  Let’s think about this.  Love requires the proper show of affection - we call that boundary setting.  The proper show of affection requires diligence and discrimination – the right spirit coupled with the right understanding. The setting and observance of boudaries is the most simple and principled way of showing love. Out of love, you don’t let little Jr. out on the street – even though he wants to – because he become tire-fodder.  In truth, proper love unites precisely because it divides. Love asks the discriminating question, “What is best for the beloved?”. Out with the bad, in with the good; out with the false, in with the true.  In St. Paul’s sublime observations in 1 Cor. 13, as an adult putting away childish thoughts (the new agey simple-think for example), we know that LOVE REJOICES IN THE TRUTH.  Keller makes this point most elegantly on the same page Randy pointed to with his question about absolute truth, secular or Christian.  Keller writes mid-page 39, “Every human community holds in common some beliefs that necessarily create boundaries, including some people and excluding others from its circle” (italics mine).   

Starting on page 40, Keller rightly points out the Christianity isn’t culturally rigid at all.  The religion of the Jewish people is adapted by the wider mediterranean gentile community on the heels of Jesus’ messianic career.  The faith has been appropriated by many different cultures over 2 millenia.  I agree with Keller’s main point, however, I take a slightly different point of emphasis in terms of Christianity’s cultural expression, especially in the church’s life of worship.  It’s not so much that the Christian faith can find various forms of expression among cultures, but more like, various cultures that have embraced Christianity willingly take upon themselves the history and cultus of the Jewish people.  Their history becomes our history.  As St. Paul observes, we are grafted on to the rootstock of the Jewish faith, brought to its completion in Christ Jesus.  This has very important practical cultural implications.  Take worship for instance.  Not just “anything goes”.  Our ancient Christian faith inherited the whole “word” portion of our worship service from our Jewish forbears and their synagogue worship.  We then added the “Eucharist” part to our worship service, stemming from Jesus’ own approprition of the Passover meal, as now the Paschal meal.  All thoroughly Jewish.  All thoroughly Christian.  As Ralph Martin writes in his excellent book Worship in the Early Church, “Christianity entered into the inheritance of an already existing pattern of worship, provided by the Temple ritual and synagogue liturgy… The backround of early Christian worship must be sought in these two institutions.”  Martin concludes, “The typical worship of the Church is to be found to this day in the union of the worship of the synagogue and the sacramental experience of the Upper Room; and that union dates from the New Testament time.”  This means that our worship as 21st century North Americans is informed by this deep Judeo-Christian-ancient Mediterranean way of worshipping.  This should exert a continuing normative influence.  I fall out of league with post-modernist Christian worshippers who well-meaningly but naively assert that the “form” of worship is unimportant.  (I don’t think that this is what Keller is asserting, but I feel he needs to be a little more careful on page 45)  Right worship entails us being formed and informed by the ancient (and always current!) form of tthe deep tradition of liturgy, word and sacrament.  Any careful read of the real history of Christian worship would illustrate that we as modern Christians willingly take on this Judeo Christian nexus in terms of our life of worship.   Such are my thoughts… sorry about the length of the rant!!

Glenn+