“Something huge and beautiful and awe-inspiring.” That is what one recent convert to Christianity was looking for. The Times called it a ‘full-fat’ faith. Not a faith which comes neatly packaged in five slogans.
This is not nostalgia, this is hunger.
Some doubt the motivation of recent converts, assuming that they are actually more interested in cultural traditionalism than in certain theological truths of Christianity.
But these people search for something big and fat because they know that the world is, in fact, complicated and life is challenging. Some of it is because the world is such a frightfully awesome place. Some of it is surely also because we have the propensity to mess things up.
We need a faith big enough to carry this all with patience and grace.
What does this mean? Recently, someone asked me about this, and this was my answer:
New Fundamentals? Five Provocations Instead
1 ‘Fundamentals‘ as reductionistic constructs of the modern era, are flawed answers to problems that we don’t have anymore. Thinking in terms of ‘Fundamentals‘ reveals a world in which reality can be grasped in the form of a few, five, unambiguous statements. As the history of 20th-century American Evangelicalism showed, it sets us up for thinking in the terms of a lowest common denominator theology. Why? Because we are trying to deal with a reality which is difficult, complex, and challenging. The first fundamental is a metaphysics of complexity.
2 The second fundamental is the holy Trinity. Christianity, as a religion of revelation, has always had to deal with one perplexing reality: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is also the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This has two important consequences: a clear dogmatic line of demarcation in Nicene orthodoxy, and the foregrounding of relations as one of the fundamental building blocks of reality.
3 Our God is not only a God far away, but also near to us. In fact, He came as close as possible in the Incarnation, the third fundamental. The Incarnation made the redemption possible, and it declared that this creation itself can be the bearer of the divine. It can be taken up in the sacramental.
4 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh. This Word was the original Metaphor through which the rest of the story makes sense. Using our restored imagination, we learn to see God again: no longer in our own image, but as the blazing reality within which we see the rest of creation.
5 Theological thinking is sense-making and not accounting. Theology has a hermeneutical character; it is a process of interpretation in which we make sense of what is given to us. This twofold movement teaches us to be humble and open to correction. We are not there yet…
So what? What do you think?