It seems to be a characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon mind to enjoy inhabiting the “polar regions” of truth. If we could straddle both poles simultaneously, we would exhibit a healthy balance. Instead, we tend to “polarize”. We push some of our brothers to one pole, while keeping the other as our own preserve.
What I am thinking of now is not so much questions of theology as questions of temperament, and in particular the tension between the “conservative” and the “radical”.
By “conservative” we are referring to people who want to conserve or preserve the past, and who therefore are resistant to change.
By “radical” we are referring to people who are in rebellion against what is inherited from the past and who are therefore agitating for change.
In 1968 I attended as an “adviser” the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches at
Let me now define my terms more precisely.
Every Christian should be “conservative”, because the Church is called by God to conserve his revelation, to “guard the deposit” (cf. 1 Tim. 6:20; 2 Tim. 1:14), to “contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). The Church’s task is not to keep inventing new gospels, new theologies, new moralities and new Christianities, but rather to be a faithful guardian of the one and only eternal gospel. The authors of the book Growing into
The Church’s first task is to keep the good news intact. It is better to speak of the habit of mind which this calling requires as “conservationist” rather than “conservative”, for the latter word can easily suggest an antiquarian addiction to what is old for its own sake and a blanket resistance to new thinking and this is not what we are talking about at all. Antiquarianism and obscurantism are vices of the Christian mind, but conservationism is among its virtues.
Some evangelicals, however, do not limit their conservatism to their biblical theology. For the truth is that they are conservative by temperament. They are therefore conservative in their politics and their social outlook, in their lifestyle, dress-style, hairstyle, beardstyle and every kind of style you care to mention! They are not just stuck in the mud, but the mud has set like concrete. Change of every kind is anathema to them. Their very blood is blue. They are like the English Duke who during his student days at
A “radical”, on the other hand, is someone who asks awkward questions of the Establishment. He regards no tradition, no convention and no institution (however ancient) as being sacrosanct. He reverences no sacred cows. On the contrary, he is prepared to subject everything inherited from the past to critical scrutiny. He wants thoroughgoing reform, even revolution (though not, if he is a Christian, by violence).
Now it is not sufficiently understood that our Lord Jesus Christ was at one and the same time both a conservative and a radical.
There is no question that Jesus was conservative in his attitude to Scripture. “The Scripture cannot be broken”, he said. “I did not come to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfil them”. And again “not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished” (John 10:35; Mt. 5:17, 18). One of Jesus’ chief complaints of contemporary Jewish leaders concerned their disrespect for and lack of submission to the Old Testament Scriptures.
But Jesus was also a radical. He was a keen critic of the Jewish Establishment, not only because of their insufficient loyalty to God’s Word but also because of their exaggerated loyalty to their own traditions. Jesus had the courage to sweep away centuries of inherited tradition (“the traditions of the elders”), in order that God’s own word might again be seen and obeyed. He insisted on caring for those whom society despised. He spoke to women in public (which was not done) and invited children to come to him (when his own disciples took it for granted that he would not want to be bothered with them). He allowed prostitutes to touch him (Pharisees would shrink from them) and himself actually touched an untouchable leper (Pharisees threw stones at them to make them keep their distance).
Thus Jesus was a unique combination of the conservative and the radical, conservative towards Scripture and radical in his scrutiny (his biblical scrutiny) of everything else.
There is an urgent need for Christians to follow Christ in this balance which he displayed, for more “Radical Conservatives” to emerge, and for evangelicals to develop a better and more critical discernment between what may not be changed and what may and even must.
Let me give an example of what may not be changed. It was customary in many English churches in former days for the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Apostles’ Creed to be painted on the east wall for everybody to see and read. In one village church the lettering had faded and a local decorator was engaged to touch up the paint where necessary. In due course the vestry received the following account (it was before the decimalization of our English currency):
To repairing the Lord’s Prayer: 10s
To 3 new commandments: 12s
To making a completely new Creed: 17s 6d
On the other hand, although we have no authority to alter either the creed or the commandments which God has revealed, yet (as Leighton Ford rightly said at the 1969 American Congress on Evangelism in Minneapolis) “God is not tied to seventeenth century English, nor to eighteenth century hymns, nor the nineteenth century architecture, nor the twentieth century clichés”, nor (one might add) to much else besides. Although he himself never changes he is also a God on the move, ever calling his people out to fresh and adventurous enterprise.
More particularly, we all need to discern more clearly between Scripture and culture. For Scripture is the eternal, unchanging Word of God. But culture is an amalgam of ecclesiastical tradition and social convention. Whatever “authority” culture may have is derived only from church and community. It cannot claim an immunity to criticism or reform. On the contrary, “culture” changes from age to age and from place to place. Moreover Christians, who say they desire to live under the authority of God’s Word, should subject their own contemporary culture to continuing biblical scrutiny. Far from resenting or resisting cultural change, we should be in the forefront of those who propose and work for it provided of course that our critique of culture is made from a sound biblical perspective.
I thank God for the Post-American and for its witness to this truth. I have often quoted to others some words of Jim Wallis’s editorial in the first issue of The Post-American (February 1971): “The offence of established religion is the proclamation and practice of a caricature of Christianity so enculturated, domesticated and lifeless that our generation easily and naturally rejects it…We find that the American church is in captivity to the values and life-style of our cultures…The American captivity of the church has resulted in the disastrous equation of the American way of life with the Christian way of life…” The same could be said of the English and European churches as well.
When we resist change—whether in church or society—we need to ask whether in reality it is not Scripture we are defending (as it is our custom stoutly to maintain), but some cherished tradition of the evangelical elders or of our cultural heritage. This is not to say that all traditions, simply because they are traditional, must at all costs be swept away. Uncritical iconoclasm is as stupid as uncritical conservatism, and sometimes is more dangerous. What I am insisting is that no tradition may be invested with a kind of diplomatic immunity to investigation. No special privilege may be claimed for it. If and when subpoenaed, it must show up and answer whatever charges are leveled against it.
When, on the other hand, we agitate for change, we need to be clear that it is not Scripture against which we are rebelling, but some unbiblical tradition which is therefore open to reform. If it is “unbiblical” in the sense of being contrary to Scripture then we should tackle it courageously and work hard for its abolition. If it is “unbiblical” in the sense of being not required by Scripture, then we must at least keep it under critical review.
More often than most of us know or care to admit, we invest our cultural ideas and practices with an authority, truth and timelessness which belong to scripture alone. They are part of our security. When they are threatened, we feel threatened. So we play safe and vigourously defend them.
At other times we sit far too loosely to Scripture and treat God’s Word as if we could set it aside as easily as we can the opinions and traditions of men. Then we prove ourselves worldly Christians who have so thoroughly absorbed the secular world’s anti-authority mood that we are not prepared even to live under the authority of God and of his Word by which he rules his people.
Evangelical Christians are called to walk this tight-rope. We are neither to resist all change nor to agitate for total change. Further, even in matters which are open to change, because Scripture gives us this liberty, we are not to be mindless iconoclasts. What we are called to is a wise discernment, informed by biblical presupposition so that we apply to all culture (in church and in society) a radical biblical criticism, and then seek to change what under God we believe could be changed for the better.
Our Anglican reformers understood this principle well in sixteenth century
Perhaps I could express my thought in biological terms by saying that we need both evangelical gadflies to sting and harry us into action for change, and also evangelical watchdogs who will bark loud and long if we show any sign of compromising biblical truth. Now neither gadflies nor watchdogs are easy companions to live with. Nor do they find each other’s company congenial. Yet the gadflies must not sting the watchdogs; nor must the watchdogs eat up the gadflies. They must learn to coexist in God’s Church and to fulfil their role by concentrating their attention on us, the hoi polloi of Christ’s people, who badly need the ministry of both.
Finally, having warned of the dangers of too much change and of too little, I am bound to conclude that the greater evangelical danger is to mistake culture for Scripture, to be too conservative and traditionalist, to be blind to those things in church and society which displease God and should therefore displease us, to dig our heels and our toes deep into the status quo, and firmly to resist that most uncomfortable of all experiences: CHANGE.
John R. W. Stott was a noted biblical expositor and was the Rector of All Souls Church in London,
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