By Chris Armstrong, reprinted from Humanism as a Way of Life.
I’m on a free-wifi-enable Delta flight, headed from Minneapolis to Boston. 20,000 feet in the sky, my thoughts turn to the widespread and influential, but fraught, “faith and work movement.”
I say the movement is “fraught” because it has been largely lay-led for decades, and thus characteristically thin on the biblical, theological, philosophical, and historical fronts. Fortunately, there are Christian Scholars dedicating themselvces to working in this particular vineyard of the Christian wisdom tradition, seeking a stronger basis for understanding and fostering human flourishing. I think of Richard Mouw, his student Matt Kaemingk, and many others in the Reformed churches; Michael Naughton, Monsignor Martin Schlag, and many faithful Catholics; and dozens of evangelical scholars of free-church bent and inquiring mind working in this conversation.
Over the past 15+ years, I’ve had the blessing of being involved—in various ways and in partnership with American seminaries and Christian colleges, the Christian study center movement, Christian History magazine, Karam Fellowship, and other organizations—in helping in small ways to resource this faith-and-flourishing conversation.
A few years ago I tried my hand at a concise, biblical “mini-story” of the relationship between Christianity and the material and social dimensions of human flourishing that are the usual subject of “faith and work” concerns and conversations. I’m reproducing it below and inviting, dear reader, your comments.
The Christian faith is more like a story than a set of doctrines or rules. It is a narrative in which we discover things about God, ourselves, and our world. This story takes the entire 66 books of Christian Scripture to tell, and in a real sense is still being told throughout the history of the church and the world—but it is always being retold in many shorter ways; for example, in the liturgy of the church. Here is one short “pro-flourishing” telling:
“Once upon a time, God created, both the world and us. And God made us in his image, and God gave us a mandate to turn the raw material of his world, by the exercise of our reason and other gifts, into a partial human flourishing—a flourishing of provision—that becomes a full flourishing only as God is also present with us, and us with him.
“And this we started to do, and have done to some degree ever since—through the creativity, mastery, stewardship, and works of justice and mercy that God gives us, and that he continues to oversee. ‘For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.’ And when we exercise our gifts in service of that mandate, we hear ‘well done, good and faithful servant.’
“But along the way, we also broke relationship with God, and each other, and our world. And he redeemed each of those relationships by entering his own world with us, and dying, and rising. And he gave us a new, reconciling mandate, as citizens of heaven living in a world alienated from him: to love him with all our hearts and to love one another.
“And our love for one another is to be practical: feeding, giving drink, clothing, sheltering, visiting the sick and imprisoned, ‘walking humbly, loving mercy, doing justice.’ And because of the fallenness of ourselves and our world, even as we work well, all our flourishing is still proximate and incomplete. Yet we do experience many foretastes of the full flourishing of God’s provision and presence, which is yet to come in the New Creation.
“And in this in-between time, good works are still good and God-blessed. And now as he was during his life among us on earth, God is still present with us sacramentally in all the materials and contexts of those works. And we not only recognize him but love him back in those works. For when we exercise our love practically by doing work that helps others flourish, we also do that work for our Lord, thus both loving him and loving each other in the very same works.
“And we also find ourselves continuing to do these new works of love within the framework of his original mandate to us: we keep on turning the raw material of his world, by the exercise of our reason and other gifts, into flourishing for each other. And in those same works, under the new mandate and the redemptive work of Christ, we act always as reconcilers – participating, as Christ’s body the Church, in his work of reconciling the world to God, now by the power of the Holy Spirit.
“So ‘whatever we do, we do to the glory of God’—as well as to the flourishing and redemption of our fellow humans.”
Whatever stories we return to and retell about how churches and individual Christians can work well “for the life of the world,” our churches, seminaries, Christian colleges, and marketplace Christians still seek faithful stories to anchor pro-flourishing faith. Any such stories, it seems to me, should do these sorts of things:
· Cross denominational and theological boundaries
· Eschew political partisanship
· Help foster racial healing
· Galvanize the young
· Provide vision for church mission statements and related activities
· Inspire and animate faithful scholars and teachers as well as pastors and ordinary Christians in their respective vocations
What do you think? What would stories look like that could do these things (and other important things related to this subject)? And how would these stories best be told (e.g. in what media, what forums, by what storytellers)? Certainly the above brief telling doesn’t fully answer this question.
A final, personal coda: I hope in my last couple of decades on earth to be able to labor shoulder-to-shoulder with other Christians who are seeking deep (heck, even adequate!) responses to the “sacred-secular divide” that haunts Western Christianity—especially in the public spaces where the church has struggled to truly be, as Alexander Schmemann once said, “for the life of the world.”
Unless we Christians can be a part of what Alan Kreider called “the patient ferment” of simply but profoundly living out our faith in the marketplace and the public square, many precious people will continue look at the church, decide it doesn’t matter to their daily concerns, and check the “none” box on census surveys asking about religious affiliation and commitment.
“The ultimate goal of Christian innovation is to invite our people into a new story – a communal story, a hopeful story. How are people transformed? People do not latch on to a plan or an abstract statement of doctrine. That does not change them. Instead, people are transformed when they participate in a story – a story that sets them on a specific trajectory.”
Scott Cormode, The Innovative Church, p. 13.
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