Christian Faith for the 21st Century

Copyright by Charles Don Keyes, 1996

Revised October 13, 2000

Charles Don Keyes, Ph.D., Th. D.
Formerly, Honorary Associate and Theological Consultant, Church of the Transfiguration, New York, NY
Formerly, Assistant Professor, The General Theological Seminary, New York, NY

The author worte the Prologue and began the Work in Progress to which it is linked to commemorate the 150th anniversary of The Church of the Transfiguration.

Prologue

The Third Millennium will dawn along with the turn of the 21st century. Such an upheaval in the way we mark time challenges us to step back and recognize our limits. Think of the immensity of all time. Measure all of your years on earth by the length of everything that has happened on it. And measure how absurdly short its troubled history is in comparison with the abysm of all the time that was before it came into existence and will be after it ceases to exist. Our earth is a small planet hidden in the depths of cosmic space so vast that a beam of light would take 18 billion years to cross it and even longer if the cosmos is expanding. Constantly facing astronomical facts like these and refusing to deny them is the cosmic shock.

Faith is not the absence of doubt. On the contrary, there can be no faith without doubt. Faith must hold fast to real doubt by calling the meaning of everything into question and still affirming life, partly in spite of massive uncertainty and partly on account of it. Christians ought to accept the cosmic shock as a challenge to recast the way they think, the kind of feelings they permit themselves to have, not to mention how they act, according to it. Faith might even recover some of its primal innocence by witnessing in the court of inexorable light years to what it already is. The faith once delivered in its fullness actually invites this, and doing so would make it more transparent to believers and perhaps others. Christians might even rediscover what their faith really is. Faith does not conflict with science, as the many claim. On the contrary, scientific evidence of the sublime magnitude of physical space and time will reawaken the sense of the holy in all but the most insensitive.

Christian faith is a holy narrative with a beginning, middle, and end bound into a meaningful whole. Regardless of whether someone stakes belief in it or not, no sensitive person could doubt the sublime magnitude of its plot: God is He Who Is, the Holy Trinity. He creates all that exists in the vast regions of cosmic space by speaking the Word: "And God said, let there be light and there was light" (Genesis 1:6). God loved our fragile planet so much in spite of its fallen condition that He gave Jesus His only begotten Son for our salvation. The Word God speaks to create the cosmos came to the earth at His Incarnation in Bethlehem: "And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). At His Second Coming Christ will "judge the living and the dead," destroy death, and reign in a new order that brings the existing narrative to a meaningful end because the plot that ties it to the beginning and the middle is one simple theme: "My heart ever faithful, sing praises, be joyful, thy Jesus is near."

If intelligent life exists on other planets, might God have sent His Son to redeem those as well? We do not know the answer to this interesting question, but that He came to this one is what matters here, because Christ's Incarnation bestows worth upon earthly flesh in spite of its fragility and insignificance in relation to cosmic space and time. The Incarnation leaves no room for theories that matter is unreal or evil. On the contrary, it means that "flesh is essentially good, matter is real and important, and biological existence is a part of our self-identity" (Keyes, 1996).

Christ elevates our human nature by becoming flesh. "True Christian humanism," as William Franklin, a prominent church historian, and others call it, "is the full flowering of the theology of the Incarnation,' wrote Thomas Merton. By sending the Son into the world in Jesus of Nazareth, God honored the human race by choosing to dwell in its midst. The incarnate one is also the crucified one. The mystery of the Incarnation indeed flowers to produce the tree of the cross. 'It is said of him who dies on the cross, deserted by God and by men, Ecce Homo! Behold the man!'" (Franklin & Shaw 1991).

Will the human species still exist in any viable way in 2099? Will it plan for the future to safeguard life on earth? The answer might depend upon which symbols human beings find worthy of belief during the years immediately ahead. Humanists, Christian and otherwise, have to challenge "earth provincialism" with one voice. We might respect our earth more if we start seeing it from a cosmic perspective and learn to cherish it accordingly. Everybody who believes in the dignity of life on earth and hopes the human species will continue to exist ought to challenge worldly cynicism. This might be the last chance we have to counteract the vacuous hopelessness that would devastate us.

Homer's Sirens tried to lure Ulysses and his rowers to shipwreck by their enticing song. Our worldly cynics, however, would lure us by the rhythms of disharmony. These entice with antitaste: "Crudity, be thou my god!" Their taste is for dismemberment of all kinds; fervent in apathy, infinite of ego, and absolute in relativism they say, "Who's to say?" Worldly cynicism cannibalizes rhythms of ongoing experience by devouring the harmony of future and past. This insensitivity towards what is fine has nowhere left to put the present. Residual pockets of humanism still exist. Everyone that values life on earth, whether atheist or theist, has to protest supremely against the violent insensitivity of our time.

The sublime magnitude of Christian faith relativizes the disharmony of worldly cynicism. Christ's Incarnation bestows hope because it contains the end, not just the beginning, of cosmic time and goes beyond the cosmic perspective while also being in it. Our time has a purpose because His Second Coming stands at the end of all time. When He comes again to judge the living and the dead He will complete the rhythm and harmony of the narrative of faith. God establishes meaning backwards. What He is going to do through His Son marks a future that creates an horizon within which it makes sense for us to project future purposes for the benefit of humankind.

Julian Victor Langmead Casserley, one of the present century's most important Anglican theologians, predicts that "by the year 2050 the world in which we have grown up and with which we are familiar, our type of civilization, culture and society, will have been entirely swept away." His statement (dated c. 1968) continues: "But perhaps the most familiar landmark that will still be surviving in undiminished vigor will be the Christian Church. It has sometimes been observed that in a world of total change nothing whatever has come to stay but the gospel. But the Church and the gospel will survive, if they do survive, not because they have refused to change but because they will have been humble enough to accept inevitable change and wise enough to confine themselves to the modes of change that conduce to survival" (Casserley 1990).

Christian faith for the 21st century must recast itself according to the cosmic perspective to do what Dr. Casserley admonishes, as well as to benefit humankind. The Church has to become much more radical than it presently is, but not in the way the many imagine. It must be radical in pulling conventional stereotypes, pious banalities, and pseudo doubts up by the roots. Christians need to become radical enough to recollect and keep all of the foundational symbols of the biblical revelation without subtraction. The Church must help safeguard, not undermine, "the momentum and identity of the specifically Western culture, including humane, naturalistic, scientific, aesthetic and theological elements of the profoundest significance" (Casserley 1967).

The Christian Church as such has a responsibility to witness to the new millennium. The various traditions that it contains will have particular ways of doing this. Each should focus on how its peculiar excellences can contribute to the survival and well-being of the human species. The Anglican Communion, for instance, must safeguard its ethos of cultural traditionalism and social tolerance. People in our unhappy time need this as much as they misunderstand it. Sometimes they even ridicule it. Anglicans must nevertheless renew their vigor steadfastly to witness to the unity of conservative theology and true liberality that conduces to hope.

Anglican theology for the 21st century will have to rediscover the rhythms and harmonies that produce this vital unity. Grass roots believers immediately grasp what those are when they want to say, but cannot quite articulate, that liturgy ought to be an aesthetic spectacle. They apprehend that liturgy is the authority for interpreting the Bible and bringing the gospel into daily life. Yet this authority is not authoritarian because it resides, not in external edict, but in the music of the spectacle. This is equally true whether the liturgy is said, sung, simple, or elaborate. The Book of Common Prayer unites Anglicans in their diversity through a certain way it and the ethos it produces orchestrate the symbols of faith. "Recognizing the aesthetics of Christian symbols in this way," as I write elsewhere, "recollects the foundational 'nonauthoritarian authority' of Christian doctrines, because it locates them in their liturgical setting. Liturgy is properly an aesthetically sublime spectacle that reenacts the events in which faith stakes belief" (Keyes 1996). Casserley suggests something like this when he writes that "it is the function of the liturgy to repeat and perpetuate the patterns of the divine redemption which we proclaim in the gospel and expound in our theology. In this sense the liturgy is the most authoritative element in Christian practice and provides us with the touchstone of authority" (Casserley 1960).

Work In Progress

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Acknowledgments and References

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