JAC Online

At The Crossroads
by Major Wayne Ennis

We believe that there is only one God, who is infinitely perfect, the Creator, Preserver, and Governor of all things, and who is the only proper object of religious worship. - Doctrine 2

 

We believe that there are three persons in the Godhead - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, undivided in essence and co-equal in power and glory.
- Doctrine 3

 

C. S. Lewis famously penned the phrase ‘God in the Dock’ and proposed that there was a ‘great divide’ between ancient and modern humans, in that our ancestors would have rightly seen themselves ‘in the dock’ before God, while we moderns have placed God there before us.  Not only has God been put in the dock but also the Bible and the gospel and their way of Christian life and faith as well. They are now seen by many as though they too are not good--even for the church. As a consequence, in far too many ways this has ruined our relationships with God, with our own selves, with one another, and even with the natural world itself.

 

Just as the 2nd century saw the church standing at the crossroads facing issues that would go on to shape the future church and its survival. Now, in the 21st century we too are at a cross road facing issues that are seeking to shape the beliefs, values and lives of each of us who claim to belong to The Salvation Army. How we respond will ultimately determine our survival.

 

What time is it? It is a dangerous time, a time of cultural captivity of The Salvation Army particularly in Western Territories. What time is it? It’s a time of near capitulation to Babylon’s imagination, symbols, practices, and worldview that is blatantly pagan and deals only in death.

 

It’s time we put an end to and free ourselves from what has become a fatal surrendering to an idolatrous cultural experiment. In order to do this will require an embracing, a reimagining of the God of our doctrinal statement, and the liberating narrative of his Gospel, his Word, and living free in his Kingdom in dangerous times.

 

This will take courage as we relearn what it means to live before the God we say we believe in the two doctrines mentioned, and to live according to his Word as claimed in doctrine one. Unless we understand this and recognise the ways in which the world is insinuating its corrupting tentacles into the very heart and soul of The Army and think we don’t have to do something about it, then we are living in a fool’s paradise.

 

If there is to be any hope of living faithfully in this post-Truth culture there will be the need to be filled, renewed, transformed, enlightened, and filled with God the Holy Spirit. And such renewal and transformation and leading cannot occur apart from a profound grasp of and being grasped by the biblical worldview.

 

This is what we would rightly call a spiritually renewed imagination that is enlightened by the Word of God. The light of the Word of God is none other than the one said ‘I am the light of the world’.

 

Rome was a military, economic, and very religious empire and like Ancient Israel in exile in Babylon, was a dangerous and hostile environment for the early church, both physically and spiritually. The 2nd and on into the 3rd centuries put the early church at the crossroads as to whether it would surrender and assimilate as the culture demanded.

 

It was during this period that the church needed to develop and settle the core beliefs that were to be held by orthodox Christianity in the face of Rome’s pressure to assimilate or die on the one hand and the ongoing campaigns by those within the church who were willing to assimilate and those who wanted an alternative gospel, Jesus, orthodoxy, and means of salvation.

 

Out of the turmoils of the period came a core set of beliefs that unified the church and enabled it to continue to grow and flourish even in the midst of punishing persecution. Their and now our core beliefs are:

Creation: Who created the world, was it created good, and how many gods were there.

 

Scripture: What is the nature of the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments and are they authoritative for Christians everywhere and always.

 

Salvation: What are we being saved from, our own sins or the trappings of the physical world? Is faith in Jesus enough to be saved, or do we need to keep the Mosaic law?

 

The Trinity: Is Jesus divine and part of the Godhead? Is the Spirit?

 

Jesus Christ: Was Jesus merely human, was he so divine that he was not human, or was he a mixture of both?

 

The Rule of Faith: Provided the necessary theological boundaries and the proper narrative framework within which the church’s theological development could take place. The Apostles Creed is the earliest example of such a Rule of Faith and as Irenaeus noted, ‘Christians must always ground their theological commitments in the fixed, unchanging tradition of the Apostles, as summarised in the rule of faith’. This all means that these beliefs have an ancient pedigree that needs to be seen and understood.

 

Where do we find ourselves today? We are living in a hostile culture that sees our core beliefs as dangerously oppressive and are only too willing to attack those of us who are not willing to change them or give them up. Sadly, as in the early church, there are those who have been willing to assimilate and seek to operate from a very different canon, and to make life difficult for those who are not willing to fall into line.

 

It seems to me that what is going on is nothing less than the abandonment by many of a biblical worldview and an enculturation of The Salvation Army in Australia that is the makings of a spiritual catastrophe. What is at stake here is our fundamental allegiance - whether to Jesus or to different gods.

 

If our presence in a culture that is fundamentally at odds with the Kingdom of God is to be biblically faithful, we must recognise, with the help of biblically informed insights, just how at odds our cultural milieu is. This means we cannot allow the culture's worldview to define reality for us, nor what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, nor what it means to be obedient to Him.

 

C. S Lewis warned ‘No generation can bequeath to its successors what it has not got.' (C.S. Lewis). What it has not got. The question as to why it has not got it is, obviously, too complex for me to answer. Nevertheless, having spent a number of years in classrooms with prospective Officers and watched what is now happening I can see that much of the ignorance today is rightly attributed by Lewis to 'the liberal writers who are continually accommodating and whittling down the truth of the Gospel. We are to defend Christianity itself - the faith preached by the Apostles, attested by the Martyrs, embodied in the Creeds, expounded by the Fathers. In other words, we are not free to consider ourselves free to alter the faith whenever the faith looks perplexing or repellent to either ourselves or the culture around us.

 

 

 

  

 

 

   

 

 

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