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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