Re-inventing the Church
POST-CHRISTENDOM
Church & Mission in a strange new world
By Stuart Murray
Paternoster. 343 pages. £9.99
ISBN 1 84227 261 6
The book sets out to show how both Christianity and the state were altered by their alignment with each other.
The first half deals with the history and effects of Christendom and the second with how we should 'do church' in post-Christendom.
History and effects of Christendom
The book starts in the third century, looking critically at Constantine and Augustine. It covers the Dark Ages, the collapse of the Roman Empire and development of the Catholic Church. It is brief and dismissive on the Reformation, glossing over the Reformers' rediscovery of salvation by grace not works, and only criticising their failure to remove Christendom.
Murray argues that we have a legacy of Christendom in two areas:
1. The political/legal vestiges remain in the State church, school assemblies, blasphemy laws, political appointment of senior churchmen.
2. The Christendom mindset focuses on maintenance rather than mission, over the importance of clergy and greater concern for social order than social justice. It is inattentive to criticisms of its historical associations with patriarchy, warfare and injustice.
'Doing-church' in Post-Christendom
* (see footnote)
Murray looks at three key areas:
Mission - He urges that mission must now rely on 'bottom-up', relational and persuasive methods. We can no longer be meeting-centred, asking or forcing the world to come in. The gospel needs to speak of 'liberation rather than personal fulfilment, reconciliation rather than justification, ... explaining the work of Christ in other ways than penal substitution, announcing good news to the poor and powerless, but judgement to the rich and powerful' (p.232).
Church - He sees the church as people in committed voluntary relationships where all members have roles to play. The 'dominance of preaching' (p.265) must cease and 'poets and story-tellers' must be allowed to 'unleash a community of power and action' (p.278). Worship needs use a blend of 'icons, candles, labyrinths, rituals, gestures, incense, chants and ancient prayers with contemporary technology and iconography, recontextualising them' (p.258). Murray, bizarrely, would like church to be a 'monastic missionary order' (p.279).
Resources - 'Due to our economic and political position of dominance in the world, we need the insights of poor, persecuted and powerless brothers and sisters to help us out of Christendom' (p.297).
Murray recommends an open mind to more liberal interpretations of the Bible.
Points to ponder
1. Murray has an inadequate and unfair view of the Reformation. While slating the Reformers for their failure fully to reform Christendom, he has little or no acknowledgement of the major steps that they did take.
2. Murray completely omits four centuries of nonconformist and other history (1600-2000). No mention is made of the Puritans, Baptists, Methodists or other nonconformist movements and their impact on our culture.
3. Murray does not discuss the gospel in biblical or theological terms, but just snipes at orthodox theology and fails to take the Bible seriously. Penal substitution is dismissed as 'the myth of redemptive violence' (p.242), the 'Openness of God' theology is suggested and the focus on the victim/powerless brings it extremely close to Liberation Theology.
4. Murray accuses Christendom of placing more emphasis on the OT than the NT and then defines worship in OT terms as 'going up to the Temple to worship'. All his references to worship are meeting-centred, showing that he has missed the focus of NT worship, which is essentially about honouring God in everyday life.
5. Murray assumes that Christendom is the only problem. In looking for 'untainted' resources from outside Christendom, he makes a naive mistake. All societies are caught in similar traps, because no society tolerates non-conformity and all seek to enforce a 'Religiondom'. (Look at South America and pre-Reformation Catholic Christendom, Africa and animism and tribalism, India and the Hindu system or any Muslim or Communist country). The only exception is the USA with its statutory state/church separation constitutionally based on God's gifts to man of dignity and responsibility. Murray needs to look more closely at the history of the USA.
6. As a mass-market book, it is virtually unreadable. The reader would need to be familiar both with a host of historical terms and all the postmodern trendy vocabulary (what is a 'post-Christendom political praxis', p.250?).
There is no doubt that Murray opens up serious questions on the crucial issue of how much the church today is still influenced by Christendom thinking, but his book is not the answer.
Tim Horn
* An excellent book on 'doing church' is The gospel-centred church by Steve Timmis and Tim Chester (The Good Book Company, £5.00, 100 pages). It is a biblical, practical and readable book that first gets the gospel straight and then looks at outreach, church and community.
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