Treasure Old and New
Part 2
Dan Bouchelle

“Therefore, every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.” - Jesus (Mt 13:52)

“We want our church to become more African and more professional. We want the freedom to read the Bible with African eyes and do things in a way that fits our culture instead of just copy everything the missionaries brought from their culture. But we also want to learn from the best models of leadership and administration available today with a more educated people in our churches.” – eldership in South Africa

In my previous blog post I talked about how we cut ourselves off from much blessing when we cannot embrace wisdom both old and new because “we” trap ourselves in anxious echo chambers reacting to “them.” I believe we can and should create more non-anxious spaces for productive dialogue. By non-anxious spaces, I mean conversations among Christians where diverse points of view can be expressed without defensiveness, reactivity, labelling and dismissing each other. In order to accomplish this, we will need a clearer understanding of the gospel so that we can better differentiate the message of scripture from the cultural captivity in which we typically trap it.

If everything a church believes or practices gets elevated to the ultimate status of faithfulness to the gospel, we will always live with high levels of fear, conflict, and division. Every disagreement or variation in practice becomes potential apostasy. Yet, such disagreements are inescapable. We all struggle to separate scripture from our culture. Let me illustrate with a story.

The first church I served as a preacher sold our previous building to a Korean church. In the conversation between the two congregations, we stumbled upon a huge culture difference. In the Korean church, the Lord’s supper was passed out by women, because in their culture, male leadership prohibited the men from serving women. Women must serve men. In the church where I preached, women were prohibited from passing communion because standing up front and passing things out communicated leadership, which violated the same principle of male leadership. Both congregations believed in male leadership, but they developed opposite practices.

Regardless of how you interpret what the Bible says about gender roles in the church, this story demonstrates how we all read scripture through thick cultural lenses. We rarely notice these lenses because we look through them instead of looking at them, unless something forces us to notice what we are doing. We naturally assume the way we read scripture is natural and clear to everyone everywhere until we encounter people who have different assumptions, ask different questions, and develop different practices.

The gospel doesn’t change, but the angle from which we view it does. Cultures change over time. We change over time. We encounter people from other cultures, or we go to new places with different perspectives, and we see things we didn’t see before. But things we could see earlier are easy to miss now also. Where we stand determines what we see. That is why we need to be in conversation with people who are seeing Christ from different angles.

We are all like the proverbial blind men touching different parts of the elephant except, unlike in the famous parable, the elephant is moving through time, at increasing speed. We need to move with the elephant and communicate well with each other. As God leads his mission through time, we need to hear the different perspectives of others or we are in danger of twisting the gospel to fit us and thereby making it not fit others.

The faster cultures change, the faster we have to adapt and the more we need to reflect on the gospel itself, not just how we’ve always understood it. The challenge is keeping grounded in the once-for-all but still connected to this time and place. The work of theology is never finished because it is always a conversation between revelation and relevance.

This is why it is so important to remember that the gospel is a story. It is a set of events and not just a set of ideas or practices. God acted in history. Jesus came, lived, died, was buried, rose, and ascended. In this story is a distinct logic, a way of thinking and acting, that takes form in each time and place with beautiful variety but consistency of character. Before Jesus came, God was working. By means of his Spirit, God is still working. But his work is all of the same kind because he never changes like everything else does.

The “gospel,” or “good news,” is first and foremost news. Christianity is a story to be lived out, not a set of ideas to debate. What Jesus and the apostles declared was indeed “good news” instead of a philosophy or law (e.g., constitution). God acted. Things are different now. The way that event (or collection of inter-related events) speaks to us depends to some degree on who we are, where we are, and how we experience the world.

How we live out the taking up of our cross depends on who and where we are as well. The gospel is always bigger than our understanding of it and the life of discipleship is an endless process of discovery and growth as we deepen our understanding and imitation of the God revealed to us in this story.

Every generation needs to be rooted in the whole story of scripture which climaxes in Jesus but is ongoing. We need to listen to those who came before us and join where God is taking us as we move toward the final consummation of all things. We need to be listening to the global church with humility and rapt attention, especially in parts of the world where their cultures are more similar to those of scripture than ours.

We also need to be listening to those who came before us in the history of the church. We need to beware of repeating Rehoboam’s error of only listening to people of his generation. But we also need to beware of repeating the Pharisee’s error of rejecting Jesus because he did not fit their traditions or the story they imagined God was writing.

This is a rather complicated way of saying we need non-anxious spaces for listening and learning from each other. Non-anxious spaces are created by humbling ourselves, listening more, going back to scripture with fresh eyes, focusing on the rhythm and logic of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and trusting God to guide us as we rediscover old truths for new times in ways that are relevant and transcendent. Each congregation of God’s people is responsible to do this and to let other congregations answer to the Lord and not to us.

We need to put more trust in God’s Word, Christ’s saving work, and the Holy Spirit’s leadership to save, direct, and advance the gospel mission among a huge variety of people, none of whom are wise enough, right enough, nor good enough to merit or boast about anything.