How's Your Reality These Days?
by Michael Crowe

At this point it seems to me that I can't connect with my religious peers because we appear to have different epistemologies. My perception of reality is that it must be apprehended in an ever-fluid, dynamic way. That is, if you're growing it's because you are willing to put everything on the table every day--daring your reality to prove itself, listening to voices that are different, perhaps larger than yours. Ultimate reality is so vast, so "other", that you can never suppose yourself to be in an era of apogee. As Christians, we can never suppose ourselves to be in a penultimate development of the faith in our century, our denomination, or our preferred circle within it--God is too large and too "wild" for that. This constant foray into fuller and more complete thought separated us from the Church of Christ earlier in our sojourn. It continues to threaten to estrange us from certain forms of evangelicalism. I'm not talking about stumbling around in a religion of rationalism--discarding all semblance of biblical faith for the self-deification of anthropologically based religion. That's clearly been tried in the last two hundred years and found wanting. But so has the "free church" with its inane subjectivism and its refusal to acknowledge its own hermeneutic, its own peculiar religio-cultural "take" on reality.

Epistemology. For example, the evangelicalism that we have shared in for the last twenty years sees "justification by faith" as the foundation, the origin, of everything Christian, the very way you receive access to God--the reality that was brought to the fore by Martin Luther and others in the sixteenth century. The Reformation is seen as a basic moral/spiritual watershed, a new foundation, an escape from the "great harlot" of Roman Catholicism, a repristination of Christian thought and life.

But now I don't see it that way--the Reformation created as many problems as it solved. "Justification by faith" is a courtroom metaphor for something immensely important, but it had been present already in the soteriology of the Roman church. God has chosen to re-appropriate mankind to his bosom by means of our trust in Christ, not ourselves. From Abraham to Augustine to Aquinas to Father Luther, Roman Catholic monk, that has been true. Luther re-grasped it for his generation, to be sure, but the proliferation of bastard movements he spawned are no glory. Their hopeless subjectivity and rootlessness have created more distortions than had the high middle ages Roman church with its exaltation of Mary, indulgence sales, Papal authority, etc.

My central point is that as we learn and grow, we're going to see the big picture differently--God, salvation, scripture, Christianity are going to be seen in an exponentially larger and deeper context than before. But my colleagues do not seem to participate in a constant and disturbing personal modification (which I call sanctification)--they seem to believe that the dispensation in which they have been standing is penultimate, that the provincial, pedestrian grasp of soteriology, ecclesiology, and eschatology that they (and we) had ten or thirty years ago is perfect, just dandy, and that the only thing that remains is to sharpen one's tools and expand the empire. They seem never to be in crisis, never to be alarmed at the state of things, never seem to be interested in the theology, the whole of things as they are popularly believed and practiced.

I'm mystified by this. If Christianity is not a risk-all-you-know-and-have-every-day proposition, what good is it? If salvation is a state of being saved, then we are safe by God's own hand, and we don't have to "play it safe." We are freed to ask the hard questions about our own pasts, our own context, our own epistemology. To allow ourselves to keep being sucked into some esoteric religious hole, however many evangelical Bible terms we use to decorate the walls, is not honest, not Christian, and not a life worth living.