Nothing New to Say?
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Recently, I was sorting through some old compact discs that had not been played in a long while. One pair of CDs caught my attention, as I had listened to them almost endlessly throughout the mid-1990’s: Rich Mullins’ The World as Best as I Remember It, Volumes One and Two. I put in Volume Two, and after Mullins’ trademark count-in to begin an album, I heard the following words:
“Hello old friends,
There’s really nothing new to say
But the old, old story bears repeating
And the plain old truth grows dearer every day.
When you find something worth believing,
Well that’s a joy that nothing could take away.”
The words struck me with particular force, for two reasons. The first was that the sentiment ran so clearly against the grain of contemporary discourse in the church and the academy. At best, the idea of simply telling the old, old story is seen as quaintly irrelevant. At worst, it is seen as culpably naïve, neglecting the vital task of constructing a new theological vision that attends to the felt needs of each social and historical context. If there truly is nothing new to say, then what could Christian proclamation possibly offer to a hurting world?
The second reason that the opening lines gave me pause was the life and witness of the person who had written them. Rich Mullins simply could not be accused of ignoring the social realities of a hurting world. Both his music and his life pointed to the historical and geographical particularity of sin and redemption. His voice as a songwriter was deeply prophetic, aiming to take honest account of the human condition in order to apprehend the depth of divine grace while singing “Give me that old time religion; it’s good enough for me.” What was going on?
What was going on, I would argue, was a recognition of the key ingredient in any truly meaningful Christian discourse. What made Mullins such a fresh and relevant voice in his context was precisely his attention to “the plain old truth”—that is, to the classical Christian witness to God’s saving work. And that nearly 30-year-old song is instructive for us today as we consider what it might look like to speak with hope in a rapidly changing world. My argument here is straightforward: the heart of the church’s preaching and teaching is always “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). The primary task of faithful Christian proclamation is to attend carefully to the self-revelation of the Triune God as received by the community of faith under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. This proclamation always strikes us with a sense of newness, precisely because of the contrast between God’s redemptive pattern of love and the typical patterns of a broken world.
This claim depends on a bedrock conviction; namely, that God has spoken and acted decisively in history. The first generations of the church proclaimed a word of good news because they were convinced that God was at work in Jesus, and that Jesus’ resurrection in particular made a difference for the entire direction of the world. They were empowered by the Holy Spirit to bear witness to this particular work of God in word and deed. Their motivation was not their own ingenuity or creativity, but rather a desire to pass on what had been entrusted to them, as we saw in the Jude text above. True, the great early minds of the church used the linguistic and conceptual tools at their disposal to articulate this witness with increasing clarity and precision. But they understood their task as pointing to what God had done in one time and place for the sake of all times and places—not as continually constructing fresh models of God to speak to the needs of their historical moment.
There are, of course, any number of objections to this approach to the task of Christian proclamation. But two are especially pointed. The first is that the message of earlier generations of Christians was framed in the philosophical or cosmological categories of their times. Even a text with wide ecumenical reception, such as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of the fourth century, is irredeemably laden with outdated conceptual material (the objection runs) that we could no longer reasonably endorse today. The second objection is that the message of every generation of the Christian church has been in essence a response to the needs of its historical context. Just as previous Christian voices constructed a theological vision to meet the needs of their society, the argument runs, so also we need to construct such a fresh vision for our own.
It is worth noting, of course, that both of these objections run up against some inconvenient realities. To the first, we might point out that the use of philosophical resources in the Patristic era was far from uncritical. Christian thinkers did not simply swallow, say, Neoplatonism whole and then recast the faith according to its intellectual demands. On the contrary, they took what was helpful in articulating Christian belief and rejected those elements that were not helpful. Conceptual terms were extended or appropriated in new ways as needed to proclaim the nature and activity of the God made known in Jesus. The key point here is that we do not need to rescue the church’s historic witness from outdated linguistic or philosophical shackles. The work of discerning what to draw upon and what to leave aside was part of the Spirit-guided process of ecumenical refinement and reception over space and time. Thus the church’s proclamation is not a scattered collection of individual voices blinded by the shortcomings of their times. Rather, it is a collective witness to what God has done in and through Jesus, drawn from a discerning and intentional use of a variety of conceptual tools and resources.
The second objection encounters a similar difficulty when one takes account of a basic historical fact. Indeed, it takes remarkable effort to miss the evidence that these early generations of Christians understood their message to be universal. We can find clear examples in the biblical witness itself, such as the Great Commission of Matthew 28:18-20, in which Jesus commands the apostles to make disciples of all nations and to pass on the teaching of the one who would be with them to the end of the age. Or, we might note the universal scope of the early church’s mission in Acts. The risen Jesus told his disciples that they would be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). Throughout the book of Acts, we see that witness expand geographically. Even in Athens in Acts 17, when the apostle Paul uses an altar with an inscription to an unknown god as a springboard to preaching the gospel, it is clear that Paul is proclaiming a message that is dramatically different from anything the Athenians had heard. Some rejected the message, of course, but it simply cannot be reasonably claimed that Paul was constructing a new theological vision to meet the needs of the Athenian context. He was proclaiming what God had done, for the Athenians and for all people, by using a point of contact that would initiate a conversation. The heart of his proclamation was the resurrection of Jesus—and that was precisely what many of the Athenians could not accept.
The deep problem with both objections is what they suggest about divine revelation. The belief that each generation should need to break down and reconstruct the content of the faith corresponds to very peculiar account of revelation indeed. Such an account might allow that God acted in history, but it seems unwilling to allow that God is able or willing to guide the community of faith in understanding the import of that action. The notion that an interpretation of the significance of what God has done is part of the content of divine revelation appears ruled out from the outset. Any such interpretations could only be, it would seem, provisional. By contrast, the apostles and their successors understood what they had received quite differently: as a witness to God’s self-revelation “once for all delivered to the saints.”
The church’s faith emerges not from its own creativity or innovation, but from the conviction that God has spoken decisively. And the Word God has spoken for us and for our salvation is transformative precisely because of its source. Hope in the midst of the social and historical particularities of a hurting world does not come from the resources offered by the broken patterns of that world; it comes from the action of the eternal and immutable God. The contrast between the eternal, self-giving love of the Triune God and the self-protective reflexes of a fallen creation means that the good news of God’s saving work always strikes us as fresh. The church speaks into the present moment with hope by attending first and foremost to the God made known in Jesus, as witnessed by the apostles. And this attentiveness is enabled by the power and illumination of the Holy Spirit who guides the church in every generation. Its proclamation is always new–not because the message is reconstructed for a changing world, but because the God who has spoken is so different from anything we have known. In that light, perhaps Rich Mullins was only partly right. Perhaps by telling the old, old story, there is in fact always something new to say.
Dr. Doug Koskela is Professor of Theology at Seattle Pacific University in Seattle, Washington. He is an ordained Elder in the Reach Conference of the Free Methodist Church.