Thursday, 5 November 2015

The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Reception of Faith,
Andrew F. Walls, T&T Clark, 2002, page 78-79

Walls identifies two dangers in the current situation.

One lies in an instinctive desire to protect our own version of Christian faith, or even to seek to establish it as the standard normative one. The other, and perhaps the more seductive in the present condition of Western Christianity, is the postmodern option: to decide that each of the expressions and versions is equally valid and authentic, and that we are therefore at liberty to enjoy our own in isolation from all the others.

Look around you and you will see both those scenarios being played out in the church today. Walls goes on:

Neither of these approaches is the Ephesian way. The Ephesian metaphors of the temple and of the body show each of the culture-specific segments as necessary to the body but as incomplete in itself. Only in Christ does completion, fullness, dwell. And Christ's completion, as we have seen, comes from all humanity, from the translation of the life of Jesus into the lifeways of all the world's cultures and subcultures through history. None of us can reach Christ's completeness on our own. We need each other's vision to correct, enlarge and focus own; only together are we complete in Christ.

A powerful call for unity; well sounded and well pitched. Jew and Gentile - the miracle of the One New Man - belong together.