Published: November 05, 2009 06:57 pm      

New and improved religion?

EDMOND — When I was about 7 years old (circa 1955), my dad took me to visit my great uncle Willie Day in Jayess, Miss. Uncle Willie was a farmer, and I remember eating fried chicken for breakfast, along with eggs and ham and grits and biscuits and red-eye gravy. I remember the farm animals, the tractor and cultivating implements, the barn and the wonderful smells of freshly-plowed earth.

I also remember wanting a drink of water and being shown a bucket with a dipper in it. Just before I went for a drink, one of the older men took a drink from the dipper. He had a beard and had been chewing tobacco. I picked up the dipper, looked at it closely, (I remember it as if it were yesterday), and I put it back into the bucket without taking a drink. I just didn’t have the stomach for drinking after a fuzzy-faced, tobacco-chewing relative.

Years later I revisited the place, and the outhouse had been replaced with a bathroom; the hand pumps at the well and in the kitchen had been replaced by running water in pipes with faucets and the bucket and dipper were nowhere in sight! What a relief!

I am reminded almost daily of the wonderful progress that we have witnessed over the past half-century. Viva progress. I’m all for it. You can have the “good old days” of shotgun houses with window fans (if you were lucky) and linoleum floors and screen doors.

I like air conditioning and computers and cars that go for 200,000 miles before falling apart. I like interstate highways that bypass small towns and traffic lights and stop signs (except when I’m riding my Harley!). I like having a cell phone that has my calendar, receives and sends my e-mail, has access to the Internet and also, by the way, works as a phone.

Everything these days is “new and improved” thanks to planned obsolescence, technological innovations and changing consumer demands. We’ve learned to expect that nothing lasts forever. Manufacturers and marketing specialists have us brainwashed and “Pavloved” (to coin a word) to drool at the idea of a new twist on last year’s version.

We’ve also developed appetites for the innovative, the new and improved version of everything from laundry detergent to sneakers. Last year’s stuff is sold at a discount. This year’s stuff promises to make us happier than pigs eatin’ slop.

Fine and good. We’re talking about stuff that is biodegradable anyway. That’s just the way it is.

But what about truth? Does it change every year or every decade or with every generation? And what about religion? Is it relative and transient? Do we need new and improved versions of faith? Is doctrine historically and culturally relative? Are there any absolutes? Can we still believe what the Apostle Paul believed? Does it make sense to believe that truth is trans-historical and trans-cultural?

I believe — along with the greatest Christian thinkers of the past 2000 years — that there is a core of Christian doctrine that is true for every age, every culture and every human condition. I believe that worship forms and musical forms and communication styles may, and should, change in order to be culturally relevant.

But the phrase “if it’s new it isn’t true” means more to me now than ever before. I don’t have to lay awake at night wondering if post-modernism or post-foundationalism are going to make the gospel irrelevant. It was true 2,000 years ago. It is true today. It will be true tomorrow.

Writing in the fifth century, Vincent of Lerins coined a phrase which gained broad approval as a means for testing the correctness of a doctrinal statement. He said we should believe that which has been believed always, everywhere, and by all. Or you could say that the three-fold test for doctrinal truth is antiquity, ubiquity and universality.

Saint Vincent wasn’t right about everything, but he got it right with that statement. The Christian church does not have to reinvent itself every generation. The truth “handed down” (the meaning of our word “tradition”) from Christ and the apostles that has become part of the inscripturated record we know as the New Testament is as much truth in November 2009 as it was in Galilee or Jerusalem or Antioch or Corinth more than 2,000 years ago:



Methods are many;

principles are few;

Methods often change;

principles never do.



The truths that make our hearts vibrate like musical strings to a tuning fork are the same truths that comforted early Christians in the catacombs of Rome; they are the same truths that inspired the Apostle John, Ignatius of Antioch, Augustine of Hippo, Anselm of Canterbury, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Balthasar Hubmaier, Conrad Grebel, William Carey and Billy Graham — and millions of others. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).



ALAN DAY is senior pastor at the First Baptist Church of Edmond. He may be reached at AlanDayFBC@aol.com.