Common gospel grace

My piece on the recent invention of teenage rebellion set me thinking about the related question of inheriting a traditional faith, versus the modern smörgåsbord of spiritual choices from satanism to shamanism, via the Salvation Army. Even a generation after Ginger Lawson, essentially my own teenage choice was whether to accept Christianity in some form, or not. Only a few years later did Eastern religion become a thing, and even considering Islam would have been absurd at that time. How different things are now!

Whilst thinking about this change, I saw a video in which someone suggested that, by the providence of God, the Shroud of Turin only became a significant aid to faith when the photography and science required to (potentially) validate it became available, just at the time when the Western mindset became socially conditioned to demand scientific evidence for everything.

Those considerations gave me two data-points to think about how, as human society has changed, God seems to have provided appropriately varying ways to facilitate belief in the gospel of Jesus Christ (as opposed to Islam, for which the more we know, the more there is reason to doubt its veracity).

I have a few caveats before I expand on that. The first is that, throughout history, the true validation of Christianity comes from the infusion of the resurrection life of Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, into the believer. That applies equally to the contemplative Roman philosopher, the peasant responding to Franciscan preaching, or the converted YouTuber. What I am talking about here are the external things that facilitate taking the claims of Christ seriously enough to open our hearts and minds to him.

The second caveat is that what follows is consciously over-simplified, particularly in following the trajectory of my own cultural history, rather than what might be true of someone in China or Chile. It also ignores the always mysterious providence of God in allowing the extinction of Christianity in various parts of the world at various times – “He is Yahweh – he will do what seems right to him.” I just want to open our minds to see the “common grace” that has enabled the gospel to be for every age, the evidence always being sufficient, though never coercive.

During Jesus’s earthly ministry, those who encountered him witnessed at first-hand his miracles, heard his teaching, and – most importantly – related to the living man. Being mostly Judaean Jews, they also had the knowledge of the prophets and widespread Messianic expectation to prime their response. After Pentecost, the apostles were able to appeal to that eye-witness experience, as well as their own testimony as Jesus’s “team,” to validate his resurrection after a death by crucifixion that was common knowledge. That generation could visit the empty tomb, maybe together with its owner Joseph of Arimathea, meet people who had been healed or miraculously fed, and so on. Paul was able to appeal to King Agrippa, thirty years later, that none of it was done in a corner.

This was even true of the diaspora Jews, who not only heard the testimony of the apostles (as they also performed miracles) and of relatives and friends from Judaea, but could go up to Jerusalem for the pilgrim feasts and check out the witnesses for themselves, much as Luke did in compiling his gospel.

Many gentiles (the “God-fearers” of Acts) were already drawn to Jewish religion and ethics, but alienated by its exclusive demands. So as well as the apostolic testimony, there was a novel sociological attraction to the inclusive gospel of Peter or Paul for them. That attractiveness, in contrast to dead paganism, continued wherever the two systems met. Yet even into the second century people including gentiles like Papias could write of meeting with apostles, and others, who had known Jesus. And of course, by then, the gospels had been written and apostolic epistles circulated, documents viewed then not as ancient authorities, but as recent memoirs of eye-witnesses.

The interesting thing is that, as those with direct memories died off, the increasing numbers of believers, witnessing to their internal spiritual witness, became a sociological phenomenon that forced one to take the new religion seriously. Rodney Stark (by training a sociologist) has pointed out how religions usually spread through families and peer groups, and such networks begin to increase exponentially at some point if the religion is any good. Furthermore, Christians embraced the Jewish belief in children as a blessing, so they had large families, as opposed to the pagan Romans whose offspring were limited by disdain for marriage, and by contraception, abortion and infanticide. Demographic decline was a constant source of worry for Roman emperors, and demographic increase a significant factor in church growth.

At the same time, “tradition” in the form envisaged by Irenaeus was growing. If you wanted to connect to the authentic historical Jesus, you could go to the churches founded by apostles, where their teaching was carefully preserved, and maybe documents too. My own church is an echo of that, if you want to learn about the early Baptists, because we still have oral traditions, documents and even a dedicated building going back to 1653.

Fast-forward to the conversion of Constantine, often seen as a disaster for Christianity by making the Church an arm of the State and clerical office a lucrative career choice for the elites. And yet for all that downside, once Christianity became the norm, individuals were confronted with a simpler choice – will I take Jesus and his teaching seriously, or not? The strong plausibility structure of a christianised society persisted, as I said in my introduction, and as atheists have rightly noticed, into my own lifetime. But note that it does not convert people – saving faith remained an individual response to the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, and the critical thinker would still examine the evidence claims.

Hence Rodney Stark (in a different book) distinguishes, in the early mediaeval Church hierarchy, “the Church of Power” from “The Church of piety.” And that’s how one may see in history both corrupt prelates murdering their rivals for gain, and godly bishops endangering their own lives to protect Jews from out-of-control Crusaders. Fstablished Christianity may well encourage false believers, but it also encourages true ones.

An interesting case, from Roman times through to Thomas Malory in the fifteenth century, is that of the warrior-aristocrats, who held mediaeval society together by being trained from childhood for violence in order to hold their own in defending the realm. From grumpy Gildas writing in post-Roman Britain, through accounts of the Crusades, to the knights in Morte d’Arthur, we see this warrior class, essentially indoctrinated into psychopathic irascibility, conflicted with a quite genuine, and to us paradoxical, piety. The church taught them, and they believed, that even killing someone in battle was a sin. They would kill their brother in a fit of rage, run amuck in battle, and womanise promiscuously, only to repent and submit willingly to penances of Crusading pilgrimage that would drain their treasuries and, in all likelihood, cause their early deaths. To me this shows how the faith was so deeply embedded in society that it challenged even the most hardened, rich and powerful, however you may judge their salvation.

In such a society, the Bible becomes not historical evidence, but a sacred text – and in mediaeval times was revered more, and read less, because of that. The Renaissance overturned that unquestioning authority by recovering, and focusing on, the authority of ancient texts of Greek wisdom, effectively setting up Plato and Aristotle, or even Epicurus, as rival foundations for life to Christ. One can view the Reformation, in large part, as the recovery of Scripture in its original tongues as an authority of no less antiquity and, through the scholarship of the Reformers, of superior wisdom. The Bible in the vernacular languages, easily and cheaply available because of the providential invention of printing, presented the claims of the gospel in a much purer form, to ploughmen and potentates alike. Literacy increased massively, and far more people were reading The Saint’s Everlasting Rest than The Decameron.

The end stage of the Renaissance was the Enlightenment (though arguably its real end-stage is the postmodernist collapse of society). The dismissal of revealed religion as superstition, and later the destructive critical analysis of the Bible, certainly damaged the intellectual plausibility of biblical Christianity for a long time. We should not forget, though, that for the common man despised by the cynical intellectuals, the Enlightenment was the time of great revivals through simple preaching not only in the Great Awakening under Wesley, Whitefield and Edwards, but in later popular movements like the 1859 Evangelical Revival in Britain or that of 1904 in Wales. To see drunken wife-beaters transformed into model citizens made the gospel message as plausible as any amount of rational theorising.

Furthermore, there were Christian intellectuals too – there was a Newton for every Leibniz, and a William Paley for every Erasmus Darwin. Deism and atheism did not go unchallenged.

Still, closer to our time rationalism became scientism, aided and abetted by a State educational system that promoted science and, increasingly, marginalised Christianity into “religious and ethical studies.” Yet, as the commenter on the Shroud of Turn at the top of this piece suggested, God has responded to this challenge to considering the gospel too. The common man (like the scientist!) may not have been taught to comprehend the metaphysical prejudices that make materialist science seem adequate, but he can see when he’s been hoodwinked by “The Science” when it comes to COVID or climate change. At the same time, quite apart from more spectacular and contentious evidence like the Turin shroud, archaeology and careful scientific research have increasingly validated the historical character of both New and Old Testaments, whilst the hyper-sceptical methodologies of the old critical scholars have been found wanting by the same research (for example, through repeatedly showing up “assured” nineteenth century textual methodologies as culturally-blinkered and subjective).

To round off this highly incomplete account, by showing the sheer range of the ways that God has repeatedly brought the Christian gospel back into the public eye, I will mention once more the way that in our present decade so many public figures, as well as ordinary folks, have begun to see the message of Jesus as the only viable response to the emergence of sheer evil around the world. I’ve often been asked why God makes it so hard to believe in him, and that’s a valid question, given that doubt and unbelief are at the root of the sinful human condition. But it’s also legitimate to ask why, if he doesn’t exist, it remains so hard not to believe in him, and common grace is a large part of the answer.