To save Judaeo-Christian values, or to be saved?

To the Messianic Judaism that informed my last post, I must add, firstly, a book I was recently lent on the importance of Christian Unity. The author, to me, seems a confused individual in that in stressing the centrality of unity, he condemns on nearly every page all those Christians who don’t, those who are lukewarm, those who aren’t really Christian (by whose definition?) etc.

For example, he accepts as inevitable that a pastor who preaches this message may well lose many members, which to him is just tough… but rather negates the irenic doctrine he promotes. But his worst fault is in treating Jesus’s last supper prayer for unity, which is his core text, as a call to our action to correct perceived lack of unity – whereas given that the Father always hears Jesus’s prayers, unity is an existing gift of God from which the true Church already benefits. Jesus’s prayer to his Father, backed by his Passion, is not a command to his disciples, who are simply told to love one another as a response.

My second additional inspiration for this blog is a YouTube video on the Demise of Puritanism.

the talk is useful in itself as history, but more importantly in debunking the current trend for equating the seventeenth century Puritans with the woke Cancel culture zealots, when they were, in fact, their direct opposite. The speaker, Michael Reeves, closes by saying that the Puritans, who were the true champions of the Reformation in England, cannot be seen merely as a historical footnote whilst the Reformation’s message is not fully embraced by our churches (instead preaching Law, or Unity, or Diversity, or Holy Spirit power).

For the Reformation was not, primarily about correcting worldly abuses in the Catholic Church, nor as is often the view nowadays, was it primarily a political movement. At its heart – from Sibbes to Bunyan and down to those “untimely born” like Spurgeon – it was about our salvation depending entirely on the finished work of Jesus, and not at all on what we do. It was sola scriptura because, as soon as Scripture is treated as a useful resource rather than as a final authority, some form of salvation by works always results. As Reeves points, that is why Erasmus was not a Reformer though he gave us back the Bible. Though to be honest nowadays the deceptions loose in our society have made salvation from sin seem either unnecessary (by downgrading both sin and God’s righteousness) or unattainable to those who lack the necessary protected characteristics.

This is a valuable reminder that Christianity is nothing unless it is good news of forgiveness to lost sinners. And it’s particularly valuable now since the mood in the world at present, if I’m not mistaken, is one of doubt and disillusion. The political revolution in America has not, so far, brought common sense at home and peace abroad, but only more troubles. The rest of the West seems to have responded not by imitation, but by seeking to ban populist parties and even by arresting their leaders – to be imitated by fence-sitting powers like Turkey. Sorry, Turkiye.

And in Britain the best hope for political change, the Reform Party, turns out to be led by a man exhibiting the signs of narcissism of which both Trump and Putin are (in my medical opinion) wrongly accused. Accordingly not only does our economic and cultural decline seems set to continue, but likewise our Islamisation.

If the political remedies appear to be failing, then it is hard, also, to see how “cultural Christianity” will rise to the surface to make Christianity appear more attractive than yesterday’s materialistic hedonism. And that, of course, is as discouraging for Christians as it is to those non-believers who have sufficient common grace to perceive the evils around them destroying our society.

Yet if, as the Puritans held before all else, the Gospel is about saving lost sheep more than it is about creating an ideal society, then we may well see the hand of God in all that is going on. The Bible does not seem to be that interested in the rebuilding of Christendom, except that achieved by the transformation of the cosmos at the return of Christ. Neither, at an opposite theological extreme, does it actually promote heaven coming down to earth in miraculous displays of power by a Joel’s Army or by anyone else (but once more, only when the last hour heralds the descent of heaven itself to earth and the resurrection of the dead). And needless to say, the Bible does not anticipate a new global order through stakeholder capitalism and DEI, the nearest approximation of that being antichrist’s doomed kingdom.

No, when politics, culture and religion manifest their greatest failures, people stop asking what they need to do to save themselves, and instead seek a Saviour. Despite the disinformation, there seems to be enough of the Puritan spirit of the Reformation left in the churches for that Saviour’s finished work of the Cross to be freely offered and seen by many of those in need. Some are even talking about the stirrings of “revival,” though that’s a word I dislike as unbiblical and too much associated with manufactured Pentecostal hype.

It’s irrelevant if sinners come to Christ in a noisy service, quietly reading a book, fearing for sanity in a prison cell or, like John Bunyan, walking across a field with a troubled conscience. All that is needed to know is Christ, and him crucified.