Speaking a new language

“We do not have all the truth, but we know the way along which truth is to be sought and found…” p. 34

“….most of us who are Christians have been brought up bilingual. For most of our early lives, through the accepted systems of public education, we have been trained to use a language which claims to make sense of the world without the hypothesis of God. For and hour or two a week we use the other language, the language of the Bible. But…the incarnate Word is Lord of all, not just of the church. There are not two worlds, one sacred and one secular. There are differing ways of understanding the one world and a choice has to be made about which is the right way, the way that corresponds to reality….” P. 49

Part of really learning the language of the Bible is living in the community of those who seek to live faithfully to the Lord it professes. Just as any language is best learned when one lives in the midst of people who speak that language, so it is with the language of Christian faith. So part of scholarship that seeks to be faithful means a committed involvement with a community of others who are seeking to live faithfully as well. Because of our bilingual existence and because of the dominant voice of the “no-God hypothesis”, we will need to set a priority on cultivating the language of faith in our lives.

Grad/Faculty ministry emphasizes four values: witness and service, spiritual formation, community, and integration of faith and academics. Newbigin would see them as inter-related, flowing into and out of one another, but they require an intentional choice on our part to develop them. Often, people think that matters of faith or spirituality ought to come ‘naturally’ as a response to an overwhelming sense of God. When that doesn’t happen, the assumption is that “I tried Christianity, but it didn’t work for me.” However, there is nothing in the Bible that gives us any reason to think that faithfulness comes easily! It’s not that Christian spirituality is difficult actually; it just calls us to a live by a radically different set of values than the dominant culture practices.

For example, in Luke 6:27-28, Jesus tells his followers to “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” This is “how much more” rhetoric in that if we are to treat even these sorts of people in this manner, how much more are these qualities to mark the way we live in general?

Using this as a guide, Christian faithfulness is not very complicated to describe: love, do good, bless, and pray. Yet choosing to live in this way will lead us along a path that will be markedly different from that which places top value on things like efficiency, power, financial success, and prestige.

Living Jesus’ way will deeply impact the way we relate to those with whom we work, the career choices we make, the priorities we set, the way we view the purpose of business, etc. Our starting point that the new creation has begun in Jesus guides us in this direction. The community of faith can help us live it out more and more faithfully. Living this way – personally and especially as a community - is what will offer to the world an example of an alternative way of life that reflects the light of Christ.