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I can’t tilt my head. If I do, information may spill out from the top and onto the floor. The cause of my fullness is the GCA church planting conference which I’m attending in Minnesota this week. From morning till night, I’ve sat through seminars, talked with colleagues, and read books on such topics as missional ministry, gospel and culture, and Christocentric community. In spare moments I’ve enjoyed thumbing through Dick Staub’s new book entitled, The Culturally Savvy Christian. You ought to check it out (by the way, we are having Staub speak at College Church for two days: September 28 and 29).

There are many themes I’d like to highlight from what I’ve learned during this week. Let me present one: the importance of looking prophetically into the future and prayerfully discerning how the gospel intersects with our world. Following is an example from history that demonstrates why a long term perspective is necessary.

While speaking at the 2002 fall convocation, Harvard President Lawrence Summers admitted that “things divine [had] been central neither to my professional nor to my personal life.” He then wondered out loud, “In what ways should Christianity be privileged, and not be privileged, recognizing the [Divinity] School’s traditions, strengths, and need for focus, and also taking into account growing religious pluralism?”1 His obvious, unspoken answer was, “Very few ways, if any at all.”

The founders would have been astonished. They had put Christ’s name on the first seal and published this 1642 account of the school’s history, rationale, and order:2

After God had carried us safe to new England, and wee had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our liveli-hood, rear’d convenient places for Gods worship, and settled the Civill Government: One of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministery to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust3 . . . Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Iesus Christ which is eternall life, Joh. 17.3. and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.4

It is a sad but interesting task to trace Harvard’s spiritual decline. Two figures deserve special mention. In 1805, the school abandoned its theological convictions when it appointed Henry Ware, a Unitarian minister, as Hollis Professor of Divinity. A century later, President Charles Eliot had extended contempt for orthodoxy throughout the university.

Of the biblical account of the Garden of Eden, Eliot said, “The conduct attributed to God in that story would be wholly unworthy of any man whose standards of conduct accorded with the average sentiments about right and wrong of civilized people today.”5 Of the University’s doctrinal roots, he opined, “No thinking person believes any longer in total human depravity. Everybody perceives that human society could not exist, and never could have existed unless the vast majority of mankind had been well disposed, affectionate, and trustworthy . . .”6 Eliot embraced the anti-Christian Ralph Waldo Emerson and appointed such non-believers to the faculty as jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, philosophical pragmatist Charles Saunders Peirce, and evolutionist Chauncey Wright.

There are numerous examples from the history of Harvard University worthy of our reflection. Among them is the example of an academic institution that relinquished the living Jesus and his gospel as it went about engaging the world. This same slouching away from orthodoxy has also happened in the church, and will continue to be a danger until the Lord returns. In light of this, I’d like to suggest it’s not enough for us to simply consider the work of the church today, as we’re driven by the tyranny of the urgent. We must also regularly lift our eyes to see the cultural dynamics taking shape around us and carefully evaluate them through the lens of Christ’s kingdom. Not only is this what it means to be a “culturally savvy” Christian, it is also a necessary safeguard for us to maintain Christian faith in the long run. After all, what will it profit the Church if it gains the whole world but loses Christ?

Footnotes:

1 Lawrence Summers, “Convocation of the Divinity School of Harvard University 2002,” Harvard University: Office of the President Website, September 8, 2002, http: //president.harvard.edu/ speeches/2002/convocation.html
2 Entitled New England’s First Fruits.
3 Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 432.
4 Ibid., 434.
5 Henry Saunderson, Charles W. Eliot, Puritan Liberal (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), 174.
6 Ibid., 211.

Last week I spoke with a young man from our church headed for seminary. He and his wife will both work to pay off debt from college, to say nothing of the mountain of graduate school expense soon to be added to their tab.

It got me thinking. To what extent should the Church assist individuals like this? I once asked this question and received an immediate response by an elderly fellow. He was a lawyer. With a somewhat impatient expression, the man quickly retorted saying, “I worked hard to make it through grad-school, shouldn’t others.” Perhaps he didn’t realize that attorney’s get paid a little bit more than pastors. The former usually scale the mountain of debt in a few years; the latter sometimes accomplish it in decades.

It’s interesting to me that evangelicals like to point the finger at Catholics and accuse them of not taking Bible teaching seriously. However, I have to tell you, when I worked as a fundraiser in the Catholic Church, I found that most dioceses had endowment funds for seminarians. Sure the polity is different; but the fact is that one church puts their money where their mouth is, while the other talks a good game.

The great missionary Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) provides us with some perspective on this matter. Renowned as the founder of the China Inland Mission (CIM), his burden was for the millions in China who had not heard the gospel. His life’s work was to mobilize men and resources to reach these unevangelized regions for Christ. Yet as he labored in that harvest field and made frequent return trips to England to impress upon people his worthy cause, the constant lamp to his feet was Scripture. His crystal clear articles reveal his own trials and frustrations with the world around him. In this exposition on Psalm 41:1, he warns against ignoring the plain injunctions of Scripture to consider the poor.

Blessed is the one who considers the poor! In the day of trouble the LORD delivers him. (Psalm 41:1)

Taylor writes, “But who is the one so blessed? Not the one who cheaply relieves his own eyes of a painful spectacle by a trifling alms, or relieves himself of the importunity of a collector for some benevolent cause. Not the one who quiets his own conscience by gifts which really cost no self-denial, and then dismisses the case of the poor and needy from his thoughts, complacently claiming the blessings promised to the charitable. As for those who seek fame and name by their gifts, we altogether dismiss their case from consideration. The blessing is pronounced on those who consider the poor, who turn their thoughts and attention towards the poor and needy, and who do what they can, at the cost of personal self-denial, to lessen the sum of human woe. Such are blessed indeed, and such shall be blessed: blessing is their inalienable portion.

Do not let us spiritualize the text so as to lose its obvious character. This we Protestants are often in no small danger of doing. How much of the precious time and strength of our Lord was spent in conferring temporal blessing on the poor, the afflicted, and the needy? Such ministrations, proceeding from right motives, cannot be lost. They are Godlike; they are Christlike.

We pen these lines in a Chinese boat, moored by a Chinese village. My heart is full; what shall I say? I implore you to consider the case of these poor, and may the Lord give you understanding.”

God put Hudson Taylor in China, and God has put College Church in an environment full of men and women training for vocational ministry. Will we be faithful in our environment as Taylor was in his?

1. Hudson Tyler, Hudson Taylor’s Legacy: A Series of Meditations, ed. Marshall Broomhall (Edinburgh: The China Inland Mission, 1931), 33.

The Reformation in England was, in many ways, a series of bonfires. While Hitler burned books, 16th century religious authorities and magistrates burned their writers and those who read them. One such reader was “little” Thomas Bilney. Bilney was burned at the stake in 1531, but his influence survived into the reign of Queen Mary. Some of the most famous English martyrs were converted under his ministry.

Bilney, like Luther, was converted by reading Paul’s epistles. He had acquired a copy of Erasmus’ Latin New Testament, more for the Latin than a desire to read a new translation of the scriptures. But as he read, he was struck by the doctrine of justification by faith alone. In a letter to Bishop Tunstall of London, in 1527, referring to 1 Timothy 1:15 he wrote:

. . . at the first reading (as I well remember) I chanced upon this sentence of St. Paul (O most sweet and comfortable sentence to my soul!) . . . ‘It is a true saying, and worthy of all men to be embraced, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief and principal.’ This one sentence, through God’s instruction and inward working, which I did not then perceive, did so exhilarate my heart, being before wounded with the guilt of my sins, and being almost in despair, that immediately I felt a marvellous comfort and quietness, insomuch that my bruised bones leaped for joy.1

Although Luther was beginning to have some influence in England at the time, Bilney was never a Lutheran himself. In fact there were many Roman doctrines, such as transubstantiation, that he continued to believe. He was, however, a fierce opponent of the prevailing kind of religion, in which the sinner tried to work a passage to heaven. His fury was directed at avaricious clergy and friars, in particular, whose only concern was enriching themselves, not feeding the sheep. He had set a collision course with the establishment and, having begun preaching in 1525, he was summoned before Cardinal Wolsey in 1526, for denouncing saint worship.

In 1527, he was summoned before Wolsey again and then Tunstall, Bishop of London. During this time he demonstrated his distaste for Luther, describing him as a “vile heretic.” However, his own views were also considered heretical. Under great pressure he finally recanted his teachings and was imprisoned in the Tower of London for a year. After that time, he repeated his recantation and was freed.

Bilney was devastated. For two years he struggled with his conscience, until he eventually told his friends that he was “going up to Jerusalem.” He began preaching openly once more in the fields of Norfolk and gave out a Tyndale’s New Testament. He was again apprehended and in August 1531, was burned at the stake.

By later standards, Bilney was not a consistent Protestant nor great theologian: he maintained certain doctrines which later Reformers died for denying. But, having bought a Bible for the sake of its Latin, he was converted to Christ, and spent the rest of his life evangelizing. Amongst those converted under Bilney were Reformation martyrs Robert Barnes, Rowland Taylor, and Hugh Latimer. In the sovereignty of God, little Thomas Bilney had a big impact on England.

It is tempting for the pastor to despise the day of small things. There are always others more learned. There are always bigger, more vibrant, works of God happening elsewhere. It is easy to forget that what God values is faithfulness to him. As he was consumed by the bonfire, Thomas Bilney cannot have imagined the blaze that would soon be lit in England. He was certainly no model hero. In human terms he was not a great man. He never held high office or wrote a book. But he did love the Lord Jesus Christ, he did teach the Bible to those around him and he was, eventually, willing to die rather than deny his Lord. Latimer’s description of him would be a fitting epitaph for any pastor to seek, “he was meek and charitable, a simple good soul, not fit for this world.”2

Footnotes:

1 Dickens and Carr, The Reformation in England (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), 28-29. See also John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe: A New and Complete Edition, vol. 4 (London: R.B. Selley and W. Brunside, 1837), 635.

2 Hugh Latimer quoted in A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1984), 102.