The slippery liberties of consumer capitalism.

People have been given so many reasons to despise Christianity. What would it be to communicate with and for the “cultured despisers of the faith”? This was the audience Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote to in his seminal work, The Christian Faith, and it is the audience Mark Labberton sought to speak to when preaching at First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California.
In this Conversing Short, Mark considers the importance of communicating the gospel in its fullness to a culture that understandably despises Christianity, rather than domesticating it as the ecclesiastical industrial complex has.
Mark Labberton: Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.
I’m Mark Labberton. Welcome to Conversing.
In between my longer conversations with people who fascinate, inspire, and challenge me, I share a short personal reflection, a focused episode that brings you the ideas, stories, questions, ponderings, insights, and perspectives that animate Conversing, and give voice to the purpose and heart of the show. Thanks for listening with me.
One of the reasons why this question, “How Dare You?,” came to me was really because of having been a follower of the writings of a 19th-century theologian named Friedrich Schleiermacher. He had written a very important book called The Christian Faith, and in the foreword to the book, he says that he’s writing it for the sake of the “cultured despisers of the faith.”
That phrase just caught me. In his case, it was pointing to the intelligentsia who by the late 19th century, because of the influence of Darwin, Freud, and many other influences like Nietzsche, felt that if you were a thoughtful cultured person, you would have had to abandon the faith.
But what I loved was his courage and his boldness in saying, no, I’m writing specifically to those people who feel as though this faith is unreal, that it has no meaning, or that it has no meaning to them, or that it has no future relevance, or that it should be left behind for the sake of progress, however that might’ve been defined.
Now today, of course, I would think of it in a much broader sense because it’s not just a question of the elite culture despisers, but it also is just people who in whatever cultural context and frame: high, low, medium, inside, outside, upside, downside. Whatever it might be, people’s life circumstances have, for understandable reasons, left them in a position to despise the faith.
That’s a very understandable position to me. The church, in so many ways, has failed to show itself to be true to what it even confesses. Even, it seems these days, less and less interested in actually being a reflection of Jesus himself, and more and more a reflection of the ecclesiastical industrial complex.
Whether it’s evangelical or mainline or some other version, it shows up in so many different ways as having offered plenty of good reasons to be despised. But what attracted me about Schleiermacher and what attracts me still about the gospel itself is that if we let the gospel actually resonate in the way that it’s meant to resonate, then in fact, it is making a claim on people’s lives with all of their despised understanding, which Jesus himself had plenty of exposure to in his own ministry, and which has always been part of the interaction between the church and the surrounding world and communities.
But in the case of being a pastor in Berkeley in the 90s and early 2000s, I was just so aware of how legitimate Christian questions were about what really did matter. What is the meaning of life? What is our existence about? For what purpose do we have our lives? Are we going to dare to believe that there is anything more than our simple material existence or social embodiment?
Is there a greater claim, a greater reality? If we can understand that and if we can somehow articulate that and even more live that, then that is the vocation that has been given to the church. And that’s throughout time and in every setting.
Besides Schleiermacher, one of the things that caught my attention is that I think the gospel itself, by God’s revelation in Christ, if that’s true, that is a shocking surprise to the world.
And the response is not an easy one that just says, “Oh, there, there. I’ll lay out the easy and fully rational case.” It’s in fact much more embodied than that. It’s more comprehensive than that. It’s more radical than that. It’s more edgy than that. And that surprised quality of the gospel, which has tragically been domesticated again, often by the church.
When it’s released, then it’s worth so much more. This is why I’ve always been drawn to the quote of Annie Dillard when she says, if we understood the power that we’re dealing with, we would have to have seatbelts in the pews and hand out crash helmets as people come into the congregation. I love that because it’s this declaration of surprise with some volatility, some uncertainty, some impact, some reorganization, some resorting.
If that’s not what we need to do, then I don’t know what it is that we need to do. But I would commend that every pastor and every leadership body consider whether crash helmets and seatbelts are ever needed to be in your service.
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary. Evan Rosa is our producer.
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I’m your host, Mark Labberton. Thanks for listening with me.
Mark Labberton hosts the Conversing podcast and is the Clifford L. Penner Presidential Chair Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Fuller Seminary.
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