Where Everybody's Crazy

Oxford Meeting Point is still going well. Last night we visited St Ebbe's church for our guest service. Ebbe's is a nice little church in the center of Oxford that thinks it's All Souls Langham Place. (Whereas, of course, Aldate's is a nice big church in the center of Oxford that thinks it's either Holy Trinity Brompton or St Barnabas Woodside Park. Or, increasingly, Kensington Temple.)

I'm starting to feel that certain strands of Christianity all have Classic Mistakes, and that I shouldn't judge a church based on the Classic Mistakes it makes. If it's a pentecostal church, I shouldn't worry if they make experience normative over Scripture, because that's what pentecostal churches tend towards. It's just what they do. Similarly, if I go to a conservative evangelical church, I shouldn't worry if:

• They underrealise eschatology. Sorry for the theology, but that just means that they think everything is predicated on what happens when you die. Because there will be a judgement one day, you should live like X and Y. The downside of this is that they can tend to pay little attention to the state of the world at the moment. Jesus said that the kingdom of God was at hand, and that people were laying hold of it, and even that some people who were around him would see it before they die; for him, heaven is much more about how you live now than how you'll live then. We sometimes talk about the "now and not yet" of the kingdom, but as with all things, steering a middle course is important.
• They misuse "logos". This one, on the other hand, should be made a criminal offence. The word "logos" or the compound "logos thew" in the New Testament is a philosophical term which relates to (a) God's creative word which spoke the universe into being, or (b) that same word incarnate in Jesus Christ. Just because we refer to the Bible as "the word of God", that does not mean you can pick up "logos thew" passages and interpret them as referring to the Bible.
• They would rather attack than contextualize. Postmodernism is bad, pluralism is bad, relativism is bad. Please get these unhelpful ideas out of your head, so we can preach at you like it's 1950 again. I'm always amazed at the extent to which Paul contextualized his message, working very much within the culture, especially in Athens, in ways which would horrify most church leaders today.

On the other hand, there are a lot of things they get spectacularly right; in particular, their handling of Scripture (apart from the logos thing) puts many others to shame. I'll think more about the various strands, their classic mistakes and classic successes when I get around to answering Dave's question.