We are now on the back end of the Radical Together message series, and you might remember that last year we did another series called Radical Followership. What's the deal with all this radical stuff? I thought that religion meant that you were supposed to be conservative and preservative, not radical and revolutionary. Great question.
I'm actually on vacation this weekend, but didn't do an MMQB this past week, so I thought instead I'd make some comments on the whole series. While on vacation I was reading a book on the arts and culture. The writer was talking about CK Chesterton and how he dislike the word "reform." Well, our church is a Reformed Church, and we believe in the ongoing reforming of our lives, families, cultures, churches, and institutions. But how? Chesterton says that this word, "reform" - and I would say also "radical" - is meaningless and even dangerous unless we understand its literal definition.
More liberal conceptions of reform (and by liberal, I don't mean what news commentators mean by liberal) imagine a gradual evolution away from an older doctrine or practice, so that reform becomes synonymous with words like "progress," and that revolution is a means to start something totally new and upend anything traditional, old, archaic, or even old-fashioned. Chesterton calls this approach misguided. True reform, in his opinion, involves a return to an earlier form, or a renewal of commitment to an existing, more basic belief. Reform comes when we have drifted so far from the foundations on which we base our faith, beliefs, and practices that we need to re-form them. This return to original beliefs and forms of faith often have startling results, or cause a great upheaval to the current system. Take the prophets, for instance - and Jesus among them. They were not preaching anything new, but something older, deeper, and more basic than what their contemporaries were promoting at the time. These prophets were seen as radical, or as radical followers of a non-contemporary system - and they were even labeled zealots for their unwavering passion.
This is the kind of radical that we are speaking about - a radicality that is founded upon the deepest and oldest beliefs and truths of the universe that look radical to a contemporary world, and even to a contemporary Christianity. This is what David Platt is talking about in his book Radical Together and the earlier one, Radical, upon which our series is based. The ideas in this book are nothing new, in fact they are far from it. They should not be radical to the committed follower of Jesus Christ, but instead a positive affirmation of a more zealous life lived for the Gospel. This is what St. Augustine meant when he said that when we discover this it is "ever ancient, ever new" and what TS Eliot meant when said that "at the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time." [Little Gidding, no. 4 in Four Quartets]
"To get away from old things passing themselves off as tradition it is necessary to go back to the farthest past - which will reveal itself to be the nearest present." --Cardinal Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith
