Joy to the world! The Lord has come; Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room, And heaven and nature sing.
Joy to the earth! The Savior reigns, Let men their songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks hills and plains, repeat the sounding joy.
No more let sins and sorrows grow, Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.
He rules the world with truth and grace, And makes the nations prove;
The glories of His righteousness, And wonders of his love.
(Isaac Watts, 1674-1748)
In a previous article, Church on Main, I suggested that the church should be seen and heard on Main Street; that is, the church needs to be engaged with the world in which it lives. In this article I want to push out on that assertion a little further.
Most of us sing the well-known Christmas carol, Joy to the World, with gusto every Christmas season. But just as regularly some well-intentioned theologian reminds us that the theology promoted by the carol is fatally flawed. Evangelicals might want to sing it to bring on the Christmas spirit, but they should not take its message seriously.
We are told that the optimism in the carol is not warranted on biblical grounds. You mean to say that all of nature will respond joyfully to the coming of King Jesus? That the Savior will in fact reign openly over all the earth one day? That he will reverse the curse wherever it is found? And that all nations will one day see and embrace the wonders of his love?
This, we are told does not fit the evangelical narrative which goes something like this. “Jesus came to earth to die for our sins. The stories about his life and teachings have little value except to prove that Jesus was a perfect and acceptable sacrifice. God heaped the wrath and condemnation we deserved upon Jesus by abandoning him on the cross. If we believe this and say so in an appropriate prayer then our souls will go to heaven when we die. To get involved with trying to improve the world is akin to rearranging the chairs on the deck of a sinking Titanic.”
I know this script well because I was raised on it. And indeed the words of “Joy to the World” do not blend well with this narrative. Its vision of a grand restoration of all things cursed and the whole world coming to see the wonders of God’s love just don’t fit. So, either we must stop singing the carol or rethink the biblical story line. I choose the latter because I have come to understand that the modern narrative we have bought into is an aberration of the message preached by the early church.
Norman T. Wright has been helpful in my transition toward a more biblical perspective of our mission in the world. I quote Wright at length below from his book, “Surprised by Hope” (p. 5).
“This book addresses two questions that have often been dealt with entirely separately, but that, I passionately believe, belong tightly together. First, what is the ultimate Christian hope? Second, what hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present? And the main answer can be put like this. As long as we see Christian hope in terms of “going to heaven,” of a salvation that is essentially away from this world, the two questions are bound to appear as unrelated. Indeed, some insist angrily that to ask the second one at all is to ignore the first one, which is the really important one…”
“But if the Christian hope is for God’s new creation, for “new heavens and new earth,” and if that hope has already come to life in Jesus of Nazareth, then there is every reason to join the two questions together. And if that is so, we find that answering the one is also answering the other. I find that to many – not least, many Christians – all this comes as a surprise: both that the Christian hope is surprisingly different from what they had assumed and that this same hope offers a coherent and energizing basis for work in today’s world.”
I think Wright is right. The contemporary evangelical mantra is certainly not central to the message of Jesus as portrayed in the four gospels of the New Testament. Nor does it surface in Acts, which documents the early Christian experience. In fact, in Peter’s second sermon to the crowds assembled in Jerusalem he proclaims that “…he (Christ) must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets.”
As Wright points out, already in the second century, Gnosticism was beginning to capture the imagination of Christians, but initially, at least, it was considered a heresy by church leaders. Gnosticism is based on Platonic dualism which considers anything of the earth, including human bodies, to be shadows of eternal realities at best which were basically corrupted. The goal, according to Plato – and Christian Gnostics that followed him – is to escape all things physical into the spiritual realm where true reality exists.
A hope that lay in escaping this physical world as disembodied spirits would not have been a threat to worldly powers. But the notion of a resurrection hope where Jesus is Lord and justice is called for was a threat to the governing powers under which early Christians lived. And for boldly proclaiming that message they paid a heavy price.
The joyful message to the world that Jesus is Lord and that sin’s curse has been broken both now, and even more fully in the future, gives us reason enough to be on “Main Street” proclaiming and demonstrating the same message. But this too needs further reflection which will come in future articles.
