A Tiny Religious Remnant

Monday, I received the indexes for Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament. (I didn't do them myself, but rather worked with the publisher to get them professionally done. Because it's better that way). And I wasn't surprised to see that no scholarship shows up on as many pages as does John A.T. Robinson (by a lot). This is as it should be, as Robinson's Redating the New Testament is the most recent work dedicated wholly to establishing the dates of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament (with consideration also of select Apostolic Fathers). But Robinson wrote a lot more than just Redating. Indeed, his 1963 book, Honest to God, has been (rightly or wrongly) described as the most talked about theological work of the twentieth century. On the first page of this book, he writes the following:

There are always those (and doubtless rightly they will be in the majority) who see the best, and indeed the only, defence of doctrine to lie in the firm reiteration, in fresh and intelligent contemporary language, of 'the faith once delivered to the saints'....At the same time, I believe we are being called, over the years ahead, to far more than a restating of traditional orthodoxy in modern terms. Indeed, if our defence of the Faith is limited to this, we shall find in all likelihood that we have lost out to all but a tiny religious remnant.

This quote—especially the part which I have written in italics—seems remarkably prescient, looking back almost sixty years later. Christianity in the Anglo-American world is today but a shadow of its former self. Church attendance and membership are at historic lows. Robinson's own tradition—the Anglican Communion—has been rent asunder by bitter disputes over sexuality. Two generations of sexual abuse scandals and ongoing revelations regarding such crimes as the Indian residential school system here in Canada have people wondering no longer asking whether one can be good without God, but rather whether one can be good with God. And such problems are no longer limited to mainline traditions or the Catholic church. For many years, evangelical Protestant traditions thought themselves largely immune to these trends and crises. But the last few years have made abundantly clear that this is not the case. The demographic data is well known, as are the sordid details of sexual misconduct committed by prominent evangelical figures.

One rather suspects that Christianity in the Anglo-American has gotten complacent. It became accustomed to being the default setting, so to speak. A broadly Christian ethos was long assumed. I can still remember going to summer camp with the Royal Canadian Air Cadets c. 1991, and when filling out the forms the choices for religion where "Catholic," "Protestant," and "Other." This was simply the way we were, not that long ago: you were some sort of Christian, or you were an other. Today, we're all others, and Christianity—although still retaining much of its former cultural prominence—is really no longer the default. It's no longer assumed that you're Christian until people hear otherwise.

Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is above my pay grade, which is to say that I'm typically more interested in the question of what's happened than I am in the question of what should have happened. What I do know is that if Christianity is going to retain much relevance to anything but a sliver of the population than it needs to start bringing its intellectual and communicative A-game. The basic form and concerns of so much Christian apologetics were shaped at a time when the question was less "Should one be Christian?" and more "What sort of Christian should one be?" They take for granted that one should be concerned with the truth and value of Christianity. That is no longer a given. If Christianity cannot explain its relevance in ways that make sure to persons not presently in the choir, then it will be inevitably consigned to increasing irrelevance.