The Identification Principle

How The Incarnation Shapes Faith And Ministry

Christopher Steed

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781783596638
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

In some places, and against prevailing trends, Christian belief and practice is not being chased out of the public square but rather, it is very active in stimulating new forms of civic and social engagement. Like two blades of scissors, an applied theology requiring both being grounded in biblical work as well as social policy, can create faith-based action that develop collaborative platforms that pass muster in today's secular culture. The theological grounding is incarnational; Incarnational suggests identification. The Identification Principle offers a new impetus to holistic and practical engagement by the church with our world. All too often, incarnational ministry is divorced from proclamation and prayer. The author, who is an Anglican minister, is responsible for a large and innovative Christian social project on the edge of city centre, which is developing new forms of community engagement in a way that does not lose the importance of spiritual formation. Word and work go hand in hand. This fresh take on incarnational life, church and society draws together recent academic research and cutting-edge ministry. It presents a renewed theology of Christian action for a new generation of evangelical leaders who have to intuitively hold together action with word and worship.The book offers both theology and praxis. Exploring the role of the atonement, the honour of God and His divine worth, the incarnation and the role of Christ. The author argues the effectiveness of proclamation, intercession, and the confronting of systemic and individual wrongs to create new types of communities that engage culture and re-focuses mission.

Part One

Being incarnational . . .

1

While we slept (the landscape changed)

What is it that makes humans human? As science and technology challenge the boundaries between life and non-life, between organic and inorganic, this ancient question presses us hard.

What news of another world? What news of the future, of purpose and a shoreline? Someone is hailing us. He stood on the lake of Galilee once and calls to us again.

How shortsighted the church has been for so long. It has been unsure which way to face – whether towards the world or away from it. It has been unsure whether to emphasize talking to itself or to follow the path of mutual comprehension by learning to listen and talk. It has not been sure whether to emphasize individual sins or collective sins; personal pietism or social responsibility. Maybe we lacked the word range to talk to the life of the world. Our God, and our vocabulary, were too small. Unwitting captives to our culture, we could not speak to it, even when we prided ourselves on the independence of church and state.

The identification principle beckons to us to join the world as Jesus did (who combined messy involvement with critical radicalism and prophetic clarity). Either that or the church should at least listen and find out what is going on at ground level. The incarnation was profoundly world-affirming.

On this journey we will bring together two important ideas. The first is that Jesus represents God becoming part of our world, sharing its life and giving his. The second is that of the value of personhood. Our immense worth is divinely accredited. Incarnation is a complete immersion project into human experience, from manger to grave, culminating in the cross, Easter and beyond. In embracing it, Jesus endorsed our worth. Yet the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus are grounded in the idea that personhood has huge worth. The immense value of a human soul and the embrace of our bodily existence receive a vote of confidence.

That this is of vital relevance in our time is indisputable. Across the length and breadth of contemporary landscapes, human worth is a tumultuous storm centre. A liberal international order experiences profound culture quake; a certain view of the world is crumbling away. The stealthy march of voices of reason parading benign technology and unstoppable progress has been shown up. Science can promote many values. The mesh of reason, scientific triumph and betterment we call Enlightenment has always been prone to illiberal forces and illogical passions. There was always a dark side of hope. Yet our value, made in the mirror of God, can be the grounding of a new version of human flourishing.

Solidarity and imperceptible drift

At a philosophical level, I remain convinced that Christianity offers the ‘best fit’ between the scientific project and the inner psychological world.

Once, with no strong faith from family, and lacking personal previous convictions except atheism, I experienced encounter’s power. Soon I was deeply touched with some wonderful truth. It was truth that set me longing and singing and soaring into God’s skies, reaching upwards for an experience of holiness that was just out of my reach – or so it seemed. That was a generation ago. But societies don’t sink, they change. What’s happened in the meantime is that society and the church have drifted further and further apart. To be sure, the church has changed and taken on a style that would leave previous generations both uneasy and perplexed. But our general culture has altered vastly more and the gap has widened to the point where drowning people can hardly see the lifeboats.

They used to call it postmodernity and, while the term and its application are past their sell-by date, there is little doubt that a massive shift is occurring. Something is going on out there. We feel the impact, though it’s difficult to grasp what we’re dealing with. The change is a fundamental alteration in the landscape. And we noticed too late. We had been sleeping at the wheel. While we slept, the landscape changed. Take another look out of the window. People think differently, use words differently. Forget a view of the world based on progress. We are relational rather than rational. In its place is a touchy-feely, consumer approach to life where we pick and mix what works best for us.

While we have been asleep, much has happened. Someone has moved the familiar landscapes around. Were we really Rip Van Winkle? Have we been asleep that long? Prepare for re-entry!

The Tide is Running Out is an evocative title surveying the continuing fall-off in church attendance. In ‘On Dover Beach’, Matthew Arnold had little conception probably of a living personal faith, but 150 years later the tide was continuing to go out. We can protest that something good is happening on our stretch of the beach, and maybe we have scooped up a little bit of water and go running down back and forward to the sea. Small local successes and a trickle here and there blind us to the bigger picture. Despite countless cries that we can see approaching waves of revival, the tide is still going out across the beach generally. The simple truth is that people go anywhere and everywhere in their spiritual search (that is as strong as ever) but prefer junk food to the bread of life.

The caller and the call

A new approach is needed. More of the same will not work.

For there is a call going out that many are hearing. While we slept and the landscape out there was subtly assuming different contours, a call was being left on our answerphone. While we got on with our own thing on our little stretch of the beach, someone was hailing us. The caller was the Lord.

The theme of this book is how the identification principle plays out in relation to the immense value of the human being. We will trace it through various pathways and show how the wider question of the worth of persons generally can both inspire worship of the Worthy One as well as clarify the incarnation and such theological issues as atonement and justification. We will be miners, mining the theme of incarnation for how much its radical implications shape practice: the very craft of ministry.

Among these implications is the call to social transformations. Until recent times, the church has not talked much about challenging the system. Surely we can get on with helping the vulnerable without going down that road? Transforming society, though, is the extension of ministry to those who are without. How can you care about the poor without caring about the poverty that produces them? How can you care for the slave without indignation against the noxious racism that generated it?

The message is simple and straightforward. It is to re-engage with the world and yet do so holistically rather than in a polarized way. It is a call we have heard many times and have wondered what it means and what the boundaries are. Many insistent voices have picked up this message and brought it to us. But this time we want to hear it and understand what we are to do.

As battle approached with the French and Spanish fleets on an October morning in 1805, Admiral Nelson ordered his famous signal: ‘England confides that every man will do his duty.’ Mr Pascoe, the Signal Lieutenant, was to run up the message quickly because Nelson had a further signal to make almost immediately. Mr Pascoe begged leave to substitute the word ‘expects’ for ‘confides’ because ‘expects’ was the first word in the Signal Book and would save several hoists. To this suggestion, the Admiral readily agreed. ‘That will do, make it directly,’ he ordered. As soon as ‘England expects’ was placarded and received to thunderous ‘three cheers’ in every ship, the next signal was quickly substituted. It was number 16, the signal for close action. ‘Engage the enemy more closely.’ Number 16 remained at the topgallant masthead of the Victory until shot away.

‘Engage the enemy more closely!’ And, to be sure, we must engage the enemy more closely, but the summons goes beyond spiritual warfare. In the roar and smoke of battle, number 16 is still fluttering. The summons to re-engage and not withdraw is an urgent call to the church. But what does it mean?

Communicate we must. Over the years the church has lost so much ground; a revolution has been steadily advancing in communications. Though incremental to its participants, spectators would observe a whirring speed of change that has accelerated through the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, and roared into the millennium. Once, telephones sat on desks or were glued to the wall. Computers were a rumour put about by geeks in the room down the corridor. Now personal communicators are a cosmetic on the ears of the public everywhere you go. Inexorably, computers were in every home and began to talk to each other. It was the birth of the internet, the most astounding means of communication since prayer started. It is the era of high-speed connection.

One thing seems certain. For the most part, people won’t be coming into Christian churches. They won’t come to hear magnificent preaching or be dazzled by our music – not necessarily because they choose not to, but because it won’t occur to them in the first place. If the people won’t come up the mountain, we must go down to engage with them where they are. This is the identification principle. It is what Jesus did as he came to serve, thereby demonstrating astonishing affinity for what it is to be human as well as bringing God-level presence. We will press the radical implications of this.

In taking to himself a new identity and wrapping himself in the curious garb of our tattered humanity, Jesus gave a vote of confidence to that very means of expression. It proclaims in unmistakable ring tones that what it means to be human is something he lovingly embraces. As the writer to the Hebrew Christians puts it in texts we will need to explore, ‘what are human beings that you are mindful of them, or mortals, that you care for them? You have made them only a little lower than the angels; you have crowned them with glory and honour’ (Hebrews 2:6–7, nrsv, invoking Psalm 8). Then comes the statement that is like high explosive. It is this very identity that Jesus has taken. The statement made is celebrated wherever Christians sing their hymns, wherever creeds are recited or theology articulated. Yet the consequences often lie hidden in rubble.

The church does not really believe in the value of humanity, so affirmed by its Lord in riotous whisperings. It cannot, or it would have behaved differently. Between rhetoric and reality is a great gulf fixed. If we really believed in the immense value borne by our fellows, how we do church would look and feel very different. We would tread softly with respect to their sacred value (while doubly indignant in the face of desecrating injustice). We would have no truck with racism or gender violence.

Jesus has so spectacularly embraced and affirmed the value and worth that humans have. That is not, though, the starting point for our journey – that is the worth of God. Humans have immense value placed upon them because they are replicas of God. Valuable in our own right, it is nevertheless a bequeathed and reflected glory, as the moon is to the sun. Humans are valued highly since they reflect upon the glory of something that is most highly prized of all. God the Lord is the source of value and worth, supremely worthy and the creator of meaning placed on personal beings such as ourselves. It is in his light that we see light. It is in the worthiness of God who holds us in his gaze that we see our own worth, a recognition of our own value marred by actions and pervasive attitudes that render us unworthy. This is the journey we will take.

The journey begins

First milestone. Personal beings have immense value, which is true of humans and even more so of the source of all value, namely God, who is transcendent and worthy of worth-ship. This is far from a philosophical puzzle. To ignore God is to disrespect; to devalue and deface is a serious business.

Second milestone. God is the guarantor of human value and worth on account of creation. Just as in human endeavours, the worth of a creator is invested in a worthwhile task; we have high value that comes from God seeing us in a certain light. The creation is a divinely shaped sphere of life.

Third milestone. In the unrepeatable incarnation, Jesus expresses solidarity with our situation, identifying as human with us and for us and then as universal victim. The embrace of embodiment came with all its ambiguity. Yet at heart this is the return of the king, who comes to re-establish the reign of Israel’s God, but whose return from the grave brings human redemption.

Fourth milestone. Dishonouring people was w...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One
• 1
• 2
• Worship (for all God’s worth)
• 3
• Children of the sixth day: the God of our humanity
• 4
• 5
• 6
• Anointed solidarity
• 7
• 8
• The day of crushing
• 9
• Redemption through violence: interpreting the cross
• 10
• Part Two
• 11
• Prayer and pathos: incarnation and intercession
• 12
• 13
• Transformative action and divine doorways
• 14
• Postscript: refocusing the mission
• Notes