Risky Discipleship

I have been influenced, as many of my friends know, by the work of the Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall. The first book of his that came into my hands was Lighten Our Darkness, which dealt forthrightly with the failure of the North American myth of progress. Although I owned copies of his three volume work on Christian theology in a North American context, I didn’t begin to read it with any seriousness until I came across a distillation of it, The Cross in our Context. I still have about one hundred pages to read in the final volume, Confessing the Faith, but, as often happens, a section of the book prompts me to think a bit about the context in which we find ourselves now, a context which is not entirely the same as Hall’s when he wrote the trilogy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The threat of nuclear annihilation seems less real than it did thirty years ago, although we now are more concerned about the possibility of nuclear weapons being used by terrorists. Certainly environmental degradation has continued and we are now very much aware of the threat posed by climate change. The list of ethical challenges that we face seems endless and it is not surprising that we at times feel overwhelmed and would much rather avoid dealing with any of them. We might be tempted to provide a negative answer to the question posed by the title of a Milton Mayer book, What Can a Man Do?

That is, however, not a response that I am willing to make. As Hall asserts, “fatalism…is not a Christian option.” (Confessing the Faith, p. 418) Christians are, after all, disciples of the Crucified One, and walking in the way of the Cross is not simply an option. Ethics that are worthy of the label Christian must be grounded in our Christology, in our understanding of what it means to belong to Christ. The work of the Holy Spirit is not to comfort us in the popular understanding of that word but to strengthen us for discipleship in the world, discipleship that leads us to share in God’s transforming work in the world.       

I understand that in responding to the call to this kind of costly and risky discipleship we will often be out of our comfort zone. This will not only be true for us personally but also for the congregations to which we belong. Far too often we have seen those congregations as refuges from the world and not as training schools for discipleship in the world. This has to change. “However improbable it may seem that middle-class Christianity in North America might renounce well-practiced craft of providing insulation against the cold winds of the future, responsible Christians are committed to think and act as if change were actually possible.” (Confessing the Faith, p. 418)

It will require both discernment and courage for us to respond faithfully to the question posed by Milton Mayer’s book title. God is already at work in the world and our task is to discern what God is doing and what God is calling us to do to share that work. Courage because, as I have already said, we will often be very far out of our comfort zones. But that is the nature of faith, not a matter of accepting certain propositions about God or knowing all the answers, but trusting the Answerer. “The faith will be confessed in our ethical praxis only by those who have the courage to subject themselves unguardedly to the peculiar darkness of our time and place and to trust that light enough will be given.” (Confessing the Faith, p. 419)