There is not one Christian interpretation of Jesus; there are many different ones, shaped by different cultures. The church itself is a changing reality, and its confession of the faith has changed and must continue to change. (Newbigin, The Open Secret, p89)
This reminds me of the axiom, “Reformed and always reforming.” Our lives and our world are not static. They are fluid. Constantly moving and changing and taking shape. The past appears fixed because we can capture it in paragraphs or pixels, but it is all embedded with a biased perspective. Why chose those words or that angle? As Newbigin says, “the church itself is a changing reality.” This is not to be avoided or abhorred, but realized, actualized, and potentially even celebrated.
For while we often paint the past as a fixed reality (which it is not), we cannot see the future as anything but an ever unfolding and changing reality. What we do now matters. And the way we understand what happened behind us affects the way we enter into what happens ahead of us.
Growing up I received a new prescription of glasses every year, starting in first grade. By the time I reached sixth grade I began wearing contacts, but not the soft kind you see in commercials (that you can sleep in); I wore hard contacts – tiny little lenses of inflexible plastic that I placed on my eye each morning and removed each night. The idea was that these hard contacts would hold my eye in place, stopping it from growing and changing ever so slightly year after year and thus maintain a more consistent prescription.
The hard contacts worked. I wore the same pair for almost five years with only minor adjustments to my prescription. Eventually I opted for a full-time life of glasses rather than the 80/20 life I was living of contacts and glasses. (Besides, geeky glasses finally became trendy!) This past summer I had my first eye exam in seven years and was curious how much my vision had changed in my almost-decade of life without contacts. To my surprise my vision had again changed, only instead of becoming worse it had actually improved. (The eye doctor said it had something to do with being an adult. Does this mean I have officially exited the stage of “extended adolescence” and “emerging adulthood”?)
We live in an ever changing and diverse world. As Newbigin says, “The church itself is a changing reality.” The result of our varied contexts and cultures is a sundry of interpretations of a singular Jesus. This does not diminish who Jesus was and is, but rather recognizes our ever-changing world and thus the ever-changing way we see and follow Jesus. Newbigin boldly states that our “confession of the faith has changed and must continue to change.” No matter how many times we try to impose hard contacts, this change is inevitable, natural, and potentially even necessary.
(For another perspective on this same conversation, read up on Spiral Dynamics. It will blow you away.)
