What I'm Reading #2: The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message (Paul Tillich)

The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message, by Paul Tillich

This slim volume is actually a collection of three lectures delivered by Paul Tillich. The description on the back of the 2007 edition aptly describes its content:

The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message is a transcript of Paul Tillich's 1963 Earl Lectures at the Graduate Theological Union. Delivered just two years before his death, these lectures present Tillich's heartfelt and deeply personal understanding of the relevance of Christian preaching and Christian theology.

Why, Tillich asks, has the Christian message become seemingly irrelevant to contemporary society? Is the gospel able to give answers to the questions raised by the existentialist analysis of the human predicament? Yes, he answers--but in order to do so Christian teaching and preaching need to undergo dramatic renewal, the root of which requires an affirmation of love as central to Christian identity. Further, we need to recognize that this task is not limited to preachers and theologians; all of us together are responsible for the irrelevance of the relevance of the gospel in our time.

I picked up this book at the suggestion of Leif Erik Bergerud (he doesn't know this (well, he does now), but my boyfriend and I refer to him as "Odin" because he totally has a Viking name), my predecessor in managing the New Creation Arts blog. I had posted about Another Level, a church that meets in a bar. I was intrigued by their approach and impressed by how they are able to reach out to a population that usually feels unwelcome in traditional church settings.

This encounter was just one more instance of me wrestling with the question of how far relevance can go before it renders the Christian message meaningless. On the other hand, as Tillich points out, irrelevance makes the gospel just as empty to outsiders (and even to supposed insiders). Tillich's talks were delivered almost 50 years ago, but they are just as alive and relevant (ha) today as they were in his time. I wonder if he ever imagined just how much of a buzzword "relevance" would become. A church I'm familiar with in Durham uses the motto "where reverence meets relevance." I even saw something about a church promoting "contemporvant" ("contemporary" + "relevant") worship.

Of course, there's a delicate balance to be struck here. The problem with getting too fixated on making Christianity relevant is that it makes our culture the standard. One could argue that we should be asking how we can make our society more relevant to the gospel. Of course, that would require a transformation of our world to the point that it would be unrecognizable in many aspects, so that's just not feasible. The gospel needs to be palatable to real people living in the real world. Tillich's suggestion of clinging to a core message of love is a profound move; it takes the gospel straight to the heart of being without compromising it. And his emphasis on the priesthood of all believers makes the participatory nature of faith a central aspect.

I suggest you check this out for yourself. After all, it's only 63 pages long.


Favorite Quotations:

"Tradition is good. Traditionalism is bad."

"What about the attack of 'relativism' against all contents of belief and ethics? There is no relativism with respect to the experience of the Unconditional in oneself. But there is the relativity of all history with respect to the religious symbols and the ethical commands. They are not unconditional. They are historically conditioned and changing. They all stand under the one unconditional criterion: agape, the Christian word for love. This is not a law, but is the negation of every law. It is in itself unconditional because nothing can transcend love and nothing less than love is sufficient. But what love is in the concrete moment is open to the creative understanding of the situation and does not have the character of a law we can define and obey."

"I believe it is the unique greatness of Christianity that it shows the positivity of life in the principle which has had many names in Christian history but which I like to call 'the acceptance of the unacceptable,' namely, the acceptance of us. ...the unacceptable must first be accepted and only then can be transformed."