THE TIDES AND TIMES OF FAITH
Tracing the context, contesting, and conflagration of awakening
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
~ Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
It was a bright setting for such a dark poem. The British Empire was at its golden zenith, and one of its beneficiaries, a twenty-eight year-old school inspector called Matthew Arnold, was celebrating his honeymoon on the south coast of England.
But standing there on Dover Beach that night, listening to the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the sea pulling shingle across the shore, Matthew Arnold mourned the Sea of Faith ebbing England’s increasingly secular shores. ‘Ah, love, let us be true to one another’ he says to his new wife –
for the world, which seems
to lie before us like a land of dreams…
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.’
Arnold’s contemporary, William Butler Yeats, attempted (and singularly failed) to lift the mood in his four-line response to Dover Beach:
Though the great song return no more
There's keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave
How are we to live when ‘the great song’ falls silent and the Sea of Faith recedes? All we can do, says Yeats, is make our own music from ‘the rattle of pebbles on the shore under the receding wave’, attempting to create beauty out of chaos, and to impose meaning upon the loss of all meaning.
“Perhaps all we can really do is cling helplessly to one another, like Matthew Arnold and his new wife, seeking some kind of comfort in love and sex.”
150 years later, Arnold and Yeats seem vindicated in diagnosis and prescription alike. The Sea of Faith does appear to have retreated far from Western shores replaced by an advancing tide of secular humanism. Old plausibility structures have almost entirely changed. And the poets’ prescription for such times is also widely accepted: Perhaps all we can really do is cling helplessly to one another, like Matthew Arnold and his new wife, seeking some kind of comfort in love and sex. Or like Yeats we should merely make music from the sound of shingle on the shore. In the loss of all meaning find what comfort you can in subjective aesthetics and experience.
So far, so bleak, especially for those of us navigating the Sea of Faith, still singing the songs of the ancient Mariner, anticipating that the earth will one day soon ‘be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.’ (Habakkuk 2:14)
Are we utterly deluded? Pitifully naïve? Living in arch denial?
Now of course, since I am preaching here to the converted, we immediately cry ‘No! We are not deluded! The tide must surely turn! Our hope is still secure!’
But perhaps we may just pause a moment to admit the profound disappointments we continue to endure; the big prayers we’ve prayed which have patently not been answered. We have worked extraordinarily hard and the church in our nation is still in depressing and distressing decline. Where once our song was sung throughout the land, now we stand and sing alone.
And so, yes, Matthew Arnold is right: the Sea of Faith does appear to be about as far out as it can possibly be. And what makes this hard is that, unlike Arnold and Yeats, we cannot just shrug our shoulders as if we don’t care. The ‘great song’ still resounds in our hearts. We cannot take any kind of ‘keen delight’ in its ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.’
The answer to our predicament must surely lie in the very meta-narratives that seem to be receding. If they are true they remain true even when they’re not in fashion. (And how very unfashionable such an assertion now sounds!)
“when a tide recedes on one side of the world, it advances on the other.”
But of course, when a tide recedes on one side of the world, it advances on the other. If we will just rise above Mathew Arnold’s limited vantage point standing on Dover Beach at the zenith of the British Empire, we will see an astonishing sight: Globally the church is growing at 2% per annum, double the speed of the world population. In Africa there are now more Christians than there are people in America. In most of the world the Sea of Faith which may have receded far from our shores, is advancing with unstoppable force.
And then there’s the other big picture – the historical timeline (perhaps we might say ‘tide-line’) upon which we find ourselves. The Kingdom of God has always ebbed and flowed, never advanced steadily along a continuum up and to the right. Throughout Scripture and subsequent history, the Sea of Faith has receded and advanced, ebbed and flowed from rebellion to repentance, apostacy to awakening.
Matthew Arnold’s analogy couldn’t be more apt but he misses its most important implication: when the tide is at its lowest ebb, it is readying itself to rise again with an inevitable, unstoppable force.
We see this principle at work in creation – seasons advance cyclically, each one making way for the next. And we see it again and again in the ancient story of God’s people ebbing from covenant election into slavery, and rising from Egypt into freedom. Ebbing away from Jerusalem into exile, and flowing back again with joy into Zion.
SIMEON AND ANNA
When Simeon and Anna held the baby in the temple courtyard that day, the Sea of Faith must surely have seemed far out. The age of the prophets appeared to have ended, and here they were living under Roman occupation, praying their whole lives for a messiah, interceding with a mixture of faith and despair for ‘the consolation of Israel.’ But in that single moment standing in the temple somehow they perceived the very moment that the tide began to turn with unstoppable force.
Was this what they thought the answer to their prayers would look like? Is this what they had been envisioning all those years as they wept and prayed for Israel? A vulnerable, incontinent, inarticulate baby screaming blue murder (having just been circumcised at a time before anaesthetics!) born to a teenage mum from an inconsequential family in a nowhere place?
Like Simeon and Anna we live under Roman occupation. Like Matthew Arnold we stand upon Dover Beach. Which posture is ours? Will it be the faith of the prophets, or the gloom of the poets with which we interpret ‘the signs of the times’ (Mt. 16:3)?
And of course there are many legitimate reasons to despair with Matthew Arnold rather than rejoicing with Simeon and Anna.
The confusion of the unexpected
Simeon and Anna remind us that our answered prayers rarely turn out looking the way we anticipated. Revival when it begins is unlikely to fit comfortably with all our current political, cultural or theological convictions. For the Pharisees Jesus was not strict enough, for the Zealots he was not militant enough, for the Sadducees he was not political or pragmatic enough, and for the Nazarenes he was not exotic enough. When the waves of God begin to advance, they will not tickle our toes. We may well be displaced from our sure-footing entirely, swept up into new places, bruised and broken by the very thing for which we have prayed.
The confusion of weariness
It’s always fascinated me to think of those who didn’t bother to join the crowds when Jesus turned up in town (perhaps because I worry it might well have been me!) There must have been those who chose to stay at home, busy in their kitchen or their workshop, weary and wary of all the hype. They literally missed out on seeing God because they had become jaded by all the hype, or preoccupied with lesser things. Because they had allowed apathy or cynicism to root in their hearts, they missed out on the greatest moment of their lives.
This is another reason we can miss the turning of the tide: we are weary of the hype. Our demeanour is arms-folded, standing back, muttering “let’s wait and see”. Simeon and anna had suffered a great deal and waited a long time, yet somehow they had retained a posture of wholehearted, expectant excitement.
The confusion of disappointment
After Jesus’ arrest, none of his disciples (perhaps even including the two Marys and John) could see in his crucifixion anything but the death of all their dreams. The ultimate “no” to all their prayers. In no way could this be the beginning of anything – it was patently, painfully, obviously and entirely the end. Experiences of profound disappointment, brokenness, or even death can also make it hard to perceive the goodness of God at work in our lives – especiallywhen that goodness is disguised within the darkness and death itself. Perhaps we might believe in the goodness of God elsewhere, at other times, in other ways, for other people, but it takes an extraordinary level of faith and revelation to look at the corpse on the cross with expectancy, or into the darkness to see there the light.
The confusion of HOPE DEFERRED
The disciples received the great commission from Jesus telling them to go into all the world and disciple nations and assuring them of his continual presence and unlimited authority. The sense of momentum and mission must have been almost unstoppable. But then that is precisely what he does next: he tells them to stop! To wait. To pray. Sometimes we do perceive the beginning of revival; the baby born to be king, the first glimpse of dawn, and the joy this releases in our lives can detonate an extraordinary and unstoppable momentum of activity. At this point, it the devil cannot stop you any longer, he will try to push you over the edge. He will immerse you in powerless activity (which will doubtless generate a great deal of excitement for a while). But you will be proceeding in your own strength and not in the power of the Holy Spirit.
“We take the word of God, and the promise of God, and seek to execute it without the power and presence of God.”
And so another reason why we can miss the moment is that we try to do God’s will in our own way. We fail to pray. We lose our sense of dependency upon him. We take the word of God, and the promise of God, and seek to execute it without the power and presence of God. I don’t doubt that the apostles could have started an extraordinary localised renewal sect within Judaism in their own strength, based upon the teachings and the commission of Jesus. But never in 2,000 years could that have become what the church is today. It was essential that they waited and prayed for the power of the Holy Spirit to begin the work of God in his own way and time.
The confusion of obstacles
And then of course, when the power of God was released, the church was born, and the kingdom of God began to advance, the ebb and flow is marked: the explosion of the church on the day of Pentecost is quickly countered with fierce persecution and threats to stop proclaiming the gospel. Once again they push into prayer and we are told that the room in which they were meeting shook and the gospel advanced.
Another season of fierce persecution drove Christians around the Roman world (diaspora) and so once again through suffering and heartbreak the gospel advances and spreads. The sea of faith that has withdrawn advances in new ways. Prior to the Wesleyan Awakening there were fewer than 5 christian MPs in the House of Commons and it is said that one struggled to find a church in London that was preaching the bible. Drunkenness was endemic. Poverty associated with the exploding Industrial Revolution was crippling the masses, helping to spark a revolution in France. The sea of faith was at its lowest ebb and then John and Charles Wesley with George Whitfield and others turned to prayer on the 31st December 1738 and the sea of faith advanced once again.
20th century
At the end of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century there was such an extraordinary outpouring of the Holy Spirit around the world (Azuza Street in Los Angeles, the Welsh revival, Mukti school in India, revival movements in Scandinavia etc) that John Mott, the leader of the YMCA and a future Nobel Prize winner, could coin the slogan “the evangelisation of the world in our generation”. In that first decade of the 20th century the key western nations at the heart of this great outpouring met in Edinburgh to conspire strategically for how they could fulfil the Great Commission by taking the gospel to every unreached people group on earth. Those 3 nations were America, Germany, and the UK. And yet within 10 years these were precisely the nations hellbent on destroying one another in the first of two world wars.
“Countless souls saved in the Welsh valleys at the turn of the 20th century bled and died in the trenches of France”
The Satanic opposition to their great ambition which threatened to usher in the return of Christ and his final destruction was not just spiritual but brutally and terrifyingly bloody. Countless souls saved in the Welsh valleys at the turn of the 20th century bled and died in the trenches of France.
And so the tide went out. It’s arguable that Europe has still not properly recovered from the agony of those wounds.
But then the tide began to come in again with the outpouring of the spirit in the charismatic and Pentecostal movements of the last 50 years which are almost certainly the greatest outpouring of the spirit the world has ever seen resulting in Assemblies of God: the fastest growing network of churches on earth planting a new church every second, the profound renewal through the power of the Holy Spirit in the Catholic church, made manifest in Vatican 2, bringing hundreds of thousands of Catholics into personal relationship with Jesus Christ and a love for scripture. A broader new outpouring of worship, countless new ministries in churches.
But then post-modernism and secular humanism rose to ascendency and took control of many of the western institutions of power, particularly the media which rose to ascendency over the other traditional sources of cultural influence (government, education, family etc) thinking people were atheists. Christian values were openly mocked and even legislated against. Scandal after scandal wracked the church and rocked wider society. The sea of faith seemed to have gone out. But then things began to shift, it seems, once again. New Atheists were discredited. The mess of the myth of a secular humanist society became increasingly evident in a loss of all absolutes, and an epistemological crisis resulting from the loss of ones own foundations. Much to the gall of secular commentators, religious belief only seemed to be growing stronger.
“Scandal after scandal wracked the church and rocked wider society. The sea of faith seemed to have gone out. But then things ”
And of course as I say these things I am conscious that voice in myself, a voice in all of us, thinks “yes but ….” It is such early days. This might be nothing. Do I dare to hope again? This is hardly the revival I had imagined or anticipated?
And so the challenge comes to each one of us: to hold the baby and say “behold the consolation of Israel”. Hear the great commission and hide oneself in the place of prayer. To look into hell itself and say here, in the death of everything I believed, at the moment where the tide is furthest from the shore, here in this moment and this way I perceive the promises of God to come.
“To believe not in nothing but in the tiny something that is not yet the everything for which we long”
In other words, it’s contingent upon us as people of faith to respond to this cultural moment with faith. To believe not in nothing but in the tiny something that is not yet the everything for which we long. To identify the small sparks of God’s favour and pour petrol upon them in prayer. To note the slowing of the “melancholy, long, withdrawing” sea of faith and perceive within it, the promise of a changing of the tide in our time.
This is what faith has always done. Indeed, it is the very essence of faith. Faith is fuelled less by facts than by possibilities. As Jon Tyson says, there really are only two choices: to manage decline in the western church, or to allow discontent to crystallize into a passion for renewal, renaissance and … yes I’m going to use the world, revival.
It begins of course with the fires of faith being ignited once more in each one of us. From there it must spread into the church of Jesus Christ (beginning with repentance and prayer) for “judgement begins with the house of the Lord”. And once the fire is burning within the church there is a certain inevitability that it will spread from there into wider society. Renewal becomes revival and turns into an awakening worthy of our Wesleyan heritage, that can truly transform society, restore politics and civic institutions, rebuild family and the fundamentals of societal cohesion, bring reconciliation between the races, the socio economic polarities, and can result in justice to the poor.
