Here I was sitting in a tent on a Saturday night. Perhaps in
and of itself not that odd I’ll grant. But it was a rather large tent, holding
about two-thousand people. Fair enough, not unknown in the summer, even in the
UK. After all, there seem to be more and more festivals popping up all the
time, many of them involving tents. But
here we were on the cusp of the third decade of the twenty-first century,
thinking about words written in the first century; seeing in those words
something of relevance to the present day (and indeed the future). Nor was this
a gathering of crusty old enthusiasts, a wistful looking back by a bunch of old
hobbyists to a bygone and much missed era. No, this was about now. Finding in
those words direction for living now, with an orientation towards an event yet
to come. Much about this is really quite odd in today’s terms.
The event was of course the first evening session of the
middle week of the Keswick Convention. Since 1875, Christians from a variety of
denominational backgrounds have met in Keswick to hear Bible teaching. The
speakers too have always been drawn from a range of backgrounds. However, at
its heart has been the conviction that the Living God speaks through a book
(the Bible), and so the “Bible Readings” (daily Bible-based talks often
covering a single book or section of the Bible) are one of the main aspects of the convention.
Even among Bible-believing Christians, Keswick has not been
without its critics. In the early days, in the late 19th Century, it
was treated with suspicion by some evangelical leaders. More recently criticism
has come from the “reformed” end of the evangelical spectrum (eg see this from
Kevin DeYoung). Much of this will seem overblown to your average convention
goer today, who is happy to listen to a range of Bible teachers who take
Scripture seriously and want to explain it simply. What’s odd is that this is
still going on at all.
The culture around us is in a state of continual flux.
Different movements and ideas wax and wane. On one reading of history, Christianity
has been in terminal decline, at least in Western Europe, for a while. That of
course was part of the great modernist project. Religion in general, and
Christianity in particular belonged to humanity’s adolescence. With the arrival
of the enlightenment and the achievements of science, it was time to grow up
and move on. Poor modernism. It’s death was declared by the post-modernists. Then
it transpired that postmodernism was a bit of a dead end, and it went into
decline. In the religious sphere there was the rise of the “new” atheists. But
even their demise has been announced (although they may be unaware of this).
I first came to Keswick when I was a student. Back in 1985 (34
years ago!) a bunch of us were here when Eric Alexander taught at the Bible
readings on 1 Corinthians (I still have the book somewhere). I was back last
year to hear Chris Wright on Micah. In the world I grew up in as a student,
Christians in general were to be tolerated, and the Bible-believing fundamentalist
sort were to be pitied. But thousands of the latter type gathered at Keswick
every summer. The culture in the UK has moved on. Those pesky fundamentalists
are still around, but now they have to be kept out of the public square, or
maligned in the cyberworld, because of their dangerous multiphobic views. But
here we were in Lake District, in July, listening in a tent, on a Saturday
night, to prescient warnings about such circumstances, written originally by a
guy called Peter in the first century.
This would all strike the average person as odd if it struck them
at all. After all,unless you knew about the Keswick convention, you wouldn’t know about
it! But think about it. The Bible is a book that has been maligned, slandered,
criticised, censored, banned, misinterpreted, mistranslated and mishandled for
as long as it has been around. Yet, somehow, it remains potent. I suppose you
could try to make the same observation about the Quran (although it’s a
relatively youthful 1400 years old) or the Communist Manifesto (somewhat out of
fashion currently). And there are other books and scriptures that have their
adherents. I don’t find those alternatives persuasive. I do find the Bible
persuasive. It presents a coherent account properly understood of the God who
is there, of His rescue mission to and for humanity, and of the demands He has
on my life now. In my own local Church (Bridge Chapel in South Liverpool), its
message struck a couple of individuals last Sunday with such force and vitality
that the direction of their lives has been altered. They are different to me,
with different backgrounds and personalities, yet somehow the message of the
Bible spoke to them the same way it speaks to me. And now we now share in the same central relationship, and
the same living hope that here in Keswick we were considering last night, from
the first letter of Peter to a bunch of first century, first generation
Christians, that he called exiles.
The people Peter wrote to were seen as odd. In their own day some called them “evildoers” (1 Pet 2:12) and they were
slandered (1 Pet 3:16) and maligned (1 Pet 4:4). In contemporary non-Christian and anti-Christian writings, they were called everything from cannibals to subversives to atheists! You’ll find examples of
similar things (and worse) in the Twittersphere and on the interweb. Perhaps soon we'll find the same types of charges being made against us in the non-virtual, non-cyber world. But
then Jesus was seen as odd, very odd. I’m happy to share that oddness, and was happy to
think about it last night in a tent at Keswick.
Which is, when you think about
it, a bit odd.
Unless it isn’t.
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