As I
write, my devotional readings have taken me to the book of Jeremiah, in the Old
Testament. When I read and listen to this prophet, I am struck by the
determination of God, expressed by the prophet, to bring His people through a
process of refining, leading to renewal and restoration. I am struck, too, at
the apparent intransigence of a people mired in sin, and the urgent call of God
that they should repent, turn back to God. What is repentance? And why is it
something we do not often speak much about, in contemporary Christian circles?
Repentance
is a two-edged sword: that is one reason we find it hard to handle. It involves
both a turning away from and a turning towards. Turning away from sin and
practices that displease God. Turning towards God, pursuing righteousness and
justice and practices that please God. Which comes first? The question can
sound like ‘the chicken and the egg’ conundrum. Yet repentance is a necessary
precursor to faith: that to suggest that faith could or should precede
repentance is to misunderstand the meaning of faith, in a New Testament sense.
Faith, in the way it is sometimes spoken of it, can be emptied of its meaning.
It is not a proof of faith, for example, that a person believes or accepts that
there is a God who is the Creator: even demons believe this (James 2.19).
Nor, it would appear from Holy Scripture, is it a proof of Christian faith that
a person recognises that Jesus Christ died for our sins: the call to Christian
faith, in the New Testament, is that we should confess Jesus Christ as Lord (Romans
10.9). Christian Faith, we would contend, involves an investment of
ourselves in the substance of that faith: Jesus Christ. We shall see more of
this in the next section.
The
Gospel narratives of the New Testament leave us in little doubt as to their
prioritisation of repentance. John the Baptist prepares the way for the Messiah
through preaching a message where, announcing that the Kingdom of God was
arriving on Earth, repentance was necessary and called for: a turning back to
God in renouncing practices that are contrary to the express will of God (Luke
3.10-14), to produce fruit that are in keeping with repentance (Matthew
3.8). The baptism that John baptised people with was one that
acknowledged this repentance: John understood that the baptism that the Christ
would bring was a subsequent one, a baptism ‘with the Holy Spirit and with
fire’ (Matthew 3.11; Luke 3.16).
At the beginnings of Jesus’ own ministry His
declaration, concerning the immanent arrival and manifestation of the Kingdom
of God, was accompanied by a call to repentance (Mark 1.15). Later, in
the New Testament Epistles, the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews would
identify the call to repentance as foundational to the Christian message (Hebrew
6.1), as the Apostle Paul did, in giving account of his preaching (Acts
20.21).
What
does this tell us about repentance? Repentance is not simply expressed through
a private attitude of the heart: it involves turning away from and renouncing
practices that are displeasing to God. Why might this prove to be a challenge
or a problem for us, today? I would suggest that there are two reasons.
The
first reason is a continuing belief in ‘decisionism’, the contention that
simply ‘by believing’, a person can become a Christian: that what is involved
is basically a change of attitude or inner persuasion. It fits well with a
belief in the ability of each and every person to freely choose their identity
and ideology; and with societies and cultures that view wider society as being
constituted as the sum total of the individual, separated people that come
together to constitute it. This, in itself, betrays the crisis of so much
contemporary culture: the conviction that society exists only in so far as
individuals choose to identify with it and be part of it.
A
second reason follows from this. Our Declaration of Principle’s insistence on a
call to repentance challenges the way we understand the constitution of a
healthy and robust society. The Biblical vision is that a healthy society is
made up of communities of conviction; and that the Christian life has a pattern
of practices, that indicate and arise from our convictions. Some of these
practices are grounded, not in transient cultures and contexts, but in the
essential substance of Christian identity that arises out of the humanity of
Jesus Christ. That these practices might differ from and contrast to the
dominant or politically promoted practices, found in the wider society around
us, is not our immediate concern. What matters is that we understand that
practices are indicative of convictions; and that convictions constitute
communities. Without communities of conviction, with recognised practices and
norms, there can be no stable society.
The
priority that lies, in the call to repentance, concerns this need to constitute
communities of conviction, wherein we demonstrate and model what it means to be
part of a society that honours and worships our God and Saviour, the Lord Jesus
Christ. We lose our sense of the need for repentance when we lose our vision of
salvation as being that which God effects for His people: a faithful society, made up of people as
constitutive parts, rather than viewed as the simply the sum of individuals who
believe. It is possible for contemporary church to fail in preparing people for
faith, through repentance, when sight is lost and our focus is moved from an
understanding of Christianity’s community nature. The call to repentance is to
build church as a society of believers who share convictions, regarding the
revealed will of God, demonstrated through practices that are consonant with
the authority of Jesus Christ, expressed through the testimony of the Holy
Scriptures and the leading of the Holy Spirit, as discerned by the community of
the church.
Questions
for reflection:
·
What has ‘repentance’ caused you to turn
away from? What has it caused you to turn towards?
·
In what ways can we encourage people to move
from their first ‘decision’ to believe, to living as a ‘disciple’?
·
How important is church, as community, to
you? How could it be better?
