Our Context for Gospel Growth
Understanding the context in which we want to see the gospel grow is essential if we want people to hear and understand what it is we are actually saying. This is not to diminish at all the authority of Scripture to do God’s miraculous work in the hearts of men and women today. However too often churches and especially paid Christian workers can hide behind the doctrine of Scripture’s authority and use it as an excuse for laziness, not to think critically about the culture in which God has placed us. We need to know our culture if we are to challenge the nation of Ireland in its sinfulness and also if we are to encourage men and women to pursue lives that actually do please God.
This raises a whole host of issues for any responsible church to think through. But I want to get the ball rolling by pointing out something that was brought to my attention 3 years past this coming March. It was from an article in Magill Magazine, which commented on Ireland’s political and cultural life at the time. In the March 2007 edition, Malachi O’Doherty wrote a perceptive piece entitled, ‘Losing our Religion?’ and in it he asks the searching question as to whether the Irish ever had it in the first place. In the light of the recent revelations detailing the sexual abuse scandals carried out by religious orders O’Doherty’s article is given substantially more weight.
O’Doherty’s context is that he is writing at the height of the Celtic Tiger. Materially things had never been better for Ireland and most warnings of the bubble bursting were muted. In that light he asks, ‘If we were as religious as we thought we were, how come we suffered no particular cultural and moral trauma when religion went into decline, when the seminaries closed, the priests aged and the Christian Brothers and nuns mostly left and got married?’ He writes, ‘Maybe we weren’t very religious at all.’
Of course there is no denying the interest that Pope John Paul II’s visit had upon the nation in 1979, but O’Doherty does not give that much weight, in terms of deciding whether the nation as a whole was devoutly Catholic or not. Instead he turns to literature and art and compares Ireland with other nations that are traditionally religiously based. ‘Genuinely devout cultures like those of India and Pakistan throw up artists who excel in the expression of religious devotion…The Hindu culture produced, for instance, Rabindranath Tagore, whose devotional poetry moved Yeats.’ In these cultures the artistic expression captures the true sense of where a culture’s attitudes to God really lie, and by and large in most cases their works are exultant celebrations of the love of God, but where is the Irish equivalent asks O’Doherty. He comments, ‘Whenever an Irish writer depicted a priest, it was always from the humanistic perspective which either pitied him for his misfortune (The Sisters’, James Joyce) or admired for his uncharacteristic wisdom (‘My Oedipus Complex’, Frank O’Connor). It is hard to think of a single short story, novel or play which empathises with the priest as the devotee of God or treats religious devotion as an adequate response to human circumstance.’
In O’Doherty’s estimation then the Irish were never all that religious anyway. We may have celebrated crossing over from a censorious, religious past to a more modern and secular present when the Tiger roared, but according to O’Doherty nothing fundamentally changed.
