Well as usual what connotations a word carries for you can have a big impact on your understanding. At baptist assembly last week we had an interesting incidence of one speaker passionately pleading with us to be relevant while the following one (who had just arrived) denounced the pursuit of relevance. It felt a bit awkward. Actually they were both calling for the same thing, but for one relevance was a cipher for what was needed, for the other a cipher for what was detrimental.
Myk’s 3rd point is surely for the integration of idea, spirituality and praxis. Good relevance comes from a solid, thoughtful and habitual connection of truth and love to real life. Bad relevance comes from an unthinking and instinctive reaction to what is happening in the world that short circuits theological reflection and just goes with “what works” by criteria that are more defined by our human needs than the gospel.
Likewise Rob, surely Myk is not intending orthodoxy to stand for the shallow and aggressive modernist conservatism that so often gets called evangelicalism or fundamentalism, but the 2,000 year old tradition of classical christianity with all its depth, breadth and diversity? Again orthodoxy can be a good word or a bad word depending on what it connotes for you. when it is a mechanism for control and the angry agendas of the white male american who is losing his grip on society it is bad, when it represents the faith handed down to us by the saints – what’s not to like?
