[Vision2020] Text of New Saint Andrews Commencement Address, 2003

[Douglas Stambler]

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The Christian Extremist
An address by Dr. Rob Rayburn, Senior Pastor, Faith Presbyterian Church (PCA), Tacoma, Washington, at New Saint Andrews College's Sixth Commencment


May 14, 2003, Logos Field House, Moscow, Idaho

Graduates, members of the College administration and faculty, honored guests,

I am well aware that someone might doubt the wisdom of speaking in praise of extremism to an assembly gathered in Northern Idaho, but that is what I propose to do. This part of the country, as you know, has a reputation for a certain kind of extremism, whether deserved or not, is not for me to say. But, the extremism I want to recommend to you is, of course, of a very different type than that of the modern recluse who creates a fortress for himself in some thick forest. And that, to be sure, raises the all important question. What do we mean, what does anyone mean, when we call someone an extremist? And can the term be applied positively? It is generally a pejorative term in our own usage as well as the usage of our culture. Can it be a good thing to be an extremist?

There are a number of important voices being raised nowadays in our culture decrying extremism of any and all kinds, but, in particular extremism of the religious type. It is that sort of extremism that worries such commentators most of all. And, insofar as this is a deeply religious audience, the notion that you should be extreme in your views and your living is a matter of deep concern in certain influential circles of our culture. But, these people do not hide the fact that by “extremism” they mean simply believing certain things to be absolutely true and living in faithfulness to one’s convictions. Shortly after 9-11 Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor, Darwinist pit bull, and modern champion of popular atheism, argued in the British press that the root cause of the kind of fanaticism that caused the havoc in New York and Washington was religious conviction, and, in particular, a firm belief in life after death. That is what turns an ordinary person into a self-guided miss!
 ile
 capable of committing such horrible acts. [Phillip Johnson, The Right Questions, 108-109] For Dawkins, strong-minded and deeply committed evangelical Christians are dangerous in the same way and for the same reason that the militant Muslims are who brought down the World Trade Center. The root of the problem is religious belief taken seriously. That is what he means by extremism and he does not see how such extremism cannot but lead inexorably to catastrophes of the type we have witnessed recently.

The same view has been widely circulated in the United States by Richard Rorty, one of the most consequential of American philosophers and perhaps the most influential champion of the modern philosophical project known as post-modernism. Rorty’s is post-modernism with a human face. He means to do good with his post-modernism. It is, if you will, a gospel and, in fact, a gospel of peace.

According to Rorty, our culture is faced with a single alternative. We must make a choice between truth and community, between objectivity and solidarity. He means that real community, human beings living peacefully together, human society enjoying tranquillity cannot co-exist with the notion that there is one truth, valid for everyone, and that those who have found that truth are right and those who have not are wrong. Social harmony cannot survive the notion that objective standards of truth and goodness divide mankind into intellectual and moral haves and have-nots. The worst kind of extremism, therefore, according to Rorty, is the extremism represented in this room, a room full of Christians of the historic type, who believe that there is one truth and that it lies behind us in one name, one person, one event, and that it has been preserved in one book. In any case, both of these secular commentators concede that extremism means nothing else to them but taking ideas very
 seriously. No Christian can thus object to extremism. It is characteristic of all the biblical heroes and of the Lord Jesus himself. He lived a very difficult life, he suffered all manner of ignominy, and finally went to the cruelest imaginable death for the sake of his convictions, what he knew to be true and right and good. And so have countless multitudes who have loved and served him in the world.

There are many things to say in response to Dawkins and to Rorty. It is a painfully simplistic and shallow vision of the world that they provide. Neither of them seems to be able to see that they are as extreme and judgmental in holding their convictions as are those whose convictions they condemn. Read Dawkins vituperation against religious believers and doubters of evolution, or read Rorty liken the sexual ethics of biblically minded Christians to that of the Nazis and it becomes painfully clear that one man’s extremism is another man’s common sense. One pundit has wondered aloud if Dawkins or Rorty, virulent as their criticism of religious believers has been, might be willing to sacrifice their own lives in an act of violence if either were convinced that such an act were necessary to save science or philosophy from being taken over by religious fundamentalists! [Johnson, 109] Surely, what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

What is more, much more grief has been visited upon the earth over the past century by extremisms of the secular kind than those that are explicitly religious, but neither Dawkins nor Rorty worry over much about secular ideology running amok. Still more, while it is incontestably true that a man or woman whose beliefs are more important to him or to her than life itself is far more dangerous than a person who holds no convictions deeply or intelligently or seriously, convictions so deeply held have been the glory and the honor of mankind and everyone knows it. People who care for nothing for which they would risk their lives are perhaps no threat to social peace, but then they inspire no one either, they are unlikely to improve the lives of others, and they are very definitely never going to make those costly sacrifices that human history repeatedly shows are necessary to better, to ennoble, and to protect what is worthy in the life of human beings. [Johnson, 109]

The fact of the matter is that if it were deep convictions of faith, duty, and sacrifice that motivated the 9-11 terrorists, I don’t say that it were, but if it were, it is very similar convictions that compel a fireman to reenter a burning building in search of the living, a father to work long hours to provide for his family, a soldier to risk his life to bring aid to a wounded comrade, or a citizen to stand up for justice and incur the wrath of a corrupt regime. When we condemn the one act and applaud the others we are admitting that the problem is not conviction itself, but wrong convictions and the need is not for tepid faith, but for people to have right beliefs.

And this, it seems to me, leads us to consider what a proper kind of Christian extremism consists of. If extremism in common parlance, in the final analysis, is only the consistent practice of deep conviction, surely Christians must be among the most extreme people in the world. But, we are all well enough acquainted with religious extremism, even of the so-called evangelical Christian type, that disgusts us as surely as it does a Richard Dawkins or Richard Rorty. We know all too well that for some who trumpet their Christian conviction true loyalty to God and Christ takes the form of strict racial separation or world flight, reading only the King James Version of the Bible or forbidding women to wear trousers.

And, perhaps personally, we are better acquainted with a well known type of evangelical Christian whose extremism, whose strongly held and faithfully practiced conviction is more Bible-based but still repugnant in its tenor and spirit. These Christians tend to beat a single drum and as loudly as they can. These believers never tire of pointing out what they perceive to be the failures of other Christians, of ringing the changes on their favorite parts of the Bible’s teaching, often the hardest parts of its teaching. It matters little if the single note being sounded is gender differentiation or the equality of the sexes, teetotalism or Christian liberty, divine sovereignty or the liberty of the will, one eschatological position or another, the constant pounding gives everyone a headache. We are perhaps in little danger from such people, but our holy faith is not adorned by them either. It is not for nothing that extremism is generally regarded as a bad thing!

But it is ours to restore its good press. Christianity is a faith of extremes. As G.K. Chesterton put it, “Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites by keeping them both and keeping them both furious.” It requires us to believe things not only profoundly offensive to the unrenewed human mind and heart – and thus requires deep conviction on our part – but breathtaking in their implications – and so requires also a decidedly theological living that must set us apart from our culture and its ethos.

But there is a wholeness to this living out of Christian conviction, a humanity, even a beauty capable of surprising even the most hardened unbeliever. And it is to this godly extremism that I wish to summon you graduates today. The challenge for you, I believe, will not be that you are too extreme, but that you are not extreme enough. And your failure will likely be that you are extreme at only certain points and not at all of them. What I summon you to today is a life of comprehensive extremism. Let me tell you what I mean.

The Bible, to be sure is an intolerant book. It brooks no opposition, it refuses to pander to the spirit of any age. It is the very Word of the living God. It demands, and rightly, our belief and our obedience and that absolutely. God reserves his favor for those human beings who tremble at his Word. But, in the teaching and preaching of its message, notice how large-hearted and tolerant the Bible is, how forgiving of doubt, how eager to help its hearers understand, to remove the obstacles in the way of their belief in its message.

The Apostle Paul was a man who had no doubt of the authority and the truthfulness of the Bible, but he himself says that he availed himself of every opportunity to gain a sympathetic hearing for its message. He was even willing, and surely this surprises us, to be thought to agree with people whom he knew to embrace theological error, so as not to put a stumbling block in the way of their hearing him explain the gospel of God. Paul was anyone’s doormat with regard to matters on which it was at all possible to be flexible so that he might win a hearing for Christ.

Surely that is a striking juxtaposition of extremisms: a book that demands our absolute submission yet, at the same time, teaches us to bend over backwards to gain a sympathetic hearing for its message. A book that brooks no opposition and yet makes every concession to its opposers for the sake of winning their hearts. Our world is full of those who will bend over backward to win the approval of others and full of people who demand absolute submission to a message, but how few are there who love the unbeliever and the message with a similar passion and are willing to make any personal sacrifice to secure a willing and heart-felt acceptance of the message by others.

Or, consider this. No Christian can deny that eternal life and death are at stake in the matter of faith in Jesus Christ. That exclusivism is part and parcel of the Bible’s message. One must believe in Jesus and follow him to live forever. However impolitic to say it nowadays, however distasteful to the modern mind the notion that there is but one way to heaven and one name by which men must be saved, to deny this for the sake of a seemingly wider and more charitable Christianity is to betray the Lord with a kiss. You must hold fast to Jesus Christ as the only name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved. Many people will think you intolerably extreme for holding such a view, so narrow, so exclusive, so discriminatory.

But, be extreme in another way as well. Take every opportunity also to say that the Lord does not desire the death of the wicked but that all men come to repentance and the knowledge of the truth. Speak of the Lord’s sorrow over man’s rebellion – even his broken heart, for so the Bible speaks – and then speak with your own sorrow of those who are lost in unbelief. Do not content yourself until you can say as Paul did that you wish yourself accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of the unbelievers you know. Nothing is so likely to adorn and render impressive the truth of solo Christo, salvation by Christ alone, as Christians who so evidently carry in their hearts the burden of the world’s unbelief and who are plainly willing to move heaven and earth if only a man or a woman will believe in Jesus and be saved.

Or, consider what is now virtually unmentionable in polite culture: the very real prospect of damnation, guaranteed by the voice of the Son of God himself. If ever there was a doctrine uncongenial to an age and a culture it is the doctrine of hell in the Western world of our time. Anyone seriously determined to proclaim and live by its reality will be considered an extremist of the worst sort. But followers of Jesus Christ can hardly afford to part company with their Master at such a fundamental point of his teaching and motive of his living and loving.

Still, how differently that extreme conviction will appear if next to it in the same life one sees the deepest sympathy for those whose hell has already begun in this world. Is it not a striking thing that it was the Son of God, who said so much about hell and spoke so uncompromisingly about it and was so obviously solemnized himself by the prospect of it, nevertheless struck people as so eminently approachable, sympathetic, understanding of the human condition, and always sensitive to the temporal wants and needs of people? Is it not striking that the man who saw hell more clearly and feared it more terribly than anyone ever has, was the man who literally exhausted himself for the sake of the salvation of others and who emanated a tender-heartedness and fellow feeling that continues to draw the needy to him even across the ages? Why is it, but for this other extremism in his life, this extremity of humanity, that so many are attracted to him who nevertheless repudiate his m!
 essage?

Richard Rorty thinks it actually impossible at one and the same time to live a life of self-sacrificial love, a life that blesses others and draws them into peaceful fellowship, and live in submission to an objective truth you believe is rejected by others only at the cost of their eternal life. He is sure that the one is the death of the other. I say to you, graduates, that your summons, your task in life, in obedience and in conformity to your Lord and Master Jesus Christ is to prove Richard Rorty wrong. And you do that by living extremely; by living a life that is both and always an extremism of truth and an extremism of love.







 



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<EM>The Christian Extremist<BR></EM>
<H2>An address by Dr. Rob Rayburn, Senior Pastor, Faith Presbyterian Church (PCA), Tacoma, Washington, at New Saint Andrews College's Sixth Commencment<BR><BR></H2>
<P><B><I>May 14, 2003, Logos Field House, Moscow, Idaho</I></B><BR><BR>Graduates, members of the College administration and faculty, honored guests,<BR><BR>I am well aware that someone might doubt the wisdom of speaking in praise of extremism to an assembly gathered in Northern Idaho, but that is what I propose to do. This part of the country, as you know, has a reputation for a certain kind of extremism, whether deserved or not, is not for me to say. But, the extremism I want to recommend to you is, of course, of a very different type than that of the modern recluse who creates a fortress for himself in some thick forest. And that, to be sure, raises the all important question. What do we mean, what does anyone mean, when we call someone an extremist? And can the term be applied positively? It is generally a pejorative term in our own usage as well as the usage of our culture. Can it be a good thing to be an extremist?<BR><BR>There are a number of important voices being rai!
 sed
 nowadays in our culture decrying extremism of any and all kinds, but, in particular extremism of the religious type. It is that sort of extremism that worries such commentators most of all. And, insofar as this is a deeply religious audience, the notion that you should be extreme in your views and your living is a matter of deep concern in certain influential circles of our culture. But, these people do not hide the fact that by “extremism” they mean simply believing certain things to be absolutely true and living in faithfulness to one’s convictions. Shortly after 9-11 Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor, Darwinist pit bull, and modern champion of popular atheism, argued in the British press that the root cause of the kind of fanaticism that caused the havoc in New York and Washington was religious conviction, and, in particular, a firm belief in life after death. That is what turns an ordinary person into a self-guided missile capable of committing such horrible acts. [Phil!
 lip
 Johnson, The Right Questions, 108-109] For Dawkins, strong-minded and deeply committed evangelical Christians are dangerous in the same way and for the same reason that the militant Muslims are who brought down the World Trade Center. The root of the problem is religious belief taken seriously. That is what he means by extremism and he does not see how such extremism cannot but lead inexorably to catastrophes of the type we have witnessed recently.<BR><BR>The same view has been widely circulated in the United States by Richard Rorty, one of the most consequential of American philosophers and perhaps the most influential champion of the modern philosophical project known as post-modernism. Rorty’s is post-modernism with a human face. He means to do good with his post-modernism. It is, if you will, a gospel and, in fact, a gospel of peace.<BR><BR>According to Rorty, our culture is faced with a single alternative. We must make a choice between truth and community, between obje!
 ctivity
 and solidarity. He means that real community, human beings living peacefully together, human society enjoying tranquillity cannot co-exist with the notion that there is one truth, valid for everyone, and that those who have found that truth are right and those who have not are wrong. Social harmony cannot survive the notion that objective standards of truth and goodness divide mankind into intellectual and moral haves and have-nots. The worst kind of extremism, therefore, according to Rorty, is the extremism represented in this room, a room full of Christians of the historic type, who believe that there is one truth and that it lies behind us in one name, one person, one event, and that it has been preserved in one book. In any case, both of these secular commentators concede that extremism means nothing else to them but taking ideas very seriously. No Christian can thus object to extremism. It is characteristic of all the biblical heroes and of the Lord Jesus himself. He l!
 ived a
 very difficult life, he suffered all manner of ignominy, and finally went to the cruelest imaginable death for the sake of his convictions, what he knew to be true and right and good. And so have countless multitudes who have loved and served him in the world.<BR><BR>There are many things to say in response to Dawkins and to Rorty. It is a painfully simplistic and shallow vision of the world that they provide. Neither of them seems to be able to see that they are as extreme and judgmental in holding their convictions as are those whose convictions they condemn. Read Dawkins vituperation against religious believers and doubters of evolution, or read Rorty liken the sexual ethics of biblically minded Christians to that of the Nazis and it becomes painfully clear that one man’s extremism is another man’s common sense. One pundit has wondered aloud if Dawkins or Rorty, virulent as their criticism of religious believers has been, might be willing to sacrifice their own lives in !
 an act of
 violence if either were convinced that such an act were necessary to save science or philosophy from being taken over by religious fundamentalists! [Johnson, 109] Surely, what is good for the goose is good for the gander.<BR><BR>What is more, much more grief has been visited upon the earth over the past century by extremisms of the secular kind than those that are explicitly religious, but neither Dawkins nor Rorty worry over much about secular ideology running amok. Still more, while it is incontestably true that a man or woman whose beliefs are more important to him or to her than life itself is far more dangerous than a person who holds no convictions deeply or intelligently or seriously, convictions so deeply held have been the glory and the honor of mankind and everyone knows it. People who care for nothing for which they would risk their lives are perhaps no threat to social peace, but then they inspire no one either, they are unlikely to improve the lives of others, !
 and they
 are very definitely never going to make those costly sacrifices that human history repeatedly shows are necessary to better, to ennoble, and to protect what is worthy in the life of human beings. [Johnson, 109]<BR><BR>The fact of the matter is that if it were deep convictions of faith, duty, and sacrifice that motivated the 9-11 terrorists, I don’t say that it were, but if it were, it is very similar convictions that compel a fireman to reenter a burning building in search of the living, a father to work long hours to provide for his family, a soldier to risk his life to bring aid to a wounded comrade, or a citizen to stand up for justice and incur the wrath of a corrupt regime. When we condemn the one act and applaud the others we are admitting that the problem is not conviction itself, but wrong convictions and the need is not for tepid faith, but for people to have right beliefs.<BR><BR>And this, it seems to me, leads us to consider what a proper kind of Christian extrem!
 ism
 consists of. If extremism in common parlance, in the final analysis, is only the consistent practice of deep conviction, surely Christians must be among the most extreme people in the world. But, we are all well enough acquainted with religious extremism, even of the so-called evangelical Christian type, that disgusts us as surely as it does a Richard Dawkins or Richard Rorty. We know all too well that for some who trumpet their Christian conviction true loyalty to God and Christ takes the form of strict racial separation or world flight, reading only the King James Version of the Bible or forbidding women to wear trousers.<BR><BR>And, perhaps personally, we are better acquainted with a well known type of evangelical Christian whose extremism, whose strongly held and faithfully practiced conviction is more Bible-based but still repugnant in its tenor and spirit. These Christians tend to beat a single drum and as loudly as they can. These believers never tire of pointing out!
  what
 they perceive to be the failures of other Christians, of ringing the changes on their favorite parts of the Bible’s teaching, often the hardest parts of its teaching. It matters little if the single note being sounded is gender differentiation or the equality of the sexes, teetotalism or Christian liberty, divine sovereignty or the liberty of the will, one eschatological position or another, the constant pounding gives everyone a headache. We are perhaps in little danger from such people, but our holy faith is not adorned by them either. It is not for nothing that extremism is generally regarded as a bad thing!<BR><BR>But it is ours to restore its good press. Christianity is a faith of extremes. As G.K. Chesterton put it, “Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites by keeping them both and keeping them both furious.” It requires us to believe things not only profoundly offensive to the unrenewed human mind and heart – and thus requires deep convicti!
 on on our
 part – but breathtaking in their implications – and so requires also a decidedly theological living that must set us apart from our culture and its ethos.<BR><BR>But there is a wholeness to this living out of Christian conviction, a humanity, even a beauty capable of surprising even the most hardened unbeliever. And it is to this godly extremism that I wish to summon you graduates today. The challenge for you, I believe, will not be that you are too extreme, but that you are not extreme enough. And your failure will likely be that you are extreme at only certain points and not at all of them. What I summon you to today is a life of comprehensive extremism. Let me tell you what I mean.<BR><BR>The Bible, to be sure is an intolerant book. It brooks no opposition, it refuses to pander to the spirit of any age. It is the very Word of the living God. It demands, and rightly, our belief and our obedience and that absolutely. God reserves his favor for those human beings who trembl!
 e at his
 Word. But, in the teaching and preaching of its message, notice how large-hearted and tolerant the Bible is, how forgiving of doubt, how eager to help its hearers understand, to remove the obstacles in the way of their belief in its message.<BR><BR>The Apostle Paul was a man who had no doubt of the authority and the truthfulness of the Bible, but he himself says that he availed himself of every opportunity to gain a sympathetic hearing for its message. He was even willing, and surely this surprises us, to be thought to agree with people whom he knew to embrace theological error, so as not to put a stumbling block in the way of their hearing him explain the gospel of God. Paul was anyone’s doormat with regard to matters on which it was at all possible to be flexible so that he might win a hearing for Christ.<BR><BR>Surely that is a striking juxtaposition of extremisms: a book that demands our absolute submission yet, at the same time, teaches us to bend over backwards to gai!
 n a
 sympathetic hearing for its message. A book that brooks no opposition and yet makes every concession to its opposers for the sake of winning their hearts. Our world is full of those who will bend over backward to win the approval of others and full of people who demand absolute submission to a message, but how few are there who love the unbeliever and the message with a similar passion and are willing to make any personal sacrifice to secure a willing and heart-felt acceptance of the message by others.<BR><BR>Or, consider this. No Christian can deny that eternal life and death are at stake in the matter of faith in Jesus Christ. That exclusivism is part and parcel of the Bible’s message. One must believe in Jesus and follow him to live forever. However impolitic to say it nowadays, however distasteful to the modern mind the notion that there is but one way to heaven and one name by which men must be saved, to deny this for the sake of a seemingly wider and more charitable
 Christianity is to betray the Lord with a kiss. You must hold fast to Jesus Christ as the only name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved. Many people will think you intolerably extreme for holding such a view, so narrow, so exclusive, so discriminatory.<BR><BR>But, be extreme in another way as well. Take every opportunity also to say that the Lord does not desire the death of the wicked but that all men come to repentance and the knowledge of the truth. Speak of the Lord’s sorrow over man’s rebellion – even his broken heart, for so the Bible speaks – and then speak with your own sorrow of those who are lost in unbelief. Do not content yourself until you can say as Paul did that you wish yourself accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of the unbelievers you know. Nothing is so likely to adorn and render impressive the truth of solo Christo, salvation by Christ alone, as Christians who so evidently carry in their hearts the burden of the world’s unbelief!
  and who
 are plainly willing to move heaven and earth if only a man or a woman will believe in Jesus and be saved.<BR><BR>Or, consider what is now virtually unmentionable in polite culture: the very real prospect of damnation, guaranteed by the voice of the Son of God himself. If ever there was a doctrine uncongenial to an age and a culture it is the doctrine of hell in the Western world of our time. Anyone seriously determined to proclaim and live by its reality will be considered an extremist of the worst sort. But followers of Jesus Christ can hardly afford to part company with their Master at such a fundamental point of his teaching and motive of his living and loving.<BR><BR>Still, how differently that extreme conviction will appear if next to it in the same life one sees the deepest sympathy for those whose hell has already begun in this world. Is it not a striking thing that it was the Son of God, who said so much about hell and spoke so uncompromisingly about it and was so o!
 bviously
 solemnized himself by the prospect of it, nevertheless struck people as so eminently approachable, sympathetic, understanding of the human condition, and always sensitive to the temporal wants and needs of people? Is it not striking that the man who saw hell more clearly and feared it more terribly than anyone ever has, was the man who literally exhausted himself for the sake of the salvation of others and who emanated a tender-heartedness and fellow feeling that continues to draw the needy to him even across the ages? Why is it, but for this other extremism in his life, this extremity of humanity, that so many are attracted to him who nevertheless repudiate his message?<BR><BR>Richard Rorty thinks it actually impossible at one and the same time to live a life of self-sacrificial love, a life that blesses others and draws them into peaceful fellowship, and live in submission to an objective truth you believe is rejected by others only at the cost of their eternal life. He i!
 s sure
 that the one is the death of the other. I say to you, graduates, that your summons, your task in life, in obedience and in conformity to your Lord and Master Jesus Christ is to prove Richard Rorty wrong. And you do that by living extremely; by living a life that is both and always an extremism of truth and an extremism of love.<BR></P>
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