In
Streams of Living Water, Richard Foster presents a thought provoking thesis: Among the various Christian traditions, there are several “streams” of piety, features of a healthy well-rounded Christian life, both personal and corporate, that do not converge in any one tradition, but each of which is characteristic of one or another tradition. The streams he identifies are prayer, personal holiness, charismatic gifts, compassion, Word-centeredness, sacraments, and he offers historical, biblical and contemporary examples from various traditions—evangelical, contemplative, social justice, etc. Well, there are problems with his list of streams. Most fundamentally, if you are not word-centered, what exactly is the character of your sacraments (are they man made?), the expression of your compassion (is it just secular ideology?), the form of your personal morality (is it legalism?), and your ecstatic experiences (are they even real?)?
But I found the general concept quite thought provoking. It gave form to something I had been stewing over for some years. I would put it this way. There are indeed, as I said, various features of a healthy, well-rounded Christian life, both personal and corporate. I would identify, perhaps not exhaustively, word-centeredness, theological orthodoxy, reverence, joy, community-love, mercy-love, and mission-love. Devotion to God under the authority of his word has to be fundamental. That is not always accompanied by theological orthodoxy, and vice versa, but the former should develop into the latter, and orthodoxy should found itself on the Word. Love is the mark of a Christian, but this takes various forms. There is the love that a body of believers has for one another as a community, a love they have for the helpless and suffering (who may or may not be among them), and a love they have for the lost, both near and far.
A faithful Christian who eagerly seeks the kingdom of God, who seeks to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, will try to understand all of these features and realize them in practice. But when he does he finds them frustratingly elusive...especially if he tries to realize them all together at once...and even more so if he tries to get there in community with other similarly zealous Christians. It is one of the “tensions” of the Christian life.
A tension is a situation in which you are drawn equally between two incompatible options. They are both good, perhaps even necessary. As such, they both beckon you. But as soon as you attempt to embrace one, you lose the other. What makes it a tension is that you cannot simply opt for one of the poles. By the very nature of things, to do so would bring great unhappiness of some sort. This is a particularly complex tension because it is multi-polar. As a result of the fall, we can never grasp all of these characteristics at once. When you try to grab onto one that you are missing, you lose at least one of those you had. The key to living with this problem is understanding that there are these multiple poles and that they are elusive this side of the Lord’s Second Coming.
This multi-polar model for understanding the complexity and difficulty of the fullness of Christian piety strikes me as useful for understanding the degree of dissatisfaction that many thoughtful and spiritually growing Christians feel toward their churches or church traditions, as well as the frustration we experience when we try to bring ourselves and our churches into greater conformity with biblical holiness.
The awareness of the multi-polar nature of a complete, biblical picture of the church and of the Christian life engenders greater humility in us when we assess other traditions, and honesty in our appreciation their strengths. It also encourages cautious and chastened expectations in one’s own pursuit of this multi-polar centering, and the understanding that the pursuit of that centering is indeed just that: a centering, as opposed to a linear rush forward from one spiritual objective to the next.
For example, Eastern Orthodoxy excels in reverence, but that comes with iconographic idolatry, Marianic mediation, and the subordination of Scripture to a tradition. Contemporary American Evangelicals have a joy that is alien to other traditions, but they are impoverished by theological indifference, individual self-absorption, and historical solipsism. Historically Reformed churches preserve theological orthodoxy with great precision, but they tend to be emotionally reserved, formalistic, and socially inward looking. The parish church offers community, but typically nothing else.
Clearly the poles are not simply equal in importance. Given the nature of the Christian religion as a faith because it is a gracious gift from God rather than a spiritual labor by men, a minimal theological orthodoxy is a sine qua non. There must also be love. “Without love you are nothing.” But love is the fruit and indication of salvation, not the means of appropriating it as a properly informed faith is. The same is true of joy and reverence.
The image of multi-polar centeredness appears to suggest the need for “balance” in the Christian life, but that is misleading. It is not as though one needs to compromise a truth over here or a virtue over there or a relationship in another direction in order to become a well-centered, biblical Christian, i.e., godly. Otherwise, loving people with God’s perfect love or embracing God’s revealed truth accurately in every point of blessed detail would be “going to an extreme” and would preclude living a godly Christian life. But how can perfectly godly love make one ungodly? How can believing the entire Bible make someone unbiblical in any way? There is a sense in which one cannot truly embrace any of the poles except in the center. Joyless orthodoxy is, in a way, a betrayal of orthodoxy.
The trickiness of living life centered between the poles is not a problem inherent in the poles. In themselves, they are perfectly in harmony with one another. In fact, they harmonized perfectly in the sinless life of Christ, who is the very image of God and the Word of truth. He understood, affirmed, and lived out the poles to their fullest. The problem is in us, living as we do in this "Already and Not Yet" condition this side of the parousia. So even a church that intellectually affirms all the poles and understands them biblically will nonetheless find them maddeningly and even divisively elusive in practice.
So with all this unsatisfying and dogged imperfection, what’s a poor pilgrim to do? Knowing the multi-polar ideal, a Christian must settle himself in a church that he conscientiously judges to be the best centered among these elusive poles. The centering Christian must then—grace permitting—hold to what is good, and then humbly, cautiously cultivate what is missing.
