As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, this is from the introduction to Rowan Greer’s Christian Hope and Christian Life:
The point I am trying to make is that a “here-and-now” Christianity, at least in my view, runs two risks–reducing the Christian life to a moralism of some kind and making the world of our experience ultimate and the only possible frame of reference. Let me say something more about the first risk. It has seemed to me that Christianity has always appeared historically as both a message of salvation and a way of life. It may well be that these two dimensions can never be perfectly balanced. In earliest Christianity, I should argue, the message of salvation often dominated the way of life. Yet, in our time the opposite would seem to me the case. We have all heard the argument that such and such a person, who never goes to church and has no obvious use for Christianity, is a “better Christian” than most of the regular church-goers. The implication is quite clear; it is moral character that defines a Christian. Even our contemporary preoccupation with spirituality drives in the same direction. Meditative techniques can sometimes appear as ways of managing stress and helping people live better. It is difficult to understand where the tendency to reduce Christianity to the moral life comes from. To be sure, the central place of the Atonement in Western Christianity places an emphasis on sin and forgiveness that can easily be understood largely in terms of this life. Moreover, late medieval piety, especially the devotio moderna, turned away from the purely contemplative life to the active life of virtue. Perhaps more important is the shift in religious thinking to be located at the end of the seventeenth century. The religious wars after the Reformation apparently taught many that ultimate questions were insoluble and that it made more sense to attend to our duties in this life, even our duties as taught to us by nature and reason. The emergence of a secular society, the empirical worldview espoused by modernism, and a post-Cartesian emphasis on religious experience may all be involved. Explaining the tendency to reduce Christianity to the moral life lies beyond my competence and my interest here. My only wish is to claim that in many ways the “here and now” of the Christian life has supplanted the Christian message of salvation. The issues that now divide Christians from one another tend to be moral ones. (pp. 3-4)
A Thinking Reed 
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