(A contribution to the 9th Working Conference of the sociological journal Biograf in Borek near Suchomasty, Czech Republic, 20th May 2006.)
Prayer is an activity, in which I engage very frequently since my turning to Christ. I pray aloud and in silence, in privacy as well as in the presence of others. Sometimes I pray while sitting, at other times while standing, often while walking, occasionally while driving (with eyes open), and from time to time it does happen that I kneel down to pray. A prayer is for me a conversation with Jesus Christ, my Lord, Saviour and Friend. I pray to worship Him, to tell Him how I love Him and how grateful I am for what he has been doing for me. I thank Him for the blessings He grants me every day. I ask Him to forgive the sins I have recently committed, to create a pure heart in me and renew a steadfast spirit within me. I thank Him for His answers to my prayers and ask Him to help people I know that need it. I tell Him what troubles me and ask for help. Also, I try to remember to stop talking and listen for what He wants to tell me.
Now I will pray, because I have an anxiety about how this talk will go. Please listen in peace. Should anyone wish to support my prayer, join in by saying "Amen" at then end, which means something like "so be it".
Dear Lord, thank you for the people you bring into my life. Thank you for this conference. Thank you for the opportunity to share insights and to encourage one another. Father Lord, thank you for the opportunity to tell the story of how You found me and turned me towards You. Thank you for the chance to share with colleagues the effects that has had on my sociological thinking. Dear Lord, thank You for being present. Fill me with Your Spirit, so that I speak truthfully and clearly. Give me the right words at the right time, so that those who have ears to hear, hear; and those who have eyes to see, see. Help us to hear Your words and everything that You want us to hear and understand. Help us to hear and to see at least something of Your Kingdom. In Your dear name, Amen.
One day (towards the end of 2003) I decided to embark on reading the bible, in German, to practice the language and fill a gap in my education. Immediately my wife obtained for me a book of the New Testament which contained, in addition to English and French versions, a German version translated by Martin Luther. During Sunday mornings, while Jayne was in church, I was slowly making my way through it, at first just three chapters at a time. The reading engaged me; perhaps not right away, but certainly after a while. I came to think with increasing frequency about Jesus, His character and calling, His crucifixion and raising from the dead. One night in the summer, when a full bladder woke me up, I got gripped by a clear and heart-felt thought: Jesus really is alive and I love Him. I said nothing to anyone, but my need to read the New Testament was no longer confined to Sunday mornings. For example, on the September day when my wife and I were to set off for our Austrian holiday, I would not start packing the car before satisfying an urge to translate Romans 12 from German into English. Soon after returning from the holiday I flew to Prague for 10 days, during which I finished the German New Testament and made a point of meeting with Bara Spalova and Dan Chytil. On my return home, I told my wife and my friend Jim that I would be attending church regularly henceforth. A few weeks later in January, I was baptised by full immersion. Christian discipleship and service has been filling my life since.
In God the Creator. He occupies endless space and eternal time. He has created our spacetime and us within it. He is the source of life and everything that is good. We are incapable of comprehending His existence because our mind is limited, in that we are incapable of imagining a thing that nowhere and never ends.
In Jesus Christ, Son of God whom God begot to be born on Earth to a human mother; to be a man and God at the same time. In Jesus, God granted us a chance to enter into a personal relationship with Him. Jesus taught us how to live according to God's will. He showed us an example of human perfection, man without sin. He told us that, our sinfulness notwithstanding, God gave us a chance to live with Him as His children in His kingdom. Jesus took all our sins upon Himself and underwent suffering and death for them, whereby he freed us from our debt for our sins. After three days he rose from the dead, showed Himself to His disciples, spoke with them and asked them to bear witness to Him throughout the world and to help God's kingdom grow within our hearts. Jesus lives and is the embodiment of God's love for us. He gives a chance to all of us to receive Him into our everyday lives as our God, Lord, Father, Saviour and friend. When I come up for God's judgement, Jesus will put in a good word and ask for grace for me, despite my countless sins.
In Holy Spirit, who impersonates the spirit of the relationship between God the Creator and Jesus Christ, and who mediates to us God's presence, wisdom and will.
In the bible. I take the bible to be a document of God's Word of what He wants us to know about Him. It is a guide to living with God in accordance with His will and in His life-giving love, wisdom, strength and peace. It is a document admittedly written by human writers for human readers, but under a direct guidance from God, mediated by the Holy Spirit. God's grace and Holy Spirit's actions are needed also when we read and study the bible.
Let's have a look at what God says about us humans right at the beginning of the bible, in Genesis 1-3. He created us so that we were able to be in a communion with Him, that is, to be close to Him despite the fundamental difference between us, of one being the Creator and the other His creatures (Gen.1:26). When He created man, he said: "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him" and created woman(Gen.2:18). Then He brought all the animals and birds and all other living things to the man and asked him to name them all (Gen.2:19). Then Satan undermined our trust in God and seduced us into disobedience and an ambition to be equal to God. We became sinners. We got moral conscience and shame, that is, an anxiety that we'd be shamed and judged if we were seen simply as we are, without the veil of social clothing. God expelled us from paradise into a land of transient life limited by death, where it is necessary to struggle with nature and work hard (Gen.3:1-24).
I draw from this the following four fundamental truths about man which sociology takes to be true too.
1. We have a basic natural ability and need for togetherness and co-operation. We are fundamentally a social creature, always relating to others and to things that the others recognize. We constantly attend to these relationships, renew them and reproduce them, or destroy them and change them.
2. We name and categorize the things of our world, and on that basis organize our engagement with it.
3. We act so that others see us to be orientated towards possible moral categorizations and judgements, so that they continue to take us to be morally adequate members of a shared social domain.
4. We live in time-cycles and conditions defined by the organization of reproduction of our species and the production of our means of life.
The knowledge produced by sociological investigations is not dependent on whether or not the investigator believes in Christ, provided it describes and conceptualises our basic human organisational activities on the basis of clearly defined corpuses of empirical data. When that is the case, sociology in this respect resembles other empirical sciences. From a Christian point of view, empirical sciences observe specific bits of God-created world, providing evidence of its orderliness, within the framework of our God-given reasoning ability.
However, we must take note also of the differences between sociological assumptions about man on the one hand and, on the other hand, what God tells us in Genesis 1-3. God created us so that we turn our face towards Him and have a need to be in a relationship with Him. After all, He is the source of life and of everything that is good. We have a need to be connected to Him. However, He also created us with the ability to assert our own will, gave us the possibility of turning away from Him and disobeying His will. For his joy, He wants people and not puppets. This spiritual dynamic (between our need to be connected to God and our willful self-alienation from God) is something sociology does not apprehend, it simply pays no attention to it. Sociology assumes man to be alienated.
This spiritual dynamic by contrast runs through the bible as its central theme. The bible shows us a history of human civilization where God civilizes His chosen nation and the chosen nation keeps sinfully turning away from Him, willfully alienating itself from Him. This history has its climax in Jesus Christ, where Jesus pays off the debt of our sin by his death and enables us to enter God's Kingdom by His rising from death. In God's Kingdom, each individual lives in total trust in God and in His grace.
My sociological texts are in their majority empirically based. Rarely do they go far beyond clearly defined corpuses of data and the assumptions about man which sociology and the bible share. They are not texts of social theory. They do not seek to replace biblical teaching about the relationship of man to God with some grand earthly theory about man and society. To this extent I may still own up to them.
From the Christian point of view, however, they do lack any interest in spiritual life. They assume man to be alienated from God and the world to be godless. This assumption is especially evident in my works of social history, which to a significant extent interpret data by drawing on modernization theory and take secularisation to be a normal phenomenon that does not really need a careful explanation. Modernization theory blinds historical investigations to phenomena such as evangelical movements for Christian revival. When it does not ignore them, it presents them and explains them in a way which loses any sight of their spiritual and biblical basis. My more recent sociological works, such as investigations of biographical narratives and ethnomethodological researches, are less burdened by modernization theory. Out of this corpus, the article about dissidents deserves the most criticism, because it is burdened by modernisation theory at least a little, and it misses the specificity of Christian dissent.
Maya Angelou is widely known through the media as an important Afro-American author, a recipient of literary prizes and a foremost representative of Black Literature. She is talked about in discourses on race and the position of women. I was surprised to come across a poem of hers entitled I'm a Christian. I have translated it so as to be able to read it out to you on my own behalf (in the masculine gender). It gives a precise expression to what is involved when a person becomes a Christian.
When I say .. "I'm a Christian,"
I'm not shouting "I'm clean livin'".
I'm whispering "I was lost,
Now I'm found and forgiven."
When I say .. "I'm a Christian,"
I don't speak of this with pride.
I'm confessing that I stumble,
And need CHRIST to be my guide.
When I say .. "I'm a Christian,"
I'm not trying to be strong.
I'm professing that I'm weak,
And need HIS strength to carry on.
When I say .. "I'm a Christian,"
I'm not bragging of success.
I'm admitting I have failed,
And need God to clean my mess.
When I say .. "I'm a Christian,"
I'm not claiming to be perfect.
My flaws are far too visible,
But God believes I am worth it.
When I say .. "I'm a Christian,"
I still feel the sting of pain.
I have my share of heartaches,
So I call upon His name.
When I say .. "I'm a Christian,"
I'm not holier than thou.
I'm just a simple sinner
Who received God's good grace somehow.
End.