THE CHURCH IN FLUX
Chapter 22
The beginning of the End.
Wherever God erects a house of prayer
The Devil always builds a chapel there;
And ’twill be found upon examination,
The latter has the largest congregation.
Daniel Defoe in The True-born Englishman
I had a dream a while ago. I was on a wide boulevard and smack in the middle of the road was a huge church blocking the way. There was no way around it. If I had to go on, I’d have to go straight through the church. I wondered what this dream meant. Come to think of it, I have had that dream before. I think it means that, no matter how ineffective the church is in its proclamation, how non-committal the people in the pew, I have to stick to the church no matter what and keep on suffering when I hear the Word weakened, its message mangled and robbed of its power. I take comfort from the fact that Jesus, even though he condemned the Pharisees in no uncertain terms, still attended the synagogue. His disciples also stuck with the temple even after Jesus had gone to heaven. Paul always first went to the Jewish gathering places to bring the Gospel, even though later Christianity abandoned this way when the path of Christianity digressed too far from Jewish teaching.
So where are we now? Perhaps has the time come to leave the church anyway, because the way organized religion functions is no longer viable? But then what should take its place, because we cannot abandon ‘the communion of saints’?
That organized religion is on the wrong track became plain to me when I, after writing almost 20 years for a Christian weekly, was refused to write about the church. The editor suspected, I am sure, that I might not completely adhere to the party line. So I quit writing for them. At the time I was reading “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoevsky’s last book. In it is an episode involving the church: it’s called “The Grand Inquisitor”.
Here’s the story, more or less, as told by Ivan, the atheist Karamazow brother, to his younger brother Alyosha, the aspiring priest. In it Jesus returns to the earth during the Spanish Inquisition. Ivan says: “It is fifteen centuries since signs from heaven were seen. And now the deity appears once more among the people.” Everyone recognizes him, because a blind man sees and a dead child rises. But the old cardinal, in charge of the Inquisition, takes Jesus to prison and tells him that: “You have no right to add anything to what you have said…. Why have you come to hinder us?” Ivan explains that this is a fundamental feature of the Church that God cannot ‘meddle’ now because “all has been given by you to the Pope. The Church is the authority now.”
The Grand Inquisitor then tells Jesus that he erred when he resisted the devil’s three temptations in the wilderness, where the devil offered him miracle, mystery and might, which the Church has accepted. Jesus, however, wanted them to have freedom of choice. But, says the clergyman, freedom is too difficult and frightful for the masses and so the Church has taken the three awesome gifts for them. The Inquisitor concludes: “We are not working with you, but with the devil– that is our mystery.” Jesus, still not speaking, kisses him on the lips. “That was all his answer.” The Grand Inquisitor opens the cell door and says, “Go, and come no more, never, never.” And the divine visitor leaves.
“Freedom is too difficult for the masses” says the cardinal, but that is the essence of Jesus’ teaching, and that’s why the church of his day killed him.
Today we hear a watered-down sort of Christianity, combined with pomp and circumstance. When we today see the church on television, we see the Pope in beautiful attire, with a miter and staff, surrounded by red-hatted cardinals and purple-colored priests. The same applies to the church the Queen of England attends, perhaps a bit less elaborate, but quite fancy just the same, something totally alien to Jesus who ‘had no place to lay his head.”
The other picture we see of the church is the mega-type, thriving on male dominance and not being earth-directed but heaven-oriented, something alien to Jesus as well, who always called himself “the son of Man,’ meaning that he personified the human race.
Frankly church development has stalled precisely at the time when creation is in deep distress. Is that a sign? The crime of Iraq, the climate threat, Africa’s agony, reminds me of Hosea 4: 2-3:
“There is only cursing, lying and murder,
stealing and adultery;
they break all bounds,
and bloodshed follows bloodshed.
Because of this the land mourns,
and all who live in it waste away;
the beasts of the field and
the birds of the air and
the fish of the sea are dying.”
By and large for the churches it is “Business as usual.” Some 50 years ago Bertrand Russell published his “Why I Am Not a Christian.” At that time his book caused quite a stir. Russell could not accept Christianity because he wondered how a benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient Deity would allow the emergence of Hitler and Stalin, the H bomb, and I may add, the more recent phenomena, such as Global Warming and World-Wide-Pollution.
In his time Dr Bertrand was so controversial that he was declared unfit to teach philosophy in a New York College.
Today questioning religion is all the rage. Books, such as “God is not Great,” by Christopher Hitchens, and “The God Delusion,” by Richard Dawkins, are on the best-sellers list for weeks on end. If you want to make money today in publishing, become a religion – or God -basher. Richard Dawkins, for example, writes that “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty unjust forgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniac..” and I could go on and on. I guess, from this quote, you can deduce that Dawkins doesn’t like God.
Nevertheless, I think that Jesus would have approved of such an outburst. He once said that a person must be either outspokenly in favor of him, or dead-set against him: it’s the lukewarm, the fence-sitters, he despises. I think I can find a few of those within the hallowed halls.
Non-church going people and perhaps a few within the churches themselves are looking for answers and are not finding them within the current ecclesiastical set-up. For many the church is no longer relevant. What is needed is a new type of church, where the world we live in, the cosmos, plays a large role. .
When God created this world he called it good seven times after each phase, and very good when it was finished. Does consistency not demand that we keep creation in that very good state and live simple and holy lives reflecting those commitments? I am sure that Jesus would be absolutely consistent in demanding not to tolerate a global and economic system that enables us, the world’s elite, to prosper at the expense of the majority, and defile the earth the way we do.
It seems to me that, if it comes to a choice between the depletion of the fish in the oceans, of the birds in the air, or of the lilies in the field, and a minister’s stipend or the mortgage, organized Christianity will opt for the latter. The irony is that paying into a church’s building fund is only a matter of money. The preservation of God’s creatures, however, goes to the heart of religion: the practice of a proper love and respect for them as creatures of God.
By now I am sure that we need a new approach to religion, a more all-inclusive approach. Looking back thousands of years, it is striking that every five – six hundred years a major religion came into being. Moses and the Hebrew brand belong to the Twelfth century before Christ; Zarathustra, Confucius, Buddha, all saw their births between 600-500 years B.C. In the first century the Christian Church conquered the world. Mohammed was born in the year 570. Shortly thereafter Celtic Christianity emerged. There were stirrings in the Roman Catholic Church in the 13-15th century, culminating in the Reformation of 1517, about 500 years ago. So it looks that we are due for a major new religious upheaval, the Final push so to say, before Christ returns.
In short: all major religions: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, have defaulted on the environmental crisis.
The basis of our present polluted planet was laid long ago when cosmos-related systems of belief were replaced by formal religions, when the Christians decided that they needed organization with the result that creation-based spirituality gave way to human-centered theologies that de-sanctified the earth and taught people to see themselves as dominant over nature.
If we want to heal the destructive divide that exists between the human spirit and the natural world, we must retrieve ‘the lost gospel of the earth’ by which people live in kinship with a sacred natural world.
In general I can say that by and large it’s the non-church people who are involved in the environmental movement, in spite of one Church hymn that starts with the line “This is my Father’s world.” However, most of the church people expect to go to heaven and so their commitment to planet earth is at best divided. It is well-known that the American Religious Right vigorously condemns environmentalists as pagans and New Agers, while defending the rights of polluters who, in their opinion, are protected by the mandates of Genesis- ” to have dominion over the earth,” which is interpreted as subjection, like a slave to a master.
Although the religious communities have often defended the poor and victims of discrimination as God’s children, they have not spoken out about the actions of corporate and government polluters as a mortal sin against God’s creation, nor have they defended the earth as sacred and holy to the Lord.
Here are some specific instances.
Let me start with quoting two general sources: the 700 page Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity includes less than one page on environmental issues. In a chapter called “The Future of Christianity,” it notes that problems of resource decline lie ahead, but we are reassured that “it seems likely that new discoveries may provide the means for averting the threats of diminishing food or resources.” In other words, the Christian hope is for a technological fix. Another source, Huston Smith, “World’s Religions”, covering, among others, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, never explores whether these belief systems include any wisdom concerning the modern environmental dilemma.
Since I will concentrate on Christianity where did it go off track?
Quite early in its history did Christianity see life as a temporary passage, and saw the earth as a phase to pass through on the way to a separate sacred place. Augustine (396-430) is the great architect of the Church’s otherworldliness. With him the separation between grace and nature had its start. He pictured the church being in charge of the soul, while he considered the earth unholy, abandoned and left to the uses of science and technology. This led to three conditions:
1. While humans are made in God’s image, nature is different, subject to the will of the people
2. Nature is no more than the sum of its parts, and can be reduced to these parts for use or abuse.
3. Human beings are the measure of all things; nature’s role is to be developed into a store house of value.
Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is the father of the scientific method. He wrote that “nature was to be placed on the rack, enslaved, bound into service, forced out of her natural state and molded.” Not long after that, Rene Descartes in 1637, made the famous pronouncement “Cogito ergo sum,” “I think therefore I am,” also divorcing the self from nature, and elevated the human destiny to be ‘masters and possessors of nature.” Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) called the universe a giant machine.
It is that sort of thinking that dominated the church. In our days during the Reagan administration, his interior secretary, the equivalent of Minister of the Environment, James Watt, a Pentecostal Christian, addressing a cattlemen’s convention, said, “if the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used.” Founders of the Wise Use movement, a coalition linking the timber and mining interests to the National Rifle Association, called environmentalists “the new paganism, in which trees are worshiped and humans are sacrificed at its altar. Environmentalism is evil and we intend to destroy it.”
I know it would be unfair to imply that mainstream Christianity shares the view of these right-wing extremists, yet as a whole organized religion in both the USA and Canada has ignored the plight of the earth for many centuries. Its heaven-oriented theology, with its lack of express participation in the healing of the cosmos, has left the ever-dwindling church crowd direction-less and even bewildered.
And the Bible, where does it leave us? Both Judaism and Christianity base themselves on the Scriptures, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
The Hebrew Bible has a host of passages which indicate that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, as Psalm 24 says.
The prophet Isaiah had a vivid picture of the earth. Some 2700 years ago he wrote: “The earth languishes and withers… lies pollutes under its inhabitants, for they have transgresses the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant.”
Joel, another prophet, addressing the earth as if it were alive wrote: Fear not, o soil, rejoice and be glad, for the Lord has wrought great deeds. Fear not, o beast of the field, for the pastures in the wilderness are clothed with grass.” James Lovelock, developing his Gaia Concept, indeed considers the earth a living entity, which is a very biblical idea.
For Isaiah, too, the earth is alive with pain and suffering. It’s polluted because of the deeds of its people. There are numerous psalms which have the mountains skip like rams, the hills like lambs.
The pre-enlightenment theologians, such as St. Francis of Assisi- 1186-1226 referred to the sun as Brother and to the moon as sister, and in connection with the earth “All praise be yours My Lord through Sister Earth, Our mother who feeds us in her sovereignty and produces fruits and colored flowers and herbs.”
The most striking text in the New Testament is John 3:16: God so loved the cosmos that he gave his only son to die for its renewal. If God so loved what he has made, then we, if we really want to follow him, must do likewise. Yet the church does little or nothing to honor that claim.
I maintain that the organized religion has failed there. It has seen the Bible as the only Word of God, paying no heed to the words of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) who said that revelation comes in two volumes – the Bible and Creation. The 1561 Belgic confession most emphatically says that we know God: “First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God.” Meister Eckhart (1260-1327), both theologian and mystic said, “Every creature is a word of God and a book about God.”
Most of North American Christianity has a far too limited view of “The Word.” That’s why during the one hour per week the church meets, sermons concern themselves only with the Scriptures, the written word, while attention to the Created Word, is only in passing.
I can’t understand why the church has never caught on to Psalm 115:16, where it says explicitly that “The heavens belong to the Lord, but the Earth he has given to humanity.” So, once it is given away, God no longer owns the earth: we do. The church got it wrong. Of course, I sincerely believe that God created it all. But just as a Rembrandt created his magnificent paintings, to which his name is tied forever, once he sold these, he no longer has possession of it. That’s how it is with the earth: God has given it to the human race. This error has misdirected the church.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man with a double doctorate in theology, professor in Berlin at the age of 25, hanged by Hitler because he opposed his godless actions, seeing the state of the church, paints an ironic picture of religion. My grandparents on a farm in the Netherlands, had one room, the most beautifully adorned room in the house, where nobody ever came. Bonhoeffer compares religion to such a room, ‘the best room,’ that has nothing to do with work, everyday life and normality, a sugar-coated faith for Sunday mornings, that turns Jesus in to a moralizing figure head.” Wrote he: “The religion of Jesus Christ is not the dessert that comes after the meal, but is the entire meal, applies to all of life.”
He then describes how Jesus actually lived quite un-religiously and he totally contradicted the customary views of religion of his days. He concluded that therefore Jesus had no use for religion and wanted human beings to act like Jesus himself that is, being fully engaged in the act of being human. Paul calls Jesus the First-born of Creation, which makes Jesus the first human being. He was the first “Mensch” in the Jewish sense as well. God became human, that’s why we belong to the earth, and the desire to go to heaven, the main plank of the Christian religion, is un-biblical. Genesis 1:1, the very first text in the bible says “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” Heaven and Earth belong together. I repeat: The heavens belong to the Lord. The earth is given to the human race, as Psalm 115:16 unambiguously claims. God, in Jesus, became human, and in the mystery of God’s humanization becoming visible, it is this earth that is God’s ever-lasting dwelling place. It is through love for this earth that we can express our love for God. The church has totally ignored this aspect and as such it has lost its way. Bonhoeffer saw that only in a world that is no longer religious, just as Jesus abandoned the religion of his days, that we, the people of this planet can become aware of ourselves; and so Christ’s reality can have a greater impact on a world come of age than a world wearing disguises of religion.”
Bonhoeffer perceived God and the world to be one: a suffering creation means a suffering God.
Yet, I had that dream, the dream of the church blocking my way. Even though we must remain connected to the visible church, what sort of form should this take?
How then shall we live and worship? More about that in the next chapter.