July 21 2018
THE ONCE AND FUTURE CHURCH
Panta rhei, oude menei.
That’s a queer start. If it is Greek to you, then you are right. Perhaps you recognize the word ‘panta’, the first part of it, ‘pan’ is found back in ‘pan’-theism, in ‘Pan’- America, indicating the whole ball of wax. The Greek Panta means ‘all things’, ‘everything’. The word ‘rhei’ we find back in such rivers as the Rio Grande, the Rhine and the Rhone, indicating streams. So the first two words really mean that “Everything flows”. For the second part I better give you the lowdown right away: it says, “Nothing remains (the same).” So the entire ancient Greek proverb means, “Everything is always in motion, nothing remains the same.”
Change applies to all people and all institutions. The physical world is changing so fast that, books are outdated as soon as they are published.
Take the Arctic. Last week I read in The Arctic News that on:
July 6 sea surface temperature near Svalbard (near the North Pole): were in
2014: -0.8°C or 30.6°F
2015: 6.2°C or 43.2°F
2016: 8.3°C or 47.0°F
2017: 14.4°C or 57.9°F
2018: 16.6°C or 61.9°F
(Created by Sam Carana for Arctic-news.blogspot.com with nullschool.net images.)
Everything is in a state of flux, nothing is static, especially in the Far North. When the ‘eternal’ ice cover at the Arctic – it could well be ice-free in September – has disappeared, it exposes the trillions of tons of methane, 50 – 100 times more dangerous for Climate Change than the CO2 emitting from cars, chimneys, forest fires, airplanes, cows. Global Warming will go in overdrive. This is a sure sign that THE end is near, and the prophecy of 2 Peter 3: 13 is about to be fulfilled, “because of which the heavens will be destroyed by burning, and the elements will melt with intense heat! But according to His promise we are looking for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells.”
Everything changes, except organized religion. No wonder it is hemorrhaging members left and right. The church has lost its moorings, has failed in its mission, has not observed the signs of the times, and has stuck to its outdated symbols, offices, doctrines, and confessions. OK. That’s easy, so what’s next?
The church has failed to heed Bonhoeffer’s words, “The church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”
Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount tells us “Be Perfect as I am Perfect” (Matthew 5: 48). The word Jesus uses here is in Greek ‘teleios’, which we find back in ‘tele’phone, ‘tele’gram, ‘tele’pathy, which comes from the Greek word ‘telos’ meaning ‘end’ or ‘far’.
What Jesus had in mind – and Bonhoeffer understood that – is that our lives must have a goal, and that this goal is ‘the end.’ And the END is the New Creation.
J. H. Bavinck, in his “Between the Beginning and the End: a radical Kingdom Vision” writes, “The goal of our lives can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things are unified under the one and only will of him who lives and rules forever.”
Bavinck also makes the radical statement that “There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity UNIVERSAL”. Jesus did not come just to save sinners, like you and me: he came to restore creation as it was before the FALL into sin.
This cardinal truth is slowly penetrating into wider circles. Dr. David Bosch, a South African theologian and missiologist, writes in his “Believing in the Future: Toward a Missiology of Western Culture”, “What we do not need, then, is to introduce more religion. The issue is not to talk about God in a culture that has become irreligious, but how to express, ethically, the coming of God’s reign, how to help people respond to the real questions of their context, how to break with the paradigm according by which religion has to do only with the private sphere…”
(I found this quote in BEYOND THE MODERN AGE, by Goudzwaard and Bartholomew).
All three, Bosch, Bonhoeffer and Bavinck point out that the Kingdom of God is the central theme of Jesus’ ministry.
I repeat Bosch’s statement, “how to express, ethically, the coming of God’s reign, how to help people respond to the real questions of their context, how to break with the paradigm according by which religion has to do only with the private sphere.”
Panta Rhei, Oude Menei.
The church remains in the deadly groove of the private sphere, of personal salvation. We just love to sing, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
Wrong, at least partly so.
The Bible tells us –John 3: 16 – “God so loved the world that he offered his Only Son as a ransom to buy back the cosmos from The Evil One, that whosoever believes this will have the privilege to dwell eternally in God’s precious work of ART.”
That is the heart of the Gospel.
“Brother are you born again”, as my Pentecostal friend asked me, is a meaningless question and a cheap one at that because it does not bind us in any one way to God’s beloved cosmos. My “speaking in tongues” friend tells me that “Upon death I go to heaven, reminding me of the old hymn, “I am a stranger here, within a foreign land, my home is far away upon the golden strand”, oh so pious and oh so pagan.
Nothing remains the same.
Gospel preaching needs a new direction, away from individualism to an all-embracing life style, analogous to early Christianity when there was no such thing as an easy conversion.
In Paul’s time switching from a pagan position to a radical Christian stance involved fracturing family ties, being shunned by one’s community, ejected from one’s social and societal status.
To go forward today entails that we have to go BACK, all the way to early Christianity, to the church that once was viable. Acts 2 tells us about Peter. Addressing the Pentecost crowd gathering in Jerusalem, he says, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation,” and some 3000 heeded the call. This chapter of Acts, depicting the early church, also gives us insight in what they thought: they really expected the imminent return of Christ, and so the rich members sold their holdings, and distributed their wealth among the others, so that all had enough. The early church, because of this radical commitment, grew.
In THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY, Rodney Stark, a professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington calculates that Christianity grew at the rate of 40 percent per decade, from 1,000 in the year 40, to 1400 in the year 50 to 7,530 at year 100 to 40,500 fifty years later, to 6,200, 832 at year 300.
And who are they? Who joined this radical religion?
Based on the development of Mormonism, a recent movement with great missionary zeal, Dr. Stark concluded that the majority of converts to American cult movements were overwhelmingly from relatively irreligious backgrounds. He concludes that the Christians were not a mass of degraded outsiders but from early days had members, friends, and relatives in high places, often within the imperial family……. In other words, Christianity was not a proletarian movement, but recruited members in the middle and upper class.
What do we see today?
We see a church that loses members at a rate of 40 percent compound per decade since 1900, the exact opposite of the early rise. Why? Because the church has retained a ‘business plan’ that has proven to be increasingly fallible: outdated confessions, static church services, sermons based on the message that Jesus came to save me, me, me, a sinner, and much more.
On July 16 the New York Times gave a front page place to an article by Roy Scranton, a professor at Notre Dame University. Its telling title in bold print was RAISING A CHILD IN A DOOMED WORLD. He is the author of “We’re Doomed. Now what?
Today all signs point to the END, the end of nature, the end of stable weather, the end of arable land, the end of potable water, the end of large wild animals, the end of faith, of economic stability, and the list goes on.
If we are honest with ourselves, when we strip away the veils of sentimentality about the fate of our offspring, now clouding our vision, when we look at this world with a realistic mind, and also remember what REVELATION tells us about our planet, now dominated by evil, we can only conclude that our world has a definite expiry date: we must admit that, indeed, our way of life is doomed. Bonhoeffer’s words come mind again, “The church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”
This message offers the church a golden opportunity to tell those people, now in despair about the FATE OF THE EARTH, that the only HOPE is the New Creation.
This vision allows people to dream of never-ending bliss, total harmony, eternity to research, unlimited time to build the perfect tools, to invent the newest of the new, to really be what we were meant to be, without camouflage, without hidden motives, without making us appear better than we are.
The TRUMP troopers and the Rapture crowd will not agree. The heaven adherents will not welcome this message. The “Jesus Loves Me and creation be damned” believers will not take this to heart. The Dogmatic element, seeing Baptism and Theology as the overriding message, will be left in the dark. They will not alter their life, will not become creation-lovers, will not curtail energy use, have no desire to alienate their peers and relatives, as the early converts in Peter’s and Paul’s days had to do.
The Belgic Confession comes to mind and the question “How do we know God?
We know God by two means:
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:
God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.
All these things are enough to convict humans
and to leave them without excuse.
Second, God makes himself known to us more clearly
by his holy and divine Word,
as much as we need in this life,
for God’s glory
and for our salvation.
This means that CREATION is God’s Primary or Direct Word and thus HOLY, while the Scriptures, which we often refer to as God’s Holy Word, is the Secondary or Indirect Word. The Church has basically no regard for God’s Primary Word, while worshiping his Secondary Word, which has led to the church now having some 40,000 different denominations, each claiming to understand the Scriptures in a different way.
It is about time that we honor Creation as divinely originated and thus HOLY.
That’s why Dr. David Bosch has stated: “What we do not need, then, is to introduce more religion. The issue is not to talk about God in a culture that has become irreligious, but how to express, ethically, the coming of God’s reign”.
“Ethically”, the question of “How then shall we live” is what counts.
More than half of the church we attend went to visit an Amish settlement nearby to find out how a community can live without electricity, without cars, without TV and cellphones and live a self-sustaining life: and thrive.
Can we proceed or rather can we, as church community come back from our polluting, carbon-dependent life, and go to a creation-friendly, a divinely-ordained life?
When we do that then we can also invite others to join, not based on religion or dogma but founded on a life that follows Jesus’ example, a life where He, we and the earth form a unity.
Among the discerning people there’s a lot of despair. For them only a miracle can save creation.
That miracle happened on Calvary where Jesus said, “It is finished”: the New Creation is about to come.