June 29 2019
THE END OF RELIGION?
When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” Luke 18: 8.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his introduction to his book on CREATION, basically an explanation of Genesis 1-3, the first Bible book, writes, “The church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”
Isn’t that curious?
And he is not alone in this. Stanley Hauerwas, Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University, in his APPROACHING THE END, makes an identical statement, when he starts his book with, “When I begin to think about what I should say about creation, the title “The End is in the Beginning” immediately comes to mind.
And then there is another voice that utters similar sounds, albeit from a different angle, but equally with the End is mind. Dr. J.H. Bavinck in his book on REVELATION, the last book of the Bible, wrote, and I translate, “Under the force of constant hammer blows, still raining upon this pseudo world, humanity finally becomes the humanity it was meant to be in the most detestable sense of the word. It becomes the real human, that is the rebel, the prisoner, the doubting, the unconverted.
“World history, stripped bare from all pretenses, is not simply a record of events: it is nothing else than that through all these happenings, through prosperity and adversity, through wars and peace, through increase in knowledge and culture, through all this and more, in the end everything becomes what it always has been. (My emphasis). That’s why the Kingdom of the Son of man, the reign of Christ who is Humanity Personified, can only come when the Kingdom of the Beast has had the entire world in his grasping hands.”
So Bavinck too states that the end is in the beginning.
In essence Bavinck says that before Christ returns the TRUE image of humanity will be revealed in all its depravity, in all its god-forsaken state of mind, in all its sinful condition, plainly evident today in our dealing with creation, God’s precious masterpiece. This indicates that we travel from Chaos to Cosmos, from Cosmos to Chaos, from Beginning to the End.
Yes, the End is in the Beginning.
The Bible starts with the three words, “In the Beginning”. Then continues, “The earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Chaos, in other words, no sense of order, no structure whatsoever, yet, somehow, in the back ground, God’s Spirit is there.
Now that we are approaching the End, we are starting to see the same initial conditions: Climate Calamity, widespread destruction, water shortages, droughts and floods, rumors of war, looming epidemics, 95% of the arable soil contaminated… and the list goes on. Our End is like the Beginning, when through prosperity and adversity, through wars and peace, through increase in knowledge and culture, through all this and more, in the end everything will become what it always has been: chaos.
Also “In the beginning” humanity was so godless that God was compelled to make a new start with Noah and his family. He also vouched not to destroy the world again, fully well knowing that perverse humanity would cause its own destruction in the end, allowing for a New Beginning.
We are at that stage now.
Today chaos is universal. Even the vast oceans, covering 70 percent of the earth, are saturated with plastic particles. All the earth and air …….No, I don’t have to start listing all the ills in the world. I take great comfort from my daily Bible reading, and am especially intrigued by Matthew 24 where Jesus warns to be vigilant: The American Religion regards Trump as a demi-god, seen as appointed by God to deliver America from the godless Democrats. Matthew 24: 10-11 points to this, “At that time many will fall away and will betray one another and hate one another. Many false prophets will arise and will mislead many.” Yes, Trump is a false prophet.
Stephen L. Carter, law professor at Yale, in his book, THE CULTURE OF DISBELIEF, writes, “America’s civil religion portrays its people, often in comparison with people in other countries, as God-fearing souls, as champions of religious liberty, and in many instances as a nation God has consciously chosen to carry out a special mission in the world. (But) America’s civil religion consists of platitudes. They have no religion except a theology of “America First”.
That “America First” theology is sharply accentuated in Trump’s Campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” That speaks to the American “Christian” mind”, an altogether pagan notion, which has nothing to do with Christ and his core message, “Seek First the Kingdom of God”, which essentially means “to seek the welfare of Creation, God’s work of art and his precious masterpiece”. Exactly the opposite is the aim of Trump’s America.
Dr. Harold Bloom, America’s foremost literary critic and Hebrew Scholar, in his THE AMERICAN RELIGION, subtitled The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation, writes that “We think we are a Christian nation, but we are not…..The American stands outside creation, Gnostics, believers in individual divinity.”
Now that we see THE END OF NATURE, we also see THE END OF CHRISTIANITY. The love for creation has disappeared as we have shaped a society totally dependent on its destruction. Whatever we do leads to greater annihilation. This simply means that with every action we destroy God and with it the Christian Religion, the two go hand in hand.
That’s why Dietrich Bonhoeffer is important today. In his essay, “Thy Kingdom Come”, he writes, “Christianity is neither an archaic replica of the heavenly world nor a cluster of sacred shrines and hallowed sanctuaries, magic escape routes from earthly turmoil. Rather the Christian is to live faith as much in the marketplace and factory as at church altars. Faith is thus to be embedded in the way each Christian becomes strong in his or her service of EARTH and its PEOPLE……………..(But) We are Christian at the expense of the earth….We cannot bear having the earth so near……However Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from this world to other world beyond: rather he gives us back to the earth as its loyal children….We have fallen into SECULARISM, and by secularism I mean pious Christian secularism, the Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the EARTH”
Here’s what Bonhoeffer says about the church, “The function of the church is to witness to the resurrection of Christ from the dead, to the end of the law of death of this world that stands under the curse, and to the power of God in the new creation.”
The church has totally failed on that score and has aided the Evil One.
Bonhoeffer sees John 3: 16 as today’s most important Bible text: “God so loved the cosmos that he gave his most precious Son to buy it back from the Satan”. 1John 5: 19 explicitly states that today, now, this very moment, while you read this, the Prince of this world, THE EVIL ONE, is in charge. And he holds sway, also over the church which, by and large, sees HEAVEN as the destination of its people.
Last week, as a caregiver, I had a meeting with other caregivers in a new nearby Baptist church. Of course I inspected the facilities, and in its news stand found a pamphlet on heaven. No surprise. The last words my oldest brother in the Netherlands who attended a conservative church, said to me, “See you in heaven.”
John 3:13 explicitly states that, “No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven–the Son of Man.” “The Son of Man” is Jesus, the Son of God. He alone, nobody else, not you nor your pious parents nor the saints of old, will go to heaven or have gone to heaven: only Jesus did, from where he will return to announce and accomplish and establish The New Earth, the re-configured Garden of Eden.
THE END OF RELIGION.
What is meant by religion?
Religion involves the human psyche which makes it a complex phenomenon. The simple explanation is that all humans are religious beings, in the same way that we are sexual beings. Just as sexuality is going through a final phase, religion too is under constant debate. There really is no scientific consensus about the question, “What is the definite definition of ‘religion’”? Some point to the three Abrahamic ones, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, while others include Hinduism, Buddhism, Humanism, Shintoism, actually any “ism”.
Andrew Sullivan tells me that, “Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.”
He writes, “By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).”
He continues, “Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God, and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer.”
Bavinck also believed that the religious impulse of humanity would not disappear, not even with increasing secularity in the West.
He wrote this about 70 years ago. Since then a lot has changed, witness the advent of Television and the Computer, with all its technical gadgets.
Bavinck essentially took a psychological view. He could not foresee the immense changes in today’s society, where Trump is seen as appointed by God to lead America, where the mainline churches are aging rapidly, which basically means that the official Christian view is disappearing.
Observing society in the Western world today, I must conclude that God has become a stranger in his world, even among the church which basically has become gnostic: God-consciousness has disappeared.
So, yes, religion is still out there, in the sense of “The Search for Meaning”, the name of a book by Viktor Frankl. Many still search, trying to come to grips with what’s happening in the world. Many more purposely ignore the signs, and close their minds to the dire state of affairs, especially climate-wise. But, as Freud has observed, “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways”.
These unexpressed emotions also apply to religious feelings, which suppressed, result in pronounced religious antagonism.
And Jesus?
Jesus did not advocate religion: he brought us LIFE and that to the full. Religion? He was thrown out of the Nazareth synagogue – his hometown. In the Jerusalem temple he chased out all the money changers. There he also argued with the religious leaders, calling them blind guides, who lead the people astray, and adders, who poison their minds. And finally, the church of his day killed him. No, Jesus was no friend of religion.
When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” Yes, there’ll be lots of faith, but not in Christ’s Kingdom to come.
The late Dr. Evan Runner, professor of Philosophy at Calvin College taught me that “All of Life is Religion”
I believe that to be true. Its consequence is that Religion disappears and becomes anonymous with life, with oxygen, with air, with everything that exists. That’s why Revelation 21: 22 points to The New Jerusalem, and tells us that there is no temple there.
In the New Creation there is no need for Religion, because then LIFE is religion. Every action, all our thinking, will be geared toward the glorification of God and the beautification of his created word. That’s why the Bible will disappear. Then the Word will be in our hearts.
That’s how we have to live TODAY, even though it means the end of religion but not of worship!