HOW THEN SHALL WE LIVE?
The perennial question.
In detective stories, the principal character, the celebrated investigator who always, in the end, nails the culprit, often lets the reader know that there is no such thing as coincidence: every occurrence, all circumstances have significance.
I can affirm this in my weekly writing: I scan a lot of perhaps useless stuff. I daily read three newspapers: The Globe and Mail, the British the Guardian, and the New York Times. Much of the writing in these three sources often seems irrelevant, yet, sometimes an article finds a place in staging my next episode of self-discovery: that’s really what my blogs are.
In these confusing times, especially for Christians, the question of “Christian Living” is a burning one. The late Harold Bloom, the famous literary critic, in his book The American Religion, states that the churches in which Americans worship, have, by and large, ceased to be Christian, now plainly evident in its leader, Donald Trump.
So, what is ‘religion?’
It reminds me of a book I have with the intriguing title, What Christianity is NOT”, written by Dr. Douglas John Hall, a McGill professor, a man I met at an environmental conference in Madison Wisconsin some 35 years ago, organized by Dr. Calvin de Witt. I discovered, having attended a few of these gatherings, that is typical for ‘Christian’ environmental meetings, that the presenters often outnumber the attendees. This certainly was the case at this Wisconsin meeting, in a Roman Catholic Convent. By and large church people are not at all interested in matters dealing with God’s Creation because the overwhelming percentage of church-going people expect to go to heaven, away from this wicked earth.
Dr. Hall starts his book with a short Latin sentence: Si comprehendis, non est Deus, a line attributed to St. Augustine, meaning, “If you understand it, you are not talking about God”.
He also mentions Karl Barth, who wrote, “The message of the Bible is that God hates religion”. In that same vein Bonhoeffer writes, “Jesus does not call people to a new religion but to life”. He bases this on John 10: 10, where Jesus says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
I believe that the thief in this text is especially us, 21th century humans: if there ever was a rapacious and destructive being in history is us, my generation. I am writing these lines on Ascension Day. There the angels appearing at the event of Jesus leaving the earth, declared: This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” (Acts 1: 11). Jesus is earth-bound! Praise the Lord.
“Seek first the Kingdom”: that’s how Jesus defines his mission. That simply means, “seeking the welfare of creation, God’s work of art, for whose restoration Christ died! Not just for us sinners? The common belief?
Dr. Sabine Dramm, quoting Bonhoeffer, wrote: “Christ died for the world, and Christ is Christ only in the midst of the world. God cannot be understood without the world nor the world without the God who has entered it in Jesus Christ: Only they who love the earth and God as one, has faith in God’s Kingdom”. When did you hear that in church?
Yet he echoes what J. H. Bavinck writes in his Between the Beginning and the End: “The Central point of the gospel is not us poor humans and our pain and suffering; rather, its entire focus is aimed at the unique and powerful reality that God wants to reinstate his Kingdom.”
Bavinck’s – not surprising – conclusion is that ‘there is no such thing as individual salvation: all salvation is of necessity universal. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all-wise of Him who lives and rules forever.”
Bonhoeffer concluded that “Only they who love the earth and God as one, have faith in God’s Kingdom”. He also wrote: “They who love God love Him as Lord of the earth as it is; they who loves the earth, love Him as Lord of the earth.
Based on this, a new look at Christianity is far overdue. Not heaven-oriented, but earth-driven. That’s why present-day Christianity is not a religion: it is ‘a way of life’, a total commitment to the welfare of creation: God’s Kingdom!
How then shall we live?
Therefore: “Seek first the Kingdom”, that means, The welfare of God’s Creation.