June 17 2017
WILL THE ORGANIZED CHURCH EVER REFORM ITSELF AGAIN?
Two thousand years ago the Christian Community took a daring step: they changed the day of worship from Saturday to Sunday, from the Sabbath – today still celebrated by the Jewish faith – to the first day of the week.
Genesis 1 relates how God created light on the first day, while Jesus called himself “the Light of the world” (John 8: 12.) To combine God creating LIGHT on the first day, and to celebrate God’s son as the LIGHT on the first day of the week, was totally fitting. Is it still?
I will attempt to challenge this custom, believing that we live in different times, which calls for a different approach to worship. Also the church needs a jolt akin to what early Christianity did in its infant days.
Some ancient history.
When the Roman Empire collapsed around 450 A.D. the church was in its ascendency and organized itself along Roman Imperial lines, with the Pope taking the place of the Emperor, the cardinals the equivalent of generals, the bishops heading the regional regiments, all the way down to priests becoming the local company commanders, imitating the Centurions.
Around the year 1500, having had a religious monopoly for about a thousand years, the church saw her doctrinal standards decline while experiencing an increase in the construction of ever more glorious religious structures, requiring ever more money. So it exploited dubious sources to finance these ventures, such as the sale of indulgences.
Enter Martin Luther.
Martin Luther himself a church official protested the sale of these indulgences which were sold with the promise that they would exempt the sinner from the consequences of sin, as in those days the fear of PURGATORY played a major role in the church.
On October 31 1517 Luther affixed 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg outlining his well-reasoned objections to the all-powerful church, ultimately resulting in a totally different denomination, aptly called THE LUTHERAN CHURCH.
Since then we have seen a proliferation of Protestant churches, one of which was guided by Jean Calvin in Geneva, Switzerland, and another by John Knox in Scotland.
I believe that today the entire denominational future is slowly fading away, because all of Western Christianity is suffering from hardening of its arteries. Already most of those disenchanted with religion have left the church and couldn’t care less what’s happening on the ecclesiastical scene, but there are still a few who want to engender REFORMATION from within. Count me among these intrepid individuals.
A brief look back to the recent past.
Frankly I have no clear idea why, some 60 years ago, Europe and Canada almost completely turned off on RELIGION. I suspect that growing indifference affected many of the regular church-going crowd, so they, the former faithful, on cue, stopped to darken the doors of the places where they were baptized as infants and had their marriage sealed by the clergy.
Take the Canadian Province of Quebec.
There the Catholic heritage is everywhere, in street names, in monuments and in church buildings galore, but Catholic practice has plummeted. The province’s main metropolis, Montreal, is as non-religious a place as any in secular Europe. Marriage (even in the civil sort, let alone church weddings) has become an unusual choice among Quebecois youngsters. A church spokesman estimates Mass attendance in Montreal at 2-4% of the population. In the province as a whole, just 11% say they are regular worshippers. But 75% of the province’s people still identify as Catholic.
The same is true for Canada’s mainline churches. In my small village the Anglican Church closed years ago. The United Church with a building dating from the 1920’s and sporting a grand church organ, had some 200 people attending in the 1950’s, but today no more than 30 show up, the old faithful, with emphasis on ‘old’. The same with my church, Presbyterian, which seats more than 250 people – built in 1890 – and now has sometimes no more than 25 attending, spread out over the entire sanctuary.
Frankly I love our small church, with its devoted and talented people, and its enthusiastic choir consisting of 3 sopranos, 2 altos, 2 basses and me, the lone tenor, and a director, of course and an audio person, both women.
A few weeks ago our choir was invited to be part of a larger one to perform at the opening of the General Assembly in Kingston, Ontario. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada is equivalent to the General Synod for churches such as the Christian Reformed Church of North America, where my roots are.
Participating in this choral affair, gave me the opportunity to listen to the sermon of the departing moderator, always a prominent person in the denomination. He had chosen as his sermon topic “The People’s Book” and the Bible readings dealt with this topic. The Old Testament section related to Josiah, the then King in Jerusalem, who had rediscovered the LOST Torah, the five books of Moses, and had an inspired urge to reacquaint his nation with the rules and commandments the Lord wanted his people to observe.
The New Testament reading was “But these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name.”
As suggested before, with the Protestant Church celebrating 500 years of rising, shining and declining influence and the Western Roman Catholic Church in the same position, it is my contention that both wings of Christianity need a thorough overhaul, as radical as when the first Christians left the Old Testament Hebrew Church.
Why?
When, in the choir loft, having an elevated view on the audience of some 400 people in St Andrew’s Kingston, on that 4th Day of June in the year of the Lord 2017, from 7-9 P.M., I saw all these dignified pastors in their elegant robes and rounded collars, and it went through my mind that 500 years after Luther’s valiant attempt to reform the church, REFORMATION had basically run stuck.
My thoughts went to Karl Barth, the great German-Swiss theologian, who said that preachers must prepare their sermons with the Bible in the one hand and the newspaper in the other. In today’s terminology that means, of course, news from whatever source.
On the General Assembly’s agenda was the ticklish topic of same-sex marriage. The preacher voiced his carefully phrased misgivings, and that came as no surprise to me because in the main the Bible is seen as the sole source of all wisdom. When that is the case, dogmatism and conservatism rule. In the Roman Catholic Church tradition too plays a large role, reason why there is a POPE and why women have no real role in worship, and the male hierarchy dominates.
So where is my beef? Here it is!
THE BIBLE IS NOT GOD’S ONLY WORD!!!
Basically the Christian Church has run stuck because it sees the Bible as THE ONLY WORD OF GOD and heaven as its goal. That is to be lamented, because we cannot really understand Creation in its wider sense without knowing the Bible, and we cannot really understand the Bible without a thorough knowledge of Creation.
Frankly, we cannot love God if we don’t love creation and see studying creation as an integral part of attaining wisdom. That’s why Romans 1: 20 is in the Bible.
THE BELGIC CONFESSION cites that text.
Here’s what this important confession says about us knowing God: “We know God FIRST by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book…. As the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20: “(the creation of) all these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse.”
Hence my radical statement: CREATION IS GOD’S PRIMARY OR DIRECT WORD!!
What does CREATION tell us?
Observing CREATION – my biologist friend George tells me – teaches us that homosexuality is also found in the animal world, so it is no surprise that humans too are afflicted with this, as some people are genetically conditioned that way.
That is what the GOD’S CREATION WORD teaches us. Nietzsche was right when he wrote that “I entreat you, brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.”
In the Old Testament God is often identified as THE CREATOR OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. Psalm 8 starts with the exclamation, “How great is your name, O Lord our God, through all the earth.”
God’s name and God’s Word are one and the same, because any facet of God portrays his totality. Thus we can also read this as, “How great is your Word, O Lord our God, through all the earth.”
The preacher in Kingston mentioned Psalm 119:105, “Your word is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path”, but failed to point out how this text combines the written word – the Scriptures, God’s Secondary or Indirect Word – with the Created Word, and so makes the two complete.
A NEW REFORMATION NEEDED.
My discovery trip to Kingston, my elevated view on the elect or as one Presbyterian minister labeled them to me some time ago as “The Frozen Chosen”, granted me the opportunity to gauge the real feeling in the church, and it filled me with compassion, because believing that the Bible is God’s only Word, leads to distortion of the truth. Seeing Creation as God’s Primary Word solves a lot of controversies because the Bible is not a book for science (it teaches us of Creation, Fall and Redemption), where Creation tells us that e.g. EVOLUTION is a fundamental aspect of Creation.
When Christianity was in its infancy it took a daring step. It looked at the Sabbath – the Seventh Day in which God rested to contemplate what he had wrought– and replaced it with the Sunday, signifying a radical break with the Jewish religion.
That was TRUE REFORMATION, and necessary. Now this has run its course. The church’s clergy-dominated Modus Operandi has failed. 500 years after Luther for the Protestants and 2000 years for the Roman Catholic Church we need a new, unified, model where also the Jewish faith finds a place.
Relying on Genesis One we read that God started creation on the First Day and ended it on the Sixth Day with the creation of Humanity. God rested on the Sabbath Day, the SEVENTH DAY. Resting means contemplating and enjoying creation.
We have to recapture that sort of REST. I believe that the church needs to make a Radical change, resting, honoring, celebrating the completion of Creation on the Seventh Day, openly recognizing that Creation is complete and openly recognizing that our personal salvation and the salvation of the earth are intricately and intimately connected: you can’t have one without the other!!
We must break the Sunday preaching monologue and the church-building fixation, because it echoes Descartes’ COGITO ERGO SUM, meaning “I think (listen to preaching) therefore I am”, threatening Christianity to become a dualistic, splitting grace from nature, experience and running the danger of making it more an intellectual exercise rather than a full-orbed experience.
WILL THE ORGANIZED CHURCH EVER REFORM ITSELF AGAIN?
NO. All branches of the church – Catholic, Jewish and Protestant – have become captives of their edifices, offices, customs, doctrines and traditions. They are beyond reforming.
So what maybe the answer?
Our local church has made a modest beginning, originating from its ENVIRONMENTAL COMMITTEE, a body every congregation should have.
In the past year it has organized two Sunday services with a direct Creation Emphasis and three short services on Saturday mornings in nearby “natural” settings, not supplanting the Sunday service, but supplementing it, away from the church building. After all we cannot store new wine in old bottles, emphasizing that God’s Word is two-fold: Creation and Scriptures.
In the out-door services we can fully embrace those of all faiths – and perhaps none – including the Jewish one, the original COVENANT people.
The church always must remind its people that our eternal future is not heaven – the church’s major heresy – but a RENEWED EARTH.