NOVEMBER 9 2014
CHURCH—ILL?
I had planned to start a series about the church, but, on second thought, I abandoned this idea, even though I had lots of sources. I even wrote a book on the church, which I never finished. What’s the use, I reasoned: the church is in decline and very few people are really interested in its fate. My writing about it will only add to the confusion. Instead I will devote future weekly columns to THE CREATED WORD, the world we all live in, the world which is our home today and in the future. I believe that future to be The New Creation, the Coming Kingdom, which the Lord Creator upon his return – he is absent now – will establish.
Another reason why I will not write about the church is the Republican victory in the USA. A good percentage of this block of people are church goers, who deny the relevance of Climate Change, see the earth as its enemy, and consider exploiting it as its rightful privilege.
Perhaps some unbiblical thinking
Just a line on where I am coming from. In the Hebrew Bible there is a mysterious passage concerning Cain who flees from his family after having killed his brother Abel. When God talks to him he replied that he was afraid being killed by roaming vagabonds (Genesis 4: 14), implying that other people were already out there. This to me conveys the distinct possibility that Adam and Eve were selected by God out of the existing human race to make a new beginning, this time filled with the Holy Spirit, thus infused with God’s wisdom. To me this could suggest that God has sensed that the humanity then present was on the verge of harming the world he loved so much (John 3: 16), so he chose a certain human pair to make a new beginning to show the rest of humanity how to live within the limits of creation. Such a choice is not unusual. Later Noah, Abraham and David too were chosen to do the same.
Ii seems to me that the two humans whom we know as Adam and Eve took fruit from a tree without asking the tree for permission, thus breaking cosmic harmony and unlocking cascading creational chaos, culminating in the current climate change. Nietzsche has written that ‘the sin against creation is the greatest of sin.’ I believe that to be the case as well, because creation is God’s direct revelation.
The Bible tells us that the entire human history is one of fall and redemption, of briefly doing God’s will and again and again going against God’s commandments. The real miracle is that, straight through all these strivings, these ups and downs, God is establishing his kingdom. Revelation 14: 13 tells us that our good deeds will accompany us in the New Creation. History has meaning, after all.
There is evolution, also in human development. That Adam and Eve were rather naïve is related by Richard Elliot Friedman in his book, The Hidden Face of God. This great Hebrew Scholar concludes that throughout history two crucial developments have taken place: (1) God’s role in the world slowly disappears – see also Deut. 32:20 were God contemplates to let humanity have its way – which resulted in (2) a shift in the balance of control toward more human power, as humans assume an ever greater responsibility for the fate of their world. Adam and Eve could not do anything about the weather. We now have done that, so much so, that the climate has gone wild.
Consider the following. Adam and Eve were so helpless that God had to make the clothes for the fallen human pair. With Noah we see a lot of progress. Where God caused the Flood to happen, Noah is the project manager for building the Ark. Abraham is even much more independent, evident in discussing with God the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, where he even argues with God (Gen. 18). In the next chapter, Genesis 19: 22, there is a real curious sentence: “I cannot do a thing until you get there,” referring God not able to act until Lot’s family has escaped from that hellish place. Writes Friedman, “Humans are not independent of God here, to be sure, but let us say, the human voice in the story is certainly growing louder.” The progression continues in Jacob who has a physical fight with God. In other words, human are confronting their creator, and that results in increasing their participation in the arena of divine prerogatives, quite in contrast with the pietistic hymn Mold me and make me after thy will, while I am waiting yielded and still.
And then there is Moses. Friedman here quotes Exodus: “See, I have made you a god to Pharaoh.” He writes: “These words are remarkable by any reckoning, but that are particularly impressive in the context of the shift in the divine- human balance.” Psalm 82: 6 comes to mind where God tells us that “you are gods; you all are sons of the Most High.” All of which makes me wonder whether we underestimate ourselves.
Later when Moses had destroyed the first tablets of the law, furious that the folk of Israel had turned to worshiping the golden calf, the second set of tablets is not inscribed by God but by Moses, who later more than once successfully persuades God to relent and change a divine decree. To top it off: Moses speaks with God “the way a man speaks to another man” (Exodus 33: 11).
In short the entire Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, is a repetitious series of falling away from God, briefly returning to his laws, and repeatedly forsaking his commands. Even though God’s prophets were extremely outspoken in their condemnation of the false religious practices of their days, their words did not seem to make much of a difference, which suggested to me also that, if I were to write a series on the church, my musings would have the same result. My change in focus is also inspired by Amos whom I see as a role model, also a lay-prophet, a farmer called by God to speak to the nation.
Years ago I made a six verses song about Amos. Yes, they can be sung on any melody with 10 10 11 11 meters. Here are 3 of them:
2. You think God will not observe what you do; that He will not see the sins you pursue: the widows you trample, the poor you despise, while rich become richer through fraud and through vice.
3. “The noise of your music and songs God detests. He hates and abhors your religious fests. Your pious assemblies they cause only dread: let Justice roll on like a river instead.
5. “Hear this you who cheat the poor of the land false dealings your holdings greatly expand. I’ll send a new famine to all people here: My blessings will cease and my Word disappear.”
I believe that basically today God’s blessings have ceased and God’s word has disappeared. The church, by and large, unless it preaches the Kingdom to Come, and prepares the church for the New Creation, has lost its focus.
Israel’s exile, which lasted 70 years, is another example. It mainly involved the cream of Israel’s intelligentsia, among them many people very knowledgeable of Israel’s past history, harboring historical data preserved through the generations by means of oral transmissions. They also managed to take along all possible written sources. Somehow these people were allowed time and had the opportunity to record much of what we now know as the Hebrew Bible.
There are lessons we can learn from this. During Israel’s 70 year exile, a genuine community had developed in Babylon. I found this also being the case during the German occupation in the Netherlands 1940-45. Oppression is a good thing for the church. The exile period resulted in deep religious questioning. However, immediately upon return to the Promised Land religious strife erupted (something also the case after the war in the Netherlands). Where the prophet Isaiah had pointed out that Yahweh’s aim was to restore the whole creation to a divinely ordered shalom, this vision was ignored by the returning parties who focused primarily on their own partisan interests. The Old Testament tells us that soon disputes arose between its two leaders, both intent on establishing their authority over all opposition, and not hesitating to call the judgment of God on the heads of their rival. Instead of establishing ‘SHALOM” as Isaiah and his followers had advocated, in other words “making Peace with the Planet”, religious strife persisted. This condition has prevailed till the present day.
What really changed my mind.
I was re-reading J. H. Bavinck’s recent book Between the Beginning and the End: a radical Kingdom Vision. I was struck by something he wrote, something the church as institute will never buy, bent as it is on individual salvation. He writes: “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.”
That’s revolutionary. We, as Christian Community, must struggle to live in expectation of the Kingdom –that is the New Creation – to come. That is the task the church is supposed to prepare us for. Frankly I can’t see that happening. My thinking not to pursue a series on the church was also influenced by the following observation:
“If the people of Israel, directly in touch with God through priests and the prophets refused to live according to God’s laws, it is extremely unlikely that the 2000 year old institution which is the church today has preserved the Truth with a Capital T.”
My conclusion is that, if the decline of the influence of the Christian Religion in the sophisticated Western World is any indication, a process that is continuing unabated, no human effort to stem that tide will be successful.
What is needed is a totally different approach. Where the Old Testament Church failed to believe what the Hebrew Bible prophesied about the coming Messiah, the New Testament Church failed to believe that “this is our Father’s World, and thus his Word as well.” The new approach must not focus on the church, because, according to Revelation 21: 22, the church has no place in the New Creation, the Kingdom to Come. This text, one of the last ones in the New Testament says: “I did not see a temple or synagogue or mosque or church building there, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple”.
From this I conclude that our focus, aided by Scripture, should be on Creation, God’s Primary Word, because also God’s Secondary Word, the Bible will no longer be relevant, as God’s law will be written on our hearts.
It is well to recall what happened to the Old Testament religion, where Jerusalem was the seat of the Jewish worship, centering on the temple, which was destroyed in the year 70 A. D. This officially ended the Old Testament way of worship, which already had ceased to be relevant with the death of Jesus who will make everything new.
There’s a revealing passage in J. H. Bavinck’s book: Between the Beginning and the End: A radical Kingdom Vision. It describes the legal process between Jesus and the High Priest. Here is a citation:
“The Messiah was the ultimate meaning of Israel’s nationhood. ….From generation to generation Israel had longed for and pined after the eventual coming of Him who would, at one time, bring salvation. The prophets had testified that this great Redeemer would be none other than God himself, the son of God who was to come into the world. And now that finally this great son of David, this Messiah, has arrived in the world, now he, by that same Israel, is labeled as a blasphemer, a person who has made himself equal to God. Has there ever been anything as tragic as this denial?”
I believe that we are making the same tragic mistake again by ignoring Scripture passages about the New World to come and effectively denying that Creation is God’s Primary Word.
The main reason I decided not to write a series on the Church, was my re-reading of J. H. Bavinck’s Between the Beginning and the End: a Radical Kingdom Vision. It contains everything and every thought I want to say. Go and buy it today. Search for EERDMANS.COM to order the book. Amazon too carries it, of course.
For 10 years I wrote a weekly column for a regional daily. Starting next week I will again do this on my blog – which had 11,000 visitors in October and 9,000 in September.
In This Was The Week That Was, I will single out events that caught my attention during the past 7 days.