THE CHURCH IN FLUX
Chapter 12
Some radical thinking on religion
Let me start with some thoughts by America’s most distinguished literary critic, a man with more than 20 books to his credit, among them The Book of J, a thorough analysis of the books of Moses: Dr Harold Bloom, a Hebrew scholar, who knows the Hebrew bible and Christianity as few others.
In his analysis of Religion, I rely solely on his intriguing book The American religion, the emergence of the post-Christian nation.
Dr Bloom states that “I argue in this book that the American Religion, which is so prevalent among us, masks itself as Protestant Christianity yet has ceased to be Christian.”
There is a provocative statement that sounds true to me, because, as Dr Bloom writes “The American Religion, seems to me irretrievably Gnostic. It is a knowing – gnosis in Greek – by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the-self, and the knowledge leads to freedom, a dangerous and doom-eager freedom: from nature, time, history, community, other selves….an obsessed society wholly in the grip of a dominant Gnosticism.”
A few pages later, Dr Bloom explains that, according to Gnostic belief “Adam and Eve, all begin as disasters in some versions of Gnostic myth, which has nothing good to say about nature, and which has no hope either for our bodies or our outward souls, no hope indeed for anything confined within the limits of space and time.”
No wonder the American churches, especially the Southern Baptist and many Pentecostal churches deny the human element in Global Warming and want President Obama to fail in his attempts to endorse Kyoto.
The success of the Left Behind series and The Great Late Planet Earth, two of the most widely read books in North America, with some 60 million copies sold, clearly affirms that almost all church-goers are believers in a flight from earth to heaven, which is pure Gnostic teaching. Many of the church hymns, across all denominations, contain references to heaven being humanity’s eternal home. No wonder that Dr Bloom toward the end of his book writes, “Christianity, like Judaism before it, is not a biblical religion, despite all its assertions, since it theologies are Greek, not Hebrew, even as normative Judaism, a second century of the Common Era formulation, was compelled to rely upon Greek thought-forms.”
Another of Bloom’s insightful and simultaneously devastating observations is: “Since I am persuaded that much of what this book describes can be found also in Americanized Catholicism and Judaism, as well as in most mainline Protestantism, much of American religiosity clearly lacks spiritual content. The societal consequences of debasing the Gnostic into selfishness, and the believer’s freedom from others into the bondage of others, are to be seen everywhere, in our inner cities and our agrarian wastelands.”
It is not surprising that he approvingly quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who once lamented that “God has granted American Christianity no Reformation.”
Shocking as it may sound to the sincere, believing and committed churchgoer when Dr Bloom states that ‘the American Religion is a form of idolatry’, I nevertheless fully endorse his opinion. Perhaps Karl Marx was correct when he wrote that “religion is the opium of the people.” At any rate, since much of the success of the American Religion has a prosperity angle, where riches are seen as a direct result of going to church, the current economic malaise – which will be quite prolonged and will only get worse – will severely test this branch of Christianity.
There is no doubt that Dr Bloom opinions are controversial. He also states that one of the hallmarks of The American Religion is its anti-intellectual stance, which ensures that very few if any of current churchgoers will ever read his books or ever question their own beliefs.
Dr Jacques Ellul is a man like Harold Bloom. He has equally controversial opinions, and, I must admit, I equally treasure his.
Dr Jacques Ellul is also an author of many books, all originally appearing in French, as he was a professor of law at the University of Bordeaux. Unlike Harold Bloom, who is a Jew, Ellul is a prominent Protestant opinion maker, who has some Jewish ancestors as well.
In his book Hope in Time of Abandonment he expresses his frustrations with organized religion and especially with the preaching, much of which is boring and irrelevant.
Here are some of his words: “Modern man is impervious to the preaching of the gospel…..We still persist in pushing the message of faith, which no longer belongs to our times.”
I see here similarity with Bloom’s thesis: the mark of Gnostics is that they have ‘gnosis’ which means ‘knowledge’. Since they ‘know’ the truth, they have ceased to look. Back to Ellul: “Where man is not looking for anything, he cannot hear the Gospel. Where he is quite content, he has no need of the Gospel.” In connection with this he quotes Jesus who said that “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick”; “Woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation” (Luke 5:31; 6:24). “That”, Ellul says, “is the crucial message of the Beatitudes.” Sermons, in other words, are mostly a waste of time, as the ministers preach to the converted, who basically are beyond hearing.
In Hope in Time of Abandonment Ellul expresses his belief that God has left humanity to its own devices – something I have referred to in an earlier chapter – which means that the only matter left to humans is ‘The Hope for the Coming of the New Creation’. That’s why he writes that “Only the deep need of man today drives me to say that the center of the Christian message is hope….. I am led to opt for hope by quite another route. If it is true that the world in which we live is a world of abandonment, if it is true that God is silent and that we are alone, then, as I shall try to demonstrate later, it is under these circumstances and at this moment that the preaching, the declaration, and the living hope is urgent….What I mean quite simply, is that the central question for man ( and for the Christian) today is not whether we believe or not, but whether we to hope or not… To believe in the Lord Jesus implies hope for his return…… We are called upon to believe what we hope. We must awaken people to hope, for only there can faith take root…..It is true that if we are in the age of abandonment, then our preaching on all other aspects of the revelation is empty, obsolete, and outworn.”
Ellul does not have a high opinion of the church. “Christians as such are mostly honorable, devout, religious, warmhearted, committed and serious. No, it is not the fault of Christians, nor of a particular vice, that the archangel of mediocrity is the true master of the Church.” Later he states that “Thus we have only one choice: either be mediocre or renegade since we, the body of Christians constituting the Church system, are in an age of abandonment.”
Ellul sees the contemporary church as purely a sociological body, good for fellowship, good for socializing, good for praying and singing, but there its usefulness ends.
Just as Bloom, Ellul concludes that “Protestantism and Catholicism both have come to the end of the road as sociological realities. We cannot go back to the sixteenth century to make them alive again… Those who are out to kill or dissolve churches at all costs are wasting their time. All they have to do is let evolution and circumstance take care of it for them….Consequently, it calls for a revision of all our church life if hope is to be the center of our life and of our witness. It calls for a revision of all our activities, our administrations, our liturgies, our teaching procedures.”
Before Bloom, who wrote The American Religion in the 1990’s and before Ellul whose books date from the early 1970’s, Dr Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings and essays date from the 1930’s and 1940’s.
His books are so special because they were composed during the Hitler regime in Germany, written while he was on the run from the Gestapo – the Geheime Stat’s Polizei – as well as when he was in prison. He was hanged in April 1945, a month before Germany surrendered. The daily threats on his life give his writings an unusual poignancy.
So what does Dietrich Bonhoeffer have to say about the church and religion in general? That his opinions are well researched and biblically sound testifies to his great intellect which earned him a double doctorate in theology before the age of 25.
In 1939, while teaching in the USA, he returned to Germany to be with his church, the Lutheran church, where he was active as teacher, minister and youth leader, but later become disenchanted with their leaders because of the silent complicity of the church with the Nazi regime.
The disillusionment with the church actually started in America, where he, following a religious service he found intolerable, wrote in his diary “the whole affair was nothing but a well-mannered, opulent, self-satisfied celebration of religion”. He then already asked himself, “Are people really unaware that they can do quite well and be better off without religion?”
Two recurrent themes in Bonhoeffer’s thoughts are ‘religion-less Christianity’ and ‘a world come of age.’ Both can be traced to Revelation 21, where in verse 22 it says that ‘I did not see a temple in the City.’ The City referred to is the New Jerusalem, symbolizing the New Creation, where only those who have lived holy and godly lives while waiting for the Lord’s return, are present. In that New Creation people will not have ‘religion’. No churches, synagogues, mosques, or temples can be found there. All will adhere to ‘religion-less Christianity, as the Law of the Lord will be written in their hearts.
Bonhoeffer writes in that connection: “Christian existence does not mean being religious in any specific manner,….rather it means being a true human being.” That’s what God wants us to be: true human beings. That’s why Christ always calls himself ‘The Son of Man’ which simply means “a true human being.”
Bonhoeffer writes that “Jesus calls a person not to a new religion but to life. (That’s why) the pure teaching of the gospel is not a religious concern but a desire to execute the will of God for a new creation. Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from the world to other worlds beyond: rather, he gives us back the earth as its loyal children.”
Bonhoeffer, like Bloom and like Ellul, strongly condemns contemporary religion where he says that “We have fallen into secularism, and by secularism I mean pious Christian secularism. Not the godlessness of atheism or cultural bolshevism, but the Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth.”