The State of the Church.
Not so long ago – say 100 years – most people had a viable church connection. Now many only have a nominal one, except in the USA, the most religious country in the West. With the new pope being from Argentina some statistics there are being quoted: 90 percent of its population is Roman Catholic, but only 7 percent attend mass. The same is true in the Quebec province of Canada. Where we live, in the Municipality of Tweed, Ontario with just over 5100 population there are still 6 churches operating: 2 large Roman Catholic churches (attended by 100 people each, according to the new priest), United, Presbyterian, Pentecostal and Salvation Army. The Anglican Church closed. I am optimistic when I say that 8 percent -400 people- attend church in Tweed on a regular basis. Even then most churches – fortunately not all – resemble more social gatherings than spiritual communities. Their sole service often is self-service and preservation and their vision no larger than the collective interests of the in-group. No wonder Jesus once said: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? (Luke 18:8).
As for me: I am a religious man. I also go to church- Presbyterian. At table my wife and I pray aloud and read at breakfast a Psalm or a portion thereof. We both for decades have written a daily meditation on a text of the lectionary of 400 words on weekdays and 800 words on Sundays in Journeying through the Days, published by the Upper Room Books in Nashville, Tenn. That, more than anything else, has shaped our insight into matters biblical. We both also are products of Christian education on the primary and secondary levels, and, of course come from a long line of Christian forefathers – and – mothers.
I am not a person who mindlessly believes. I question and probe all the time. I believe that Heraclitus was right, a Greek philosopher, who lived from about 540 BC to 480 BC, thus some 2500 years ago, at the same time when the people of Judah returned from Babylon to re-build Jerusalem and the temple. Heraclitus coined the Greek saying “Panta Rhei, Oude Menei” which translates as “Everything flows, Nothing Remains the same.” For the Jews the 70 year period of the Babylonian Exile had been one of deep religious questioning. The clash of opinions came to a head when a remnant returned from Persia- Iran-Iraq. The dispute: return to temple-centered worship or implement the divine vision of God as the universal creator and redeemer, recognizing that “Everything changes, nothing is static. Sad to say the conservatives won as usual. When we look at the Roman Catholic Church and Islam as well, we also see little of change: a body of believers gathered in an organizational structure that basically has not altered for more than 1500 years, or in case of the Protestant churches, 500 years. The Greek saying from more than 2.5 millennia ago does not apply to the ecclesiastical scene. So either the church or mosque is right or Heraclitus was.
I recently translated a book by Johan Herman Bavinck: The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming, soon to be published by Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, Mich. In it Bavinck writes:
“At first glance we might see some similarity between a merchant in the Roman Empire and a CEO of a commercial enterprise in our time. They both deal with identical problems; both cope with the laws of economic reality, valid for all ages. But when I search the two lives a bit closer I discover that the comparison does not hold water. They stand at a different point in time and this determines their entire life. History has advanced during those two thousand years, which is why the human problems too are totally different. It is simply not possible to lift a person out of his time?frame and his milieu: we must regard him or her within the context of the totality of that particular period of history in which his life is anchored. Only then do we see that person in his totality. After all, mankind is history. History is not an aspect of his being; no, it is at the core of his life. This is the outlook which modern Western man has acquired on history and on the individual person.”
Does what applies to persons, also pertain to institutions? In my opinion a form of organization that dates from as far back as the Fourth Century can no longer function in the Twenty First Century in the same format. And that includes all organized religion, including Islam.
In the introduction to his highly acclaimed book CHRISTIANITY the First Three Thousand Years, the author Diarmaid MacCullogh writes that “Still in the eighth century of the Christian era, the great new city of Baghdad would have been a more likely capital for worldwide Christianity than Rome. [The Middle East was Paul’s most successful mission field]. The extraordinary accident of the eruption of Islam is the chief reason why Christian history turned in another direction.” This Oxford Professor continues to relate that already in the fourth century the bishop of Rome was referred to as papa (‘Pope’) and became the unchallenged leader of the Western, Latin-speaking Church. As the emperors abandoned Rome, more and more power was flowing into the hands of the churchmen. The church itself assumed the structure of the fading empire.
I think it was exactly by becoming a secular power where the church went wrong. Jesus repeatedly said that “My kingdom has no connection whatsoever with political matters.” The disciples kept on urging Jesus to use his divine powers – resurrecting the dead, miraculously feeding thousands – to re- establish the Davidic Empire, but Jesus always refused, emphasizing that the church must grow from the ground-up and not from the top down. This was the case after the Pentecost event in Jerusalem and later with Paul: word of mouth and charitable living made the early church grow. The ‘extraordinary’ accident of Islam could well have been the direct result of the power grab of the Bishop of Rome. As the post-exile period about 500 years before Christ shows, the church always prefers building physical structures rather than spreading ‘shalom’ fostering human relationships in whatever form. Shalom describes the cosmic harmony that exists where the world and all its inhabitants are reconciled with God. T.S. Eliot defines it poetically: “What life have you if not life together? There is no life that is not in community, and no community not lived in praise of God.”
All religions, but especially Islam and the Church of Rome are typified by their determination to adhere to certain manmade rules, and by refusing to alter them. Had the church been more down to earth, empowering people and encouraging them to approach neighbours at the door-to-door level to live peacefully together, the extraordinary event of Islam might not have happened. (I admire the Jehovah Witnesses for their zeal in promoting its religion.) For centuries the Roman church forbade its adherents to read or have a bible. Even now the Bible is a closed book for most church-goers.
Is it too late now to have true Church Reform? Jesus fervent prayer was for church unity “May they be one as my Father and I are one”. In the New Creation – the Kingdom to come – people will be as united as Jesus and the Father- personified in creation- are one. Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell once suggested that the root of the modern crisis is spiritual. People thought that in a society come of age, they could live without the sacred. Now that they stare into the void of secularization and profanation, which is failing to answer the questions dealing with death, tragedy, obligation and love, Bell believed that this crisis would prepare the way for a ‘return to the sacred’. I am not that optimistic. It seems to me that the situation is more in line with what G.K Chesterton once said: “When we cease to worship God we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.”
Is that what we see now? Is that The State of the Church?
That brings me to today where Religion is very much in the news. The April issue of HARPER’S has an essay on “BLINDED BY THE RIGHT? How hippie Christians begat evangelical conservatives. According to T. M. Luhrmann, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, the Jesus People of earlier days changed what it meant to be a Christian in America. “They made speaking in tongues common. They made reading the Bible literally a mainstream practice. They made the idea of Rapture – the process by which believers will be spirited up to heaven when Jesus returns for the Second Coming – a cultural touchstone.”
All these revolutionary hippies of yesteryear are now mostly the Tea Party, right-wing Republicans. The flag and the fetus is their main political plank. Jesus saw real dangers in the flag as a symbol of nationalism, while the Bible never mentions abortion, which was legal under Roman law, and Exodus distinguishes between the murder of a person and the murder of a fetus. The first is punishable by death, the second by a fine.
In the USA Republicans – about 50 percent of the population – are primarily the church-going crowd, who, paradoxically, see such issues as pollution, resource depletion, Peak Everything, irrelevant, because they will be “Raptured”, a word that has its root in the Latin verb Rapio, rapere, raptum, which my Latin dictionary defines as “to seize, snatch, tear away.” Actually our word ‘rape’ is derived from it as well. Indeed Rapture plays an important role in allowing the ‘rape’ of the earth, God’s beloved creation (John 3:16) to proceed unhindered. The “Left Behind” series, so immensely popular, actually displays the biblical ignorance of this movement. Matthew 24: 39 clearly says that the sinners are swept away while the righteous are ’left behind’ to have another go at rebuilding creation.
Harold Bloom, famous for his commentaries on Shakespeare, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University, America’s most distinguished literary critic, wrote The American Religion the emergence of the Post-Christian nation, in which he examines America’s national soul.
Bloom, an acute observer, argues in his book that the American Religion, which is so prevalent among us, masks itself as Protestant Christianity, yet has ceased to be Christian. He sees American society as dangerously religion-soaked, even religion-mad. Dr. Bloom sees the American religion as a variation on Gnosticism. Gnosticism is so condemned by the Apostle John in his 3 letters that he explicitly warns the church against it. Gnosticism teaches that spirit is good but matter is evil, including one’s body. Salvation is the escape from the body- hence Rapture. Christ’s humanity is denied. All created matter, including one’s body can be treated harshly. I see that as the original cause of obesity, especially rampant in the American South, where the Southern Baptists and the Pentecostal Churches constitute the majority.
Dr. Bloom is quite severe in his pronouncements on the American religion. He writes: “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.” At the root of the problems in the North American Church, and the cause of the miserable State of the Church, lies the heresy of ‘going to heaven’, something never mentioned in the Bible. No wonder Dietrich Bonhoeffer once stated that “God has granted American Religion no Reformation.” Jesus too had his doubts about the church’s effectiveness when he said: “Many are called, few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14).
Carl Jung, one of the first modern psychologists to address the issue of collective madness, makes an interesting observation. He theorized that individual humans possess not only a personal unconscious mind but has also a collective unconscious mind which from time to time becomes activated and generates a form of communal madness. The American Religion with it Gnostic emphasis is a kind of concerted derangement, as all idolatry is. It also has exported this to the Rest of the World, especially South America and Africa where Pentecostalism is rapidly expanding. The result is that most inhabitants of the world are living in cultures committed to infinite growth, consumerism, resource extraction, war, and of course, massive denial that any of these destructive policies lead inevitably to planetary suicide. Thanks to a devilish interpretation of religion humans are united in perpetuating universal insanity, based on an erroneous illusion which can only have one possible outcome: collapse. Of course there are notable exceptions to this situation, but they are definitely very much in the minority.
Next week I will continue to investigate the church, religion and atheism, and conclude with the task of the church.