DECEMBER 27 2015
DOES CHRISTIANITY NEED ANOTHER PARADIGM SHIFT?
(I am struggling with this idea: comments are appreciated.)
2000 years ago there was indeed a paradigm shift in the concept of what was seen as the true religion, one from being saved by adhering to the laws of Moses, the Torah, to Paul’s message of being saved ‘by grace alone through faith’. There were significant outward changes as well: the Saturday Sabbath became the Sunday Day of Rest, honoring Jesus’ Resurrection. Circumcision was replaced by Baptism: deed was combined with word.
Are similar changes needed today? The ‘being saved by grace alone’ is just as true as before, but is Sola Scripture still valid now after 2000 years? Is “Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus”, no salvation outside the church, a Roman Catholic doctrine, also outdated? Has being saved based on the preaching of Scriptures alone become the equivalent of what used to be the adherence to the law?
All these are controversial questions, perhaps highly inconvenient for the ministers of the gospel, whose stock in trade is being questioned here, putting their job at risk.
Let me throw a good Reformed slogan into the mix: Ecclesia Reformata, semper Reformanda, meaning that “The church is reformed and always is in the process of Reforming.
I’d wish this were really true, because Christianity desperately needs a different Reformation, a total change in direction, witness the exodus of many, especially the youth.
Why now? The naked truth is that we are entering a time of alarming and bewildering change — the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a totally new employment scene, while simultaneously coping with multispecies mass extinction and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Yes, the end of the world is now openly discussed. That’s why the church, which I love, also needs a total different approach.
Fact is we do experience the end of civilization as we know it because we all, Christian and non-Christian, have been sucked in a way of life that destroys God’s Holy Creation. A number of focused studies — by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science for instance — have warned us that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a ‘perfect storm’ within about fifteen years.
Church people by and large refuse to see this, thanks to the Heaven Heresy: why bother with the earth if we go to heaven anyway? That the world groans under the weight of seven plus billion humans, while every new birth adds another mouth hungry for food, another life greedy for energy, is not seen as important by them.
We forget that God has removed himself from the earth. 1 John 5: 19 explicitly tells us that the Evil one rules. God has left us to our devices and we are on our own. Deuteronomy comes to mind: “I shall hide my face from them; I will see what their end will be.” (Deut. 32:20). We are on our own. The world has become Satan’s domain. Nietzsche has written somewhere that when God is dead – and we have declared him as such – then everything is permitted. Just imagine: Right-wing denialists – usually the church-going crowd – insist that climate change isn’t happening, or that it’s not caused by humans, or that the real problem is terrorism or refugees, while left-wing denialists – usually the liberal Democrats, Canada’s Justin Trudeau included – insist that the problems are fixable, under our control, merely a matter of political will.
Perhaps it is dawning on people that since nothing is fixable anymore, we might as well kill as many people as possible, before we kill ourselves, as now happens all too frequently. Meanwhile, as the gap between the future we’re entering and the future we once imagined grows ever wider, nihilism takes root in the shadow of our fear: if all is already lost, nothing matters anyway.
Signs that nothing matters anymore are everywhere: in TV shows, I am told, because I never watch TV except for news programs, and these newscasts now are called ‘shows’ too because they have to be entertaining. What is so entertaining about tornadoes and Trump and his nonsensical tirades, or about drowning refugees and the rush to war, sectarianism and racial hatred?
At the core is the total absence of religion: what is missing is the belief that ultimately God is in charge and that his Kingdom is on the way. The concept of the kingdom, the new earth to come, is totally absent in the ecclesiastical scene, so nihilism, religious nihilism has taken over. The heaven-heresy simply encourages this.
The greatest failure in our times has been the churches, just as they were in Germany in the time of Hitler. When Bonhoeffer argued this point he was killed. Yes, there are still voices that argue against ‘the spirit of this age’, Pope Francis among them. But is there true reform in the Roman Church? No. Where are the women in the Roman Church? Why that destructive celibacy ordinance? And then all these elaborate vestments and a strictly enforced hierarchy, from cardinal down, an organizational form more Old Testament than the freedom Christ proclaimed.
Perhaps churches today are as outdated as the synagogues in the time after Pentecost. Of course churches are still needed, because the new birth has to start there, just as Christianity is a child of Jewry.
Friedrich Nietzsche, one of Western philosophy’s most incisive diagnosticians of religion, wrote near the end of the 19th century: “Man will sooner will nothingness than not will.” That to me suggests that we prefer ‘nothing’ over something: the entire entertainment enterprise basically consists of nothing, including the fanatic attachment to a certain sports team, or the Jihad movement in the Middle East, both totally nihilistic – Satan inspired concepts. When Nietzsche wrote “Man will sooner will nothingness than not will,” he offered an explanation for today: we, on the precipice of nihilism, would rather choose self-annihilation over a simply structured life.
The Nazi movement was a good example of that. Today we see it in every new suicide attack by jihadi terrorists. As nihilism becomes more ingrained, we just might stumble toward another thoughtless war, asking young men and women to throw their lives away so we might continue believing the Western way of life means something. In essence war is active nihilism supplanting a passive one because war reduces everything to ‘nothing’, to nihil.
Nietzsche wasn’t himself a nihilist: he loved creation. When he saw a horse whipped to death by a cruel owner, he literally lost his mind. As a son of a Lutheran clergyman, and a grandson of one as well, and early in life slated to follow in their footsteps, he knew the Bible as no other. He also saw the church accommodating to the world and so became a severe critic of religion as was practiced in Germany in his day. With the church dead, he wrote that for all practical purposes God is dead as well.
Today, as every hour brings new alarms of war and climate disaster, we might wish we could take Nietzsche’s place. He had to cope only with the death of God, while we must come to terms with the death of our world. Peril lurks on every side, from the delusions of hope to the fury of reaction, from the despondency of hopelessness to the promise of destruction.
We stand today on a precipice of a total annihilation that Nietzsche could not have even imagined. There is no reason to hope that we’ll be able to slow down global warming before we pass a tipping point. We’re already one degree Celsius above preindustrial temperatures and there’s at least another half a degree baked in. The West Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing, Greenland is melting, permafrost across the world is liquefying, and methane has been detected leaking from sea floors and Siberian craters: it’s already too late to stop these feedbacks, which means it’s already too late to stop apocalyptic planetary warming.
Yet the church refuses to see the signs of the times. Business as usual: pious sermons every Sunday to the chosen few. Or are they the frozen few? Unable to dislodge themselves from our Satanic way of life?
Meanwhile the world slides into hate-filled, bloody havoc, as foretold in the last book of the Bible, Revelation.
Yes, in a world founded on hope, built with “can do” grit, and bedazzled by its own technological wizardry, the very idea that something might be beyond our power or that humans have intrinsic limits verges on blasphemy.
I repeatedly am called a ‘pessimist’. Basically people believe that every problem has a solution; suggesting otherwise stirs a deep and often hostile resistance. It’s not so much that accepting the truth of our situation means thinking the wrong thought, but rather thinking the unthinkable. The church is at the forefront of this denial, totally forgetting the core of Bible teaching and the reason why Christ died: he died to save the world, the cosmos, now in the power of Satan and nihilism.
It seems to me that often the church has no message anymore for the world. Its function has been reduced to ceremonial and preaching to the converted. Converted to what? Its very existence in beautiful buildings, accessible only by automobiles, means that it must cling to a progressivist, profit-seeking, technology-can-fix-it ideology of fossil-fueled capitalism. The youth sees through this and is abandoning the church in droves.
So what must happen?
Instead the church and especially Christian Education from bottom to top, need to learn to let our current civilization die and gear up for the New World to come, a world as envisioned in the last chapters of Revelation. Christians need to work together to transform a global order of meaning focused on accumulation into a new order of meaning that knows the value of limits, knows the meaning of eternity, knows the truth of the holiness of creation.
We also need to learn to see the world not just with Western eyes but with Buddhist and Hebrew eyes and Inuit eyes, not just with human eyes but with golden-cheeked warbler eyes, with pacific-salmon eyes, and Arctic polar bear eyes, and not even just with eyes at all but with the wild, barely articulate being of clouds and seas and rocks and trees and stars.
The Bible tells us in 1 John 5: 19 that today the Evil one rules. That’s why Jesus told us that we don’t belong to that world (John 17: 14), a world dominated by evil. We belong to the world to come, God’s new world. That is the shift we have to make. Truly a paradigm shift. We all are like the proverbial frog, being boiled to death. Can we still extract ourselves from the death-trap we live in?
Today we are on the eve of what will be the human world’s greatest catastrophe. None of us chose this, not deliberately. None of us can choose to avoid it either.
As Christians we today have a different calling. The old way of life is gone. The new way of life is upon us. No longer can the old endure; no longer is it business as usual. Yes, the old ways have been good for us.
And here I address myself to my generation of Dutch immigrants and their offspring. They have done well in the new country, myself included: they have always been at the forefront of Christian action. Apart from a few tiny instances, these people and their offspring still act as if nothing has changed and will change. They, we all, have to accept that we live in the last days: all signs point to this. This means that we live in drastically different times. The church has to switch, make a radical change from exclusively regarding the Scriptures as the sole source of inspiration to concentrating effectively on God’s Primary Word, his Direct Revelation: God’s Holy creation: the world we will inherit!
Scripture and the church will disappear in the New Creation, where God’s Cosmos is All and in All. This is already happening! If Romans 1: 20 condemns those who have failed to see creation as God’s, then, indeed, John 3: 16 stands out as the center of the Gospel: Loving God’s Holy Earth and living so that it remains holy and we with it.
We have to abandon the ruinous way of life that’s destroying us today, and that has to start in the Christian education system, inculcating the youth and young adults. The Reformed Churches have been pioneers in “all things Christian”. Now it must lead in seeing all of creation as holy as well. Can they make these changes?
That means they have to prepare for a totally different life, a life of permanence, a life of permaculture, a life of eternal perpetuity in open defiance of the Evil one, in open obedience to God the Creator.
That is the new and final Christian message: none other is relevant anymore.
Is a paradigm shift still possible? Deed must be combined with word.