March 25 2017
ECCLESIOLA IN ECCLESIA
Patience, a bit later I’ll explain this Latin phrase. Actually it is not hard to guess what it means.
Late last year I was in Minnesota and Wisconsin for a grandson’s wedding and talked to American Christians: staunch Lutherans, staunch Republicans and also staunch Trumpians.
At one time I was not a Lutheran but a Dutch Reformed stauncher: born into the staunchiest of Calvinistic cradles. I grew up in a Reformed Christian extended family: twice to church on Sunday, weekly youth meetings; went to Christian schools. Christian thinking infiltrated all sections of our life. My father was active in a Christian Political Party, banked at the BOAZ bank; before the war my oldest brother played in a Christian Soccer Club: the whole ball of wax.
Soon after I arrived in Canada in 1951 I too became active in pursuing that same course: helping to start Christian schools from elementary through College and University. All our five kids attended these institutions.
Today it’s different. It is not that the institutions are changing: I am having second thoughts. Oh yes, I still go to church. Oh yes, I still financially support these various Christian organizations, even though I am afraid they are stuck in a rut. Once you build a church or a cathedral or basilisk or a St Peter’s or a mosque or synagogue you are stuck with them. Once you have installed a Pope, cardinal, bishop, priest, rabbi, imam you are stuck with them. Once you have seminaries to prepare preachers, have college professors to teach them the ropes, you are stuck with them. Once you have denominations, Anglican, Roman Catholic, whatever, you are stuck with them. In other words, I see institutions defined by their unchangeable physical features, their statements of faith and their historic offices. I also believe that their economic existence depends on prosperous financial conditions: capitalism in other words.
In my opinion in today’s less affluent times new approaches must be tried based on different, more all-inclusive, more radical thinking.
Already there is a within the churches growing sterility, aging populations, mounting ossification, hardening of doctrinal stances, lack of flexibility, increasing concern whether “Religion” will survive the forces of decay.
I am also wondering whether church buildings are still the proper meeting places as they are often less than half full, are hard to heat, thus anti- environment, and expensive to insure. Are current confessions, the clerical offices, the well-worked out ‘statements of faith’ still needed?
When the curtain between the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem temple was torn from top to bottom when Jesus died, signifying the end of the Old Testament Hebrew Religion, and when that same Jerusalem temple was razed in the year 70 AD, reaffirming this again, so too all institutional religion will totally disappear upon Christ’s return, never to be resurrected again.
That’s the situation we have to prepare ourselves for.
So how do we go about that?
Already a lot of questioning is going on.
This past week I read a book review on THE CRISIS OF EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY: ROOTS, CONSEQUENCES AND RESOLUTIONS, written by Keith Sewell, Professor of History Emeritus at Dordt College, a Christian (Reformed) College in Sioux Center, Iowa.
He hits all the appropriate buttons, such as the Reformed emphasis on creational theology which the reviewer calls central to Dutch Reformed thought, while condemning the lack of this perspective in Evangelicalism where the individual ‘soul’ is all too prominent.
Long ago I bought a book entitled THE AMERICAN RELIGION. In it Harold Bloom exposes the vacuity of much what is called ‘religion’ in the USA, correctly calling it Gnostic and no longer Christian. Its most severe heresy finds its culmination in the ‘heaven belief’ that has penetrated all denominations. In my (Presbyterian) hymnbook many songs have a ‘heaven’ reference: the book needs a radical overhaul, which will not happen – it would offend too many due-paying people. Although Sewell, as far as I can conclude from the review, uses the same language I employ: “All of Life is Religion” the reviewer laments that the resolutions Sewell proposes would benefit from a few more specific examples of how all this can be applied to concrete situations.
This suggests to me – not having read the book – that Sewell fails to come up with something new. Anything radical? I doubt it.
Yes, we humans themselves are at a critical point.
That humanity is at a crucial juncture is plain from the writings of a secular Jewish historian. Yuval Noah Harari is the author of SAPIENS and HOMO DEUS, two books dealing with the future of HOMO SAPIENS – our human race as now constituted.
He claims that we will disappear in our present form within the next century replaced by a being dominated by biotechnology and artificial intelligence, making us totally different entities. Gone will be our ‘image of God’ status: the new being emerging as Homo Technicus or whatever.
In the light of current developments others too strive for solutions to the ‘worship’ problem, evident from two articles in the New York Times lately: one by Ross Douthat: CHRISTIANS IN THE HANDS OF DONALD TRUMP, another by David Brooks.
Douthat writes that “Many church leaders found ways to cast Trump as a heaven-sent figure, whose flaws and failings were no worse than those of a King David or a Constantine.”
It is all too plain that Christianity in the USA divorces God from his creation, a clear sign that GNOSTICISM is at work, which regards the earth as evil and heaven good. US Christianity also has strong apocalyptic characteristics.
Both Douthat and David Brooks extensively quote Rod Dreher whose new book THE BENEDICT OPTION is quite popular. The Benedict option refers to the 7th Century monastic movement where Christians, during those dark ages after the collapse of Rome, founded monasteries where the true believers – all men – devoted themselves to a life of true Christian living, which, in their opinion, excluded sex.
Dreher is a pessimist. He thinks that Western Christianity is predestined to all but disappear, collapsing from within even as its institutions are regulated and taxed to death by secular inquisitors. That’s why he wants to go the Medieval way of religious communities — churches, schools, families, social networks — that are more resilient, more rigorous and more capable of passing on the faith than much of Christianity today is capable of doing: hence THE BENEDICT OPTION, a community sheltered from the evils in society.
I am (re)-reading THE NAME OF THE ROSE, a book dealing with the goings on in a 14th Century abbey, a typical BENEDICT institution where, sorry to say, violence and sex are not absent.
Nevertheless Dreher states that “There can be no peace between Christianity and the sexual revolution, because they are radically opposed.”
He refers to homosexuality and the wider L.G.B.T. activism. He asserts that the struggle over gay rights is what is threatening religious liberty, putting Christian merchants out of business, threatening the tax-exempt status and accreditation of Christian schools and colleges.
The BENEDICT OPTION reminds me of the PARABLE OF THE WEEDS, related in Matthew 13. There Jesus warns against human efforts for purity, because, he says, while pulling the weed, expelling the bad guys, you may also uproot the good guys. Jesus says that in the end he will sort this out.
Jesus always was moderate in his verdicts witness his conversation with the Samaritan woman, the equivalent of Muslims today.
From personal experience I can testify that THE BENEDICT OPTION is no panacea. From 1975 to 1980 our family was part of something like THE BENEDICT OPTION, involving 5 families and lots of children. It stranded on religious differences.
I learned a lot from this. In the end we joined the local Presbyterian Church and have been a member there since.
There we were fortunate to find people who share our concerns for the earth. In these ensuing 37 years I have been involved in all facets of its church life, as well as locally in the village, initiating what is now a 128 bed Long Term Care Facility.
Since then I have become a devotee of both J.H. Bavinck and Bonhoeffer, especially the latter, because he literally lived in the last days, knowing that he would not survive under the Hitler regime. He saw the Lutheran church capitulating to a secular regime – the Nazis -for the sole purpose of maintaining its present structure.
Today is no different: the current US vice-president, Mike Pence, thinks that homosexuality is an acquired condition which is curable. The current Washington regime, with the enthusiastic approval of most churches, has scrapped all climate regulations.
Back to my two favorite theologians.
What all religious writers, including Sewell, miss is the NEW CREATION prospect for which we have to prepare ourselves NOW. That’s why Bavinck and Bonhoeffer are so needed today.
Bavinck convinced me that we cannot understand creation without the Bible and we cannot understand the Bible without creation. He made me see that the redemption of ourselves and the redemption of creation go hand in hand: you can’t have the one without the other: A RADICAL THOUGHT, that’s why the most important text in the Bible today is John 3:16: “God so loved the world that he offered the life of his son to buy creation back from the Evil One, who until Christ returns, in full charge of the earth.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a courageous thinker, toying with Religion-less Religion and living ‘etsi non daretur Deus’ living as God did not exist.
He really lived his words as is evident in the opening paragraph of his CREATION AND FALL: “The church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”
He called himself an ANTHROPOS TELEIOS, (Matthew 5: 48) a human being that always has the end in mind.
Back to my earlier statement that ‘in the end’ all church-affiliated matters will disappear when Christ returns. Now already we must prepare ourselves for that condition. Now already we must live the life as if the end has come, because if we do not do this, our adjustment to life eternal becomes impossible.
For that reason our entire existence must be focused, not on denominational structures, not on unity-destroying sexual orientations, not on maintaining and expanding “Christian’ organizations, but our total focus should be on the all-important text: GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD, the COSMOS the place that contains all elements God created: really the apple of his eye.
Finally ECCLESIOLA IN ECCLESIA explained.
From personal experience I, for now, reject the BENEDICT OPTION. I sense that the best way to prepare for the New Creation is the formation of what somebody once described as Ecclesiolae in Ecclesia, small churches within the larger church.
The concept dates from the year 1727 when the Hussite Unitas Fratrum or Unity of Brothers, was formed within the framework of the established Lutheran church of Saxony.
I actually see that happening in our own church where, in addition to the regular Sunday sermon-centered service, during the week a dozen people, while discussing a bible book, currently N.T. Wright comments on REVELATION, gather to discuss alternatives, something that somehow doesn’t seem to fit in a regular worship setting.
As an experiment, we’ve had a service in a riverfront park, another in a commercial greenhouse raising bedding plants, both promoting creation-orientated activities. On EARTH DAY we will again have a special service – prepared by the environmental committee – devoted to an aspect of creation: water this time.
I do believe that it is beneficial to discuss THE BENEDICT OPTION. In 2003 Father and son McNeill, both professional historians, recommended this in their book THE HUMAN WEB. Their concluding paragraph warns us:
“The most obvious alternative is collapse of the existing (human) web, which would bring radical impoverishment, catastrophic die-off, and perhaps, if humankind survived, a new start on the basis of local, broken fragments of the web. I conclude that we live on the crest of a breaking wave.”
When this happens, THE BENEDICT OPTION will be forced upon us.
An ‘ECCLESIOLA IN ECCLESIA’ offers the best opportunity to prepare for such an eventuality.