JESUS AND THE CHURCH
I have this book to which I return at least once a year: The Hidden Face of God, written by a Jewish Professor of Hebrew, Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman. In it he frequently quotes both the Old- and the New Testaments, as well as Bonhoeffer, Nietzsche and also Dostoevsky, whose passage from The Brothers Karamazov has intrigued me for a long time.
Here it is:
Dostoevsky presents ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, as a story that Ivan, the atheist Karamazov brother has composed and recounts to his younger brother Alyosha, the aspiring priest. In it, Jesus returns to the earth during the Spanish Inquisition….”It is fifteen centuries since man has ceased to see signs from heaven. And now the deity appears once more among men in human shape in which he walked among men for three years. The divine visitor performs miracles: a blind man sees, a dead child rises. Everyone recognizes him. And then the aged cardinal sees him and has him seized and taken to prison (and tells him) not to speak for ‘Thou hast no right to add anything to what Thou hadst said of old….. Why hast Thou come now to hinder us?…..All has been given by Thee to the Pope….the Church is the authority now.’ The Grand Inquisitor then tells Jesus that he erred when he resisted the devil’s three temptations in the wilderness: miracle, mystery and authority, and Jesus rejected them. But, the old cardinal reveals, the Church accepted them. The Church rules the masses precisely by miracle, mystery and authority; and he argues that is what the masses need…., but Jesus wanted them to have freedom of choice. But freedom is too difficult and frightful for them, says the Inquisitor and so the church has taken the three awesome gifts from the devil, and he concludes, “We are not working with Thee, Jesus, but with him: that is our secret.” The Grand Inquisitor opens the cell door and says, “Go, and come no more…. Come not at all, never, never”. And the divine visitor leaves.
Dostoevsky is entirely correct when he writes that ‘Jesus wanted us to have freedom, but freedom is too difficult and frightful for the common folk’.
That still is true today. Preachers and sermons essentially have replaced the old cardinal with their ecclesiastical preaching monopoly. The monologue method of communication is not only outdated but essentially deprives the laity of the ‘freedom’ to explore and question, something Jesus wanted his followers to be engaged in, all the time. “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling”, says the Gospel. That requires ‘freedom’ to search and ‘freedom’ to experiment, something ministers and priests in particular and the church in general through their dominance make very difficult for the communion of saints to implement.
Jesus, just like I, had his run-ins with the church. In his hometown they wanted to kill him when he spoke in the ‘church’. The same happened when he ventured into the temple, that’s also why his preferred podium was the natural open space, God’s real holy temple.
That brings me back to both Friedman and Bonhoeffer. There is a striking similarity between the conclusion Dr. Friedman reaches in the book I mentioned, and what Bonhoeffer, after a lifetime of reflection writes. After almost 300 pages of exploring The Hidden Face of God, Dr. Friedman concludes in his very last sentence, “There is some likelihood that the universe IS the hidden face of God”. Being a cautious professor, he really means that he is certain that creation and the deity are synonymous.
It is also quite startling that Bonhoeffer, the eminent protestant scholar, has reached the very same outcome. Dr. Sabine Dramm, in her spiritual biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, also on the very last pages, writes, “What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and Creation as one, and the perception of life that has its wellspring in this world in God, and in turn proceeds from this world back again to God”.
That’s why God in his grace has shown me that not heaven, but the earth has become the centre of my life: Think about that for a few hours. I am NOT heaven-bound, but now my freedom encompasses the entire creation.
The Belgic Confession is also quite explicit on that score, stating that we know God primarily through his creation which, “like a tapestry, like a marvelous picture book, in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God.”
God and Creation are co-existent: harming creation is cursing God, is ‘using God’s Name in vain’.
On his departure from America in 1939, where he was offered a teaching position at a prestigious seminary, to return to Hitler Germany and certain death, Bonhoeffer wrote:
God has granted American Christianity no Reformation. He has given it strong revivalist preachers, churchmen and theologians, but no Reformation of the church of Jesus Christ by the Word of God.
Dr. Harold Bloom, famous literary critic in his The American Religion writes that “The American Religion is Post-Christian”, in which “The Flag and the Foetus” dominate. It has ceased to be Christian”. Gnosticism has penetrated it from top to bottom. In ‘Gnosticism’ it does not believe or trust: it ‘knows’. (Gnosis). It knows it goes to heaven. James Watt, former secretary of the Interior (charged with the preservation of ‘the land’), opposed conservation because, as he explained, “this world would pass away within a generation or two.” That outright heresy now dominates most regular religious organizations.
Oh America, which calls thyself “A City on the Hill”, a shining light in a dark world. How little dost thou know thyself.
How then shall we live?
Implement Jesus’ words, as recorded in John 10: 10.
I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
That is more fully outlined in John 3. In verse 13 Jesus tells an upper-class Bible scholar, Nicodemus – who had come to Jesus by night, sneaked into the home were Jesus was staying – “Nobody has gone to heaven, except Jesus himself”, a direct refute to all ‘know-nothing’ evangelicals. Jesus then tells this theologian,
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
Here Jesus instructs this theological expert, a Teacher of Israel, how to live. This text proves again that the ‘know-nothing’ Fundamentalists really know nothing. This text plainly states that Jesus did not come to save sinners. His primary mission was to ‘save the earth’, and included in that ‘saved earth’, would be those (1) who ‘loved the earth’ as God did, and (2) believed in the saving act of Jesus Christ, God’s Son. That’s the message the church has to proclaim, all the time. That truth will set us free.
Want to live forever in a perfect world?
In perfect freedom?
Remember: God and Creation are co-existent: harming creation is cursing God, is ‘using God’s Name in vain’. Old Testament religion killed Jesus, and New Testament religion killed God.”
Yes, I admit: Jesus and the church is a very contentious issue.
What I have learned is to beware of religion, and to beware of the church. What I have learned is to: “Love the earth, and so love God”.
What I have learned is to: “Believe in Jesus Christ, who taught us how to live and that to the full”.
What I have learned is that: “Redemption of the planet and personal redemption go hand in hand: you can’t have one without the other.”