April 7 2013
The final Reformation?
A case can be made that some history runs in cycles. Major religions, for instance, seem to be born every six hundred years. Moses and the emergence of the Yahweh worship took place some 1200 years before Christ. About 600 years later the world saw the birth of three separate religious streams: Zoroaster in Persia, Confucius in China and Buddha in South East Asia. Then the Christian Religion took off with the death of Christ, while Islam saw its rise with Mohammed who lived from 570-632. Due to the Crusades – 1096-1291- the 100 year war between France and England -1337-1453-, and especially the 14th Century Black Plague pandemic which killed at least one-third of the European population, the next religious event, the Protestant Reformation, had a long time in coming with Martin Luther acting as catalyst in 1517. Now, with the speeding up of history thanks to our carboholic addiction, 500 years later we are due for what I call the Final Reformation.
If the Church were a business it would have been redundant or bankrupt a long time ago, loosing ‘customers’ continuously. In spite of the growth of some churches in North America, the overall ecclesiastical scene is negative: somehow organized religion no longer appeals to the masses.
We – my wife and I – attend the local Presbyterian Church. A couple of disastrous ministers caused a lot of people to leave. The average attendance dropped from 50-60 to 25-30, with the old guard staying put and the young people leaving. Perhaps our church is not a good example and I may be out of touch, attending a so-called mainline church. But I am not wrong when I know that the more popular churches are not in the creation-saving business and have no Kingdom perspective whatsoever. Instead they concentrate on saving ‘souls’. Years ago, doing an appraisal on a business, the owner asked whether I was born again. I found the question somewhat embarrassing because what I thought was meant by being born again and what I presumed his notion would be were probably two entirely different things. So I guess I mumbled something and went on with inspecting the premises.
Of course in the Presbyterian Church you never ask a person whether he or she is born again. Perhaps we should, and explain what it means. So what does it mean? Jesus told Nicodemus that a person should be born again. Old Nick too found it troubling: he had never heard of such a thing. In that sense he would have made a good main-line Christian. However, whatever was meant before by being born again has, I believe, now taken on a new form.
Johan Herman Bavinck, in his The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming – soon available through Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Mich. – has no use for individual salvation, the still common explanation of re-birth. He wrote: “It is God’s intent to unite all fractured parts of his creation into one overarching harmony. There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal. (emphasis mine). The goal of our life can never be that we personally may enjoy God and be saved in him. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things (including animals from Ants to Zebras, I might add) are again unified under the one and only all?wise will of him who lives and rules for ever.”
“There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal”. If this is true, and I believe it to be, then the church needs to undertake a drastic revision of its modus operandi, an entirely new approach to the Good News. Since the current model of “Brother (sister) are you born again?” doesn’t seem to work anyway why not try a different Way? What should take its place?
Let me take a little detour while you mull this over. The Heidelberg Catechism asks us what our only comfort is in life and death. For practically all people in the West it means embracing a certain religion, one that is not the biblical kind. We all somehow are part of that religion, pressed upon us by the sheer force of events. The surrogate God that western civilization adores, hesitantly in the 19th century and with increasing conviction and passion now is ‘Progress’. Today, when we hear the politicians speak and the national budget makers compile their calculations, they religiously claim that ‘Progress’, that economic growth will deliver us from all evil. We speak of ‘Progress’ with the fervor of converts, religiously believe in its omnipotence and infinite benevolence, and have adopted it as the core doctrines of our civil religion, and made it central to our contemporary notions of meaning and value, as Christianity was before the Age of Reason.
Just as all idols, Progress is failing us. The gods of our age are abandoning us as more growth inevitably results in faster Climate Change and higher pollution. Just look at China! Actually it certainly looks that we have entered the age of no-or even negative growth, which means that we have to look for a different god.
Here the church has a golden opportunity.
In the last chapter of The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming entitled “The Road to Life”, J. H. Bavinck writes: “With a degree of nostalgia we recall how in the ancient church baptism was experienced as real renewal. Coming out of a pagan culture and the enchantments that life there offered, people would hesitantly draw near to the cross of Jesus Christ, where they would gradually be taken in by his word which displayed a new life in which only Christ was Lord and King. When then, at last, such persons, drawn from darkness, experienced baptism, a new world would open up for them. That meant that they would often be shunned by their old friends, perhaps even their own parents, but they would be received in a new circle, the church of Christ, and they would stand with that church in the life?connection of the risen Saviour. In the most perfect sense that was real renewal as the old was indeed a matter of the past, and look, all had become new! In its ultimate sense the fact of baptism can only be compared with the Flood that once had consumed the ancient world, of which baptism was the contrast, the antitype (1 Pet. 3:21). As then, so now, through baptism, an old world, destined for destruction, drowned forever, and a new world arose, a world filled with God’s precious promises. Baptism meant forsaking the world and becoming a new person for the sake of Christ. It was submerging in Christ and again rising in him. Baptism was the entrance to a new world, a new heaven and a new earth. It was customary at one time to assume a new name to show once and for all that the old person was dead and a new one was born in Christ. That is how radically people experienced the transition from the old to the new, from Adam to Christ. “The old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Cor. 5:17).”
Back to today and “there is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal. If that is true, then we have some work to do. The Final Reformation is all about conscious caring for the holy creation: not only believing it but also living it. “I am not my own but belong to my Saviour Jesus Christ,” says the Heidelberg Catechism. It is about time to fill that in. In Colossians 1: 15-20 Jesus is “All and in All”. The Greek words there are ta panta, which includes everything under the sun. Not just us and our soul: all salvation is of necessity universal, because Jesus brings the Kingdom, the New Earth and if we want to be part of that then we must see the cosmos as holy, which means that with whatever we do we must contemplate their consequences. The unintended consequences of Progress are Climate Change and Pollution. The consequence of confessing Christ is a metanoia as intense and as thorough, a switch in our mode of life as drastic as converting from paganism to Christianity, something the early Christians did. Metanoia – being re-born -means as fundamental a shift as an Islam believer experiences when leaving the teachings of Mohammed and confessing Christ as the only Saviour and seeing all of creation as part of God’s holiness. Why? Since there is no such thing as individual salvation, since all salvation is of necessity universal, our lifestyle must reflect that. That is the major and perhaps most difficult change Christianity has to make in these final days in order to gain admission to the new creation. As a born and raised Calvinist I realize that the grace of God plays the ultimate role here.
Last week I promised to again consult with Bonhoeffer, who saw God, Creation and Humanity united in an unbreakable bond. When he was in the Tegel prison in Berlin and an accommodating guard smuggled his letters out to his fiancé, family and friends, he wrote on July 16 1944:”Etsi Deus Non Daretur. Living as if God does not exist….. Before God and with God we live without God.” That hints at “and there was no temple there” (Rev. 21:22), and leaves just us and creation. Religion interferes with us being human, since we are created to be one with the earth from which we originate, that feeds us and which, when we die, serves as our resting place, where we sleep until Jesus wakes us up.
J. H. Bavinck says something similar:
“The Kingdom is in shatters. That is the profound tragedy confronting the life of the world. This goes far beyond the fact that we have torn up its cohesion: it actually means that God has surrendered his own creation to Satan and his followers, whose only purpose is to abuse it and destroy it. The Kingdom, after all, comprises all things, all plants, all animals, all people, all angels. The Kingdom includes the sea and the land, the mountains and the valleys, all that was and is and is to come; and all of it is incorporated in a great and mighty whole. The Kingdom is the place where all things are in their rightful place and where everything can fulfill its function and deploy its potential in complete harmony with all that surrounds it. The Kingdom is synonymous with light, peace, joy, service to God, in harmonious veneration. Where the Kingdom is being destroyed, where this structure comes apart at the seams, there is decomposition, brokenness, fragmentation, enmity, contradiction, meaninglessness, darkness, death. The Kingdom is the smile of God’s good pleasure: “See, it was very good.” With the breaking of the Kingdom God hides his face. Psalm 104:29 reads: “When you hide your face, they are terrified.” The glow fades away; something akin to the pall of death covers the world.”
We are living in the days where God is absent. Among God’s last words to Moses were, as recorded in Deut. 31: 17, 18, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.”
We are in that final stage of history. We are on our own. It could quite well be that it is too late for the churches to experience the Final Reformation. Churches, religious bodies, seem to be too anchored in the world and too cumbersome to change course, also because they depend too much on the existing economic structure to survive.
Of course the Church will prevail. It is as in the days of Elisha when there were 8000 who had not bowed their knee to Baal, many of them unknown to each other because it was too dangerous to seek affiliation with others. At the same time the church cannot go back to the situation of the first Pentecost congregation in Jerusalem. Then society was much more interdependent, living physically close. Today we live in our subdivided and exurban diaspora. The only way to really prepare somewhat for the dangerous times to come- and they will come – is to sell out and form a sort of a monastery for families, living as new-creation-friendly as possible, with a great degree of self-sufficiency, perhaps clustering around a certain profession or trade or institution as is done in rural Africa.
Just as people converting from paganism to the Christian Way in the early days faced alienation from their families and friends, such a switch too would be derided as fanatic and unduly pessimistic: “Progress will come again!” will always be the secular mantra. The Final Reformation entails becoming more and more earth-minded, feeling the kinship with all that is created.
Am I correct? Is my analysis acceptable? Think about it. I may be wrong. My voice is just one of many. In the meantime I am busy getting ready for spring: my seedlings are doing well. The Maple Syrup season was better than last year. A later spring is much more creation-friendly than last year’s far too early one, which resulted in us not having any apples. Today we live much more in a ‘trusting God’ situation because of our self-inflicted climatic dangers. What worries me especially is the ‘bee’ situation. Apparently it is in particular the Monsanto type of seed, impregnated with long-lasting pesticides, that causes bees to die. We are playing with fire when we change the creation order.
Next week: LESS FOR MORE