July 21 -13
Our World Today
Dangerous Religious Musings
The Lost Gospel of the Kingdom
Saturday’s – July 13 – the Globe and Mail, its Focus section, caused me to become quite agitated. For years I have been writing that we are in the Final Phase of human history, something that is difficult to visualize when nobody else makes this same claim. Suddenly this is changing. What I read in Canada’s National news paper was quite frightening. Here’s what the headline said: One disaster after another- it can mean only one thing: the End of the world. This by the Globe’s book editor who also wrote ”I do not believe in God per se, but I believe in our ability to destroy ourselves, promptly. And in a sense, that’s faith.”
Faith without Religion, faith without believing in God. It reminds me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He loved to quote a saying by Martin Luther ”the godless man’s curse can be more pleasing to God than the hallelujahs of the pious.” Here is a godless man’s curse – the end of the world is terrible because it spells doom and gloom, and brings a curse on everything.
Let me carry that a bit further.
The heading of this section is ”The Lost Gospel of the Kingdom”. The book editor referred to this – without realizing it. The Kingdom is God’s earth, which we are destroying at an ever more rapid rate. I have yet to hear a sermon on that topic. Preachers usually do an adequate job explaining a passage from the Written Word, but almost always fail to relate it to the Created Word, so much so that the impression is created that the Scriptures are God’s only Revelation, which– again- brings me to the Kingdom: the gospel of the kingdom is lost in the church, and once lost, the King no longer counts – what is a King without a Kingdom! – and thus God is lost as well. In that case all the Hallelujahs of the pious amount to little. When such is the case God puts a higher value on the curses of the godless than on all the church’s piety.
Hmmm. It sometimes is really dangerous to carry an argument to its bitter end. I imagine these remarks will not sit too well with the church and its faithful.
Reliigon is divorced from real life
Actually what I am writing is not all that new. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote on this first. A word of Bonhoeffer. He was a brillaint theologian who consciously experienced the end of the world while under a death sentence from the Hitler hordes in godless Germany in 1943-45. He was hanged in April 1945 just before the Third Reich collapsed. He was 39. While in prison he was able in his mind to visualize the end of society with ’Religion-less Christianity’ and a ’World without God”, basically the state we find ourselves in now, 70 years later.
Walter Brueggemann – who is an Old Testament theologian and also a prophet writes that theological education- seminary schooling (required training for future preachers) – must involve a comprehensive critique of society. He says this because we live in a culture that is false and that will dehumanize and destroy us. Brueggemann says that the church by and large accomodates to the current culture and so lacks the critical power to take capitalism to task. That is also the reason why the church lacks the Kingdom perspective.
Bonhoeffer saw this quite clearly. For him life was religion but when he studied the church scene he observed a religious scene separated from reality, faith divorced from life, the church not playing any part in people’s daily routine. In other words he observed life lived without religion at all, except for such ancient ceremonies as marriage and baptism and an often less than stellar quarter-hour sermon on Sunday. With marriages in decline, births becoming less frequent, even these official functions are performed less and less. Whatever is left of religion is becoming a facet of fanaticism, not only in the Middle East but also in North America where the Rapture craze and the Wealth worship have turned religion into a farce. The Rapture theory is based on a single text in 1 Thess. 4: 17. It is not mentioned anywhere else in the Bible. We should treat it as we do some other passages, such as stoning adulterers or women being silent or Jesus’ claim that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom, because by biblical standards every one in the Western world is rich.
Mammon rules.
Let’s face it: money is a much more powerful agent in society than God. So much so that we see it as an almost divine right to have our huge houses and drive our carbon-spouting cars and take delight in our cute gadgets and have our far-away holidays and ample pension plans. We wouldn’t have a clue what to do with ourselves if all that fell away one day. We, as a society, would cease to function without all of the accumulated wealth. Even if we as individuals would say we have enough, our rulers would still demand growth, or else they cannot keep up the welfare state.
The bible is quite open: you can’t serve God while also worship Mammon. I believe that Mammon wins hands down. When the next big financial crisis hits – which is all but inevitable – we won’t just have a financial crisis, we’ll have a crisis of faith as well, because the real God in Western society is Mammon. Once Mammon falls what will take his place? (I assume that Mammon is male.) Will people turn to the church en masse? Unless the church makes a complete switch from individual salvation, from “Brother-sister are you born again?” to the Gospel of the Kingdom and doing whatever to save creation in anticipation of the return of the Lord, this will not happen.
Bonhoeffer and Bavinck: two theologians, one voice. Both say that Christ calls us not to a new religion but to Life.
The church has lost the Gospel of the Kingdom. Writes J. H. Bavinck in his forthcoming The Kingdom- Speed Its Coming: “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. 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 are again unified under the one and only all?wise will of him who lives and rules for ever.”
That entails a totally different gospel: not Rapture proclamation, not the Wealth Gospel, nothing like that: there is no individual salvation: only as part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God- his cosmos for which he gave his life- is eternal life possible.
This brings me back to Bonhoeffer. He also saw religion as a totality: everything created is holy. There is no division between sacred and secular. In the text in Matthew 5: 45, which is translated as “Be perfect as God is perfect” the word for perfect is ‘teleios”. Bonhoeffer called himself an ‘anthropos – man- teleios’. The better translation of teleios is holistic, based on the root which is ‘telos’ which means ‘the far away end’. Thus in everything we must keep ‘the end’, the kingdom, in mind, always consider the ultimate outcome and based on that perfection – which is the hallmark of the Kingdom – we must base our life. If the church – formal religion- fails to aim for that purpose then it forfeits its raison d’être.
“Extra ecclesiam nulla salus” said Cardinal Ratzinger who resigned as Pope Benedict XVI. The Latin means ‘there is no salvation outside the church’. Not true says I. While I am writing this, for a brief moment I wondered whether there is salvation inside the church. Fortunately I know better. Yet, if we take Jesus as an example, then we see that he himself lived quite un-religiously, quite contrary to the then customary views on religion. That’s why Bonhoeffer said that “God comes to us in his own ways independently of the religious images we make of him and independently of the religious requirements we impose upon him.” He also said that “God’s path to man is a highly a-religious path… Christ does not bring a new religion; rather, He brings God….Jesus does not call us to a new religion but to LIFE.”
Can I tie this together?
The best thing I ever did was translate J. H. Bavink’s Dutch book which I gave the title of The Kingdom- Speed Its Coming. I translated it on a whim, suddenly, after having had the book for many decades. I never dreamed that a publisher would pay me a substantial sum – indeed thousands of dollars – as an advance on royalties. I based the title on 2 Peter 3: 12: “as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.” Having been a Bonhoeffer aficionado already, I also became a devoted admirer of Bavink’s writings, because I noticed a lot of similarities between the two theologians even though they never met or even knew of each other. Both lived in the first half of the 20th century. Both came from a generation of theologians. Both wrote extensively on The Kingdom.
Here is what Bonhoeffer wrote in an essay – written in German naturally under the title Dein Reich Komme or Your Kingdom Come, a line we in our church recite without fail every Sunday.
“We are otherworldly – ever since we hit upon the devious trick of being religious, yes even ‘Christian’ at the expense of the earth…
We disdain the earth; we are better than it….When an explosion seems imminent, who would not be so human as to quickly mount the chariot that comes down from the skies with the promise of taking us to a better world beyond? ….We are weak; we cannot bear having the earth so near, the earth that bears us. We cannot stand it, because the earth is stronger than we and because we want to be better than the evil earth. So we extricate ourselves from it; we refuse to take it seriously….We are weak and we weaklings are open to the religion of otherworldliness. ….Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from this world to other worlds beyond; rather he gives us back the earth as its loyal children.
We have fallen into secularism and by secularism I mean pious Christian secularism. Not the godliness of atheism or cultural bolshevism but the Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth…..This pious secularism also makes it possible to preach and say nice things……The function of the church is to witness to the resurrection of Christ from the dead, to the end of the law of death of this world that stands under the curse, and of the power of God in the new creation.
Bonhoeffer also writes that “Technology is the power with which the earth grips people and subdues them. And because we are no longer in command, we lose ground. The earth is therefore no longer our earth, and thus we become strangers to the earth…..Without God, without our brother and sister, we lose the earth: God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together…I belong completely to this world. It bears me, it nurtures me, and holds me.”
Last week I quoted J. H. Bavinck who wrote: “With every sinew of our existence we are tied to the earth, which bears us and feeds us.”
Any doctrine, any church teaching that proclaims otherwise, any hint that we are going to leave this earth, is false teaching. Bavinck and Bonhoeffer are two sides of the same coin.
By and large all religions adhere to this otherworldly theology, and do so with ever greater force. Don’t pay any attention to it. Our present state and our future life are right here. Cherish the earth. Care for it. Indeed love it and do everything possible to preserve and even enhance it. It’s the only one we’ll ever have.
Next week I may skip: too many social obligations. It’s also summer: vacation time. But then I am a bit of a workoholic. So…. who knows.