The Church in Flux
Chapter 19
Another small step toward a possible solution
The problem with the church is precisely that it is not “in flux”, is not evolving, is not changing with the times. The people in the church – average age of 60 years – also are simply too comfortable with the status quo. Of course that generation has benefited the most from the immense prosperity we have enjoyed, thanks to the Oil influx, which made everything possible. It generated unheard of wealth for even the poorest among us, as governments handed out, at least in Canada, ample support for those in need of help, especially the senior class.
Since it is the senior class that, by and large, is the mainstay of the church, and since they are well off, the members of the clergy see no need for change, because it is upsetting, so everything remains as it is, even while fewer and fewer people go to church. That the sermons are mostly irrelevant, doesn’t matter either, because the after-the-service-coffee and pastries are good and the people friendly. So, the word ‘reformation’ is never heard, let alone pursued.
Yet something drastic is going to happen, because, as I set out to say in the very first chapter, Panta Rhei, Oude Menei: Everything flows, nothing remains the same. The flow that goes on is like an underground river, and is undermining the very foundation of society and the church is no exception.
In the past 18 chapters I have shown that we live in the Last Days. I have also pointed out that God has temporarily surrendered the cosmos to His great adversary, something which Jesus affirmed when he was tempted by the Devil as recorded in Matthew 4. This was also shown in Chapter 16 and 17 – dealing with Job – when Satan made a visit to heaven and God gave him permission to make life miserable for Job and, by extension, for the human race.
Actually for us life went to another extreme: because Job already lived a life of ease, he became an impoverished and detested outcast, and an AIDS sufferer as well. With us it went the other way: life in our time went from the hardships of the 1930’s depression to an existence of easy comfort, thanks to the temporary benefits of oil. C.S. Lewis once remarked that the road to hell is smooth, slightly sloping, no sudden turns. That’s the kind of life Satan has locked us into, courtesy our carbon-based society. It will be tremendously difficult for even the most sincere Christ-believers to extract themselves from this flick-of-the-finger luxurious living.
And where is the church in all this? Almost without exception, it has surrendered to a dangerous form of Gnosticism, which has caused the church to lose sight of its true mission, which Jesus outlined in the Sermon on the Mount, where he, in Matthew 6:33, said: “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
That kingdom is the New Creation, and the most magnificent life style a person can ever imagine. Its righteousness is to seek what is right for the creation that God loved so much that he offered his Son’s life to buy it back from the Satan who had temporarily taken possession of it. Failure to ‘seek the betterment of the kingdom/creation’ has resulted in a dangerous form of dualism, where we go to Church on Sunday and for the rest of the week we fail to observe the laws of creation, something Lynn White has correctly pointed out, when he outlined that the ecological crisis originated in Christianity.
I have repeatedly shown that the real mission of Jesus was to establish the Kingdom, a task to be assumed by the church when Jesus left to be with his Father in heaven. I cannot remember ever hearing a sermon on “seeking the Kingdom.” Yet this was an explicit command from Jesus. The concept of ‘kingdom’ is simply assumed to be fulfilled in the church: the church is the kingdom which needs no further explanation, and therefore this is never openly discussed. That’s also the reason ‘Kingdom seeking’ is never listed in their ‘mission statement.’
Another, equally valid explanation for not pursuing the Kingdom goal is that every church member, as an individual, is bound for Heaven: the church is there to facilitate personal salvation: everybody on their own, even though the Apostles’ Creed defines the church as “the communion of saints,” never mentions heaven and expresses its destination as “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” Those too have become mere words.
If we really were to quiz people on heaven, and especially how they would visualize life there after death, we would hear a variety of answers, none of them definite, because the Bible gives no description of it: only 1 Timothy 6: 16 holds a clue, and it is not an encouraging one for the heaven-bound crowd. It says, “God alone is immortal, and who lives in inapproachable light, who no one has seen or can see.” But then the church people, who swear by the Bible, have often a totally wrong view on matters eternal. If they really were honest, they would admit that heaven holds no desire for them, because what does one do in heaven? Any full-blooded, active person delights in being human. Jesus always wanted to be known not as a heavenly being but as The Son of Humanity. Heaven-desire breeds passiveness, which is, indeed, the hallmark of the church. The kingdom is here. The kingdom is this earth which God called ‘good’ after each creation act and ‘very good’ when it was finished. God made no junk and will not junk what he has made.
But the church has a different goal: away from this beautiful earth for which we have been created, toward a heaven where life will be what?
No wonder the church is failing for want of defining its calling, as it now has little or no notion, what its real task is on earth. That heaven is so ingrained in people became clear to me when a good friend – a doctor in education – had her turn to read the Scriptures in our church. Her bible reading was Matthew 24, where, in verse 39, it says that “they – the people in Noah’s days – knew nothing about what would happen until the Flood came and took them all away.” When I asked her, after church, who were taken away to heaven and who were left behind, she said ‘The born again went to heaven’. When I pointed out that the ‘left behind’ were the ‘born again’, she admitted to having been brainwashed all her life.
The “Left Behind” crowd have read this passage totally wrong. In their videos the sinners are ‘left behind,’ while the ‘born again’ are taken away.
The church sees itself and calls itself: The Bride of Christ. There is another assumption which is not true. Isaiah 62:4 quite plainly says that: “the land will be married.” The church is not the Bride: the land is the Bride, and she will be married to the Groom, the human race, all believers, with Jesus as the ‘Primus inter Pares’, the First among equals.
That sort of language is not an allegory, is not a representation of a spiritual meaning through a concrete example. There are a few more incidents where creation is compared to a woman: Romans 8:22 points out that the whole creation – the land – is groaning as in the pains of child-birth. That too suggests that the land is female, and, actually is pregnant with the New Earth, whose birth is imminent. Jesus, as head of the New Covenant, as Head of the New Humanity, as the First Human Being, together with all those who have regarded creation as Holy, will be formally united in marriage with The Earth. Revelation 21:2 carried that imagery through when it says that “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.” That statement is not an allegory but a concrete example of the New Creation being the Bride and the New Humanity the groom.
To the people of the church all this sounds totally foreign. For centuries the church has taught the wrong concept, has missed the boat as far as the Good News is concerned. The Good News is that we humans are humans, and will be humans into eternity.
What is the ruling doctrine in the church is not The Kingdom proclamation but Gnosticism, as was shown, when discussing The American Religion. The ruling North American Religion, usually regarded as Christianity in North America, has, according to Dr Harold Bloom, ceased to be Christian, and instead has taken on the essence of Gnosticism, a false religion against which especially the Apostle John in his letters agitates strongly. The introduction to his letters, in the New International Version (NIV), has, under the heading of Gnosticism, the following explanation: “One of the most dangerous heresies of the first two centuries of the church was Gnosticism. Its central teaching was that spirit is entirely good and matter is entirely evil. From this unbiblical dualism flowed five important errors:
- (1) Man’s body, which is matter, is therefore evil. It is to be contrasted with God, who is wholly spirit, and therefore good.
- (2) Salvation is the escape of the body, achieved not by faith in Christ, but by special knowledge (the Greek word for ‘knowledge’ is gnosis, hence Gnosticism).
- (3) Christ’s true humanity was denied in two ways (a) some said that Christ only seemed to have a body, a view called Docetism, from the Greek dokeo (to seem) and (b) others said that the divine Christ joined the man Jesus at baptism and left him before he died, a view called Cerinthianism, after its most prominent spokesman, Cerinthius. This view is the background of much of 1 John (see 1:1; 2:22; 4:2-3)
- (4) Since the body was considered evil, it was to be treated harshly. This ascetic form of Gnosticism is the background of part of the letter to the Colossians (2:21-23)
- (5) Paradoxically, this dualism led to licentiousness. The reasoning was that, since matter – and not the breaking of God’s law (1John 3:4) – was considered evil, breaking of the law was of no moral consequence. The Gnosticism addressed in the New Testament was an early form of the heresy, not an intricately developed system of the second and third centuries. In addition to that seen in Colossians and in John Letters, acquaintance with early Gnosticism is reflected in 1,2 Timothy, Titus, and 2 Peter and perhaps 1 Corinthians.
By and large, almost without exception, the North American churches are influenced by Gnosticism. That is reflected in their ‘heaven’ goal which, as Dr Bloom pointed out, is a Greek heresy. Even though there are some churches which have modified their heaven orientation, almost all of their members still adhere to this teaching.
What then is a biblical approach to Christ’ teaching? More about that in the next chapters.