WHAT CONSTITUTES CHRISTIANITY?
John Maynard Keynes said: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
Trump has been told that tariffs made the US rich in the 19th century and will do so again now, 200 years later, during a time when world population soared from 1 billion to 8.
Just as President Trump, unknowingly, bases his imposition of tariffs on outdated theories, so today the church, too, has fallen into this trap.
Luther, the great church reformer, spearheading the secession from Roman Catholic domination in 1517, retained the doctrine that God had ordained two regiments: the spiritual which by the Holy Spirit produces Christians and pious folk under Christ, and the secularsector, seen as evil, a dualistic view based on ancient Greek, pagan, thinking, propagated by Plato and Socrates.
Descartes expanded on this, based on his famous slogan: “Cogito, ergo sum”, meaning “I use my brain, therefore I am”. He then relegated anything not human to be of no consequence, and even evil. Hence the split between grace – good – and nature – bad.
That thinking has dominated the church until this day, culminating in Heaven being our destination. It allowed Hitler to rise and present-day Russia to be so cozy with the church. And….. it is the basic reason why we today are facing extinction through Climate Change, as the church preaches ‘HEAVEN’, leaving earth to rot.
A different view.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer took issue with this false doctrine and wrote: “Credo, ergo sum” = I believe therefore I am, relying on John 3: 16: God so loved the world, the cosmos, everything that God created, from microbes to mammoths. That’s why the Trump administration, catering to its base (his Christians) has promised additional environmental rollbacks in the coming weeks. “The Energy Dominance Council that the president established last month is looking to eliminate a vast array of regulations in an effort to boost the fossil fuel industry”, the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, told the oil and gas conference in Houston last week: “We will come up with the ways that we can cut red tape, we can easily get rid of 20-30% of our regulations.”
So: What is Christian?
I read an interesting book report in the New York Times. Its heading was: ”Like a Prayer”, subtitled, “A grieving atheist searching for peace retires to a convent but finds crisis instead.”
The book is STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL by Charlotte Wood, a nonfiction account. In 2021, the world faced the Covid pandemic, and, where she lived in eastern Australia, the region contended with a great surplus of mice ravaging crops and communities alike.
It’s basically the diary of an older person, tired of trying and failing to rescue the planet from man-made destruction.
The article makes me wonder about the concept of ‘salvation, and ‘original sin’. I have long believed that Adam and Eve, in the Bible portrayed as the first humans, took the ‘fruit’ from the tree without asking the tree’s permission. In her book, Charlotte Wood grieves creation’s current day outcome. She mirrors God who, in His unfathomable LOVE for creation, offers the life of his only Son, as payment for buying back the totality of Creation from the Evil One.
That to me is definite proof that Jesus died, not exclusively for our personal salvation – that too – but primarily for liberating the ‘cosmos’ (everything that has a being, from the tiniest insect to the majestic whales and elephants) from the clutches of the Evil One. 1 John 5: 19 confirms this: “We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”
Here is a rhymed version of my concept of ‘redemption’.
RENEW YOUR VOW.
Renew your vow
And do it now,
The world’s is quickly warming;
The poles melt fast
The die is cast
World’s state is quite alarming.
Renew your vow,
And do it now.
Do love God’s good creation:
Do it with force
It is our source
For life and for salvation.
Renew your vow,
And do it now.
The timeclock now runs faster,
The hour is late
God has a date
He is earth’s only Master.
Renew your vow,
And do it now.
For Christ will give no warning
He comes again
We don’t know when
It could be the next morning.
(There is a tune to this: God enkel licht)
Actually, there are plenty of warnings: Every 100 years storm, almost every week, heralds the looming end.
I believe the author, Charlotte Wood, a confessed atheist, in her lament for creation, is closer to redemption than most church-members, who Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his essay on Thy Kingdom Come, calls “Pious Secularists”.
All of this makes me wonder: “What really constitutes Christianity? Can an atheist be saved?“
P.S.
Due to a needed operation, my weekly blog was postponed a few days.