Church History: What Went Wrong? part 1: A Prophetic Think Tank
This is the first article in a series. The following are:
Church History: What Went Wrong? part I
Liberal Madness, Conservative Treachery, and Jesus: part II
Liberal Madness, Conservative Treachery, and Jesus: part III: Allegory
Liberal Madness, Conservative Treachery, and Jesus: part IV: Allegory
Liberals, Conservatives, and Jesus: part V: Male and Female
Liberals, Conservatives, and Jesus, part VI: Politics and Religion
Church History, What went wrong?
Well, just about every Christian scholar seems to think that something went wrong over the course of nearly 1900 years since the apostles died. Every church history that has been written explores the various opinions, with many taking up their own, about the nature and origin of the ideas foreign to the original apostolic understanding of revelation that came in through time, but no one seems to know what was that original thing. I believe that not knowing it has rent our understanding of the revelation and messed us up.
If we don’t know what we had from Christ and what we had from those after, invariably what we will talk about that is different is only one conceptual style over another, whether destructive, advantageous or inconsequential. But a different way of thinking about an original idea is not necessarily a different meaning for the original idea. When we are looking only among various permutations of what humans have constructed to intersect with Jesus’s truth, the consequences are, by definition, that what we find is only what we are looking for. We just can’t seem to get a handle on what was indisputably Jesus’ main issue of concern because we are looking for it in the wrong place and with the wrong motives.
So what did change after 100 AD? What happened is because of something conceptual that was added, not something that was necessarily left behind that was not. But the real error goes deeper than this, for what has happened, whether by omission or commission of certain good ideas or bad, is not because of their direct influence or lack thereof, but because of what the ancients called “sin” in the human heart, which is at its root not only a congenital love for things broken, corrupt and incomplete. Things preferred to complete and divine systems complete and which don’t need our specially engineered life support systems to stay alive or true. What is loved is that which we can tinker ourselves, put our own names upon, and by which we can visit acclaim and virtue on ourselves for it instead of voices from transcendence.
From our beginnings, the human race was born into a world without any memory whatsoever of any prior existence. This is true always for each individual thereafter. All we know was given us from inside our world, not from outside it. There was no natural clue that compelled us without the need for reasonable or necessary skepticism to think a transcendent sphere was even a sane notion.
The whole thought that it might be a sane notion, and the start of what we call religion and philosophy, was forced not principally from natural revelation, but from the fact that human beings have within themselves something that makes them radically different from animals: a transcendent noetic sphere somewhere inside of us called”spirit.” Transcendent not only because among creatures it is unique to us, but because it contains content and an apparatus for creating it that cannot belong here without an outside creative agent. The last assertion is one that the atheists will deny out of hand, but it cannot be denied, no matter how much the behaviorists have tried, that to deny or affirm anything as a result of conscious thought and deliberation to a belief is to practice transcendence within the world toward something sharply outside of it.
This is merely to say that denying that there is an ultimate objective reality that is fundamentally different from our own is a denial that one is denying anything since denial is itself a part of that reality: a spiritual one. If it is not, and only because of neurons firing in the brain, then atheism is not a belief worthy of consideration or personal belief either. Assertions and beliefs of any kind are the property of a spirit, or “mind” if you wish, and if they are not they do not exist. If we admit to having a spiritual dimension ourselves, then to say that there is no one outside of us is not only to deny ourselves, but to make the tacit assertion that there is no possible basis for that belief of denial except the denial itself, and no possible evidence to be found otherwise.
Our problem in our history, and especially Church history, has been just that: a progressive chafing against the idea of a revealed message from outside the world, a spiritual world, that is a natural interface for what we have that is inside our spiritual world, prepared for its reception. We claw and stomp and resist and resist, but what we out spirit is as much a part of us as our hand to our arm. Self-hate and suspicion won’t remove it.
Well, on its face this seems to fit right in with what we already believe as Christians How is that then our problem? It’s our problem because we accept the idea of a unique kind of human spirit but not a unique kind of revelation that is engineered to enter it. “Revealed message” is a special kind, of course, the Orthodox would say. But it is not special because we want it to be. Only if intrinsically, independently has the power to show itself of outside origin as much as the special transcendent spiritual field within us has the potential power to affirm it, and show itself fully compatible with it.
The principle is simple. Ignore my epigrams.
An ultimate spiritual realm, as well as one that may exist within the human heart, is one which is not divided against itself, but that which is divided against itself is the natural state of man. The division is not a division if we are speaking of true revealed knowledge, of content that can only point to and attests to the proof of its origin of identity and authority. An undivided revelation has them both and of equal importance. In a divided kingdom, they are always at war with each other.
A revelation that is perceived badly is not one only with content. Content is always there, in a twisted kind, alone and without a container magnifying our want and ability to focus only on ourselves without outside distraction or guilt, whereby great industries of content, of product and symbol, of science, religion, and philosophy can be made and maintained which give us something to do and make us virtuous by our own hands. This has the capacity to make make a virtual spiritual virtue for the purpose of rising above our carnal circumstances and lowly state. When content does not have a real transcendent container, we create a fake one. Content of one kind or another is worshiped in its place, and only by Man and only to Man. The more man makes, the more he reads, writes and stacks books and college degrees up, the more he becomes convinced, either intellectually or emotionally, of the transcendence of his own power and the whole idea of an objective transcendence becomes optional or a big no-show
There is one principle that the reader should keep in mind about human beings and the way they are wont to think as we briefly survey Church history. One way or another there is an insistence in turning God into matter, Christianity into a common, earth-grown set of ideas, and any one idea as acceptable and true from the rationality of the idea alone, drawing upon its own resources as a bare assertion, and requiring that its resources not be bound up equally in showing an indelible mark of having come across the transom of eternity and into our very sad, limited, and hopeless world.
The subject in this article begins with what a revealed religion is and what is not. Christianity has always claimed that it is so, with Judaism and Islam. The Christian claims do not rest or are supposed to rest, in what their leaders say, or about how the pronouncements from its scriptures seem to commend themselves to reason or sensibility, but it is true only if they show themselves as having come from outside the world.
Judaism, because of prophecy, certainly does so show itself as such a revealed religion by this standard.
Islam never has claimed to found the truth of its message from God on any kind of supernatural historical demonstration. An angel spoke to Mohammed, take it or leave it. It is taken naively as true, in a faith where faith is sufficient for itself in a definition that does not need or want positive confirmation to be faith.
The problem with Judaism is that it frontally, willfully rejects the witness from its own revelation, treating it as a religion founded solely for its own purposes as a religion, which makes itself, pertaining to the quality of its faith, into Islam.
The problem with Christianity is that it does not frontally reject the attesting power, it does it through, as it were, the back door, and therefore makes itself like Judaism and Islam.
Back door?
Yes, all we need to do to show how historical and particularly contemporary Christianity treats the concept of revealed religion through its use of language. This is not to say that there is no one that does it right, but that the tendency I describe is and has always been our spiritual haute couture, against which such honest men have fought against and by the influence of those cacophonous voices drowned out. What you don’t like, or that which does not motivate you or impresses you about the faith, but which is also integral and indispensable for the continued existence of the religion, you just don’t mention much. That is Christianity. People will forget about it in time, and it will be replaced by our idle theological speculations that are at least things which we can claim as our own. In a fallen world everything eventually falls unless God is allowed to raise it up.
Our Holy, Black Box
Revealed religion is a religion that asserts that it has acquired its theology from a place far outside our black box, without which it would have been impossible for man to acquire by his own efforts.
There is, again, two necessary parts to this word “revealed”: one, the ideas or claims asserted to be revealed, that alone can commend themselves to reason or common sense and, two, the indications within the claimed revelation that demonstrate that it did not originate with us.
“Before Abraham was, I am” is the ideational revelation. What is the same message and scriptural corpus in which it is found that proves it is the other part of the same message? We miss this because of the tendency to take things as they are instead of what they ultimately mean, although that injunction is embedded within the statement, without which the statement cannot be taken as true: Jesus Christ, the Messiah, according to scripture was before Abraham (Isa 9:6; Mic 5:2). This Jesus as the Messiah comes from Dan 9:27, Isa 53, Psa 22, Zech 12:10, Zech 11, and many others. These are prophecies, and it is these by which the ideational statement “before Abraham was, I AM” is contained.
This is not rocket science. Jesus is no fool, just the opposite. Being that we must take seriously that he was instead an eternal intelligence and knew the heart of Man because he was its designer, he knew we would act this way. He knew that such parabolic speech is the only way to keep the truth undefiled from the content worshipers. If someone walks up to Vladimir Putin and hands him a handwritten note signed by Barak Obama, Putin does not naively accept it as having come from Obama because of his visceral impression is that he wrote it. Putin and all sane people are not content fetishists. Putin would first ask “is this real,” and, “how do we know this? How did it come here? Who are you and how did you get this?”
Go to the following article: http://www.theologian.org.uk/doctrine/revealed.html. We do not need to rigorously do a comparative study of the world’s religious philosophers to get a handle on this. This page represents the way that we Christians like to think about revealed religion, and its been this way for almost 2000 years.
I don’t care if we are talking about Tillich, Barth, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, most of the Church Fathers, Augustine or Pat Robertson. (a little joke there). We like to deal with the content, not the predicates of the assertion that positively place the content as foreign to the world. This is, again, not only because we are not that impressed with what the Bible claims to supply for this, but that when we take up a lot of time writing about it exclusively we drive away the real audience we should be trying to reach in order to grow our overall audience numbers from the world.
In the above online article, “prophecy” does not appear once. After a list of 8 requirements that must be met to claim that God revealed anything, including “it [revealed religion] is the best explanation of the claims of the prophets, of Christ and of the apostles,” the article ends with the ubiquitous quote by J.I. Packer that has an almost parasitic presence in many mainstream evangelism manuals: “God’s purpose in revelation is to make friends with us.”
Not that it not true, and it certainly is, but, as I said, it’s Christianity coming through the back door. If God’s purpose is principally or only to make friends with us and not to confirm the objective truth of His statements, then Putin should move immediately on the content of Obama’s note which says “the missiles are on their way” or “I love you. I’m in town and we can meet secretly in Café Pushkin.” Messianic prophecy is not a part of that message, it is not a servant to that message, it is not for the purpose of helping that message, it is exactly half of that message, and if we lose this simple fact it is by this sin that we fall, not by pornography, occultism, heretical doctrines, “backsliding,” or et al, as they are its mere symptoms.
As we go through Chruch History, look for this pattern I describe, and you will see something that you never considered before about the Church and about ourselves.
To be continued…
Please see these articles:
What is the Word of God?: Passing by Nehushtan
Liberal Madness, Conservative Treachery, and Jesus: part II
