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I wrestled a lot with the term “big” but I’ll stick by it. “true” usually gets people into “correct”, Yhwh vs. Baal or Buddha and stuff like that and that isn’t where I wanted to go. The idolatry of religion is much deeper than consumer selection of a deity.
It runs along the lines of a post I made on voices previously about church losing focus. I often keep longer posts I write on my blog: http://leadingchurch.com/wordpress/?p=890
A number of years ago a light went on for me when on my trip to Redeemer in NYC Tim Keller made the comment that what churches tend to do is demand that their people spend more and more time in the church AS institution. More Bible studies, more prayer groups, more leadership meetings, more, more more. I immediately saw that he was right.
Churches, denominations, ministries, all want to grow. That isn’t a bad thing necessarily but I think a lot of it for us is cancerous. It’s the kind of growth that Sauron wants to do in the Lord of the Rings. It isn’t the kind of generous, humble growth that we see in Jesus and the creator God. For the church it is the cancerous growth of the religious aspect. It is a religious totalitarianism and we have cast God as the tyrant. Part of the rebellion we find among angry ex-Christians is due to this totalitarianism. It is important to note that the first thing Adam and Eve DIDN’T do in the garden was to build a temple, the garden WAS the temple. In the New Jerusalem there isn’t a temple, the new heaven and earth ARE the temple. In fact the tabernacle and temple were intended to be micro-cosmos.
I also used the word “Big” in hopes that people would hear an echo of the “Big government” complaint. Even though in this group I’m not on the conservative political wing one of the things conservatives have right is the recognition that governments too can become idolatrous. The irony is that some who complain about “Big government” don’t seem to have the same scruples about “Big Religion”.
“Big religion” is one way of understanding the error of those Jesus used his most violent words with. Religion got so big it overshadowed that which the law was given to value and preserve. Big religion usually leads to religious tyrants who leverage their religious positions to dominate the other legitimate aspects of God ordained culture making. Christendom has tended to suffer from this. I think Kuyper’s notion of sphere sovereignty pursues this. Church as institution just tended to smell too much like tyranny.
Now human beings all of who are rebellions by nature can have a knee jerk reaction to tyranny and a tendency to confuse even legitimate, life giving authority as tyranny tend to switch between tyranny and anarchy depending upon which serves their immediate agenda. There’s plenty of that in the cries of the post-Christian rebels too, but those reactions tend to need to be addressed from the inside out. What we in the institutional church have to watch is our tendency to abuse and manipulate what has been entrusted to us. pvk
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This is from a video from http://publicchristianity.org/Videos/ethics_and_the_good_life.html of David Bentley Hart commenting on why he things modernity has struggled with being able to sustain a unified, compelling ethic without a metaphysical base. I thought how he phrased the two perspectives on freedom was very clear.
“We work with a model of freedom in the modern age that has a theological history stretching back to the fourteenth century, at least, and a secular philosophical history going back probably to the late fifteenth century which defines freedom not in classical sense as the power of a being to realize its nature by growing into greater conformity with ‘the good’ as such. We don’t assume we have a nature we don’t assume ‘the good’ as such is anything other than a cultural construction. Rather freedom consists in the unrestrained, spontaneous power of the self to construct for itself the ends it desires and then to pursue them with as little interference as possible to the greatest extent of its power. If that’s true, if we’re working with that model of freedom the pretense that there’s just some obviously self-evident system of ethics out there that all rational persons will agree on because its good for us is absurd. It may be, it has been catastrophically the case in the 20th century that we’re not interested in what’s good for us, we’re interested in what’s good for me, or for the German people or for the utopia of the future.”
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I wrote this for CRC-Voices
Over the last couple of days we’ve been talking about the CRC denominational offices losing focus (along with a lot of other churches) and wandering into the work of a lot of other things. Should the CRC be getting into environmental issues? Middle east peace? War in Iraq? Abortion? Legal fights over homeschooling or credit card practices? How do we chose? What is the gospel anyway? Should the church be just about getting souls saved and leave these other “worldly” things alone?
So I’m trying out some of these ideas assured that the cloud of reading witnesses in Voices land will have push back if not blow back. 🙂
Yesterday I saw this post on the CRC-Network site and I responded to it and kept my response for my blog. Here it is:
(See blog post http://leadingchurch.com/wordpress/?p=875) I wrote this responding to this post on the new CRC-Network website.
Thank you for writing this (and whoever tweeted this). In my opinion this is one (among others of course) areas of the church where we have significantly failed. As Reformed people we’ve long asserted that the calling to serve the institutional church is no “higher calling” that every other honorable vocation present amidst our congregations. Every time I assert this publicly I get mostly skeptical looks and contradictory comments. Where have people picked up this skewed perspective? From the pastors.
It also comes from our implicit gnosticism of “heaven” and a deficient appreciation for the value of history. One of the reasons the church has spent so little time encouraging the cruciform and resurrection oriented development of the rest of the vocational spectrum is because a lot of alien theological and missiological packages we’ve grabbed hold of. History is not a soul-sorting apparatus that leads to either ethereal reward or fiery punishment, it is redemptive pursuit of celebrating the generosity of God embedded in creation and culminating in renewed creation. The wedding banquet of the lamb will celebrate the harvest of God-seeded culture from stories and cultures we’ve imagined have been lost.
As preachers we are called as part of Gospel proclamation to excite the participation of all vocations in preparation of this celebration. The banquet of the lamb will not be some poofed up turkish delight by a magic wand, that is the way of the white witch. The sitting at the table will be the final celebration of the chefs of God who cook, the farmers of God who supply the food, the engineers of God who design the farm equipment, the architects God who design the room, the carpenters of God who build the tables and the chairs, the designers of God who design the table settings, the composures of God who write the music, the musicians of God who play and sing, etc. etc. etc. pvk
Part of the reason the church AS AN INSTITUTION is getting out of its own area of service (specialization, expertise, etc.) is because we have failed to as a Church (not institutional but organic) to encourage or connect to the diversity of callings out there. CRC functionaries should probably stick to the proclamation of the end of the age of decay and the dawning of creation 2.0 in the resurrection and the Church (big C) can continue to work on the application of the laity of the church into praying for, theologizing (who says only the clergy can do theology), discussing, working through, etc. all of the multitude of areas of application and obedience that we touch on in our context. Pastors are generally ill equipped to really work on environmental issues or political issues or economic issues, etc. Where the institutional church starts to color outside of its lines is when it starts trying to pronounce sphere specific application in these areas. Hopefully there are communities of believing lay persons who will fight these fights and have the conversations necessary to make headway in these areas.
I am fully aware these lines are not always clean, but Jesus himself was a very interesting example in the context of his culture war. The Pharisees were deeply embroiled in it and I think part of their rejection and eventual participation in Jesus’ execution was derived from his refusal to leverage his obvious popularity and miraculous strength in opposing the Roman occupation. Was Jesus not concerned about the clear violation of social justice that the Roman occupation represented? Was Jesus blind to the clear oppression by the hand of Caesar empire? Was Jesus soft on Tiberius? Given the context of Roman tyranny why pick on what seemed the smaller violations of the Jewish religious leadership’s hypocrisy and abuse of the people? Jesus’ dramatic response to the religious leaders of his day might seem out of proportion when we consider the Romans next door who regularly crucified people as a way of emphasizing the punchline that “Caesar is Lord”.
The questions continue as you read on into the New Testament. Now lots of people more easily take potshots at Paul for now speaking clearly against slavery or a system where women were more like property than equal bearers of the image of God, yet Jesus said not a mumbl’n word about polygamy or slavery either when both were clearly practiced around him and he gets a pass.
I think it is clear from Jesus and Paul that the church makes application in a self-consciously limited way in order to be subversive in a diversity of contexts were specific and obvious applications would undermine its own subversive agenda. A good subversive knows how to not give up their position in a specific context and to act with strategy so that the longer term war can be won.
