Dorothy Sayers told us that we will have either creed or chaos. The storms around the Da Vinci Code reveals this to be true. A creed is simply a standard of belief that endures through different ages and cultures and which defines the parameters of what it means to be Christian. That standard defines the banks within which Christian life is lived and experienced. Without the banks, the river becomes a swamp.
We have a New Testament now because in the third and forth centuries the church set a standard for distinguishing Holy Scripture from interesting and inspiring writing. Contrary to what the current rewriters of our faith would have us to believe, the church leaders did not invent the New Testament or suppress scripture. The Church Fathers merely officially recognized what the vast majority of Christians had believed since the earliest days of the faith. Christians disagreed for awhile about a few books. For example, the Book of Hebrews was suspect for a long time simply because no one knew who wrote it. The book of 2 Peter was suspect too because its style seemed different than that of the first epistle of Peter. Also, some Christians argued that the Shepherd of Hermes and the Epistle of 1 Clement ought to be accepted as scripture because they found them helpful to their spiritual lives. Other than these exceptions, the Church Fathers merely declared what Christians had long believed to be the Christian scriptures. Since then, the “canon” (writings recognized as scripture) has represented a boundary for all Christian believers.
Orthodoxy -- “that which has at all times and in all places been believed by the whole people of God --” is our common deposit of faith. All Christians of all denominations are accountable to it. We can disagree about much but we if we disagree about what constitutes the Bible, whether Jesus is God or whether there is life everlasting, then we cease to be Christians. We can be nice people, intelligent people or even spiritual people. But we can’t be Christians without Christ and a “Christ” that does not die for our sins and resurrect for our justification is not the Christ that Christians confess. It is a hard choice but Jesus and his death on the cross remains “to the Greeks foolishness and to the Jews a stumbling block but to those who believe the power of God unto salvation.”
During the life of the second bishop of Antioch, while people were still alive who had known the apostles, Christians began to use a statement of faith that they expected new converts to learn. That statement of faith is easily recognizable as what soon evolved to become the Apostle’s Creed. It already contained phrases that so offend modern ears – “born of the Virgin Mary,” “rose again from the dead, “forgiveness of sins,” and “the resurrection of the body” and such like. Furthermore, the phrases were not mere pious metaphors. People died confessing them. They still do.
For a long time, many Christians have been taking a lot for granted. They haven’t felt a need to take an hour or two and memorize a creed or, for that matter, the Lord’s Prayer. They would just go to church once in a while and throw some money in the plate. Christians would always believe that Jesus was God come in the flesh. People would always believe that the Bible was far more than Man’s word about God; it was God’s Word to fallen Man. Others would take care of the foundations. Now we know better.
Each generation of believers must deliberately and consciously nurture, love, honor and absorb the faith. Each generation must wrestle with what it means to say that Jesus is “very God of very God, truly God and truly man.” Each must decide whether or not the apostles were following “cleverly devised fables” or were, as they claimed, “eyewitnesses to the Word of life.” Each must decide whether our faith is a comforting conglomeration of mythologies, allegories and metaphors, or whether Jesus is God come in the flesh.
Every human being has the right to either accept or to reject Christianity’s common heritage. Christians do not have that opinion. Like every Kingdom, the Kingdom of God has borders. Stand on one side and you are in one realm; stand on the other and you are in alien territory.
Friday, May 26, 2006
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Vision #11
The Da Vinci Code is more than a book. It’s a trumpeter. And it is blasting out alarming news. There has been a coup and Christianity no longer is the prevailing ideology of Western Civilization. Indeed, it is no longer the prevailing ideology of many Christian Churches.
The revolutionary forces against Western Christianity had been steadily graining strength for several centuries. However, it was in the years between 1900- 1915, in the city of Vienna, where an intellectual earthquake took place that dislocated the ideological foundations of Western Christianity. It has taken a century for the aftershocks of that quake to reach many of the churches of North America.
In the opening years of the twentieth century, psychologists and physicists made starling new claims about the nature of reality. The theory of relativity told us that the only thing constant in the universe was the speed of light. Everything else – size, weight, color, distance and even time – were all relative measurements that depended upon the “eye of the beholder.” Quantum mechanics told us that the same “principle of uncertainty” was the operating parameters for the world of subatomic particles – the pieces of matter that make up atoms. Above us and beneath us there was only void. Meanwhile, the psychologists taught that our motives, actions and behaviors derived from parts of ourselves that we do not know and over which we have little control. Not only do we not know the universe, we do not know even our selves.
Soon, artists, who in those days still read books, began manifesting their anxieties over the loss of confidence in the created order that the new information implied. Twisted forms and symbolic splashes of color, sound and music erupted across Europe. The artistic overthrow of convention delighted some. It horrified others. Among those horrified was a want-to-be artist living in Vienna. He decided to rise up and set the world right. He spoke with such passion and power about restoring moral order and sanity to Europe that many fearful people decided to give him a chance. His name was Adolf.
And so the century continued its bloody path of revolution and reaction. Finally, Europe was dying from its self- inflicted wounds. While Western Civilization fought for its survival, few seemed to notice that the Christian faith in Europe was reeling. Some believers took one side of the cultural war and some the other. However, most Christians on both sides were fighting symptoms. Few were willing or able to deal with the roots of the war. Few seemed to understand that the foundations of reality itself had been thrown into question. Few seemed to realize that Christianity’s sacred text, its belief in a spiritual world; its belief in sin, repentance and salvation; and its ways of bringing the human soul into a sacred encounter with God, had all been seriously undermined. The older generations of believers would die in peace, most of them completely unaware of how the ground had shifted under their feet as they went on with their lives. With each succeeding generation though, more and more European believers had to face the impossibility of ignoring the erosion of faith within their culture and modern church life.
Slowly, the aftershocks of the Vienna earthquake made their way across the Atlantic. Some American seminaries brazenly declared that centuries of Christian thought were now dead. Others, just as boldly shouted that they would defend the honor of their faith by turning a deaf ear to science, art, philosophy and literature. The liberals would reject their own faith; the fundamentalist would reject all aspects of culture that seemed to challenge their faith. One would expand the definition of faith until it defined nothing; the other would shrink the definition of faith until it became mostly about defending cultural and political traditionalism.
Evangelical Christianity in North American thus has two major problems: we have not valued our scholars and have thus lost much content and, we have largely lost our ability to encounter the presence of God in worship. We have been busy fighting “liberalism” by achieving financial and numerical growth and by becoming politically active. This strategy has won many battles. Unfortunately, we have been losing the larger war for the soul of Western Civilization. We have paid far too much of attention to technique and appearance and not enough to spiritual substance. Furthermore, many of us who have cared about “spirituality” have not believed that the intellect has much to do with one’s spiritual growth and development. In fact, many came to view the intellect as the enemy of God and faith. Thus, we have disarmed ourselves. But our enemy has not.
The Da Vinci Code is a delightful book. It is not only full of action and adventure, it teaches about art, history, religion, philosophy and values. Many of the conclusions it draws about these subjects are not factual and it sometimes plays with the underlying “facts” themselves. Of course, the author tells us, ‘lighten up; it’s a novel. Just enjoy the book.” We Christians cannot lighten up because we know that there is something behind the book that is frightening and hostile. And since we are disarmed and unprepared, we hardly know what to do. Our enemies, the secularists and Gnostics who now govern Western Civilization, are smart. They know more about our faith than most believers. They are rewriting our religion so that even if our grandchildren consider themselves believers, their faith will not be the sort that contains troublesome things like scripture, sacrament, commandments and sacred meetings with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
A few years ago Phillip Jenkins, in his book, The Next Christendom, told us that the faith as we had known it has moved to Africa, Asia and Latin America. He was writing for Oxford Press. So he was hard to ignore. But we somehow managed – liberals and conservatives alike.
Revival is still possible. However, it will require us to recover worship that moves our souls to awe, to recover our intellect by studying the Holy Scriptures and our own history and to recover genuine gifts of the Holy Spirit, without which no church has ever prevailed against darkness. Being thus rearmed and humbled by grace, we can learn to view life and all it contains through eyes of faith, serve humanity through acts of service in the name of Christ and face the real rulers of the new Western World – the same enemies we have been facing for two thousand years -- the world, the flesh and the devil.
The revolutionary forces against Western Christianity had been steadily graining strength for several centuries. However, it was in the years between 1900- 1915, in the city of Vienna, where an intellectual earthquake took place that dislocated the ideological foundations of Western Christianity. It has taken a century for the aftershocks of that quake to reach many of the churches of North America.
In the opening years of the twentieth century, psychologists and physicists made starling new claims about the nature of reality. The theory of relativity told us that the only thing constant in the universe was the speed of light. Everything else – size, weight, color, distance and even time – were all relative measurements that depended upon the “eye of the beholder.” Quantum mechanics told us that the same “principle of uncertainty” was the operating parameters for the world of subatomic particles – the pieces of matter that make up atoms. Above us and beneath us there was only void. Meanwhile, the psychologists taught that our motives, actions and behaviors derived from parts of ourselves that we do not know and over which we have little control. Not only do we not know the universe, we do not know even our selves.
Soon, artists, who in those days still read books, began manifesting their anxieties over the loss of confidence in the created order that the new information implied. Twisted forms and symbolic splashes of color, sound and music erupted across Europe. The artistic overthrow of convention delighted some. It horrified others. Among those horrified was a want-to-be artist living in Vienna. He decided to rise up and set the world right. He spoke with such passion and power about restoring moral order and sanity to Europe that many fearful people decided to give him a chance. His name was Adolf.
And so the century continued its bloody path of revolution and reaction. Finally, Europe was dying from its self- inflicted wounds. While Western Civilization fought for its survival, few seemed to notice that the Christian faith in Europe was reeling. Some believers took one side of the cultural war and some the other. However, most Christians on both sides were fighting symptoms. Few were willing or able to deal with the roots of the war. Few seemed to understand that the foundations of reality itself had been thrown into question. Few seemed to realize that Christianity’s sacred text, its belief in a spiritual world; its belief in sin, repentance and salvation; and its ways of bringing the human soul into a sacred encounter with God, had all been seriously undermined. The older generations of believers would die in peace, most of them completely unaware of how the ground had shifted under their feet as they went on with their lives. With each succeeding generation though, more and more European believers had to face the impossibility of ignoring the erosion of faith within their culture and modern church life.
Slowly, the aftershocks of the Vienna earthquake made their way across the Atlantic. Some American seminaries brazenly declared that centuries of Christian thought were now dead. Others, just as boldly shouted that they would defend the honor of their faith by turning a deaf ear to science, art, philosophy and literature. The liberals would reject their own faith; the fundamentalist would reject all aspects of culture that seemed to challenge their faith. One would expand the definition of faith until it defined nothing; the other would shrink the definition of faith until it became mostly about defending cultural and political traditionalism.
Evangelical Christianity in North American thus has two major problems: we have not valued our scholars and have thus lost much content and, we have largely lost our ability to encounter the presence of God in worship. We have been busy fighting “liberalism” by achieving financial and numerical growth and by becoming politically active. This strategy has won many battles. Unfortunately, we have been losing the larger war for the soul of Western Civilization. We have paid far too much of attention to technique and appearance and not enough to spiritual substance. Furthermore, many of us who have cared about “spirituality” have not believed that the intellect has much to do with one’s spiritual growth and development. In fact, many came to view the intellect as the enemy of God and faith. Thus, we have disarmed ourselves. But our enemy has not.
The Da Vinci Code is a delightful book. It is not only full of action and adventure, it teaches about art, history, religion, philosophy and values. Many of the conclusions it draws about these subjects are not factual and it sometimes plays with the underlying “facts” themselves. Of course, the author tells us, ‘lighten up; it’s a novel. Just enjoy the book.” We Christians cannot lighten up because we know that there is something behind the book that is frightening and hostile. And since we are disarmed and unprepared, we hardly know what to do. Our enemies, the secularists and Gnostics who now govern Western Civilization, are smart. They know more about our faith than most believers. They are rewriting our religion so that even if our grandchildren consider themselves believers, their faith will not be the sort that contains troublesome things like scripture, sacrament, commandments and sacred meetings with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
A few years ago Phillip Jenkins, in his book, The Next Christendom, told us that the faith as we had known it has moved to Africa, Asia and Latin America. He was writing for Oxford Press. So he was hard to ignore. But we somehow managed – liberals and conservatives alike.
Revival is still possible. However, it will require us to recover worship that moves our souls to awe, to recover our intellect by studying the Holy Scriptures and our own history and to recover genuine gifts of the Holy Spirit, without which no church has ever prevailed against darkness. Being thus rearmed and humbled by grace, we can learn to view life and all it contains through eyes of faith, serve humanity through acts of service in the name of Christ and face the real rulers of the new Western World – the same enemies we have been facing for two thousand years -- the world, the flesh and the devil.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Vision #10
Warning: This is a long email about why I am reading the Da Vinci Code.
My children read it a couple of years ago and asked me to read with them. I just wasn’t that interested at the time. So I kept putting it off. I should have listened to them. It would have prepared me for the spiritual storm that the book has birthed. So last week, I read the special edition of US News about the book. (I want to be able to sniff out the philosophical and religious opinions that form the foundations for the story.)
Many of the ideas behind the story revolve around a belief that the church has brutally suppressed ancient documents and ancient faiths. Thus, a new school of academics, social engineers and apostate church leaders speak in glowing terms about the worship of the nurturing, earth-friendly, female deities of ancient peoples and the wholesome, liberated attitudes toward sexuality that they encouraged. In fact, we are to believe, early Christians, including Jesus himself, were most likely influenced by the beautiful, ecstatic and nurturing priestesses of these old orders. (The idea of Jesus being God is an invention of the nasty old church fathers.)
This is where Mary Magdalene comes in. She becomes the perfect candidate for creating a new icon to reshape Christianity into something more compatible with the old goddess religions. In the newly reshaped faith, the saint becomes not a loose woman redeemed by grace but rather a “temple prostitute” (though that term is an invention of sex-hating male church leaders) who possessed a secret knowledge about how to lead people to encounter the divine through sexual experience. Her famous anointing of Jesus becomes an erotic gift that initiates Jesus into his work as a spiritual leader. Their union becomes a primal fertility rite to bring healing to the human family.
Of course, we are to believe, these roots of our faith have been ruthlessly supplanted by male church leaders at war against sexuality and feminine power. (The adoration of the Mother of Jesus doesn’t count. Her Virginity is a problem for people wanting to revive fertility religions.) Thus, there was a plot from the very beginning of the faith to keep Gnostic scriptures out of the New Testament, to demonize sexuality, to suppress knowledge of Mary Magdalene’s real role, to foster the doctrine of original sin, to emphasize the bloody notion of atonement through the cross, and to get all hung up on the belief in a physical resurrection. These were all deliberate, insidious, hateful notions fostered by power hungry people to keep Christians ignorant about the history of their own faith. The Church Councils are the dreadful events where the suppression became institutionalized and which all denominations have supported since.
am old enough to be shocked that intelligent people are taking any of this seriously. They are, however. So many Christians are alarmed that people are rewriting their faith. Then again, Christians have been chipping away at their own spiritual structures for several generations. We were told that we didn’t need to learn doctrine – that was just old, stale, pseudo-intellectualism. We didn’t need to linger in prayer – people were too busy. We didn’t need much Bible teaching – what we really needed was a Jesus bowling league and God loves you tee shirts. We didn’t need to prepare our hearts for communion – just pass those convenient flip-top juice and wafer thingamabobs in the last five minutes of the Sunday Jesus show – after all the important events. We didn’t need to know the history of our faith – better to talk about relevant things like the Desperate Housewives instead of Susanna Wesley. We have bought the lie that we would become more relevant by taking more and more of our faith less and less seriously. We have sown to the wind; we are reaping the whirlwind. Our loss of the sacred has made us captives of the profane. So why are we shocked?
The truth is, being a Christian involves the intellect as well as the heart. Many of my good Christian friends disagree with me about this. They are wrong. We are ill prepared for the cultural attack upon our faith because we have been intellectually lazy. That’s why we respond with anger and fear. So we call for boycotts. We call for picket lines. We call for believers to write Hollywood. Then we are dismayed because none of that works.
A few weeks ago, I watched The Exorcism of Emily Rose. It is about a real trial of a Catholic priest who attempted to exorcize a young lady tormented by evil. The prosecuting attorney was a professing Christian. He was appalled at the medieval barbarism that was, after all these centuries, still pretending to represent his faith. The defense attorney was an agnostic. The trial was really about whether Christians comfort themselves with a harmless set of myths or whether they really believe that evil exists and is at war with Christ and His church. Like the Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Di Vinci Code exposes this difference of opinion. The exposure makes many believers very uncomfortable..
The Da Vinci Code is a good adventure story. It is, in many ways, much like Raiders of the Lost Ark. However, it resonates deeply with themes that our contemporary culture now offers as ways to reshape our faith. It resonates with that culture for the same reason that The Passion of the Christ repulsed it. The architects of secularism demand the right to define the terms and to write the history. They are not happy when people in the “flyover zones” do not comply with their agenda. So Di Vinci Code is good; Passion of the Christ is bad.
Well, anyway, I am going to read the Di Vinci Code. After that, I am going to teach what Gnosticism is, how the canon of scripture was formed, why the creeds are important, why ancient Jews and Christians rejected fertility rites and paganism, why writings like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas were never considered scripture, why Jesus died and resurrected in a physical body, and why Christians must reclaim their love for knowledge and study. Study is an essential ingredient in authentic revival and we desperately need revival.
A vision for revival and renewal cannot be defined then as a call for retreat into blissful ignorance. Revival is not an orgiastic escape into sentimentality; it is a quickening of our being – body, mind, soul and spirit. It is not an abandonment of life; it is a retrieval of a forgotten piety that can rekindle life. It is not a severance of our spiritual root system in an attempt to become relevant to a culture that is quickly becoming anti-Christ; it is the bold embrace of eternal truths that transcend culture, time and space.
So perhaps the Di Vinci Code will become a gift to American Christians. Perhaps it will cause us to realize that no matter how enthusiastically we throw away our hymns, crosses, religious language and antiquated ways in order to be relevant, the emerging culture will never be satisfied until we have thrown away the Christ as well.
My children read it a couple of years ago and asked me to read with them. I just wasn’t that interested at the time. So I kept putting it off. I should have listened to them. It would have prepared me for the spiritual storm that the book has birthed. So last week, I read the special edition of US News about the book. (I want to be able to sniff out the philosophical and religious opinions that form the foundations for the story.)
Many of the ideas behind the story revolve around a belief that the church has brutally suppressed ancient documents and ancient faiths. Thus, a new school of academics, social engineers and apostate church leaders speak in glowing terms about the worship of the nurturing, earth-friendly, female deities of ancient peoples and the wholesome, liberated attitudes toward sexuality that they encouraged. In fact, we are to believe, early Christians, including Jesus himself, were most likely influenced by the beautiful, ecstatic and nurturing priestesses of these old orders. (The idea of Jesus being God is an invention of the nasty old church fathers.)
This is where Mary Magdalene comes in. She becomes the perfect candidate for creating a new icon to reshape Christianity into something more compatible with the old goddess religions. In the newly reshaped faith, the saint becomes not a loose woman redeemed by grace but rather a “temple prostitute” (though that term is an invention of sex-hating male church leaders) who possessed a secret knowledge about how to lead people to encounter the divine through sexual experience. Her famous anointing of Jesus becomes an erotic gift that initiates Jesus into his work as a spiritual leader. Their union becomes a primal fertility rite to bring healing to the human family.
Of course, we are to believe, these roots of our faith have been ruthlessly supplanted by male church leaders at war against sexuality and feminine power. (The adoration of the Mother of Jesus doesn’t count. Her Virginity is a problem for people wanting to revive fertility religions.) Thus, there was a plot from the very beginning of the faith to keep Gnostic scriptures out of the New Testament, to demonize sexuality, to suppress knowledge of Mary Magdalene’s real role, to foster the doctrine of original sin, to emphasize the bloody notion of atonement through the cross, and to get all hung up on the belief in a physical resurrection. These were all deliberate, insidious, hateful notions fostered by power hungry people to keep Christians ignorant about the history of their own faith. The Church Councils are the dreadful events where the suppression became institutionalized and which all denominations have supported since.
am old enough to be shocked that intelligent people are taking any of this seriously. They are, however. So many Christians are alarmed that people are rewriting their faith. Then again, Christians have been chipping away at their own spiritual structures for several generations. We were told that we didn’t need to learn doctrine – that was just old, stale, pseudo-intellectualism. We didn’t need to linger in prayer – people were too busy. We didn’t need much Bible teaching – what we really needed was a Jesus bowling league and God loves you tee shirts. We didn’t need to prepare our hearts for communion – just pass those convenient flip-top juice and wafer thingamabobs in the last five minutes of the Sunday Jesus show – after all the important events. We didn’t need to know the history of our faith – better to talk about relevant things like the Desperate Housewives instead of Susanna Wesley. We have bought the lie that we would become more relevant by taking more and more of our faith less and less seriously. We have sown to the wind; we are reaping the whirlwind. Our loss of the sacred has made us captives of the profane. So why are we shocked?
The truth is, being a Christian involves the intellect as well as the heart. Many of my good Christian friends disagree with me about this. They are wrong. We are ill prepared for the cultural attack upon our faith because we have been intellectually lazy. That’s why we respond with anger and fear. So we call for boycotts. We call for picket lines. We call for believers to write Hollywood. Then we are dismayed because none of that works.
A few weeks ago, I watched The Exorcism of Emily Rose. It is about a real trial of a Catholic priest who attempted to exorcize a young lady tormented by evil. The prosecuting attorney was a professing Christian. He was appalled at the medieval barbarism that was, after all these centuries, still pretending to represent his faith. The defense attorney was an agnostic. The trial was really about whether Christians comfort themselves with a harmless set of myths or whether they really believe that evil exists and is at war with Christ and His church. Like the Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Di Vinci Code exposes this difference of opinion. The exposure makes many believers very uncomfortable..
The Da Vinci Code is a good adventure story. It is, in many ways, much like Raiders of the Lost Ark. However, it resonates deeply with themes that our contemporary culture now offers as ways to reshape our faith. It resonates with that culture for the same reason that The Passion of the Christ repulsed it. The architects of secularism demand the right to define the terms and to write the history. They are not happy when people in the “flyover zones” do not comply with their agenda. So Di Vinci Code is good; Passion of the Christ is bad.
Well, anyway, I am going to read the Di Vinci Code. After that, I am going to teach what Gnosticism is, how the canon of scripture was formed, why the creeds are important, why ancient Jews and Christians rejected fertility rites and paganism, why writings like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas were never considered scripture, why Jesus died and resurrected in a physical body, and why Christians must reclaim their love for knowledge and study. Study is an essential ingredient in authentic revival and we desperately need revival.
A vision for revival and renewal cannot be defined then as a call for retreat into blissful ignorance. Revival is not an orgiastic escape into sentimentality; it is a quickening of our being – body, mind, soul and spirit. It is not an abandonment of life; it is a retrieval of a forgotten piety that can rekindle life. It is not a severance of our spiritual root system in an attempt to become relevant to a culture that is quickly becoming anti-Christ; it is the bold embrace of eternal truths that transcend culture, time and space.
So perhaps the Di Vinci Code will become a gift to American Christians. Perhaps it will cause us to realize that no matter how enthusiastically we throw away our hymns, crosses, religious language and antiquated ways in order to be relevant, the emerging culture will never be satisfied until we have thrown away the Christ as well.
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