Ancient - Future

     I often speak and write about two things which especially seem to get me into trouble with fellow believers: globalization, the fact that the world’s peoples are now culturally interpenetrated among one another throughout the globe; and, the importance of practicing an “ancient-future” as opposed to a “secularized” faith.


         Perhaps later I will write about the spiritual implications of living in a globalized world. For now, I want to write a blog or two about what I mean by "ancient-future." A few words on that subject may help clear up where I stand on the subject. At very least, an explanation may offer my critics more effective and accurate ammunition than what they have been using so far.

         The concept of ancient-future faith has theological implications, of course. However, it is the way the concept affects worship that seems to provoke people the most. So, let’s focus our attention there.

         First, ancient-future worship is intentionally “other than” a contemporary experience. It deliberately leads us out of contemporary culture, not in order to glorify the past, but in order to help us experience eternity. It is the experience of "tasting of the powers of the world to come," as the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it.

         Secondly, ancient-future worship does not deny that we live within a contemporary culture. For this reason, traditionalists -- those who worship the past  -- do not tend to appreciate the concept any more than do those who worship the present. Ancient-future faith is not traditionalism, in that it does not seek to reproduce the past by reviving ancient practices for their own sake, as though the past were more sacred than the present. Ancient-future worship acknowledges that contemporary music and contemporary settings may be as sacred or as holy as ancient ones. So, our quest is not about reverence for the past, present or future; it is about the pursuit of timeless and eternal things.

         Thirdly, ancient-future worship does not fear spiritual intimacy. That is to say, it is an “incarnated” spirituality rather than a form of  "worship" which encourages a spectator response. It insists that worship involves physical movement, emotion, and one’s full and focused intellectual attention. It defines worship as the process of directing one's entire being toward the risen Christ in praise of the Creator, through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit. It is a type of “work” rather than a form of leisure. In ancient-future worship, one is consciously digesting words, attitudes, concepts, (and even the physical elements of bread and wine) into one's being. In other words, worship is a part of one’s deliberate and conscious pursuit of God. The product of this “work” (the New Testament word “ liturgia,” often translated “ministry” literally means “the work of the people) is the personal transformation, or sanctification of the worshipper. That is to say, authentic worship brings a person who has trusted in Christ under the governance of Christ, which over time results in the formation of the character of Christ within him or her.

In worship, one deliberately leaves secular space behind and intentionally enters sacred space. He turns his attention from all that is the world, not because the world is evil but because it is incomplete. Indeed, when the worshipper leaves that sacred space, he or she deliberately reenters secular space, as an ambassador of heaven and as a priest of God appointed to serve a dying world.

Why is it important to remain mindful of the past or to envision the future in our worship? Because our faith teaches that we are timeless beings and that when we worship we gather with the saints of all ages and places. We are small parts or a great spiritual movement that stretches through time and space.

Ancient-future worship is an acknowledgement then of the presence of both past and future within the present moment.

We are mindful of the past because we follow an ancient faith; one that offers us the accumulated treasures of practices and thoughts of those who preceded us. We use this inheritance to learn how to express our own devotion to God.

We acknowledge the future because we are steadily moving toward the culmination of God’s work in the world, namely the summing up of all things in Christ, the Redeemer and Lord of Creation.

We are also mindful of the present moment, that is to say the contemporary culture.

Ancient-future worship may employ video or the latest praise chorus but does not chose such things because they are new and cool. We use them because they are the offerings of God’s people who are alive in this moment.

At the same time, ancient-future worship may draw upon practices from the third century, not because the practice is old or spooky but because that practice may offer a way to root our awareness of God to something other than our present mood or contemporary fads.

Ancient-future does not revolve around a “seeker.” It does not discard the need to connect with a person who is new to the faith. Neither does it eliminate authentic worship in order to evangelize. The presence of God can be disturbing to one who has lived his or her life within a secular time and space. The very notion of “sacred” is strange to contemporary man or woman. Nonetheless, it is an encounter with the presence of God that awakens the soul. Therefore, comforting or not, God must be experienced.

It is quite different to view worship as something God has defined (and the ages have confirmed) rather than something believers create and continually adapt to meet their own needs. 

To say it again: Ancient-future worship is primarily about drawing people into the experienced presence of God rather than about gathering seekers into church by demystifying the experience of worship.

What we hope for in the practice of ancient-future worship is not that people will leave the church saying, “that was the best music and preaching I ever experienced,” but rather, “God is surely in that place.”

In the Book of Ezekiel, God says that he has this against the priests and prophets, that they have eliminated the difference between that which is sacred and that which is profane (secular).

I have heard Christian leaders say passionately that we need to stop viewing things as either “sacred,” or “secular’ because in the New Testament, everything is sacred.

But everything is not sacred! If everything is sacred (set apart, holy), then nothing is really sacred. And if nothing is sacred, then there is no place in this time or space where I can go that is not under the control of the world, the flesh and the devil. Everything and everyone bows the knee to the spirit of the age, including the saints. Without sacred times and places, there is no “tasting of the powers of the world to come.”

Secularization of worship is a self-inflicted spiritual impoverishment. It produces a generation that no longer knows the ways of God nor recognizes the presence of God.

It is the wrong way.

It doesn’t lead to a good place.

I have decided to walk another way; on the path the saints have walked.   

Why? Because time is running out for me I want to become a saint.

So I don’t have any more time for cute.

I need God.

And so do the seekers.

In my opinion, this is precisely what they are seeking.

The Presence of the Future

Religion is rooted in habits of thought and action developed and maintained by generations of adherents and transmitted to each succeeding generation by formal and informal means. Although it is popular now to claim that Christianity is somehow unique in this regard, and in fact should not even be defined as a religion, our faith, like others, is based upon beliefs and practices that we did not invent but which were faithfully transmitted to us from the past. Furthermore, this was done intentionally; not only by our parents but by each generation before them, since the days of the apostles.

St. Paul certainly intended for this to happen. He pointedly instructs Timothy to train faithful teachers, capable of producing yet other teachers. That was the beginning of Christian catechism, which effectively taught the hearts and minds of believers to view the world through eyes of faith. Through the 1,500 years of history in which Holy Scripture was not available except to a handful of literate souls, this structure of instruction successfully transmitted our faith from the past and into the present.

In those centuries, one learned bits and pieces of scripture, memorized prayers, internalized the movement of corporate worship, and developed habits of piety. Thus our faith, in a manner not unlike that of other faiths, come to revere its past and to speak in hushed tones about the foundations of its spiritual life. The reverence was born of an appropriate gratitude for the priceless gifts of spirituality and civilization we had received from antiquity.

 Such reverence and gratitude is a godly response.

 I have the deepest contempt for our modern attitude toward history and tradition. We seem to expect no consequences as we foolishly keep sawing off the limb of history upon which we are sitting. Nonetheless, I assert that respect for sacred history does not make our faith unique. Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Sikhs also revere their histories and heroes. They too pass on to their children the habits of mind and action that they have received from the past.

The uniqueness of Christianity lies in the way it envisions the future.

Christianity does not view the past as superior to the present, nor dread a future it believes grows increasingly dark and godless.   Our faith is not propelled from a holy past into a degenerating future. It is pulled from a dark past into a holy consummation in which, at last, evil will be destroyed and redeemed humankind will become the eternal companions of God.

We do not believe that our God is in the past so that each step into the future carries us further away from His presence. No, we believe that God is in the future, continually pulling us toward Himself and each step into the future carries us toward Him. The New Testament calls that moment ahead, when we see God face to face "the eschaton," which is, for a Christian, much more significant than Eden or the origins of heaven and earth. Holy history demonstrates how, since the very beginning, the universe has been moving toward that inevitable consummation for which it was designed and toward which it was intentionally aimed. History tells us that time is God's instrument and that it performs at His bidding and on our behalf. However, it is the future that we celebrate because that is where He awaits us.

Our eyes are on the eschaton because the golden age is before us, not behind us.

In Christ, sacred future made its first bright appearance. In Him, the future state of the universe (and the future state of all who belong to Him) became visible and tangible.  In him, the past, even the holy past of our faith, found its purpose and explanation.

Two lines from a beloved Christmas carol sums up the essentials of Christian eschatology:

"Long lay the world in sin and error pinning, till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope, a weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn."

Full steam ahead!

Why then all this anxiety and fear among Christians? Why all the angst about our lost past and the deplorable nature of the present? Why all the fear about the anti-Christ, and obsession with our evil and powerful enemies?

What are we to do about this foolish Christian pessimism, through which our ancient past is judged as insignificant, the future viewed as a source of unbearable anxiety, but our recent past -- especially the decades just preceding our birth -- some sort of golden age of faith and spiritual life?

Have we lost the bright light of the eschaton? Have we forgotten the moment towards which we travel and for which our ancestors so diligently prepared us?

For anyone who has fixed his eyes upon the eschaton, the future is not dark. A beacon shines from a place just beyond our years. In its light, the shadows of our present are undone and the mysteries of the past are fully illuminated.

Crisis

A crisis is a fork in the road of life. It is a place of decision; an inescapable shift in one’s direction. Most of us do not like such moments. We would much rather maintain the leisurely pace of habit and routine.  We would like to keep doing what we’ve been doing. Be who we’ve been. Believe what we have believed.

Crisis requires a reevaluation of things we would rather just take for granted.

A medieval peasant for example, did not question his piety or his view of reality. He lived life and approached death with the security that “as it was from the beginning, is now and shall ever be, world without end.” He knew that the world ended somewhere beyond the straits of Gibraltar, and that somewhere beyond lay the boundaries of human habitation. Great dragons and monsters guarded that boundary and terrorized those foolish enough to venture toward the edge. He knew that there were four corners of the earth. The sun and moon rotated around the planet to give humankind light and heat. The stars sprinkled the skies to help us navigate the seas and, could, if properly studied, give directions about whom to marry or when the hour of death would come.

Then Copernicus and Columbus shattered the way the world worked.  They shook the foundations of Europe’s faith. After them, how could a man still believe that the sun once stood still in the valley of Ajelon and gave Joshua more time to win the victory over his enemies? How could one still believe that the sun runs his daily course across the heavens like a bridegroom processing to his wedding?

Well, most peasants just dismissed the news about a round earth and the discovery that we inhabit a heliocentric solar system. So if pressed, they responded to such information with amusement, indifference or anger. Why not? There were crops to plant. There were babies to conceive. There were old people to bury. Abstract intellectual ranting in big cities was not worth the normal person’s concerns.

That’s why phrases like “the setting of the sun,” and “the ends of the earth,” survived, even to our own times.  Common people ignored the implications of important discoveries for a very long time.

So, in time the old phrases became poetic forms of speech.  Gradually, the knowledge sank in and the words shifted their meaning. People who still believe in a flat earth now become wards of the state and are forced to wear funny jackets.

The crisis in cosmology that ended the medieval world, and turned the word “sunset” from a description about reality into a poetic metaphor, took centuries.

We don’t get centuries to process our intellectual revolutions. Since 1901, we have absorbed the equivalent of a Copernican revolution every five years:  the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, continental drift, the double helix, the digitalization of records, translation software that promises to make all data accumulated in all times and in all places available to all in their own tongue - need I go on?  

We simply have not absorbed what all this means. However, we will not have the luxury of living as though the world is the same as it was in 1880.

In one sense, we haven’t done that, of course. For many generations now we have been using nifty new gadgets produced by all these discoveries. The point it though, we have been doing our best to ignore the radically different view of reality that these discoveries have made possible.  Nonetheless, the world has been shifting as we have fought our wars, made our money, raised our children, and yes, said our prayers.

Now the explosions of new information have become impossible to ignore, even at the popular level. All sorts of global crises in a number of fields are forcing us to the crossroads. Furthermore, by the time we adjust, new pieces of information make our adjustment obsolete. We find ourselves required to adjust again.

We are just not built for this. It is like constructing a house in an earthquake.

So, if our faith is in a system, dogma or protocol; we are going to treat new information like sea monsters. Our terror will grow. Our rage will increase. Our grip on sanity will become ever more tenuous. The center will give way.

As we approach the crossroads, we will decide to take the right fork, only to encounter another crossroads. We’ll stumble through that one and find ourselves facing yet another. At each turn, we will only be able to guess about where to turn because we have no maps for this new territory.

What we do have though is a friend who knows the way.

It was a Person who guided our ancestors across the horror of their collapsed system of medieval thought. That person delivered our ancestors safely into the modern age. That is why it is difficult for us to understand why the changes were so excruciating for them. We are so adjusted to modern thought that the medieval systems of thought, so carefully constructed on a foundation of faith, seem to us bizarre and alien. The crisis forced a new way of thinking about the world and about faith. Yet, we do not experience that shift as a loss of faith, although our ancestors certainly did at first.

The same Person is with us that was with our ancestors. Of course, he does not override our idolatrous obsession with systems and protocol. So if we refuse to trust Him, we may miss the turn, all the while clutching our terrors and mumbling our clichés and slogans. 

These are times that try men’s souls. The crisis is painful and disorienting.

The crisis is also unavoidable.

Our old world is not coming back.

Unfortunately, many of our maps are inaccurate.  They describe the territory of that old world, like those maps everyone loves with the sea monsters at the edge of the earth.

Since we don’t have a map, we need to listen carefully to our Helper.

Otherwise, we will have to wrestle with the monsters, even if they are not really there.

We will not win that fight because we will be fighting our own heads.

There is only one way through this crisis: we must cling to the Christ.

Image of a DNA helix