Modern Monks?

Some cut themselves to make certain that they feel.  Pain becomes an assurance of reality, of existence.  In relation, many Christians take up causes; sometimes social, sometimes political.  Yet it becomes readily apparent that their instigation of and participation in such activities is a fearful and faithless act.  The need to constantly remind themselves that they merit what they claim and the fear that they do not are the catalysts, implicit or otherwise, of this form of activism within evangelicalism today.  Modern evangelicalism has become very medieval and monastic in this regard.  Emphasis is constantly placed upon relevance, response and results.  Programs come to mean more than substance and utilitarianism becomes the regulative principle for worship. But the modern version of asceticism is not a retreat from the world but is rather the renovation of the world with a Christian veneer and theocratic elements.  Many Christian today seem to feel that even the mundane and the common must be harnessed for holy and sacred use  if they are to be of use the Christian, be enjoyed by him, or justifiably exist at all.  This facade is what I would call the second blessing of cultural transformationalism; the church triumphant is not the church which in Christ is victorious but is the church which has come to power as Constantine; remaking the city of man in their own image.

As evangelicalism has cast off the confessional structure of the church and renounced biblically regulated worship they have found themselves increasingly dissatisfied with the biblical doctrine of Justification by faith through grace alone. And, as the realization of this dissatisfaction has become more precise, the pursuit to satiate the need for assurance has become more desperate.  It has come to the point of epicurean deconstruction; biblical worship has become replaced by “Spirituality”, evocation has replaced invocation, feeling now trumps promise as the theology of the cross is displaced by many shades of the theology of glory.

And ultimately, they are left with mysticism.

More to follow….

Soup Anyone

Social activism as a response to the pricking of ones conscience highlights the absence of a true gospel ministry and can only ever be a temporal suture, which, though effective, provides no lasting method of treatment.  It can only ameliorate the accusations of the conscience, the law written on the heart of man; a topical analgesic of the soul.  Nothing is altered in the end, that good works in the face of moral culpability is flight rather than fight.

Consequently, when it is found blossoming in the Church, the Gospel is soon found to be lacking in it’s message of salvation to the damned, because it requires no work on the part of the redeemed and casts aspersions upon there moral goodness.  And that results in the politicizing of the institutional Church in search of applicable and immediate meaning, in other words, a “what have you done for me lately” approach to word and sacrament.  This effectively self-destructs the church community into splinter groups vying for their own agenda using Christianity and its vernacular.  The language of the Church becomes the language of the collective pursuit of humanity for equality.  Thus, the laity as constituents demand the satisfaction of their felt needs and social ailments to be rectified by their leaders( pastors and elders).  And so joining a particular church body has more in common with choosing Italian over Chinese rather than salvation by grace alone, through faith alone.  It becomes a question of who can offer the most amenities rather than who faithfully delivers word and sacrament.

And so, with the obfuscation of the Gospel, the Church becomes an elaborate social club, albeit one which is possessed of more seriousness, yet a social club nonetheless.  Civic action becomes the sacrament of the Christless Church wherein Christ has become simply a progenitor rather than a savior.  And in the midst of the people the cross is thrown down and the Gospel cast aside, because man is not really all that bad, he just needs to learn some manners.

Sacramental Activity?

The distinction between the faith, piety and practice of confessionally Reformed Christianity and the faithfulness, pietism and practicality of much of Evangelicalism becomes apparent in the contrast of response to initiative. The difference between Word and Sacrament vs. advice and excitement is that one produces gratitude in response to the Law and Gospel, while the other incites, through psychological manipulation and suggestion; an introspection and insecurity that in turn is used to justify the pursuit of a pietism that produces a rationalistic gnosticism nourished by a lack of confidence in the life and work of Christ and an overemphasis of the ability of the individual. Sin becomes confused with the affectations and accouterments of the sinner and creation is divided into the “sacred” and the “secular”. By this conflation of substance into the sin which utilizes it, an inverse conclusion is arrived at; for if one thing can be sinful than why can’t sanctification be caused by the possession and use of Christian “culture” and “merchandise”?

The reinvention and reintroduction of iconoclasm into much of mainstream Protestantism is the result of a loss of confidence in the traditional method of preaching and by a view which transforms the sacraments into empty sepulchers of memory. The verbal method of transmission that is preaching is no longer viewed as sufficient to reach the masses. Baptism has become a mere act of obedience and communion a memorial, remembering nothing but a name. Nothing is communicated, nothing is received other than the reminisce of a deed. So what inevitably occurs is that other, cultural and non-ordained practices are elevated to the level of sacrament and thought to communicate that necessary spiritual food to our souls. The most notable example is contemporary Christian music, but this envisioning of “stuff” that sanctifies by communicating grace is extended into the civil realm.

Thus, what we do has become sacramental in much of Evangelicalism; in the counter culture of societal sanctification or the sacramental application of Christendom, vocation has become a sacrament, rather than a common element of creation. It is thought that we must now resort to the contextualization of the Church and the Gospel into the new media, maintaining relevance in the new world. And so the recidivism of the verbal to the pictorial is of inevitable necessity in the new paradigm in order to advance the kingdom of God. Spiritual utilitarianism, the new iconoclasm, the new industry of indulgences fueling the false expectation that a parochial culture will produce a life of sanctity, mortification of the flesh, and ultimately the notion that we can express and present the life and work of Jesus Christ with nary a word from our mouths; personal piety over corporate, covenantal participation, one finds that the objectivity of the covenant to be too rankling to man who would pull God down to him.

This is a form of Christianity that has more in common with the pioneer spirit and rugged individualism of early America than the historic Christian Church; the me first and God second religion, looking to God for reward and safety rather than mercy and grace. Furthermore, in this commingling of cult and culture, this confusion of the two kingdoms, some within the Church begin to see themselves as a political body empowered and compelled to take action by virtue of their status and possession of moral and ethical “superiority” in the culture to transform it. Yet, lacking authority, but proclaiming superiority of ethics and culture, they inevitably generate the the notion that they are fundamentalist, extremist, intolerant of all but their own kind and seeking to bring all people under the sway of their ideologies.

My position is that this, if practiced on a large scale this cannot but help to cause a reaction of oppression, discrimination, and fear. Thus the identity of the Church, when not in political ascendency will be that of the oppressed, but a persecution  caused by a paradigm of manifest destiny rather than simply the preaching of the Gospel. And to begin to associate the people of God, or the Church, with the political and socially oppressed is to incorporate, implicitly, the notion of revolution as a viable act in the furtherance of the Gospel and the liberation of God’s people in order to extend the reach of the Kingdom of Heaven. What makes this even more odd is that this notion of being on the outside looking in is developed by the American Church in a situation of affluence and in the absence of real political and social oppression in comparison to the global, in/visible church; this is not the liberation theology of Latin America, where there is real oppression. Therefore, any oppression that does occur is the consequence of an attitude of ascendancy and arrogance, not on account of a confession of Christ as Lord as primary but the way in which they use the Word of God as a manifesto for all life.

To do this is to believe that the Church’s place in this present evil age is one of social and cultural domination and enforced cultural homogeny rather than contribution without permanence; that we contribute to society, on the terms that Caesar has set without seeking to become Caesar. The Church must be content to dwell in the tents of impermanence rather than in cities of permanence.

The Gospel As A Manifesto?

ac·tiv·ism

–noun

1. the doctrine or practice of vigorous action or involvement as a means of achieving political or other goals, sometimes by demonstrations, protests, etc.

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

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The Covenant People are not politically or socially oriented as liberators, nor as purveyors of a distinct cultural export. Liberation and cultural patronage are the activities, realm and purview of the common man. Entrance into and continued membership in the Covenant Kingdom of God is not based upon a persons economic, intellectual, or social “situatedness”, rather, it is confessionally oriented. No, politics and cultural pursuits do not fall within the paradigm of the pilgrimage of God’s people through this age. The People of God exist in a different covenantal orientation then the common man that he co-habitats with in the creation, the one in grace the other still ruled exclusively by law, united only in their natural occupation as image bearers. The Christian is required to passively resist those within and intrusions by hostile forces into the Church whereas the pagan has no such mandate of pacifism. What is more, the Christian also has no such mandate of pacifism when it touches the city of man rather than the city of God. Because, if the kingdom of heaven is not possessed of present earthly permanence, then it may be reasoned, if man would truly render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, a dual citizenship must then be part of the nature of the Christian in the present age. The Christian is one who lives concurrently under the authority of the divine and the magistrate, being beholden to both, to the one functioning as one created in the image of God and affirming the solidarity of the human race and to the former as one in covenant with God who has redeemed and reconciled him to himself through the work of the cross. And activism, if left solely to the pursuit of the betterment of man is perfectly acceptable, but it is when the Gospel is cannibalized in order to justify the relevance of the Church and her Gospel to the culture that it sojourns in that activism becomes syncretism.

Thus, there is nothing inherently Christian about activism, yet that does not disqualify Christians from being activists. The essential element, though, which defends against the Gospel from being used as a resource for political action and manifesto, is motivation. The minute that we seek to act in the public arena because we are Christians with the express intent of spreading the Good News of The Gospel in order to christianize or transform the culture we have confused the two kingdoms and abandoned our role as pilgrims; intent on bringing heaven down now through the “sweat of our brow and the strength of our back”. We must recall that Christendom is a failed project; it resulted either in attempted genocide and or the forceful acquisition of land and their people under the auspices of “manifest destiny” while wearing the guise of “converting the savages”, which is neither ethically, morally, or theologically defensible. So, when the Gospel is placed within the shell of activism, what is distinctly Christian begins to be transformed into something which is practiced, while taking what is secular(see culture) and making it the concern of that which is sacred, twisting the message to fit the intent of the activist. Activism in the Church flattens out any distinction between the two kingdoms to eventually politicize and moralize Christianity, leaving it as a rationalistic methodology that speaks the hollow rhetoric of religious connotation; always looking for the meaning the words affect rather than the meaning the words represent. It devours Christianity to leave it stripped of an object yet nonetheless attempting to maintain the illusion of a transcendent goal. But in the end it will become a race that cannot be won, a faith that cannot be had in a messiah who shall never return.

Furthermore, when the the Church becomes primarily a shelter for the less fortunate of society, it has jettisoned the otherworldliness of the Gospel for the historical Jesus of Liberal theology. And although I don’t think that they all actively set out to deny the message of the cross, the certainly deny its purpose by harnessing the resources of the Church for social activism rather than the care of the congregation and the evangelization of the community because they interpret the transcendent through their navel. But then again, this is why the social Gospel is so appealing, it offers the kingdom now with no cost, being already in line with the natural tendencies of man rather than declaring the Gospel over and against the natural inclinations of mankind; offering not what is attractive and desired but what is irreducibly necessary.

The meta-narrative becomes lost in a Kantian induced postmodern miasma where nothing is true yet all receive affirmation and validation, the ultimate concern being to justify Dionysian hedonism as the prevailing ethic, because man simply wants to do what he wants to do. Yet the conscience(the Law) stands in the way of that, with the Gospel offering absolution and an end to the accusations of the Law, but man would rather choose a third way, which is really no way at all, the way of narcissism. But I don’t mean a narcissism of the individual precisely, but one of the collective race of man, one that sets man not only above the rest of creation but above God himself as the source of that which is good and right in the world, in which the breaking of the covenant in Eden is seen as liberation from the oppression of “primitive myths” to finally be human. For them the Gospel, if it is good news at all, must be dealt with solely on the mortal plane, conflating any vertical activity into the horizontal as mere myth intended to justify militant social activism, moral/ethical improvement and to explain the common phenomena of the conscience.

In the end, the passivity of the Christian Pilgrimage is simply at odds with the activist inclinations and sympathies of man in the natural realm. Man naturally wants to do to cause or affect change. But that is to practice dominion, to homestead, and it is certainly not the image of a pilgrim sojourning for a time in the midst of his journey.