The Radical Resurgence

Phe-nom-e-non

1. An observable fact or event. 2. An extraordinary person or thing or event.

3. An outward sign of the working of a law of nature (The Merriam- Webster Dictionary)

Ekklesia

1. Assembly, as a regularly summoned political body.

2. Assemblage, gathering, meeting generally.

3. The congregation of the Israelites.

4. The Christian church or congregation (Arndt & Gingrich Greek- English Lexicon)

Let’s not use the word “church.” It has so many preconceived meanings. Also, it is not even a translation of the Greek word ekklesia. “Church” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word kirk meaning, “of or pertaining to the Lord.” A good statement about God’s people, but not an accurate translation of ekklesia.

Christianity in Crisis: A Response by Diana Butler Bass

Christianity in Crisis: A Response by Frank Viola

Christianity in Crisis: Response by Trevin Wax

The Kingdom Question

Do you long for a stronger economy? safer cities and neighborhoods? better education? more integrity in politics? more respect for traditional values? a greater respect for Christians? more godly laws? cleaner television and movies? an end to abortion, pornography homosexuality, and violence? In short, a better world?

Do these longings represent your hopes for the future? If so, why? Do you believe we as Christians have a right to expect these things from society? Do you believe that the Lord even expects His people to demand them? And if they are not forthcoming, to fight for them?

The Lord promises a new heaven and a new earth. To long for them is normal and even right. But what exactly do we have a right to expect while in this world, in its present condition – besides animosity, hostility, and tribulation, that is? Do we have a right to expect any of the societal improvements mentioned above? If so, on what Scriptural basis?

The Early Church

Do our national problems hinder anyone from exercising faith? or love? or holiness? or repentance? or from pursuing a relationship with the living God? The early church had all of our national woes times ten – and was only stronger for it. Not only that, but they exerted no energy other than fervent prayer, sincere love and faithful witness to effect a change.

Did they place their hope in a better Rome? a more righteous Galatia? a Christian Corinth? Or was their hope solely “in the grace to be revealed at the revelation of Christ Jesus” (I Pet. 1:5)? Indeed it was, and that hope is still the calling to which we must be faithful. The world’s need for moral reformation is not our mission – any more than reforming Egypt was Israel’s responsibility in the days of Moses.

Read the complete interview with Christian Smith on “The Bible Made Impossible.”

How The Institutional Church Affects The Clergy

We have now seen what, in organic nature, churches show themselves to be. Let us now look at some of the effects of the institution upon churchmen. The dependence of doctrine for stability and of religious societies for continuity upon property, tends automatically to transfer the interest of the priesthood from the superstructure of faith and communion that first attracts them to the foundation of possessions that finally holds them. The manipulation of the gods for the benefit of men gives way to the management of properties for the benefit of Mother Church….

Creed and dogma are recognized as tools merely in the aggrandizement of the ecclesiastical institutions and the fortunes of the priesthood…. The deposit of faith is handled purely as a device for the accumulation of wealth and the concentration of power. Competition is suppressed not because “the faith” is true but because income is threatened. It is the most enfranchised popes that worked the Inquisition and the Index the hardest, that refuse to stir in the face of the Lutheran revolt. It took a generation and the failure of thirty years of horrible religious warfare to convince the ecclesiastical authority that its sources of income could not be restored by the customary devices of the Inquisition, the Index, the crusade and the sword….

As for the lesser and individual clergy, they are what the institution and the general community make them. The practice of their profession sets them in a fixed routine, of which to repeat interminable prayers and litanies in a strange tongue is a large part…. Habit in liturgy leads to heedlessness and boredom. The point is, to get through. “Hocus pocus” is what remains of the solemn mass with its “Hoc est corpus meus.” The Buddhist parallel is the prayer wheel. In that the mantra is brought up to the highest mechanical efficiency — every turn a prayer… Liturgy and ritual and sermons and other priestly duties are to do, and to be done with, as quickly as possible, that other more interesting and novel things may be attended to…. The problems of great churchmen are problems in the management of properties, in the care and acquisition of properties; the Catholic Church once owned as much as a third of England….

Ensuring Conformity

Churches are possessed of instruments of destruction as well as habits of appropriation. Conformity can be imposed by means of excommuni­cation and interdict, in their varying degrees. It is a mistake to imagine that those devices are obsolete…. The function of excommunications and the interdict is to cut off a person or a community from the professional services of the clergy; they are sacerdotal strikes.

The Roman Catholic Church maintains a blacklist as well. The blacklist applies to books and ideas. The ideas are studied by the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition and, according to their judgment, condemned or proscribed. Books are condemned by the Sacred Congregation of the Index and public notice is given that they are placed in the Index Expurgatorius. Then, without very special permission, no faithful Catholic may read them….

All churches that attain a fixed and infallible revelation, a set of sacred scriptures whose meaning is in the custody of a specially ordained priesthood trained for the purpose and organized in an ecclesiastical hierarchy, require considerable material equipment not only to win greater power but to keep from losing ground. A customary section of this equipment is the machinery of suppressing variations, exterminating differences, keeping the revelation secure from the menace of rivalry …. Churches, as we have seen, are founded on professional priests. They rest upon the establishment of a vested interest in the art of manipulating the supernatural. The products of this art constitute a commodity that churches sell and that they seek, each in its own way, to monopolize ….

How Clergy Developed

The story of the elaboration of the arts and crafts of manipulating the supernatural is like the story of any other enterprise of man that has come down the years as an institution. You begin with a technique in which the house-mother or the house-father or the tribal headman is especially skilled. The technique is a patterned action, involving the formal use of various objects such as we have already observed to be constantly recurrent in the practice of religion. The action is accompanied by incantations, by liturgical formulas, also patterned and highly stylized….

A Sociological Examination of the Traditional Elements of Religion

Religion comes first as a family or clan or personal endeavor to win the services of supernatural force in situations not otherwise controllable. Out of this endeavor a priestly caste comes into being and the gods are born. The recognized existence of specialists in the manipulation of the gods becomes the point of departure for a new system of relationships, a new mode of association between men and gods. This new system constitutes a church. It is a separate and distinct institution of society. It has its own traditions, its own learning and its own scheme of education for transmitting its knowledge and training its generations of experts. It has its own household and its own household economy. It bears the same relation to the rest of the community as any other institution seeking to live and grow in and with the complex striving disorder of works and beliefs we call civilization.

Since the Protestant Reformation in Europe, churches have multiplied and their importance has decreased. The Reformation was itself postulated on the principle that the relation between a man and his gods — or at least their revealed word — was primary and direct. It repudiated the well- known doctrine of Roman Catholicism that only through the mediation of a church, i.e., through the intervention of professional mediators, can a man establish communication with his gods…. Nevertheless, the institutional habit is so deeply ingrained in the social inheritance of the moderns that a religion without an institutional setting is difficult to conceive….

So far as religion exercises a recognizable modifying influence upon society, it does so through the medium of churches. Let us, then, inspect the general structure of the church, and get a view of its anatomy. On the first appearance the institution, however small and poor the example may be, looks pretty complicated.

In the New Testament we should be struck by the utter simplicity that characterized life in the early churches. We are given a broad picture of church life, but many particulars – which are troublesome for us – are left untouched by the New Testament. As time elapsed, the visible church lost its original simplicity and became enmeshed in a quagmire of ecclesiastical machinery and theological speculation.

The Lord’s Supper is a case in point. There is a simplicity about this practice in the sketchy New Testament data. Yet in post-apostolic times the remembrance meal (1) became embedded in hierarchical church structures so that it became a mysterious ritual to be “administered” by the “ordained,” and (2) ended up being the source of endless speculation about “what happens” in the “sacrament.”[1]

The evidence indicates that this remembrance meal, and the instruction which accompanied it, was a center point in Christian assemblies (cf. Acts 20:7). Eating together in the “breaking of bread” and remembering the Lord in the Supper were virtually synonymous in Christian worship.[2] Obviously, many things have changed in our practice since the early days. In this article, I would like to explore some basic points concerning the Lord’s Supper – based on 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 – and compare them with our conceptions and practices.

The asteroid has struck, the sky is darkening, and the mainstream churches and any evangelical megachurch you care to name are the dinosaurs.

The asteroid is late capitalism and it is darkening the skies in at least two ways.

(1) The global economy is putting an end to national economies and marginalizing the modern nation state. The present recession is the result of our inability to understand or control global financial flows. People in the right places press a few keys on their desktops and laptops and vast amounts of money leap across boundaries and around the world and ‘national’ economies are twisted into bizarre pretzel shapes by the event.

Capital intensive forms of church and parachurch will undergo a mass extinction event as this recession is followed by later ones. It is impossible to predict (much less control) the outputs of what mathematicians call ‘ a chaotic system’ so this will just be the first of many such downturns each resulting in yet another episode of what the economist Shumpeter called ‘creative destruction”.

(2) Historic cultures are replaced by a symbolic marketplace. Cultures are looted in order to replace them with niche markets, lifestyle options, and colorful commodities. Counseling options of all sorts become available (Freudian, Neofreudian,and Postfreudian psychotherapy are joined by Jungian depth psychology, Adlerian analytical psychology, gestalt therapy, rational-emotive therapy, reality therapy, Skinnerian behavioral modification, hypnotherapy, group therapy, New Age spiritualities et cetera, et cetera).