culture

For some reason, the Lord is having me share things written by others lately. I am surprised by this, too. So here goes, by Timothy L. Price of KingdomCitizenship.org. Shared by permission.

I saw a sign in front of a local denominational building in Lincoln, Nebraska that hit me like a ton of bricks. My mind automatically reeled with questions. What does this sign mean? How can this be? Is this group serious? Many other questions flew through my mind for the next few hours as I contemplated the warning that caught my eye and what it could mean.

What was the sign? It was an advertisement for a video series: The Silencing of God.
http://www.silencingofgod.com/ …

Here are a few questions I considered.

1. If God is infinite, how can anyone or anything be silencing Him?
2. How can God be silenced when He has millions of followers?
3. If God can be silenced with His millions of followers, how did the early church make Him speak so loud it drew the ire of the empire?
4. What is different about the christians today and the early believers in the first few decades following Christ?
5. Is the view of modern religious people merely fear based speculation?
6. Why are these religious folks so afraid at the alleged silencing of God?
7. What does it say if God can be silenced, as this video seems to be convinced?
8. Where is this silencing occurring, in the pews, in the courts, in the culture or in the politics?

These are some heavy-weight questions with no short answers. However, we should entertain them and see where they press us. Perhaps we/they see the problems incorrectly. Perhaps the situation is not as bad as it would seem given this signage. On the other hand, maybe the situation is worse than the sign implies.

The mere grammatics of the title, The Silencing of God, is rather peculiar given theological tendencies of the denominational house where in this video series was shown. First, the question of God’s sovereignty is questionable given this title. It is not that God is silent or that He has silenced Himself; given the title. No, the implication is that something or someone is muzzling God.

Most religious people would object to my bold reflection on the meaning behind this title. Perhaps the authors did not mean this exactly. But if not, what did they mean? We are left only with the words of their advertisement. I cannot speak for their exact mindset, because who knows the heart of a man not to mention a bunch of people putting together a seminar like this one.

The subtitle of the website promulgating this video series reads: The Dismantling of America’s Christian Heritage. Now, this is even more confusing. The subtitle with the title implies that God is somehow inseparable from America, its past, its existence and the necessity of it continuing as it has been thought of for many years. It must be tantamount to “God’s kingdom on earth” or perhaps the new “covenant nation” as a replacement for Israel…

Confronted with this assessment many touting this video and its contents would recoil in disagreement. They would deny that God is somehow bound to America and it’s perpetuity… I would agree. However, the suggestion from the title and subtitle still remain. Objective folks will see what I mean. The person embattled in what this video series implies, they are still stuck.

How does one express what is happening in America, what is happening to church people marginalized within the political order they entrusted themselves and their message to?

What does this video say about church people in this country? What does it say that they do not see that it says?

God is infinite and nothing can silence Him if He does not want to be silenced. So, in the author’s mind who put together this video series, silencing God has to do with something else than His sovereignty, right? Secondly, if God has millions of believers in this country and around the world, supposing of course that these speak of Him and by Him, how could silencing really happen? Are we tracking here? Thus, the alleged silencing of God alluded to by this video must be happening somewhere else than in the church pew, between people or between God dealing with people directly, right?

You do not have to read much further than the index page of this video website to see where they are going. Though they do not say it, nor do they realize it, what they are cranked up about is civil religion being disenfranchised.

What is civil religion?

The definition is not solid or succinct. Many explanations for this reality exist. However, let me explain what I mean employing the term. Civil Religion is when religiously held beliefs or ideals are formulated into a cultural consciousness, laws and social protocol. Religious people in this arrangement depend on representation in the public square through political involvement and the passive agreement of the culture, even non-believers. Religion is benefited by inclusion in State mechanisms. The State is strengthened by the alleged morality and wisdom of religion but more importantly by the appearance that religion has a voice in its realm.

Today, more than ever religious people and religious ideas are being drummed out of the public arena. The alleged gains of the religious community in political affairs in the last 40 years are being reversed at a precipitous rate. Gay marriage has taken hold; outlawed abortion procedures and funding have burst upon the scene once again. The “immorality” of fetal stem cell harvesting and research is once again is the law of the land. Any ground gained in the culture wars has been retaken with excessive new invasiveness and insults to those civilly religious.

In addition, America, through the policies of the current and former administrations has gone over the cliff. We are in the throes of bracing for impact. Policy was supposed to protect America. Yet it would seems the only plausible answer to the realities of what is happening is that those who are in charge must have total sabotage in mind. The founding fathers would roll in their graves if they could see what America has come to… It is this view along with the unmet expectations inclusion in the political order that has the religious community in an uproar; leading to such published notions that God is being silenced.

In the arrangement of this video series, the silencing of God is equivalent to the religious communities’ expulsion from the political order or being gagging by it. [sic] In other words, civil religionists no longer have the voice and sway they once thought they had.

Civil religion in the form of people who believe in Christ, even sincerely, who have vested themselves in the State as far as; representation, propagation of religious ideas thought [sic] political mechanism, identity and belonging, see the state of affairs in America is not just getting worse. They see it as getting anti, which is persecutive in a way they never conceived possible in America. They see no means to do or say anything about what they say they believe other than through the political arena. They are irreparably detached from reality of early followers of Christ who had no “representation in society” by the means of the political order, e.g. no civil religion. Yet, the early church spread like wildfire.

Christ as well as all of His disciples/apostles never depended on the political order to declare right from wrong or provide a stage to bandy notions of morality and enlightenment; much less true righteousness. The early church was seen as a threat to the political order because it marched to the beat of a different drum. The church was an alternative belonging to the belonging social/political order afforded citizens or subjects. Today, what is thought to be the church has “been” the social/political order. Except now, the state and many people in the state have gotten tired of this kind of religion.

Those who have ears to hear should stop throwing pearls before swine and crying that they don’t play ball anymore. They should see that they too could proclaim truth by the things God calls us to do in everyday life, which upstage and co-opt the political order. They should see that an alternative is much more convincing than thin religious ideas that get watered down in a political process even more. They should see that the political order and society around them, good, bad or indifferent, does not have any reflection on them since we have a kingdom of our own. They should see that we are empowered by Someone that is greater than any champion of the state’s system.

The title, “The Silencing of God,” is drenched with fear. It is forged in misunderstandings of reality, the identity of the believer, God and His sovereignty and His interaction with the nations of the devil’s world. This title speaks of disenfranchisement. If God is for us who can be against us? How can we be disenfranchised? The video title speaks of the alleged primacy of the state. It denies most of Christ’s teaching in the New Testament.

Jesus said, FEAR NOT, for I am always with you. He allayed the disciple’s anxiety in regards to the social/political order and their disintegrating relationship to it. Paul continues in this message with words like grace and peace in his epistles. The early church faced being hunted, slaughtered, tortured, enslaved, families separated… In polar contrast, the modern religious community calling itself church is exercised over being disincluded [sic] in the political process. How does the guy with anguish and pain over a broken leg relate to the guy cries buckets over a skinned knee?

Dark days are ahead for those who have placed their faith in civil religion with Jesus as a footnote. The same goes for those with their eyes on Jesus, the latter will not be surprised. There is time for the former to repent; there is forgiveness for the sin of idolatry. There is an identity in Jesus that we can learn once again. God is not hampered by the political order of the state and the world and its new attitude towards people of faith, real or fake. We need to see this as purification. We need to prepare ourselves from unprecedented apostasy of those we thought to be committed to God. We need to find real followers of God and be built up in their company with God orchestrating our activity. Whether we live or die, we are the Lords. Remember people FROM every tribe tongue and nation will worship before His thrown. This would be over and against those OF every nation.

We, the body of Christ around the world, are to be a holy nation. There are no dual citizenships in God’s economy and this is one thing He trying to show the religious community in America and in the western world.

“Remember what Bilbo used to say: It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” [J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings]

Today I struggle over here with wondering how valid my cultural comfort is in determining what people, church situations I should be involved with. Sometimes I do wonder about the line between things moral and things cultural. It can be daunting to address these things when you are face to face with them.

And where are the markers when we talk about the authenticity of the faith? Was chatting with a lady about how some speak of the traditions of a particular place at a particular time as informing their faith. Then there are many of us who feel most informed when we think in terms of first century Judea. But, as the lady pointed out to me, there has never been a time when the faith was not borne along on someone’s culture.

Jesus told the Syrophenician woman that he was sent only to the house of Israel. Yet she prevailed and He blessed her, too. So, is this any indication that God is as willing to bless our non-Jewish, non-first-century informed lives as He was to reach out to this woman? Do we study the NT to find out how to properly “do” the faith according to the culture and means that existed then, or do we read it to understand the heart of God in our culture today?

Scary topic. Scary implications. It seems I have stumbled upon some kind of intersection of the faith here — a really scary one, I might add, with lots of cross traffic. Now do I want to live in the middle of the intersection, cross to the other side, stay on my side and wave at people as they pass by? It’s very hard to live in the middle of a busy intersection, isn’t it? Might even be downright dangerous.

This might sound like a question that only the liberal church would address, but I find myself thinking once more of Bruce Olson and the Motilones again. Funny how that guy has impacted my life. As an evangelical, he certainly had to grapple with that issue. And I am now going to go smoke a metaphorical pipe and have a think about the whole thing. Can it be that I have long missed a vital component to our witness on earth?

Methinks I smell an adventure coming on and perhaps when I return I shall tell ye all about it.

Following my reading of The Story of Christianity, vol. 1, by Justo Gonzalez (San Francisco: Harper, 1984), I feel compelled to make the case briefly that the Christian faith is not a “white man’s religion”, as has often been charged. It was birthed in the Middle East and not in Europe. Before the spread of the Christian faith into the West, its strength of paganism rivaled that in the East.

In many places this paganism survived alongside of or syncretistically with the Christian religion. Yet it seems that one of the peculiar aspects of Christianity in Europe and Asia is the difficulty of naming a truly indigenous church. Surely there must have been regional or tribal aspects of community worship in the early days, but nothing much survived after officialdom but a normed church culture. Worship in many places became a contrivance that carried little relevance in daily life for many.

If I have bashed the councils following Nicea, there is one good thing we may say of it. While the marriage of church and state had a corrupting influence on both, that first council called by Constantine left us a summation of what the churches had always believed up to that point. The council did not create new beliefs; it merely strained out what had been believed for over 300 years. When Paul told Timothy not to forget the traditions he had learned, it seems doubtful that he referred to a set of rituals. Rituals are culture dependent. More likely, Paul referred to the fundamentals of the common faith. I believe the Nicene Creed spelled out these fundamentals and it went something, more or less, like this:

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father.
With the Father and the Son
he is worshipped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. AMEN.

From my point of view, that was the last important thing any council ever did, as later councils engaged in little other than hair-splitting debates over matters that God never invited us to peer into. The Nicene Creed sums up the gospel for all time, albeit in a freeze-dried state. For many, these became memorized words, but as God does now and again, He waters those words so that they come alive to those who seek.

The indigenous churches thereafter were mostly suppressed into a sameness of ritual and custom that served the purposes of the state. Occasionally, God has burst through the cold concrete of the imperial layers to reach His people. I believe He did this in Francis of Assisi and in Bernard of Clairvaux and probably in many others whose names have been lost to us but whose influence remains.

Consider the irony that today there is a push underway to grant Native Americans and other non-European types the freedom to establish their own indigenous churches. I find it ironic, considering that the European diaspora sent missionaries to so many tribal people, yet had no indigenous church of its own. Indeed, it did not know that it was even missing such. The closest we come to a legitimate native European church community is that of the Celtic church in the far West Isles before the influence of Constantine.

For my next grand experiment, I hope to examine ways and means of taking the church back for the people it was intended for. The difficulty is that culture does not stand still and, though I stand perfectly in the way to exhume the Celtic community flavor, I find myself at a loss. I cannot represent the Celtic community as it was, for I am a member of the Celtic diaspora to the New World — not the world that was and having no contact with the lands my people came from. Fortunately, my generation was the last who were taught anything of the stories, song and dance of our people at large and so I bring a vicarious memory that stretches beyond the manufactured culture of the television.

Because my background is blended from having been in the New World long enough to be mingled with people of other lands, my interpretation of the ancient church cannot be a pure product of one heritage. To top it off, I live in a region where my culture has been shaped by the proximity of Mexico and the addition of a Germanic heritage. But, a truly indigenous church should be able to shift with such changes so that the members of its worship community feel at home in their skin while still being able to accommodate those unlike themselves.

While we are on the topic, I thought I would throw in a video I found the other day about the up-and-coming churches of the Native Americans. It has great implications for the rest of us. Here are people who still operate according to the family rather than nationalism. Some of their practices and symbols might shock us, but I realized this may be little different than our Celtic crosses or the Coptic ankhs which were originally pagan symbols. There is nothing inherently “Christian” in concepts of eternity, judgment, righteousness and other universal ideas. The meanings still hold. Please have a look here and enjoy stretching your understanding of how God communicates in and through native thought.

Having finished the book, The Story of Christianity, by Justo Gonzalez (San Francisco: Harper, 1984) — and now going back over the parts of it that I highlighted — I realize one simple fact concerning the reason I even picked it up in the first place. I was trying to see how close the Western fringes of the Celtic church matched the early church in Jerusalem and then in Egypt. But what I find is a continental church history having absolutely nothing to do with that virginal outcrop. Questions of Gnosticism, apostolic succession, hierarchy, and world powers had not seemingly touched the far Western church. It could not seriously be argued that a return to the Orthodox Church or any of the Oriental churches today would return the Western church to its original condition, as these are not what they once were when they sent the first emissaries to the West.

Only a fool would argue that Constantine had no great influence on the church. Of course, it just took a lot longer for that influence to reach the far West — through various stages and kinds of conquest. I probably highlighted a quarter of the earliest chapters in the book. To be sure, the church was completely different in the mainstream than on the fringes after that and had normed everything according to Constantine. For all of that norming, there remains much influence of folk religion in the areas where the church has always been strongest. Folk religion aside, we may deduce that, had Constantine not arrived on the scene, each region would still have marked its worship with its own culture. The Council at Nicea did not create an orthodoxy that did not exist among many church gatherngs already — it just spelled it out officially and enforced it with the backing of the state from then on. Ironically, a new church was created out of this merger with the state that undermined it ever since.

Let us turn to Gonzalez again to note some of these changes (which, as I say, had nothing to do with the far West):

Until Constantine’s time, Christian worship had been relatively simple. At first, Christians gathered to worship in private homes. Then they began to gather in cemeteries, such as the Roman catacombs. By the third century there were structures set aside for worship. The oldest church that archaeologists have discovered is that of Dura-Europos, which dates from about A.D. 250. This is a fairly small room, decorated with very simple murals.

After Constantine’s conversion Christian worship began to be influenced by imperial protocol. Incense, which was used as a sign of respect for the emperor, began appearing in Christian churches. Officiating ministers, who until then had worn everyday clothes, began dressing in more luxurious garments. Likewise, a number of gestures indicating respect, which were normally made before the emperor, now became part of Christian worship. The custom was also introduced of beginning services with a processional. Choirs were developed, partly in order to give body to that procession. Eventually the congregation came to have a less active role in worship.

Already in the second century, it had become customary to commemorate the anniversary of a martyr’s death by celebrating communion where the martyr had been buried. Now churches were built in many of those places. Eventually, some came to think that worship as particularly valid if it was celebrated in one of those holy places, where the relics of a martyr were present … [Gonzalez, 125]

Isn’t it interesting that even Gonzalez begins to use the word “church” in a meaning that begins to shift almost imperceptibly from meaning the “body of believers” to meaning a “building”? He does not offer an explanation of this, perhaps because it was unconscious on his part or perhaps because its usage is so common now that he felt no need to explain.

As to the practice of collecting relics — particularly dead saints’ bones, I suspect this falls under the category of regional custom. I cannot imagine the early Jewish believers doing such a thing. I find its normalization particularly interesting. It may have served a culturally relevant purpose in its point of origin, but it might have been ill received in a place where the inhabitants were not naturally disposed to harboring such relics. Example: in my own culture, we do not maintain such things — not because we are afraid of death as some have charged, but because we consider such relics unclean. I remember how horribly shocked I was the first time I saw pictures of the Sedlec Ossuary in Czechoslovakia. I thought it must be some kind of anti-Christ place filled with fallen priests of the Black Arts. Now I realize that this must be how the culture of that day redeemed a tragedy of slaughter.

I found the origin of the incense quite fascinating. The oldest churches worship with all the senses. I was brought up to worship with none of my senses except common sense, and even that could be debated. My faith was much more interiorized and I felt it a mark of security that if I should ever lose sight, sound, taste, and the rest, I could still find God in my soul. But should I really say I lost all these senses in worship? If so, I was “taught” to do so, but it was not the reality of my daily life. Once more church culture is “churchy” because it is not where we really live.

After reading of the Celtic dislike of structure and love of nature, I realized I had not lost that heritage in my private life, no matter the enforced church culture. The night skies filled with stars were my ceiling. I could imagine Abraham looking at the same stars in the desert. I remembered the smell of freshly plowed dirt and the scent of soon-rain in the air, full of mystery and engagement. To me, this always evoked the Creator –who else would have put it there? Perhaps that was my heaven and my incense all along. My institutional church only fooled themselves into thinking they had snuffed out that nonsense.

I am well into the first volume of The Story of Christianity by Justo Gonzalez (San Francisco: Harper, 1984). On reading the preface, I knew I had found a man after my own heart, as his academic background spans at least two languages and broad cultures. When he mentioned the Inca Garcilaso and Ortega y Gasset, I thrilled to think that at long last I was dealing with an author able to distinguish between his cultural eyeglasses and his manuscripts. He did his honest best and I am the glad and grateful recipient.

I will be quoting liberally throughout the first few chapters of this book. This first volume has given me many of the answers I sought. Before getting started, I would like to point out my overall observation that Christianity started as a sect of Judaism, then spread to the Gentiles where it became enculturated with things having nothing to do with itself. It was captured by politics, greatly damaging its anima as it became redefined by the kingdoms of this world which had no legitimate claims on it. Yet some good, admittedly, was also accomplished at times.

Let’s think of the Gospel as a snapshot of God in Jesus Christ, which has then been framed in human culture and politics. It is the frame that offends so many — not the Christ of the photograph. I blame politics more than culture for the ills of the Church. Unlike some who seek to unify the Church by eradicating culture, I consider culture something to be embraced. It cannot define God for the entire world, as this is akin to creating a God who looks like ourselves and trying to force the world to bow to our image. Rather, culture directs the light of God through its own facets to its cultural members. Politics, on the other hand, tries to force cultural conformity between unlike peoples.

The Council of Jerusalem placed few restrictions upon the Gentile believers:

Act 15:20 … that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and [from] fornication, and [from] things strangled, and [from] blood.

Politics has further placed many burdens on the backs of the members of the Church. I believe, as I said elsewhere, that the conquest of civilization is one reason “church” has little relationship to the lives of many. It has given them many rules to be borne instead of principles to follow within the framework of culture. The Church fell into the same state as the Pharisees who Jesus took to task:

Luk 11:46 …Woe unto you also, [ye] lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers.

Quoting liberally (as I prefer not to tamper with what has already been stated so well), Gonzalez says of church history:

There are episodes in the course of that history where it is difficult to see the action of the Holy Spirit. As our narrative unfolds, we shall find those who have used the faith of the church for their financial gain, or to increase their personal power. There will be others who will forget or twist the commandment of love, and will persecute their enemies with a vindictiveness unworthy of the name of Jesus. At other times it will appear to many of us that the church has forsaken the biblical faith, and some will even doubt that such a church can truly be called “Christian.” At such points in our narrative, it may be well to remember two things.

The first of these is that, while this narrative is the history of the deeds of the Spirit, it is the history of those deeds through sinners such as us. This is clear as early as New Testament times, where Peter, Paul, and the rest are depicted both as people of faith and as sinners. And, if that example is not sufficiently stark, it should suffice to take another look at the “saints” to whom Paul addresses his first Epistle to the Corinthians!

The second is that it has been through those sinners and that church — and only through them — that the biblical message has come to us. Even in the darkest times in the life of the church, there were those Christians who loved, studied, kept, and copied the Scriptures, and thus bequeathed them to us. [p. xvi]

Gonzalez counts the nameless as well as known figures like Martin Luther and Anselm of Canterbury among the many “diverse and even contradictory witnesses” who formed our history.

The notion that we read the New Testament exactly as the early Christians did, without any weight of tradition coloring our interpretation, is an illusion. It is also a dangerous illusion, for it tends to absolutize our interpretation, confusing it with the Word of God.

One way in which we can avoid this danger is to know the past that colors our vision. A person wearing tinted glasses can avoid the conclusion that the entire world is tinted only by being conscious of the glasses themselves. Likewise, if we are to break away free from an undue weight of tradition, we must begin by understanding what that tradition is, how we came to be where we are, and how particular elements in our past color our view of the present. It is then that we are free to choose which elements in the past — and in the present — we wish to reject, and which we will affirm. [p. xvii]

I look forward to sharing some of the things I have highlighted from Gonzalez’ coverage of the first centuries of the church. Many of these things have illuminated my own understanding of where I have been and where I want to go from here. I find that — yes, I do have a culture — admittedly far removed from its place of origin to another setting — which I now feel free to embrace as an authentic expression of the faith. At the same time, the culture itself is not the faith and I am free to affirm those who express the faith in other ways without necessarily being diminished or disturbing my own conscience about it. For a perfectionist like myself, I would call that growth.