Let’s think about this so we’ll know how to pray.
The imperative of Creation is to reflect God’s glory. Don’t ask who the audience is; that’s missing the point. His glory must shine — period. In the Fall, some other agency intrudes into His glory. Obscure prophetic hints tell us that Satan fell first, in that his position as God’s glory mantle (“covering Cherub”) was a mission was to transmit that glory to and from Creation. At some point, he began to consume some of that glory for himself. Thus, in the Garden, he tempted Adam and Eve to make the same mistake. The fundamental nature of the Forbidden Fruit is to seize some of the divine glory for the human self.
Thus, after the Fall, a primary effort in divine mercy is restoring His glory. Nothing will do us more good. God reveals progressively over the story line of Scripture quite pointedly what the difference is between mankind seeking self glory versus seeking God’s glory. Restoring access to the Tree of Life in the Garden means we stop eating the Forbidden Fruit. We have to do that while in our mortal form.
In the revelation narrative of the Bible, the story progresses to the point that God seeks to reveal Himself and His ways through a nation called to live His ways. Their core mission is to reflect divine glory into the rest of the fallen world. The outreach model in the Old Testament was a matter of building a large enough earthly presence that no one could ignore your nation and how it is unique from the rest of humanity. The message was manifested in the Covenant.
But as you might expect, if you understand holy cynicism, most of the “outreach” was aimed at keeping folks inside the Covenant faithful. There is a tremendous outpouring of revelation regarding the examination of what faithfulness looks like, and how the nation kept failing. There is also a certain amount of celebration for the few times when things went rather well.
But the final condemnation on the Chosen Nation was how it utterly failed, twisting the message so much that they failed to transmit it internally, to the point there was no transmission at all externally. Instead, the message was perverted into a batch of lies that turned the world away.
So when Jesus on the Cross closed the earthly national covenant and opened it to all humanity as a heavenly covenant, the issue came to be correcting the original message so that it draws the whole world. We are treated to stories of how the New Covenant folk spread the message to folks who may or may not be familiar with the Old Covenant. The whole point of the old was to cast forth an appeal to those outside the Covenant community. That part never changed.
The essential message remains the same, only the way in which it was implemented has changed. Not the moral truth, but the way in which the community is formed and how it infiltrates the secular society around it. Somewhere along the path of events, the New Covenant folks quickly got off track again, in pretty much the same ways that the Old Covenant folks got off track. Indeed, the old nation had gone so far astray as to actively seduce the new “nation” into the same errors. A part of the underlying strategy of old nation folk was to destroy the sense of community structure that they wanted for themselves alone, but which they wanted on their own terms. They did everything they could to prevent the new nation folk from building the moral unity that they themselves were previously supposed to have.
The Judaizers who plagued the First Century churches had as one major element of their campaign the disruption of a moral unity they themselves rejected. The only unity discussed was political in nature, which as we all know, cannot possibly work. It was a chimera (a gross monstrosity of imagination). They tried to steer the churches to emphasize this bogus political unity, which kept churches inevitably tied up with secular politics. It didn’t matter what brand of politics the churches might choose from the mixed mass available at any given time and place, only that the church leadership never got hold of the concept of being aloof from such things.
The effect was to keep the message from being truly effective. Sure, it drew a lot of numbers of people looking for relief from the oppressive politics of their day, but the churches were seldom able to actually deliver on that promise, as the churches themselves were too deeply mired in human politics internally. They did form some distinct communities, but they were just another brand of worldly community, never able to rise clearly to the level above human political wrangling. The churches never quite seized the power of moral clarity that only rarely characterized the Old Covenant nation.
Today we are plagued with a vast array of varied church bodies all competing in various applications of human politics, as if that were the mission. They mimic the efforts of the Apostles to announce a new otherworldly Kingdom of Heaven, but they keep the gospel message mired in worldly political wrangling. And because of this entanglement, the gospel message of how God expects us to live is subject to perversion from all the cultural influences that alter the meaning of the message. It’s mired in principles that never rise to moral truth, but which intellectual principles are called “truth.”
Spreading the gospel was never a matter of getting out and selling the ideas. That was just the means to a much higher end: Drawing attention to the glory of the Lord. Whatever it is that we do with Radix Fidem, we cannot afford to keep stomping around in the sewage of human political organizing. We must be unique in our portrayal of something much higher. We have to ditch all the stuff people come up with, and upon which they paint Bible verses to make it sound like it’s the gospel. We don’t need a Jesus frisbee, or a gospel car, or a presumed biblical means of doing human politics.
The biblical model is wholly anti-political; it’s a feudal tribal covenant community. Whatever you might not like about that model, it reduces human political wrangling to a minimum. It’s consistent with how we are wired as humans. And it’s anti-legalistic if you can understand what is meant by the heart-led way.
Let’s pray first that we can build households on that model, and then wider communities. Let’s pray that we can stand up for the glory of the Lord by rejecting all the perversions that seeped into the early churches. Let’s learn from the mistakes of the past.
Lord, build Your church.
