That book I mentioned won’t be coming any time soon. It’s going to be a different kind of project than my other stuff. For one, I have no idea if it will be enough stuff to call it a book. I’m not bursting with ideas. Rather, I’m exploring something that beckons to me, and some of it will be new terrain.
In fact, there’s a whole lot of fresh newness in front of me. It’s not just the formality of resigning as elder and prophet. This whole thing was a signal to me that reality had shifted. A lot of what used to matter, now suddenly doesn’t matter. It’s not that I have a sense of regret about what I wrote in the past, but that things have changed and some of what I was doing is now unimportant. It’s a matter of exploring and discovering what has died and should be dropping off, and what sprouts in its place.
It doesn’t matter to me whether anyone else sees this dramatic shift in reality. All I have to worry about is my reality. A part of this big shift is just recognizing that. There’s a meta-shift, a shift in thinking about the shift. I’ve been moved to another world. I am willing to talk about it because I suspect at least a part of my experience will have echoes for some of you. It may sound to you like a plausible explanation for what you experience in your world. Maybe there’s something in my personal nattering here that you will recognize.
Either way, I’m thoroughly convinced that I need to work from the assumption that the world itself has changed radically. There’s a disturbance in the moral sphere. Some good and some bad, but it’s big enough that a lot of other people have been writing about it on the Net, and there seems to be some common elements. Something like this has to play out, like ripples across a still pond. Except this is more like a tsunami rippling around the world and swamping every shore. It takes a while.
I doubt I’ll ever understand in this life what happened from a divine point of view. But I believe the Lord has allowed me to get just a glimmer of that. I believe that God has issued a decree that went into effect just about late last Saturday. That’s when I felt this sudden shift in my soul, that everything I had been doing up to that point was closed, even if it wasn’t complete. Time’s up class; turn in your work. The next semester is starting.
This new semester comes with a lot of tribulation and persecution. Any hope that this fallen world might accommodate some of our mission is now gone. Something this big will take awhile, but we absolutely cannot trust any part of the human system from here on out. The demons have been unleashed and all the rules have been thrown out. This calls for a new level of cynicism. Virtually every tool we’ve been using will become unfit for any purpose.
Sometime around 65 AD, Nero’s persecution of Christians got to the point that in many locations the government was confiscating all private property held by Christians. During this time Peter wrote his first letter to the Jewish Christians in what is today northern Turkey. He warned them to not be too attached to their worldly possessions. For those living in the imperial capital, it meant taking up residence in the Catacombs, just to find a measure of peace and sanity from the daily threat.
We aren’t in Rome, but there are parallels. I’m not sure how much of their specific practices would be applicable today, but the atmosphere of hatred against Christian faith is certainly going to rise for us. What we believe and practice under Radix Fidem will most certainly be a threat to what the civil government is planning. I’m sure each of us will have to find our own mixture of things we must do to respond to that, but there remains a common thread of thinking about the meaning of it all that we can share.
One of the primary parallels is that the Roman government encouraged mob action against Christians. Christians in the Roman Empire lost any of the protections of law, because it become de facto illegal to be a Christian long before it was de jure illegal. We can already see that here in the USA.
We should really think and pray about this, because I’m convinced it requires a different approach to how we think about living here in the USA. While I sincerely hope and believe local and state governments will rise up to resist in various measures, even to the point of dissolving the Union of States, I seriously doubt that will be soon. As I see it, there will be a significant period of time when the oppressors will hold the federal sword.
And while a popular resistance will rise up, that resistance will be no friend of ours. They will not be fighting our battle. Some of them will hate us, too. But for the most part, the persecution and the backlash will not be about us specifically. We will be painted into the target with a broad brush, simply because we share some external similarities with the real targets. Our biggest problem with any backlash will be their totally different focus on what they believe matters.
In a very real sense, we’ll be caught in the crossfire. It will be hard to find cover from stray projectiles, and we are as likely to be hit by one side as by the other. It will be doubly hard on us. At least, that’s how I see it. That’s what I’m preparing to react to.
As always, most of the battle will be online. Sure, there will be more street brawls, takeovers of neighborhoods, transportation and specific locations bombed, etc. And then there’s the collapsing economy. Still, the source of those conflicts will be found online. I am pretty much convinced that very, very little evangelism is possible online now. Rather, the whole value of the Internet for us will be as a means of sharing our faith with each other, of strengthening our faith as disconnected individuals. Only in the most gossamer sense of things will this be any part of a church. That’s why it will be like a Catacombs experience, because there were no large spaces where believers could assemble. They remained thinly scattered to protect each other, since any time they got together, they became a juicy target.
Yet I’m certain the power of the Spirit is able to keep us tied together in fellowship and communion even in the most restricted means of communication. I’m convinced God is telling us that this is our new reality. But it’s as if I have been side-shifted into an alternate reality, and I’m not sure how many of you have shifted with me, and whether it will seem new to you, as well. So from here on out, I’ll be writing as if this were little more than some kind of published diary.
Update: Someone asked about the Catacombs. So far as we know, very few people actually lived in the Catacombs. Christians went there to worship and fellowship after church buildings were confiscated. The Christians pretty much owned the Catacombs because they buried their dead, continuing the Jewish practice, while most pagans preferred cremation. Graves were not permitted inside the capital, so the Jews first, then later the Christians, gained rights to dig into the volcanic stone ground outside the city. There were numerous catacombs and most of them had multiple levels. Chapels were inevitable for Christian burial areas. When the surface accommodations were closed to them, meeting in the Catacombs became the only option. During brief periods, some Christian households might stay in them while preparing to seek some other refuge.
