The Enlightenment brought to life a fervor to remake the systems that had been around for hundreds of years. That philosophy included a hope for some humility in seeking to build new systems to guard against our own flaws. Sounds noble, no? The rules took the place of the nobility. Those systems have run their course and are breaking down. We see it in government and in church management.
There are genuine efforts to rebuild once again. Here’s one: Buying Pastors & Stalking Churchgoers: Israel’s Longtime Heist on the Christian Church Exposed. It’s a little over an hour-and-a-half long. It includes ads that may annoy some of you. I’m not recommending it, but I’m referring to it.
Anything involving Tucker Carlson will be infected by his biases. I’m not with him on most of that. The whole interview is infested with hopes for a renewed Enlightenment with a Christian flavor, instead of the historical anti-religion movement behind it. It’s still the same basic assumption that we can come up with a better system. The featured interviewee, Nathan Apffel, does a good job of identifying flaws in the current system, the one that’s dying. He does a good job on certain emphases of the New Testament that have been long lost in the West.
For example, he notes vividly how the early churches did not teach tithing because that belongs in the old dead covenant. Rather, they taught freewill generosity to the poor, and didn’t build little earthly empires with budgets, bodies and buildings. He gets that part right. Indeed, he reveals some shocking data on how the current entrepreneurial churches are grabbing up all the material resources to make the leadership wealthy. The histrionics are really moving.
Did you know that churches can buy out other churches? Did you know that churches could subsume for-profit businesses under their tax-free umbrella?
Still, Appfel clings to the root of Enlightenment confidence in human ability to design a system that’s better than the one the early churches used. Maybe he simply hasn’t noticed because his theology assumes that one doesn’t need genuine biblical scholarship, with all the wealth of background material that isn’t in the Bible itself. I certainly don’t like elitism either, but you can’t trash all of that background just because it’s not in the pages of your favorite Bible translation. Otherwise, you won’t have a clear idea what the authors of the Bible were thinking, and you won’t understand very well that mattered to them.
You won’t have the mind of Christ. You’ll be projecting your own thinking back onto some image of Him.
I really liked the early part of the interview, exposing how the State of Israel is spending a lot of money trying to manipulate church folks into supporting their rapacious agenda. If you attend one of those monster churches, Google’s geofencing technology is employed to target your accounts with pro-Israel propaganda. It’s anti-Christian espionage.
I still say it should be common-core teaching for churches to restore a Hebraic philosophical orientation and the Hebrew literature background that supports Scripture. Not many others are saying that. Neither Carlson nor Appfel are saying that in this interview. It’s all about transparency and oversight of systems. That’s a start on one kind of problem, but it’s not a sufficient answer by itself.
It promotes merely a slightly better version of the same old thing.
