I have become more convinced that the foremost reason for a decline in Christianity* or at least in its "mainline" form is its failure to articulate the most audacious claims of Christianity. I think a lot of them went to college, got brow-beat by the materialists and science and wanted to fit in, too much.
There might be a reason that a form of Christianity which is decidedly less faithful to the Gospel and Epistles seems to flourish as the more faithful forms of it languish. They haven't given up audacity, even in its most ludicrous and anti-Christian forms. Martin Luther said that there was no reason to let the devil have all of the best tunes, or so I was taught when studied music in college, why let him have the best stories, as well?
One of the landmarks in my recent progress, one which I believe I mentioned exactly a year ago, today, was Walter Brueggemann pointing out that in Genesis 9 , that God said he had made a covenant with the animals.
9 “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth.
The idea that God made covenants with animals is something I must have read before when I read that story but I'd never noticed it until then. It's a beautiful and audacious idea. That it is after the flood that Genesis seems to give permission to eat animals for the first time in the Bible sort of puts a damper on that. Maybe it's one of those scribal corruptions of the text that we're always hearing about.
Of course, the atheists who troll my blog are already scoffing because, in their limited knowledge of the Bible, the lore surrounding Noah is perhaps second in the debunking literature in its cooties conferring power only to the story of Adam and Eve . So, what the hell, I'm going to go full audacious and say starting there but continuing on to the end of the Bible and beyond, I'm going to propose the ultimate in Christian audacity, the doctrine of apocatastasis, the idea more than merely implied by Paul in several places, most notably in First Corinthians 15
20 But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. 21 For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; 22 for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. 23 But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. 24 Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. 25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 27 For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” But when it says, “All things are put in subjection,” it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him. 28 When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all.
Some may have had one phrase of that jump out, "26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death," because J. K. Rowling put it on the gravestone of Harry Potter's parents (if I remember, correctly). For me, it was an opening into the most radical, the most audacious and the most mysteriously awesome of all Christian stories, the best of all stories, the most radically expansive claims about the Incarnation and salvation history, the end of it.
I was introduced to the most radical form of universalism, apocatastasis, through reading St. Gregory of Nyssa, one of my favorite of the early saints. Universalism is much more encountered in Orthodox Christianity than in the West where the idea of eternal damnation is more popular. I think it's a contradiction, certainly if you hold the idea that God is all powerful to think that it's possible for any of his creatures to hold out against God for eternity, even more so if you believe that God is identical with love. It makes far more sense than the idea that God, who is supposed to be perfect in love, would created myriads of babies who were destined to burn in hell forever because they would never have access to baptism - one of the most demented and unBiblical doctrines ever to gain currency. While I don't think Gregory's analogies of refining impurities out of gold or an encrusted rope being pulled through a hole are entirely successful, no analogies are, but they're a lot more successful than the hellish doctrine of predestination which I can't think could be adopted except through a human weakness for enjoying the contemplation of the pain of others.
A lot of darkness came into Christianity when Augustine got depressed over the falling Roman empire, I can't remember who it was who regretted that he'd lived long enough to write The City of God, in which he pushed his darkest form of eternal damnation. Considering his motive in writing that, it's ironic that a lot more came into it as it was further polluted with European paganism and, most disastrously of all, became the state religion under "Most Christian" kings and princes and emperors who were far more pagan than Christian. His fatalistic eternal damnation seems to me to be more compatible with paganism than it is with the Gospel and Epistles. And it produced Christianity which was thoroughly polluted with the feudalism that came after the Roman Empire. If you want to see examples of that, look at the trappings of Brit royalty, especially the warrior aspects of it.
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I think especially Western Christianity is too limited in its claims for The Incarnation as the salvation limited to "Good Christians" or "men of good will" or even, in some Western universalists, all human beings. I don't think it's adequate, nor is it adequate to view Jesus Christ as merely having significance for human beings, though that is certainly how the human beings who wrote the Second Testament tend to present him. I think that passage from Paul is a good place to start with expanding the significance of the incarnated Jesus - God with us, God made flesh, to cover the entire range of embodied life and the entire physical universe, the same universe that Genesis declares three or four times God found was good. As Richard Rohr said:
The Gospels are about the historical Jesus. Paul, however, whose writings make up a third of the New Testament, never talks about that Jesus. He is talking about the Christ. Jesus is the microcosm; Christ is the macrocosm. There is a movement between the two that we ourselves have to imitate in our life and walk, the resurrection journey.
Western Christianity has plucked Jesus completely out of the Trinity. The historical Jesus has become the new monotheistic God -- God the Father for all practical purposes. Once you no longer have a Trinitarian view, you no longer have a dynamic view of God. When you emphasize Jesus apart from the Father and Holy Spirit, then creation is just an afterthought or a backdrop to a limited salvation drama, “an evacuation plan to the next world,” in Brian McLaren’s phrase. We become preoccupied with those last three hours of Jesus’ life, when we get the blood sacrifice that gets us humans saved, our ticket to heaven punched. Protestants are somewhat worse than we are on this, to be honest.
The real trump card of Christianity is not just that we believe in God. The mystery we are about is much more than that: It’s that the material and the spiritual coexist. It’s the mystery of the Incarnation.
Once we restore the idea that the Incarnation means God truly loves creation then we restore the sacred dimension to nature. We bring the plants and animals and all of nature in with us. They are windows into the endless creativity, fruitfulness and joy of God. We assert that we believe in the sweep of history, humanity and all of creation that Christ includes.
Incarnation is already redemption. Bethlehem was more important than Calvary. It is good to be human. The Earth is good. God has revealed that God has always been here.
He goes on to, no doubt proudly, point out that this is a characteristic Franciscan idea,
It’s a Franciscan approach, and indeed was the theology of key Franciscan figures like Duns Scotus and St. Bonaventure. It will increasingly become mainline spirituality as we become more comfortable with an expanded view of the mystery of Incarnation in the cosmos. If we Christians had taken this mystery seriously, we would never have raped the planet like we do, never have developed such an inadequate theology about sexuality.
I am convinced that he's right, this will increasingly become mainline spirituality. I also think it's a remedy for Karl Rahner's pessimistic prediction of the decline of Christianity into a merely personal mystical experience, of a modest "wintry Christianity" of reduced dimensions, as appealing as that idea might be, it's not enough. Rahner's theology, massively impressive as an intellectual exercise, is too modest in that it rejects the kind of audacity I think is necessary to sustain Christianity. Its subjugation by modernism and scientism makes me wonder if that isn't just a modern form of what happened when Greek philosophy came to dominate the radicalism of the Hebrew tradition in which Christianity began. I think it might be a modern recapitulation of Augustine's pessimism caused by the fall of Rome. I think, Rahner and others sense a new dark age starting and they're trimming their sails. Rahner, in Germany in the 20th century certainly had a front row seat to that falling darkness. Though, as Elizabeth Johnson points out, he adopts the Franciscan view of creation as good, I don't think he could allow himself the audacity to believe it included the salvation in eternity for all creatures.
I think Gregory of Nyssa and the other Cappadocians seem to have struck a better balance in that. Though they were all, clearly, well versed in Greek philosophy and culture but their religion doesn't seem to be as submerged by it as so much other Christian theology. Perhaps it has something to do with where they were located, though the family of Gregory and his brother St. Basil, their sister St. Macrina the younger and their grandmother, St. Macrina the greater, had experience of Roman imperial oppression during their parents generation. Maybe things were looking up for them, in the Eastern empire even as the Western one was falling around Augustine. I wonder what consequences that has had for the succeeding centuries of Western Christianity, up to and including today. Maybe if I knew more about his teacher, Martin Heidegger, I might be able to figure out more of why.
In the end, I would rather be wrong in thinking well of God than wrong in thinking badly of God. I'm hoping for the story to end as well as it possibly could. I think that's a story that people will believe. It will overcome the darkness. I think the best hope for the future is to be as audacious as that story is. I think it makes the most sense, I find the arguments of the universalists to be more convincing, the God they conceived of is more convincing. I certainly think the fruit they bore is better. I'm holding out for God saving it all, whether they like it or not, at first.
* If, indeed, that's what we're in now, I only mention it for rhetorical purposes, I'm not convinced that's what we're seeing
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