The Wonder Springs Chronicle

The World’s Coming Grace Infusion

13 December 2010

The American Cult Football world learned early Sunday Morning that the roof of the inflatable Metrodome in Minneapolis collapsed canceling the NFL meeting of the Minnesota Vikings and the New York Giants. Could this be the beginning of some emerging threat to the religion of millions, perhaps billions worldwide?

Well it is probably a little too much to proclaim that this event happened for some great religious reason. However in a world in which every human has a religion, whether they admit it or not, for some their religion has become football, especially the football of the National Football League. After all the Super Bowl is one of the most watched events of the year.

Furthermore this roof collapse has strategic importance as it relates to the consecutive game starts by Bret Favre, which currently stands at a league record 297 games. A Monday game now to be played in Detroit probably means a continuation of Bret’s streak.

Sunday also means that the United States is still the most churched nation in history and many Americans will make the Sunday trek to church no matter the weather. Whether you attribute the recently uncharacteristic weather we have been experiencing worldwide to global warming or regular weather and climate variability, when you come right down to it, weather is the great world phenomena we humans would like to control, because it continually points to the reality that we can’t (control the weather).

It is fitting, because of the title of this article, that this weather variability points to the reality that Americans are the world’s largest, most culturally diverse religious culture. All of this religion has come about because of some political-technical-religious term we call the, “separation of church and state.”

While American’s are quite diverse in the naming of their faith, there is still a common Christian thread that makes up this religion. Recently it has become known as “moral therapeutic deism.” This really isn’t all that much different than Benjamin Franklin’s definition of “Heaven helps those who help themselves.”

What makes all this more interesting is that Franklin combined with Thomas Jefferson proposed an image for the great seal of the United States that included Exodus symbolism of Moses, the Red Sea passage, and the pillar of fire that led the Jewish people through the wilderness to the Promised Land.

Into that firelight we are told on one hand that the founders of the American republic were at best passive deists. On the other hand we hear that most of these men were devout Christians that were attempting to create a shining city on a hill, the eternal Jerusalem here on earth.

All this misses the real point, theologically best described by Augustine as the City of God in contrast with the City of Man. These city metaphors basically describe two kingdoms within the human desire to bring down heaven here to earth, essentially in the form of a city. This city however is best described as the city of Babylon in Genesis Chapter 11.

Bringing that into a present context, we have an atheistic Babylon and a Deistic Babylon. It is our cultural belief that both are evolving toward that human goal of saving ourselves by our own merits. The atheistic evolutionary model looks toward some sort of collective community that can get it put together, if we just all believe. The Deistic model is loosely based upon the Biblical law given to Moses on Mt. Sinai.

This surely should lead everyone to pray, “God deliver us from this dumbed down world of sound bites, political spin, and gross materialism. Give us a world in which we can again find peace and joy amongst all the chaos and incessant noise.”

Before we could truly form this prayer, we can now vaguely see that this change in reality is coming forth in this land and around the world.

I recently began reading “Bonhoeffer — Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.” I would have to say it is a welcome change to read a book written by someone who can create a piece of literature, rather than just a contemporary book. You don’t read this biography in a few hours, but rather it is a journey through the life of a man whose martyred life has profound applications to the United States and the world today.

Towards the end of his life, while isolated in a concentration camp, Bonhoeffer begins corresponding with a friend about Religionless Christianity. The context of these letters is basically not some form of humanistic religion, without the saving work and justification of Jesus Christ, but rather about a confessing church that rids itself of humanistic religion. This Christianity without religion focuses specifically on the historic confessions of the true nature of historic orthodox Christianity.

Pretty much most of my adult life in Christianity, I have been associated with churches that essentially believe not in the common historic practices of the Christian religion, but rather a more spiritual concept generally defined as “relationship.”

I have discovered however, there is a tendency to make that relationship Christianity another religion as well. Put in a more succinct way, both take you back to a ritual law defined as “dead religion” or a Gnostic reality of the same law given at Sinai. Together, just as with true Old Testament law, the responsibility remains on me.

What we really see in the context of Augustine, is that the City of God moves into the City of Man and while people tend to argue the evils of dead religion, contrasted with the life in the spirit, they become polar opposites of the wisdom of dead doctrine contrasted with personal experience.

We can’t throw out these paradigms or prejudices of the human personality, but perhaps it is a good time to look at a different context that may help us see, in Bonhoeffer’s concept, a less noisy, less chaotic tension of Religionless Christianity. To do that we must begin by restating the sources of human inspiration which form the basis of all our religions.

Rather than use Augustine’s tale of two cities, it is much better to use a concept of two revelations. In Christianity one revelation is designated as common to all humans, which may include scientific natural laws as well as generally understood laws of morals and decency. These standards reflect that humans were created by God, as the highest form of God’s creation, and we still maintain a certain residual of that created goodness. While other peoples hold somewhat different worldviews and creation evolutionary accounts, all people share a very complex human nature.

A specific special revelation of Christianity is that mankind made the choice to reject God’s sovereignty and rebel, where Christians use the term original sin, but other religions use other terms to describe this source and reality of evil among humanity. All religions have varying specific revelations about how or what a person may do after this present life.

Religionless Christianity basically rests upon the precepts of the legal propitiatory offering of Jesus of Nazareth as the fully human — fully God, sinless sacrifice for the redemption and justification of humanity before our Creator. Only Christianity has the concept of this type of graceful understanding, as a free gift of salvation to enter into eternal life, or make your life count during this journey we call life. All other religions rest upon some form of law keeping, or human based ability.

Now let us put these two concepts into a somewhat different creation paradigm than what you have heard in church. We really don’t know for sure whether the founding fathers of the American Republic were the Religionless Christians because we have always interpreted their actions in terms of our contemporary religious views.

For example Thomas Jefferson took all the miracles out of the Bible and created what we today call the Jefferson Bible. Those who state Jefferson was a deist do so on the basis of the Bible that bears his name and hence they believe he personally didn’t believe in Christianity in the historic redemptive sense. However the context of Jefferson’s creation of his Bible was really a common or natural rendition of the Bible without the miracles to provide a means to teach Judeo-Christian values to the native Indians. To infer from this that Jefferson truly was not a Christian requires a leap of faith of another presupposition of another religion.

Similar instances can be found for many other founding fathers, but especially George Washington. The point that our current religious spinners would like you to believe is that the founders didn’t know what they were doing, and we in our exalted historical hindsight can dictate reality the way we want history to justify our concepts and ideas of our specific religion.

How about this open-minded concept: The founders of the United States of America desired to create a secular nation based upon common Judeo-Christian values that they all understood and most believed to be true. They also understood, something that are petty narcissism can’t comprehend, they believed that each person responded to the enlightenment he or she received and hence God was the ultimate judge of how we lived our lives. This was first and foremost a common declaration of especially Benjamin Franklin himself. Humans were not created to be judges of one another, other than in the constructs of common human instituted law. How far has our legalism transgressed this founding American Absolute?

Putting this in a somewhat specific Christian worldview. The Bible doesn’t speak of a shining city on a hill except of a New Jerusalem at the end of the Book of Revelation. Over time many Christians and cults have wanted to help God out in that endeavor and hence bring about through human will, the end of the present age, and essentially teach those “sinners” that our religion was right and theirs was wrong.

However the Bible does speak to a “Kingdom of God.” In the English Standard Version there are sixty-seven results for the term in quotation, all in the New Testament. Fifty-three are found in the four gospels, six in Acts, one each in Romans, Galatians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians, and four in I Corinthians. All of these citations were either made by Jesus himself, or refer to the finished work of Jesus — his death on the cross for man’s sins, and his resurrection from the dead.

From this we can somewhat infer that this Kingdom of God has been coming about through time for essentially two thousand years. If we look at human progress over that time, which we all believe is true, what we really see is a few strategic changes. First of all there are more people alive today than ever in history. Furthermore we are all tied together by this sort of Babylonian model of global enterprise. The one that God grandly remodeled a long time ago, but that doesn’t keep we humans from trying to resurrect our own economic and religious savior. Finally most common human revelation absolutes are by their nature morally neutral. That is to say that they can be used for either the betterment of mankind or for the evil exploitation of our human attributes.

So this world we have thought we have been systematically developing and exploiting over history, has developed simultaneously, within the constructs of Divine Providence the “Kingdom of God” Two thousand years ago, an infusion of God’s grace occurred in a small country in what we call the Middle East. In a couple of weeks a holiday we call Christmas, celebrates the birth of the Messiah of the Jews and the Savior of mankind. That country viewed itself as a very religious place, occupied by very religious people. But if we look at those New Testament Kingdom of God teachings, they were really the antithesis of Judea’s contemporary formal religious thought.

We too are living in such a time; Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived and became a martyr in humanities’ latest fascist world model. Religionless Christianity shows a similar opportunity by understanding afresh that two thousand year old principle of the Kingdom of God, the grace infusion into our world. God’s infusion with “costly grace” is now beginning. This is strongly tensioned with the “cheap grace” that has become a slowly spreading form of human entropy since that last infusion two millennia ago.

In the fullness of time long ago, when selfish sinful mankind had reach the precipice of total collapse, an infusion of God’s grace occurred and created the common energetic informational structure to build what we call our modern world. That redemptive infusion occurred once, for all time.

We do not need to go to the mountaintop to wait for the return of the Lord, for the Kingdom of God is at hand. Our problem is that we have been looking for it through various religious laws instead of the infusion of Divine Providential grace. There are those out in the world who will take your money, sell you a book, and take you places to find the answer. But the answer comes from the place where we least expect it, for we have been looking in all the wrong places. A search of the New Testament “Kingdom of God” will give you some hints.

Psalm 46:10 states it best: "Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!"