The Wonder Springs Chronicle

On three

4 October 2010

Access now the “The Wonder Springs Chronicle” Front Page. Be sure to check out the grizzly times wisdom and fresh insights of Brute’ Griz every Friday here at The Wonder Springs Chronicle and every Wednesday at Deep Woods Moola and Redux Rendezvous.

To make a donation to the Wonder Springs community please do so at the address below, or follow the donation links on the website.

PDF Print

Most people consider Christianity as one of the world’s great religions. In that regard, most of those same people believe, as such, it is just one path to eternity among many. We have argued here however, that only Christianity has the ability to transcend common-ordinary human religion and achieve in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Religionless Christianity.”

All of the world’s great religions, in their paths to God, also make that path to God exclusive within the dogma of their doctrines and the precepts necessary to achieve that path. Those who consider themselves more enlightened at the fringes of these religious paradigms, attempt to suppress these exclusive paths or to dismiss religious transcendence.

This human concept focuses entirely on making all religion just a primitive residual of man’s evolutionary path. The point being that this worldview will quickly sequester formal religion and a totally human centered culture will emerge out of this individual chaos. That of course requires a leap of faith well beyond the precept that historic religions, when it comes to overcoming the natural laws of thermodynamic entropy.

Religionless Christianity however is different in that it is not about mankind reaching up to God or finding God within. Religionless Christianity is about God reaching down to mankind, but more than that, Religionless Christianity is about God actually adopting exclusive children into a transcendent eternal reality while still bound to this totally mundane pedantic common world.

This God centered evangel has become a quite common outreach that is called the gospel, or more historically the “Good News.” In the west, especially in America this has become so common that it is not that unusual to see signs at sporting events featuring the words “John 3:16.” Other expressions also include leaving small printed tracts in various places such as public restrooms or handing them out or preaching on the street corner, the eminent return of the Lord Jesus Christ.

In the process the transcendence of God’s adoption becomes so common that it becomes ridiculed and despised as a stupid method, as individuals attempt to bring others into that transcendent legal kingdom totally by individual human achievements. This is historically called the Pelagian heresy, and served as the theological basis in the United States of the Second Great Awakening, and the still present burned over area of upstate New York, from whence this religious fire spread across the country and slowly around the world. The focus is to create converts rather than religious disciples, because the ordinary-common means can truly create only common-ordinary results.

This cult football outreach however, attempts to take another approach, to use transcendence from Religionless Christianity to set a different tone. As we have taught elsewhere at various times, American Football is the ultimate game, in terms of human interactive capacities, by its total reliance of specialization of groups of three to five individuals, which are led by another.

So as football is played on offence you have essentially five interior linemen, led by a center that determines blocking assignments. These five people provide security and opportunities for five other offensive weapons to score by the use of running backs and wide receivers. All of this led by the eleventh man, the field general, the quarterback. Why he is called the quarterback, I have no idea, other than while the leader, he is just the first back traditionally behind the center, and then there were two halfbacks and one fullback in the early traditional T formation.

On the defensive side of the ball you have three or four down linemen, the opposite number of linebackers, and four defensive backs, broken into cornerbacks and safeties.

When you put this team together you have twenty-two specialists, who are to function as one team on the field. Enlarging the football analogy into the common functioning of human culture, you have these “twenties” serving as the basis of military platoons, and bands of indigenous people groups.

What you find is these groups of twenties have enough specialization to become self sufficient, and when you mesh two to five of these groups you have basically a football team, or a military company, a human village. Continuing these historic groupings upward you essentially have the foundations of human identities — tribes and nations.

Wandering off the path briefly, the downfall of western civilization, as we know it today, will come about because we fail to recognize this common reality of an effective human culture. We create instead a process by which we isolate human individuals, so that they can be manipulated by others who really don’t form an effective leadership structure, but rather a elitist class, that serves almost exclusively the furtherance of its own agenda, rather than some more commonly transcendent greater good.

So let us go back to the football offensive huddle as the quarterback calls the play — touchdown success; on three; ready break (the planning huddle).

Why the “On three?”

Maybe it fits between one and five, where we find the basic building blocks of common community success. On the other extreme of Christian transcendence you have the Trinity, a single Godhead consisting of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Glenn Beck has made popular again the King James Bible translation of the Apostle Paul’s words on the essentials of the common transcendent understanding of Christianity, which are “Faith — Hope — Charity.”

If we treat one another in faith, hope, and charity we have the basic building blocks of a successful human culture, civilization, and nation. These were codified in human history in the uniquely American Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

When you get down to the root of Barack Obama’s message, it is essentially faith, hope, and charity through a centralized federal government. Taking it back even further this is essentially the government-centered message of what we are now learning in a very common way as the progressive movement.

What we really see in progressivism is a noble concept corrupted by faulty leadership, or more precisely collective elitism, substituting for leadership. While the current election noise focuses on president Obama and the Democrat version of not only federalism, but also globalism, president George Bush 41, often spoke of global governance and that policy served as a model for nation building in Iraq under Bush 43, and now Obama in Afghanistan.

We mentioned earlier the Religionless Christianity of the unique external nature of God reaching down to humanity through the gospel of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This serves as the propitiatory sacrifice to satisfy the requirements of God’s holy law, thereby creating the specific revelation of transcendent grace by which humanity is not just justified legally, but also adopted.

This specific revelation of grace however does something else that moves the Christian religion into the realm of Religionless Christianity. This changes the nature of “on three” into more like a specific revelation conduit, even though that verbal expression greatly limits the transcendent reality.

Herein this reality, Faith becomes the conduit by which grace is received not only by the individual, but it is also the mechanism (again a limited term) by which grace is expressed in the world and becomes the way by which the gospel is transmitted, both through transcendent witness and other forms of human communications.

Hope is expanded into peace that just as the past has been conquered, the present exists; the future itself is in God’s hands. The Bible speaks to the wonder of the “peace that surpasses all understanding.” (Philippians 4:7) This peace, as the verse continues, guards your present circumstance from fear of the present and the future, even though to our humanity it appears that our faith has failed. In common terms, surpassing all understanding precisely means what it says, and must be transcendently experienced; ergo beyond human reasoning yet quite real when experienced.

Charity in our modern translations of the Bible is defined as love. Commonly we are said to believe that love conquers all. It has gotten so bad that even in the old movie, “Love Story,” love was defined as “never having to say you’re sorry.” This specific concept, is best defined is extreme self-love, but at the core of the matter, you cannot love others unless you love yourself. This is the basic common Biblical expression of the “Golden Rule,” which is common in almost all human cultures, no matter the religious basis or bias.

So if we take the concept of love of the unlovable, where Sister Teresa is our twentieth century model, we see a human being becoming a loving vessel to transfer God’s love to others. In that same light you can express grace, peace, and love, beyond our human capacity, in Religionless Christianity by just asking for God to abundantly supply, to minister to the needs and the desires of others. In simple terms we can just “unconditionally love on people” that we would ignore or even manipulate most of the time.

We have so little, because we ask so infrequently, with so little enthusiasm, expecting essentially nothing to happen. A lot of that comes from what, as Martin Luther describes as our “bondage of the will.” But this is exacerbated by the reality that we continually seek ease and lazy comfort, a situation that we don’t need anything. When we create our world in which we rule, the only why in which we seek transcendence is when our present no longer is truly mundane.

We have created a world of spectator sports, essentially because we have told the many that they are not good enough to play in the big leagues. This flows down into all of our lives in very common ways. So we have cult football to give us essentially the cultic reason to get excited about something, anything. Cultic football lets me know I am alive, and by extension our favorite players become extensions of who were are, or what we always hoped we would attain. In reality we had hope, but never the faith that we could do the impossible, because we loved ourselves, or more precisely our security, rather than the discipline required to become who God created us to be.

Just because we choose to be lazy however doesn’t alter the unity in diversity of Faith and Grace, Hope and Peace, Charity and Love.

Our times continue to become the most trying in our lifetimes. This will again provide an opportunity to move onward and upward in both a natural and transcendent fashion. This is expressed in a graphic rendition in the Grace Spiritual Life Curve.