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Prayer
Lead us to You, O Christ, and
We repent of even the good,
Your gifts in time, however sacred to us,
That we have placed between the Word and the Church;
Therefore, let us hear and see anew, You.
Amen.
Quote
The gospel needs to be liberated from its protective custody in the Bible. Just because the gospel is at the heart of Christianity, it does not mean it belongs only to Christianity. The gospel has a life of its own. It appears in the most usual and unusual places, subverting our conventional ways of thinking and feeling. It turns our world upside down and empties us so that we will have room in our souls for the kingdom of heaven.
To be “evangelized” really is to be “gospelized”—to open eyes and hears to hear the gospel in everyday life. Once you are “gospelized,” you are able to look past all of the grim evidence to the contrary and perceive the possibilities for love. Seeing the gospel all around us enables us to live as if life is good, giving us hope and strength we need to create the realm of the divine on earth.
—Jim Burklo, Open Christianity
Comments
Many persons today struggle to connect with the tribal mentality of many churches. Rather than the Word, the Universal Christ Jesus, defining the contents of Christian faith, many have sought to encase the Gospel, even the Word, also, in a church or theological package. However, one sign of a healthy church and good theology is openness to change, progress, and deeper meanings. Theology and church is a living process, not a dead end. If it is made a dead end, it dies.
One example of this constriction of the Gospel is the use of the Bible. Scripture is a means of inspiration to see into and live out the Story in our present context. Scripture, in context with tradition, reason, and experience, all exercised within community, is to open us to see hidden depths of meaning and relevance, but always for our lives together. There can be no private reading of Scripture that is not applicable publicly.
A matter applicable is that much evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity has dethroned, so to speak, the Word and replaced the Word with the Bible. In the Scripture of the Old Testament, the divine word, or dabhar, was a living, creative, and energetic presence, and extension into time and space of the Creating One. Then, in the Christian faith that word becomes Person: Jesus Christ, or logos.
Indeed, note that nowhere does the Bible call the Bible the Word of God. However, in the Bible Jesus Christ is called the Word. Recently, I heard a person speaking of the differences in concept of the Word of God among Jews, Muslims, and Christians. He noted that in Judaism the Word of God is the Torah, in Islam the Word of God is the Koran, in Christianity the Word of God is a Person, Jesus Christ.
Scripture, the Gospel, rite, creed, and community, however, become means of the Word, as Person, communing with community in the Holy Spirit. Apart from the Word, even Scripture itself would have no energetic value of meaning or transformation. Outside the Word, as Person, or Jesus Christ, the Bible would be just a book of words. Why? Well, let us proceed.
According to Church tradition and Scripture, as in St. John 1, Jesus Christ, as the Word, is the means of all causes. Indeed, the Father is the source of all causes, and the source of the Son, or begetter of the Word. In non-temporal terms the Son is derived from the Father. In the Word, the Son, inhere all causes, all effects, and the continuing sustenance of all effects. Noting exists that does not come from the Word and as applied by the Spirit, the efficacy of Christ. Says the Irish theologian John Scotus Eriugena:
All things, therefore, that were made by the Word, live in him unchangeably and are life. In him all things exist neither by temporal intervals or places, nor as what is to come; but all are one in him, above all times and places, and subsist in him eternally.
(The Voice of the Eagle: The Heart of Celtic Christianity, John Scotus Eriugena’s Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John, Trans. with Intro. and Reflections by Christopher Bamford)
Therefore, all causes, even all truth from God comes from the Truth, the Word, in Whom all causation and effects of such inhere eternally. No group or sect can contain the Truth in time, and it is always issuing from the Word. Now, therefore, while the Gospel is at the heart of Christianity, the Gospel as encompassing the Truth was, temporally, prior to Christianity. For truth from Truth is eternal, for Truth is eternal, and truth cannot be born in time unless it exists “in the beginning,” or “in God,” and through the Word in eternity, or eternally.
Therefore, theologically, I am repeating somewhat what Jim Burklo writes. The Gospel is free from the Church, for it is prior to the Church. The Church is to be faithful to the Gospel, not vice versa. The Gospel has a life its own, though birthed in and through the Church, due to the link between the Church and the Word.
To set the Gospel free is to become intimate with Christ Jesus, the Word. When we are intimate with the Truth, the Word, then we no longer serve truths, but they serve us in our growing into likeness to the Word. A truly setting the Gospel free church would not replace the Word with the Bible, reverencing it in place of the Word of God.
Truly, Christianity is most able to be evangelistic, when it frees itself from staid and propositional reliance on the Bible. It does not abandon the Scripture, rather, it seeks to let the Scripture lead it to release the Gospel and the Word from attempted captivity of the Gospel and the Word. The Word transcending Christianity leads the Christian to see that Word, Christ, in the most unlikely places and Grace, as energy of the Word, operating both within and outside the instituted Church. Therefore, in Christ, Scripture is a means of liberation in the Spirit, not another law, like the law the Church struggled to outgrow, as seen in the Book of Acts.
Then, we have room, as Burklo notes, for the kingdom of heaven within. However, we come to realize there is no division between within and without. The same realization of Heaven can be found anywhere, but only for those with the freedom, even freedom from religion, to see. Therefore, as a Christian, my devotion to Jesus Christ and my love of the Church leads me to see both inside and outside the parameters of the historical Church. In such a movement, the Gospel, through the Bible and the Church, liberates me to enjoy the freedom and awe, the beauty and joy, of Heaven, even as eternity permeates time with a foretaste of the bliss of our eternal Abode in the God-in-Three.
Concluding, notice the freedom of Jesus in the written Gospel. Jesus had profound respect for the religious tradition. He never acted apart from it. However, he was servant to Truth, and he challenged the religous tradition, where he discerned it had become merely religion over Love and truths over Truth.
Reflection
What in the above writing challenged your present thinking? Explain.
What did you find encouraging? Explain.
Spiritual Exercise
Keep spending at least twenty to thirty minutes daily in Silence, resting in the Lord of Love.
Explore the website www.sacredspace.ie offered by the Irish Jesuits and do some of the meditation exercises offered at the site.
Consider, if you are not already, sponsoring a child through Compassion International. You can find out more about Compassion International by going to www.compassion.net to read about sponsoring, in the name of Jesus, children living in poverty. Thanks! Brian K. Wilcox
To contact Brian, write briankwilcox@comcast.net .
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