More good quotations from
this teaching from Gregory Boyd:
To sum it up: Subtract love from any ability, any charismatic gift, any accomplishment, any belief, any issue, any fast growing mega-church, any acclaimed book, and firely revival – subtract love from any of these and what you are left with is worthless religious noise!
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Could any teaching be more radical? It means that the only thing that matters in assessing whether an activity, a church or a revival has any kingdom value is love. “The only thing that counts,” Paul elsewhere says, “is faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6). The only thing!
Our churches may be growing by leaps and bounds, our sermons may dazzle crowds, our worship services may move them to tears, but if they don’t result in people having a greater capacity to notice, care about and sacrifice for the needs of people they come across every day, all this is worthless. A revival may result in people being healed, seeing visions, experiencing holy laughter and many other such things. But if it doesn’t result in people having a greater capacity and willingness to engage in sacrificial action on behalf of others, without any consideration of their ethnicity, social status, life style choices, nationality, religious beliefs or even whether their friend or foe, the revival was nothing more than a religious carnival. We may in our personal lives accomplish many great things, but if our character is rude, arrogant, unkind, irritable, it means we gain nothing by our accomplishments.
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Only insofar as the beauty of Calvary is being replicated in our lives and through our lives are we doing what we think we’re doing, and what we’re supposed to be doing, in building churches , holding conferences, hosting revivals, writing books or anything else. For only insofar as the beauty of Calvary is being replicated and expanded are we participating in the kingdom of God. If this isn’t happening, nothing of kingdom value is happening. Conversely, if this is happening, the New Testament teaches, everything else that needs to happen will happen. For love fulfills the entire law. (Rom. 13:8, 10; Gal 5:14).
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Nothing is more elementary to the spiritual life than this. Yet nothing is more profound to the spiritual life than this. For this is the beginning, middle and end of the spiritual life. And yet, this all-or-nothing thing has been largely absent from the religion of Christian, historically and yet today. None of our ecumenical creeds mention this all-or-nothing command. And while the church has burned millions of people to death for heresy, never have the executioners had so much as their hand slapped for committing the worst heresy of all: lacking Christ-like love.
The Demise of the Christian Religion
Now, you may be asking, what has all this got to do with the future Church? In my opinion, it’s got absolutely everything to do with the future church. For, as I shall now argue, the world we live in is forcing us, and freeing us, to recover the centrality of love in the Church – and it is long overdue.
The only form of faith that will survive and thrive in the future, I submit, is the faith that understands that receiving and expressing Calvary-quality love is ultimately the only thing that matters. If the Bible’s teaching wasn’t enough to motivate us to “do church” like this — which it obviously has not been, for the Church today and throughout history has generally lacked this love – then the world is thankfully in the process of giving us further motivation. In our post-modern context, the only thing that will not fail is Calvary-quality love (I Cor. 13). Our post-modern world thus forces us to become more biblical, and for this we should be thankful.
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As Bonhoeffer ingeniously saw over sixty years ago, this future church will be a religionless Church. The historic Christianity that was defined by a set of distinctive religious beliefs and religious behaviors lost it’s credibility and relevance in much of the world long ago.
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It’s diabolically bloody history and unfortunate association with western culture and nationalistic interests secured this. But Bonhoeffer saw that even in his own time it was losing its credibility and relevance even in the west where it once reigned. In our post-modern context, I think its safe to say that this credibility and relevance has now largely disappeared.
Those who are heavily invested in the religion of Christianity understandably view its demise as threatening and depressing. With Bonhoeffer, however, I submit that the loss of the credibility and relevance of the Christian religion is actually something to be embraced and even celebrated. ***For in dying to our religion we are able to live in Christ.***
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The fact of the matter is that Christianity was never supposed to be defined primarily as a distinctive set of religious beliefs and religious behaviors. Jesus didn’t come into the world to establish a club of people who are defined by their right theological and ethical opinions over and against all those with wrong beliefs and wrong ethical opinions. He didn’t come to give us the right way to be Pharisees! ***************
He came into the world to establish a new reality. He came into the world to establish the kingdom of God. And as we’ve seen, the essence of this new and radically different kingdom is Calvary-quality love.
As often as not, the “religion” of Christianity lacked this radical love – as much as it yet lacks it today. The death of this religion is not a thing to be mourned. Even a cursory look at Church history reveals that, as often as not, the church lacked the beauty of Calvary. Indeed, it has to a large extent engaged in the sort of carnal activity that is typical of all the tit-for-tat kingdoms of the world. It to a large extent has looked as ugly as the kingdoms of the world typically look.
Consider that from the fourth century on – as soon as Christian seized secular power – the Church routinely defended and promoted its distinctive religious beliefs and behaviors – its religious “holiness” — by
coercion, war, torture and murder. We expect this from the kingdoms of the world, but by definition it can never characterize the kingdom of God. The irony is diabolical! In the name of the one who taught us to turn the other cheek, the religion of Christianity cut off people’s heads. In the name of the one who taught us to love our enemies, the religion burned its enemies alive. In the name of the one who taught us to bless those who persecute us, the religion persecuted others!
This sort of behavior is thankful no longer legal in most parts of the world,
but the attitude behind it is alive and well.. Much of the modern day Church – especially the evangelical Church — yet strives to protect and advance its distinctive “holiness” by exercising power over others, trusting the power of coercion more than the power of the cross, trusting the power of a lobbying for votes more than the power of sacrificial service. Instead of dying for sinners, they seek to pass laws against sinners and laws that protect themselves from sinners.
With Bonhoeffer, I see the death of this religious mindset as a positive thing. It has hindered the kingdom more than it has helped. When the beauty of the kingdom of God gets associated with this sort of religious and nationalistic ugliness, it clouds the kingdoms beauty. It justifies unbelief.
It sets people against the kingdom rather than winning them over through love. The fact that fewer and fewer post-modern people are finding this form of religion plausible or attractive is a good thing, for it graciously forces us to say out loud that the kingdom has never been about religion. If we are bold enough to seize the opportunity,
it gives us the privilege of communicating in action, and with words whem necessary, the truth that the kingdom is as beautiful as Jesus Christ. The religion is dying, but for just this reason the kingdom is positioned to flourish.
I’d like to conclude by briefly discussing more specifically two closely related ways that the religionless church of the future will differ from the religious church of the past. Each suggests – or at least expresses the hope — that the Church that will survive into the future is simply the Church that Christ always intended to establish.
A Christ-Centered Church
First, in contrast to most people in the past, post-modern people have difficulty being confident about very much and thus have little interest in joining a club on the basis of its distinct religious beliefs and ethical requirements – especially when these beliefs and ethical mandates are based on the credibility of a written or ecclesial authority. The Church that will continue to define itself by a set of authority-based theological and ethical beliefs, all of which are held to be equally important, is and will continue to be increasingly unbelievable, irrelevant, and unattractive to non-believers. It is dying.
Now, it would be unconscionable for the Church to alter the content of her faith for the sake of becoming more marketable to the post-modern world. But as we’ve argued, Christianity was never supposed to be defined by a distinctive set of religious beliefs and ethical requirements in the first place. Of course there are distinctive beliefs and behaviorial ideals the church has always held to and should continue to hold to.
But these were never supposed to define us over and against the world. The only thing that is supposed to define us does so in service to the world, not over and aganst the world, and that is the love of God revealed on Calvary. To insist that core definition is more important than all other beliefs and ethical ideals we might hold is not a concession to post-modernism: it’s foundationally biblical. We are to live in love, not our doctrine.
We are to place our commitment to love above all other commitments. Everything, including our true beliefs, are devoid of kingdom value without love.
The demise of the Christian religion presents us with a marvelous opportunity to recover this center as the core center, a center the religion has usually lacked. And while post-modern people are resistant to authority-based truth claims, they are as hungry for and thus attracted by genuine kingdom love as people have ever been. The religion of Christianity will die, as Bonhoeffer foresaw. But the love revealed on Calvary can never fail.
This isn’t to suggest that the Church should abandon all its doctrine except its Christology. But it is to suggest that the future Church will hold all other doctrines in a way that is different from the past.
When people get their worth, significance and security from Christ alone, as we all should, they don’t need to get their worth, significance and security from the rightness of their beliefs and behaviors – their religion. And this lessens the urgency to be absolutely certain of the rightness of one’s beliefs and behaviors and of convincing others of this certainty.
I believe the Christ-centered religionless church of the future will thus be a tribe that is more inclusive of and attractive to people who have not fully “arrived” yet. It will see faith as much as a journey as it is a place to have arrived at. With its identity found exclusively on Christ, the future Church will embrace all who simply are attracted by the beauty of Christ and will allow for more flexibility and diversity on particular beliefs than the religious church allows for. It will be a community where doubts are expressed more honestly, questions are wrestled with more authentically and less defensively, and people are given space to grow at their own pace.
An Incarnational Church
Second, and closely related to this, I believe the Church that will survive and thrive in the future will be a Church that is centrally committed to living out a theology of the Incarnation. It will define its mission as a call to imitate God and follow the example of Jesus Christ in all things. The religion of Christianity has been largely characterized by verbal demands for compliance motivated with threats of eternal punishment, and often immediate threats of physical punishment, if not death. Sadly, the concept that people need to be won over to faith by sacrificing for them has been, and continues to be, all-to-often absent in the religion of Christianity.
But the
religion is dying. The agree-or-suffer approach to evangelism has less and less influence in the post-modern world. And this fact wonderfully forces us to become more biblical in our evangelism. For as we noted above, it was always God’s intent for the world to be won over by our Christ-like, sacrificial love.
When Jesus sent out the 70 disciples in Luke 10, he told them to first use their kingdom authority to bless people. They were then to enter into fellowship with people and spend time serving them by meeting their needs. Only after they had done all this were they to announce that the Kingdom of come had come – their words now explaining their loving deeds (Lk 10).
By God’s design, the lives of Jesus-followers are to be so distinctively loving that they raise a question that only accepting the reality of Jesus Christ can answer. Our lives should force the question, Why do you care about me the way you do? And now we have a platform to name the name of Jesus with credibility. This is how evangelism was always supposed to be carried out. And this is how evangelism will have to be carried out in the future if it is to be successful.
The death of the religion helps us recover biblical evangelism, for biblical evangelism is incarnational. As Bonhoeffer saw, only when followers of Jesus get freed from getting life from their religious distinctness can they be free to be as scandalously loving as Christ was. This, infact, was a central reason why he believed the demise of the Christian religion was a positive thing. When a peoples’ identity is found in their distinctive “right” opinions, their identity is necessarily also found by contrasting themselves with “wrong” opinions. The religion becomes the club of all those who believe the right things over and against those who believe the wrong things and the club of those who behave right over and against those who behave wrong.
Such a community is by necessity rooted in judgment which, as I’ve elsewhere argued, is the “original” sin of Genesis 3. We eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, judging ourselves good and others evil. We devise a self-serving sin-list that minimizes our own sin while maximizing the sin of others. While we may not be perfect, we think to ourselves, “at least we aren’t like those sinners.” Yes,, we may struggle with heterosexual lust, for example, but at least we aren’t gay! We judge our sins to be “religiously acceptable” while judging “outsiders” sins to be unacceptable – which is why we classify them as “outsiders.” When we take public stances to “crack down on sin,” its always their sin we’re going after, not our own. (Ironically, the sins religious Christians tend to accept are those most frequently and most forcefully mentioned in the Bible: greed, gluttony, gossip, self-righteousness, etc.)
Judgment always blocks love, which is why the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was placed in the middle of the garden. Life as God intends it to be lived revolves around our honoring God’s loving “No trespassing” sign. We are to love like God loves, Genesis 3 is teaching us, not judge like only the omniscient God can judge. When we play God and judge others, we separate ourselves from them and place ourselves over them. And this is the antithesis of love.
Recall, once again, that love is defined by Calvary. Far from separating himself from us, the all-holy God entered into solidarity with us by becoming our sin and taking on our punishment on the cross. Our central task in life as kingdom people is to replicate this. We are to mimic God! Instead of separating ourselves from others and standing over others, we are to come under others, enter into solidarity with others, serve others, ascribe worth to others at cost to ourselves, without any regard for whether they deserve it or not. For this is what God has done for us – while we were yet sinners.
To help us love like this, Jesus teaches us to do the exact opposite of what religion invariably does. Far from maximizing others sins while minimizing our own, we are to maximize our own sin and minimize the sins of others. We are to assume that our sins are tree trunks while theirs are little dust particles (Mt 7:1-3). Whatever you find in another, consider your sin to be much worse! If Christians began to take this teaching seriously, we would be known for our outrageous, nonjudgmental humility rather than for our self-righteous and self-serving tendency to publically “crack down” on other people’s sins.
When we die to getting life from our religious distinctiveness and seek all our worth, purpose and security in Christ alone, we are freed from the need to judge others. We can love them as Christ loved us, just as they are. And now our words may begin to have meaning to them. The claim that God loves them with a Calvary-quality love takes on plausibility as they see this love incarnated in our life. It should never have been otherwise, but our religion has significantly blinded us.
Now that the religion is dying, we have the forced opportunity to be freed to be more biblical, more incarnational, more Christ-like, more loving in our evangelism.
Conclusion
The only church that will remain credible and relevant in the future is the church that God designed to be credible and relevant for all time.
It will be a church that gets no life from its distinctive beliefs and practices but rather finds all its life in Christ’s unconditional love. It will be a church that defines itself not over and against the world, but in loving relationship to the world. It will not be a religion that stands over the world as the moral guardian and judge of the world, but will be a tribe of highly unusual people who stand under the world as the servant of the world.
It will be a Church that is exclusively centered on Christ and that therefore holds its distinctive beliefs as addendums to this central conviction. It will thus be a gathering of people on a journey more than a community of people who think they have arrived. Because it is defined exclusively by the love it receives and is called to give, it will be a community where questions and doubts do not generate fear, but loving exploration. It will be a tribe that looks a bit like Jesus’ followers looked, with inquisitive and hungry tax collectors and prostitutes comfortably in their midst.
The Church of the future will have to be what the Church always should have been:
a Church that looks like Jesus, ascribing worth to others at cost to itself. Being freed from ugly religion, it will be beautiful, as Christ is beautiful. For this is simply what the kingdom of God is.
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