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August 27, 2006 at 1:50 pm

"A Heretic's Guide to Eternity": Chapter 5...

I must apologize for the long delay in this next chapter review. It was a busy week. Aside from that, Chapter 5 of ”A Heretic's Guide to Eternity,” by Spencer Burke, is a pretty long one, chalk full of things I’d like to quote. Needless to say, I can’t quote everything, so I’ll try my best to give a good overview of the concepts held within.

Chapter 4 continues on the theme of grace and is called, “Grace Held Hostage.” But, as it turns out, according to Burke, grace is not the only aspect of today’s Christianity that is being “held hostage”—according to Burke, any number of faith-related subjects have been twisted and redefined by the institutional side of the church in order that the church retain its stake on religious authority.

Beginning Chapter 4, Spencer Burke recognizes that some people are attempting to reclaim church for themselves, but may not have the right idea.

“Some people insist that the church simply needs a makeover. In fact, saving religion seems to be what many people are attempting to do today by making it relevant, contemporary, and appealing to a largely disinterested public. They want to reform the church.

But, to Spencer, this reform is not really what the “disinterested public” wants.

“Last time I checked, people weren’t rejecting institutional religion because they didn’t like the ambience; they’re rejecting it because they don’t relate to the message, the ideas, or the concepts it advances about God and life.”

What the church needs, claims Burke, is that the move beyond institutional faith is not about being cool, but about acknowledging that the church’s current restraints are inhibiting God’s grace in our world.

Spencer goes on to say that another one of the issues in today’s church is its tendency towards hate (something completely opposite to the teachings of Jesus Christ).

“Time and again, institutions seems to use their religious views as a pretext for an aggressive and adversarial posture against the wider culture. The issue of gay rights is just one of the many issues where this tendency emerges. The beauty of the message of Jesus often gets lost in a destructive symbolism that rants and snarls at the world but seldom inspires longing for newness or a finer way of being human…

“Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you. Treat others as you would have them treat you. These are the kinds of things that Jesus said to do, and you don’t have to become religious or believe a set of prescribed things about him in order to do them.”

Chapter 4 continues with a shoft towards the context of the bible—it talks about how most Christians might not quite get what the bible is really for, especially when dealing with our faith in Jesus. Instead of looking to the bible as our source of faith or a set of answers to all of our questions, we should look to Jesus. Jesus, Burke says, is the living word that the tradition of our faith is built upon.

“Real tradition is not an institutional form of faith or the artifact of a past that is never to return. It is alive—a force that anticipates and informs the present. We ask questions of the Bible that our ancestors would not have conceived, questions about nuclear technology, global capitalism, genetic engineering, and a host of other issues that make life challenging. As we approach Scripture with these questions, the Bible changes. It changes because we read into it and it forms new issues, new questions, and new challenges. It grows, and so do we. We approach it as a living text, believing that it can speak to our lives today even though it was written long ago, and then we attempt to set its meaning in stone. But you can’t have it both ways.”

If you’ve known me for a while, you most likely know that this concept is something that I often try to explain—but often come up short of a good definition of my thoughts. Thanks to Burke, I now have a very finely put summation that I can look to. The idea that the bible is living and changing is not something (in my mind) that undermines God’s power, but rather, something that proves it. Jesus was not sent as someone who would die and then be forgotten. He was sent to die and live again.

As the chapter progresses, Burke begins to point out that the church is one of the few institutions that attempts to forego change. In a primarily capatalist world, most business models realize the ebb and flow of culture, but the church doesn’t seem to care. Some traditionalists would tout this as a success for the church but, like the bible, the church is a living organism. Without adaptation and growth, it will most likely be killed by something stronger.

”...the present-day church often still looks and functions much like it did in the Middle Ages. The church still wishes to be the final authority in matters related to faith and belief. It still wants everyone to convert to its particular understanding of salvation and the divine. It still wants to make belief ordinary by compacting it into a simple matter of accepting predigested concepts.”

After a brief history of various institutional models and, in particular, where hierarchy came from (and how hierarchy is perceived today), Spencer Burke describes one of the key “models” that the Christian church is communicating in the wrong way.

“Churches assume their role is about eternity when in fact eternity is God’s business. The landowner in Jesus’ story [Matthew 13:24-30] is very clear that his workers cannot separate the wheat from the weeds, for they might pull up perfectly good wheat in their zeal to remove the wayward weeds. When explaining this story to his followers, Jesus makes it clear that the task of determining who is in or out is not the responsibility of humans, no matter how qualified they believe they are. I would likewise argue that the church should not be so focused on eternity. The church’s task is to help people follow Jesus here on earth.”

This section deals with two prevailing subjects within Christianity’s collective mind: judgment and eternity. How much good wheat has been torn out of the field in religion’s haste to judge in God’s place? At the same time, the Christian church I have experienced focuses much on eternity and little on interacting with the world around us. Jesus was all about communing with the world he lived in and while he may have spoken often of God’s kingdom, his actions pertained to those whom he encounted. If we are to live like Jesus, then shouldn’t we also be concerned with that which surrounds us? Shouldn’t we leave the judgment of those we commune with up to God?

Burke’s take on current day religion is stark, but very truthful. Too many Christian leaders throughout the years have conformed a fairly simple faith into a ruleset that limits God to a human-understandable being. The last paragraph of Chapter 5 sums this up nicely
with a quote from the singer Sinead O’Connor.

“Rescuing God from religion is how I’d put it. All these rules and regulations and locked doors keep God a prisoner who cannot be shared unless we do this, or do that, or the other.”

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