The purpose of prophetic scripture – and all scripture is prophetic – is to communicate the mind of God. In the words of the apostle Paul, we have, we possess, the mind of Christ – we, who are born of ‘water and blood’ or Word and Spirit, according to the gospel of John. The great salvation we have in Christ, our spiritual investiture as sons and daughters created in the image of the Most High, is the substance of the divine revelation we have in Christ. And it is the sacred scriptures – what we call the Word of God – which constitute the spiritual seed, which is to say, the informational content of the divine investiture.
One would imagine then that our Holy Bible – the Word of God – would be treasured by the churches of the world – that it would be valued, revered, preserved and studied. Alas, the opposite is the case, namely that the churches of the world are ready to trash the Bible – and that’s all of them, where by church I mean that which declares itself under the rubric of organised religion. And there is but one consequence of this attitude – the abrogation of that great salvation and its attendant blessings.
Now that’s a very hard saying, I hear the retort – how can one sustain this, my assertion?
It is really very simple. What is extolled by the churches – by religious organisations – is not the Bible, but interpretations of the Bible. The object of engagement is not the transcendent mind of God as imparted by his Word, but a man-made creed, a reductive distillation of sacred scripture in conformity with the conceptions of human intellect. This much is self-evident, as it is their mutually dissenting creeds (ostensibly deriving from the same textual sources) which distinguish and define the more than 30,000 declared denominations of Christendom.
One may observe this in countless church organisational websites, as under the banner of Who We Are or What We Believe, where follows a summary of tenets to which the faithful are invited to subscribe. Of course, not one in ten who depress the pews can actually give an account of their doctrinal pedigree, wherefore none of this has anything to do with actual worldview or belief. What it purports is simply this, namely that such-and-such [insert creed] – when push comes to shove and we’re up against the wall – is what we pay cautious lip service to.
Not Jerusalem but Rome is the mother and wellspring of the modern church. Not a mystical experience in the baptism of the Holy Spirit, but a creedal confession has become the ostensible hallmark of the Christian faith – which confession is invariably coercive, perfunctory and spiritually inert, insofar, as should be evident, one cannot make oneself believe what one does not believe. Yet it is this psychology of dogmatism – as, perhaps, in the spirit of Tertullian: I believe because it is absurd – which, although antichrist to the core, is worn militantly, defiantly and as a badge of honour, by churchmen, typically with all the fanaticism and lack of humour characteristic of a medieval inquisitor.
What happens in effect is that instead of elevating the human understanding to the divine – the declared purpose of scripture – that divine legacy is redacted and altogether diminished to accord with human conceptions. As our secular critics rightly charge, God is created in the image of man, in what constitutes, unknown to them, an inversion of the biblical investiture. Whereas no such critique would fly in the face of an apostolic faith as grounded in spiritual experience, it is evident that the modern church has none of the spiritual goods enjoyed by the original disciples – not to put too fine a point on it.
This, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with Christendom, and we’re all agreed that something is wrong. Here then is to our church doctors who operate with manicure scissors, when the axe is laid to the root of the tree. A word in your ear, my dear friends. While the organisational churches are fussing about fundamentals, while they are busy reinventing the faith or discarding the whole thing as archaic, while utter confusion thus reigns among the churches – even in that same hour the mystical body and bride of Jesus Christ is putting the finishing touches – dainty and exquisite – upon the spiritual temple.
As states the Revelation, Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife has made herself ready.