The Present Moment
Reforming and Re-Creation
Today is Reformation Sunday. Today I am reflecting on the strange history and contradicting principles that have led to today. What does it mean to be a Protestant in this present moment?
The Reformation both affirmed and contradicted Christianity. It both rejected the tradition it inherited and innovated new paths. However, these new ways of following Jesus were seen as returning to some original, uncorrupted way. For me, this is wholly unsatisfactory. An insistence that we hold fast, no matter what, to ancient ways of being has been proven to be wrong time and time again. The church has consistently stood on the incorrect side of history, save a few sparse voices. Every correction after it realizes how lagged behind it is updates what it means for the faith to really hold to the “original way”. The constant pretense of holding to an “eternal” truth (that was just discovered) shows itself as a rotting foundation. There must be an alternative and honest way to live faithfully.
The more I read the works of Church past, it becomes obvious that much of the God-talk we use is drenched in a metaphysics that is completely out of step with modernity. This dissonance leads to either arguing for things that obviously untrue or saying stuff that makes no sense to us. Nietzsche was right to mourn the death of God when he said
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
The death of Greek metaphysics and the Ptolemaic cosmology renders much of Christianity expression vague at best and vapid language at worst. Along with them, God too has died. Too many people think the solution to God’s death is to prop up their idolatrous puppets and pretend there still is a magnificent wizard behind the curtain. All the charades of returning to some original way in the past that we just so happened to find last week leave the value of Christianity in the past. The rejection of modernity as a symbol of one’s holding fast to an unshakable foundation leads to being hip-deep in sinking sand.
Recreating & Reforming
Rather than seeing reforming the faith as a return to the past, we must instead see it as a genuine grappling of the current moment and creating new ways of being. The death of God is not bad — it allows for God to resurrect Himself anew. There cannot be a resurrection without death. Karl Barth in the Church Dogmatics says
And this grasping and accepting of the promise : Immanuel with us sinners, in the word of the prophets and apostles, this is the faith of the Church . In this faith it recollects the past revelation of God and in this faith it expects the future revelation that has yet to come. It recollects the incarnation of the eternal Word and the reconciliation accomplished in Him, and it expects the future of Jesus Christ and its own redemption from the power of evil.
Recollection is important for how Barth considers Christian faith. As a community of faith, through the Bible we recollect who God has revealed Himself to be in Christ — and then in anticipation of the future we declare who God is Here and Now. We do not remain stagnant in the past, but we do not reject it either. We remember the past so that we may speak accurately of who Jesus is Today.
The process and cycles of interpretations are a blessed wandering in the wilderness where we follow the Spirit in creating new signs towards the truth. We cannot follow old signage to mirages which have no water, but instead must consider what we have learned and move into the future. Rather than playing games of pretense that claim to rediscover the Truth, we can instead recognize that the past is the past and move newly. Rather than conforming ourselves to the Christianity of then and there we can trail new paths of here and now. The Reformation re-formed the faith to the dead past, but today we can re-create the faith to the living present in anticipation of the coming future. Recreation, rather than Reformation allows us to be honest about being wrong and asks us to prune the dead branches to allow for new life to grow. Recreation moves past reforming to find where God is now, not where He used to be.
The Jesus of Today
Nietzsche was right to say that we must invent new ways, but it cannot be under the pretense that we can become gods worthy of the murder we have committed. Jesus is the God of resurrection. We have killed God, and God has died. But God cannot stay dead — how could Death contain Life itself. But when God dies so do our ways of talking about God. Resurrection is not the reanimation of a corpse, but a transformation as distinct as a seed and the flower that comes from it.
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. We are not. God is the unrelenting God of Love. We cannot be. Our interpretations of Jesus reconciling the world to God must be rooted in the soil of the past, but must allow for new flowers to sprout. If that means we end up reject vast portions of the past, so be it. God violates all of our conceptions. The God-talk of the past remains useful, but it is not all encompassing.
For myself, I find it increasingly important that the Jesus of Today is untied of the metaphysics of the past. Ancient cosmologies that believe in a God that truly lives “up there” beyond the planets and stars make little sense in an age post-space race that finds no God in the heavens. Science has discovered the universe operates in ways that destroy even the strongest proofs for God. But God does not need to be proven by reason to be incontrovertibly real. God is not a logical proposition — God is the living and wild whispering Lover revealed by Jesus Christ who draws us all to reconciliation. We must take a hammer to our idols and locate where Jesus is today.
The Present Moment
A genuine and honest Protestantism protests against the shackles of the past and frees us in the present to create and recreate a future of freedom that seeks after God past the edges of what was acceptable then to find Him now. Grappling with the complex past, we can find new ways to talk about God and seek His face — without rejecting our present moment. Rather we declare Jesus is Lord of even the Now and echo His Yes! to all in His death and resurrection. If this means we have to rethink what our words mean, so be it. God is not proven, He is found in Jesus Christ.
