becoming a third millennium christian - 5 theses

1) The third millennium Christian will need to spend less time obsessing over other worlds and more time stewarding this one.

It’s a cliché but a good one to say that the primary existential question for many is no longer Is there life after death? but Is there life before death?

Luckily, Jesus’ death to life story has always been about more than what happens after you die. In the Gospel of John the words for “abundant life” and “eternal life” are used interchangeably. In the other three gospels, the “kingdom of God” is something that can come over people not after they die but in the middle of their lives—for  the privileged, at the moment that they discover a new way of being in the world (think of the tax collector Zaccheus giving away half of his wealth to the poor and those he had defrauded) and, for the underprivileged, at the moment where their debts are canceled and their socially ostracizing conditions are healed.

What I call the “otherworldliness” of medieval Christianity and most of Protestantism up through modern ‘Murica was a concern that the church relegated itself to in order to prove itself unthreatening to the political order of the empire (that the church should’ve had to work so hard to prove this should say something about the volatile message still sitting in its attic, even if buried under some old stoles). In exchange for spaying and neutering its message so as not to disturb the “natural order,” the church was given a prominent symbolic status even if, functionally, it served as nothing more than funeral director to the society.

If the primary existential question that people are asking in our technologized, hyper-convenient, alienated culture concerns whether there is life before death, a church that waves its hand around in the air and assures people of the “transcendence of their soul” (which is not an authentically Christian idea but is more like the secular religion of the western world both inside the church and out) will continue to have nothing new to say.

A church, on the other hand, that can promise not only life but purposeful, abundant life in the “ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18) bringing “good news to the poor” and proclaiming “release to the captives…recovery of sight to the blind,” and letting “the oppressed go free” (Lk. 4:18-19) may be able to not only promise a future life with Christ but draw people into the life of Christ right now.

2) The third millennium Christian will need to see opportunity in the decline of Christendom (the marriage of the church with the power and influence of the state) rather than lamenting it.

Any atheist can see the incongruity between a wealthy, politically connected, socially influential church and the homeless, disestablished vagabond whom it claims to worship (why so many within the protestant and Roman Catholic establishments of the western world can’t see this is beyond me).

That’s not to say that Christians should spend their energy arbitrarily eschewing social convention and political influence—that could be childish cynicism just as easily as faithfulness—but power and status, when we happen upon them, should be worn like a hair shirt with a deep suspicion that we might have done something very unlike the head of our church who was crucified as a political and religious troublemaker. 

If we truly are seeing the end of the church’s long dalliance with power and prestige, it should be seen as a reason to hope, not a loss. For the first time in 17 centuries, since it was named the ‘official’ religion of the ‘official’ people of the world, Christianity has the chance to authentically live up to its calling to side with the lost, the left out, and the forgotten about. This is good news not only for the church but the world. A world drunk on power and status can only be redeemed from the outside.

3) The third millennium Christian will need to stop claiming to have a monopoly on the truth but needs only claim a relationship with the Truth-teller.

In the past when being a Christian meant forcing one's own intellect to accept certain pseudo-scientific doctrines about God and world, those questions about how to relate to people of other faiths or no faith were very tricky. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that Jesus were a person and not a set of beliefs (I know, wild, right?). Suddenly, those questions become a cinch. I can't claim any special ownership of Jesus, the person, anymore than I can claim “Meredith is my friend, therefore she must not be yours.” 

And to be sure, it's no easier for this Jewish mashiach (“messiah”) to relate to someone weaned on the mostly pagan and Greek philosophical mess of mythologies and metaphysics that parade around as “Christian” than it is for him to relate to a first century pagan or a new age Buddhist. Only our naiveté about our own ideological origins ever allowed us to think otherwise—e.g. that believing certain things about the age of the Earth or displaying a collection of cherubic angels on the mantle somehow activated our status as God’s official people.  

I can easily get from “I believe such and such about God, and you don’t” to “therefore, you’re wrong.” But there’s no way to get from “God has a relationship with me” to “therefore you’re wrong.”  

4) The third millennium Christian will need to do less explaining and more loving.

Does this one need to be explained?

5) The third millennium Christian needs to give up Christianity’s present indifference to the well-being of the planet.

This relates to number 1. Why would a church that’s only interested in teleporting transcendent souls to another world have any concern for this one? Somehow, most of contemporary Christianity missed the part about how God "so loved" this world, called it “very good” and entrusted it to us as benevolent caretakers. But, in fairness, where might they have gotten that memo? Oh, right. I guess maybe where it says so on—um, hi—THE VERY FIRST PAGE OF THE BOOK THAT WE’RE ALWAYS BEATING OVER OTHER PEOPLE’S HEADS AND QUOTING IN CONGRESS.

I’m going to need to take out another prescription if I try too hard to understand how things have gotten this backward.

Every time a “Gawwud fearin’” Christian walks up to the podium in The House or takes the microphone on a radio talk show and gleefully preaches indifference to the Earth, they are not only severing their precious remaining strands of credibility for generations that can no longer afford to be flippant about the ecological challenges we now face, they are defying the very first responsibility with which their own self-claimed God charged the very first human in their own story!  If people have to fly out to a TED convention to hear someone preach that this world is worth saving because they know they won’t get that message in their local church, then “it would have been better [for their local church] to have never been born.”

If, on the other hand, ‘Murican Christianity should rouse itself to rethink the challenges of our time and suddenly take an interest in embodying God's kingdom in this present age—but, lets say, conservatively, they were only interested in the well-being of people, not the rest of creation—I’m fine with that as a concession. Should they happen to know anyone who lives on the Earth, then we’ll still be on the same team.