Top 12 of CiHD: #2

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (the first week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

We’re down to the last two posts in the Top 12 Blog Posts at Covered in His Dust series. Today, we’ll look at the second-most-viewed post in the history of my blog. Just what is the second-most-viewed post, you ask? Well, it’s an old post on the book of Obadiah. You can read the original post here.

Wait… what? Obadiah? You’ve got to be kidding.

I’m not kidding, but more on that in a moment.

In this series, as we look at each post, I want to ask three questions: why, what, and what else? Why do I think these posts got so many views; why were others drawn to them? What do I hope people found when they got here; what do I hope they heard? Finally, what else have I learned about this; what else would I say about these ideas?

WHY THIS POST?

I have absolutely no idea.

I couldn’t even begin to offer a respectable guess on why this was my second-most-read post. I can’t find any keywords that jump off the page. I can’t think of any topical connections. While the ancient city of Petra may have some draw to it, I’m not sure it would justify that kind of viewership.

What about the old Christian rock band? Yeah, I don’t think so, either (although you're welcome for that link).

Moving along…

WHAT DO I HOPE THEY FOUND?

I hope the reader found a helpful dialogue about a book that we spend very little time in. Writing about these prophets is fun because a person could count the number of sermons or lessons they’ve heard on Obadiah on one hand (if there were any to count at all). So to bring an unexcavated portion of the Text out and shine a flashlight on it is a great discipline to be a part of. I hope that experience was beneficial for my readers.

I also hope this conversation on a seldom-talked-about book of the Bible provided a new look at a conversation that we do have often — that is, how we treat other human beings, no matter who they are. These conversations or behavioral soundbites can become like white noise in our world of spiritual development. We hear the “be nice to others” lesson so much that it loses its potency. A book like Obadiah has the potential to jar us to attention because of the unusual setting where the conversation takes place. The context is like its own inductive teaching.

WHAT ELSE WOULD I SAY?

I think I would be tempted to wax eloquent on how this post is even more applicable now than it was when I first wrote it. The original was posted on June 4, 2014, in a much different world than we live in today. In the last four years, a few things have changed politically, ecclesiologically, and digitally — and mostly not for the better. We now seem to demonstrate even less ability to show the minimal amount decency and respect to others. Quite simply, we need to figure out how to disagree and still have a dialogue. We need to figure out to the find the humanity in our brother/sister and not demonize their perspective or their history. We need to figure out how to learn from each other and seek understanding like buried treasure.

And that means this book has a deeply serious message for us: God expects a certain amount of human decency from all people — how much more the people of God! It is not OK for human beings to treat other human beings in need with disdain or negligence. I have always felt like the words that fell from Cain’s lips in Genesis — “Am I my brother’s keeper?” — are the words that sit unspoken by the people of Edom in Obadiah. And God’s response is telling: “Yes, you are your brother’s keeper.” We all have to look out for our brothers, our half-brothers, our distant cousins, and even our enemies.

It doesn’t matter if the person you are talking to wears a MAGA hat or voted for Hillary. It doesn’t matter if they are pre-millennial, post-tribulation, Muslim, or Baptist. They are people; they are divine image bearers with thoughts and values that lead to convictions, just like you. There is a shared humanity being lost and I have great faith that our children are going to teach us how to reclaim it. My prayer is that their instruction will come in time, before the condemnation of Obadiah passes for too many of us Edomites.

MAKING AN IMPACT: Character

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the third week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

The next value we will talk about with our MAKING AN IMPACT series is one that is stated in almost every organization, is incredibly important, and is yet a struggle for so many churches, organizations, and fellowships. This is the value of CHARACTER.

Why is this such a struggle for the Christian world? I think the short answer is that we are just a bunch of people who are screwed up. That is true, but how many of us are tired of reading what feels like a continuous news feed of Christian organizations that harbor abusers, struggle with sexual conduct, mistreat women, and succumb to other “moral failures”? It’s exhausting.

I think the answer is that theology matters. I won’t be taking this time and space to pull apart the pieces of theology I think are most responsible for these stories, but I will say that our theology is often the bedrock we build our culture on. The way we understand the nature of who God is and what He is doing in the world, the way we understand the nature of humanity, and the way we define the gospel, breeds a particular culture in the missional communities we belong to. If we foster a theology that believes God is looking for the unflinching devotion to a moral code, we will simultaneously breed a culture that puts on a show, afraid to be vulnerable to the struggle we all experience to become the kinds of whole people God has designed us to be.

So what do we do? Impact Campus Ministries has said — like so many others — that we want to be people of integrity and great character. How will we succeed where so many others seem to fail?

A large part of this will reside in our commitment to community and each other (more on this value in another post). The greatest form of accountability will be the fact that we don’t do life (or ministry) alone. Of course, this commitment is only powerful if we trust each other enough to be vulnerable. We have to work hard to build a culture of openness and honesty from the top of our organization all the way down to the bottom. We don’t want to be people who fight for privacy, but fight for each other.

This isn’t to say that privacy is not important or that wisdom would dictate open vulnerability with all people in all circumstances — it would not. But within our family at ICM, we need to learn how to trust each other with our struggles and our failures. This means we can’t be quick to punish others when they slip up, but we also need to be resolute in our commitment to each other, to help each other become the people God is inviting us to become.

Hopefully you can see how well our value of character works alongside the tension of excellence and compassion. We have to have a commitment to excellence in our integrity, but that will only be achieved if we can be gracious in our failures. I really believe that the destructive and harmful failures in character come as the byproduct of a culture that doesn’t foster healthy growth and compassionate belonging. When those things don’t exist, we begin to hide. When we begin to hide, our lack of character begins to fester until it erupts in something horribly destructive.

Unfortunately, this culture of hiding is often cultivated in our faith communities.

We want to be better than this. We want to be the kind of family — brothers and sisters — who make sure we all have a place to belong and that the space can be trusted. We want to build a culture that says, “I am FOR you!” — and doesn’t doubt the sincerity of that stance. Only then can we be honest about who we truly are and who we are trying to become. And only when we are honest can we find family who help us strive to develop as we pursue character in our organization.

This will be an ongoing struggle. We are far from perfect.

But may God bless ICM’s efforts to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly [together] with our God.

MAKING AN IMPACT: Excellence & Compassion

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the third week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

We want to close out the rest of this year with our MAKING AN IMPACT series by looking at our stated values at Impact Campus Ministries. Our values are the things that drive our decisions and determine the way in which we pursue our mission and vision. In a sense, our mission and vision are built upon and performed on the foundation of our organizational values.

Today, I want to write about two of our six values. I do this for a couple reasons: First, there are only twelve months in a year and thirteen items that I need to talk about — so I need to combine two (seems like a pretty good mathematical reason to me); but second, I combine these two values because they are two that always seem to exist in tension.

These values are EXCELLENCE and COMPASSION.

ICM has the value of excellence. We want to pursue excellence in all things; we always want to fight against the mentality of, “Meh, it’s good enough.” We want to resist the urge to cut corners or stop short, even when it appears that it won’t make a difference. We value this because we believe it always makes a difference. While going the extra mile might not have a practical application in the immediate situation, we believe it has an impact on who we are as people. In addition to this, we want to be reminded that our work is powered by God’s provision through the generosity of others. Their investment in God’s Kingdom deserves our best stewardship; their dollars (or God’s dollars given through them) need to be planted and watered with nothing less than our best.

But ICM also has the value of compassion. The truth of the matter is that we all blow it — routinely. We want to practice grace with each other and demonstrate a hospitable and generous spirit with others when we are less than excellent. This is a stated value with ICM not only because we want it to be true internally, but externally as well. We want to demonstrate compassion for those we work with in churches and with our supporters. We want to demonstrate compassion to those who might seek to make our lives difficult. Most importantly, we want to treat our students with compassion and model a life of compassion so they can experience and see the fruit that comes from a life modeled after Jesus.

We find that pursing these values simultaneously is very difficult. But we also find that this tension is very, very good. We want to be able to challenge ourselves to run hard and push for the best. We want to celebrate when God takes our efforts at excellence and does something awesome with them. But we also want to guard each other from the shame and guilt of never feeling like we’re enough.

In the words of Jeff VanderLaan, ICM’s Vice President, “We want to always be raising the bar and lowering the fence.” What a great line! We need to raise the bar — raise our sights and our expectations — while simultaneously lowering the fence of who can participate in pursuing those goals.

It is important to learn that these two values are not at all mutually exclusive. Just because we value excellence does not mean we have to be jerks, unrelenting as we demand excellence from ourselves and our teammates. But just because we value compassion does not mean we can be halfhearted in our efforts. We can still challenge each other to be the best possible stewards of our talents and resources.

This tension is difficult, and yet I feel like parenting has taught me more about this tension than anything else. I have the highest hopes for my children. I want them to be the absolute best version of themselves that they can be. However, I also love them tremendously and would do anything to make sure they are never treated with anything less than unconditional love and acceptance. I want to teach them the value of excellence and model the compassion of a loving father to them the entire way. This is one of the only soils in which healthy parenting can exist.

May we as leaders seek to foster this same culture in the ministries that we lead.

CHURCH HISTORY: You Are Here

We’ve now finished the journey. Over the course of four years, we have traveled from “In the beginning…” to this very day in 2017. We have just spent the last few months wandering through postbiblical history, figuring out how we got to the point we are at today.

You are here.

I’d like to summarize what I believe I learn from church history in the same way I summarize the trips I lead for my students in Israel and Turkey. As I look at the early Church, a church couched in the context of first-century Judaism, I see four things that stand out to me as a learner.

TEXT: The first-century Jewish world of Jesus was a world deeply committed to the Text. Teaching their children how to memorize the entire Torah at a very early age (and then much of the rest of the Tanakh), they had a working knowledge of God’s commandments we can hardly begin to understand. Without the printing press, this oral communication and commitment of God’s Word to memory would prove invaluable to an entire culture of people devoted to following God. Unfortunately, when we lost our connection to our Jewish heritage (by rejecting the Jewish identity upon which we were built), we didn’t just lose relationships with the Jewish people — we lost the written Word of God, as well. As the one Word that doesn’t return void, but always accomplishes the purpose for which it is sent (Isaiah 55), we effectively lost the power of our movement. Paul told us in Ephesians that the Word of God is “the sword of the Spirit.” I believe we lost the power of the Spirit by losing our connection to the Text, exchanging it for a fascination (maybe idolatry) with doctrine and creed.

COMMUNITY: Our Hellenistic ways always deceive us. Again, as we jettisoned our connection to a Jewish world that lived in intentional subversion to the pagan narrative, we were left with our own pagan roots, deeply entrenched in the narrative of Empire and the Roman worldview. Instead of living in intentional community, rejecting the lies of self-preservation, luxury, comfort, and leisure — we embraced (and still do to this day) these tools of the empire. The most fascinating and effective tool of the Kingdom is an inclusive community that shows the world a better way to live.

DISCIPLESHIP: One of the best ways of training up leaders was the first-century model of discipleship. Consider the fact that Jesus started no churches and went on no missionary journeys. What he did do (and then asked us to do) was make disciples. He spent three years with twelve young men — all day, every day — and he changed the course of human history. He didn’t lead Bible studies (which are great) or create awesome new conferences to teach the masses (although those are incredibly beneficial, as well). He simply went out, told twelve guys to “follow me,” and then showed them how to live as God had asked them to live. It changed everything. We don’t do this anymore.

WRESTLING: The early church community was a community devoted to the same wrestling that Jacob, the father of the Israelites, was known for. They didn’t think answers to all the questions were the point. They believed the Text was meant to be wrestled with and that life was tricky and difficult. They did not believe in formulas or self-help strategies. They believed in walking the path with faithfulness. This walk meant things could be quite complicated and messy. There are many shades of gray. However, working with God to restore the world would be worth the great wrestling match. But this, too, was something we lost. Because we had lost the Text, questions and doubts were threatening. We immediately began to identify orthodox answers to questions and discouraged dissent. In a world that was founded on a culture of chutzpah and engagement, this is an odd experiment.

So, we lost the Text, disengaged from subversively inclusive community, stopped making disciples the way our Jesus did, and discouraged wrestling.

We still don’t know our Text. We find it nearly impossible even to experiment with true community because of the idolatry of our consumerism and comfort. We run church programs and invest in programmatic ministries rather than believing discipleship could change the world. And we still discourage people from asking questions that push the boundaries or color outside the lines.

Is there any hope?

Yes!

God has placed you and I here for such a time as this. Consider the following:

TEXT: Because of the Internet, we have an unprecedented amount of Bible study tools and information at our fingertips. Unlike any other point in human history, accessibility to truth is at an all-time high. Even though many of us struggle to have a knowledge of the Text rivaling that of Orthodox Judaism, we do have the tools to pursue that kind of understanding and keep learning, learning, learning. If the disciples knew we have biblegateway.com or online lexicons to do word searches in a matter of seconds, they would roll over in their graves. There is no reason we cannot create our own kind of Essene community — people who seek to know the path and walk it.

COMMUNITY: No matter the time or place in history, if we are human, then we are capable of great community. There is no reason we cannot create subversively inclusive communities that show the lies of our culture’s idolatry for what it is, and show the way of Jesus is the best way to live, even after all of these centuries. We can create communities that teach the world how to Sabbath, forgive, and be generously hospitable to others. We can look out for the mumzers. There is nothing stopping us from these endeavors. In fact, because of our “connectivity” in our social networking world, we have tools to facilitate community like never before. It simply requires us not to settle for pseudo-community that allows us keep our Herodian idolatry of consumerism and neo-Hellenism. We have to make the sacrifices necessary for true community.

DISCIPLESHIP: I remain convinced that this model and methodology of discipleship would be just as effective in our world as it ever was in the Greco-Roman context. Total immersion is still the best context for true learning and transformation. It is not easy to fit into our world, and we certainly don’t live in a culture that facilitates these commitments, but the Great Commission still sits for us to seize — today more than ever.

WRESTLING: Maybe one of the best things postmodernity has given us is a culture that values the complexities of life and rejects the notion of black and white answers. This kind of context — often misidentified as moral relativism — is not our enemy, but an incredible opportunity. We need to recapture a world where questions are not a threat to our systems of control, but the doorway to discovery. We need to trust the process of searching, believing that if we truly do search for God, we will find Him — just as He promised us.

Will you wake up tomorrow and do all these things like a champ? No, you will not. But can you wake up tomorrow and set some realistic and obtainable goals to begin making new ground in all four of these areas? Yes, you can.

And I believe some wise man once said the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

Or as the Talmud instructs us: Just as rain falls in drops and forms mighty rivers, so it is with Torah. A man studies a little here and a little there, until understanding comes like a rushing stream.

May it be so.

In our day, LORD.

Amen.

CHURCH HISTORY: AD 1925 thru Today

NB: For readers who missed it, I suggest going back to review my setup to this section on church history to know about my disclaimers. For the graphics used in this post, the timelines are not to scale, and the dates represented are not intended to be exact. They are meant to be visual aids for understanding the larger conversation.

Fundamentalism and secular humanism continued to be locked in a fierce battle for “truth” for a decade. It would be worth answering the question that often goes unanswered in these conversations: What happened to the parts of Christendom that wouldn’t have aligned with fundamentalism? At this point in history, those who would have rejected fundamentalism often drifted towards theological liberalism. While the Church (in this century) would eventually learn how to have more progressive conversations and put more “options” on the table (rather than a simple bifurcated presentation of the argument), this is not that point in history. For much of [theological] liberalism, their position felt like a weak take on humanism, with Jesus slapped on the label.

The two options most 20th-century Christians had to choose from seem today like equally bad options; it also looked like Christianity, while putting up a good fight, was not going to have the staying power to outlast the run that humanism was putting together.

But that all ended with the arrival of World War II.

Any hope that humanity could usher in some utopian societal existence, whether it was by fascist, socialist, communist, or even democratic means, would come to a crashing end. Every humanistic worldview seemed to show its true self in the face of unbelievable genocide, communist oppression, and nuclear war. Simply put, humanity isn’t as great as we thought it was.

This gave Christianity a great and sudden turnaround that ushered in what I call the modern evangelistic era, and the eventual rise of the evangelical church. Fundamentalism gives way to a broader, softer version of itself in a wide representation of Protestant, American Christianity. While the beliefs that justify “evangelical orthodoxy” change depending on who you ask (even today), modern evangelicalism attempted to plant its flag and set up its defenses. It’s worth noting that we still find ourselves in this tension today. The “culture wars” of the current evangelical church are not the great Promised Land of our day, nor are they the last and final Armageddon we often want them to be. At best, they are simply the awkward phases of a modern evangelicalism that is going through a sociological “puberty” and, at worst, they are the final gasping breaths of a movement coming to a very unflattering end. We would do well to consider these things.

The modern evangelical movement was created by some of the greatest evangelists of our era. People like Billy Graham and Bill Bright (founder of Campus Crusade for Christ) helped the church navigate this very difficult era, giving the Church language for communicating the gospel like we had never seen. I believe history might look back on this era with a similar perspective to our view of the printing press and the Reformation. This modern evangelical push paved the way for cultural engagement like never before.

Evangelism was now in the hands of normal, everyday parishioners — not just the clergy and preachers in revival tents. The creation of the “Four Spiritual Laws” (no matter how you or I might feel about their theological accuracy) created a world where college students, coworkers, and soccer moms could articulate the movement of Jesus in simple language. The same resurgence of cultural engagement would eventually lead to what many from the 1970s call the “Jesus Movement” and the great testimonies of the movement of Jesus in people’s hearts. 

About the same time (the 1970s), the world of biblical scholarship was experiencing a new frontier, as well. While this is highly oversimplified, the work of Jacob Neusner changed the world of hermeneutics as we know it. Neusner, a Jewish literary scholar (not a Christian), was attempting to understand how modern Christian thought had influenced Jewish thought. As he brought modern Christian scholars (mostly Catholic) to the table, they found themselves learning lessons from Judaism that had gone missing some 1800 years ago. Realizing the impact this had on our understanding of the Bible, academic Christians would never again engage in scholastic research or archaeology without the aid of their Jewish brothers.

Many people have asked me, “How could we have not known this stuff for all these years?” The ridiculously simplistic answer is that we just hadn’t asked. Until the work of Neusner and others, Christendom had been too worried about doctrinal purity and theological rightness to ask basic questions about the Bible’s long-lost Jewish context. Since the turn of the century, many evangelical churches are beginning to experience the work of these scholars, finally “turning the corner” to our common knowledge.

I had professors who told me in college that new discoveries often took 20–30 years to find a presence in the Church. These new discoveries have to be vetted and then handed to the educational institutions (universities and seminaries), and then taught to the eventual pastors who would teach these things from pulpits (and through blog posts). Now, with the rise of the Internet, the distribution of this information — and all information (good and bad) — is increasing exponentially.

But that’s not the only thing that changed at the turn of the century. The world of science had also taken an unexpected turn. While the modern era produced a scientific belief that we would be able to figure out everything if given enough time (see how this fits so well with secular humanism?), the discovery of quantum science radically changed all of that. Some of the most basic principles of physics and Newtonian movement no longer applied in quantum science. The scientific world reeled in the implications of this development.

Combine this with the sociological realizations of this century, and we have a major shift in worldview. While humanism took a major hit, secularism was (and is) far from dead. In fact, since the days of the French Revolution, this might be the most shocking shift Christendom has yet to accept. While we talk about it often (“post-Christian culture”), we have not figured out how to respond well to it.

Enter: Postmodernity.

In the late 1990s, the cultural cry became, “What do we truly know, anyway?” Whether it was society or politics or science, it seemed like absolutes weren’t as absolute as we had once thought. While the Church cried out against what they perceived as moral relativism, the world moved on anyway. Some progressive evangelicals attempted to move with this cultural change, bringing the gospel back into the cultural conversation by creating what is known as the Emerging Church. Largely rejected by Evangelicalism (and, I would argue, no longer considered a viable approach to the “new day” of Christian thought — at least in its original form), the Emerging Church helped start some conversations that would set the stage for growth the Church needed to prepare for its survival.

And now, a decade or two later, we find ourselves at today. With the rise of decentralized consumerism (Uber, Airbnb, etc) and social networks changing the language of interaction everywhere, it’s hard to know exactly what lies just around the bend. Where is God calling us and what does any of this mean? Is there any hope at all for the future of Christianity? It seems like we have devolved into such a mess that it's hard to know what God would even approve of in our efforts.

Well, in fact, I believe we find ourselves (as every generation has) perfectly placed for the future.

CHURCH HISTORY: AD 1300 thru AD 1550

NB: For readers who missed it, I suggest going back to review my setup to this section on church history to know about my disclaimers. For the graphics used in this post, the timelines are not to scale, and the dates represented are not intended to be exact. They are meant to be visual aids for understanding the larger conversation.

So Christendom emerges from the period of the Crusades in horrible shape: completely beaten up, completely broken. Having spent everything they had on war and conquest, they now turn their sights toward rebuilding. In order to do this, they need to find a way to get resources.

Well, in a world that is largely illiterate, where the educated are priests and leadership, studying the Text that is written in an archaic, foreign language is difficult. It becomes simple to manipulate the truth that the masses depend on you to communicate. With a little shaping here and a little gloss there, the narrative of God quickly becomes something that can enslave people in a system of fear, guilt, and control. At its best, you had priests and Church leadership who were maintaining a commitment to sound doctrine, modeling a self-sacrificial life, and instilling a message of hope into people who needed the gospel so badly.

At its worst, we saw the rise of the Age of Indulgences. While the entire conversation is incredibly complex and usually oversimplified (as even I am about to do for the sake of brevity), the general understanding of the problem is relatively accurate. As parishioners came for their typical interaction with the sacraments, the Church leveraged this need to help control the general populace.

To understand this conversation, one needs a basic understanding of sacraments. To the orthodox faith of the Middle Ages, people believed you would interact with the many different practices of the Church in order to experience the grace, mercy, and forgiveness of God. You might remember the liturgy and order we spoke of when we talked about the contribution of Gregory the Great. The Church had identified seven sacraments to serve as corporate practices for experiencing the dispensation of grace. For these early thinkers, there is nothing magical about the sacrament itself, other than its service as a conduit to receive the grace of God into your life. Things like baptism, the Eucharist, confession, marriage — these all allow the grace of God to flow into your life.

You can imagine, as people come to engage these sacraments and anticipate the reception of God’s grace in their lives, it is a short leap for the Church to start manipulating this system for their ends. At some of its worst moments, the Church was even offering forgiveness at a monetary price. Come to confession and absolve your sins by going through the appropriate motions — and offering the appropriate gift.

In short, we are seeing a rabid abuse of Church leadership and priesthood.

Not all the educated were prepared to turn a blind eye to these abuses. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are littered with names of those who stood up against this corruption and fought to reveal the gospel as it ought to be seen. Two popular names in the world of scholasticism are Wycliffe and Hus.

John Wycliffe — Wycliffe was known for consistently attacking the imperial privilege of the Church at large. He hated the separation between the clergy and the laypeople and thought the gap should be dissolved. While he railed against the pomp of the high Church system, he also argued that the Text should not be held captive in an ancient language. He wanted the Scriptures to be accessible for all and thought they should be translated into the common vernacular for people to understand in services. In a lot of ways, Wycliffe paved the way for the Reformation.

John Hus — Sometimes referred to as the true father of the Reformation, it’s hard to see Hus apart from the work of Wycliffe. Hus led an informal resistance to the papacy and was eventually executed for leading what history knows as the Bohemian Revolt. There were two successful regional Crusades against the reigning papacy. While his methods may be subject, his thinking deeply shaped the thought process in western Europe and definitely laid the groundwork for what we know as the Protestant Reformation.

Part of the issue in this period of Catholic history was the geopolitical context. With a new sense of what I call “medieval nationalism,” the power structures in the world were shifting entirely. No longer was the world ruled by one giant papacy; as Christendom tried to figure out how to hold onto their outdated systems of governance, the world changed around them. People were seeing their allegiance aligned more with the powers of the state and country than they were with a foreign church. People associated with being French or German as a more immediate identification than they did with being “Catholic.”

This made it easier and easier to reject foreign papacy and rule. The papacy of Avignon actually shifted the seat of power away from Rome and into France for a period of seven popes, leading to what would later be called the “Western Schism” — when the Western Church was spilt between western and eastern Europe.

The Church continued to suffer from divisions and schisms.

In light of the many abuses of religious power, the Protestant Reformation was simply waiting for good leaders. How “good” these leaders were is left to historical debate. I will leave my personal opinions out of it; so much material has been written about the Reformation and I encourage you to do your own study. Needless to say, people like Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin led reformations away from the Catholic Church in their respective lands, each with their own nuances to their understanding of theology.

At this point, we begin to split over the smallest of nuances. No longer held together by a common hierarchy or papal leadership, we were free to disagree over the smallest details, often fueled by our nationalistic identifications. However, each national identity will get a denominational affiliation: Germans would be Lutheran, the French might be Calvinistic Reformers, and the Swiss would follow Zwingli.

Their many opinions splintered the faith of Christendom, and we don’t have time for that full conversation. However, as far as the good this movement did, it is hard to overstate. The invention of the printing press allowed the widespread distribution of the Text in the language of the common person. The Reformation changed the face of education and cinched up the gap between the educated and the uneducated, especially in reference to theology — both orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

And while this might seem like an unbelievable amount of change for the world to endure, the change is only beginning.

CHURCH HISTORY: AD 1000 thru AD 1300

NB: For readers who missed it, I suggest going back to review my setup to this section on church history to know about my disclaimers. For the graphics used in this post, the timelines are not to scale, and the dates represented are not intended to be exact. They are meant to be visual aids for understanding the larger conversation.

We left our last discussion with the world of Christendom having been rocked to its core. With the departure of the Eastern Church, the danger is that it would raise a whole new sense of papal rejection. If folks can just tell the pope no, then what does that mean?

Well, as the saying goes, nothing brings a people together like a common enemy.

To be fair, I’m not going to wade into the spicy conversation surrounding the Crusades and present myself as a historian or expert. I know talking about this period of history can be incredibly charged emotionally — as it should be. I know some historical reconstructionists have attempted to put a “positive spin” on the Crusades and what the intentions were behind them. I will be attempting no such explanation. For me, this chapter of Christian history is dark and marked with all sorts of problems, which most of us have simply kept out of sight and out of mind.

I remember the chapter in Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller where he spoke about his experience at the reverse confessional. He talked about how they set up a confessional booth at Reed College and — instead of receiving confessions from others — they offered confessions on behalf of their faith, both current and historic. I have not stopped hearing the kickback from readers or thinkers who say, “But why would I/they apologize for something that happened centuries ago?” This question shows our blatant disconnection from our faith and where it comes from. This disconnection stops us from being able to think critically about how we could ever get to that place. And a dark history disowned by the descendants of it will be bound to repeat itself. Some would say we are on the verge of such an era right now.

But I won’t try to present myself as an expert — only as a learner, a student of history, and a fellow thinker.

It’s my belief that in our desperate need to unify Christendom, we seized an opportunity that arose at just the right time. Shortly after the East-West Schism, the Islamic movement was making its way to capture Palestine. While there is no way I am going to give you a history of the Islamic faith here, it would be helpful to know that as Mohammed was doing the work of canonizing his teaching and creation of the Qur’an was underway, there were three dominant worldviews at play within Islam. There was what we might have called a progressive movement — which wanted to live peaceably with everyone. There was a moderate movement that saw itself as the correct faith, and others as largely apostate, but did not seek to convert them by force. There was also a radical branch of the faith bent on violent overthrow of the pagan idolaters.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. We studied Judaism of the second temple period and its different sects. We have seen the same movements grow and disappear within Christian history, as well. (I cannot move on without recommending Battle for God by Karen Armstrong, a wonderful look at the history of the three faiths and the rise of radical fundamentalism in each.)

I find this helpful because most people choose which groups they want to represent their own faith story. While Christians would (typically) never define themselves by the fringe, radical edges of fundamentalism, we consistently do the opposite to the “other” in the conversation. I would say the movement of Islam toward capturing Palestine did not represent the Islamic faith as a whole (not even close). It did have a lot of traction at this point in history, though, and it did provide a perfect opportunity for the Church in the west to find a common enemy and use it as a scapegoat to bring unity to a struggling kingdom.

This is my unauthoritative (and probably oversimplified) opinion on this point of history. I am no expert in the Crusades, so I will not try to explain my way through it. Let’s just say that these few centuries were an absolute mess, and the mess seemed to galvanize an unfortunate unity in Christendom.

But before we move on to the next chapter of history, it would be worth pointing out that not everyone is out fighting in the Crusades.

They never are. We let the poor, the uneducated, and the commoners do that work for us.

Simultaneously, as the Crusades are being fought, we witness the rise of “scholasticism” and an ever-widening gap between those who have and those who have not. This is a gap we are well acquainted with today; we often talk about the gap between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the world. In the Middle Ages, this gap was driven more by education and academic privilege. While the middle and bottom classes were fighting in the Crusades, the cream of the crop was being taught and educated at a level we simply hadn’t seen before. With the rise of science and the accomplishments it brought, a university system that we still understand and rely on today began to take shape. Apprentices were taught not only how to read and write (which was an incredible advantage, by the way!), but they were also instructed in the blossoming fields of mathematics, science, theology, and the arts — most of which was driven by the Greek philosophers of the Hellenistic era.

One of the most revered names in Church history is often that of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas, without a doubt, changed the face of Christian history by bringing into a logical order the many fields of education. Aquinas showed how the world of mathematics and science could blend with the world of philosophy and theology, and the western world would never be the same. The way we understand our education system today is largely shaped by the perspective brought to us through the work of Thomas Aquinas. Many would call him the father of logic and reason.

I’ll resist my desire to be critical until we conclude our study of history, but I’m hoping my western-minded readers will notice that somewhere around a millennia before this, we lost some things that were absolutely crucial to the health of the Church. While I realize we are all still enamored with the pillars of Hellenism today, I hope we learned enough to critically examine just how lost we are 1,000 years after the Judaic movement of Jesus. But I digress.

Or do I? We shall see.

REVELATION: The Fall of Greatness

Now that we’re getting used to the tool of interpreting the literature of Revelation, the eighteenth chapter will be pretty straightforward.

After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven. He had great authority, and the earth was illuminated by his splendor. With a mighty voice he shouted:

“ ‘Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!’
    She has become a dwelling for demons
and a haunt for every impure spirit,
    a haunt for every unclean bird,
    a haunt for every unclean and detestable animal.
For all the nations have drunk
    the maddening wine of her adulteries.
The kings of the earth committed adultery with her,
    and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.”

Now, even though this is straightforward, it certainly doesn’t mean it’s simple or slight. To quote the footnotes in the Zondervan Archaeological Study Bible, John “wrote a funeral dirge for the mightiest empire in the world.” While this doesn’t seem so impressive as we read it almost 2,000 years later, please realize the prophetic, subversive, and chutzpah-laden message John is communicating. John is proclaiming the downfall of an empire that — at this point in history — nobody would see coming.

Then I heard another voice from heaven say:

“ ‘Come out of her, my people,’
    so that you will not share in her sins,
    so that you will not receive any of her plagues;
for her sins are piled up to heaven,
    and God has remembered her crimes.
Give back to her as she has given;
    pay her back double for what she has done.
    Pour her a double portion from her own cup.
Give her as much torment and grief
    as the glory and luxury she gave herself.
In her heart she boasts,
    ‘I sit enthroned as queen.
I am not a widow;
    I will never mourn.’
Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her:
    death, mourning and famine.
She will be consumed by fire,
    for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.

“When the kings of the earth who committed adultery with her and shared her luxury see the smoke of her burning, they will weep and mourn over her. Terrified at her torment, they will stand far off and cry:

“ ‘Woe! Woe to you, great city,
    you mighty city of Babylon!
In one hour your doom has come!’ ”

The invitation extends itself to all of God’s people. If this is how sure the apostle is that empire is going to fall, it would stand to reason God’s people will want to decide which side of the conversation to be on.

And this is not the first time God’s people have been faced with such an invitation. Consider the ending of Isaiah 48:

Leave Babylon,    flee from the Babylonians!Announce this with shouts of joy    and proclaim it.Send it out to the ends of the earth;    say, “The LORD has redeemed his servant Jacob.”They did not thirst when he led them through the deserts;    he made water flow for them from the rock;he split the rock    and water gushed out.

“There is no peace,” says the LORD, “for the wicked.”

Or how about Jeremiah 50:

“Flee out of Babylon;    leave the land of the Babylonians,    and be like the goats that lead the flock.For I will stir up and bring against Babylon    an alliance of great nations from the land of the north.They will take up their positions against her,    and from the north she will be captured.Their arrows will be like skilled warriors    who do not return empty-handed.So Babylonia will be plundered;    all who plunder her will have their fill,”declares the LORD.

But John continues,

“The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes anymore—cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones and pearls; fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet cloth; every sort of citron wood, and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron and marble; cargoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense, myrrh and frankincense, of wine and olive oil, of fine flour and wheat; cattle and sheep; horses and carriages; and human beings sold as slaves.

“They will say, ‘The fruit you longed for is gone from you. All your luxury and splendor have vanished, never to be recovered.’ The merchants who sold these things and gained their wealth from her will stand far off, terrified at her torment. They will weep and mourn and cry out:

“ ‘Woe! Woe to you, great city,
    dressed in fine linen, purple and scarlet,
    and glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls!
In one hour such great wealth has been brought to ruin!’

“Every sea captain, and all who travel by ship, the sailors, and all who earn their living from the sea, will stand far off. When they see the smoke of her burning, they will exclaim, ‘Was there ever a city like this great city?’ They will throw dust on their heads, and with weeping and mourning cry out:

“ ‘Woe! Woe to you, great city,
    where all who had ships on the sea
    became rich through her wealth!
In one hour she has been brought to ruin!’

“Rejoice over her, you heavens!
    Rejoice, you people of God!
    Rejoice, apostles and prophets!
For God has judged her
    with the judgment she imposed on you.”

Then a mighty angel picked up a boulder the size of a large millstone and threw it into the sea, and said:

“With such violence
    the great city of Babylon will be thrown down,
    never to be found again.
The music of harpists and musicians, pipers and trumpeters,
    will never be heard in you again.
No worker of any trade
    will ever be found in you again.
The sound of a millstone
    will never be heard in you again.
The light of a lamp
    will never shine in you again.
The voice of bridegroom and bride
    will never be heard in you again.
Your merchants were the world’s important people.
    By your magic spell all the nations were led astray.
In her was found the blood of prophets and of God’s holy people,
    of all who have been slaughtered on the earth.”

John utters a prophesy about the downfall of this empire and makes sure to emphasize the economic nature of this calamity. This is easy for us to relate to, as we put so much of our own stock in the stability of our economy and its ability to provide us with security. Keep in mind that Caesar Augustus had ushered in an unprecedented time of Roman prosperity — 84 years of uninterrupted economic growth. To proclaim the downfall of such a system would be nonsense to the average listener.

But this wasn’t the first time his readers heard such a claim. Not only does this chapter close with words that are echoed from Jeremiah, but the entire lament is pulled directly from the prophesy of Ezekiel (chapter 27). To place the entire chapter here would be overkill, but I urge you to take the time to pull out your Bible and read it through. You’ll see how much time Ezekiel took in proclaiming the economic ramifications of Tyre’s arrogance.

And this is one of those passages that stings a little to read in our culture. Not only do we cry “persecution” in places where those true martyrs would balk at our struggle, but I’m not sure we would pick the right side of this imperial showdown. The woman on the beast has been judged and the sentence pronounced; her downfall is imminent and the funeral dirge has begun. This all sounds well and good when we are talking about metaphors and pictures, but this becomes a little more personal when the empire being denounced is the basic description of what most of us would call “the pursuit of happiness.”

It might be that the invitation of Revelation 18 falls to you and I as much today as it ever has. Maybe the idolatry of security and the lust of empire have its talons in us deeper than we’d like to admit. And maybe there’s a “mark” on our forehead that we’d like to head to the bathroom and start scrubbing off.

Maybe…