MY CONTENTION (5)

Freedom

 

The second ‘but’ is the word freedom itself.  Since what we’re talking about here is the good news of Jesus and the life and times of Jesus and his apostles, the word we’re looking for is the Greek one – from the New Testament.  In English, we have a couple of medical terms that help us: eleutherophilia – meaning a love of freedodm; eleutherophobia – meaning a fear of freedom; eleutheromania – meaning an intense and irresistible desire for freedom.  The root of them all is eleutheria, the New Testament Greek word for freedom.

To ancient Greeks, this ‘freedom’ was a natural law: a proper state of being, the aberration of which is slavery or bondage.  It refers to the power of self-determination; exemption from arbitrary or despotic control.  However, it was not, in that era, universally available but the possession of a select few in a class of their own, for whom it means the possession of particular privileges.  At its root, it carries the idea that a person or thing is “free” when it can and does perform in the manner and for the purpose for which it was made.  A train is not free to act as a fishing boat but to run on fixed tracks; and a human being is not free when constrained under the control or bondage of another.

The good news of Jesus (and its apostolic heralding) sees it as the natural state of being for all who are in Christ – restored and reconciled to God.  Paul expressed it to the Corinthians this way: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” (2 Cor. 3:17)  Paul appears to take the view that, in Christ, we humans can now live and operate according to the purpose for which we were created by God – a condition constrained by the disease of sin and by the futile efforts of law in our unredeemed state.

However, as with all words, we must resist the temptation to apply all our meanings of our English word freedom onto this Greek word and its common use in the time the apostles would have used it.  One of the main objections people have to the concept of freedom is that it appears to imply no restraint – and certainly that is a useful understanding of the idea.  But it is perhaps not the best one to understand its meaning as the apostles intended.

One of the best apostolic quotes to use to get a handle on freedom comes from Paul’s letter to the Galatians 5:1 – “It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.”  As a matter of interest, the phrase “be subject again to a yoke of slavery” is a perfect rendition of the word ‘religion’ as we discussed earlier.

What is the nature and substance of the freedom for which Jesus Christ has set us free?  New Testament Greek scholars (Thayer and Strong for example) give us this insight: a) liberty to do or to omit things having no relation to salvation; b) liberty from the yoke of the Mosaic law; c) liberty from Jewish errors so blinding the mental vision that it does not discern the majesty of Christ; d) liberty from the dominion of corrupt desires, so that we do by the free impulse of the soul what the will of God requires.

And d) above is central and pivotal to the good news of freedom in Christ.  One of the most important things to understand about Jesus, his gospel and the life and ministry of the first apostles is that freedom in Christ is not simply a lifestyle choice by people seeking their own good pleasure or good fortune.  To them, freedom in Christ comes as a result of laying down one’s life in the cause of Christ, in repentance and faith, and, in the words of both Jesus and his apostles, being born again as a gift from God the Father by the will and power of the Holy Spirit, into a brother relationship with Jesus, where God the Father names us among His sons.

This process – all an initiative and act of the grace of God – enables and equips one to, as point d) above says, “do by the free impulse of the soul what the will of God requires.”  Paul wrote to the Romans, “... sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.  What then?  Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?  May it never be!”  Law is not our Master, Jesus is.  Consistent with that, he wrote to the Corinthians, “All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable.  All things are lawful, but not all things edify.”  In Christ, we are not under law – any law.  But that does not excuse lawlessness; the same freedom in Christ also gives us the capacity, as I said, to “do by free impulse of the soul what the will of God requires.”  In our unredeemed state, we do not possess that free impulse; in Christ, we do – as a result of the gracious gift of God’s Spirit.

In Christ in this way, we are not under any obligation (another meaning of the Greek word eleutheria) to keep any other law in order to please and satisfy God our Father.  This is the fundamental reason they sought to kill Jesus, and ultimately succeeded.  It is also the reason for the continual persecution of Paul and his teams throughout their lives.  It is what lies behind the recorded incident in Acts 15 of the eleutherophobiacs (Pharisees and their adherents) trying unsuccessfully to bring Jesus’ disciples back under the law of Moses.

And so-called church history is riddled with the holes of an unrelenting stream of bullets from a continually firing machine gun that refuses to permit the freedom in Christ of those who opt to lay down their lives for Christ and, as the New Testament says, “worship the Father in spirit and in truth.” (See John’s gospel chapter 4.)  In Jesus’ day, they were fanatics and radicals worthy of internment or death – and little has changed to this day.  As Karl Marx suggested years ago, religion is the sop we take to immunise ourselves against the reality of freedom in Christ; it is the illusion of godliness we take on board so we can delude ourselves that we have the ‘benefits’ of having a right relationship with God without actually having the relationship we think we have.

And now, at this point in history, religion is the preferred way and freedom in Christ is decried, persecuted and lampooned – as it has been from the beginning.

But now it’s all coming apart and the opportunity for the truth to be inserted into the dialogue is imminent and pressing.

 

>>  NEXT: But it's all coming apart!

MY CONTENTION (4)

What Have We Missed Out On?

So, in all of this, what have we missed out on?  Well, it’s not so much what we’ve missed out on as what we’ve failed to see and understand and apprehend – because it has been hidden, corrupted and campaigned against.  And if it can be reduced to a single word, that word is freedom: freedom in Christ; freedom from and freedom to, both in such abundance that any – repeat any – human being can find their origin, purpose and destiny, and live a full and abundant life fully immersed in all that Jesus has accomplished for us.

BUT – there’s always a but, or two or three.

We first have to understand that religion is the direct opposite of that freedom.  To get at the nub of this matter, we need to consider three issues: the original/literal meaning of the term and it’s etymology; it’s dictionary meaning; it’s current contextual meaning.

Religion is an old Latin word made up of three parts; a root, a prefix and a suffix.  Thus re-lig-ion.  The root is lig meaning to bind up or a bondage; the prefix re means back or again; the suffix ion means the act of.  It’s literal meaning then is ‘the act of binding up again’ – implying that a thing or a person was once bound up, has been freed and is bound up again.  The use of this word is traceable back to a time in history – and in particular ‘church’ history – considered by some as the “Late Latin” era: 200 to 550 AD.

In this period, a deal was struck between the so-called ‘church Fathers’ and Roman Emperor Constantine to accept “Christianity” as a legitimate social force and institution and permit the ownership of land and property and the construction of houses of worship.  In the lead-up to this agreement, the profound freedom discovered and experienced by those who chose to follow Jesus Christ as their Lord and Master was a real problem to the political and ecclesiastical authorities of the day.  Not least of the problems was their insistence that they had no king but Jesus.  The agreement struck was that, in return for the right to official recognition, the right to own property and the right to build places of worship, the church Fathers would bring the “rabble” into line by curbing and restricting the freedom of Christians and subjugating them to the Emperor’s authority by bringing them under the authority of an equivalent to the Emperor – one who would be known as a Bishop, and later Arch-Bishop or “ruling” Bishop.  In other words, a description of what transpired was “the act of binding up again” otherwise free people: in Late Latin, religion.

Many people today do not know that the word cathedral means the “home” or site of the Bishop’s throne.  Over time, cathedrals and the institutions and authority structures they represent legitimised the impositions and the destruction of the freedom in Christ the Apostle Paul was at pains to emphasise right up to his death prior to the end of the first century AD.  How familiar it seems to us today – with so many freedoms being compromised in the name of “national security”.  A sanitisation process akin to money laundering turns freedoms into crimes and crimes against humanity into a new definition of ‘freedom’.  White becomes black and black becomes white.

That is what ‘religion’ in its original form represented.  However, if you look up a dictionary or hold a public forum with a panel of society’s leaders today, you’ll get a very different picture.  This is the evolution of the sanitisation process legitimising the destruction of the freedom in Christ that the true gospel of Jesus – the one true faith which was, according to the epistle of Jude, “once for all handed down to the saints” (1:3) via Apostle Paul – delivered to those who staked their lives on Jesus Christ their Lord and Master.

There is an Old Testament story analogous to this sad theme of history.  In Genesis 25:29-34, Esau sells his birthright for a bowl of lentils or some rough equivalent to his scheming brother Jacob.  Esau’s attitude was ‘I am about to die, what good is a birthright to me’.

Wikipedia notes the meaning of the AV Bible English phrase “mess of pottage” which Esau traded his birthright for in this way: “A mess of pottage is something immediately attractive but of little value taken foolishly and carelessly in exchange for something more distant and perhaps less tangible but immensely more valuable”.

That definition aptly fits the debauching of the freedom in Christ that happened long ago basically terminating the blood-line and DNA of the true gospel of Jesus and the first apostles soon after they were dead and gone.

But we do need to understand that this was not some surprise, unexpected circumstance or happening.  The entire ministry of Jesus and those first apostles was plagued by the pressure for this debauchery imposed by the religious and political establishment of the day.  From the very outset, both Jesus and Paul were persecuted for the ‘scandal’ of the freedom the good news of Jesus brought to people’s lives.

Our present day dictionary definitions and socio-political interpretations have all taken on board the sanitisation process described earlier, leading to the situation where religion is viewed and accepted as a positive force for the good and the betterment of individuals and societies globally.  When evidence appears of the opposite, every effort is made to placate offenders and excuse their behaviour – whether malicious or not – on the basis of ‘It’s our religion, we’re entitled to it.’

Is it legitimate for our dictionaries and our social, political and legal mores to be tilted permanently and irrevocably in favour of a deliberately twisted and distorted word?  Can we justifiably continue the delusion of bondage being used to justify itself – in the name of political expedience?

Many today refuse to look at or think about anything Karl Marx said, but we would all be better off if we paid a bit of attention to some of his words.  Sometimes people argue against all official ‘religion’ on the basis of a supposed quote from Karl Marx that goes something like this: “Religion is the opiate of the masses”.  But, as usual, this is poor translation and a cut-down version of Marx.

In 1844, the introduction to Marx’ work critiquing G.W.F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right was published and it contained this paragraph:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.

Note the sentence, “It is the opium of the people”.  In the midst of distress and difficulty, people turn to religion.  According to Marx, religion is the sigh of the oppressed, the heart of the heartless world and soul of the soulless situation – all probably true, and certainly that’s the positive spin most put on it today.  To Marx, in this, it works like opium giving a feeling of disconnection from oppression, from the heartless world and from soulless situations and connecting to a much better place.  However, to Marx, if people want real happiness, they need to abandon religion because it is an illusory happiness.  Further, he says, if people want to abandon their illusions about their human condition, they need to abandon religion because religion is a “condition which needs illusions”.  Religion mitigates against being fully human, fully alive because it is in part about disconnecting from everyday reality.

I’m with Marx.  I sometimes find it useful to consider this analogy: you want the latest model of your favourite car but you can’t afford it so you settle for a tiny pedal car scale model of it instead.  Religion, to me, is the pretend, scale-model look-alike of the real thing.  And to me, the real thing is faith.  Hence, as with Marx ‘if you want true happiness, you have to abandon illusory happiness and the pursuit of it’; religion is pretend or faux faith and it requires illusion to sustain it.  Furthermore, religion cannot deliver you to faith since it is going in the opposite direction; it is the reverse boat gear.  Therefore religion is, to me, the antithesis of faith.

The Late Latin word ‘religion’ has never been translated into English – how very convenient!  It is a Latin word, appearing in a Greek New Testament, and simply transliterated (from its Latin form) into English.  The New Testament apostles and writers used the Greek word threskeia to represent the idea behind the only time the word ‘religion’ is used in our English New Testaments and it has only tenuous links to the meaning we attribute to the word today.

The word ‘religion’ should never have been used in our English bibles since the word is more correctly translated as one of several words for ‘worship’.  Although using a slightly older from of English, Ellicott’s commentary for English readers on James 1:27 says:

It will be observed that by religion here is meant religious service. No one word can express this obvious interpretation of the original, taken as it must be in completion of the verse before; and certainly “religion” in its ordinary sense will not convey the right idea. Real worship, we may say, pure and undefiled, beheld and acknowledged as such in the presence of God, even the Father—mark the tender pathos of His divine relationship—is this: to visit the fatherless (or orphans) and widows in their distress and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

What we now see as “charity” the first apostles saw as ‘pure and undefiled worship’; what we now call “religion” had an equivalent for them in either paganism or in Jewish culture.  Religion is the antithesis of both faith and worship for true disciples of Jesus.

That’s the first ‘but’ out of the way.

 

>>  NEXT: Second 'but' - freedom.

MY CONTENTION (3)

Everything Must Change

William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament does not contain the word ‘church’ because, he said, the word is simply not there.  [See my blog "God Without Church".]  He was murdered for that, along with a few other words, all of which are ‘church’ words and were inserted into our English bibles illegitimately by edict of King James, not by informed, spiritual translators.  Revival begins with our seeing the elephant in the room and putting it out – or at least letting those so gifted do so instead of marginalising them and ensuring they can only serve the body in certain ‘acceptable’ ways.

The implications of this are comprehensive and profound.  Nothing is left untouched; most things are re-defined; everything is re-made and re-shaped.  In my view, that’s revival: personal spiritual renewal; corporate spiritual restoration; community/national spiritual awakening.  But we delude ourselves if we think we can have the revival without the restoration and the renewal; and the renewal and restoration is a comprehensive and profound transformation.  As author Brian McLaren says, Everything Must Change.  The subtitle of this 2008 book is “Jesus, Global Crises and a Revolution of Hope”.

On my watch, over the last twenty years, God has been saying – through His prophets and teachers – that everything must change.  And, of course, that is way too radical for most if not all to hear.  It is no less true just because we struggle to hear, listen and obey.  Throughout the journey of my watch since the early 1990s, there has been no subject or ‘theology’ that does not need to be transformed, renewed, turned on its head or – frankly – properly heard for the first time.  The vast bulk of our theology traces its heritage back to one version or another of ‘historic church doctrine’.  In the process, its DNA has been corrupted and it can no longer reproduce uncorrupted offspring.  We need – if you’ll excuse the analogy for a moment – stem cells from Jesus and Paul to bring our body back to health and make it capable of reproducing according to the apostolic pattern.

And at the core of this entire process is our profound need to understand – as the first-century disciples did – that a full and complete and perfectly mutually satisfying relationship with God is available without church, without religion and without bible-thumping.  And on that last matter, we need to understand – again, as the first-century disciples did – that the bible and “the word of God” are not synonymous; one really must not interchange the two terms.

In an interview about his book Everything Must Change with ‘theotherjournal.com’, Brian McLaren said this:

… when you think about civilization, in many ways it’s like a machine. It’s this complex structure that we put together to help us achieve these three good desires for prosperity, equity, and security.  Not to say there aren’t other desires too, but those seem to be the fundamental purposes of civilization.  But if that machine is driven by bad programming, and once again, the term I use for this is a destructive framing story, then the very machinery that you’ve built to help you becomes machinery that can destroy you.  That’s why I call it a suicide machine.  And you know, it’s interesting that this shows up in modern film. You think about a movie like The Matrix. It’s about a machine that we’ve built turning on us.  Or the movie I-Robot.  Or even the movie Titanic, in a certain way. It’s a machine that we’ve put our confidence into to take us where we want to go, and because of the hubris or overconfidence that drives it, we sink!

In his book, McLaren reminds us that the earliest followers of Jesus were called ‘disciples’, “which means students and apprentices.  As disciples, they would learn to practice, to live, to walk this new way, which would also require them to unlearn old ways.”

He then goes on to say (page 284):

So, faith communities that seek to form disciples of this sort today will have a dual task.  First, they must recognize that the dominant societal system, the collective reality we have called the suicide machine, has its own covert curriculum, a curriculum that must be unlearned.  Second, they must develop their own creative counter-curriculum to teach people the art of living in this new way.  As they do so, they discover the subtle but pervasive power of the dominant system’s covert curriculum.

 Although I have not employed this language, I have really warmed to McLaren’s idea, which apparently came from something Dr Leonard Sweet said in McLaren’s hearing (see McLaren p.52 ).  In particular, I’m interested in this “covert curriculum”, or McLaren’s “framing story”.  Embedded within it are what he calls “the stories we tell ourselves” – the narratives that form a central part of the covert curriculum.  And this curriculum is the engine, if you like, of the suicide machine, contributing significantly to the various dysfunctions that turn our societal-system machine feral and it begins to turn on its creators.

Personally, we tell ourselves all sorts of strange things: “that’ll never happen to me”; “I can quit anytime”; “if I can do it, anyone can”; “good will triumph over evil”; “positive thinking will win the day”.  We tell ourselves these things so we can feel like we’re in control and not letting anything get the better of us.  We become over-confident and hubristic; and it seems to never enter our heads that these ‘stories’ might be lies.

And it’s not just ‘stories’ like these; on the one hand, we have large and elaborate myths – personally and nationally – that we pass on from one generation to the next for the purpose of social control.  On the other hand, we have individual words we love to use even though those words mean different things to different people and we have deliberately changed their meaning to suit our purposes.

 

>>  NEXT: What have we missed out on?

MY CONTENTION (2)

The Elephant in the Room

Few people who have not done theological study can accurately recount the apostolic ‘gospel’; most people can regurgitate some churchy and religious explanation of going to heaven or hell when you die.  Where did that come from?  How did we get here?  Why are we in this predicament?  Most Australians have never heard, seen or experienced the good news of Jesus, the gospel of Paul, the mystery of the grace of God.  Instead, what they are most likely to hear is a churchy and religious corruption of it with strings attached that bind people up to ideas, organisations, structures, systems and rites, all of which have nothing in common with Jesus or Paul.

And of course, I’m a raving lunatic – at best, seriously deluded – or so they say.  Well let me ask: since our concept of ‘church’ is nowhere to be found in the New Testament (the word isn’t even there, let alone its ideas and rites) how do we communicate Jesus and Paul without reference to ‘church’ and without insisting that people should listen to and/or attend ‘church’?  We cannot separate ‘church’ and religion from our preaching, yet neither concept was present in Jesus, Paul or the first apostles, nor was it in their preaching.

We have well and truly departed from the apostolic gospel, the mystery of the grace of God, but that departure was well before White Australia came into existence.  I was born in 1952, and in my lifetime, my experience of our ‘preaching the gospel’ has been, first, that I cannot remember ever hearing the apostolic message uncorrupted by ‘church’ or religious rites or moral behavioural injunctions; second, that when I attempt to do it (noting that I am not gifted as an evangelist) I am mostly shunned, ridiculed or ‘counselled’; third, that a lot of modern teaching says that the best way to ‘preach the gospel’ is to multiply churches.

Now even if we admit the word ‘church’ into New Testament vocabulary for the moment, the first believers had it the other way around: ‘churches’ are the product of the gospel, not the source of it.  If our ‘churches’ were like the ones we see in Acts, perhaps they could be effective in allowing the surrounding culture to hear, see and experience the good news of the kingdom of God in Jesus Christ, the gospel of Paul, the mystery of the grace of God.  Instead, our churches repeat the culture of old Israel and then expect that the gospel of Jesus is going to emanate from them.  That is not only counter-intuitive and counter-productive, it is rather like having the police and the military running a family holiday resort: there are rules for everything!

But Australia did not inherit New Testament-like gatherings and assemblies of disciples of Jesus; instead, we inherited a long-established religious and ‘church’ history from the UK and Continental Europe, complete with its corrupted DNA.   And most of the other stuff that has come here has come from the private-wealth, free-market capitalism theology of the United States, with its ‘health, wealth and happiness’ dogma.  The rare exception to this came in the form of preachers on horseback arriving in this land from out of the fires of the Wesleyan revivals in the UK, European Anabaptists escaping church persecutions and Brethren missionaries preaching Christ without ‘church’ and ‘pastor’.

From time to time, the grace of God could be seen in Australia in small outbreaks of sovereign, authentic Holy Spirit revival and awakening.  But the Wesleys and Whitefield were not trying to start a new denomination, they were Anglicans; it was their followers who turned ‘methodist fellowships’ into ‘churches’ and denominations.  The Anabaptists, similarly, sought the freedom to be true to the apostolic preaching as they typically saw it.  The Brethren, on the one hand, wanted no part of what they saw as unconverted Clergy presiding over their own fiefdoms and, on the other hand, sought to bring people Christ without the trappings of church.  All tended to focus on taking the gospel as they knew it to working-class people.

Pockets of genuine, sovereign, organic Holy Spirit awakening did emerge.  However, these never really continued in the same vein; they all ended up as institutions or parts of pre-existing institutions.  Multiplying churches and counting numbers of people in them came along in less than one generation in most cases.

Where is a genuinely immigrant-Australian expression of the good news of Jesus?  Where is our “Book of Acts”?  And of course that begs the question:  where is the gospel of Jesus in our indigenous peoples?  Have they, in fact, got something to teach us?  Have we corrupted them too – with our White European culture-religion we call church?

My contention is that Australia needs ‘revival’ (for want of a better word).  But it needs ‘revival’ that is not manufactured out of the raw materials of ‘church’ here.  If I were making humans, would I use cancerous or otherwise corrupted DNA?; only if I had a vested interest in producing something that suited me.  We need the pure DNA of God’s eternity and a direct ‘genetic’ link to Jesus and Paul.

Is that possible?  How do we get there?  It is eminently possible; and we get there as the first disciples did.  However, we will never get there by repeating any culture-christianity, which is what all ‘churches’ have proven to be.  You cannot make a ‘church’ without cultural-religious rites.  But making church (or rather ekklesia) is not our business anyway.  Like Paul and the other apostles, we are to be first and foremost bond-servants of Jesus as they were.  When we are, the Holy Spirit brings about renewal, restoration and revival; and He builds ekklesia, a ‘dwelling-place of God in the Spirit’.

Want revival?  Don’t think about church and activities and programs and the like; think about being ekklesia and living, as well as sharing and earnestly contending for, “the faith once for all handed down to the saints.”  It will not happen as long as we insist on church and our religious clubs.  How do I know?  As a prophet, I see the elephant in the room.  The elephant is called ‘church’ and, like the H & R Block advertising campaign (see still below), it’s my job to call out and point to the elephant.  Whether we care enough to put the elephant out is another matter altogether.

 

>> NEXT: Everything Must Change

MY CONTENTION (1)

Cut Down and Shaved Back

It is unequivocally my clear contention that Australia has yet to see, hear and experience a full and unadulterated presentation of the good news of the kingdom of God in Jesus Christ, and of the revelation of ekklesia and the new covenant as delivered to apostle Paul.

According to the letter written by Jude, a half-brother of Jesus, “the faith” was “once for all handed down to the saints” (1:3): once for everybody (Jew and non-Jew alike); and once for all time.  And according to Ephesians, that ‘handing down’ was to apostle Paul: “the stewardship of God’s grace which was given to me for you [Gentiles]; that by revelation there was made known to me the mystery...” (3:2-3)  And the ‘mystery’ is not some weird invention of Paul himself but “the mystery of Christ, which in other generations was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed to His holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.” (3:5).

When Paul said in 3:3 “as I wrote before in brief”, I believe he was referring to an earlier part of this same letter, quite probably 1:3-14.  And, to be sure, that passage is a ‘brief’ restatement compared to his other writings of Romans and Galatians.

The central core of his message – not dreamed up but received by revelation from the triune God – was that, since Jesus and in and through Jesus, the blessings of God were now available to Gentiles (non-Jews) or ‘Greeks’ as Paul often referred to them.  And indeed that was a true ‘mystery’ to most Jews, being written about in type and symbol in their sacred writings but largely not comprehended or understood.

The most galling part (to the Jews) of Paul’s revelation was that the new revelation included the point that one does not have to keep the ‘Law of Moses’ to be reconciled and justified in God’s sight.  To this day, it galls many, to the extent that people write and preach sincerely and loudly that Paul is in fact the “false apostle” of Revelation – precisely because he teaches that one can be right with God without the need to keep the Jewish law.

Paul’s message is both the revelation of what was previously ‘hidden’ and of how this is a profound act of grace on God’s part which should not be trifled with or trivialised – least of all should it be corrupted by permitting the Mosaic law to creep back in.  Paul fought for this his entire post-Damascus life and many attempts were made on his life.  Eventually his opposition succeeded in having him assassinated.  Nevertheless, he died true to the revelation.

Jude in his short letter (see above) is arguing for the same thing when he says, “I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints.  For certain persons have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into wanton violence and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.”  The central reason for the revelation and for the act of Grace on God’s part was the point that most of the Jews then and many still today reject Jesus as Master, Lord and Christ.

Bringing this back to Australia today, my chief contention is that what Australia got was a corrupted version of the apostolic doctrine and Pauline ‘mystery’.  And I point specifically to the systems, structures, hierarchy and ‘rites’ of religious culture and practice in what we call “the church”; to our consistent failure to ‘earnestly contend for the faith’ as Jude urged; and to not noticing legalists creeping in – because we rely on logic, natural desires and human planning instead of the Spirit-gifted persons God has provided for us.  These people, incidentally, are part of the Divine plan, the ‘mystery’ and the revelation of Paul (see Ephesians 4), yet we so easily abandon them for a system that mimics the thoughts, practices and theology of old Israel.  Then we brand it all with a word stolen from the Pauline revelation (ekklesia) and think that sanitises it and makes it what it patently cannot be.

My contention is that ‘church’ and ekklesia are NOT – repeat NOT – the same thing: not now, not then, not ever.  In fact, I contend that what we know as ‘church’ in the White history of Australia is a case-in-point of “certain persons have crept in unnoticed”; of the “leaven” of Galatians 5; of those whom Paul wished would “go and mutilate themselves”; of the tares in among the wheat that Jesus spoke of (Matthew 13).

My contention is that ‘church’ shares almost nothing in common with the revelation of Paul and the mystery of the Grace of God in Jesus Christ; and that it shares much in common with Old Testament Judaism – including its moral code and religious rites.  And that is what we have preached; and that is what Australians consistently dislike.  We have not received and passed on Paul’s revelation and the mystery of the Grace of God in Jesus Christ; instead we have received and passed on the very thing Paul was fighting against as we see it in the book of Acts: the redemption of Jesus on condition that we keep the law.  And this despite the fact that part of Paul’s revelation is that the law is fundamentally, totally and absolutely unable to save a Gentile!

My contention is that we must make a clear separation in our message between the good news of the kingdom of God in Jesus Christ [the revelation of Paul and the mystery of the grace of God] on the one hand, and ‘religion’, church and a rites-based ‘faith’ on the other.  Church has stolen ekklesia and we need to steal it back – alternatively, we could find a new word.  But whatever word we use, it must mean basically the opposite of what we know as ‘church’.

The “faith which was once for all handed down to the saints”, from its earliest time, has been persistently assaulted by “certain persons [creeping in] unnoticed”.  Luke wrote about it in Acts 15:1: “Some men came down from Judea and began teaching the brethren, ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved’.”  They managed to hit it on the head, but it never went away.  Eventually the Judaisers won and today the “faith which was once for all handed down to the saints” is the heady domain of debated theology, not the life and times of the everyday christian.

>> NEXT: The Elephant in the Room