Читать книгу Blessing the Curse? - Ksenija Magda - Страница 15

Though the church has been around for two millennia, and it has conquered most of the world’s nations, we have not seen this glorious revelation of God’s children and its vision of salvation for the whole creation. Rather, the church is being accused of having played a major role in cursing the world – not blessing it. In the name of Christ’s church, many parts of Africa and Asia have been exploited, and Christian mission endeavours throughout the nineteenth century have generally been refuted as imperial cultural conquests.^[1] As victims speak up, sex scandals by church leaders are uncovered. A huge pile of sin seems to linger over the church. Was Paul wrong about his projections for the glory of the children of God? As a Christian writing for Christians, this is not an easy chapter to examine. And yet, only sincere self-critical evaluation and repentance can show us the way forward. Though Christians are generally sincere about the importance of personal repentance, they can be blind to systemic sin. We have established doctrines that separate sin into superficial categories, making it difficult to confront sin, particularly regarding the taboo subjects of money, sex, and power. From a global perspective, the church is misrepresenting both Scripture and God when it blesses the curse by adopting worldly criteria about subjects that are so central to the way things work in the world.

One such superficial belief is that the curse in Genesis 3 is a prescription for Christians and God’s will for the world. In this view, God established a hierarchical structure, where men must rule over women because women are not fit to live without men.^[2] Moreover, if men are ordained by God to rule, then they must have dominion over all of creation, and they must exploit the world and its resources because the world was created for that purpose. These premises have been widely attacked theologically, but they have proven stubbornly resistant to change in the Christian church.

Another superficial belief that diminishes the “glory of the children of God” in the world is escapist eschatology, which claims that the world is destined to go up in flames.^[3] Such interpretations read Genesis 3 over Genesis 1 and ignore the overarching theme of God’s salvation for the world in Christ, who abolishes the curse. We need to read both Genesis 1 and 3 through the Christ story of a redeemed creation, as the Apostle Paul does in Romans 1–8. The Bible is not so much a set of doctrines, nor a divine philosophy that we accept without question, but a story about God’s love for the world and a vision about God’s people as co-labourers for a renewed creation. People who stand humbly before God can participate in God’s original plan by becoming a blessing to others and the world.

My reading has been largely shaped by a single line in Miroslav Volf’s systematic theology class: “The church is a charismatically structured, eschatological community.” The church is charismatically structured, because the Spirit gives believers the gift of life and all other gifts. Because the Spirit gives these gifts, they are meant to be expressed in the church by the people who have received them. We are not meant to ask the usual questions about social exclusion. The structure of the church is compared to a body – it is not meant to be chaos. Though there is a God-given ministerial structure in the Bible, there is no hierarchy, where some rule over others. The church is eschatological in the way it models the circumstances of God’s future in the world. In the now of humanity and its structures of sin, it is a community that lives by a different law. There are no solo Christians that demonstrate God’s purpose for the world on their own. In the many years of my ministry to the local and global church, I have observed Volf’s little sentence to be true.

The church is meant to be led and structured by the Spirit so that all its members contribute to one another’s growth and minister to each other. As the church grows, its members are transformed to the likeness of Christ. As they are thus transformed, they will go out and meet the needs of the world and seek to change its circumstances. Such a community does not talk, but shows to the world what God’s eternity could look like if people embraced and lived out God’s will.

This does not suggest that the church can or will bring about God’s kingdom to the earth. As we shall see a little later, Paul emphasizes both aspects: first, the final revelation of the children of God is a promised event that will be fulfilled in the future; second, God has already started to fulfil this promise for those who are his. Paul insists that only God can fully transform the structures of sin. But he also insists that the resurrecting Spirit of God lives in the believers and resurrects them to new life within the structures of sin (Rom 8:11). Paul expects the church to be led by God’s Spirit of resurrection to break the structures of sin in their environments. The Spirit of God that was upon Jesus and his ministry has not changed. When Jesus says that the prophetic word from Isaiah 61:1–4 is fulfilled in him (Luke 4:18) by the Spirit of God, it is also fulfilled in those who have his Spirit, for “Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him” (Luke 8:9). Unfortunately, churches often express the culture of the structures of sin rather than God’s eschatology. Even more troubling, many church members actually believe that these structures of sin are God-ordained, and so they see themselves as keepers of certain kinds of human culture – as if the culture were eternal rather than God’s vision of salvation for the world. Such Christians feed on rigid legalism and harsh boundaries around leadership roles, yet their rules are often only enforced for others but rationalized in their own lives.

In our internet age, every scandal in the church can be blown up out of proportion and exposed for everyone to see. Whenever people who should be caring for others abuse or hurt them, hope for the future is diminished. No wonder the youth of this generation feel a general state of confusion and apathy.^[4] When the church fails to live up to its mission to reflect God’s eternity, the world neither hears nor believes its messages of hope. When Christians behave like the rest of the world, there is no good news. To respond to this dilemma, we need to look at the Christian church critically, particularly at how it promotes and even ordains structures of sin as divine. This will not be an easy chapter to read, but in order to change, we have to reckon with our failures.