Category Archives: Big Picture Christianity

Big Picture Christianity, General

PROPHECY RECONSIDERED

The Bible offers us God’s reflection over centuries, cultures and empires on our political ways and miseries, especially through the prophets through to Jesus. It is time to revisit prophecy, away from the recent selection by some Christians in the States of an idiot as Superman. Prophecy addresses the big sweep of human political fallibility. With a bit of cultural transposition it gives us views of where we are. It truly locates us again in humble, law-abiding living and politics before God.

In the US we are watching the partial downfall of a superpower, or as Toynbee would call it, a civilisation. It is not necessary or automatic, but the centre is rotten and our responses before God need radial rethinking which the prophets help us to do.

Here, in brief, are some of the woven Biblical messages from the prophets which it is not difficult to relocate to the world situation today.

  1. The Centre demands praise, even worship, as Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar and Caesar were to be falsely worshipped. But God will have them in derision. Carrying these false idols about is burdensome..
  2. The Centre collects wealth from the economic colonies through patterns of enslavement and taxation. They become centres of useless luxury and self-obsession centred on entertaining trivia, sexual predation and performance. But God will free the slaves and the centre, without repentance, will collapse in its own inefficiency.
  3. The Centre will become a source of oppression and destruction, even when it believes it is the world’s saviour. This lack of self-awareness will be its undoing, unless it looks to God and humbles itself.
  4. The Centre will become a law unto itself and believe it has the right to overrule God’s laws for humankind. It believes that might is right, when precisely, might is wrong and swords should be ploughshares.
  5. The Centre that has preyed on others will find a bird of prey from a far off lands who will fulfil God’s purposes in judgement. Trump is the opposite of “Cyrus”. Judgement is coming down the track from other places.
  6. God is sovereign over all nations and the basic laws for the good of all humanity must rule in all states and nations. You do not kill, steal, lie, misrepresent, covet or close down neighbour love. There is no exceptionalism.
  7. Fighting and war bring intrigue, power battles, domination and destruction. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and that is an urgent warning..
  8. The judgement for imperial arrogance and super-powerdom is often war and destruction. Can the Mighty not see that their might destroys them?
  9. There will be false prophets who will often say what the ruler wants them to say, so they can have their place in the system, and people will go after them. They get “peace” wrong and compromise the truth.
  10. The captives carried to Babylon, or the slaves transported to the US, will become the prophets- political commentators and even Presidents of their new homes.
  11. Like Nebuchadnezzar the self-worshipping ruler will become mad until he faces the real eating grass humility of his place before God. “Is not this the great Babylon which I have built by my mighty power and the glory of my majesty?” Well, No. You have been blessed by God and extorted from others. You claim credit for what is not yours.
  12. The little people, the small nations, have their problems too. The failed self-righteousness of the self asserting great must not be transferred by antithesis to the little peoples.  They, too, must reform before God.
  13. Restoration is always possible. It involves repentance and the end of self-rightness. We were wrong, we must love enemies, focus on justice for all, die to selfishness, banish false idols and open up to God for what is good and blessed.
  14. Then there is the gentle Kingdom of God which deconstructs the destruction of the mighty and self-worshipping, and insists on bringing down the mighty from their thrones. Jesus gently and firmly insists on the Government of God and demotes all other would-be rulers. To him the little people of all the nations will flock. His Kingdom is one where the first are last and the last first. His burden is light. He gives us peace and requires we love our enemies. He sees the destruction of the citadels of power. He heals the sick and raises children in status. He loves and deconstructs self-righteousness and self-rightness. His kingdom testifies truth and the power of service.

Becoming renewed students or disciples of the Christ requires a lot of rethinking, especially in the States and its poodle, the UK.

The big picture of prophecy, often read too tightly, puts world politics down in its place as we wrestle with the failures of modernist arrogance.

Big Picture Christianity

A CHRISTIAN WAKE UP CALL.

Things must change in British politics and public life. But why are Christians incapable of doing it? During the Evangelical Revival they ended slavery, provided education for the nation’s children – largely from scratch, tackled gross overwork, provided housing, extended the vote, ended most alcoholism and child labour, sorted sewers, addressed mental ill-health and reformed much of British life with principles of justice and human care. Why are British Christians largely incapable of doing anything coherent today? Surely, we should be examining our Christian attitudes with some urgency. Here’s my list of why we do not move. Of course, there are exceptions, but few of us are not dressed in these

  1. WE ARE REACTIONARY. Some conservative Christians are busy defending their Christianity against other Christians fighting battles of the past as though God needs defending. Their categories are culturally dead.
  2. WE MARGINALISE FAITH. Most Christians imbibe 40-90% of contemporary culture (usually from mass and social media and education) and leave their faith peripheral.
  3. WE ARE SACRED/SECULAR. Most Christians have bought into the Sacred-Secular distinction which limits their faith to cultic activities and excludes it from life. The Secularists in the BBC, Politics, media and Capitalism encourage this.
  4. MOST CHRISTIANS ARE CHURCHY. Their faith is ecclesiastical. It hangs around church events, vicars, bishops and the ecclesiastical year and is evacuated from life. New Testament Christianity is obviously life, not ecclesiastical. We do not see faith in work, education, family, city, community, markets, education and more much of the time.
  5. ESTABLISHMENT RULES. Anglican Christians are, on the whole, establishment, the more so the higher up. They will not stand against Government policies or for reform, because it is not nice and rocks the boat. We have no nonconformist backbone. Most nonconformists, (except Ron and some others) have no nonconformist backbone.
  6. THEOLOGY IS UP A CREEK. Theology became a small discipline in public thinking. It sits outside science. It edges the physical and human sciences. Its language is rationalist, often academicized and introverted. It has lost the big picture. It has departed the public stage, except perhaps in Scotland.
  7. CHRISTIANITY STRAINS AT GNATS AND SWALLOWS CAMELS. We fit exactly Christ’s warning. We swallow Individualism, Consumerism, Populism, Capitalism and the Selfish Society and choke on whether women should be bishops, gay relationships should be recognised in church services and what the liturgy for lockdown should be. We do not see the Big Picture.
  8. WE HAVE NO CULTURAL CRITIQUE. That the Individualism/Ego culture, Consumer Capitalism, State Power Systems, self-contained understandings of Science and Technology might be wrong are not considered by Christians. We are shallow enough to be taken in by charlatans. We are still on the train of Progress waving out of the window shortly before it crashes. Time for radical critique.
  9. WE ARE UNEDUCATED IN THE CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW. The Christian understanding of Creation, human stewardship, the norms of life together, the centrality of God for all of life, the forms of sin and human evil, the Christian science of the natural world, the evils of political power, militarism, mammon, self-righteousness, human tribalism, the character of the gentle Kingdom of God and God’s victory over the cross and human sin and evil and the calling of Christians is lost to many Christians. We have the world’s greatest teacher, but are uneducated.
  10. WE DO NOT ACT TOGETHER. Christians are a body headed by Christ. We act like ants attacked by an anteater – incoherently and in suppressed panic. We do not see what we could do together. Two billion plus around the world can move quite a few mountains at once, but we do not even see the possibility. A thousand people, really working together, are formidable.
  11. WE DO NOT LIVE BY FAITH. We are so entrenched in our present lifestyles, especially in the “west”, that we do not see that we are not living the lives and the way of Christ with any integrity. We, almost all of us, are deeply compromised.
  12. WE DO NOT WORK OUT HOW TO MOVE MOUNTAINS. Jesus said it. If you are fighting a war, plan it. He did not mean a military war – different kit, different end, but you have to know where you are going. I’ve spent twenty years on this one, and you can’t do two until you’ve done one. Good honest non-individualist Christian strategy is needed.

We can, with some changes of heart and mind, address these issues. They have been around much of our lives and God might be asking us to take them on…

Big Picture Christianity, General

THIS IS THE WORLD CRISIS

The word, “Crisis”, may be is overused, but it has its content. Events explode out of normal channels into destructive and fast-moving processes we cannot control. But you did not notice the key word. It is “normal”, for normal does not exist. It is always going somewhere. It is five years before war breaks out, or the end of the slave trade, or before the birth of Christ or the extinction of the dinosaurs. “Normal” now is not normal. Look at data on energy consumption, the extinction of species, or refugees. In a variety of ways, we are accelerating across the globe.

Part of it is rich and poor. Economic calculations are always approximate but the people who could gather in a plush medium sized room would have assets equal to the poorest half of the world’s population. Ordinary rich people will receive a hundred or a thousand times the income of the poor. This is not a neutral process. The rich nations are the old colonial powers and the new corporate colonial powers. Money has been, and is extracted from the poor and poor countries, by near slave labour, resource extraction, poor country manufacture, corruption and trade manipulation on a vast scale. It has been, and is, unfair, unjust, and we, the rich nations pretend it is our superiority and justify ourselves in terms of the “status quo” which is going where it is going as a tidal wave.

Second, we are buying trash. On a vast scale, through vanity, you-owe-it-to-yourself, egomania, flattery, advertising indoctrination, glitzy presentation and more we are buying stuff and its packaging which is ruining the planet. We are gyrating round the world on near meaningless trips of self-importance. We drive fast to the next traffic jam. But we are under judgement. The judgement is on our rich overconsumption as we die singing, “I did it my way”. China, used by the West for a hundred years, is now dominant in world production and doing the western colonial economic thing in reverse. There is the judgement of affluence on health, relationships, thinking and lifestyle filling the world with rich fools. It judges us by global warming, the friction of consumerism, and the bonfire is ready. The planet will burn.

Third, we are under the judgement of false nationalism. The Great USA, GUSA, is sinking under its own obesity, armed to fight the rest of the world and having to goad enemies into opposition. It has an idiot as President, and much of a population which has been brainwashed out of thinking by decades of trashy media. Other nations defend themselves against putative enemies and fail to notice that “enemies” are caused by wars and the threat of wars and going there on holiday is easy. Britain claims it is leading the world, but only in pomposity. Putin builds a cathedral to the military, which, I am told, fails to impress God. Meanwhile fighting, arms, refugees, military dictators, failed states, bombed cities, revenge and manufacturing arms destroys the possibility of a good world in unthinking patriotism designed merely to keep the arms companies in business.

Then there is the great introversion of the human race, as everyone puts their heads down to the mobile phone and to another generation of captivation to gaming, apps, links, contentless chat, selfies, and trillions of images. A generation grows which will not be able to recognize a brick, let alone lay one, which votes for people they like, which faces lockdown through Coronavirus without noticing that they have already locked down out of public affairs, real work, what is true, evidence, thoughtful speaking and reading and building human societies. The great contraction of the human mind from the television screen, itself often mindless, to the smart screen goes on apace. But, as the person steers himself by his mobile phone, he does not see the car coming with the driver also looking at his mobile phone. The crisis is coming.

Who will see it? Who will say, in the round, This is the Real Crisis? Surely not the Church. Of course not the Church with Archbishops in pointy hats and people intoning the same things every week and waiting for the next Coronation, or smiley vicars, or singing slowly “Amazing Grace”. Or the Church in denominations, with self-reflecting “theologies”, obsessed with not being obsessed by sex, rattling collection boxes and with Cathedrals full of Canons as if people knew what Canons are. No. That Church is incapable of anything decisive. The Church can do nothing.

But Christianity should see the crisis. God has a fair grasp of it across human history and has set out its parameters. God knows we are meant to be stewards of God’s earth. God tells us the meek will inherit the earth, because unless we are meek there will be no planet to inherit. God sets up prophets to warn and tell the worst. Christ sees us through Mammon and seeking gratification. He insists justice comes first. He knows those who take the sword perish by it in their own stupidity. He knows others are more important than the self. We learn God straightens out life and Christ can turn us all around and turn us inside out and economize on what we “need”. God sees through the destruction of temples and empires. Christianity can both identify the crises of the self, western materialism and money worship and address it at root. Christ can reconcile nations and peoples, and show us the foolishness of our ways, and he already has over two billion people to work with, though mainly we are asleep, compromised, small minded and preoccupied.

Of course, it requires the ripping up of much of the contemporary Church – its small mindedness, absorption of western culture, cultic worship, rituals and focus on ecclesiastical survival, and its pathetic temerity to power. It requires a rediscovery of the big world-changing good news of Christ. It is an in and out revolution – into our lifestyles and out to all the principalities and powers which are leading us into this Crisis. It is part of and beyond climate revolution. It will take on the megapowers beyond threats and its weapon is the sharp sword that comes from the mouth of Christ. Blessed are the poor and cursed are the rich. The mighty are down, and the yoke is easy. Don’t worry about things. Die to self. Don’t strain at gnats and swallow camels. Those who take the sword die by it, so spread peace; it costs nothing. So the Gentle Nazarine turns us around, rebirths the good before God and heals the nations.

Yes, there is the big Crisis and we must learn to name it truthfully. It involves the full scope of human sin. There is the Saviour and Teacher of the World. He doesn’t shout, but two billion need to listen urgently and see the big picture he presents through to the healing of the nations..

Big Picture Christianity

The World Church

world christians

It is astonishing that in the 21st century the World Church should be so fragmented and never realize its biblical identity or think of acting together. There is no conceivable doubt that the Church is a World Church. Christians were told to go into all the world and preach the Gospel. John 3:16 says, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes on him, should not perish and have eternal life.” The chorus, “Red and yellow, black and white – all are precious in his sight” has been round for a century or more. We hear Coptic, Russian, African, American worship and know the witness of Christians in every continent, but still most of the time churchgoers revert to being Anglicans in the Ely Diocese, or Welsh Methodists, and we practise our tribal rituals.

Of course, Christians know that there is a worldwide church out there, and they have been very adept at having events on television and throughout the media conveying it. There is no way Christians cannot be aware of their brothers and sisters across the globe through missionary movements, news of persecution, music, and so on. And, of course, the Catholic Church has been global for several centuries. Yet, still we are not the World Church.

There are three obvious impediments. The first is ecclesiasticism and institutional church loyalty. Still demoninations, sorry denominations, claim the organisational loyalty of Christians, and their money, and the institutional churches focus down on their within-building worship and ritualised behaviour. Churches have been through ecumenism and come out the other side knowing that somehow pulling together organisational churchianity misses the point.

The second is doctrinal exclusivism, the self-rightness of different groups and their need to possess their truth. For centuries the Catholic Church owned its truth, largely because it allowed membership criteria and created religious power. The Reformation and the opening up the Bible created a rich set of discussions about all kinds of aspects of truth, but sadly both Catholics and Protestants settled down on their own versions of infallibilism, infected by the need for pulpit power or the need to “defend” God. Poor education, doses of rationalism, and a range of sub-cultural attitudes kept us small minded, but God will give us big picture Christianity than which nothing is bigger.

Then the Church was frightened by Fascism, Atheistic Communism and Western secularism away from thinking big, or standing on public issues and it has become the amorphous introverted body it is at present, with some intimations of what God’s wider purposes might be, but actually unable to organise into the body of I Corinthians 12 knit together from the Head or able to run a race like an athlete, to do something efficiently. It is not fit for purpose. What might that purpose be?

This issue has grown from studying the 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference when the World Church nearly emerged. Tens of millions of Christians and others, possibly amounting to nearly half the world’s population got behind world disarmament. It was backed by the Pope, Archbishops, Kings, most of the world political leaders, and usually on Christian grounds. President Hoover supported by almost all the world’s political leaders proposed a radical 1/3 plus immediate cut in arms, but the arms companies, and the British Government, because it was jealous of the United States, stalled it. Hitler came to power. He was funded and armed, and World War Two killed off the World Church, and it has stayed fragmented since.

It nearly happened, and it could happen again on the issue of disarmament. 2.3 billion World Church Christians could disarm the world, if we worked to one purpose. This time we can have the wit to see it through and save the world from disasters, waste, threats, wars, military global warming, just when the whole system of militarism is ramping up. But Christians need first to wake up to the possibility. The Lamb on the world throne, rather than the Bomb, is the God-given Way. Loving enemies works. Wars are stupid. Arms only destroy and are worse than useless. Weapons and War can be systematically rolled back. The logistics are not difficult. The costs are vastly negative. But for this to happen we need to undo a century of brainwashing by the militarists. Then we can disarm the world.

How can a Church preoccupied by chasubles, frightened by secular powers, locked in denominationalism, focussed on minutiae wake up to this – to being the World Church, to lifting its heads, to disarming the world? Really, it is easy in a social media world where hundreds of thousands of church members could sign petitions in a day, and all Christians can make peace all across the world. We need to know where the shoes of peace are going. The stages are relatively clear. The opposition is obvious. It will be a fight, but with the armour of God – truth, justice, peace, salvation and the Word of God – it can be done. But the first question is: Can the World Church wake up? You, too, are the World Church. Your power is not control or aggression, but shared public conviction and action with Christians everywhere. You are the World Church; you can bring about world multilateral disarmament and much more in God’s purposes.

Big Picture Christianity

Big Picture Christianity

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1. The Christian World Presence.

About 2.3 billion Christians are found around the world in most countries and continents. In cultures not historically Christian, like China, there are at least 50 million. In others, like Russia, where persecution has taken place, Christianity has returned strongly since 1990. Of course, these groups are different in language, culture and often outlook, but there is a great deal they share. The Bible has been translated into almost all languages and most Christian worldwide interact with it often at least once a week. There is a focus on the teaching and life of Christ at the centre of their faith and they meet and share their lives in varying degrees.

The model of Christian growth around the world is also not quite accurate. It is sometimes seen as spread with western colonialism. But that is not fully true even in the Roman Empire. Christianity spread through migration often, and more especially through missionaries, perhaps the most ignored group in human history. The Spanish Empire was substantially a conquest of state and religion, but many missionaries went beyond imperial boundaries, were outside the patterns of conquest and even worked against the imperial power from which they had come. The New Testament model of “go and tell” spread the Christian faith mainly on the basis of coming to faith as a communal and personal matter.

A further aspect of the Christian presence, often ignored, is of the level of persecution and suppression present throughout the 20th century and until the present. In Germany the Kulturkampf signalled a determination to subject Catholicism to the prior loyalty of the State. The Communist Revolution was ideologically secular aiming to eradicate Christianity from the USSR after 1918. The Nazis attacked the Churches and replaced it with a Nazi Church, and Mussolini similarly brought the Catholic Church under the Italian State. This pattern was extended to the Eastern European block after 1945 and the Chinese Communist Revolution had a similar focus. Throughout much of the later 20th century Christianity has been substantially repressed in the Muslim world right up to the present. This makes the two billion figure remarkable.

The other dominant perception of Christianity is of churches and denominations which divide its loyalties. Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant groups were followed by a spate of Protestant denominations and them more recently Pentecostal and Charismatic groups. These groups, it is suggested, inhibit the sharing and commonality of Christians, just as different loyalties are present in Hinduism, Islam and Judaism. There is some truth to this, but it may be changing. For example, the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism at the Reformation have effectively been buried in recent Encyclicals, and denominations work together at all kinds of levels. More than this, the denominational difference which seemed so toxic in earlier centuries are now of little or less import. Most Christians value and enjoy the contributions of other Christian traditions in teaching, faith, music, worship, thinking and community, rather than seeing it in oppositional terms. The globalisation of contemporary culture makes these patterns of Christian international contact easier and they are happening on an enormous scale. A Christian friend flies in from New Zealand on her way to a tree nursery in Uganda which she mentors that has now produced a million trees. Vast patterns of Christian co-operation are underway that seldom hit the headlines.

In truth Christianity has been global in intent since Jesus invited Christians to go into all the world to share the Gospel and global Christianity has developed through mission, translation, education, hospitals, aid and a range of other patterns of co-operation and sharing. Now global Christianity has come and we are entitled to ask what it looks like. It is not a pattern of conquest, though some earlier Christians made that mistake. It sadly has and does involve some persecution though really Christianity offers no threat. It is a worldview and faith within which people live, and the challenge today is expressing and understanding the scope of its significance in world history as well as within the lives of us ordinary Christians. This piece tries to paint the picture.