What is the Goal?

Sunday's texts provided an interesting opportunity for me to verbalize an element of the Emergent Church movement that I have often mentally and emotionally considered, but had never before said. That element is the different goal/aim of the Emergent Church, when compared to the traditional, institutional model of the modern age.

 

It seems to me to be quite clear that the Christian faith began in its infancy to be something entirely different from the bulk of its historical identity. That is, the ethic of Jesus - and maybe even Paul -differs significantly from the institutional developments that take place in the Church within the next several hundred years. The theology changes. The practices develop. Orthodoxy replaces the ethic of Jesus. Institutional adherence displaces spiritual energy. Within several hundred years of Jesus, the burgeoning institution that bears his name became an organization with a completely different goal, aim and outcome.

 

The aim of Jesus' ethic was a radically fair and just way of life that embraces every person, bringing peace and joy to every life. The aim of Jesus' ministry is a universally shared ethic of self-sacrifice and mutual concern that results in care for every person. Paul picked up Jesus' theological ball with the suggestion that Christ's Crucifixion and Resurrection might serve as archetype for those who would follow Jesus. The aim and goal of the faith was establishment of God's kingdom on earth. In Paul's age, the urgency of establishing a cultural order that served every crease and crevice of Creation overshadowed the selfishness and myopia of traditional Judaism.

 

Soon, though, a whole new theological component replaced the ethic of Jesus and Paul. Instead of the energy for establishing a new cultural order, the faith's goal and aim soon changed to providing its adherents a means of eternal reward. Hope of Heaven displaced an ethic and urgency for peace and justice. As the institutional Christian Church developed, it offered a clear path to eternity in paradise. This hope was other-worldly, after-life, beyond death. The more it became the aim and goal of the Christian faith, the less the Church embodied the ethic of Jesus and Paul. 

 

The cultural changes that began sometime in the late 1960's have highlighted the core hypocrisy of the Christian Church. While the faith began with an ethic of servanthood, equality and radical unity, it quickly became self-serving, ritualistic, divisive and reflective of social order and status. The new culture will not be deceived by the righteous words and dire warnings of eternal damnation. It knows better. Christian faith is only Christian faith insofar as its adherents follow its base ethic in Jesus and Paul.

 

The Emergent Church therefore has as its goal and aim an ethic for human life that reflects the ministry of Jesus Christ and Paul. It offers a rejection of the divisive and exclusionary claims of a theology of Heaven or Hell.

 

So, I have come to see the Emergent Church movement as a further step in the Church's spiritual evolution. It is a re-awakening of the ethic that drove the faith in its infancy. It is recovery of the most ancient attitudes of the faith, those that rested with Jesus and Paul...and maybe others. While the Emergent Church movement calls the contemporary Church to retool, undoing a great deal that the institutions holds sacred, this step forward in the spiritual evolution of the Church is necessary to its relevancy and meaningfulness, as much as it is to its survival.

 

Can we give up a theological aim and goal of eternity in Heaven?