Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is an engineer, teacher, and former pastor. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Kansas with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has practicing tae kwon do and pondering the mysteries of light.
Sometimes it is hard to see the shape of landscape you are traversing when you are in the middle of it. Or as the saying goes, “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” I have found this to be true about the church. Of all the things that I have noticed about the church after leaving the pastorate, the one that has been the most continually bothersome to me is the confidence, often hubris, with which the church engages the world. I see two parts to this confidence/hubris.
The first part is the implicit denial that there is anything good and sacred in the world outside the church. In its less subtle forms, you’ll find churches and pastors acting as the gatekeepers of all that is good and beautiful in this world. “You can’t like that song, it uses a curse word.” “You can’t like that movie, it wasn’t produced by one of our vetted Christian production companies.” “You can’t read that book, so-and-so says that it has hints of paganism in it.” In its subtler forms, this comes across as a sense that the people who aren’t connected with a church must be pining somewhere deep down for whatever your specific church is good at. Somehow, your church has the capacity to meet the deepest and most fundamental needs of those who aren’t already involved. (Just ignore the fact that your own church doesn’t even meet your own deepest and most fundamental desires and yearnings. More on this soon.)
The second part is the assurance that churches so often have that they can fix the world. Look around. Churches all over the place promise, implicitly or explicitly, that they know how to truly bring in the Kingdom of Heaven: how to end hunger, greed, and racism; how to get our country back on track; how to end violence, stop wars, heal all maladies, and often, but subtly, how to avoid death itself.
Remember several years ago when Charlie Sheen became known for his chaotic internet rants and his catchphrase, “winning”? I wonder sometimes if this is how the outside world sees the modern American church.
That is a harsh assessment, but I think it is worth considering. How much time do churches and denominations spend telling themselves that they are on the right path, that they are walking the straight and narrow, that they are truly doing Kingdom work? And yet, attendance continues to decline, and each year 50% more church doors shut forever than open new. (Not to mention that Jesus’ criticism was almost always aimed at the religious authorities, in other words pastors and denominational leaders.)
I tend to believe that at the heart of most of our issues, individually and corporately, lies some false understanding or poor theology. And I want to submit that part of what is ailing the church and causing these present symptoms is a warped theology of the Fall. So I invite you to take a moment with me and reconsider what the Fall means. Let’s rethink the Fall.
The biblical story of the Fall is told in Genesis 3. There the representative first man and woman were tempted to distrust God’s goodness and take matters into their own hands. They ate of the forbidden fruit, abandoned God’s plan, and we have been reaping the consequences ever since. We screwed up. We keep screwing up and it is only thanks to Jesus that we are able to break the cycle of sin and get back on track.
If this were all that the Fall told us, I would have nothing else to say.
But there is more to the Fall story than I just relayed, and not just because I paraphrased a whole chapter in just a couple of sentences. From very early on in Judaism it was felt that there were holes in the story of the Fall that needed to be filled in, questions that needed to be explored. Such as what do we do with the snake who tempted the humans? Where did it come from? How did an agent of chaos and evil end up in a brand-new, untouched garden-paradise? It wasn’t long before the snake became a representation of Satan, a character that was eventually fleshed out to be a fallen member of God’s servants, the angels.
Christianity adopted and further developed the stories of Satan and the back-story of how evil made its way into God’s good creation. In the second century AD, just a century or so after Jesus’ resurrection, Irenaeus told his own version of this story. It’s my favorite. (You can read in in his little book On the Apostolic Preaching.) Here is how he explains the situation.
Before God created anything else, He created a whole host of angelic creatures, servants (angels) and stewards (archangels). These creatures were given various roles and authorities in the cosmos. The greatest archangel, Lucifer, was given authority over the world that we call Earth. That was to be the place of God’s most special creation, humanity, creatures made in the very image of God. These humans would not be like the angelic creatures; they would need time to mature and develop into the full creatures that God created them to be. But once they reached maturity, they would be the greatest creatures in all God’s vast Creation, second only to God Himself. The process of maturity would take some guidance and careful oversight. For this task God assigned His greatest archangel, Lucifer. But Lucifer, upon hearing God’s plan, how these creatures that he would be guiding and raising would one day be greater than him, would rule over him, became jealous. He formulated his own plan. He would keep his authority over the earth, but he would rebel against God’s plan. He would throw the humans off course and never allow them to reach a status higher than he held. They would be his servants forever.
According to Irenaeus, this was the motivation behind the temptation in the garden. This is how evil came to be present in an otherwise perfect world. This is how we got off track. Yes, humanity failed to obey perfectly and yes we are culpable for the ways that we still serve our own will, rather than the will of God. But the deck has been stacked against us since before we were born. The steward of our world, of humanity itself, turned selfish and sought his own good rather than ours.
It isn’t hard to see this story at play in the ministry of Jesus. When he is tempted in the desert Satan leads him up to a high mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of the world. He offers Jesus authority over these kingdoms and claims that such authority had been given to him. Jesus doesn’t argue. He affirms the authority of Satan over our world. In Jesus’ ministry Satan is talked about as a renegade ruler, as a usurper of authority, as a rebel more than anything else. Jesus comes to reclaim the throne, but is defeated. The crucifixion is the final word on who’s world this really is. Until, that is, the Resurrection, when Jesus is raised to a new kind of life, the kind that humanity was always destined for. But then something curious happens.
After spending a few weeks on earth enjoying his resurrected body, Jesus leaves. He ascends to heaven to take his place as the rightful King of the cosmos. But that is the tricky part. The decisive battle has been won, but the war continues. We still live in enemy-occupied territory. We live in a world that is still under a rogue authority. This isn’t the full story, for Jesus sent his Holy Spirit to be present with us. We have more capacity to resist Satan than humans perhaps did before Pentecost. But the war isn’t over.
I can’t tell you why this is the case. I don’t have a good explanation for why Jesus is still preparing a place for us 2,000 years on. But I can say that the church doesn’t do anyone any favors pretending that the situation is anything other than it is.
Just like humanity itself, we have each grown up in a world ruled by a fallen archangel. All that we have learned, we have learned in the context of a bent and disordered world. All the good that we have done or experienced has been marred by the selfishness we have inherited from of our caretaker. All the beauty that we possess, or create, or enjoy is streaked with the ugliness of his pride active in us. We live in a fallen world, a world so bent and perverted and distorted that what we consider our most righteous acts are nothing but filthy rags when compared to the glory we were created for.
That analogy comes from the prophet Isaiah (64:4). But I’m pretty sure that it is not meant to cause us to feel guilty. We did not cause the situation. Certainly, we have added to it; I do daily. We are not guiltless. But we cannot take upon ourselves, the cosmic disorder that has been growing ever since the ruler of our world decided to rebel and sabotage God’s good plan.
Jesus came to take this on, and did take it on in his Incarnation, death and Resurrection. But the project is incomplete. All has not yet been made right. Not in us, and not in our world.
And quite frankly, we suffer from a huge dearth of imagination when it comes to a vision of how the world really should be, was supposed to be.
All of our best visions of the ideal, of the New Heavens and New Earth, are Spinal Tap visions. They are simply the best aspects of our experience “taken to 11.” We envision God’s plan for us to be something like all the best moments of our life put together with none of the bad stuff. I imagine this is something like dreaming of playing in sewage when compared to the life God actually created us to live, the life we will one day enjoy. Jesus came to reclaim this world and to forge a new path to a life so exceedingly good, and beautiful, and joyous that our greatest moments in this life are little more than pale shadows of it.
This is why I find the modern church’s overconfidence in itself so frustrating, especially when it talks about bringing in the Kingdom, or doing Kingdom work, or fighting for the Kingdom, or reclaiming the Kingdom. It seems to ignore the reality that there is a force, an authority, still ruling over this world, distorting and warping all we see and experience. And when that is ignored, people get hurt.
People are hurt when they realize that they can’t simply pray away suffering and their implicit theology tells them that they should be able to. People are hurt when they are afflicted with random, chaotic illnesses, and their church is too focused on being a positive and encouraging part of the Kingdom to attend to their needs. People are hurt when their church’s striving for the Kingdom ignores or ostracizes them. And quite frankly, people are hurt when they buy into the idea that the Kingdom can be achieved through leadership, through politics, through force, through activism, rather than through sacrifice, through humility, through forgiveness and through reconciliation.
There are many good things that churches are doing: many good ministries, many good ways of caring for people, many good ways of working towards peace and reconciliation. These are all aspects of the ideal that God created us for. But they are pale shadows of our heavenly Kingdom projected onto a bent and broken world. We have never seen any visions of the Kingdom that didn’t take on some of the attributes of this broken world we live in.
The work of the church is necessary. But it ought to serve as something like a hospital, caring for bent and broken souls, doing good, but doing it humbly knowing that the Kingdom will only fully arrive when Christ returns and makes all things new. All our best works are still filthy rags when compared to that glorious day.
Until then we wait, not passively, but always seeking to align our actions with God’s will. We may not be able to fix the problem, but we can mend some wounds along the way. And we cultivate a spiritual imagination that recognizes our own deepest longings and creatively considers what kind of Kingdom might actually satisfy all that we are looking for.
God’s true Kingdom is even greater than that.