Where will you go when your Kingdoms lay in ruins?
In the history of higher education in America two aspects of education were initially fused in the social function of education: (1) personal piety and discipline buttressed by Calvinist and Puritan theological systems; and (2) the overwhelming social structural foundations created by the various denominations and sects that founded institutions of higher education from the late 1600's thought he late 1800's. What we see is that a fusion of social enterprise with a theological perspective causes both to either succeed or fall apart.
In the case of American higher education, the short story is that when discipline and piety as the foundational functions of the curriculum began to get left behind the increase of knowledge in terms of science, egalitarian democracy, nationalism, progressivism, and a proliferation of disciplines, it remained fused with religion and so, religion went down with it. Rather than let go of the idea of discipline and piety as central notions that had to be communicated through a classical curriculum of ancient languages and rhetoric, religion clung to the system to validate its place of privilege and importance in a changing society and culture.
The same sort of phenomenon can be seen in a place like France in which the organic fusion of Catholicism for centuries was so pervasive in increasingly corrupt political systems, that when those political systems were called into question and rejected by the masses, it was only natural to reject Catholicism at the same time.
It is a constant problem in religion that when it holds on to social and political systems that serve the ends of specific social classes and ideologies, the very representation of God by that religion will be sundered by those that it rejects. This is not because the people start of wanting to reject God or even the religion. It happens because religion cannot let go of the social systems that are keeping its own systems intact. When those systems in the Kingdoms of the World crumble, religion in its selfish desire to retain its privileged view of the world sinks with it.
This is an important message this Easter season. We live in a world with political and economic systems that continue to crumble. We have religious and theological ideas and structures that are insufficient to make sense of it all. Jesus knew this over 2000 years ago. It is why he came to reveal and found a Kingdom that was not dependent on the Kingdoms of the World. Humanity rejected that message and rejected that Kingdom not because they first hated God, but because that Kingdom threatened the stability of their own Kingdoms and asked everyone to give up their own self-preservation in these Kingdoms in order to pursue a different one of God's creation. Clinging to their own Kingdoms, they killed Jesus – an act which is the ultimate expression of human sin and idolatry.
If we fuse and confuse our own Kingdoms with that which Jesus came to found, and if we cling to our own Kingdoms to maintain some kind of privilege status in the world, where we will go when they crumble either through human error, or by the very wrath of God that ripped open the Temple curtain on Good Friday?
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