Yesterday I had a wonderful conversation with Thomas for the Something Beautiful podcast. Today, a subsequent Twitter conversation and unrelated post by Greg Bolt on the nature of the boundaries of a church body lead me to focus on the same question: where is God revealed and how can we incorporate that into our religious social structures.
The model of Christendom is that God is specially revealed in specific religious structures and social systems – the denominations. This paradigm ignores that God can also be revealed in systems that have nothing or very little to do with traditional religious structures within Christendom. Essentially, if you want to participate in the life of God, receive forgiveness, salvation, etc., you had better get your butt in church. Even though there is a movement away from this notion, that God can only be revealed and received within specific denominational social structures, it is still assumed and perhaps insisted that as long as you are some sort of Christian church or other named social space or community, you are doing the job of revealing God in the right way.
What this does not take into account is that the very source of a church's revelation, the grace of God which we receive by following the way of Jesus, is formed in a ministry that revealed God to all of those outside of the bounds of the normative religious structures, social spaces, and religious social systems of the time. In parable after parable, and confrontation after confrontation with religious and political authorities, Jesus has reveals a clear and common thread: when the Kingdom of God is revealed, it is revealed everywhere to everyone. Jesus reveals a Kingdom, a community and socio-political system, completely radical to all social systems of the time. The only fault of the religious authorities is that they are so bound to the system of revelation that they received, that they do not see God revealed fully in their very presence in Jesus.
I have been asked many times by atheists why I don't believe in unicorns, Zeus, or follow Allah revealed through Muhammad if I cannot actually prove any of it, much less why I specifically believe in Jesus. My answer is that this revelation of God, in Jesus Christ, makes sense to me, it forms a lifeworld I understand, it is a set of traditions that I hold dear because they have made me the person I am, and it offers me a source of spiritual nourishment. If Jesus is the special and unique revelation of God, that makes sense to me. In short, Jesus works.
I believe that every human being is born with a unique sense of the spiritual and is born with a unique ability to receive God. I also believe that God is so beyond our physical limitations – our churches, our traditions, our cultures, and the existence of space and time – that there is no place within the entire set of space and time that was and is out of the reach of God's resurrection in Christ. In Christ space and time were healed from the great rift that space and time create between the human ability to receive God, and the being of God itself.
To say that God can only be received or even fully received within a specific tradition betrays the very ministry through which Jesus reveals to us the Kingdom of God. That the two greatest commandments are love of God and love of neighbor are not limited to the Abrahamic traditions alone is witness to the reality that God is revealed in every corner of the universe, in every hidden place where we delude ourselves and convince ourselves that God cannot possibly be. The narrow gate of Christ is thus a paradox since it rips open all space and all time to show that God invites all into a Kingdom that is being revealed literally everywhere. The beauty we only need to receive it.
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