The Islamization of the Church

Funerals in America are often elaborate events. There will rarely be hired wailers anymore, as there were in past cultures. A different set of rituals has replaced much of the reality of death, with its sharp interference in the normal lives of relatives and neighbors. The deceased are no longer kept in the family home until burial but are whisked away, disinfected and embellished, and then exposed at a reception in their honor in the parlor of the funeral home. This is called a wake. As mentioned earlier, one advertisement suggested, "You just die, we do the rest." Skillful morticians disguise the face of death with their creams and lotions and a mouth filled with wire. Landscaped cemeteries resemble rolling hills and parks, sometimes with music piped in. Stones and monuments mark a place and time against oblivion and point to the sky until the expected resurrection from the brutality of death.

When death becomes a normal part of life rather than its revolting antithesis, a remarkable shift in the horizon of grief and hope has taken place. Both are reduced, only privately held, not publicly admitted. Perhaps this is the result of our longer lives and exhausted attachments. As an adult, you have had your turn. Now move over and cede the place to the younger ones in the cycles of life! But in that case something central to the biblical view of life and history has been made irrelevant.

Its comfort is reduced to improving personal feelings. Its message is spiritual in a perverted way. It no longer remembers the tragedy of life now and a future hope. Life and death are merely a part of the flow of things. The embellishment is an attempt to reduce the grief over the absence of a real and unique person. It is considered more spiritual to accept what has happened.

The message at a recent funeral of a distant relative is in many ways typical. A girl had died after struggling under her physical handicap for twelve years, supported by the intense, warm, and loving care of her parents. The pastor spoke about the plan of God for each life: God does not make mistakes. He had given that child to her parents to teach them these things, which they had learned. Now it was time to call her back to himself. In God's sovereignty he had permitted the handicap. Now he had decided on her death. This was good. We were all the richer for it: Lessons learned, sovereignty affirmed, events approved. End of sermon!

There was no word of grief, no admission that death stinks and is not part of the plan of God. It had all gone according to plan. Even the handicap of the child was a part of that, since "God does not make mistakes." The lessons learned by the parents had required the child to be burdened, to live a life of struggle and pain. The comfort comes from the belief in a plan of an inscrutable God who makes no mistakes and teaches us spiritual lessons.

There is, however, a shift in theology and in practical belief confessed by many Christians in American churches, the result of two distinct changes in perception. The God of the Bible is first transcendent. That means he is not found in creation, which he had made outside of himself. (All of reality is present to God, but God is not present in all reality: You can continue to eat your sandwich, for God is not in it!) Creation is outside of God because he is eternal, and creation thus has a beginning. God made the universe distinct from himself, looked at it face to face in various stages, and saw it as good. He was pleased with what he had made. Into such a creation he acts through powerful intervention, miracles, additional creative acts, and his Word, both written and living. Prophets and apostles spoke and acted as God's Spirit directed them. Jesus came into the world and became flesh in order to bear our sin on the cross and to be raised again from the dead. Transcendent does not mean that God is finished with his creation. There is no room for a deist view of things, which proposed that God once made the world but then left it to function according to its own laws and program. The God of the Bible is intimately involved with and personally active in creation, history, and the future of man at every moment. Yet the Creator is always the eternal, infinite, and personal God of the Bible. The creation is always limited, for it had a beginning and was made in the shape and with the definitions imagined and spoken into existence by God.

In this view the knowledge of God comes to us through language, his Word, from outside of what we see around us. We do not create the knowledge of God, but his Spirit informs us what is on God's mind. "Man does not live by bread alone" suggests that there is more to life than the stuff you find lying around and what nature produces. The more is "every word that comes from the mouth of the lord" (Deuteronomy 8:3; Matthew 4:4). Concepts, meaning, moral directions, definitions, and explanations about purpose are not found in nature but in the mind of the Creator, who communicates them through language, grammar, and syntax.

This transcendent view has now, however, been replaced by a greater emphasis on God's immanence. By that is meant that God is seen no longer as acting into history from the perspective of his own moral character and will; instead God is somehow linked to the flow of history itself. God is found in nature, in the choices of man, and in the events around us. Nature now speaks to us and gives us clues about meaning, manners, and morals. What happens is seen as divine. The outside critique or reference of the Word, which allowed us to evaluate all events, has been replaced by an inside reference system of events. The transcendent God of the Bible has been supplanted by the immanent gods of powers, feelings, occurrences, and various life experiences in the flow of time.

The second harmful shift lies in the assumption that events, history, and life itself is a manifestation of the will of God. For then the moral distance between God and a fallen creation is abolished. The Bible clearly stated (and here again it is unique in all religions and worldviews) that we now live in an abnormal world. Sin has destroyed what God had in mind and what he had, successfully of course, made. There is a real moral and existential chasm between the original creation and what is the result of sin. Death among human beings, for instance, was not part of creation and will not always be a part of creation God created us to live forever. The work of Christ, the Messiah, will make that possible again in the future. Sin, death, and the consequences of sin were not part of the plan or will of God. He warned against them before the Fall.

Death among people did not exist as a part of God's creation. He grieved over Adam and Eve after they turned against him and rebelled. They produced, by their choice to rebel, a new situation that affected all creation. They responded to the serpent's temptation and brought death into the perfect world, which God had finished creating at the end of the sixth day.

The way toward expressing God's sovereign will is filled with battles and scars, which requires our moral discernment concerning what is good and evil, right and wrong. History is not a clear flow or stream of God's design and purpose. It is also the result of sin, rebellion, stupidity, and accusations powerfully carried out by Satan. The book of Job draws open the curtain for us to see something of this battle in the heavens.

Thus the Christian and the Jew never had to bow blindly to circumstances. For both of them, whatever happened in history was always to be checked again through the moral and defining lens of God's Word. They prayed for deliverance, for a change of kings and battle lines. They interceded against the sins of people, so that God's will would be done where it was not yet being done on earth.

This allowed the Christian and the Jew to contribute to the creation of history rather than just to submit to it as final or to tolerate it spiritually. The believer is the one who engages himself against nature's hostility, against the injustice of men, and against sickness and death in a broken world. There was never a reason for fatalism, resignation, or unquestioned submission in the teaching of the Bible or in the life of the church.

How tragic, if not perverse, it is then that fatalism, resignation, and spiritual submission to an assumed will of God, seen in the events and course of history, have become Christian virtues! What was characteristic of Islam, of African tribal religion, of the teaching about the inevitable march and cost of history in Marxism, or of the stars determining the experiences of your life and telling you about this in horoscopes has entered as a mind-set in much modern Christian teaching.

Death is not normal! The late Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann addressed this trend of Western culture in his little book For the Life of the World. He made many of the same notes: that we tend to treat death as something perfectly normal, albiet unpleasant and best hygenized and shunted away out of view. On the other hand, Schmemann says, the 'religious' view is that death is merely a part of God's plan. Neither view, of course, is true: death is awful, brutal, a mockery of God and man and all being. It is something to be treated as a reviled enemy. We are to recognize Christ's defeat of death, and thus we have reason not to fear it. However, this does not mean we should accept it; rather, we should despise it all the more.

Very worthwhile. Thank you. I especially appreciated this part.

I suggest that the reason many like to identify God with what is happening in their lives is a fear of a loss of control. They make themselves believe in a closed sovereignty, for they do not like the unfinished situation found in a fallen world. Consequently while they advocate the control of God over the events in history, they abandon God to immorality. He becomes the author of whatever comes to pass. At least he allows what, in their eyes, he could prevent, if only he chose to. But since it happens, he must have decided not to want to help, even though he could have.

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