I believe absolutely in the truth of Christ, and yet I do not belong to an established church or spiritual organization of any kind. I might even go so far as to say it’s because I believe in Christ that I do not belong to any church. The reason is that we are living in that time known as the latter days in Christian eschatology, and this is a time of spiritual decline during which all outer forms of spirituality, including those religions which have previously promoted and protected truth, are falling away from the purity of their original vision. But that is not the only problem for while these avenues to truth were more than sufficient to satisfy man’s spiritual needs in the past, they all arose at a time when human consciousness was rather different to what it is now so they can no longer perform their function effectively.
The fact is outward forms of religion are right and necessary for souls at a certain stage but there comes a time when the individual needs to transfer his attention away from the outer path to the inner, and that often means going beyond conventional religion. In the past that was not so necessary but in these end times it is increasingly the case. If a religion is made up of body and soul, which are the outer structure and the inner animating vision, it is surely obvious that in a time of materialism the body will loom large while the soul will recede. The religion turns into an institution which means it is no longer a real religion.
And from that arises my chief complaint against the modern churches which is that they have all allowed themselves to be corrupted by “this world”. All too often they now conceive of spirituality horizontally, which means their eyes are fixed on human beings rather than God. Doubtless this is part of a demonic attempt to undermine truth, but it is aided and abetted by the feeble quality of church leaders who, for the most part, are not men of vision, still less saints or mystics, but administrators and bureaucrats, more concerned with their organisation than divine truth. The result has been they have conceded more and more ground to the modernist ideology of worldly progress, and now have values little different from the current left/liberal ethos which is founded on the centrality of the human being as he appears to be in this world. This is a process that has been ongoing for well over a century, but has really picked up speed over the last few decades.
The result is that much official Christianity is now a hollowed-out shell. It has followed the world instead of renouncing it. It has succumbed to the temptation of appearing loving rather than actually being loving, and it has done this because it has misconceived love, restricting it to a kind of non-judgmental egalitarianism due to the earthly self rather than the developing soul. Tolerance, currently meaning full acceptance of pretty much anything regardless of what it is, has become more important to it than truth. That has inevitably led to a loss of truth and a disconnect from the transcendent God with the result that many churches now seem more concerned with matters of social justice than spiritual transformation. And all this has come about because contemporary Christianity has made the huge mistake of trying to compromise with the modern world.
Many branches of Christianity have followed that path and despiritualised themselves. They have become absorbed into the modern anti-spiritual mindset because they were not strong enough to resist it. The spirituality of the leaders and members of these branches of religion has been too shallow, too insubstantial and too little felt for them to be able to shake off the influences of this world. Consequently, they have accommodated themselves to it, become part of it and are now not only indistinguishable from it but actively fight on its side and against real religion if by that we mean, as we should, spiritual truth.
Official Christianity has compromised. The trouble with compromise is that it tends to assume truth lies between two extremes. But does truth lie between the extremes of right and wrong? Does it lie between God and no God, between truth and a lie? Evidently not, but when a lie is powerful enough, and almost universally accepted, it can take on the mantle of a truth. The only thing to do then is to reject it and point out its falseness. You cannot make a compromise with it or you will be infected by it and the infection will spread, eventually taking over completely. This is what has happened in the Western world which has set the agenda for everywhere else.
The only justification for a religion is that it is a doorway to the supernatural. When the doorway is open the religion functions as it should. But when the supernatural is no longer the absolute be all and end all of the religion it is spiritually defunct even if it carries on existing, even if it grows and spreads.
This is based on a chapter from Remember The Creator.
No comments:
Post a Comment