Spot On - The Essential Conflict

The difficulty of this blog is that by squeezing out one article at a time between thesis revisions :) you might miss the big picture of what I'm trying to do. I want to use this column to talk about the big picture, and to generate some analogies that might be useful in seeing what we are doing. It all has to do with what I call the essential conflict, the conflict that has shaped human history since its inception.

Throughout history the essential conflict has raged between the people and the priests. The pattern is the same across many different cultures and thousands of years. God reveals himself to the people, so that they can get to know him. Whether voluntarily or by force, the people form a priesthood. At first the priest tries to help the people get to know God, but soon his humanity takes over. He craves the power of being the intermediary between God and man. He knows the sins of everyone in the village. He makes it more difficult to get to God by adding his own requirements. The priests band together to form a power structure. This power structure starts accumulating power, prestige, money, and sex. The priests hold the keys to the kingdom. Rebelling against them is the same as rebelling against God. In three generations or so the priest no longer makes it easier for people to find God, but harder. He has become the gatekeeper, and only those he smiles upon achieve eternal life. We can't criticize him; he's doing an important job after all. His needs are different. He speaks the word of God.

Then, someone stands up to the priests and says "No!" to their power structure. Depending on how integrated the priests have become with the political system (or, in the middle ages, when they were the political system) this person can be imprisoned, killed, silenced. Another rises. Soon, after much sacrifice and suffering at the hands of the priests, a group of people breaks out of the system. They want access to God without priests, so they create a community that has direct access to God. They are often persecuted, called witches and hunted down. This type of revolution has happened over and over in history. The bible contains the record of several such revolutions: Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul, to name a few. And if you study church history in the slightest way, you'll see this pattern repeated over and over.

Jesus came to end once and for all the rule of the priests. He gave us all direct access to God, without any intermediary but himself. Being fully God, Jesus proved that he could be a priest without the human temptations to power. Think of his trials in the desert. God himself became our intermediary. So true religion, the true worship of God, needs no priest. This is the radical message of Jesus, and why the Pharisees ultimately killed him. They, after all, were the priests of their day.

It is true about human nature that we will rule over one another if given the chance. We will always take the actions that benefit us, and if they screw over someone else, well too bad. We would expect this attitude in business or politics, and we would hope that such would not be the case in our religious lives. But it is. We are no different in church than we are in the boardroom. We are evil, face it. We shouldn't be trusted with each others salvation, and God doesn't want us to be.

Now, I've said that this cycle has played itself out over and over again. Just look at church history. A church rises in a flush of joy over finding God, power structures form, and soon the church is trapped in a human set of rules and games meant to enrich those at the top of the structure. Should we just consign ourselves to this truth? Maybe this is just what God wants?

No. I cannot believe that the creator of the space-time continuum enjoys seeing his people flayed alive by the priests in his name. If you've spent any time in ministry, you know the evil that relatively stable and sane people can subject each other to. I did it; everyone does it. It's part of the package. To be a priest is to inflict pain on others. Sometimes you'll find someone who avoids the worst aspects of a priest, but we all at one time or another end up ganging up on someone, or using our power for our own gain, or lying to our congregation to protect ourselves. I've had sweet old lady ministers lie to my face while scheming against me the whole time. The ministry is a web of schemes and infighting and one-upmanship. It's a horrible, filthy, ugly, wicked, petty, conniving world.

So, I'm not interested in just reforming the problems of the Evangelical church. Someone could do that pretty easily. At the moment the Evangelical church is integrating itself into our government, so pretty soon disobeying a pastor will not just get you thrown out of church, it will brand you as a terrorist. As America decays into a theocracy, it will become dangerous to criticize the church. You'll notice that among the sins decried by the Evangelical church, violence is absent, because you need violence to run a police state. Blackballing people who are not Evangelical Christians already occurs at the Army base where I work; I'm sure it's even worse in private industry. Of course, as the Evangelical church gains more power, they become more corrupt. Soon, any sort of revolution in the church would be a revolution against the government; the two are rapidly becoming the same thing. The priests are winning in America, and now they have nukes.

Thankfully, governments come and go and one day they will sift through the sands of America looking for artifacts, trying to learn our language, arguing over our texts. But God's people will still be around, joking about what significance the female shape of the Coke bottle had in the sexually repressed 1950s.

No, what is needed is a fundamental shift in what the church is, to finally break us out of the cycle of priests vs. people.

This is what we must do: we must reshape the church at its very core, so that it has nothing that causes men to want to use it to dominate others. This is difficult, but I think it can be done. At the moment there are several aspects of the church that make it useful to someone who wants to control other people:

1. Conformity. Everyone in a church thinks the same way. People who think differently are ostracized.
2. Ignorance. Authority in the church comes from the leadership's interpretation of the Bible. They claim they are "just reading" it, but anyone with a bit of skill in reading can see where they are wrong. Thus, it becomes important to lift up the priest as the only one who can "properly" interpret the bible. Most people don't have the time, so in their ignorance they trust the priest.
3. Large-group Shared Experience. Church services are designed to promote the loyalty of people to something larger than themselves. This is a fine thing, but normally the "something larger" is God. In this case it is the church hierarchy and the sect.
4. Sloganeering. Sermons are designed around slogans that require little thought and cannot be critiqued: "Give it all to God!", "Sola Scriptura!", etc. Thus people do not learn to critique an argument, only to repeat the slogan. Critical thinking is discouraged in the church.
5. Hell. The threat of disobedience to the church hierarchy is eternal damnation. Sure, they'll say that people outside their sect go to heaven, but they don't really mean it. Only by following their doctrine and obeying their rules are you assured of heaven.
6. Manipulation. People in church are used to responding to manipulation, whether it is for the collection, the sermon, or appeals to work in the nursery. Thus, they tend to be more malleable than unchurched people. That plus ignorance is a big benefit to someone who wants to control people.

The church makes an excellent base from which to rule the world. And that's what many men have done over the centuries. We must change this, by negating the effects given above that make a church so tempting to those who want to control others. Perhaps by doing this, we can break the cycle of priest and people by once and for all destroying the need for priests.

"You will be a kingdom of priests, and a royal priesthood."

The way that we change the church to be less appealing to the controllers of the world is the task of this site. It's a tough one, but I think we can do it. If we don't the church will be condemned to another millennia of men using it for their own means. We can't let that happen.