The Unchristian “Christian” Faith (Excerpt from upcoming book)
The honest observer will be hard-pressed to find in the extravagant indecorum and catastrophic novelty of la ecclesia moderna, a single point of contact with the original citadel of truth that was the “primitive” Christian Church; ever besieged but never surrendering; stripped of earthly riches, but happily sated by the glory of Christ and Him crucified.
Liberated from the onerous service of the self, the followers of The Way became free to pursue a never-before-seen, ego-transcending love for friend and foe alike. This full, four-dimensional display of otherworldly divine love (agape) turned the world of their day upside down, causing their faith to spread with a celerity unmatched in prior or subsequent human history. The patently obvious disconnect between the more popular manifestations of Christianity, now and throughout history, to its apostolic, Biblical DNA —the everlasting gospel of Jesus Christ (Revelation 14: 6)— is the world’s worst ongoing tragedy; the restoration of the same is the Church’s most pressing need. Which begs the question: What is the gospel?
Like St Paul the Apostle (AD 5-65?) before him, St Irenaeus of Lyons (AD 130-200?) saw in the self-emptying (“kenosis”) of Jesus, as depicted in Philippians 2: 5-11, the essence of the Gospel. Namely, that the pre-Existent Jesus, (the “Logos” by Whom all things were made” and who “was with God, and was God,” John 1: 1), “self-emptied” of divine prerogatives, came down from heaven, and that in His vicarious, Virgin-birthed, impeccably righteous human life of absolute giving, the “Savior of the world” recapitulated the human race and its history; that He undid its sin and disobedience by His obedience, and, that He gathered it up as a new humanity under His headship as “the last Adam,” and, as such, freely entered into the hellish horrors of a “God-accursed” cross, where “He tasted death [the full judgment of God upon sin] for every man” (Hebrews 2: 9); that in enduring the cross, Christ revealed the height, depth, breadth and width of agapic love –self-giving, unmerited, freely-bestowed, reconciling love; that Christ was resurrected to reveal that nothing, not even death, can separate man from the love of God.
This original, pristine, Christ-centric, world-upending, all-humanity-inclusive, heart-gripping, lifechanging, commandment-keeper-producing, everlasting Good News is so unlike what religion has made of it, that, should you choose to embrace it in word and deed, you will be, by necessity, witnessing to a Christianity that will appear “unchristian” and superhuman to the average Christian; it will have none of the trappings of religion, and all the markings and makings of a most “UNCHRISTIAN” CHRISTIAN FAITH.
