Church welfare takes the well-paved road

But when we read the kingdom parables of the New Testament we find they do not fit the idea of human progress as produced by our activity. Compared with what the New Testament calls hope, this utopian version can only be described as a fabrication, however well-meaning and attractive.

Rather, the Kingdom of God is the consummation towards which all God’s ways and works are moving. It is not a development within previous possibilities, but the new possibility of life. It is the kingdom of God, not man.

It is tempting to identify the West’s enormous progress with the establishment of the kingdom, and we must admit there is a connection between that progress and our Christian inheritance that other non-Christian nations seem to lack.

As is shown by the now almost complete secularisation of our society, however, scientific and technological progress continue to expand to produce wealth that lifts many out of poverty while being antagonistic to the Christian inheritance. We can do all that we do without waiting on God.

It has been the mark of the liberal Church that it turns to psychology, sociology and social work to find its place in the community. A misunderstanding of the result of historical critical study of the Bible has devastated its theology and reduced Jesus to the good guy whom we should all emulate.

Because Jesus as the “One who comes” has been replaced by the good moral teacher, preaching finds little to say that is not patently obvious. It is remarkable to hear a sermon based ostensibly on the most confronting text that tells of the coming of God and the fulfillment of all things, ending with unremarkable bits of spiritual advice.

When the liberal Church jettisoned the New Testament’s end-time orientation, it rendered it indecipherable. If the preacher has a social conscience, sermons inevitably become a bandwagon for all kinds of causes. The social justice committee has a habit of establishing a new kind of pharisaism that happily gives us a catalogue of issues and its judgment of what side we should be on.

The parables of the light set on a stand and of the leaven in the dough are interpreted in terms of what we can do for society rather than what God has done in us that can be shared with the world.

Our greatest gift to the world is not to be found in our activism but in our witness to the Word that makes all things new. This is why the Church traditionally has built beautiful churches complete with wonderful stained glass and thundering organs. This is why the celebration has been replete with vestments, silverware and incense, and a liturgy that melts our hearts. Public worship was meant to be astonishing because the gospel under which it lived was astonishing.

When the Church loses its faith and turns towards the betterment of the conditions of men and women, it is inevitable expenditure on the luxuries of worship will be condemned as wasteful and irresponsible. We must remember how the feet of Jesus were anointed with pure nard and how some complained that the act was extravagant: it should have been sold and given to the poor.

One of the delights of touring Europe is to visit parish churches and medieval cathedrals. The love and expense showered on places of worship by communities that had little compared to our excess puts the modern Church to shame. The idea that we should sell our places of worship to be where the people are is fanciful.

The loss of the New Testament’s end-time orientation, filled out in terms of the coming of the “Crucified and Risen One”, has given us a church that can only mouth the truisms we find in everyday life.