The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard spoke for me when, about 150 years ago he said, "Christendom has done away with Christianity without quite being aware of it."
If Christianity is this belief system that has at its core the basic truth of salvation through faith in Jesus, then Christendom is the huge empire of religion that has grown up around it. The empire includes churches, denominations, the politics of Christianity, the business of Christianity, and everything else that has attached itself to the gospel.
I also see a similar analogy in the confusing relationship between the Church as the Body of Believers or the Bride of Christ, and the church as the religious institution. Most Christians, I would say, are thinking of the two as one-and-the-same. Yet, it is possible for the Body of Christ to function completely outside the institution, and in fact, David Barrett, author of the World Christian Encyclopedia, predicts that the number of Christians who are not associated with any church or denomination will double in the next twenty years.
One of the deadly by-products of this confusion is that people are born and raised believing that they are saved by the church rather than by faith in Christ. And this is not an exclusively Catholic phenomenon.
I said more about this dynamic between the "Church" and the "church" in a previous blog, "Harmful Hierarchy Part 2".
2 comments:
"...it is possible for the Body of Christ to function completely outside the institution..."
When I read this line, my mind goes to the converse: that it is also possible for the institutional church to operate at full-tilt without any presence of the living and functioning Body of Christ.
Good thoughts Bob and Kaye. They do however break my heart.
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