PERPETUAL REFORMATION — free as the sky

I am one who believes that continual reformation of the Church is needed. Deeper still, is the need for reformation of humanity’s collective God-given-consciousness—how we see God, how we see ourselves, and how we see the relationship between God and us and with one another. From this need for perpetual reformation, fundamental questions stemming from our contexts such as the meaning of life, how we ought to live our life, how societies and communities need to function, etc. would naturally emerge.

In many ways, unrelenting reformation is inevitable and necessary. The Protestant Reformation was a desperately needed reformation originated more from cultural disconnects and discrepancies rather than clear theological convictions. Theological differences were more incidental than primary. The main driving force was the cultural disengagement from the Latin ecclesial world of dominance and absolute authority tainted by corruptions and pagan practices. Luther and Calvin did what they had to do. If not them, there certainly would have been others. It was a cultural revolt against the religious control of the Latin South! (I published an article back in 2006 under the title of Another Reformation on the Horizon. In the middle of the article, I dealt with the Protestant Reformation more specifically. (I am warning you, it is a LONG article!)

I reject the notion that our call is simply to go back to the Reformation and recover what we think we lost. I also reject the notion that Christianity before the Reformation is all rubbish and we are to reject everything Catholic. I would encourage us to embrace the trajectory that was launched by the Protestant reformers. And this trajectory existed long before the Reformation, as there were many other “reformers” throughout history. We are to steward our unique “understanding of the signs of the times” to reinterpret, or if you like, contextualize, how God’s Kingdom ought to be the reality in our times. We are our unique voices in our generation!

This forces us to be students of our times as well as students of God’s ways revealed both in Scriptures and in creation (including our consciences). We then need to engage afresh in serious and robust “conversation” between our understanding of our times and God’s ways both individually and collectively. This duty and burden of “conversation” is unique to our time and should be ever ongoing. This will lead to prophetic (multiple) voices declaring what they are seeing and understanding followed closely by apostles who are eager to break new ground and spearhead new and fresh movements.

Reformation is called for because it helps to question how we got here and helps to shed unnecessary and ill-fitting requirements and boundaries that are not (really never meant to be) for our time. June 19, 2020, is radically different even from April of 2020. June of 2020 is a whole new world and reality away from June 2019. It is and should be a tireless effort in reinterpretation or deeper interpretation of what we think who God is and how God’s Kingdom needs to reign on this earth now.

Parker Palmer speaks with sheer honesty that is fitting for our time. It is a long quote but worth pondering.

“I would be lost in the dark without the light Christianity sheds on my life, the light I find in truths like incarnation, grace, sacrament, forgiveness, blessings, and the paradoxical dance of death and resurrection. But when Christians claim that their light is the only light and that anyone who does not share their understanding of it is doomed to eternal damnation, things get very dark for me. I want to run screaming out into the so-called secular world—which is, I believe, better-named the wide, wild world of God—where I can recover my God given mind. Out there, I catch sight once again of the truth, goodness, and beauty that disappear when pious Christians slam the door on their musty, windowless, lifeless room. Next to a Christian eclipsed by theological arrogance, an honest atheist shines like the sun. Next to a church proclaimed by its exclusion of “otherness,” a city of true diversity is a cathedral.”

I spoke of trajectory earlier. The overarching question is this. Where does this continual reformation go? Where should it be headed? In the words of Stephen A Smith, ESPN sports analyst, “What’s your end game?” It can neither be toward an arrogant theological perfection nor any religiosity’s appetite toward exclusion of otherness. This is the wrong panacea. Rather, it is a call to radical and generous love, more precisely Love. Because God is love, God is steering the entire creation toward union with divine intimacy, which is love both in essence and action.

Could this be God’s Kingdom coming on this earth?