Tuesday, July 26, 2005

A bedtime story

Of course, there´s always an opinion on whatever subject to be found when wanted. I found a tale of sorts on the Internet which relates to the subject of Christian anarchy. I´m not calling it the God-awful truth (and there are some mis-spellings), but it´s kind of cute none the less. “Arky” is a neologism signifying “hierarchichal power” or “worldly might” or some such thing. (From http://www.hccentral.com/eller12/part1.html The site is quite extensive, and actually I would advise to read it with caution, some of it is VERY partisan)

“You see, once upon a time there was this little anarchist church--in fact, the very one we've been talking about--that of Jesus, Paul, and the other New Testament Christians. And it--in its rather weak, unorganized, anarchical way (following the pattern its anarchical apostle)--went bumbling about the empire, evangelizing handfuls of individuals here and there and leaving them in little anarchical house-groups.

Actually, in comparison to some other churches of other eras, its church-growth statistics weren't all that bad. Nevertheless, in time, some strategic planners came along who said, "Folks, this anarchical way of going at things is stupid. We'll never get the world won for Christ this way. Why, people are being born faster than we're set up to convert them (infant baptism not yet having been invented); we'll never catch up. We've got to start thinking big and quit being so leery about using a bit of organization and power. We need to operate from strength. What we really ought to do is go for the Arky--go for the Big One. God wants his church to grow. And just think of how much more good we can accomplish by using arky power rather than shying from it!"

And wouldn't you know, it worked! They went for the emperor and got him--and he brought the whole of the Big Arky over with him. Christianity was proclaimed the official religion of the Roman Empire--and the world was won for Christ. You know, you have to smile a bit at the Old Anarchy, thinking that three thousand in one day was pretty big stuff. I don't know just how long it took to get the changeover recorded; but I do know the Vatican computers were jammed trying to move names across from the PAGAN column to the CHRISTIAN column--until somebody realized it just easier to switch the headings.

At one fell swoop we now had a whole empireful of Christians; as finally in a position to do some real good for humanity and bring in the truly just society. Talk about revolution! The church praised God from whom all blessings flow ... and the empire snickered all the way to the bank. His empire had found the Lord and become "Christian" without having to make any changes at all; Christianity had done all the changing. Indeed, the conversion would probably qualify as "forensic justification": all it took was a word from God (or at least his official representatives) and we now had "The HOLY Roman Empire." Pretty neat, wouldn't you say?”

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home