The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
At the outset, it is imperative to understand that this essay is by no means an attempt to provide an objective account of the current Bishop of Rome, nor is it an objective brief summary of the current Roman Catholic Church. Instead, it is written from the perspective of one who has become a great admirer of Pope Francis I and who has had a lifelong admiration for many aspects of the historic Roman Catholic Church. Further to clarify so as to avoid any misunderstanding, this is an opinion piece and an essay; it is an outsider’s glimpse at the largest Christian insider’s institution in the world.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis I
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected Pope on March 13, 2013. Very shortly afterward, he joked to reporters that the conclave of cardinals who elevated him to what all of us would agree is the highest position in Christianity literally had to go to the end of the earth to find him. They went a distance of ten thousand miles. The Pope has an outstanding sense of humor, which is a great asset for the papacy. If a pope can’t laugh at some of the ancient restrictions of his office and at himself, his office can turn into an intolerable life sentence.
Pope Francis is the first Jesuit priest to become a pope. In general, Jesuits have always avoided becoming diocesan bishops or cardinals. Members of other religious orders have the same reluctance, but it is especially strong among Jesuits. Jesuits are a teaching order of priests. They are mentally very rigorous and intellectual and independent, and they resist assuming ecclesiastical, as opposed to Jesuit Order, positions.
Cardinal Bergoglio was always very rigorous and intellectual and independent, but for most of his career he was a teacher and the leader of the Argentine Province of Jesuits. He also was a strong proponent of the Argentine Catholic Church and the Argentine state uniting to reach out to the poor and dispossessed. He became a bishop almost by accident, and largely because of political problems in Argentina which had nothing to do either with him or the Jesuit Order.
Ironically, the highest cleric in Roman Catholicism is anti-clerical, which is to say that Pope Francis believes priests and bishops have become too powerful in the Church. He thinks the ordinary people, the laity, should be more involved in church leadership.
When the Curia and the other cardinals elected Archbishop Bergoglio as pope, they should have known those things, and no doubt many of them of them did. However, unlike most bishops who have ever been elected pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a notably infrequent visitor to Rome and the Vatican. He seemed happy to stay as far away from Rome as possible, which is about where Buenos Aires is in relationship to Rome. He was in the Vatican on occasion, but most assuredly he did not consider himself to be of the Vatican.
Francis is also the first Latin American to be elected pope, and the first bishop from the Americas to become pope. If someone from the Western Hemisphere was to become the leader of the Church of Rome, it was more important for that person to be a Spanish speaker than an English speaker, and I believe it was gloriously providential that person turned out to be Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
Not every Catholic would agree with that opinion. There was much opposition to Francis from the day he was elevated to the throne of St. Peter, and that opposition has grown exponentially ever since. It is astonishing how openly some of the most conservative prelates in the Church speak so disparagingly of their superior. I can’t recall there has ever been as much open and widespread criticism of any other pope.
I am indebted for this essay to a book called Pilgrimage: My Search for the Real Pope Francis. It was written by Mark Shriver, who is the son of Sargent Shriver and Eunice Kennedy Shriver.
Eunice Shriver was John Kennedy’s sister, so that meant President Kennedy was Mark Shriver’s uncle. Sargent Shriver was a close aide of the President. Mark Shriver is a fallen-away Catholic who perhaps has been wooed back into the fold by the remarkable Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
Whenever a new pope is elected, he chooses a new name. Archbishop Bergoglio chose the name Francis, after St. Francis of Assisi. St. Francis was a thirteenth-century Church reformer who wanted less clergy domination of the Roman ecclesiastical structure, and who paid particularly keen attention to the poor and marginalized people of Umbria, north of Rome. So here was a Jesuit (and there had never been a Jesuit pope) who took the name of a revolutionary mystical saint who established the admirable religious order known as the Franciscans. No previous pope had ever dared to call himself Francis, because it might raise suspicions.
When he did that, conservatives and reactionaries became instantly alarmed. Was he another Latin American liberation theologian, God forbid, they asked themselves? Was he more concerned about improving the world than in strengthening the Church? Was he more devoted to victory for the earth than for Vatican domination of the earth?
To begin with, the man refused to live in the huge top-floor papal apartment! He lives in a simple two-room first-floor flat where anyone who knows where it is can get to it! Francis I is a man of the people, and men of the people can appear to be threatening populists! They might spend more energy in serving people than the Church, for heaven’s sake!
Amazonia in Brazil is filled with many groups of indigenous people who may have been reached by the Catholic Church, but whom many Catholics would think are not truly Catholics. Perhaps technically they are not.
Last October Pope Francis called a special synod in Rome to address the needs of people all over the world such as the peoples of Amazonia. Two days before the synod was convened, he and some Vatican dignitaries observed a ceremony in the Vatican gardens which was led by indigenous people from around the world, including Amazonia. According to the Catholic News Agency, they had statues of two pregnant women “who appeared to be semi-clothed.”
A woman in the group presented the Pope with one of the statues. He happily received it, and blessed it. Apparently this ignited a firestorm of criticism. A conservative Catholic website called it a “blasphemous abomination.”
An article in The Economist (Oct. 26, 2019) said this: “Exasperation with the reforming pope has been gathering momentum among a minority of traditional Catholics. Even some of his cardinals believe he is distorting the church’s teaching. Talk of a schism within the church is growing.”
At the synod two very controversial topics were raised. The first was a discussion of whether women in Latin America should be ordained as deacons. There are thousands of lay male deacons in current world Catholicism who are serving as quasi-priests, because there are not nearly enough priests to go around. That is especially the case for Latin America. The synod also talked about the possibility of giving Amazonia a special dispensation to ordain married Roman Catholic men. To this revolutionary notion we shall return shortly.
Of course that opens an enormous ecclesiastical can of worms. If you allow women deacons, might that lead to women priests? And if you allow married priests in the Amazon, why not married priests everywhere? Certainly the pope has not hinted at such a thing, and has insisted it will not happen, at least during his papacy. Nonetheless this interested outsider is openly asking it. Further, the outsider would note, if there is to be a Pope Francis II, I predict he will also come either from the Southern Hemisphere or from a relatively poor Northern Hemisphere country, which these days are relatively hard to find at any relative distance from the equator.
This past Christmas the pope addressed the topic of traditional ecclesiastical resistance in a speech to the men of the Sala Clementina of the Apostolic Palace. He said, “Here we have to beware of the temptation of assuming a rigid outlook. Rigidity and imbalance fuel one another in a vicious circle. And these days the temptation to rigidity has become so apparent.”
Roman Catholicism has not lasted for near two millennia merely by chance. It is an extremely careful and cautious religious institution, and it values its institutionalism as perhaps does no other example of religion anywhere in the world. The Catholic Church always moves slowly on most issues, especially the most important issues. (Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, Henry VIII, John Calvin, John Knox and others would verify that, were they here to voice their opinions.)
Francis has felt very restricted in how he addresses the major issue of clerical sexual abuse of children and young people. Last December he announced that he has abolished pontifical secrecy regarding the many recorded allegations of priestly crimes. Victims have openly expressed gratitude for his courage in doing so, but of course there has been an outcry from those who believe this will damage the Church even more than it has already suffered over this tragic controversy.
.Like almost every other pope, Francis I became the official Vicar of Christ fairly late in life. Advanced age goes with the territory of the papacy. I am convinced Francis wants to do as much as he can to reform the Church as much as he can in the time he has left. He is astonishingly forthright in his efforts as a reformer.
David Gibson is affiliated with the Fordham University Center on Religion and Culture. Referring to the pope’s widespread world travels, he said, “It’s an evangelical urgency, if I can put it that way. I don’t think it’s just him looking at the calendar, how much time he has, but also looking at the state of the world and feeling it is in a very perilous state.” That perception by the pope includes such things as climate change, authoritarianism, environmental degradation, resistance to immigration, neglect of the poor, and so on.
Jorge Bergoglio identifies with the poor and downtrodden more than most other popes in history, because he served for most of his ministry among such folks. Most other prelates who become the pope have been sheltered from the truly needy simply by virtue of the positions they actually held during their priesthood. The higher up on the ecclesiastical ladder the clergy go, the less likely they are to rub elbows with the meek and lowly.
The Amazon synod cast a particularly bright spotlight on the pope’s unique feeling for the plight of the world’s poor. As a result of the synod, the Italian author and journalist Gianni Valente has published a book-length series of interviews he made with the pope before and after the synod. It is called Without Him We Can Do Nothing. In the book, Francis referred to the heated debates which were held when Catholic missionaries first went into the Amazon region in the sixteenth century. A major consideration was whether “savages” were “worthy” of evangelization. Reluctantly, it was concluded they were, and over the next four centuries the indigenous peoples became more-or-less Christianized.
Speaking of the contemporaneous situation in the Amazon and other parts of the world, Pope Francis told Gianni Valente, “In the period we are living, it becomes even more urgent to bear in mind that the revealed message is not identified with a particular culture. And when meeting new cultures or cultures that have not accepted the Christian proclamation, we must not try to impose a determined cultural form together with the evangelical proposition.”
These words may sound innocuous, but they are absolutely revolutionary. What Francis is implying, I am convinced, is that twenty-first century evangelism must carefully avoid trying to insist that new converts to Christianity must not first become “westernized” or “”modernized” or even “Romanized.” Instead, they must be allowed to adapt Christianity to their own cultures in their own chosen ways. It is a serious ecclesiastical and theological error, according to Papa Francesco, to attempt to turn new Christians first into little copies of our own cultural selves before they become proper Catholics.
In Mark Shriver’s biography, he recalled the words of an Argentine economist named Luis Secco who knew the future pope back in the darkest days of recent Argentine history, although it is still quite dark there. Mr. Secco reminded Shriver that Argentina had five different presidents in a stretch of ten days in 1999. Finally the Congress appointed a man named Eduardo Duhalde as president. He worked with Cardinal Bergoglio for four years to try to bring some semblance of order out of the chaos that the Argentine government and economy had become.
Secco said that President Duhalde and Cardinal Bergoglio initiated what they called “The Argentine Dialogue.” Secco said, “It was open to all political parties, unions, the private sector, and nongovernmental organizations. Bergoglio also worked with the government, the Peronist party, with the unions, and with those who weren’t part of any union – what we call the informal sector. For him, it was the idea of solidarity with those who had nothing.”
Francis I has always been willing to work with anybody to try to improve conditions for the least, the last, and the lost. He has an amazing ability to identify with all groups while never allowing himself to be aligned with any single group.
Francis I is very much like that far more famous first-century radical religious reformer, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus radically identified with the poor and the outcast, and that is what Francis does. That also is why Jesus was so unpopular in his own time and why Francis is so unpopular among so many Catholics in his own time.
Revolutions are hard to ignite. They are fraught with all kinds of perils. You can never know for certain what will happen, and often you never understand what a revolution means until long after it happens. That means none of us will fully understand the influence of Francis I, the Pope of the Poor. Only people fifty or a hundred or two hundred years from now will be able completely to discern that.
Francis recently restored to the priesthood a theologian who had been defrocked by his religious superior for advocating in Church circles on behalf of LGBTQ people, those whose sexual orientation has been condemned by many in the hierarchy. Francis wrote to James Alison, “I want you to walk with deep interior freedom, following the spirit of Jesus.” It took enormous courage for the pope to renew the ordination of that man, and it was also courageous of the bishop who notified the pope of the nullification of Father Alison’s ordination. There is always a price for reaching out to unpopular people.
Because he has managed to survive seven years in the papacy, by now Francis has named over 52% of the cardinals of the Catholic Church. Realistically, it is the cardinals who determine most of the significant changes that occur in Roman Catholicism. If the pope lives in relatively good health for another seven-plus years, his ideas may become woven into the permanent fabric of the Church, because he will have named nearly all the cardinals then serving Mater Ecclesia.
Eight of the ten newest cardinals eligible to vote in Vatican conclaves are members of religious orders. This is in keeping with the pope’s intention to focus on those areas of the world where missionaries are still hard at work among the poor and marginalized. One of the new cardinals is a Spanish Salesian archbishop who was a missionary in Paraguay and Bolivia before becoming the archbishop of Rabat, Morocco, in North Africa. His name is Cristobal Lopez Romero.
Cardinal Romero observed of Francis to a group of journalists in the Vatican, “I think the pope wanted to make visible the churches that were almost invisible. He wanted to say to us that we are moving in a good direction and we have to continue to work on the interreligious and inter-Christian dialogue and immigrant people.”
Because he has spent his entire life in the Southern Hemisphere, Francis I is acutely aware that the direction of Christian growth for all the churches, including the Catholic Church, is moving from north to south. Christianity is waning in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere where it was dominant for nearly the past two millennia. Prior to the Muslim Conquest in the seventh and eighth centuries, Roman Catholic Christianity was predominant in the Middle East and North Africa, but from the twentieth century on, both Catholicism and Protestantism have begun to lose their influence in those regions, as well as in Europe, North America, and in many parts of Latin America. Evangelical and fundamentalist Protestantism have made enormous inroads into the religious landscape of Central and South America.
Therefore we now turn to the current status of Roman Catholicism throughout the world. As the popular song proclaims, “The times, they are a-changing.”
Roman Catholicism in the Twenty-First Century
From the end of the first century onward, the ecclesiastical institution which soon thereafter called itself the Roman Catholic Church has always been the world’s largest and most influential branch of Christianity. Eastern Orthodoxy has more influence in southeastern Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, and Protestantism is stronger in particular sections of Europe, Great Britain, North America, and Australia. Nonetheless, numerically as well ecclesiastically, the Roman Catholic Church has always been the strongest and most universally-situated Church in Christendom.
However, as has previously been noted, most religions in general, including Christianity, are currently slowly losing their cultural influence in those areas of the world where heretofore they have been unusually strong. Secularization is growing, while both religion and religiosity are declining.
Back when I was in seminary in Chicago nearly sixty years ago, we were taught that Christianity developed as an urban, as opposed to a rural, phenomenon. Nearly all of the earliest Christians lived in cities. “Pagans” (from the Latin paganus: fields, countryside, boondocks), and “heathens” (from the Anglo-Saxon heath: moor, uninhabited space) lived in the hinterlands. “Syncretism” (the union of Christian and pagan religiosity) was more prevalent in the countryside than in the urban areas. For most of its history, Christianity was the strongest in metropolitan areas and the weakest in rural areas.
By some measures that is still the pattern now, except that the cities that are becoming the true centers of Christendom have names like Seoul, Manila, Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Lagos, Johannesburg, Bogota, Sao Paulo, and Buenos Aires. Rome, Constantinople (Istanbul), Geneva, Edinburgh, London, and Chicago are no longer where Christianity “is at.”
Only in the past few decades have ecclesiastical sociologists begun to highlight the southerly influence of Christianity in Africa, southern and southeastern Asia, and Central and South America. The fact that Jorge Bergoglio was named the present pope by the amazingly internationalized College of Cardinals is the most obvious personal indication of that trend.
Catholicism’s three largest national churches are, in order, Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines. They are relatively poor countries, whereas Catholicism has traditionally been strongest in rich northern countries.
In addition, there is also a growing “ruralization” of Christianity, Catholic as well as and Orthodox. That suggests that metropolitan areas are where the greatest slippage of religious power has occurred. In the rural areas, however, especially in the rural areas of the southern parts of the Northern Hemisphere and throughout the Southern Hemisphere, Christianity is thriving in new and totally unanticipated ways. The “Boonies People” think that we who are essentially “City Folks” have lost our theological and ecclesiastical bearings. They believe we have given in far too readily to secularization and secularism.
Rural Christianity probably always was far more exuberant and emotional than urban Christianity. If people such as ourselves were to attend services of worship in what used to be called “Third World Countries,” it would probably give many of us “ecclesiastical bitter quivers.” That would be the case were those churches Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or mainline Protestant. There would be too much hand-clapping, body-swaying, and loud music for our urbane and supposedly sophisticated sensibilities.
Since our focus for the moment is on Roman Catholicism, let us see how that plays itself out. There are more archbishops and cardinals now who are of Asian, African, Latino American, and Pacific Islanders than ever before in the history of the Catholic Church.
That is bound to have a growing influence on how Roman Catholicism perceives itself. It has always called itself the Roman Catholic (Universal) Church, but it is now far more genuinely universal than at any point in its two-millennial history. It is no longer the Western World Roman Catholic Church; now it is the Total World Catholic Church, and Rome is not nearly as dominant as it once was.
That takes a lot of “getting used to” for millions of Catholics in the previously Roman-dominated Roman Catholic Church. Of course all of us should be inclusive, whether religious or not. Francis I has helped all of us to see that, but many Catholics are asking themselves, “Must we really become comfortable with all those black and brown and non-white Church leaders? Is that what ‘inclusivity’ means?”
“We are living, we are dwelling in a grand and awful time,” as the mid-nineteenth century poem-turned-hymn declared. It may even be more evident in the early twenty-first century than it was in the mid-nineteenth century.
Roman Catholicism has always tried to muddle through, using the tried-and-true doctrines and methods of previous centuries. It has succeeded remarkably well at that.
But that was then, and this is now, and will that continue to work? Francis I probably thinks not, and I, as an outsider Protestant minister looking in at the Church of Rome, think he is correct. “New occasions teach new duties; time makes ancient good uncouth,” as another mid-nineteenth century poem-turned-hymn declared to the twenty-first century. However, it has always been a severe test for the Catholic Church to admit that new occasions do make ancient good uncouth.
Let us therefore finally focus on three matters the Catholic Church has traditionally opposed: married and female priests, abortion, and homosexuality.
To insure its own healthy future, I am convinced the Roman Catholic Church must soon both allow and encourage married men to become priests. A Church which has always been dominated by clergy, as opposed to a clergy-laity partnership, cannot withstand the increasing shortage of priests it has been facing for many decades. There was no imposition of clerical celibacy for a thousand years in Catholicism, although most priests were celibate back then. For the good of its own cause, Roman Catholicism must shortly jettison its demand for clerical celibacy. Millions within the Catholic Church understand this in their inner being, including many thousands of priests, but thus far the tradition-bound Vatican has insisted on holding to this old, obviously outdated pattern.
Shortly after married men are encouraged to become priests, women also should be welcomed into the ranks of the clergy, as has happened in a sizeable majority of Protestant denominations. That even includes the Southern Baptists, although there has almost as much reactionary reluctance there as there is in Roman Catholicism.
When I was a young Presbyterian minister, I confess that I too had major reservations about what would happen should there ever turn out to be as many women as men in the ranks of Presbyterian clergy. Time has greatly changed the Presbyterian Church (USA), but the thousands of women now serving as clergy are by no means the primary reason for those changes. The mere passage of the decades has altered the complexion of Presbyterianism and every other Protestant denomination far more than the advancement of women, which was long overdue. Female clergy have made outstanding additions to the clerical ranks of all Protestant denominations which have had the wisdom and foresight to include them.
Aversion to abortion should be felt by everyone, but Catholic absolute abortion aversion must cease. As a corollary, the skewed notion of male superiority has far too long existed among far too many conservative men and women. The world cannot and should not tolerate it any longer.
The union of Roman Catholic and evangelical-fundamentalist Protestant political influence on certain cultural questions must be defeated in both state and national legislatures in the USA and all over the world. It is immoral and unjust to prevent women from getting abortions who for legitimate personal reasons of their own may decide that an abortion is the least bad of all bad choices which face them in an unwanted pregnancy. It is unwise for any legislatures to decree what birth control methods are or are not legal. It is culturally intolerable for any institutions, political or religious, to eliminate rights which women naturally possess, by both natural and human-created law.
Very slowly federal judges are overturning various draconian state abortion laws. That will be hard for many Catholics to accept, but in my opinion, accept it they must. Most advanced nations allow for abortions under carefully considered guidelines, and it is time that the United States of America and its fifty states also finally join the twenty-first century.
Last November, a federal judge in Alabama blocked an Alabama law which made the performance of abortions under nearly all circumstances a felony. He sided with a lawsuit brought by abortion rights groups the previous May. The suit claimed that the law would fall disproportionally on black women, who comprise 60% of those who seek abortions in Alabama.
Attitudes toward abortion are formed more by cultural considerations than by religious considerations. Abortion is condoned or even mildly approved in certain cultures more than in other cultures, regardless of whatever religion or religions may be dominant in those places. It is as much a mistake on supposedly theological grounds for any branch of religion to oppose abortion as it is for it to favor male superiority on similar spurious grounds, including spurious biblical grounds.
In mid-2019, the pastor of St. Anthony’s Catholic Church in Florence, SC made the headlines during the endless Democratic Presidential campaign of 2020. He refused to serve Joe Biden communion when the former Vice-President was in Florence seeking the presidential nomination of South Carolina Democrats. Fr. Robert Morey made the refusal, he said, because “any public figure who advocates for abortion places himself or herself outside of Church teaching.”
Joe Biden wisely refrained from making any comment about this incident. Unbidden, however, I will comment that no one, including Joe Biden, enthusiastically “advocates for abortion.” It was a deliberate calumny for that priest to make such a libelous statement.
The Catholic Church, like most fundamentally conservative religious institutions, has also traditionally opposed homosexuality. Naturally therefore it has forbidden the very recent phenomenon of same-sex marriage. I believe this prohibition is not based on a solid theological or biblical foundation, but on an ancient widely-held cultural prejudice. Only in the past generation has same-sex marriage become widely accepted in many of the advanced nations of the world. It is time for Roman Catholicism to negate the inherently flawed cultural and psychological aversion to homosexuality by supporting the people in its vast membership who genetically exhibit same-sex preference in the same percentage that most other people genetically have a homosexual preference.
Despite its centuries-old inherent conservatism, the Catholic Church is nevertheless the most praiseworthy proponent of institutional religion the world has ever known. One could reasonable argue that it is the most admirable institution ever to have existed in human civilization.
Catholicism oozes institutionalism, it exudes institutionalism, it magnificently and perpetually proclaims institutionalism. Nothing could last as a constantly changing institution, while appearing to remain fundamentally unchanged, like the Church of Rome.
The Catholic Church has weathered countless crises. It likely shall weather all future challenges to the end of time. Therefore we end with an encomium from the language the Universal Church used to use universally, Euge, Mater Ecclesia: Bravo, Mother Church!
The Future of Christianity
Having addressed the papacy of Francis I and the Roman Catholic Church, let us now very briefly consider the likely directions of Christianity in general in the near future. As has herein been postulated, Christianity is losing influence in those areas of the world where for many centuries it has been dominant, and it is gaining influence in parts of the world where it has had little or no previous influence, especially in the southern nations of the globe.
Christianity also is becoming much less centralized than it was in its first two millennia. The Western Church became centralized in Rome, and the Eastern Church in Constantinople. Now neither Rome nor Constantinople (Istanbul) hold the power they once did in determining the directions of Christendom.
That trend is even more pronounced in the unseemly plethora of Protestant denominations. International and national Christian organizations no longer sway the actions and opinions of member Churches or individuals as they once did. These include such groups and the World Council of Churches, the U.S. National Council of Churches, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Lutheran World Federation, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, the worldwide United Methodist Church, and so on.
Part of the explanation for this decline in influence is financial. The member Churches simply cannot or do not provide the financial support to the larger ecclesiastical bodies that they once did, so they do not have the staff or materials to provide leadership and assistance to the member groups. Furthermore, there is a general turning away from centralized political authority of any kind throughout much of the world. This is evidenced by the rapid growth of political populism in the last ten years or so.
Western Christians might become too easily dismayed by these trends. It could appear to millions of Christians that Christianity is in a severe tailspin. That may be somewhat true in particular areas of the world, but it is not true in the world at large. Christianity is numerically still by far the largest religion in the world, and will continue to be for many years to come.
However, as many sociologists of religion have noted, Muslim numbers are increasing much more quickly than Christian numbers. That is primarily because Muslims on average have more children than Christians, and not because Muslims are more “evangelical” than Christians. In addition, that is not because Muslims are naturally more prolific, but because they choose to be more prolific.
In general, “Christian” nations are more highly developed economically than “Muslim” nations. And in general, people in developed nations choose to have fewer children than those in underdeveloped nations.
Thus at the present time more Muslim women are having more babies than Christian women. As Islamic states achieve greater economic stability, women in those countries will inevitably have fewer children. Whether Islam will outnumber Christianity in the near future is anybody’s guess, but by no means is Christianity in danger of dying out. In fact, as I have occasionally claimed in sermons, Christianity is like crab grass or kudzu; you can’t obliterate it, no matter how hard you might try. And some people, such as atheists, secularists, and religionists other than Christians, have been trying for centuries to eradicate the ineradicable.
The nature of Christianity is changing, however, as it probably always has. It is becoming even more diverse than it has always been. Long-term denominations are in decline, and entirely new denominations are springing up. At the same time, there are many more congregations unaffiliated with any larger church organizations than ever before, and the numbers of such congregations are rapidly increasing.
If there ever was such a reality as “theological purity,” it is also disappearing. Christian beliefs and practices are less unified than in previous times. Heresy in the Church or in all the churches has become almost as rare as high-button shoes or hula hoops.
Christianity is becoming more individualized, and less “corporate-ized.” That means that “Church” (with a capital “C”) is less influential, and “church” (with as small “c”) is gaining dominance. It also means that the individual’s connection to God and Jesus Christ has more relevance now than the ecclesiastical connection to God and Jesus Christ of former centuries.
What will happen ultimately? Only God knows about ultimate matters, and it is probably fruitless to speculate about such things.
In the meantime, Christians shall continue doing many of the things they have always done, they shall do some things they have never done, they shall have both failures and successes, and they shall continue to wonder, as Christians and everyone always have, where they are headed.
For the foreseeable future, therefore, Christians should bear in mind what Jesus of Nazareth is purported to have said two thousand years ago in his last statement on earth to his disciples, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the close of the age” - - - whatever that last phrase means.
- February 22, 2020
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwallshhi.com. Feel free to forward this essay to anyone you think might benefit from it.