Sep 05 2008
Heartless Institutions
Bottlenecks in History
The distant past throws long shadows across modern life. Americans recently fought a war in the Balkans that lasted from 1991 to 2001, but did you know this conflict actually began in the 1500’s?
In the same way, many Christians don’t realize the trends in their modern Christian church are tied directly to the 1500s. These long chains of the past are now stressed by secular culture, forcing Christians everywhere to reconsider hallowed institutions once codified during this violent era in European history. The greatest impediment to the Gospel is the Christian’s blind loyalty to those antiquated human institutions.
During this war in the 16th century, King Charles V and the Holy Roman Empire tried to block Ottoman Turk Muslims from invading southern Christian Europe. King Charles did halt the invasion, but lacked the strength to dislodge the invaders. Known as “the Balkan Peninsula,” the area became a perpetual powder keg between Islamic and Christian religions.
Then 500 years later President Clinton and the American military finally settled the issue, theoretically, right here in Ohio at the “Dayton Peace Accords”.
The Birth of a Movement
As strange as it may seem, the Muslim invasions brought welcome relief to the infant Protestant movement. For two decades King Charles was entangled with Muslims in southern Europe, while Protestant uprisings grew in Germany, far to the north. The Vatican chaffed and issued threats and edicts from Rome to quash the Protestant movement, but Rome was unable do anything to prevent Protestants from dismantling a millennium of well-established church authority.
It was a raucous movement led by rowdy, beer-drinking Luther. The Reformation rocked Germany like John Bellushi’s Animal House (minus the sex, drugs and Rock ‘n Roll.) Protestants turned the Sunday Mass into a spirited attack against the papacy. This was all terribly exciting for the peasants.
The movement enjoyed widespread popularity. “High Church” ceremonies were swept away by spiritual freedom and love for a personal Savior. The somber atmosphere of Mass was shattered by a crazy new, beer-hall instrument called an organ. A joyful cry of “Sola Scriptura!” raced across Europe and spilled into France, where the carefree movement was suddenly crushed in great bloodshed.
One who fled these massacres was John Calvin. While in hiding, he furiously wrote his famous Magnum Opus a mere three years after his conversion. With Institutes of the Christian Religion, he established a theology of crushing, sovereign authority headed by Jesus Christ which justified torture, massacres and wars. He loved the Protestant cause, but his disciplined mind was repulsed by its wild pace and enthusiasm. He wanted more law and order.
Calvin soon unleashed his theology in Geneva where he established an orderly Protestant world and ruled it with an iron will. Catholics, who were previously the hunters of Protestant rebels, suddenly became the hunted ones in Switzerland.
Institutionalized Christianity
Without a doubt the institutions of the church are the greatest obstacles for God’s love and the single cause for Christianity’s dark history. With good motives, brilliant men wrapped tight structures around the church to preserve it.
Yet the Gospel is conspicuously silent about the structures and institutions we humans are so-enamored with. During the entire first century while the New Testament was written, Christianity spread like wildfire, yet we find little written about their structures and institutions. Why is this? History screams the answer: whenever the Gospel gets wrapped in the systems and business of the Kosmos — the “World System” as the Bible calls it — the sweet message of God’s grace is gripped by a monster that won’t let go. Human institutions always grow more complex, and their hold grows continually more fixed and frozen.
In this way biblical Christianity became the beastly Institutionalized Christianity that emerged in Europe from the Dark Ages.
