Yes, it still walks around, corrupting the standards of acceptable locomotion with its scraping shuffle, groaning in abject misery as a disease more fatal than the Black Plague overpowers its bloodstream.
Yes, it speaks, defying laws of mortality, with a death rattle stuttering Words of Life, twisting them up around a rotting tongue into the shape of noose, forcing its followers to hang on every word…
Yes, it grabs: its claw-like hands clutching violently at anything that threatens its unsteady gait, tearing the robes off the corpses of priests it has strangled, pulling the costume on over its ash-covered head in preparation of its last great performance.
But it is dead.
“Christian” was once an adjective, a word of honor to pronounce upon a humble, Christ-like follower of the Way.
But it became a noun: an object, a group to hide behind, and an identity that could be claimed without being earned – not even by the blood of its namesake.
Under the Way, the temple was destroyed, rebuilt in three days as the body of Christ: the eyes, hands, and feet of the Cornerstone.
But Christianity, weakened by religion – specifically the law – built itself a golden calf of its own deified glory. It rebuilt the temple, “God’s House,” using wood, hay, and stubble: physical manifestations of its material weakness. Even though there was already one body, one temple, one church, they made these manmade structures into little temples. “Do not profane God’s house!” They looked at the body, and built a machine. They called it a church.
The created the church of hell.
In the first century, Judaism held men captive, clutching them close like a corpse after Rigor Mortus has set in. It gouged out eyes, blinding them; it cut off ears, deafening them; and it gave them blood money, buying them off, feeding their camels with a wealth of needles.
Christ came, halting religion’s spiral of death in its tracks – “I have not come to abolish the law, but to fulfil.” The most religious men were insulted and cursed by the humble, lowly God Almighty. Bringing to completion the crumbling efforts of man, whether truly abolished or simply completed, either Way:
“It is finished.”
Religion’s part in the play was over. Act I was ended. Man had reached his sinful, contaminated hands towards the heavens, building towers of confusion out of blood, sweat, and tears, working for centuries for a righteousness he could not achieve.
Enter Christ. He reached down, once, killing death and rendering religion irrelevant.
It is finished.
Names carry power. Judaism became a social indicator, a status symbol, with evil, scornful men – highly revered by the religious following – rising into positions of power and prestige, while the poor and needy were trampled underfoot. Corrupted by the power its name carried, Judaism became another outlet for wickedness.
The Way had no name, no defining attributes, no theological bullet points, no governmental interference, no fame and glory to hide behind or parade in front of. It was simply the movement of following Jesus: to be willing to hang on the Roman Road.
Following the Christ – the Way – it did not mean socially assumed righteousness; it meant public ridicule, governmental inquisition, social hostility, and torture to the point of death.
It was not a religion. There was no system to exploit; it was no Christianized pyramid scheme.
Christianity became a Name – a noun. Originating as an insult to those who were already being beaten and tortured for Christ, it was adopted as a banner of pride and, later, egotism.
Paul said that he boasted in Christ. But names carry power. Power corrupts. Eventually, we have come to boast not in Christ, but in Christianity. We hold our heads up high walking into the church of hell. Our eyes twinkle with suppressed pride, as our evil self-righteousness lifts us up on the altars on which we have slaughtered our brothers. “I will hold you accountable,” we proclaim, ignoring the logs that have become our eyes – digging with blunt and broken fingernails at the sheep with a fleck of dust in his eyelash. “Fifty lashes!” we scream, flaying their backs with the knotted whips – the very whips we used to whip Jesus. “This is church discipline. Submit!”
We rob temples, we burn temples. We kill our brothers – temples of the Holy Spirit – with the very Word He entrusted us with. We worship our beliefs and hate those who disagree, cursing them in the name of Jesus Christ who died so that we could know love. We adopted a new law: our theology. We strictly adhere to these “sound, biblical teachings,” excusing our close-minded hatred with words we’ve shredded and scribbled out.
Stuck in the same wicked pattern of the religious leaders of the first century, we idolize our teachers – our pastors – who get drunk on our praise and high on their arrogance. Many become addicted to their own flattery until only devouring the weak will sate their thirst for superiority. We bow down and worship to the extinction of our feeble faiths.
And still we rise – miserable, sensual gluttons – and praise one another in the name of the Adversary. Of course, the satan does not have a name, so we do not say it verbally. But actions speak louder than words.
But we do not think we have been very clever, to have exploited a position of humility and love in order to feed our fatuous lusts – we do not think at all. This is how Christianity has died: we wear it like a work uniform – we do not choose it, we do not think about it, and we take it off the second we get home. It means so much to us to appear to one another as exceptionally righteous, but only when we step out of our homes and into the fold. Especially when in the presence of the Pastor and his sharp teeth. Soon we become lost in our own images until it overflows, washing over Christ and burying Him in the waste, burying with it Christianity.
We’ve killed it; it is dead, an unneeded and unnecessary stumbling block of religion, tripping up Pharisees and their devoted followers. We took the curtain and sewed it back together, making our religious identity into a golden calf to choke on.
Christianity is dead. It was stillborn, an unworthy god put upon a cross it couldn’t conquer, a king to sit upon a fatal throne it couldn’t endure. It, as every other idol we’ve constructed, had no chance at all of survival, and even less at saving.
Yet still we rest in it, hiding in the bones of our sanctuaries, like maggots hiding away in a rotting corpse; the biggest difference being that the corpse feeds the maggots, while we starve, quenching the Spirit in our arrogance and greed.
Christianity is a name – a powerful name – but it is the wrong Name to follow. It did not rise from the dead. It did not defeat death.
It only begot it.
- S.M.
