No Going Back - The War of Ideas

I have blood on my hands. There's no going back now. - Saul of Tarsus (from the movie "Paul the Apostle")

There have been many of them since the day Jesus poured his Spirit on the early church, soon after His return to the Father. All of them, in some way or another, that have had to fight the war of ideas here on this battlefield called Earth.

Though history has always been interesting to me, it has become more of a passion to me in recent years. I consume great quantities of historical literature and media. The history during the past 2000+ years has become a particular obsession. The history of the church.

I'm watching an excellent movie right now while I work away on my elliptical machine in the afternoons during naptime. It's called "Paul the Apostle," and I'm delighted because it's acting and sets, while they aren't going to win any oscars, are enough that they don't distract from the message. And oh, what a message! The sweet words of the New Testament as the story of Saul who killed Christians and Paul who made them. Blanks filled in seamlessly.

Thoughts have been forming in my mind that I must write down before they waft away on the breeze that is the life of a wife and mother of young ones. Many things have occurred since Paul preached Christ across the reaches of the known world. Times have come and gone, many kings, leaders, churches and teachers have lived and died. And yet, it was obvious to me as I watched the story of Paul unfold: Nothing has changed. The war of ideas continues, and it is always the same string of ideas that ignite the passions of sinners and saints alike.

In the time of Paul, the problems were fairly straightforward. Christians had seen Christ die, seen Him rise again and could do nothing but believe that He was the Son of God. This inflamed the keepers of the law, both religious and governments, because it could not coexist with their ideas. A high priest in the temple could not continue to preach that God expected their sacrifices and could no longer do his appointed job to pardon sins and be the mediator between God and man if the Messiah had come and rendered his position obsolete. So what was his only choice if he rejected the idea of following the Messiah? To try to push down the new idea, even if it was true. If the government sensed a power that could defeat their reigning power, unless they were willing to be destroyed, they would stamp out the "rebellion" where it began.

And so the religious leaders and the Roman government became unlikely partners in the attempt to wipe out the sect of people who were called Christians. Like children who respond in frustration to push down other children who say things they don't like or agree with, those leaders pushed and shoved and fumed and stomped. And when they thought they had cut down the resistance, they looked around and saw the numbers had doubled. Tripled. Quadrupled. Not one fighting back, accept in their God-given ability to reproduce.

This continued outside Jewish city walls and in Roman arenas. Three hundred years later, with a wake of destruction behind them, the powers that be suddenly stopped resisting. Constantine, the Roman Emperor, became a Christian.

You might think this should be the end of the story. But you know it isn't. Constantine may have had a genuine heart of faith, but he misunderstood one thing: You can't make people believe in Jesus. God has never forced one soul to accept His Son and find forgiveness and eternal life. God would never ask His people to badger anyone into Christianity either. But Constantine thought it would be a good idea to use his vast power to force people into the Kingdom. And as a result, a very disjointed path of the church was born. Not healthy from it's beginning, because God's simple Word had not been respected in its inception. But when something is spiritually unhealthy it can become an extremely powerful tool of evil.

And before you knew it, this church had become "white-washed walls" on the outside, and darkness within. When Martin Luther stepped forward and complained, saying that what was happening was against God, the ones that were supposed to bear God's Word and reach the lost with love for Christ, got angry. THEIR words had become their Bible. THEIR traditions were too important to correct, even if they were unbiblical in every respect.

And so the bloodthirst began. And once one martyr had been placed on the stake and burned to their death, there was no going back. There was no admitting that error had occurred. It was a pact sealed with blood. And so the body count rose, higher and higher, as the faithful few were silenced and the masses were warned to conform or die. Some chose to conform. Some chose to die. But no matter how hard the powers fought to contain the resistance, it grew. And grew. And grew.

You may say "But that isn't happening now." Not here, in America. Not yet. But there are powers in this world who would silence Christianity forever. There are forces in places in many parts of the world that are dragging Christians from their homes and slaying them in the street, even mothers and fathers, while their children watch in horror. Pastors that are imprisoned, beaten. Churches and homes routinely set on fire. For the offense of believing and teaching that Jesus is our Savior, that people can have eternal life in His name, and forgiveness of sins.

The war of ideas is occurring - so far in a bloodless battle - within God's church as well. I grew up in a setting where I was taught to respect the boundaries of denominations, and be grateful that we could separate ourselves into different parts of God's church and coexist without destroying each other. But the older I am, the more I doubt that our segregation pleases our Savior. I keep hearing His prayer in the garden, for US, when He pleaded with God to help us to be one as They are one. There are many today who are throwing off the weight of denominational distinctions, and painstakingly removing traditions and ideas that are unbiblical in nature. There are those who are angered by this. Those who condemn and denounce the ones who thoughtfully step out in faith and follow the Spirit. The ideas of men, the traditions of our ancestors mean more to them than the spirit of unity that Christ would have us all know.

This should not be. History and current events have already shown us that once ideas become more important than Scripture, the bloodshed soon follows. None of us are immune from the effects of sin once we decide something is important enough to kill in the name of. Once one child of God is pushed down in the name of ideas, it is easier to push down another.

So it is with this concern that I remained always more and more skeptical of the good of any denomination created by man's ideas. Of calling one's self anything but a child of God through Christ. I used to be comfortable referring to myself as a Baptist. I am not anymore.

Does this mean I believe that we should all leave our Baptist churches and our Pentecostal churches and Presbyterian, our reformed traditions or any other type of body in the people that are part of the Body of Christ? NO. That is a strong and emphatic "absolutely not." As destructive as denominations can become, there is an equally devastating problem in God's people at this point in history. Apathy. More simply said: LAZINESS. When we don't agree with someone, instead of turning to the Word and resolving our differences, we leave. When we get angry at other people for not doing their jobs or not volunteering for ministries or speaking against something we think is a good idea, we don't try to pray and work it out in Jesus powerful name, we just leave. And we miss the blessing of learning to become one in Him. We cripple the Body of Christ that Jesus loved enough to die for.

Ideally, we should all do a spring cleaning of our heart and wash off anything that doesn't belong by God's Word. But since we are still sinners and this isn't likely to happen, we should stay where God has us, as long as the Gospel is being preached and the Word upheld as the only source of life and truth and we should learn to get along. Learn to love. Learn step by step, day by day, difficulty by difficulty, argument by argument, how to look another follower of Christ in the eye and say "I love you, and I am your brother and sister, no matter how our many worthless thoughts may differ."

Not an easy task. But if we are to heal from the many wounds that have been inflicted in the past and the many fiery arrows the evil forces are sending our way at this very moment, we must work together. We must focus our energies on our unity. It is essential.

So to my little section of the Body, I plead: Let us love one another. Let us get along. Let us respect each other and defer to each other. Let's not fight about things that don't matter.

Until He comes back. I'm for you, you be for me. We'll get to the finish line together. After all, we aren't racing against each other. There's no easy way to get to that line where He stands with open arms unless we help one another.

May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. John 17:23

DISCLAIMER: After I wrote this blog I continued to watch "Paul the Apostle" and discovered some objectionable material. It is a secular miniseries and does contain some elements that are definitely not for children, and some that aren't for adults either. There is brief nudity and violence. The questionable aspects have nothing to do with the message, which was still excellent.

The Heritage

So this is my Great-Great Grandma Gilbert, pictured with her husband, Joseph McGregor.

I know, she's not much to look at. This sturdy pioneer woman helped raise my grandfather after his father was killed in an accident saving his children's lives. She died from an accidental self-induced carbolic acid poisoning. And she is descended from kings all the way back to the tenth century.

As you can tell, I've been doing some genealogy research. My Dad started it on ancestry.com, and I've been researching some of the fascinating characters that grace the pages of my family tree.

Some of my relations include Emily Dickinson, the nineteenth century poet, who is a great aunt of sorts on both sides of my paternal grandparents. I suppose that isn't too surprising, considering the level of interest in writing in my family. Maybe it's my all-too-overactive imagination, but I can see my sister Kathy's face in her portrait, and I can hear my Grandma's provoking rhyme in her wandering, thoughtful poetry.

Others, such as the Cables of Cade's Cove, and Christopher Martin, whose name appears with 40 others on the Mayflower Compact, have left their mark on history. My Scottish ancestors heralded from the McGregor, McDonald and Robertson clans during the middle ages, and I have many many ancestors from the Netherlands back into the 1500's.

It's been Grandma Georgianna Gilbert's pedigree that has been the most surprising and interesting. Through the Gilbert family, I found myself back in fourteenth century England, during the reign of King Henry VIII, visiting castles and palaces, rubbing arms with royalty, walking the halls of Cambridge and Oxford with my British ancestors. I found that the Holland family, some of my relatives during this time period, are quite possibly descended to the Plantagenet line of English kings, and I was able to trace those through historical records through Norman and Viking kings all the way back to a "Fulk, King of Jerusalem" in the tenth century. I am not so proud of his crusading exploits, or his title "Fulk, the Rude," but I am fascinated that this body that sits here this night in 2009 has a connection to such a past. The distant, unreachable, unfathomable past so many grandmothers and grandfathers ago... and yet there is a link.

Also through the Gilberts I found some more commendable fathers. A brother to my own great-times-a-few grandfather was Sir Henry Adams, who left a legacy of service and charity and also a "stone" of some sort that killed him and is now kept at a laboratory somewhere inside Cambridge University. His effigy is pictured here.

My extremely distant relative through the Benedict family of Nottinghamshire and Norfolk, was Benedict, brother of King Canute IV of Denmark in the mid-eleventh century. He apparently gave his life along with his brother as a martyr, and so his family named lived on through the centuries.

I realize that many people are descended from interesting historical figures. The further back history takes us on the path of our relatives, the more related we all become. But I am completely intrigued by history to the point of obsession, and to have some sort of link with the dark pages of the past - to me - is not unlike uncovering a treasure that has been buried away for years.

There's a place that the Spirit always seems to redirect me when I am lost in the ocean of people and places from history. Though these people handed down their DNA in some form to combine with others and eventually form the person I am, it is the spiritual link that is more sure, more tangible, and more unbending and unquestionable than even my own family tree. Jesus came. Jesus did an amazing thing at Calvary and then burst from a sealed tomb to change the world. His Spirit left turned the hearts of fearful, fleeing disciples into strong hearted apostles that set their faces toward the far corners of the world and went with a joyful message of love and peace. Their legacy, though tried by crosses, by fire, by beheadings, by tortures, by ridicule and false doctrine and every sort of attempt by darkness to uproot it and leave it lost in the hidden corners of history's documentations... their legacy only grew stronger. The fires of trial and persecution only refined that strength into a deeper and more unrelenting passion that lives on today. And that fire lives on in me.

The fire that joined my heart to Christ's 26 years ago is my true lineage, my most amazing connection to history. And I have no shame to be called a child of God, though I can find reasons to be ashamed of my ancestors. So I will not boast in kings and princes that ruled earthly realms, but instead I will boast in my Savior Jesus Christ.

And you can too. Acceptance into this amazing heritage of a family is guaranteed and irrevocable.

All you have to do is ask.