Blueprint for a Revolution: Building Upon ALL of the New Testament - Volume Two
(What Your Church Should Be Teaching and Building)
by
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An Imagined Ecumenical Gathering
Imagine a gathering of representatives from such diverse and even historically antagonis-tic traditions as listed in the beginning of this Introduction. Imagine them to be people who truly do represent their denominations at their best: not “young Turk” radicals full of anger at “the es-tablishment,” but people motivated by a desire to build up both individuals and the church. There are many personal ministries among them: pastors, scholars, monks and nuns, social workers, leaders of intentional communities, therapists. Each of them has become especially sensitized to the concerns natural to his profession: for a just and intimate society, for providing relief to the poor and the lonely, for deep and clear thinking, for prayerfulness and God-centeredness, for good order and discipline, for personal growth and excellent family relationships. Imagine further that, for all of their diversity, these men and women are ardent disciples of Jesus Christ, and each is much more committed to Biblical revelation than to his respective denominational or theologi-cal tradition. Being gathered together in some marvelous and mysterious way (if only I knew how!), these leaders are charged with coming to a common mind in order to raise up a description for a Christianity which satisfies all that is godly within their respective traditions, and in a form which fulfills the human needs to which they have become sensitive because of their personal ministries. These leaders agree on the following procedural principle: they are bound to accept the clear and simple intent of Scripture, no matter how radical, how liberal, how conservative or how out of step with the times it may appear to be. They also look to the church’s spokesmen of the first several centuries for important clues about apostolic Christianity, yet do not allow their high regard for that period to weaken the preeminence of the Scriptures. Given all of the above, what would come into being? The following chapters attempt to describe just that.
• From whole-hearted Anabaptist disciples, for example, we could learn to take the Sermon on the Mount as a way of life instead of as a vague ideal. From them we would also learn to acknowledge as Christian, and baptize, only those who have publicly committed them-selves to walk as disciples of Jesus, believing all of his teachings, obeying all of His com-mands.
• From similarly consecrated Anglican disciples, we could learn how to recognize and warmly receive the best in both Catholic and Protestant traditions, and to bring the high-est achievements of our cultures into the service of God’s kingdom.
• From Catholic disciples (Roman and Eastern Orthodox) we would learn to take seriously the promises about an authority filled Church, to honor vowed poverty and celibacy, to incorporate confession of sin and fasting into our way of life, and to understand the tre-mendous importance of serious systematic theology and sacramental piety.
• From Charismatic disciples we would learn to expect the Spirit of God and the promises of God to be as operative today as in apostolic times.
• From communal Christians (whether monastic or family-oriented) we would learn to be more serious about having all things in common, and how to restore the social nature of the church.
And, marvel of marvels, from disciples that we may rightfully judge to be too liberal in many important areas, we may learn some of the most important instincts of all: compassion for the downtrodden and a determination to bring relief to them. Without their humane instincts, many of us conservative, “Bible-believing Christians” may wind up sharing the most fiery regions of hell-fire with the Pharisees of old.
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The Importance Of The Church: God’s Kingdom Among Men!
There is no need more urgent on our planet than that apostolic Christianity should be re-stored. Considering the desperate conditions that exist on this planet, that is a bold statement in-deed! Poverty and hunger, suicidal loneliness, political and racial hatreds, people slipping over the brink into insanity, families disintegrating: can the establishment of a “religious” organization really be more important than the resolution of those wretched conditions? Properly understood, the answer is a resounding “yes!”
And I do not say this lightly: decades ago, I knew what it was like to fear that suicide might be the only alternative to a total breakdown. And perhaps like you, during the course of my life of eight decades, I have known loneliness to the point of tears; I have felt the fear of failure, and have known deep anxiety about whether I might “go under” financially. Yet I still say that there is no need more urgent than that the Christianity of Christ and His apostles should be restored. You see, if the churches were to enter into the Biblical teaching and obedience de-scribed in the following chapters, she would provide a form of human society within which none of those wretched conditions mentioned above would ever need exist again!
We humans have many basic needs, and even more subtle ones. God’s design for His redeemed children is that we satisfy those needs not simply as individuals, or even as families, or even as the typical “church,” but as the tightly knit communities of disciples of Jesus that are described within the New Testament. Hear this, Christian: Christ in His Church is God’s solution to all human needs and problems, not just its [supposedly] “religious” ones! Governments down through the ages have addressed, with varying degrees of seriousness and various degrees of success, what they considered to be the pressing problems of man. Sadly, history shows us that they never have been able to provide an adequate solution to those problems; and there are no grounds for believing that such an inability will ever change. The thesis of this book, however, is that within the society of the Church of Christ (and only in His church) there is such a solution: a solution that actually used to exist, and a solution that God intends to restore!
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The Importance Of The Church: God’s Kingdom Among Men!
There is no need more urgent on our planet than that apostolic Christianity should be restored. Considering the desperate conditions that exist on this planet, that is a bold statement indeed! Can the establishment of a “religious organization” really be more important than the resolution of the world’s desperate problems? Properly understood, the answer is a resounding “yes!” You see, if the churches were to enter into the Biblical teaching and obedience described in the fol-lowing chapters, she would provide a form of human society within which none of those wretched conditions mentioned above would ever need exist again!
Hear this, Christian: Christ in His church is God’s solution to all human needs and problems, not just its supposedly “religious” ones! The thesis of this book is that within the society of the Church of Christ (and only within that divine society) there is such a solution: a solution that actually used to exist, and a solution that God intends to restore!
When the Kingdom of God is manifested on the earth, a visible society is created. As created by God, the church is that society of regenerated humans who have accepted Jesus as the divinely appointed ruler of the entire race of man. Her charter includes a demonstration of how the entire race of humans could function if they yielded to the authority and the Spirit of Jesus. His church is the sphere where God’s plans for the “total man” and for every aspect of human society are accomplished. Indeed, His church is the true form of human society! - such is her call; such is what is necessarily implied in being “Christ’s body”, “a chosen race, ... a holy nation, ... the people of God.”
About the Author
He is a fifth-generation Californian, who in 1945 at age four, got immersed into the culture shock of moving from the small farming town of Lompoc to Brooklyn at the end of World War II, spending most of the rest of his life in and around New York City and Philadelphia. With Ann, his wife of fifty-seven years, he is now retired in Tucson, Arizona, where there is no snow, and cabs do not delight in frightening pedestrians! He owes her a great debt of gratitude for typing the hundreds of pages of these volumes!
In 1958, he received a Congressional appointment to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York, studying Nautical Science and Marine Engineering, preparing for a career at sea. Part of their training is to spend a year at sea working onboard various ships. It was during this year that God drew Him to Himself. He started that year as a typical superficial American teenager but became plunged into a world that was suffering the effects of the absence of the spirit and teachings of God’s Son: the drunkenness and sexual promiscuity of shipboard culture, horrible poverty in Haiti, bloody and destructive revolution in the Belgian Congo (where he was almost murdered by revolutionaries), and the cultural and racial injustice of apartheid, the South African brutal form of segregation. It was then that he began to think about the effects of so many supposed “Christians” and their churches being active in, or acquiescing to, such hypocritical actions. By the end of that year, he was drawn to enter the ministry.
Seminary required a liberal arts degree, so he left the Academy after three years and obtained a full scholarship to Lycoming College, where he majored in history with the equivalent of minors in literature, religion and psychology. It was during that time that his desire began to see Christians uniting, fulfill Jesus’s prayer, “that they may be one, even as we are one” (John 17:22). During that time at college, he became an Episcopalian, thinking that it was more representative of apostolic Christianity. After three years, he obtained his bachelor’s degree (with honors), and was accepted to attend the Episcopal church’s Philadelphia Divinity School, where he focused upon Biblical and ancient church history studies. He graduated first in his class, with awards in Biblical Studies and Patristics. He was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1968. After several years of parish ministry, he obtained a full scholarship from the Episcopal church Foundation and was accepted into the Ph.D program at Fordham University, studying in its new “Religions of India, China and Japan” program. After three years, he finished the course work for the Ph.D, but decided to return to parish ministry. It was in 1973 that he began studying and taking notes for what would ultimately become, almost fifty years later, these two volumes of Blueprint For A Revolution: Building Upon ALL Of The New Testament. These volumes are the fulfillment of his yearning about how Christians can unite together in the restoration of the same divine Kingdom of God movement that Jesus and His apostles created on earth. May you be as blessed in reading it as He was in writing it!