Covenant Essays. T. Hoogsteen
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the restrictive hatreds of this world and started them off, though they remained in the world, on the long history of eschatological tensions in the New Church, journeying into the future of hope. The Twelve awoke thereby with growth in comprehension to the immensity of the moment.
For the Twelve to grow in the Faith Jesus declared hitherto concealed eternal depths of his love for the New Church; he had chosen the Twelve out of the world with all the powers of predestination, which he intended to certify publicly upon the Cross. Because of this Christ-given faith and hope, the disciples were no longer citizens of any hate movement such as Hellenism, Caesarianism, or Judaism. Now they were the New Church, in fact, foundation stones for the Church on which all of Christ journeyed (analogically) through the Millennium, Eph 2:20, functionally different, radically in Christ: never again to hate him, but to love the Lord Jesus and his own, all of the one Church, trusting the Savior at his word. They thereby constituted the Church, the beginning of the new world, the Recreation, or Matthew’s, 19:28, the regeneration.
Given the world’s animosity from its myriad components of religiosity, no one volunteers or opts for church membership. Entry into the faith and hope of the new and eternal life is by election only. Omnisciently and omnipotently by an act of eternity the Lord Jesus sovereignly chose his own. Because of this divinely initiated predestinarian activity, the world obstructs both election and reprobation, seeking to this day to reconstruct the Church into a social organization to mishandle her not of this world origin. John 15:16. All who hate the Christ, even if ensconced in a congregation, demand by ways of Arminianism, Semi-Pelagianism, or outright Pelagianism, to control the present and the future, which confirms the main intent of religiosity in its numerous ideological embodiments. Fearful of the Christ’s lordship, in fact, of the Son of God/Son of Man, the Judge, they insist upon total control. However, even the hatreds of the world against Jesus resurrected and ascended cannot destroy an ultimate fact: out of the darkness of hatred the almighty Lord of heaven and earth elected for himself first the Twelve whom he for every generation since bonded and bound as the initial manifestation of the New Testament Church.
Day after day, seven per week, the disciples experienced the world’s hostile reception centered on Jesus Christ; therein they knew experientially external and internal pressures to conform: let Jesus go his own way, and they then assimilate into Judaism. Except for the overriding power of predestination, they had every opportunity to entomb themselves in a friendship with high-minded Christ haters and there through escape multiplying pains of persecution.
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Since that timely teaching session, the New Church in every day consciously suffers from similar malice and spite: constant crowding to accommodate to the world, unclench pains of shunning, evade mockeries of hate, and prove Christianity’s irrelevancy. Instead of Judaism, Caesarianism, or Hellenism, revolts against the Church stem from, for instance, secularism, post-modern relativism, and capitalism’s covetousness. Disorders of the day slowly grind stronger against all of the Church to assimilate other, all-penetrating moral values and economic comforts, in this manner suppress and turn the rush of history into the visions of any number of ideologies. Each ideology, even fear of climate change, laden with the dull momentum of religiosity, presents itself with cheery faces, illusions of friendship, and inscrutable hopes of self-fulfillment.
Through revolving doors of numerous ideological promises for friendship agapic weariness, if not collapse, sets in; love for the Christ fades and vitiated neighbor love moves to the edges, with the result that . . .
• Fast-spreading Roman Catholicism strips away conviction with respect to the legitimacy of the Reformation.
• Reformed brokenness impairs works of rightful ecumenicity.
• Persistent secularism with its hatred for Christianity degenerates integrity to speak out and stand up for the Lord Jesus Christ and his church-gathering work.
• The onslaught of thin-skinned small-l liberalism, Modernism, in the Church presently to determine the rationalistic future of Christianity now mutates into late twentieth century, early twenty-first century Postmodernism with its baffling relativistic values difficult to evade.
• Strengths of Neo-Conservatism mislead into revolts of disobedience against Christ Jesus and the coming of the Kingdom.
• Lay armies of the Islam moving into every country put Christianity on the defensive.
• Phoenix-like, Nazism draws renewed popularity from a generation unfamiliar with its hateful destruction and death.
• The Religious Right flies its political flag only over reactionary battles, discrediting the name of the Lord.
Furthermore, proponents of society at large pride themselves on secular and multicultural political systems, liberal democracies. With foundational values changed into the religiosities of multiculturalism to accommodate all, everyone must honor religious aspirations, each with its distinctive demands involving a host of reactive communities. The rise of the secular state pushes the lordship of Jesus Christ into a corner, all the while with patronizing intent seeking to please religious communities with some sort of equal status—as if political legislation may dominate the Lord of heaven and earth, and determine the place of religion in public life.
These and more rebellious turbulences depress, make uncomfortable, in fact, question Christ’s claims to headship in the Church and lordship over the earth. Worse, each at ground-level revolution presents a pleasant face and offers friendship: assimilate and ameliorate tension by focusing on our vision of the future. Each such hole of lamentation dark with fatal confidence holds up freedom from the Christ and underpins the roaming rights of human autonomy.
For many of the Church, hearts grow colder; amidst circling enmities, love of neighbors in a missionary way and on a local scale slides away. Enough is enough, and therefore the old way into covetousness on its unstable ground takes over. Cross-carrying? No, self-serving! As numb devotion immerses in complacency, more fall asleep in church, so much the wiser than the Christ; on slow drifts into conformity with the world and unstoppable in reprobation, they lock into every enemy force. Rather than love for church neighbors manifested by holding the Christ first and high through doing the Commandments, social, financial, and political ambitions offer a nice as well as ravishing environment in which all care for themselves and get along driven by cumbersome forms of toleration. This other eschatology, however, since long ago and in each generation still breaks off from the main road. Primary care for oneself and a few choice good works for neighbors and friends produce a lukewarm sort of civil religion—Christianity on the outside, revolution in a fury on the inside.
In every generation, as the world’s hatred for the Christ manifests itself always the same; with hustling and bustling in design, the pressure is on against the Church doing the new commandment, “Love one another.” John 13:34–35, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 15:12, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” This love for one another that Jesus drew from the Old Testament and reinitiated within the Twelve he applied to the entire Church all through the centuries and millennia of his one thousand-year reign—until the Parousia. By this neighbor love, he demonstrates his mighty agape in and for the Church. On a directly personal front, John 14:21, “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” This agape separates the Church from the world’s multiform ideological hates. Christ’s all-consuming love for the Church and this all-consuming love of the Church for neighbors manifest the humorless difference between the Church and the world. Repetitious proclamation of this love sharpens discipleship and penetrates hearts of flesh with reformation.
As Jesus took salvific suffering obediently upon himself for the Church, unrestricted manifestation of his church-saving work, so too on the way ahead the Twelve took up and congregations take up whatever persecution Jesus Christ deems necessary to the glory of the Father.
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By the entire in the world/not of the world paradox, the Son of God, the LORD God,