Another year (10th) is over for the EJournal. If Christ remains away for another thousand years, the solutions put into print to long-standing exegetical problems in the pages of this EJournal will be lost and it will have been so for hundreds of years. In order for a Christian community to persist through time, it has to be big, it has to have great wealth, and it has to have lasting physical structures, such as churches, colleges, libraries and land; it has to have an establishment status and be tied into the structures of the state. Nations rise and fall, but a Christian community that is tied to the nation can adapt to the ebb and flow of history and ally itself to any state.
Of course, this does not mean that such communities are ‘Christian’ in a New Testament sense; we are using the term ‘Christian’ in a modern cultural sense. Our point is simply that the truth is found and lost and then found and lost as generation succeeds generation. If you know where to look, you can find the correct exegesis of many difficult passages in the Bible in the back catalogue of Christadelphian writings since John Thomas. But the chances are that you have no idea where to look in the writings of, say, the Racovian Brethren. Their writings are not completely lost but they are obscure and difficult to access. Whether you live in a country and a generation that has the truth is a matter of providence. Unless truth does not matter that much, and any church will do, the chances of getting to know the truth over the last two thousand years have been slim.
This line of thought raises the question of whether all Christians of whatever hue should not just agree that they are part of the one worldwide church which for better or worse recognises the primacy of Rome. This would in effect be a World Council of Churches considered as ‘the Church’. Christians just accept their differences and associations while rejecting any idea that they are all not just ‘one Church’. The problem with this is that such a conception doesn’t fit with the apostolic concern for truth in matters of doctrine nor does it fit with Christ’s example in Revelation of discriminating between churches and threatening to cast wayward churches aside.
Another question is therefore raised. Can there be a genuinely new theology of the church in this day and age? Can there be anything new under the sun? If the truth is lost and found and then lost and found, then after two thousand years, nothing is new in theology but there might be something to find again. Accordingly, if the church is only a ‘last-days’ building work of Christ, then this is a genuinely new idea because all churches presume that they are the church that Christ began to build in the days of the apostles. Furthermore, this idea would now be of its time if these are (soon to be) the Last Days. For lovers of jargon, this idea would be an a-ecclesial theology. This may not be a new idea, but was it discovered by John Thomas and manifested in his reluctance to adopt the name ‘Christadelphians’? Has the idea been lost since his day?
A lot of theology gets rewritten if this basis is accepted – areas such as the understanding of the Spirit, the way in which Scripture, and particularly the New Testament, is to be applied before the Last Days are upon the world, the position of Israel in God’s purpose, and the relation of any true followers of Jesus to Israel before Jesus once again builds his church. It also provides an explanation of the rise and fall of communities that have held the apostolic faith down the centuries. This is just a matter of the vicissitudes of history and not a matter of Church History. It also places the response of individuals to the apostolic faith centre-stage rather than membership of a church.
Prophecy is not an end unto itself