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Docta Ignorantia XXXV Paradigm Shift for the Church I am very happy the subject of an ecclesiastical, even ecclesiological, paradigm shift is being discussed in the parish. For what they are worth, I am enclosing my thoughts on the subject. The summary is that paradigm shifts are matters of proximate interest only. Ultimately, they are indifferent and even meaningless. Plus ça change, plus c'est la mem chôse -- the more things change the more they stay the same. There are two reasons for this. The first reason is that, being of the realm of mutability, paradigm shifts, ipso facto, cannot be matters of ultimate concern. The second reason is that, being the kin and ken of saints and sages, paradigm shifts are beyond the competence of the vast majority of humanity, including ordinary clergy and laity. Since what one talks about one must do and what one cannot do one should not talk about, ordinary clergy and laity have no reason to talk about ecclesiastical paradigm shifts except to observe and teach them. They do not develop or establish them. Now the details. The paradigm shift indicated in The Now and Future Church was crafted and set in place by Teilhard, Bonhoeffer, Hoekendijk and Tillich during the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s of this century, respectively. It was foreseen 200 years earlier by the great German scholars who discovered that our European languages are species of Sanskrit and that our Christian religion is a species of Vedas. Harvey Cox noted the paradigm shift in the early 60s and fatuously mis-identified its origin. At Union, in 1968, I led the effort to discover if organizational development theory (OD), then a subset of cybernetics (communications) theory, was a suitable tool for ramifying the paradigm shift we knew was upon us, inherited from Bonhoeffer, specifically. We found that it was not, as Dieterich had found ahead of us, that OD is uni-dimensional usually and bi-dimensional at best and therefore insufficiently puissant for the modeling required. This is still the case. And we worked with an OD significantly more robust than that in general use then or today .... And now Alban Institute wants me to believe that the paradigm shift is both inchoate and futurely and that its gist is a application of OD to ecclesiastical affairs. I answer, "Got any more howlers to foist on the stupendously lazy clergy and laity who've had their heads buried for the last 50 years?" The mission of the church. The mission of the church is finished, done, accomplished. The church has no mission. It hasn't had a mission since the 1930s. The Gospel has been preached to the ends of the earth and the thing is over. The pews are not going to fill. Not ever again. The ecumenical era is present. The physical plant is not going to be supported at its accustomed level -- nor the professional staff. The whole operation, plant and personnel, is scaling back because its mission is accomplished. The church succeeded. It's job is done ... so long as its job is taken to be mission. The events in Germany were oracular to clear vision: Bonhoeffer saw in 1935 that nothing at all is going to fill the pews. Hoekendijk had the thing brought home to him in his flesh -- as did Bonhoeffer. Tillich left Union and then Harvard because neither locale was big enough, mind or heart, to grasp the moment either in its enormity or in its potentiality. The spurt of church membership in the 50s was a social, not a spiritual phenomenon and as such, frivolous. This was clear even then to impartial vision. The Now and Future Church is late and ludicrous. The paradigm shift occurred 50 years ago ... and is clearly visible ... and the church has no mission. Neither this nor any future generation is going to support the church as former generations believed, more or less in good faith, that it was and always would be.1 No amount of OD -- which in the case of an hierarchical institution is sleight-of-hand -- will convince folks that the church is a significant institution, much less a cultural or even a spiritual necessity. A convenience, yes, maybe, a necessity, no, never. The times have changed. The mission is accomplished. Baring the introduction of a church tax collected by governmental agencies, the church won't be supported either in plant or in personnel by this and future generations. The Now and Future Church is late and ludicrous. Its author could be identified as a man of banal stupidity. "St." Cyprian's Dictum. The church is built on Cyprian's famous dictum, Extra ecclesiam nulla salus -- outside the church there is no salvation. It is both the tenor and the tendention of this assertion which God never supported and the world, come of age, now flatly denies and will not accept. It never was true, of course, but cultural/social realities, within limits, could be arranged to make it appear that it was. Now even the appearance cannot be sustained. While the reverse of Cyprian's dictum (Intra ecclesiam salus non est -- inside the church there is no salvation) cannot be truthfully asserted, as many vainly wish it could be, unless we would be laughingstocks, we will never again assert his dictum except in camera and then, as always, without any reference to the facts.2 There is copious salvation outside the church, as there is inside it, and this fact humanity will throw in the teeth of any cleric of any religion who plays chauvinist with their faith. Between full, complete religions as well as between mere Christian denominations, the playing field is absolutely level. It always has been. Salvation is entirely beyond the control of the church of any religion. God does not need the church. The church needs God. What passes for Christianity in our history is often merely Church-ianity, idolatry of something man-made, as the church in every way and exclusively is. What Loosh calls "The Graham Agenda." The church is a prayer hall for all believers, for the adherents of all religions. This is its function. Clergy should earn a living at a regular occupation, something amenable to their taste and which affords them time to engage in their primal and primary activity, which is study. The clergy's great responsibility is the conduct of the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the culture. The number of physical plants should be drastically shrunk, the front shortened. Concentration increases sweetness. It also increases puissance. This is the insight behind the raising of our greatest churches, the Templars' Cathedrals. And then there are the depth and competence of the officer corps -- clerical and musical. Both are at almost the lowest possible level consistent with keeping the doors open. Expansion is out of the question. The largest segment of the student body at Union, for example, is Episcopalian and black lesbian. The former is ever more widely understood as a high risk HIV infection zone in our society -- and indeed it is -- and no one will argue that black lesbians are going to fill the pews or the schools of the American Church of any denomination, even black. Union is, as always, the harbinger .... Musicians - who, in fact, are the real draw (or not) to a parish church -- are so poorly treated, so little supported and so stupidly (I use the word with care) misunderstood that were it not for their inner necessity, more congregations than do would hear Aunt Sadie in her 65-year-old saddle shoes pumping the Baldwin in her loft. Musicians -- real ones -- see clergy preen themselves on the notion that folks come to hear them preach or celebrate when the truth, which musicians also see, is that folks come to hear music and enjoy a quiet, pretty, non-commercial environment for a rest. The intemperate arrogance of the clergy and the unexamined ignorance of the laity regarding church musicians is a needless cost and a destructive one. It is also not sustainable. St. Thomas parish faces this phenomenon. The wealth WW2 and its aftermath concentrated in the hands of the generation who fought it is being dissipated and/or hoarded and in any case will not be used to the same ends by the next generation even if it gets passed to them, which is unlikely. Within the space of two decades and perhaps even one, St. Thomas will serve as a regional, multi-congregation sanctuary -- even a multi-religion one -- or be sold to endow such a facility elsewhere. The choices are that simple. Bonhoeffer and others saw the augury of this configuration in the fires of Dresden and Peenemünde. The end of the church as a missionary body was already visible in the first half of this century. The millennium was building not to a universal Ecclesiastical Hegemony, as ordinary clergy so often and vainly hope, but to a universal spiritual ultra-democracy, a genuine ecumenism. In this configuration, clergy had better not be a burden on congregations. If they are, they will be cuffed. Clergy have to study and earn on their own and lead from the authority of moral purity combined with intellectual clarity. Clergy whose minds and hearts are not bound to Truth are not clergy at all but a species of highwaymen. Ordination is a making ordinary, common, regular, persistent, continuous, trans-temporal. Ordination is done by the community, setting aside persons to foster the peace, prosperity and happiness of all beings everywhere by maintaining the harmony of the spheres through (1) the proper conduct of primal ritual (administration of the sacraments) and (2) the delivery of primal Truth (preaching of the Word). Ordination confers no status or privilege either in this world or the next. Ordinands are made not special but common. Clergy are no closer to God, believers or holy things than anyone else is. But if God, believers or holy things are abused, clergy answer for it. The calling of clergy is a heavy responsibility and dangerous beyond words. Jesus had talked about these things .... He had not talked about a church .... Clergy must support themselves at an occupation, or better yet, a trade amenable to their tastes and capacities. This includes bishops and all other clergy. The relevant model is Pauline, Basilian, Benedictine and Franciscan. Indeed, the reason Paul is so despised by modern clergy is just because his silent sermon of living illumines their sloth and commerce. They find any number of occasions to malign him, but the root is their bad conscience for abridging the Christ-ian and apostolic model. Clergy who claim apostolic succession while living off the laity are lying about their ancestry. In such terms was the paradigm shift made by saints and sages during the last bicentenium. It was carefully wrought, keenly tested and finally put in place during the middle years of this century. The nature of the church. The church is a man-made institution. It is God-allowed but never God-approved. The church is a work of art, not a work of God. The church is of proximate value and interest, if at all, never of ultimate value or interest. We have to travel beyond all limitations of reason and the mind and emerge in the Absolute, in the unspeakable God. That, only, is salvation. And that, only, will quench the spiritual thirst. The fact of paradigm shifts in the church -- the fact of on-going mutability -- is evidence that the church is superficial and temporal, a man-made device. God attends to constancy, such as nature exhibits in her processes. God and nature are invariant. The church is never constant, always changing, in flux, mutable, needing "reform" because it is merely man-made. The church is useful, engaging, even fun, as a great art always is -- but never of divine origin and absolutely not anything for ultimate concern. All possible paradigms of the church are operational somewhere on the planet at all times in all ages. In one area there may be a paradigm shift, but to call that local event a paradigm shift for the church is provincial bravado, not creditable to intelligence or to Christian charity. There is nothing new under the sun. Everything that can be done has been done and is being done at once, simultaneously, all the time everywhere. The church contains all possible paradigms and is using all of them all the time, each one somewhere somehow. This phenomenon is called polytime. Today, folks are self-consciously operating in polytime. Polytime means that all time-fields of history are running concurrently. There is nothing new under the sun because everything is always present and always the same.3 Origin and nature of our paradigm shift. Paradigm shifts in the church are decided and implemented by saints and sages. Ordinary clergy and laity have to learn from the lessons saints and sages put in their way. The paradigm shift now affecting elements of the Western Church stands on three legs: Jeremiah 7:22, the language of religionless Christianity and the awareness that India is the spiritual heart of this planet. Jeremiah 7:22. This language came to Jeremiah as he watched the temple clergy, of which he was one, codify their sacrificial codes and place them in the pen of Moses. His language is unequivocal: the clergy's entire Pentateuchal sacrificial system, both concept (theology) and practice (piety), are not from Moses and therefore not from God. To say that they are from Moses and God, as the temple clergy did -- and do today -- is to lie. And to build a religion(s) on this lie is an enormity. Insofar as canon and liturgy derive from the Pentateuchal sacrificial system, they are vacated by Jeremiah 7:22:4 5 they comprise neither fecund standard nor productive labor. Direct communion with the Almighty in the recesses of the heart -- His real Residence, the Holy of Holies (qqodesh ha qqodashim) -- is the foundation of theology as well as the essence of piety. The church is an unnecessary but possibly useful aid to that communion. True and full religion is in the quiet of the hermitages, the solitude of the priories -- in the ineffability of the Divine Principle. Religionless Christianity. This phrase is redolent with the balm of humility. Bonhoeffer meant many things by it. What he meant most was the strategy for living as Christians in the world which -- as he knew before we did -- hates God, culture and Christians about equally and with proactive greed. How does one accept and respond to the Call of the Divine in the Person of Jesus in a world which denies such Calls, derogates the Divine, dismisses the Person of Jesus and defiles everything? What is the staying-power of moral purity in a world which relishes its opposite? And what Providence has allowed this extremity to transpire, a world upside down and backwards and mighty proud of it? Obviously, these were the questions Bonhoeffer faced and answered long before we had to. But he was a seer and a harbinger. He had "over-the-horizon radar," which is to say, a pure heart. He went before us into the paradigm shift. He had to. Our discussion of it is merely tardy and considerably ex post facto. It is also bootless inasmuch as the shift was long ago determined and implemented by saints and sages preparing for our welfare. India as the spiritual heart of this planet. Christianity is based on the Seers of Buddhism, not on Judaism. It is a Vedic religion, not a Semitic one. This "fact" is obviously not obvious to us, but it is the truth. And there is a substantial body of documentary, archaeological and theological evidence to demonstrate the fact. Holger Kersten's Jesus Lived in India gives a foretaste, replete with mis-steps but in the right direction: India and Buddhism. Jesus spent most of his Career in India and Tibet, including both before and after the resurrection, which was from a death not bodily. Christianity is an Eastern religion, not a Western one. It is grounded in "Eastern thought," or better, "Eastern vision." Its direct ancestor is Buddhism, not Judaism. While Christianity is certainly not "New Age" -- a thing akin to Helleno/Egyptian astral preoccupations -- it certainly is of a nature, origin and disposition neither its canon, its tradition nor its modernly prevailing reason clearly mark. Yet, the signs are there -- not least of them that no one of sound mind and sturdy heart has faith in the received canon as entirely canonical, the received tradition as entirely traditional or the received reason as entirely reasonable. Everyone of sound mind and sturdy heart is convinced that a whole lot is happening in those areas -- scripture, tradition, reason -- which has no business being there and a whole lot more is happening without being properly or adequately recognized. The questions are so numerous and consequential as to comprise, as I have said elsewhere, a "monster." All signs point to India. The "monster" noted by Käsemann6 and felt one way and another by all is tamable only through a return to Christian origins -- to India and Tibet. This is just an unavoidable fact of our life. It is the only strength Christians and the church can mount in answer to the terrific attack the world has mounted and will sustain against them. There isn't another resource at our disposal excepting this one of our origin. And it is sufficient. Not only so, but with it we can beat the victory drum. But never again will we be permitted the prodigious delusion of taking ourselves for the only game in town, as Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, much less as Christendom. Western civilization is a species of Vedic culture, of Indian spirituality. This is the key to expansion and progress. It is anything but inchoate and futurely. It has been the system kernel of our life for three generations.
1 Even without pathetic, suicidal activities such as invoking anti-clerical canons and recalling sitting vestries -- activities which reflect a view of the church as a sporting arena and result only in episodic Pyrrhic victories -- this and future generations are too well versed in ecumenism of both secular and religious varieties to support an operation, such as the church, which claims exclusive and in the church's case even plenary authority.
Adwaitha Hermitage
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