I am posting this very interesting conclusion on Church by a Catholic Monk in my block. He came as a Catholic Father and a Benedictine monk and died here after living nearly forty years in Tamilnadhu. I met him once and had some talk. A profound writer and thinker. Those who are interested can read it which will help some of us. I am also writing one article ‘Square Round’. Once I complete it I will post.
The Myth of the Church
Bede Griffiths, Marriage between East and West, Saccidananda Ashram, Thannirpalli, year not mentioned, Chapter 3 The Myth of the Church. Pp. 192-203
…As consciousness grows in man. Nature becomes conscious of the immanent power within her and the Church is born.—p. 193
…A new power of the Spirit, the Sakti, enters the creation and begins to draw man back into the life of the Spirit. This is the beginning of the Church, humanity drawn out of sin by the power of the Spirit and responding to the Word of God. In this sense, the Church is present in humanity from the beginning of history….—p 193 [Though I understand the spirit with which Griffiths use the term ‘church’ here, it should be dropped now and rather ‘sat-sang’ or ‘spiritual fellowship’ should be used, at least to the Indian context—db]
For while the Church has this cosmic dimension, this universal character, it is also a historical institution. This is in accordance with the biblical tradition, which while it looks towards the final consummation of creation and man, at the same time sees this great Myth rooted in historic time and place. Jesus, who is the cosmic Lord and Universal Saviour, is also the man who was ‘crucified under Pontius Pilate’. So also the Church, which is the consummation of the world and of history, has its beginning in time. While the Bible sees the plan of God extending to all humanity, from the first to the second Adam, it also sees it working out in the history of a particular people and coming to ahead at a particular time….—p. 195
…Such is the mission of the earthly Church, to be the witness, or rather the embodiment, of the power of the Spirit, acting as a leaven in creation and bringing it to fulfilment in the kingdom of God.
But once the Church enters into the world, it becomes subject to all the vicissitudes of time and change. This is the hazard which faces every religion, The spirit which inspired the religion, which is the presence of God himself, becomes overshadowed by human sins and infirmity. When we look at the Christian Churches today and recall their history, it often seems more like a record of human sin than of divine grace. If we look deep enough, we shall see that the Spirit of God is always present, changing people’s lives, moving them to love and service, often effecting radical changes in society, inspiring people with ideals of sacrifice, with visions of truth, with the fire of mystical experience. But the other side, not only of sin, but of human limitations, of cultural blindness, above all of narrowness of mind and fanaticism, is only too evident. If the Myth of the Church is to be revived today, it must find new forms of expression. Its universal meaning has to be discovered, its relationship to all the religious traditions of mankind, its relevance to the world in which we live. Such a rebirth of the Myth of the Church is already taking place, but it still has along way to go. Above all, we have to discover (p.196) the source of those deformations which have afflicted all the Churches and have led to their present state.
We have first of all to consider the cultural limitations Christianity. It was the product of a Semitic culture which had a very narrow horizon. Israel grew up in the small world of the Middle East, bounded by Egypt on one side and Babylonia on the other. Influences from Persia and from Greece later came to enrich it, but its vision, though profound, remained very limited. It had no knowledge of the cultures of India or China or the rest of the world, and imagined that all those who were outside Israel were without knowledge of God, just as the Greeks imagined that all who were not Greeks were ‘barbarians’. Also, its vision was temporally very limited, so that it did not extend beyond the year 5000 BC and imagined that it was living in the ‘last age’ of the world. [a honest Confession—db]
It was from this milieu and with these limitations that the Christian Church came out into the Graeco-Roman world. The Greeks brought with them their genius for philosophy, and the Romans their genius for law, and the theology and organization of the Church were built up by these means. This certainly gave the Church a profound theology and a powerful organization but it also brought grave limitations. Greek philosophy was essentially a rational philosophy, and though Plato brought to it the insights of intuitive wisdom, its influence was more and more felt in the development of logical rational thought and scientific system which are characteristic of Western man. The Church thus became dominated by that system of rational thought, which is the cause of the imbalance of the Western world, though the imaginative insight and intuitive wisdom of the biblical tradition was never wholly lost, The result of this was that the Church became obsessed with the need to construct logical formulas and rational systems by which to express its( p.197) faith. When these formulas or ‘dogmas’ came to be reinforced by the legal system of Rome, the Inquisition came into being, and the attempt was made to impose this doctrinal by force. The Reformation was a revolt against this rational legal system and sought to set the Church free by a return to the Bible, but again the Western mind introduced its logical formulas and legal systems and each church set itself up as alone professing the true faith. The result is that the Church today consists of innumerable sects, each claiming to represent the true faith and denouncing the others as ‘heretical’. The ecumenical movement has come to seek to overcome these divisions and to return to the unity of the Church, but unless it abandons the search for doctrinal formulas and legal systems, and recovers the intuitive wisdom of the Bible and of ancient man, there is little hope of success.
It is here that the encounter with Eastern thought, with its intuitive basis, is crucial. Christianity cannot grow as a religion today, unless it abandons its Western culture with its rational masculine bias and learns again the feminine intuitive understanding of the East. The suppression of women in the Church is but one of the many signs of this masculine domination. This does not mean, of course, that the real values of science and reason, of logical and systematic thought have to be abandoned. Reason has to be ‘married’ to intuition; it has to learn to surrender itself to the deeper intuitions of the Spirit. These intuitions come, as we have seen, from the presence of the Spirit in the depths of the soul. They are an expression of a growing self-awareness, of an integral knowledge not of the mind or reason alone, but of the whole man, body, soul and spirit. Faith itself is a function not of the rational but of the intuitive mind. It does not consist, as Western man has often thought, in an assent to logical propositions, but in a grasp of the ‘mystery’ of truth as a whole. The intuitive mind, it will be remembered, (p.198) does not analyse but grasps the whole, or rather opens itself to the unfathomable truth and to the whole, allows it to take possession.—pp. 198-199
…Every genuine religion bears witness to some aspect of the divine mystery, embodied in its myths and rituals, its customs and traditions, its prayer and mystical experience, and each has something to give to the universal Church….—p. 199 [Though Griffiths has changed his idea what the church is later in his life, it should be completely dropped now and should be called ‘universal humanity’.—db]
…Each religion must leam to discern its essential truth and to reject its cultural and historical limitations. This may be a painful experience, a rejection of innumerable elements in religion which have grown up with the cultural and historical development of a religion and have often been identified with the religion itself. Yet this seems to be the only path open to humanity today. What stands in the dominant mentality of the Western world. This is the hour of trial for Western man….—p. 199 [No body can reject cultural and historical limitations be it on religion or any other need in life. Learning the lesson from the past, we should create a new history that is relevant for our time, paving the way for the future to do the same.—db]
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…Though the Mystery of Christ is always present in the Church, and is the secret presence by which she lives, yet the doctrinal and sacramental structures of the Church are all the product of the Western mind, whether it is Roman Catholicism or Greek Orthodoxy, or Anglicanism, Lutheranism or Calvinism, or the various Protestant Churches in Britain and America. All alike are developments of the Mystery of Christ produced by the Western mind. Neither papacy nor episcopacy or any other system of church government is found in the New Testament. They are the work of the Greek and Roman genius, building on the foundation of the New Testament. Jesus himself gave no system of government to the Church. He founded it on twelve disciples to represent the new Israel, the new people of God, and according to the earliest tradition, gave Peter, as the Rock (Cephas), a position of leadership in it; he also gave it by all accounts the sacramental rites of Baptism and the Eucharist. But beyond this he left everything to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, who was to lead his disciples into all truth, All that has been erected on this foundation, all doctrinal and sacramental and legal systems, are the work of the Western mind, guided no doubt by the Holy Spirit in varying degrees, but all alike conditioned by historical circumstances.
The fact that Rome became the centre of Christendom is an accident of history and the Bishop of Rome only acquired his present position after many centuries. One may hold that this development was providential, but there is no reason to believe that the present structure of the papacy is permanent, or that the Church may not acquire a new structure in the context of future history.—p. 200 [Wow what a change in Bede Griffith from what he was when he came to India and changed completely after spending so many years and studying Hinduism deeply.—db]
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in the same way, episcopacy as a system of government was only gradually established and there is no reason to hold as a that the present structure, whether in its Roman or Greek or Anglican or Lutheran form, should always remain. All church or structures are subject to the law of historical growth.—p. 201
In the same way the doctrinal structures, built up by the Western mind on the foundations of the faith of the apostles, e all historically conditioned and bear the mark of the limitations of the Western mind. It is certain that the people of Asia will never accept Christianity in its present form. Five and more of missionary activity have shown the futility of the attempt. Christianity remains for the people centuries of the East a foreign religion, moulded by the Western mind.—p.201
…Atheism and the agnosticism signify the rejection of certain images and concepts of God or of Truth, which are historically conditioned and therefore inadequate. Atheism is a challenge to religion to purify its images and concepts and come nearer of the divine mystery.—p. 201
We have always to bear in mind that the divine Mystery the ultimate Truth, always lies beyond our conception. The great Myths of the world reveal different aspects of this mystery according to the imaginative insight of the different peoples of the world. In Jesus the Myth took a particular historical form which is recorded in the New Testament and preserved in the Church. But the Myth is capable of new understanding as the human mind reflects upon it. I has been given a particular rational and legal structure by the Western mind, but the Eastern mind and the primitive intuitive mind throughout the world is capable of discovering new depths of meaning in it, and the modern Western mind, freed from the shackles of a mechanistic model of the universe, is capable of rediscovering the meaning of the Myth. The building of the Church as the manifestation in history of the presence of God in man, is therefore the work of all mankind. The Hindu, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the humanist, the philosopher, the scientist, have all something to give and something to receive. The Christian, to whatever church he may belong, cannot claim to have the monopoly of the Truth We are all pilgrims in search of truth, of reality, of final fulfilment. But we have to recognize that this Truth will always remain beyond our understanding. No science or philosophy or theology can ever encompass the Truth. No poetry or art or human institution can ever embody it. The great Myths are only reflections in the human imagination of that transcendent Mystery. Even the Myth of Christ belongs still to the world of signs, and we have to go beyond the Myth to the Mystery itself, beyond word and thought, beyond life and death. For the ultimate Mystery can only be known through the passage of death. ‘you have died: wrote St Paul, ‘and your life is hidden with Christ in God; when Christ who is our life appears, you also will appear with him in glory, ’38—p.202
The Christian Revelation: The Rebirth of the Myth
Jesus left his disciples with the expectation that he would again and bring this world to an end. This is the Jesus condition under which we all live. At no time in history has the world been nearer to destruction than it is at the present moment. There are forces present in the world which are capable of destroying all life on this planet and those who control these forces are themselves beyond control. It may be that the Western world will change, or at least a sufficient number will be there to initiate a change, to undergo a metanoia, a change of heart, and set the world on another course, bringing about the marriage of East and West. But there can be no finality even in this. Our destiny is not in this world, and we have to be prepared to go beyond death. We have to die to this world and everything in it, that is, everything that changes and passes in this world, to find the reality which does not change or pass. Above all, we have to go beyond words and images and concepts. No imaginative vision or conceptual framework is adequate to the great reality. When Christ will appear in glory, it will not be in any earthly form or in any manner we can conceive. ‘For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face;’39 and we shall only ‘appear in glory’, when we have died to ourselves and become a ‘new creation’.40 Then alone shall we encounter the fullness of truth and reality which is also the fullness of wisdom and knowledge and the fullness of bliss and love. Then only will the final marriage take place, of East and West, of man and woman, of matter and mind, of time and eternity.—p. 203
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