Imagine going to a wedding, and everyone is celebrating and happy and there is a palpable feeling of joy and love in the air at what is about to occur: the joining of two people for the start of a new life together, which will, hopefully, overflow into more new life well into the future. Weddings, of course, are a celebration of life and its perpetuation through family and children, and that’s what you’re all there to celebrate, and the joy of it is contagious. Your heart and the hearts of all around you are full when the music starts to play and you hear the sanctuary doors swing open, and so you turn along with the rest of the guests to watch the bride enter, and …  

She is a corpse.

In every other respect, she has been prepared for the event: her dress, her hair, her makeup and jewelry are all impeccable, along with the decorations and flowers of the venue, and by all appearances, she would be the perfect bride and this the perfect wedding ceremony … but for the fact that she is dead.

To your bewilderment and compounded revulsion, the collective joy of the guests is totally uninterrupted and undiminished. Many even gush effusively over the supposed beauty of this painted cadaver as her beaming father wheels the upright gurney along to proceed down the aisle, while you choke on the heavy perfume that fails to disguise the stench of rotting flesh as she passes. No one other than you is surprised or disturbed in the least, as if this is all expected and normal and precisely in line with what they came to celebrate.

Sounds like a horror movie, right?

Well … this is, without exaggeration, exactly how I feel whenever I go to church.

Church sickens me. I never feel more alone or more distant from God than when I’m standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a packed church on Sunday morning.

Of course, regular churchgoers are always scandalized when I say things like that, and they think I’m just being cynical or too demanding and critical. What do I expect, after all? “Look around you!” they insist. “Can’t you hear the music? Aren’t you impressed by the grandeur of the venue? Can’t you see the flowers? Aren’t the bridesmaids stunning and the groomsmen dashing in their tuxedos? Aren’t you moved by the eloquence of the invocation? He quoted Scripture! Everything can’t be perfect! You must be angry at God. That’s it. What happened to you? Why do you hate weddings so much?”

But I don’t hate weddings and I especially don’t hate God and the Church. Quite the contrary.  

I just happen to be aware that for a wedding to be real, and not a demonic, horror-movie parody of itself, the bride has to be alive, as a minimal requirement, and anything else is an insult to the very concept of weddings, so I am very insistent on that point.

Likewise, for a church to be real, it also must not be a corpse.

The modern, mainstream, market-standard Church has all of the pomp and ceremony and expected trappings, but that which it is supposed to celebrate is absent. It has no life, and so it cannot perpetuate itself, except by continuing with the pomp and ceremony and outward trappings to maintain the illusion of what it purports to represent and celebrate.

The Meaning of ‘Life’

When the Church first began, in the time soon after the Life of God descended to dwell within and regenerate them, the apostles were arrested and imprisoned by the religious authorities, but an angel freed them and instructed, “Go, stand in the temple and tell the people the whole message about this life.”

Some translators render it “ … about this new life,” which isn’t present in the Greek, but it’s a bit of theological editorializing that I can agree with, because it obviously wasn’t “life” in the general sense they were to proclaim. They weren’t doing “life coaching” or talking about “the good life” or anything else that might fall under the broad category of “life” (as you might often hear about in church today). The message was about “life” in the very particular sense of the eternal life Christ died and – most importantly for our purposes here – was raised to give to us.

So, what is this “new life”?

If you ask your garden-variety churchgoer about it, they’re likely to say it’s about going to heaven in ghost-form when we die instead of hell.

Yet, if you read every sermon, debate or doctrinal declaration in the Book of Acts, before and after that event, there isn’t a single mention of dead humans going off to some afterlife as disembodied spirits or souls.

And, for that matter, and as I have explained at length in other articles, this idea is totally absent from the rest of the Bible, except when we bring it with us.

Also, and more importantly, they spoke of it, not merely as some far-off promise to enjoy in an indefinite future (although, that aspect is there), but as a present reality to be lived here, now.

The apostle Peter wrote that God “has given us everything needed for life and godliness.”

We have it, Peter wrote, through God’s promises: He has promised that, if we trust in Him through Jesus Christ, we have the very nature of God within us, and so we can – we must – participate in God’s nature and thereby escape the corruption of the world.

As in, we already have eternal life – it isn’t something we merely wait for. It’s something we are supposed to have now. What happens in the future is the consummation and completion of what we are supposed to have in the present. Here, when we first believe, we receive the seed of that life, and the Christian life is about cultivating it so that it grows and bears fruit and perpetuates itself to others, and thus the kingdom of heaven advances on earth.

Remember to Check Your Bride’s Pulse

Of course, much of this is old hat and most churchgoers would affirm much of this just as I would.

Or, at least, they have a doctrine about the indwelling of the Spirit, and they are fluent with terms like “sanctification” and “regeneration” or maybe even “theosis” as they speak about it.

But, their doctrines do more to inoculate them – to blind them to these teachings as they find them in the Bible, because they gloss them over when they read them, imposing their presuppositions in place of the actual meaning of the text.

That they have a totally different understanding in mind than what the biblical writers intended becomes glaringly obvious when they’re confronted with the surrounding verses.

Cite Peter’s teachings from 2 Peter 1:3-4 about how we participate in the Divine Nature through God’s promises and they’ll nod in agreement.

But then go on to the very next set of verses: “For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith excellence; and to excellence, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-mastery; and to self-mastery, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly affection; and to brotherly affection, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins.”

They won’t take that warning as too terribly dire, because the immediate context gives them room to supply their own definitions for those outcomes instead of heeding the far more sobering definitions supplied by the writer, and by Jesus himself.

But if you put the emphasis on that “make every effort”-part, it will become immediately clear that the plain meaning of that passage and all others like it simply does not penetrate.

More times than I can count, I have quoted that passage, without comment – I just recited it, verbatim, as it appears on the page – and the person’s reflexive, immediate response has been to accuse me of promoting “works-based salvation.”

“You can’t do anything to add to your salvation! It’s all God, not you!” they insist.

Their understanding of the New Life is that it is totally passive. It is something God does to you, and once He does it, it’s done, cannot be undone, and you can neither add to nor subtract from it, even if you tried.

And so, when they come across passages like that – passages that exhort believers to “make every effort,” to strive, to discipline themselves, to act, to take any initiative at all, to do anything, as well as any passage with warnings about what will happen if they don’t – the response is always, “Yes, the passage says that, but …” as they follow up with something to blunt the urgency, to lower the stakes, to get themselves off the hook. The common pattern is that where the biblical writers exhorted Christians to exert effort and take active initiative and responsibility, the modern churchgoer lawyers it to justify passivity, taking no responsibility, rejecting any demands that might be placed on them as Christians, and they do so in a way that makes it sound very pious and devout, as if these are all virtues to be cultivated instead of the vice and cowardice and laziness that they actually are.

The entire point of the Church existing in the first place, though, is to actively mentor believers in taking that initiative, according to Paul – to “build up” the body of Christ “until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”

Nobody connects that passage in Ephesians 4 to 2 Peter 1:3-11 and others like it, because we don’t have that understanding of what Church and Christianity are for. Our “participation in the Divine Nature” by our growth into all these qualities is something that happens of itself, we insist, and so the Church, in our understanding, just doesn’t have a role to perform along the lines of what we read in Ephesians 4.

We gloss these concepts over into vague abstraction and redefine terms to shoehorn them into the vapid, passive and feckless notions of our theological systems.

Consequently, the Church is a demonic parody of itself – a wedding held for a corpse.