Dogmatism

 

 May God give us big hearts. May we have faith in his working in all men, though without any mixture of spirits. May he give us a crystal-clear faith that includes love for all people and yet mixes with no darkness that forgives and understands all yet does not betray one iota of the truth.

 We have to embrace the whole Christ –his sharpness as well as his act of love on the cross. Christ’s love for all men is the love of the Lamb who carries the sin of the world. Yet he proclaims eternal damnation (Jn. 5:29-30) as necessary for the future of God’s rulership of love, unity, and justice. To change or weaken this would be to misrepresent his message.

 You state that to believe this or that is dogmatic. But such a conception is pure theology. It is the churches that are guilty – they have given millions of people the impression that certain beliefs are nothing but dogma, yet it is they who made them into dogma.

We are free of any doubt about the miracles of God. We feel completely free to believe in the miracle of Jesus’ birth and the coming of God in Jesus. On the other hand, we never want to lay this as a burden on the consciences of others, and we refuse all theological fighting over the issue. We do not doubt that Jesus of Nazareth came directly from God and that he was and is one with God, but we do not want to dispute the issue on a dogmatic level. We reject all dogmatism because it kills. We hope for and believe in the Holy Spirit.

The birth of Christ happens again and again. Where two or three are together in his name, where he is accepted with the same faith as Mary’s, there the living Christ will come into being. If we believe in the Holy Spirit, then the Word will become flesh in our hearts and prove itself to us as the Son of God.

This becoming flesh is a reality, but the fact that you cannot believe it makes it possible for you to participate in a church where unjust conditions remain unchanged. You attack social injustice, but you still participate in a church where the love of God does not come into the flesh and where the material world is independent of the spiritual experience. Here lies a deep separation between faith and experience. You call our beliefs dogma: in actual fact, it is any religious life that does not change life in the flesh and the economic sphere that is dogmatic and dangerous for the inner man.

We must become “narrow” in the right way– “narrow” in the sense that we live only for Christ. I do not mean at all that our lives should show more religiosity. There is no one as broadhearted as the crucified Christ, whose outstretched arms seek all men. It is a matter of decisiveness in one’s heart, of living only for Christ. If we have this decisiveness, we will have broad hearts, though not, of course, in the worldly sense of tolerance for anything and everything.

The main thing is that we are united in the things we find precious –love, openness, and sharing –in our struggle against coercion, in our fight against selfishness, in understanding our children, in seeking freedom from private property, and so on. It is for these things that we live together. We want to follow Jesus and none other; we want to go in his footsteps. We want God’s kingdom to come to this earth. You want a life free from the sins of society. Yet not (Mt. 17:27) even Jesus was free from the “guilt” of using unjust mammon.

There is a difference between direct personal guilt and the collective guilt of fallen creation. We cannot separate ourselves from collective guilt; we would have to live alone on our own piece of land, and we would lose all contact with our fellow men. It is better to have a business relationship with a person than no relationship at all.

In what sense do you mean: “Why can’t we work to reclaim the earth and help bring it back under God’s power, instead of joining in the world’s ways of destruction?” How shall we do what you suggest except by isolating ourselves completely from the world? Try it. Do what you want to do. You will end up with a lot of principles, but in complete loneliness and lovelessness.

 Principles themselves do not lead to lovelessness, but in my experience they often lead to disaster. I knew a man who would not use any money or the post office or a passport, and he was jailed again and again for not paying taxes. He was very firm in his principles, but he ended up losing his faith in Jesus and then all his principles too.

Where is God in your fear of using outward religious forms? In him all was created; nothing was created without him. He gave form to everything we see in the beauty of the earth. Your longing to dispense with all forms is anti-Christian. Didn’t Jesus allow himself to be baptized, and didn’t he establish the Lord’s Supper or Meal of Remembrance? Formal Christianity is horrifying. But you go too far with your fears. Marriage is a form; so is the common table and the common purse. You cannot simply fear all forms, otherwise you will not be able to live a Christian life at all.

 What does it help us to share our goods or to live in community and to be of one faith, if hu­man souls are harmed because we have too little time to love our brothers and sisters and to express this love again and again? Let us watch that we never ever become obsessed by a principle, however right and true. By itself, the “right” principle is deadly. It kills the soul. “Right” principles resulted in Gethsemane. They too easily take the place that belongs only to God, his goodness, and his grace. Our principles must be overshadowed by our love to one another and by the compassion and grace of God.