Blog Post – 9 – Are your roots showing?

God’s priority is not the spreading of American culture, but rather the culture of heaven. The establishment of the kingdom of God on earth is not synonymous with the culture of any nation.  Heaven has a culture, and that is the one the Father, Son, and Spirit plan to cover the earth with.  Does he love America?  Yes, but He equally loves Russia, China, and Iran.  Washington D.C. is not the center of God’s activity on the earth; heaven is.  The culture of heaven is what it is, totally independent from any other culture.  It is a realm where the Trinity rules supreme.  The culture of heaven is love, a place where the atmosphere is set by the unrestricted, non-competitive, interpenetrating, mutually beneficial, self-giving love of the persons of the Trinity.  If the current Western Evangelical belief system was lifted into heaven’s atmosphere of raging goodness and intense agape how much would fit, and how much would burn?  What would not withstand the heavenly purge?  That is what this time in the Rethink Tank is about.  How would the Penal Substitutionary Theory of atonement hold up?  The Early Church Fathers had other theories of atonement which were all redemptive and restorative.  This idea of an angry Father that must be appeased before He can forgive us, would burn to a crisp in the light of heaven.  A good Father does not murder one son to save the others.  We killed Jesus.  God took the absolute worst that man could give Him and turned it into our salvation.  The Father was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. The idea of an angry God obsessed with retributive justice and punishment was picked up from a Greco-Roman influence that permeated the church after the marriage of the church and the government of Rome.  Our American court system has roots in Rome, not heaven.  We have developed a God more like Zeus than Yahweh.   Straying from the concept of the Triune God has led to endless distortion of the truth.  God exists in three persons, each sharing the same essence, the same nature, consubstantial.  They are not three Gods nor is each person one-third God.  The Father and Son were not on different pages about mankind.  The Father is no holier than Jesus.  Jesus is not more loving than the Father.  God could not and did not turn His back on Jesus. Early church true Trinitarians clearly understood this.  Only after centuries of under-emphasizing the truth of the Trinity would we fall for this.  The one “theory” of the atonement that has become the current evangelical gospel was not even formalized until the 16^th century based on ideas that surface in the 11^th century.  If we are concerned about the fruit of American Christianity, maybe we should go back to the root.  Are we truly currently united with Christ, one spirit with Him?  Do we function out of carnal minds or the mind of Christ?  Are we rooted in heaven or are we rooted in a historical theological journey that was hijacked by Western Culture?  The Reformation did not jump back to the beginning of the church for restoration; it is simply an inadequate modification of the corrupt system.  Yes, needed changes were made, but too much was carried over from the polluted doctrinal stream.  Until we reconnect with heaven, we will not see heaven on earth.  And, by the way, God is more concerned with that than getting you to heaven.  I have probably stirred up enough for one post.  May your day be filled with the Trinitarian bliss of heaven here and now.