True Christianity is an Apocalyptic Vision

“Little children, it is the last time” (1Jn. 2:18). True Christianity is a pronouncement of the end; not an end unto death but an end unto never ending Life. What then is ending? The corrupt system of sin and death that is proliferated and energized through human rebellion against truth in Christ Jesus. Christ our Lord came to put an end to this tyranny of destruction. The good creation that God Himself called into existence from nothing languishes under the evil yoke of sin that mankind has willingly subjected himself and creation to through rebellion and self-exaltation (cf. Rom 8:19-22). But not without hope, it awaits the refashioning of all things at the end, the restoration of incorruption and the victory of Life and Truth. Yet St. John the Theologian proclaims, “The world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever” (1 Jn 2:17). The world, the system of rebellion against God, is passing away, it is ending, it is its last time. And its death throes are visible in rippling effects which are growing with every passing day. The world is passing because, as a system, it has rejected Christ. Only Christ is Eternal. Christ announces to the world: I have come (the first time) not to condemn but to save (Jn. 3:17, 12:31); I have come to bring you from death to life, so that you shall not perish (Jn 6:33,51); I am the light of the world (Jn 9:5); cease your rebellion and be healed. Essentially Christ announces: I have come to bring an end to the darkness and death that have bound you. The tragedy is:“Light came into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (Jn. 3:19). The world system was - and is - too in love with its own darkness and bondage, it fears the freedom proclaimed by Christ Jesus. What would we do without the bonds we have grown so use too, indeed that we have grown to love? Fear then turns to hatred, for the love of bondage can be nothing but hatred. The world system has turned against the very One Who has come to heal, save, and bring life to all. Thus our Lord Jesus said, “The world … hates Me” (Jn 7:7, 15:28), “I am not of this world” (Jn. 8:23), and He tells His disciples that the world will rejoice in His seeming destruction (cf. Jn. 16:20). Christ proclaimed the end of death and darkness and the beginning of Life and Light. He ratified this freedom with His own Blood, destroying death and sin, rising on the third day as the Victorious King. “Remembering the saving commandments, and all those things that have come to pass for us: the cross, the tomb, the resurrection on the third day, the ascension into heaven, the sitting at the right hand of God the Father, and the second glorious coming again”, in truth these are the events of the eschaton.

True Christianity is mandated with the same dramatic eschatological proclamation. For all those who have been truly born from above through water and in Spirit (Jn 3: 5) have begun to put on Christ (Gal 3:27, Rom 13:14), to acquire the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16), and thereby crucifying the flesh and its lusts (Gal. 5:24). The Body of Christ, the fulness of Him who fills all things (Eph. 1:23), continues Christ's proclamation to the world: Come, abandon death and darkness, throw off the totalitarian dictates of sin and the devil, they are passing away into the never ending destruction of Gehenna. Christ has come to set you free. But Christ Jesus soberly warns his Church, “If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of this world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of this world, therefore the world hates you ... If they kept My words, they will keep yours also” (Jn 15:18-20). The Theologian instructs, “Do not marvel, my brethren, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life” (1 Jn 3:13-14). It is a difficult thing to endure hatred. But there seems to be only two general responses (most of all according to St. John) to this proclamation of end: Hatred or love, rejection or acceptance. Thus the world that continues in darkness seeks to stop up the mouths of those proclaiming its end.

True Christianity in its essence is eschatological. Indeed it must be. Christ calls His followers out of the world, which insists on grasping relentlessly to its bonds. Why? Because these bonds will destroy true Life, they will burden the soul and keep it in bondage to death. “Where your treasure is there your heart shall be also,” Christ the Lord reveals (Mat. 6:21). From the very beginning of this proclamation of the end, the consciousness of the Church has been that She is no longer part of this phantom reality of the world. She has become the ambassador of the World without end. Thus She warns those who call Her their home and mother, “Many lose their true home because they have greater love for the road that leads them there. Let us not love the road rather than our home, in case we should lose our eternal home … Let us keep to this principle, therefore, that we should live as travelers and pilgrims on the road … free of lusts and earthly desires, but let us fill our mind with heavenly and spiritual forms” (St. Columbanus). St. Peter calls us to remember, “Beloved, I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul” (1 Pet. 2:11). Elder Sophrony warns, "The tragedy of our times lies in our almost complete unawareness, or unmindfulness, that there are two kingdoms, the temporal and the eternal. We would build the Kingdom of heaven on earth, rejecting all idea of resurrection or eternity." Normalizing and acceptance of sin reveals a complete lack of true love, it betrays a cancer like infiltration by this world system. When Christianity becomes an integral institution of this fallen world something is dreadfully wrong. When it emulates the fashions and mentalities of mutable fallenness as standards of governing principles it has completely failed and lost its way. Indeed it is no longer by any means Christian. Not that the Church can ever be corrupted in Her essence, there She will remain pure and spotless to the end, and we as believers are called to enter into and conform our lives to that realm of purity. But those who would call themselves Christians and yet refuse to heed the pure call of Christ in the bosom of the Church are but building permanent structures on the road; and shall share in its destiny. When eschatological vision fails, Christianity becomes a hallow ringing of nicety, an empty gonging of ritual, a sterile structure, it becomes temporal institution using an eternal message for passing gain. Then every woe spoken by Christ to the pharisees aptly applies in fulness (cf. Mat 23:13-36). Therefore it is written, “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of this world makes himself an enemy of God” (James 5:4).

True Christianity is always an apocalyptic vision of the eschaton. Thus the book of the age is the book known as Revelation, or the Apocalypse. It is the record of this vision of the Church. The revelation of the struggle of this dying age with the coming Eternal One. It is the great and final Exodus, the last journey of the Children of God from the midst of Egypt and Babylon, which was inaugurated by Christ Himself and will be consummated by Him. “Come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord” (2 Cor. 6:17). St. Ignatius of Antioch radically councils, “Do not talk about Jesus Christ while you desire the world.” It may be that one of the reasons the book of Revelation is not read liturgically in the Church is because the Church Herself is the book of Revelation. In Her, as in Her Bridegroom, the proclamation of the end continues as the existent reality. Thus we see reflected in the very structure of the Church and Her worship the Apocalypse. The Church is not simply a reflection of the coming age, She is the unfolding revelation and reality of that eternal age in this withering one. The message is clear: this world is ending and those who cling to it will share the same fate. Thus all believers are constantly reminded by every means possible to lift their hearts and eyes unto the heavens, and by doing so afford the world the only true hope and help possible. This vital eschatological experience must never cease to be the heart of the true Christian proclamation to the world, could it ever truly not be? If those claiming Christ lose this message they simply become members of this world system but with "Jesus" tags, salt which has become insipid. Those who are Christians are throwing off this world and its hegemony of lusts and passions, they have left behind this decrepit land of bondage and have transferred their “citizenship (to) heaven, from which we also eagerly await the Savior, the Lord Jesus” (Phil. 3:20). Yet Christ extends His mercy to all, compassionately delaying the culmination of the end so that humanity may repent (cf. 1 Pet. 3:1-9). He has not left the world without testimony, nor will He until that great and Final Day. Therefore the Church longs for Her Savior, and Her unending cry is the culmination of the age, the exclamation of the end, the eschaton: “And the Spirit and the bride say, 'Come!' And let him who hears say, 'Come!' And let him who thirsts come. Whoever desires, let him take the waters of life freely … Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus” (Rev. 22:17, 20).

Superficial faith

By St. Nikolai Velimirovich

"Why do some people, well educated and baptized as Christians, fall away from Christianity and give themselves over to philosophy and pedantic theories, pretending that these are truer than Christianity? They do so for two principle reasons: either because of a totally superficial understanding of Christianity or because of sin. A superficial understanding of Christianity rejects it, and sin flees from Christ as does a criminal from the judge. Superficial and sinful Christians were as often enraged and infuriated with Christianity as the pagans. The superficial and culpable find it is more comfortable for them to bathe in the shallow puddle of human thoughts than in the perilous depths of Christ. For those who sincerely follow Christ, He constantly calls them to a greater and greater depth, as He once said to the Apostle Peter: Launch out into the deep (Lk. 5:4). St Mark the Ascetic writes that the Law of God is understood in accordance with the fulfillment of the commandments of God: 'Ignorance compels a person to speak in opposition to that which is beneficial, and insolence multiplies vice.'"