Via Dolorosa, Part III

After the Apostasy, What Then?

Christian suffering at the hands of Unbelief generally takes two forms: persecution and apostasy.  When the Gospel of Jesus Christ first comes to a pagan society the powers-that-be are threatened, offended, and eventually incensed.  The interests and social privileges of the pagan powers react and strike back at Christ and His followers.  Persecution breaks out.

The initial form of persecution is usually sporadic, occasional, and opportunistic.  A classic example is found in Acts 19 where guild interests led a riot against the Apostle Paul and the Church.  The silversmiths in Ephesus found that their lucrative trade in selling silver shrines to the goddess Diana became threatened as more and more people in the region became Christians and stopped buying the superstitious trinkets.  The silversmiths, led by one Demetrius, provoked a riot and dragged some of the Christian leaders into the local stadium, calling for their deaths.

Eventually, the hostility to Christ can grow until it becomes official--a governing policy of the realm. 

A similar pattern emerges when apostasy occurs--that is, when a formerly Christianised culture turns away to a renewed paganism.
The initial signs are widespread indifference to the faith of one forbears and a belief that there is a better, superior way to live.  Then, hostility towards Christians and Christian practices breaks out sporadically.  In a similar manner to the case in Ephesus, often the first confrontations are to do with commerce and trade.  The apostate culture insists that Christians must no longer be allowed to practice their religion in public--especially when it comes to trade and commerce.  It is not an accident that many of the incidents of persecution in the West these days are connected with employment and commerce.  Christians are being fired, fined, and punished for conscience sake.  They are wanting to trade as consistent Christians, only to face a barrage of hostile opprobrium.  Quixotically bakers seem to be the target-d'jour.  Bakers refusing to bake and sell cakes celebrating homosexual or lesbian "marriage" are being targeted.

The state and governing powers become conjoined, promulgating libertine non-discrimination and anti-intolerance laws.  Christians are punished, fined, and eventually imprisoned.

But the case of apostasy from the Christian faith--when a culture or nation turns against its Christian history--its strength is likely short-lived.  Apostasy quickly integrates into the void and destroys itself.  It's hard to build a world-and-life view on the basis of negation.  "We despise the Christ; therefore we insist upon abortion, and no-fault divorce, and  pluriform 'marriage'."  Every "liberty" quickly becomes a license because there is nothing in the centre to hold the apostate culture.  The earnest demander of the rights of homosexuals to "marry" becomes swamped by the fast-followers who demand pluriform and multiform "open marriages", complete with unlimited "gender" diversity and trans-sexualism.  Moreover, these creatures of the next iteration are militantly deploying the exact same arguments of those who began just a few short years previously to demand the right to homosexual "marriage".  The more "conservative" homosexual advocates are left up the creek without a paddle.

Apostasy can tear down; it struggles to build.  It becomes a victim of its own nihilism.  Meanwhile the Gospel of Jesus Christ continues to be proclaimed and heralded.  In an increasingly mad world, it becomes the only voice of reason, sanity, and hope.

But there is one historical exception.  Throughout the Christian era, there has emerged just one alternative, one anti-Christ to fill the void that apostasy inevitably brings in its wake.  Hendrikus Berkhof explains:

We cannot neglect discussing Islam in this connection. . . . In the faith of his followers Mohammed began more and more to take on the appearance of the counter-christ. . . . Motivated by its Jewish and Christian inspiration Islam aspires to be a theocracy.  . . . In Islam we find the elements of Christ's historical suffering as they are presented in the New Testament.  Islam is the great apostasy and competitive doctrine of salvation in one.  Both are geographically expanded to the extent that an innumerable mass of people has been made inaccessible to the Lordship of Christ.

Ethically and culturally, too, Islam is the greatest adversary of the gospel.  It gives man the illusion of being delivered from paganism, without in the least giving him the freedom which comes through the appearance of Christ.  Gospel and Islam belong together as the sun and shadow.  Islam is the form in which the negative signs of Christ's presence take on world-historical proportions.  [Hendrikus Berkhof, Christ the Meaning of History, (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1966). Fourth edition,  p.107f.]

It is intriguing that precisely at the time when the West's apostasy is reaching a howling crescendo and the fault-lines of its secular culture are widening into fissures and chasms, Islam is rapidly gaining ground in Western countries.  So the stage is set.  Either the secular West will repent of its enervating rebellion against Christ and return to His gentle, light yoke, or it will embrace the anti-Christ of Islam, whereupon we will be facing the long dark of Moria.