1. Rebuild Ancient Walls

Isaiah 58:12 (The Message)

‘You’ll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew,
rebuild the foundations from out of your past.
You’ll be known as those who can fix anything,
restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate,
make the community livable again.’

The walls of the church are indeed ancient. When we look back at our religious experience, it’s not just Christianity we’re talking about. Before that came Judaism, and that’s been around about as long as anyone can remember or prove on the record (depending on how far back you want to take it…Adam and Eve? If they were real people?).

In 2023, at a time during which UFO’s have finally been admitted as real by world governments, artificial intelligence is rapidly developing at a rate many find deeply concerning, and fascism at a level above anything the world has ever seen are all coming to light, the ancient roots of Christianity are still highly relevant as a comfort, reminding us of universal truth and about the value of faith.

But. We have to be honest.

The world is different in ways no one could have imagined at the the time Christianity was formed and its records canonized.

I can already hear the rebuttals. Can you?

• “The Bible will always be the most relevant resource we have regardless of the state of the world, because it’s the authoritative Word of God, divinely inspired, inerrant and infallible.”

• “Prophecy told us all of this would happen. Just read Revelation.”

• “While the world may change, God never changes. He is not surprised by any of this. We can take refuge and comfort in the promises He makes in his Word.”

Those all sound pretty great, y’know? Very reassuring. The logic sounds almost undeniable, granted you believe in God in the first place and you take it on good faith that God really did basically pen every word of that Bible you’ve got on your shelf—certainly not the many books written around the same time excluded from the canon, not the works of the Gnostics, and most definitely not any books or teachings which sprang from the world’s assorted faith traditions. Those can’t be valid; they obviously came from the Devil since the one true God saw fit to constrain his influence to a small geographical area for eons before finally sending Jesus to spread the message far and wide (through Constantine and the Crusades, it seems).

Nope. The Bible is it and everyone else is wrong. They’re going to hell unless you evangelize them. I mean, you don’t have to worry too much about evangelism if you’re a Calvinist, and somehow find the idea tenable that a loving God could predetermine babies and children from other religions to an eternal hell when they’ve never heard the name of Jesus, by no fault of their own (“but, but…Abraham’s bosom and the age of accountability…or something!”). Oh well. At least you’re one of the elect, right?

If you’re reading this right now (congrats for getting this far), you probably just aren’t satisfied with that circular logic. There is plenty of defensible doctrine inside the tradition—really, really good stuff. Cathedral Project is not here to pick theological fights, and neither am I. We do, however, find ourselves landing in a space where the self-referential kind of logic outlined in the bullet points above, which we have encountered so much throughout our faith journey, just do not interest us anymore.

Those defensible doctrines, those abundant touch points where Christianity overlaps and agrees with the world’s great wisdom traditions, are the ones that still hold our attention. This new, shall we say, “faith location” is a liberating place to be. You can feel the weight of legalism and myopic dogma begin to fall away. You begin to trust the Spirit within you. Because it IS YOU—YOU at the deepest level, the truest self, known by God and formed in “the secret place”, “before the foundations of the world”.

Those are the ancient walls and dwellings we wish to rebuild and renovate. Let’s modernize this Christianity thing, even if it means you no longer call yourself a Christian, or if you no longer use words like “God” or “calling” or “#blessed” or whatever. We can work with “Universe” and “synchronicity”. We’re big girls and boys (and everything in between).

It’s been a long time coming. This thing is bigger than all of us.

—cheers.