I skipped the hall to enter to the new and improved Pirates of the Caribbean this week past at Disneyland in California. The ominous smells brought my hidden memories to screaming life. Nothing’ll bring back memories like that old familiar waft of diesel, churros, and clorinated water that is in all its glory, Disneyland.
This trip was different. For a number of reasons. Of course it was endless and needless fun, but it didn’t pump my adreno gland as it used to. My more mature eye could spot glitches in the ‘cast-members’ and hardware of the park. For the first time I saw where they took all the garbage. I must admit that hearing the frontman at Toad’s Wild Ride cuss sucks the magic out of anyone. Don’t recall that from my childhood. All these stood out. But what stood out the most was this. Everything is updated. The Haunted House is all different, Main Street has new shops, and most importantly, my favorite ride has a new character it didn’t have when I was a kid. And I didn’t like it. Jack Sparrow was now in Pirates. He didn’t used to be.
Many religious movements have bought into an idea I like to call, ‘the myth of the pristine past.’ It’s this idea that the goal of each movement, most particularly in Christian movements, should be to get as close as possible to the pristine beginnings of its beginning. This plays out often in Christian circles with the ‘we are the only ones’ spirit, and ‘we have it right, you have it wrong’ attitude, because ‘we are as close to the early founders as anyone.’ And this often, as you can imagine, does little to help inter-religious dialogue.
Academics call this ‘restorationism’.
The restoring to something in the present to the past.
And of course, many fringe groups do this. Mormons have built a religion on the ‘myth of the pristine past.’ As have Jehovah’s Witnesses. But closer to home, as have the Pentecostals, a circle in which I find myself.
I must confess, I am a restorationist. But not of the type we are talking. I would argue that if we are to restore to anything, it shouldn’t be to the early church, but to the earliest creation (Gen. 1) when humans, creation, and God lived like we were in love. That is something that believe we are to restore to.
Now inevitably, every Christian group thinks they are right. They wouldn’t be a group if they didn’t, and they wouldn’t have formed if not for some good reason. This is fine. It is when our dreams of returning to the past keep us from the dream of reclaiming the future that we go wrong.
Let’s try to be the early church. At least parts of it. There are parts we can leave out, and if we are unaware of those parts, do a personal Bible study through 1 Corinthians and Acts. If you would like to return to Ananias and Saphirra, you are a different Christian than I. But yes, lets restore our love for the gospel, lets restore our sharing, lets restore our love for Jesus. But more importantly, lets restore to Genesis 1 and 2 when we lived with God, and with the animals, and all creation, in peace and harmony. Lets restore to the right time for a ripe future.
But let’s not restore to the stupid stuff of our history. I love church history, but really struggle with the Crusades, the inquisitions, and so on. I believe in the gospel, but I struggle to believe in those who have carried it so faithfully. It is the spirit of restoration that seeks the wonderful things of the past to reconstitute, with the help of God’s Spirit, to the moment of today. All with the humility to learn from the mistakes of yesterday. So let’s restore the great things of yesterday to great things of today and tomorrow, with, say, a little humility. The church must be a storehouse of the new and old.
Oh, and to be honest. Jack Sparrow is fine…as long as we can still sing ‘Yo-ho-yo-ho, a Pirates life for me’.
