Making Part Stand for Whole — Art Katz

Gracious God on high, your servants are hearing. What is it, Lord, that you would speak tonight? What is in your heart for our hearts? It's an astonishment, Lord, that we might hear you, that you have an explicit thought toward us and for us.

And I ask the mercy, my God, that takes nothing for granted, that you would be pleased somehow and disposed to express it. We ask the grace, Lord, that will open the inner ear and the heart to hear and to receive the sense of what you are about.

I think I can speak for this congregation and say, we desire to be changed. We need to be changed. We acknowledge our need, Lord. And if you will not change us, how shall we be changed? And if we will not be changed by your word, then by what means?

So we're asking, Lord, that you'll speak, that you'll require, that you'll put your finger in our chest if we have dodged you or evaded. Come, my God, and let it be a significant night for many, turning point even, for the church at large, for individuals, for men in ministries.

So we thank you, Lord, convey and communicate the urgency of your own heart. We know that your thoughts are not our thoughts and your ways are not our ways. We have taken vast liberties with you. It's astonishing what we have said and claimed in your name.

So, my God, come and chastise us gently. May we not need more than your word. So do we bless you, Lord, and thank you for your redemption of this night. Look upon the dust that I myself am. And you know, my God, the truth of my condition and my own need, despite the appearance that is conveyed to your people that this man seems to have it all together.

You know, my God, the terrible weakness that is true. So come, my God, be strength, be clarity, be the precious high priest and apostle of our confession. Come, Lord. May we hear your voice. And live, we thank and give you praise in Jesus' name.

Amen. Well, I'm still in the book of Acts. This time, chapter 5, the episode of Ananias and Sapphira, a remarkable instruction. Everything calculated for the church at the end of the age, not only the scriptures pertaining to Hebrew scriptures that says that these things are written for us upon whom the ends of the age have come, but also and especially the New Testament.

This is more than historical record. It's fraught with remarkable instruction. And we need to obtain that. So chapter 5 of the book of Acts describes a man named Ananias, who, with the consent of his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property with his wife's knowledge, keeping back some of the proceeds and brought only a part and laid it at the apostle's feet.

Ananias, Peter asked, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, were not the proceeds at your disposal?

How is it that you have contrived this deed or conceived this deed in your heart? You did not lie to us, but to God. Now Ananias heard these words, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard of it.

The young men came and wrapped up his body, and they carried him out and buried him. After an interval of about three hours, his wife came in. Not knowing what had happened, Peter said to her, tell me whether you and your husband sold the land for such and such a price.

Oh, she said, yes, that was the price. Then Peter said to her, how is it that you have agreed together to put the spirit of the Lord to the test? Look, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out and bury you also.

Immediately, she fell down at his feet and died. When the young men came in, they found her dead. So they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. And great fear seized the whole church and all who heard of these things.

Now, many signs and wonders were done among the people through the apostles, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, because of the jealous apostolic attention to the spirit of truth, the spirit of God, therefore, was available in demonstration of signs and wonders done among the people.

Because as our book, The Spirit of Truth, reminds us that the spirit of power is first the spirit of truth. The first manifestation of God's spirit is always as truth, always as the dove. We cannot enjoy the power and the benefit and the advantage of this spirit and grossly neglect the spirit as the spirit of truth.

So this remarkable episode is very instructive of how far God will go and how jealous the early church was in protecting jealously the standard of truth in its own midst. That's an apostolic jealousy.

And that Paul, I'm sorry, Peter, was so discerning as to immediately see through the pretense of someone who offered a generous contribution and made it to appear as the whole, but it was only in part.

With his wife's knowledge, it's remarkable you did not lie to us, but to God. How can you lie to the Holy Spirit? Read the Psalms and the Proverbs. Lying seems to be a greater abhorrence to God than virtually any sin.

Something about lying that is so detestable, no liar will enter the kingdom because a lie is the greatest effrontery to God. It presumes that somehow he's not seeing, not hearing, not understanding, and that somehow we can get by with something that escapes his attention.

A lie is ultimate presumption upon God. It's degrading God, denigrating God, reducing God, who himself is the spirit of truth. The great question that the Church needs to ask is whether we are guilty, historically and presently, of the sin of Ananias and Sapphira.

Namely, presenting something as if it represents the whole thing, the full thing, when in fact it is only in part. And that somehow we can get away with it and impress God that the portion that we are offering constitutes the whole.

Israel and the Church: When the Part Is Mistaken for the Whole

So I'm trying to express something historic about the Church that might, as I believe, presently be true. And that the part that we are excluding is the significant part that pertains to Israel. And somehow we have allowed its exclusion and present the Church as if it represents the whole counsel of God and the whole understanding of God and have left out that aspect of the comprehensive knowledge that includes the relationship between the Church and Israel and somehow not being a vital aspect of truth.

And we are disfigured by this absence. Help me with this. In your spirit, I'm feeling for something. I believe that the right acknowledgment of Israel is so critical to the Church's own comprehension of itself and its own calling and purpose in God that the neglect or the rejection of that has disfigured the Church and allowed it to be more dead than it knows.

That spiritually speaking, it has already been carried out feet first while we yet remain continuing with our practices, continuing with our services, continuing with our programs, so dead as not to even know that we're lacking the vital life of God and that somehow the now that was true of the early Church and so absent from ourselves is dismissed as being appropriate to them historically but not something that we should expect in our own time in our own generation.

The absence of God in power, the lack of fear that is in the Church, is more a symptom and a statement of a spiritual death that must necessarily be ours who are trying to impress God and ourselves that somehow we have it all together when we have only a part and make that part to stand for the whole.

Somehow, acknowledgment of Israel and a sympathy for the present state and a desire for its success and occasional prayer for the peace of Jerusalem is as much a rejection of the truth of God about Israel for the Church as a total dismissal.

If our attitude and relationship with Israel is only sentimental, is only a gesture, is only, so to speak, throwing a bone to God, if it is not a vital center that requires some radical effect upon our faith and whole understanding of it, somehow we're guilty of having only in part what we assume is the whole.

I wrote here, a merely benign and sanctimonious approval of present Israel in no way threatens our petty kingdoms and leaves them quite intact. The revelation of a redeemed nation resurrected out of death of the present state shatters all and requires and makes necessary even the revision of our understanding of God as God.

If the subject of Israel is not rightly understood and rightly apprehended, if we have been satisfied with only a minimal acknowledgment and sympathy for the state and make that to stand for the whole reality that God has determined should be central for the Church's own understanding of itself, we are presenting something in part that really should stand for the whole.

We have not the full appropriation of God's truth. I believe that every petty kingdom that characterizes our present Christianity, whether it's the ministry of a single man or of a denomination, is a statement of the absence of the, and only, kingdom of God from our consideration and our walk.

And we have lost the reality of the kingdom that Jesus said is at hand in exact proportion as we have lost the significance of Israel in the way in which God would have us to understand it. Israel is not an object for our pity or a basis for our sentimental identification or a place to go that's interesting.

Israel, in the largest sense, is the purpose for our being as a Church. From the very beginning, the Lord created something out of Israel's fall, a Gentile body for the purpose of restoring the nation that had fallen away with the crucifixion of Jesus.

That the Church today exists without this consciousness and only gives Israel a scant consideration and thinks that the whole issue of Israel is the mere hope for the success of the state is to have in part what God intends as the whole.

You'll know you'll have it in full when it disturbs and unseats every petty and lesser kingdom. There's something about the true appropriation of the subject of Israel apostolically and prophetically understood and received that compels every petty kingdom to flee.

It requires something of us. If your attachment to Israel has not made any requirements, if it enables you comfortably to continue in the mode of faith that has been familiar to now, you have not rightly been apprehended by this central subject.

You have it only in part. ...book on the crucified God. A German theologian says, true faith begins where the atheist thinks it should end. The cross demolishes all religious categories, all sanctimonious notions of who we think God to be.

The Crucified God and the Cost of Sentimental Religion

There's something about the devastation of the cross. God crucified. It's God crucified that demolishes any religious notion that we can have that makes it compatible with our lifestyle, with our place in the world.

God has chosen something so contrary to our religious propensity that the apprehension of the reality of the crucified God shatters all categories and requires and calls us to a faith of a deeper kind than what we presently know.

Probably one of the greatest tragedies of our Christianity is the sentimentalization of the cross, the removing of its horror, the learning to live with it comfortably, the use of it as a symbol around our neck or in the church architecture.

The cross has lost its capacity to stun and to astonish, to shock us in how far God will go in his redemptive intent for mankind. And the issue of Israel is like unto it because Israel is going itself to be crucified.

Israel must necessarily, as I shared last night, walk a road to Calvary. What we have done to the cross to sentimentalize and minimize it and allow us to fit comfortably a Christianity that is compatible with the world and does not make ultimate requirement and allows us a kind of respectability is the same thing that we have done with Israel.

Israel, to pray for the peace of Israel, is hardly a requirement at all in the way in which Christians have been performing that till now. It's only a moment's consideration that requires really nothing.

But to pray for the peace of Jerusalem that you know will not come except that the nation first is subjected to God's chastisement and a devastation and uprooting of the present nation and a dispelling of it into the world and a movement through all nations and a sifting in which a majority of Jews alive in the world today will not survive.

To pray for that kind of peace that follows that dealing of God is quite another kind of prayer. It's one, in fact, that you cannot even make by yourself alone. That kind of prayer is really a groaning and a travail because it's a prayer predicated upon a knowledge of necessary judgment that knows that the peace, the shalom of Israel is not going to come cheaply by some kind of sanctimonious prayer that removes from us any real requirement and somehow will come easily and readily of itself.

The true peace that will come will be after the smoke clears from a devastating last dealing of God with Israel that Jesus described as being the greatest and final trouble of the nation exceeding everything that it had known prior to it and that this trouble will be of such a kind, such a severity that unless that time were cut short, no flesh would survive but for the elect's sake, that time would be cut short.

I'm trying to feel for something and to express something that we have only something in part and we have made the part to stand for the whole and therefore a certain death has come into the church while it yet lives.

It's an act of deception in which we think we have satisfied God because we have a sentimental affinity for the state that does not require any discomfort or sacrifice that fits in with the way in which we have allowed the faith to be known and to be practiced and that enables us to keep a certain posture in the world and with the world that does not threaten and even becomes polite and acceptable both by the world and by the church.

The issue of Israel and its apocalyptic judgment that is future, the vast dealing of God with world Jewry being sifted through the nations to say yes to that, to acknowledge yes that that is coming, that is the judgment of God which is itself a mercy and makes a requirement of the church as these Jews will be proliferated through all nations and require from us a mercy or there'll be no survival at all.

That is the true apprehension of the subject of Israel for the church. Until we have understood that and received that, we have made the part to stand for the whole. Am I making any kind of sense? Only Israel rightly understood brings to the church the tempering fear of God that issues from the awareness of the severity and goodness expressed toward that nation.

Therefore, Paul says to the church in Romans 11, fear. There's a lack of fear in the church. There's a lightness in the church. And I believe that every deficiency in the church in the last analysis issues from the loss of this center.

The right apprehension of the subject of Israel for the church's own consideration that requires of it an apostolic faith and a willingness for sacrifice of an identification that is more than sentimental.

Israel, Apostolic Calling, and the Church’s Submission

The issue of Israel for the church is the issue of the cross. The issue of Israel for the church is the issue of the church as community, tempered together, as a band that can receive Jews in that last day's condition without breaking.

It's a people who are willing not only to experience discomfort, but even threat to their life. The issue of Israel is the issue of the cross. It's the issue of martyrdom. It's the issue. It's really remarkable to me in my 37 years as a believer and the way in which by the Lord from time to time I cross paths with or touch eminent Christian ministers and to find out how few of them have understood or have sought to understand Romans chapter 11, Romans 9 through 11, the heart of Paul's most systematic statement of his apostolic perspective.

It's as if they are at liberty to be bankrupt or uninformed about this statement of Paul's deepest apostolic heart as if it's only an item that interests Paul out of his own ethnic identification with Jews, being a Jew, and bringing no obligation to them as ministers to lay hold of this mystery.

When Paul describes in Romans 9, I would wish myself a curse for my brethren's sake, when he gives that stricken heart cry for his kinsmen according to the flesh, the question is, is Paul identifying and expressing something because of his blood relationship with Jews as a Jew?

Or is the cry issuing out of his apostolic heart because he's an apostle? That's no small question. Because if Paul's cry is not an ethnic identification but an apostolic one that is really the heart of God, then it's a cry that can equally issue from us.

You don't have to be Jewish to be so identified with this people and so desire so fervently their salvation because their salvation is the issue of the kingdom. Their redemption is the issue of the release of the king to come and to inhabit their city and to rule from the throne of David and bring the law of God out to the nations through this redeemed people.

Paul's cry is not just an issue of sympathy of an ethnic Jewish kind, it's an apostolic heart cry that recognizes the significance of Israel's redemption so much so that he would wish himself a curse for that sake.

If that does not issue from Paul as a Jew but from Paul as an apostle, what then is our excuse for our indifference or our casual air or our satisfaction with ourselves that we can pray for the peace of Jerusalem though it might take as much as 60 seconds?

Can you see, dear saints, we are found out. The casualness of our attitude about Israel, however well-meaning, is something less than God's identification for the church that makes the church the church.

And we're content with that. We're content to live beneath the apostolic standard. We have learned to abide in a church without the glory of God. We do not insist a now will come to us of signs and wonders and power and demonstration of our shadow falling on the sick that they might be healed.

We have learned to live with something much less and other than was the glory of God in the church that was at the first. We have something only in part, but we assume that we have it in full. Listen to our vocabulary, full gospel businessmen.

We think ourselves to be, but we don't know that we have neglected that which would constitute that fullness, even the issue of Israel. A sister asked me this morning, what do you do with a recalcitrant and unwilling carnal husband?

How is he to come into the faith and take his manly part? And my answer was, the question is not with him, the question is with you. What will you reveal to him that will win him even without the word, as Peter says in chapter 3 of his first letter, that by the chaste behavior of the wife, he can be won without the word in the demonstration of a meek and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is of great price.

That the issue of a husband's salvation or his full participation in the glorious work of the church will not be obtained by a wife's harassment, but by her submission. And that is a picture of the church itself when it will have come into its bridal identity as being adorned for the bridegroom.

But how do we come as a church to a spirit of submittedness with a quiet and meek spirit that is not aggressive for ourselves, that is not arrogant, that is not demanding, that is not puffed up, that is not inflated.

By being in the relationship with Israel that God intends, that is comparable to the relationship of a wife to her husband. The wife, however bright, however gifted, even of God, is called to lay down that expression, trusting for it to be expressed through a husband.

And maybe the thing that has deterred the husband's participation is the wife's overt and aggressive expression of a gifting that God would have expressed through the head if they were joined as one body and she would find as much gratification in the husband expressing this ability in the word and ability to teach as if it had come from herself.

When the church will come to a relationship with Israel of a kind where it will come under and submit itself in a priestly way to the issue of the redemption of this reluctant and unwilling nation to come into the purposes of God they will be won by the submittedness of the church as the husband will be won by the submittedness of the wife.

That is to say the recognition that our foremost purpose for being is not our own celebration or our own success as the church but as God's provision for their restoration. Are you willing to play second fiddle?

Are you willing not to be foremost? Are you willing to see the church not as the thing in itself but as a means to a larger and greater end? The redemption of an apostate and fallen nation whose return constitutes the coming of the king and the establishing of his kingdom.

That is much more than making a trip to Israel planting a tree or attending a feast of tabernacle celebration. That's the whole. This is the recognition of the church's call that it is secondary in itself to come under and to be the supportive and priestly factor that brings about Israel's restoration and return.

Second, and not to think ourselves as the thing in itself because Paul warned I would not have you to be ignorant of this mystery lest you become wise in your own conceit. What I'm seeing as I survey the church worldwide is that thing about which Paul warned.

The conceit. We are the Israel of God. God is finished with them. Replacement. Or we are bringing the kingdom. Or we are the kingdom. Or we're going to take over the institutions of society and Christianize them and by such a means bring the kingdom.

The church is subject to all kinds of self-exalting exaggeration that is not God's intention for it. The church is not the church unless it exhibits the very character of God himself. The humility and the tempering and the fear and the submission that Jesus exhibited as a son to the father who never initiated his own remarks or his own acts.

He came under. I believe that Israel rightly understood is God's provision for us to come under. I believe that the absence of that explains the lightness in the church. The emphasis today for experience called revival.

Worship being exploited as technique, methodology, the celebration of feeling, of soul, invoking God's presence. I don't know if these things are current in Asia or in Singapore. Surely in the Western church in America the emphasis on invoking God's presence to worship is scandalous.

It's as if we can manipulate God by something we perform. In my opinion it's an arrogance of an ultimate kind which could not take place if the church were tempered, subdued, submitted and humbled by the relationship that by the effect of the relationship God intends for the church with Israel.

The absence of that relationship, the sentimentalizing of Israel only, leaves us free to be arrogant and pretentious in things that we have assumed for ourselves that God never intended for the church.

We will play second fiddle now and come under the purposes of God for Israel. We will play first fiddle eternally. We will rule and reign with Him from heavenly places. We will have glorified bodies. We will have privileges with and in God that even a redeemed and restored Israel will lack.

They will have millennial blessedness. They will have longevity of life. They will have an abundance of fruit and seasons where they will flood the earth with their fruit. They will have privilege being the locus of God's theocratic kingdom, but they will not have glorified bodies to ascend and descend upon the Son of Man.

They will not rule over five cities or ten. They will not have a part in the theocratic kingdom of ruling and reigning with Him from heavenly places. If we humble ourselves in this life and come into the intention of God for us with this people, the reward for that humbling is an exaltation millennially and internally that exceeds even the privilege that comes to Israel as a redeemed nation.

When Jesus saw Nathan and He said, I've seen you under the fig tree. What? Thou art the King. Thou art the Son of God. You saw me? You saw my disconsolate heart? You saw my forlorn sense of the failure of Israel?

I saw you when I knew you. Then you're the King of Israel. You're impressed that I saw you there? I'll tell you what. You will see something greater. It will be angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.

Jesus might have said, you will see what is the greatest. The glory that will come to the church millennially and eternally when it graduates in the purposes of God and receives a glorified body not to save it from the ills of age or the inconveniences of organic failure, but to be a means by which we can move in dimensions that Jesus Himself demonstrated in His resurrected body when He came right through closed doors.

We will ascend and descend in the fulfillment of our theocratic role obtained as reward and fulfillment for our submittedness to God in the purposes toward Israel in the last days. This right apprehension of the relationship between the church and Israel in my opinion is the very factor, the distinctive thing that constitutes the church as church.

It's the corrective from giving undue attention to men, their needs, a man-centered church, the neglect of God's glory, the loss of the sense of the kingdom as the issue of God's rule, and the turning of the subject of the kingdom of God into some kind of subjective and personal inward dimension that has missed the greater glory of God's rule over His creation.

The issue of Israel is the issue of the kingdom. The issue of Israel is the issue of Zion. The issue of Zion is the issue of the law of God going forth to the nations. The subject of Israel is not an addendum.

It is the heart of the matter for which God established the church. That you who are far off and without God and without hope in the world have been brought nigh by the blood of the Messiah into the commonwealth of Israel, into the covenants and hopes of that nation, into an existing body, an interim of the continuation of the most holy faith, and the demonstration of which would win back a remnant through the jealousy that will be theirs as they observe the reality of God in your life as the church.

Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid, Paul says in Romans 11 .11, but through their fall, salvation has come to the Gentiles so as to move them to jealousy. In one statement, Paul gives a purpose for the salvation of the church beyond itself.

That there's a reason for your being that has not to do with the benefit that you receive in believing, though those benefits are enormous. But if that's the whole of your Christianity centered in benefit, you lose the very identity of the church and the reality that God intends.

It's only when you realize that salvation has come to you not for your sake, but for their sake that you come in to the proper realization of the purpose for which you have been saved. And it does not even require the presence of the Jew in Singapore to fulfill this.

It could be the church in Tibet, the church anywhere, understanding and appropriating this mystery and submitting to it that affects the church itself and brings it into a place of reality, authority, and power because it is now the church in truth and the spirit of power is first the spirit of truth before it can be realized as power.

That's why the now came to the church after Ananias and Sapphira were taken away and buried in a judgment that came because they had the gall and the presumption to offer something in part before men and before God as if it constituted the whole.

Those young men that carted away that husband and wife and buried them received more instruction in God in that one function, that entire education in a seminary. It taught them the fear of God. It taught them the jealousy of God for the apostolic church and its necessity to be jealous over the issue of its truth for the church is the ground and pillar of truth and if it begins to become lazy, casual, and indifferent, if it thinks that it could, has the right to exempt the statement of Paul on Romans 11, 9 -11 on the mystery of Israel, if it has neglected the whole corpus of prophecy pertaining to Israel's restoration in the last days, if it has not understood the mystery and feels that it's not under obligation and that it can function quite well without this, merely with a sentimental aside to the present state, it is out of the purpose of God.

It is only something in part sufficient to constitute services, sufficient to have church life and program, but it has fallen short of the glory and it is more dead than it knows. It has been carted out even while it remains.

There's a life of dimension waiting that God will restore at the point at which we bring back that which has been lost. The mystery of Israel, central to the church's own understanding of itself. Following me?

That's why too much attention is paid to men and man's need, too much man-pleasing, too little fear of God, too much emphasis on enjoyment, too much manipulation, too much turning up of the amplifiers, too much affecting of the atmosphere, too much making our enjoyment as if that is the whole focus of the faith itself.

How did you enjoy the service? How did you like the speaker? As if the whole issue of our faith is our enjoyment and what we like rather than what pertains to the glory of God. We have lost the consciousness of God's glory with which Paul ends his great statement in Romans 11, that to him be glory forever.

And we will not have that sense of glory back and a jealousy for it and a truth that must attend it until we have seen and appropriated God's intention for us as the church, with that nation, with that people.

The State of Israel, the Nation of Israel, and Eschatological Hope

Not the state per se, but the nation. What are you talking about, Art? What's the difference between the state and the nation? The state is a political expediency summoned from 1948 under the providence of God for the purposes that have to do with Israel's ultimate redemption but is not the thing in itself.

It's a temporary proviso that can be extinguished but the nation, God says, will never pass from my sight. So long as my covenant remains with creation and the sun and the moon give their light, so long will Israel remain before me as a nation.

No other nation has been so privileged. No other nation has come under such consideration. No other nation has been so select. No other nation has called the apple of its eye. No other nation has received the law.

Of what advantage has it to you? Much in every way. We have been a privileged people selected and chosen by God as a nation and God's final redemptive purpose in creation will come in the restoration of this nation at the end of the age through the office of the church in its own willingness to bear sacrifice and suffering for their sake.

As a nation and God's final redemptive purpose in creation will come in the restoration of this nation at the end of the age through the office of the church in its own willingness to bear sacrifice and suffering for their sake.

Because the issue of their return is the issue of his kingdom and the issue of his kingdom is the issue of his glory. Anything less is a distortion. Anything less is a convenience that gratifies us and gives us a sense of having an affinity for present Israel but requires nothing substantial.

Unless we have laid hold of Israel in the way of God's intention we will not be required of. And it's the requirement that compels us to be the church in an apostolic sense. The subject of the Holy Spirit then is not some casual concern or interest.

It's some benefit that will be derived by some influence in our atmosphere. The Spirit and the gifts then become a vital provision from God to sustain us in our last days radical in the opposition of the powers of darkness that will fall upon us when they recognize that we have taken God seriously and are willing to be demanded upon for Israel's sake.

We will need the gifts of the Spirit. They will not be a luxury. They will not be a dimension that only distinguishes certain denominations that are distant from us and in fact frighten us. We will need utterly the realities that they themselves have not rightly represented.

Now we have lived short of that glory and have not needed it because our Christianity as it is presently constituted does not make that requirement. We can well perform services and conduct programs in a way pleasing to us that gratifies us but falls short of the glory of God.

When we come into the radical dimension that is apostolic with the understanding of our role toward Israel all of a sudden the issue of the Church, the issue of the gifts of the Spirit, the issue of a baptism of the Spirit, the issue of the power of the Spirit become no more a trifle or a secondary consideration or something that can be put off as the unique property of denominations who have majored in that but become the essential condition for our own life as God intended.

The Last Days, Psalm 2, and the Powers of Darkness

I attended a recent conference and more than one speaker spoke about the Church of the 21st century. I thought to myself surely that kind of expression gives an indication that the Church is going to be a continuing and ongoing phenomenon.

There is no end in sight, there is no consummation, no conclusion. There is no eschatology, there is no expectation of finale and crisis that concludes the age. The Church of the 21st century, and then we'll talk about the Church of the 22nd century, there is no sense of terminus, no sense that we are coming to the end of an age and that these are the last days.