The GREAT AWAKENING and the End of Institutionalization
To paraphrase the words of Ivan Illich:
The corruption of the best has become the worst.
Through the attempt to insure, to guarantee, to regulate Revelation, the best has become the worst.
There isn't a religion called Christianity that was then later corrupted. Rather the corruption was in its institutionalization as a religion.
The Incarnation makes possible a surprising and entirely new flowering of love and knowledge. First, that God has become fully incarnate, embodied, in a human person; second that this is surprising − that is it couldn’t have been anticipated, or claimed or thought in any way necessary – it’s a gift; third that it’s new – it hasn’t happened before and couldn’t have happened before because it’s a revealed possibility, not one that could have been discovered or produced; and finally it says that this revelation expresses itself as both love and knowledge.
But, this freedom to love is immediately shadowed by two dangers: the first is that it threatens the integrity of families, communities and cultures by undermining their right to entrain and direct love within proper boundaries; the second is the danger of "institutionalization"- a temptation to try to manage and, eventually, to legislate this new love, to create an institution that will guarantee it, insure it, and protect it by criminalizing its opposite.
Faith in the incarnate Logos sacrificed on the cross is not a religion and cannot be analyzed within the concepts of religious science. The teachings of Jesus are full of anti-religious statements and satires on the scrupulous observances of his opponents as in his pregnant statement (Mark 2:27) that "the sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."
What is impressive about the transition from the early Church to the established Western church is how thoroughly this mystery disappeared from the Church's teaching and the concern of most of its members.
The ways of history do not lead directly upwards to the Kingdom of God, they pass by way of the final unveiling of the anti-Christ concealed under the last mask to be stripped away - the mask of "care" worn by the "institution."
Since the rise of the Roman Church/State, which served as the template for all subsequent institutions, all presumed to do more for humans than what humans could do for themselves.
Man can do what God cannot, namely manipulate others for their own salvation. This domestication of the Gospel is, on the one hand, a historical process, perceptible by all – Christianity changes the world – but it is also, to quote Paul, a “mystery of evil” - a mystery because its meaning, and perhaps its dynamism as well, depends on and derives from the Revelation which it corrupts and betrays.
This mystery is today more clearly present than ever before.
The attempt to make institutions perform in place of persons has finally reached its theoretical maximum.
Once again, the logos shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehends it not.