A History of Consequences

“His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clear His threshing floor; and He will gather His wheat into the barn, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” Matthew 3:12  NASB

Burn up– Very few people in modern society have any sense of history.  Yes, we know what happened yesterday, last week, last month.  But in our technological age, the news passes before us like a lightning bolt on the horizon.  No one cares about the “long-term” implications.  What matters is which rumor will spike the markets today. So if I ask you, “When did the prosperity gospel of the Church come to an end?” you will probably be perplexed. You will respond, “But it hasn’t ended. The idea that God wants us all to be healthy, wealthy and wise is still preached all over.”  Ah, now for a little history lesson.

The prosperity gospel came to an end in 1348.

“The medieval great chain of being suffered a climactic trauma: the Black Death of 1348, a bubonic plague that killed up to 40 percent of Europe’s population. Boccaccio describes the breakdown of law and government, the desertion of child by parent and husband by wife. . . The Black Death worked in reverse [of the Athenian plague], giving birth to the Renaissance by destroying the Middle Ages. . .  Christianity’s failure to protect the good damaged Church authority and opened the way for the Reformation. . .  Pagan nudity reappeared in its anguished Hellenistic form of torture, massacre, and decay.  By reducing persons to bodies, the plague put personality into a purely physical or secular dimension.”[1]

We hardly recognize what the Black Plague did to Europe’s cultural psyche.  As the Plague spread across Europe, the Pope initiated a special weekly mass for protection.  But since priests and members of the congregations were the ones who helped those who were sick, they died along with the rest of the community. In some parts of Europe, entire villages died.  The only hope seemed to be found in fleeing all populated areas, and some did.  But most didn’t.  100,000 people died every 6 to 7 weeks.  Most people died within 5 days of contracting the Plague.  80 percent of the nobles, administrators and clergy died.  The entire governmental systems of Europe were devastated.  Social collapse followed.  The Church viewed the Plague as God’s judgment for sins, but as the death toll mounted and thousands of the clergy died, it appeared to the population that the Church was totally powerless, and perhaps implicit in the mass destruction.  Millions of bodies were consigned to the “bone fires” (the origin of “bonfire” and “ring around the rosie”).  What was left of Europe began to ask the question, “Why was the Church unable to protect us?”  And that led to “Maybe there isn’t really a loving God?”  It took Europe 200 years to recover, and in those 200 years, the authority and nobility of the Church vanished.  The tiny flea that carried the bacterium causing the Plague did more to destroy Christianity than any invading pagan army.  The stage was set for a society without God.  We have inherited the consequences of the Plague.

History matters. We can look back thousands of years to Egypt, a country that never recovered from the plagues of Exodus.  Perhaps we are in the same boat but simply don’t know it.  Perhaps the West will never recover its spiritual orientation because of a flea.

Today’s Church is back to preaching prosperity.  That means ignoring the forecasts of wrath found throughout the apostolic writings.  That means pretending that 1348 can’t happen again.  That means forgetting the history of consequences.  Head-in-the-sand history leaves us ill-prepared for the flea.

Topical Index:  burn up, katakaiō, wrath, judgment, Black Plague, Matthew 3:12

[1]Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson, pp. 140-141.