The Empty Church

not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.  Hebrews 10:25 ESV

To meet together – Christianity employs this verse and others like it to proclaim that the Bible commands us to join in holy fellowship in the Church.  The purpose is clear: encouragement as the Day of the Lord (the end of times) draws near.  If this were true in the first century, how much more must it be true today, two thousand years later?

Ah, and that’s the rub.  The urgency of this text gets lost in centuries of waiting.  If that Day hasn’t arrived in two thousand years, what makes you think it will arrive tomorrow?  No wonder it’s the habit of some to neglect assembling.  Discouragement breeds isolation.

That’s not the only problem.  This text wasn’t written to Christians.  They didn’t exist when the author penned (or dictated) these words.  He must be writing to the fledgling Jewish-Messianic communities who were feeling quite displaced in the religious world of the first century.  In fact, the faithful have, in a sense, always felt displaced.  Soloveitchik writes:

“ . . . the man of faith has no single home.  He is a wanderer striking roots in one community, only to then be uprooted himself and travel to another, in a perpetual cycle.  This continuous oscillation is a source of loneliness—and it cannot be overcome.”[1]

Of course, the loneliness of the man or woman of faith stands in opposition to homo religiosus (the religious man).  Being part of a religious community is not the same as being faithful.

“This is not to say that contemporary Adam the First has no religion.  He may well attend a house of worship and participate vigorously in institutionalized religion.  But in Rabbi Soloveitchik’s analysis, he seeks a religion that caters to his interests; ‘he is not searching for a faith in all its singularity and otherness, but for religious culture.’  He wants from his religion serenity, not sacrifice; comfort, not commitment; an aesthetic experience, not a covenantal one.”[2]

In a sense the Jews have always embodied the lonely facet of faithfulness.  They are wanderers on God’s behalf.  Even with a “national” homeland, faithful Jews are not at home.  Israel is a nation state in the modern world, not the Kingdom of God on earth, and the faithful know this.  They feel it in their bones.  As we mentioned yesterday, “In Judaism, man is always somehow a survivor . . . Something within him is waiting.”[3]  Church and synagoge are no substitutes for the Kingdom.  In fact, when it comes to the lonely ones of faith, you might even say that our religious assemblies are empty.

Topical Index:  church, assembly, meet together, Hebrews 10:25

[1] David Shatz, forward to Joseph Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (Three Leaves Press, Doubleday, 1965), p. xi.

[2] David Shatz, forward to Joseph Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (Three Leaves Press, Doubleday, 1965), p. xiv.

[3] Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (Notre Dame University Press, 1983, pp. 404-405, cited in Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, pp. 113-114.