Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

of transforming it... Christendom is dead, and Christianity is alive and well without it”
(Walls, 2002:35).
We must also consider the French connection, as it were, between the Western disestablishment
of Christianity and the postmodern cultural wave. As Roland Benediktor
notes the postmoderns are directly linked to the French revolutionary spirit and without
question a product of it. Here again, we find an unequivocal correlation between these
two dynamics, still very much at work in our era.
The Christendom notion fully survived the Reformation, carried on by the Protestants
who wanted a ‘Reformed’ Christendom, not a ‘Catholic’ Christendom. A number of
Protestant groups sought the purer life (e.g., Calvin’s Geneva), and consequently
established separate groups and societies. In many of these, Old Testament Laws were
the basis for civil order -- church and state being effectively one, as pre-Babylonian Israel
had been. Some of these societies were quite harsh, especially by contemporary
standards. The Christendom notion went with settlers to new lands, where similar
communities were established, but none survived intact. Ultimately, Christendom
collapsed under the weight of both secularism and nationalism. As Christianity emerged
from these Constantinian roots, Christians also found themselves relieved of the burden
of maintaining custodianship of the socio-religious obligations of the corpus
Christianum.
In short, we are free, insofar as we are
courageous enough to undertake it, to
contemplate and to enact in concrete ways the
only biblically and theologically sound reason
we have for calling ourselves Christians
-- which is to say our confession of Jesus as
the Christ. As long as Christianity had to
play -- or allowed itself to play -- the role of
Western culture-religion, the nomenclature
‘Christian’ was obliged to stand for all sorts
of dispositions extraneous or tangential in
relation to biblical faith (Hall, 1999).
In some European countries, the process of disestablishment has been slow. In the
UK, for instance, the Anglican Church remains the state religion, headed by the monarch
of England. The Anglican Church is, like the monarch, little more than a ceremonious
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University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa