Remember New Coke?
I would imagine that more of us remember the idea of New Coke more than remember New Coke. That is, certain things seep into consciousness so that you 'remember' them whether you remember them or not. Books and movies work like that too, certain books are things that we all feel like we've read since they're so culturally prevalent. Movies too. You don't need to see 'the sound of music' or 'star wars' at this point to have seen them, if you see what I mean.
And New Coke fits that bill too. New Coke was when the coca-cola corporation reformulated their, uh, formula, in order that they may compete better with pepsi and associated drinks. The formula was altered to be New Coke, and was instantly hated by the public. It was so hated that the old coke formula came back, and was rebranded as Coca-Cola Classic. And New Coke wouldn't be seen again until its relaunch in 2019 as a Stranger Things tie-in novelty. It actually sold briskly due to the nostalgia factor.
I bring up New Coke because it was, and is, a cautionary tale. Coca-Cola is the number one selling soft drink in every country in the world apart from Scotland. There, they drink Irn Bru. So if Coca-Cola is so popular, if everyone seeeeeeems to like it okay, then what is the benefit to changing the formula. Or, to put it another way, what would the possible benefit be of changing it?
Let's talk about God's holy church: God's church is something that, like Coca-Cola, cannot be improved by adding anything or reworking the formula. You're not going to make Coke, or Ghostbusters, or Psycho, or the scriptures any better by adding your cool new spin to it. All it's going to do is to make things worse. But over time, the church, as it tends to do, added more and more to life and doctrine. And when it did, it made things worse. Demonstrably.
Here's my go to point - celibate clergy. Now, if you were to ask a Roman Catholic, they'd say that Saint Peter, Simon Peter, was the first pope. They would also say that Priests, Bishops, Cardinals, and especially the Pope, are supposed to be celibate. But Peter was absolutely married. Jesus healed his mother-in-law, Paul wrote about how Christians have the right to a believing spouse, as Peter did. So why can clergy not be married? New Coke. We know what the scriptures said, we just want to add something to it, and by doing so, make it worse. Roman Catholics may disagree with me, but I would posit that bucking the trend that Saint Peter first exemplified has brought nothing but trouble into the church. Why are you doing it? Did Christ give direct instruction for clergy to remain unwed? Did God reveal it in scripture? Did Paul write on the topic favourably? Quite the opposite, actually. So why do you feel the need to New Coke it?
Frequently, what I tend to find is that the arguments people have against the church are arguments largely against what we did to it, not what the content of the scriptures actually are. Or, to talk about my rather tortured metaphor, people dislike New Coke, they all do, but not Coca-Cola Classic.
The rush to return to Coca-Cola Classic was because everyone hated New Coke. And the Protestant Reformation was a return to Church, Scripture Classic. What Martin Luther brought forward wasn't anything new, quite the opposite. He just wanted to go back to what already worked, what was positive, what was of God, and to abandon all the changes that really didn't work. It's not going forward, it's going backwards.
And when we talk about the spirit of the reformation still now, part of what we're doing is to discuss the necessity to have every generation pull the scriptures back from where they've been concealed by us, and to discover it anew. Not by looking at the doctrine and adding new spin to it, but in doing the phenomenal nature of pulling the word of God forward, and finding it again. That's the reformation spirit - finding out how good Coca-Cola Classic was from the beginning.
