Christmas #2

Here is the second of three Christmas Bible studies - this one focusing on Luke's Gospel....

12/10/09

Luke’s nativity has a different atmosphere than Matthew’s. Luke is the author of the classic nativity story - the shepherds, the stable, the manger. He is the master of spin – presenting a story that would be recognizable and acceptable to a predominantly Greek and Roman audience while hanging on to the key gospel elements.

Luke begins in Chapter 1:1-4 with a formal introduction similar to others of the day. There were no publishers in the ancient world – instead there were patrons. Writers would dedicate their manuscript to an important person who would then distribute it. Luke’s Gospel has this same style – it opens with an introduction to “Theophilus” which means “lover of God”. The name may indicate that this is not a real person but symbolic of the emerging Christian community. Luke is using an accepted and easily recognizable opening to ease his audience into the narrative. He is pitching his story to the educated cultured people of his time to communicate the story of Jesus in a way that they will embrace.

Luke’s Gospel is about political and social transformation. His focus is transforming the human space. It is arguably the most human of the Gospels and is sometimes considered the Gospel of the Catholic Church. It roots Christianity in recognizable human society. Luke places itself in the age of the gentiles – looking to a time when the gospel is communicated through the whole world.

The nativity narrative begins with the temple –with Zechariah and Elizabeth, privileged priestly figures. They bring to mind authority and holiness and immediately set the reader at ease. They are easily recognizable (every culture has temple figures) but Luke links them to Old Testament themes. He repeats motifs from the Old Testament – in particular the stories of Abraham and Sarah and of Hannah and Samuel. These are stories of barren women living in a time when motherhood gave women status and value. Elizabeth’s story fits with this archetype. Her experience (LK1:24) is the same – the childless woman rescued by God.

Luke intertwines the stories of Elizabeth and Mary in 1:26-80. Elizabeth overcoming adversity cues the reader to expect something similar with Mary. Zechariah and Elizabeth are totally legitimate characters (they come from the house of Aaron who was Moses’ right hand man). Intertwining their story with Mary’s gives her credibility and acceptability. The text does not give any background to Mary – her parentage and lineage. She is identified as a relative of Elizabeth’s, but this is unspecified. It is Joseph who can claim the house of David. St. Anne and St Joachim were later identified as Mary’s parents – but this is a tradition from the second century and is not scripturally based. There is a murkiness to Mary’s story and background. Luke builds her up. He portrays Mary’s story as even more amazing than Elizabeth’s– birth by virgin trumps that by old woman!

Unlike Matthew’s nativity, there is no element of scandal attached to Mary in Luke’s narrative. She explicitly states literally “I do not know man” which is translated as “I am a virgin”. Here an angel addresses her as “the favored one” – if anything her prestige goes up. Luke transforms the irregularity of Jesus’ conception into something beautiful and mysterious. Luke’s account of the miraculous conception has elements of both the Greek and Jewish. Nietzsche said that the story is reminiscent of the Greek Gods, such as Zeus, who impregnated mortal women in the guise of a swan, a bull and a shower of gold. Other scholars disagree – in the Lukan account there is nothing explicitly physical – it does not make sense for God to be supplying the y-chromosome. There is also no trickery involved. It involves the consent of Mary. The touch of God is so light and mysterious echoing the movement of the Spirit over the waters at the dawn of creation.
Mary achieves enormous status in Luke. Joseph, so important in Matthew, is a tangential figure in Luke. In Luke’s Gospel it is all about Mary. More than any of the other Gospels, Luke boosts the role of women and shows a concern for women’s issues. He gives Mary a voice – and she proclaims a knockout hymn of praise – the Magnificat (V46-56). Mary’s Magnificat repeats some of the words of Hannah (the mother of Samuel) in 1Samuel 2. The theme of the Magnificat is reversal – the powerful will be dethroned, the lowly lifted up. Mary gets to be the voice of the overturning of the world order. It encapsulates the social reversal that Luke is all about. Luke has set the stage so that by the time Mary makes her revolutionary proclamation you are totally on her side. While Matthew’s nativity story addresses and counters the violence of Herod and worldly power; Luke is about overcoming inequality. This message is reinforced by the story of the shepherds.

Chapter 2:1-20 is the account of Jesus’ birth. The census places Jesus not just in Herod’s Palestine, but in the context of the whole Roman Empire and points to Augustus Caesar as the most powerful person in the known civilized world. Historically there is no record of this particular census. Others took place but not at this specific time. Luke uses the device of the census to connect Jesus to the historical, political world of his time. The contrast is stark - the savior of the world lying in a manger because of the dictates of the worldly emperor. Jesus is born in a byre with the animals, placed in an animal’s feeding trough. His birth is recognized and celebrated by shepherds. The symbolism is strong – of Jesus as the good shepherd, the sacrificial lamb, as the bread of life. But shepherds were also poor, landless people, living on the mountainside like gypsies. They were people remote from culture, living outside the system and its taxation. Yet it is to shepherds that the angels appear. Traditionally it is the temple where you meet God, where God is revealed – Zechariah’s place. In Luke’s story the heavens open and God is revealed in a field to the forgotten and marginalized. If God is in the feeding trough then the temple becomes redundant. Ultimately it is a revolutionary and challenging message that offers hope, presenting the possibility of a different world.

Christmas Study

Here is the first of our Christmas studies...

Christmas #1 12/03/09

Of the two major Christian feasts (Easter and Christmas) Christmas, while less central to the Christian message, has been the one most widely embraced. December 25th was superimposed upon the older Roman feasts of Saturnalia and New Year. St Francis of Assisi introduced the nativity crib, and then the Santa story and other mid-winter traditions were all thrown into the mix. There is something about the Christmas spirit – the giving of gifts, the message of peace and goodwill, that makes us feel good. Soldiers in the first year of the 1st world war reached out across the trenches to play football with the enemy on Christmas morning. Another attraction of Christmas is the very human interest in origins – in particular of famous and important figures. How did they come to turn out like they did? There is truth in the saying “the child is the father to the man”.

Neither Mark (the first of the Gospels chronologically) nor John recount Jesus’ birth or childhood. Both start with Jesus’ adult ministry. Only two of the Gospels, Matthew and Luke, have nativity narratives. These narratives differ widely – much more so than the “single eye” with which these gospels approach the account of his adult life. Raymond Brown, an eminent Roman Catholic scholar of the 20th century, describes the nativity narratives as “folkloristic stories”. They come from people’s conversation. They can have an element of truth, but also an element of elaboration. If they are not taken with naïve literalness then the meaning of story is allowed to come through more powerfully. The four key teachings of the nativity story are:

1. That Jesus represents a radical alternative and contrast to the imperial power under which he was born.
2. Jesus represents a fulfillment of humanity’s search for wisdom.
3. Jesus sides with the poor and abandoned.
4. The core story and circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth to an unwed mother.

Matthew has more formal structure and has a more systematic approach than the earlier Markan Gospel. By the time of Matthew’s composition the Jesus’ story was well established in the growing Christian communities. Matthew’s audience was from communities emerging from a predominantly Jewish background. His Gospel is constructed in five sections that recollect the five books of the Jewish Torah, and Jesus is presented as the new Moses.

Jesus was born marginal to both his own community and to the imperial power of his time. In Matthew we have the story of Herod the Great and the visit of the magi. Pliny, a historian writing towards the end of the first century, describes kings from the east visiting Nero guided by a star. In MT 2:1-23 we have the story of the magi, the flight to Egypt and the slaughter of the innocents. This echoes the story of Moses in the Torah. Pharaoh demanded that the Hebrew newborn sons be killed immediately they were born by throwing them into the Nile. Moses escaped death by being set adrift on the Nile hidden in a basket. In Jesus’ story Herod takes the place of Pharaoh, and Jesus of the whole of Israel. There is no account of the slaughter of the innocents by Herod outside of the New Testament, however he was notorious for his brutality. It was said that it was “better to be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son” because his religion forbade him to eat pork, yet he killed several of his sons, his wife and other relatives because of his paranoia of rivals. When he was dying, he ordered his soldiers to round up 2 men from each village to be cut down by arrows when he died so that there would be mourning in the land (recorded by Josephus). So the Gospel story is credible to his character and fits with the historical portrait that exists. Herod’s response is of deadly fear against an unknown threat. Worldly power senses the threat inherent in innocence and non-violence. Dietrich Bonheoffer used the example of Herod in his famous Christmas sermon that resisted the Nazi regime. Herod reacts brutally by killing a lot of people. It is often the case that the gospel can initially seem to make things worse if it is taken seriously. The gospel confronts us and challenges us and upsets the established order. It is because of this that Christianity is often contained and boxed in, because it is so disruptive.

The Magi were scholars of arcane and esoteric knowledge. They gathered this knowledge from the stars and from ancient prophecies. They studied an ancient and deep secular wisdom. The tradition developed that they were also kings because of the cost of their gifts (gold for sovereignty, frankincense for deity and myrrh used in the anointing of the dead). The story of the magi indicates that human wisdom will recognize Jesus. His importance is for the whole earth and extends beyond the Jewish people. In this he is like other key Old Testament figures such as Cyrus king of the Persians (“the anointed” in Isaiah). It also brings to mind the Isaiah prophesies of the Servant - the ends of the earth are waiting for his teaching. The magi story seems to say that the truth of the gospel can be found in any wisdom tradition if one searches deeply enough.

Many people today still place faith in astrology – signs and meanings derived from the constellations. The Babylonians and Persians were famous for it. Our cosmology (our understanding of the heavens and our universe) is usually dependent on our understanding of ourselves. If we are violent then we will project that violence in to our cosmology (a violent God, cosmic battles and end-times filled with conflict). If we see the heavens through the lens of the baby Jesus, then they are transformed into a peaceful place filled with the music of angels and the light of a brilliant star. The story of the star that leads the magi suggests a restructuring of our violent cosmology.

Matthew’s Gospel begins with the genealogy of Jesus. This is divided into three groups of fourteen generations. From Abraham to David; from Solomon to Jeconiah; and from Shealtiel to Joseph. Fourteen represents a doubling of the number seven – a number associated with divine activity (e.g. the seven days of creation). Three represents the divine presence (for example the three angels who visited Abraham, the Trinity, etc). The genealogy is there to underscore the divine influence and involvement in the birth of Jesus. Except that there are only thirteen in the final group. Some scholars say that it was a miscalculation by Matthew. It seems more likely though that the final person listed in Jesus’ genealogy is meant to be Mary. MT 1:6 reads “and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary of whom Jesus was born,” (the same verb, in passive form, as used of the male progenitors). This claim is backed up by the presence of four other women mentioned in the long list of male names. These four are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and the wife of Uriah (Bathsheba). All four of these women were associated with sexual impropriety. Rahab was a prostitute, Tamar and Ruth acted as prostitutes and Bathsheba was the victim of a rape. All four were of gentile origins (Rahab and Tamar were Canaanite; Ruth was a Moabite and Bathsheba’s name indicates that she was a “daughter of Sheba” and her husband was a Hittite). All four were marginal women and yet they were crucial to the line that led to Jesus. Their presence in the genealogy sets the scene for Mary – another marginal woman crucial to Jesus’ story.

Mt 1:18-25 describes Mary’s situation which was one of great dubiousness and impropriety. In the Talmud Jesus is described as the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier. Elsewhere in the Gospels Jesus’ illegitimacy is hinted at by his accusers (Jn 8: 41). In v. 18 Mary is found to be with child “of the Holy Spirit”. These four words were added by Matthew at this point of the narrative to decrease the scandal of her situation for the reader. If omitted what remains is a much more real and concrete account of vulnerability and peril. Deuteronomy 22:13 states the consequences to an unwed mother if discovered – death by stoning. What stood between Mary and this fate was the compassion of Joseph, although as a righteous man he was also going to reject her.

We are used to the idea of a virgin birth because Luke makes this explicit when Mary says “I have known no man”. As well as this Matthew substitutes the Greek word “parthenos” for the original Hebrew word “maiden” or “young girl” used in the Isaiah prophecy: “Behold a virgin will conceive..”. If you allow yourself to step away from this idea for a moment then the redeeming action of God in the world becomes even more profound. Jesus enters the world as he leaves it – both condemned and yet innocent. From the very beginning of his life he has to confront the condemnation of the world. The taint of illegitimacy would have impacted Jesus – his relationships with outcasts, his compassion for the outsider. Yet love was also present in his childhood providing a witness of a different kind – of acceptance, forgiveness and mercy among the members of his immediate family. Not knowing his biological father may have strengthened his relationship with his heavenly Father. Perhaps what makes this a more powerful understanding of the nativity would be the realization that God takes and transforms the situation of all people - however lowly. God is revealed in terrible circumstances and takes the part of the discarded. In his very act of being born Jesus brings mercy and redemption – to Mary, to Joseph.

This reading of the Gospels has been largely veiled by the Christian tradition –it was even too much for the Evangelists themselves to clearly present. Historically those disputing the Virgin Birth have often been people trying to detract from the divinity of Jesus. Perhaps today, with illegitimacy not such a scandalous event, we can begin to understand the truly wondrous nature of God that enters our world in such a way to bring forgiveness and redemption to all. In his birth Jesus establishes that there is no place outside of God’s love. “Of the Holy Spirit” means exactly this: all human situations of rejection and condemnation are rendered forgiven and filled with God.

Journey with Jesus #19

Here is the final Journey with Jesus Bible Study for November. Look for a series of three Bible Studies on the theme of Christmas coming soon - the first will be posted in the next couple of days, then weekly until Christmas. -Linda

Old Testament - Time to Come 11/19/09

The Old Testament prophets are famous for warning of a disastrous future of terrible violence resulting from the disobedience of the people. Perhaps the best examples of this come from the prophets Amos and Jeremiah. Amos lived in the relatively prosperous period preceding the fall of Israel to the Assyrians. He preached judgment to the wealthy leaders because of their neglect of the poor and oppressed. Jeremiah lived in the time of the fall of Judea and the subsequent Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE. While Jeremiah has some hopeful elements, Amos has no mercy. His book ends in total destruction. There is a final urgency in his message – “your time is up”. The storm clouds are already on the horizon. Jeremiah tried to overcome the complacency of his people. But then the hammer fell. He said things as they knew them were coming to an end. Jeremiah was considered a traitor in his lifetime, although he was ultimately proven right in his predictions – Jer 52:1-16 describes the fall of Jerusalem and its society.

This sense of time as an urgent future coming towards us is a hallmark of Old Testament prophetic teaching. It differs from the more stationary or cyclical sense of time present in many other ancient cultures. When John the Baptist and Jesus started to preach of impending destruction if the people did not repent it was therefore taken seriously. The Israelites had lived through it before and knew it could all come down again –and in fact did in 70AD, with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Our culture has absorbed this sense of urgency and so we live in the expectation of impending violence and doom. We live under the shadow of nuclear winter and now ecological disaster. Just think of all the “end-time” movies out there– for example The Day after Tomorrow, Terminator, and most recently 2012.

Another Old Testament prophet, Isaiah , had a different approach and a different sense of the future. He has an almost timeless, exalted vision of the future. The first part of Isaiah (Chapters 1-39) describes Zion as the city of God that will endure. All peoples of the world will come to Zion to learn the Law of the Lord. The future is an endless and boundless time in which the forces that take away life and peace are themselves done away with. It is the time when all life is fulfilled and accomplished on the Earth. Death has no sting in that future Earth filled with life. Is 25:6-10 describes the end of war, hunger and death. In their place there is a feast for all peoples, the end of disgrace, and death is swallowed up forever. This exalted vision is tied to the earth by a specific place (Mount Zion). This vision contrasts with the more abstract, ethereal and Greek understanding of life after death that is common today – of escaping the earth to a place out of time. This “heaven” is a static place of no movement. The world is left behind along with all of the things that makes time so oppressive.

Jeremiah ends with the destruction of Jerusalem. The Second book of Isaiah (from chapter 40) was also written at this time of absolute loss. A time without king, priest or other significant political or cultural leadership. In Is 42:1-4 a new figure is revealed – the “servant”. In Second Isaiah it is a person not a city who will put things right. He is described as gentle, hardly noticed. He respects the weak and is himself apparently weak. His teaching will go to the ends of the earth, the “coastlands,” and they are waiting for him. In the servant prophesies the peoples of the world do not come to the city, rather his teaching goes to them. Through this figure justice will come to the earth. The future is no longer something to be feared, but hoped for. And there is a sense that it does not have to be fought or strived for, but that it is going to happen inevitably. Just as with the earlier Isaiah visions of the future, this one is emptied of all that harms and destroys life.

The Old Testament opens up our sense of time. The prophets reject the concept of fate. They move away from the traditional cyclical experience of time and the focus on the times of sowing and harvest. While the seasons are good and beautiful they do not change the human situation. The Biblical story begins in a garden and ends in a city – the New Jerusalem. The city represents all that humans have brought to the world in the form of human culture. The future becomes a transformed human space here on earth where death and violence have no place.

Journey with Jesus #18

Here is the first of the November Bible Studies - the second will be posted shortly -Linda.


NT- Time to Come 11/12/09


There are two ways to look at time. The first way is traditional clock time. Here time is measured movement. Like the movement of sand through the hour glass. The second way is experienced time. For example, time has a different feel for children. Things take more time, and there is always something to look forward to. Time for children is very future oriented. There is an excitement about what is coming, or just arriving. Children don’t have much of a past. Adults construct their own past. It is made up of others’ past, their nation’s past. Part of being formed by a culture is to receive a past. Time is constructed for you by your own experiences and by your culture. A child hardly looks back – they are always looking forward.

Children’s sense of time is closer to the Christian sense of time. The Gospels are full of this future sense of time, and this Christian sense of time has also entered into our culture.

In Mt. 24 Jesus gives his apocalyptic discourse (also in Mk. 13 but it has been expanded by Matthew). In it Jesus teaches about what is coming. There is a powerful, urgent sense of the coming of the new. There have been various interpretations of this text.

In the 19th century a former priest in the Church of Ireland, John Nelson Darby, began to map out a detailed timetable of how the events and tribulations of these end times were going to occur. He promoted what is called “dispensationalism,” a teaching about distinct phases and eras in God’s dealing with humankind, including Darby’s special contribution of a “secret rapture” of the just, leaving the earth behind to tribulation and chaos. His views were promoted in the commentary and cross-references of the Scofield Bible, an enormously popular U.S. bible version through the early part of the 20th century. They thus entered the mainstream of evangelical thinking in the U.S. Darby’s beliefs have become widely accepted as theologically sound and because of them a mythic view of the end times became entrenched. They depict a violent future in which Christians are on the winning side. The basic timetable he described include the secret Second Coming or Rapture; seven years of Tribulation (when God violently defends Israel against, its enemies Gog and Magog – often depicted as the Arabs and Russians); the Thousand Year Reign on earth of Christ and his saints; Satan’s escape from the pit; the Final Battle and the End of the World.

When the present is intolerable and the gospel of compassion is not preached, those who feel abandoned by society and history gravitate to this kind of message. It offers a mathematical control of the future, providing self-vindication buttressed by a kind of fate. Something similar is present in Nostradamus, almanacs and horoscopes. The most current secular version is the Mayan 2012 prediction of the end of the world.

Classical church belief has been a kind of virtual millennialism—the reign of Christ on earth becomes a mystical abstract thing. There is a backing away from any expectation of a real transformation in history. The Church itself becomes the embodiment of Christ’s rule.

It is necessary to read the Matthew passage in a different way. The time of Christ is a newness that we are being pulled toward, both individually and collectively. How it will work out we don’t know, but there is no doubt the pull of the new provokes crisis and challenge.

Jesus uses symbolism to open us to the possibility of something new. He uses several images to symbolize the coming of the end times. The fig tree, the flood, kidnappings, a thief in the night, and slaves waiting for their master’s return. (Interestingly vv.40-41: “Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together, one will be taken and one left,” have been used as a reference to rapture by arbitrary connection to 1 Thessalonians 4:17. More traditionally they are linked in the sense of final judgment to the earlier v. 31 where the angels “gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other” The nearest sense, however, derived from the image of sweeping away in the flood [v.39], suggests forceful abduction– it is the ones who are left behind who are the lucky ones! In line with this, previous gatherings in Matthew are of the wicked from the earth [13:30 & amp. 40-41—“collect the weeds first,” and the angels “will collect out of the kingdom all causes of sin.”] In other words the “one taken” can be read either positively or negatively, with a suspicion toward the latter. It is mythical to derive literal descriptions from selective verses, rather than a broad description of challenge and crisis.)

Jesus’ metaphors are either from nature or from catastrophic events. They represent both sides of the coming change – it is organic but also shocking and dramatic, totally new. Or, like the images Jesus uses for the kingdom of God, yeast and mustard seed, which are completely natural but bring about huge changes.

Mk 13:32 is the original version of the parable of the slave watching for his master’s return. This includes the classic statement in which Jesus makes it clear that no-one – not even the Son – knows the hour of the end times. (Seems like Darby knew more than Jesus!) The message here is to stay alert and to keep awake. Mt. 24:45-51 expands the theme (the need for watchfulness) to include punishment of the unfaithful slave. Matthew’s audience was the early Christian community, and perhaps reflects a warning to church leaders who have become domineering and exploitative. Matthew’s violent language stems from his desire for authentic Christian community.

Mt. 13:24-30 gives another parable of the end times – the parable of the tares and wheat. Here the harvest gives an image of the end of time – again organic but momentous. The servants offer to pull up the weeds that are growing alongside the wheat – but are told to wait. There is no way to distinguish between good and evil people because we are all interconnected. While theologians like Augustine say this is because you can’t tell at any historical moment who is one of the final elect, the point is rather that we are all so intertwined. Separation is impossible now and must come at the end. As time goes on the choices we make—between goodness and evil, between life and death—will become more and more evident. It will be clearer what we need to do. Those who choose nonviolence, forgiveness and peace will live. In the growing crisis the clarity of choice will grow. Thus these parables are pictures of choice not predictions of outcomes. What is valued and is of the kingdom will last, what is worthless will be lost. The emphasis is on the choice. Matthew’s explanation of the parable at v. 36 (likely an editorial addition and exposition) shifts the emphasis from our interconnectedness and our choice to the final sorting. You can already see happening the temptation toward prediction and pre-emptive division!

A New Testament passage that crystallizes the gospel sense of time and the breaking in of the future into the now is 1Cor. 7: 29. It describes not a physical destruction of the earth, but rather the passing away of the forms of the world as they have been up to now. Not the world passing a way but the present form of the world transforming! What Paul is saying is that what has seemed important and valuable in worldly terms – marriage, mourning, celebration, wealth and dealings with the world are no longer important. What is coming is the key thing.

In the light of all this the thousand year reign of Christ may be understood as the continued pull of Christ on the world, shifting it toward compassion, peace, forgiveness. It is a subversive reign but it is a reign all the same, because it is the root guiding force of all contemporary history. There is no guarantee that the world will submit, and so the outcome remains uncertain. But in the meantime the subversive reign is real and the thousand years is now. It is contemporary with present history, as indeed all the images of Revelation are, including the battle of the Word against the kings and armies of the earth. It is the same movie plot played out again and again! Christians today are called to live into the future-now of the new thing Christ has brought.

Christianity As Pollution

I labor under a couple of disabilities, but I have compensating advantages! I mean this in respect of relating to churches and what you might call formal Christianity.

I was formed in the R.C. tradition where models of passionate relationship to God and the human are held up for emulation. They are often called saints, but the approach extends to imagery and art, that kind of thing. There was an undercurrent of sensate love celebrated and I do miss that, that intimate chapel feeling of being close to the divine. Or all those wonderful El Greco faces and their freaky flesh stretched out in ecstasy!

But who am I kidding? Those models are the ones that got past the censor, the ones that accepted the bargain of a huge world-historical organization where passion is only good when kept within the box. The Roman Catholic church is pure Plato’s Republic, a city ruled by philosopher kings with twenty-twenty vision of the eternal forms communicating their laws to all the lesser, clay-bound creatures under them. Augustine’s City of God practically said it in the title, but Augustine was also up to something else.

Augustine knew that there was no way you could perfectly identify the church with the heavenly city as opposed to the earthly one, and neither would you want to. First, God’s choice for salvation was insuperable and you could never tell who might actually be in the church but would not finally make the cut. But also—and this is a matter of opinion on my part, I have no real chapter and verse—I think Augustine secretly reckoned on some worldly types in the church’s ranks in order to bring it hard-nosed realpolitik in its long march through time. And whether I’m right or wrong, you do get the picture. Those Renaissance popes (and later too) certainly behaved as if salvation was secondary to worldly success.

Meanwhile, back with Augustine, the hordes of people then pouring into the church from the Roman Empire were told there was one sure thing—you may not be absolutely certain of final grace inside the church, but outside you are definitely damned. This was the message that got through: the church is the ark of salvation run by its captain priests; all those not aboard are going down. Hence, in that framework, a certain disability for me.

But then along came Luther. He fixed everyone a life-raft. Threw them out on the raging sea like there was no tomorrow. Everyone became the captain of his or her soul and they set sail for Paradise like an immense flotilla of migrating jellyfish. That really did a number on the Roman church’s pretensions, but in the process it also did a number on the solidarity of folk. They were no longer in the big boat together, very much the contrary. The whole thing of sensate love, of something happening in the human order that changed the human order, well this got definitively displaced to the individual and his/her happy hereafter. Hence, another disability.

For, as I say, Catholicism always had this undertow of real stuff in a real world—of the Word made flesh-- but to break the grip of the corporate guys who managed it all Luther individualized it precisely and exclusively to the soul. Gone was the solidarity of the flesh. Each individual instead had this other-worldly thing inside them communicated to directly by this other-worldly God, and bam! we’re all basically out of here. Now I don’t know if in some sense I’m still a Catholic but this individualism is completely foreign to me. And so if I find it hard to communicate with a lot of Catholics because of rejecting their church’s Platonic organization, I find it perhaps twice as difficult to communicate with a lot of Protestants who go even beyond Plato, reducing the human city to the dimensions of a single soul.

“Shoot,” I hear you say, “this guy has so many disabilities I wonder why he bothers.” Well, hold on, there are also the compensating factors I mentioned. These factors are in fact so strong that I think there is a complete renewal of Christianity under way, one which makes both Catholicism and Protestantism perhaps little more than bumps on a road of Christian history rather than the end of the road itself.

It’s to do with that sensate love I was talking about. My feeling that God’s love affects the real human world is not restricted to devotional images or works of art. And really it couldn’t be. If the gentle Spirit of self-giving love has touched human beings, and over the course of two millennia, then it has to leave traces in all sorts of ways. One of the happiest times in my life was spent in a town called Spello. I lived in a small community of manual work and prayer among the vine-and-olive hills of Umbria. The place seemed flooded, saturated with prayer. That special Italian light melded together with stories of St. Francis and produced a contemplative constant. But for me the light reached out beyond the silver hills. It said indeed we inherit the earth. It meant a whole different world, a world at peace, and in love.

Christianity is a pollution of light in the world, like Los Angeles from the air, where there is this bronzy pink haze over everything. That’s pollution, but it’s also a strange captivating light. Let me give you an example. A relative of one of the victims of the so-named “Beltway Sniper” said recently he had to forgive the perpetrator both because the bible taught him to do so, and because, related to this (his words), if he didn’t forgive him hate would eat him up from the inside. I’m not sure if he expressly intended this but I think his sense was that the Gospel can actually (paradoxically) make hate worse so long as there is not forgiveness. So long as the message of Christ is broadcast in culture there is something saying there is possible forgiveness for all sorts of killers and offenders, and our anger and hatred, if maintained, are prolonged. In a Christian-infected culture we are unable to consign these people to ultimate final darkness. Christ has entered the time of the earth, that is our time, and forbidden killing, and has done so in the very depths of our imagination. So, short of a complete surrender to the time of forgiveness, human culture can only experience a thicker and thicker haze of anger and hatred which at the same time continues to show strange mesmerizing tints of a beautiful light. That light is an earth at peace.

It is far too easy to dismiss these effects cynically, as too little to make a real difference or simply willed to show God’s judgment in an absolute metaphysical fashion but not to change anything. Either response—scandal before the Gospel’s weakness or turning it into some horribly inverted legal condemnation—flies in the face of love itself, of light itself. Love hopes all things, believes all things. And light which gives itself with boundless generosity, squandering itself on all things without discrimination, cannot change its nature. It can only be light. In contrast it’s only we who can change, from killing to peace, from darkness to light, and we in our time are constantly pressed to do so.

So, you see, the compensations way outweigh the disabilities! Who would want to go back to a Christianity of either Catholic or Protestant Platonism when we can have one of loving pollution transforming the human earth itself?

Tony

Capitalism, Not The Whole Story

I just saw Michael Moore’s Capitalism, A Love Story. Weird, this movie is supposed to be about money and all that evil stuff (which it is), but I don’t think I’ve seen such a Jesus-centered film since The Passion of the Christ.
It’s a very personal film, perhaps Moore’s most personal. He has his father in it, an old guy in Flint, Michigan, pointing out where the factory used to be where he worked almost all his life but now raised to the ground. Michael clearly loves and respects his Dad. It also has a short grainy film from Michael’s first communion and the revelation that at one time, as a little boy, he wanted to be a Roman Catholic priest because of the priests he saw committing their lives to the poor. But underneath it all, underneath Moore’s shambling sweet-comic persona, there is a barely concealed, simmering anger.
He’s angry because of destruction of unions, because of banking deregulation, because so many people lost their homes and land, because of Wall Street dealing in “exotic instruments” and needing a massive bail-out from taxpayers (I understand “exotic” like this: you’re running a horse in a race that you’re sure is going to lose [because it’s actually people buying houses they can’t afford] and at the same time you’re taking bets in the form of huge I.O.U’s with a small but significant upfront payment against the time when the horse will actually lose and meanwhile you’re delaying the race and every week the horse doesn’t lose you’re paying out partial winnings and everybody’s happy because people keep placing the bets and there’s an astronomical amount of fictitious money pumped into the system until finally the horse collapses in plain sight and everybody’s asking where’s my money and of course there is none, and if that makes no sense then go see the film for the ridiculously funny bits when Moore gets a finance professional and a professor to try explain “derivatives” and they both get lost in the first sentence. It’s not meant to be understood.)
Michael is angry, and he’s also frustrated because he can’t figure out why the rest of us are not just as angry as he is, why in fact we’re not in a state of open revolt. He would like us to be but we’re not.
Now poor Michael, he’s is in a terrible bind. He knows the only way he can make his point and try to rouse us to action is by entertaining us, by making us laugh. He has to be funny, clownish, non-threatening in order in the process to inform us, provoke us, get us ultimately to threaten the massively vested interests that have got us in this mess. But how can that work? He runs the risk of being just about as subversive as Mary Tyler Moore. To make his point he has to be part of an entertainment industry whose business it is precisely to keep us with glazed eyes only half-aware of what really is happening to us and just too couch-comfortable to do anything. If Eisenhower back in 1961 warned of a military-industrial complex I think more likely he’d name it today as a military-financial-entertainment complex.
So where does that leave Michael Moore the filmmaker. What can he possibly show us to make a difference? Because that’s the thing about filmmaking, it’s about showing stuff, not primarily about abstract thought or ideas. It works at the level of the visual, of visual signs and the immediate impact they have. And what Moore shows us, unmistakably, out of the crisis of communication that grips him, is Jesus. The figure of Jesus runs through Capitalism, A Love Story like Best Supporting Actor, second only to Moore himself. He turns up in the priests and bishops Moore keeps interviewing, in hilarious clips from Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth with mashup voiceover in ripe Robert Powell tones (“I’m sorry I can’t heal you, it’s a pre-existing condition"), in an image of the Crucified strung up over the big banks, and finally in the stirring Woodie Guthrie song heard while credits roll, “They laid Jesus Christ in his grave.”
This is not liberation theology, telling us that Jesus is on the side of the poor. Sure, it is that on one level, but what difference is the theological idea going to make when we can’t even connect with the notion of $700 billion (and counting) being fleeced from the nation’s collective pockets? What is much more potent, and the only hope, is the abyssal truth of Jesus, crucified at the heart of the world system and slowly but surely subverting it with the earthquake of the innocent yet forgiving victim. You see what I mean? I mean it’s not about a political change founded in distributive justice and the struggle for such justice. It’s already too late for that. We’re like lobsters in a pot, cooked alive with lies and the violence of lies. But Jesus is faithful to the truth at a level deeper than any lie, and it is that faithfulness which calls us at this moment in time. He calls us to be faithful at this radical level, as individuals, as groups, as small communities, finding ways to live justly through love and forgiveness with each other. We do so in the knowledge that the world system is terminal and cannot be salvaged without a change that goes way beyond what any politician today can imagine or propose. It can only be helped at the level of the Crucified, the one who reveals all violence while offering it all forgiveness, and that means effectively, in the actual surrender of violence by humans. (For-giveness only really happens when the perpetrator gives in reciprocally to the giving of forgiveness.)
That is what Moore as artist and filmmaker understood and showed. And I take my hat off to him. Really there has always been capitalism, plutocracy etc. But the protest against it is a biblical thought—“let there be no poor among you.” What Jesus is doing goes deeper still. He says “Blessed are the poor,” meaning the absolute change in the world order has already occurred. Those who follow Jesus live that way, in an absolutely new way. For them the transformation has already happened, no matter what Fox News or Wall St. does. And by making Jesus Best Supporting Actor in his movie Moore really said that, even though he perhaps didn’t realize it. I am glad he didn’t get ordained. I don’t think the robes would suit him. But I’m sure glad he’s a filmmaker-priest, holding up the image of Christ deep in the world’s abyss.

Shaking Pivots! (or making space for the space God has made)

My friend, Jerry from Liverpool wrote saying he liked the blog “Falling Pregnant” but didn’t get the last paragraphs about “making space for God.” So I tehought I’d follow-up.
The way I take here might not first seem to the point, but stay on it and it should get there. So here goes.
The world makes perfect sense. It’s just that our ways of understanding it don’t!
Take the Big Bang. It’s not so much that there is this galactic elephant in the room—the question, what caused the Big Bang in the first place: and although I understand that in a scientific and philosophical method sense you just can’t ask this question that doesn’t stop it coming to mind as an ultimate horizon. But aside from that, the whole explosive device and expansion thing seems absurdly one-sided. It’s like what a little boy would imagine, a huge bang and that’s it! There has to be an equal backward flux or return movement for the whole thing to hold together. Only currents and circles and cycles make full sense. And maybe that’s what they’re calling “Dark Matter” is but as yet I’ve not heard it expressed or developed in this way. And if it were it would change our cosmology enormously, and with that our anthropology. Because the way we imagine the universe—and this is a key point—is the way we imagine ourselves. If it’s a mind-numbingly huge explosion we will probably think about our life with ultimate violence as its ultimate sense. If it’s some sort of cycle of surrender and return, then we will perhaps gauge our behavior as gift and love.
Anyway, you see what I mean? From a “making sense” perspective many explanations don’t really make sense. It’s only when you take the human into account—holistically—that you approach a true, full account. Both the universe and the human have to go together. And it’s not a matter of cherry-picking the evidence and forcing the data, because we do that all the time unconsciously anyway. (Einstein said something along these lines: “It is the theory which decides what can be observed.”) We see according to the way we are, and we are according to how we are structured. It’s a creative enterprise and the point is to find a truly life-giving explanation of the universe and humanity all in one, in order that humanity might live. From a biblical point of view you could say that the whole biblical enterprise—the bible itself—is a story told over and over, reimagining the beginning, both in theory and practice, and thus seeking the right ending—one of boundless life.
Today it’s most of all the field of anthropology that underpins the intuition of the profound interconnectedness of our intellectual universe and the way we are as human beings. Our thinking is rooted in how we are set up relationally and structurally. According to Rene Girard it is violence that holds the key to how we are originally structured, and our intellectual universe is based on the world-shaping power of foundational murder at the dawn of culture. Human thinking begins in mythology and ritual, brim full of violence, and science for all its “objectivity,” has not escaped the trauma of its birth.
According to Rene Girard it has been the bible which has provided a progressive revelation of the violent founding mechanisms of humanity. He doesn’t put equal stress on the equivalent revelation of new human mechanisms, of justice, forgiveness and love, but I think this logically has to be the case. Really you can’t have the former without the latter, even if, understandably, the former appears more evident: violence is always more noisily apparent than peace. Part of the problem is that because the biblical pathway has deeply affected human culture the old mechanisms are critically weakened, while people hesitate to turn to the new ones. The result seems more and more chaotic and dangerous. One passage from the bible has been going through my head recently and it seems to sum all this up : “The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called….” The line is from Isaiah’s magnificent vision of the Lord in the temple with the seraphs in attendance and it is their voices calling “holy, holy, holy” which have this thunderous impact (6:1-4). The image communicates the power of what was happening: it is enough to make the temple itself shake, including the hinges on its doors. To my mind, the shaking of the pivots is the trembling of the very system of differentiation whereby we can hinge back and forth smoothly from the world of the archaic sacred—read “mystified violence”—to the world of the ordinary or profane. Let me explain further.
This division of the sacred and profane is commonplace to scholars of religion and culture. But adding in the Girardian piece tells us that it’s really violence that is being negotiated, not some mysterious transcendence. When violence is in the temple it is controlled and directed—used up in sacrifice or directed outward to the enemies of God or the tribe, and so it generally keeps the area of the profane (the broader territory around the temple) free of violence. Thus the world is divided up in an orderly fashion between ritually controlled sacrificial violence and the world at peace around the temple precincts. But now here’s the kicker: the biblical God does not allow this division. This God breaks out in awe-inspiring love to re-found the world, not on violence but forgiveness and love. And so the pivots on the temple doorposts shake!
So now, we can bring all this together and provide an answer to our initial question. If (1) space itself, that is the whole physical (and metaphysical) area around us, used to be controlled by the effects of violence concentrated in a sacred place making the rest of the area relatively safe the rest of the time, and (2) the biblical tradition broadcast in culture has served progressively to break this down, then the meaning of space itself has changed. The change is twofold, each compellingly powerful: on the one hand there is no longer the traditional ordering of the universe (and there are a lot of names for this tectonic change, from freedom, competition, consumerism, to anomie, alienation, anxiety, to lawyers, gun rights, and war on terror), and, on the other, there is also the spontaneous hidden growth of spaces of compassion, forgiveness, peace and love. In other words this anarchy is at the same time the hidden growth of the kingdom because the kingdom is in fact its root cause, the breaking out of awe-inspiring love! I emphasize hidden because it cannot be delimited by the old boundaries and system of boundaries. And so it stays hidden to ordinary bilateral sight! Many people don’t recognize it, don’t think it’s there. But as they say, you will know it when you see it!
Thus, finally, the business of Christians is to seek consciously and actively to act on and create these spaces by lives of love and simple service. Being demarcated by belonging to a temple or church doesn’t really cut it anymore. And that’s what I meant by “making space for God.” By members of Wood Hath Hope sharing a food budget, cooking and some actual meals we are attempting to act on the emergence of new humanity inspired by a God of love. But doing these things does not of itself make the new humanity—to say that would simply create a new temple. It is simply a response in faith both to what only God can accomplish, but also to what God is in fact accomplishing! Making space for God is making space for the space that God has made!

Tony

Journey with Jesus #17

Here is the second October Bible Study...

OT - Healing 10/22/09

There are relatively few accounts of healings in the Old Testament. The focus of the Torah was the liberation of the people – the Exodus story recounting the setting free of the Hebrew slaves. Thus the big miracle of the Old Testament is the crossing of the Red Sea, later echoed in the crossing of the Jordan and the entry into the Promised Land. The histories then record the establishment and fall of the kingdoms. They tell of political and religious struggle not healing. There is, however, one point where a number of healings do take place: in the stories of Elijah and Elisha.

Elijah had the prestige of being the first of the Yahwist resistance prophets. A sign of the respect given to Elijah is that he appears with Moses at Jesus’ transfiguration. After the entry into the Promised Land there was a period of transition when the Israelites were led by charismatic warriors called “judges”. Then came David and Solomon followed by the splitting of the country into the Northern and Southern kingdoms. Ahab was a king who married Jezebel, daughter of the king of Sidon (a Phoenician city). She brought with her the Phoenician religion of the Baals. The Baals were warrior gods of violence and fertility. They were gods of the annual cycle of death and rebirth.

The word “baal” means “lord” and there are some places in the Old Testament where there is some confusion between Baal and Yahweh as a result. At the time of Elijah a tremendous effort was made to make a true distinction. Elijah fights against the prophets of Baal. He calls fire from heaven and slaughters the prophets. He defeats them, but then in fear for his life he runs away.

It is in this time of crisis in the prophet’s life and in the story of Israel that a little flurry of healings occur.1Kings 17: 8-23 tells the story of the widow of Sidon. The widow offers Elijah food from the little that she has. As a result her jar of meal and jug of oil do not fail. Later when the son of the widow becomes ill, Elijah stretches himself upon the child three times and he is brought back to life. Sidon, the place where Elijah escapes to, the home of the widow is located in Phoenicia. The miracles demonstrate both the character and the sovereignty of Yahweh. His character is illustrated in the care for the widow and child: in feeding the hungry and restoring life. His power is displayed in his actions taking place in the heart of the territory of Elijah’s enemies, over and against the “baals.” Jesus quotes this story in Luke 4:25 – but he takes from it a radical sense: rather than showing God’s sovereignty it demonstrates his healing grace is for everyone.

Another healing is the one performed by Elisha, the healing of the leper Namaan in Kings 5:1-19. An Israelite slave tells his master, a Syrian commander, of the prophet who has the power to heal his disease. The healing by Elisha is another example of the miracle displaying the power of Yahweh and his superiority over other gods. These are almost the only healing accounts of the Old Testament.

After the time of Elijah, Yahweh became established as the one God of Israel. It wasn’t until the Greek invasion of the 2nd century BCE that the influence of other gods again became something to be resisted. The books of the Maccabees give the account of the rebellion against Antiochus Epiphanes who attempted to impose Greek culture and religion on the Israelites. This time the battle is political and military. Unlike the fight against Jezebel which came down to the actions of a single prophet, this time the Maccabean family lead the violent resistance.

There were others who resisted the imposition of Greek religion but who seem to have taken a non-violent stance. Daniel 11:32-35 describes a group of people called “the wise”.
“The wise among the people shall give understanding to many; for some days, however, they shall fall by the sword and flame and suffer captivity and plunder…. Some of the wise shall fall so that they may be refined, purified, and cleansed, until the time of the end”.

In Dn 12:1-3. Michael shall rise during this time of anguish to deliver those written about in the book. “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Those who are wise [who have preciously fallen by the sword] shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.” This is the first clear statement of resurrection in the Bible. It is vital to note its relation to non-retaliation and nonviolence.

Elijah fought with the sword and miracles. These “wise” people refuse to use the sword. The healing here is resurrection the greatest of all the miracles and resurrection is the last defense of the nonviolent. 1Macc 2:29-38 (written about the same time as Daniel) describes the same group. Here the “wise”, those “who were seeking righteousness and justice,” are portrayed as living in the wilderness, as refugees. They are pursued for refusing to obey the king. They refuse to fight on the Sabbath and as a result of their non-retaliation they are killed. 1 Maccabees (written from the point of view of those who did fight) says that they “die[d] in their innocence” (2:37). This group of people rejected violence. It is out of that group that the doctrine of the resurrection emerged. Out of their sacrifice a message of consolation and hope arises, one essential to the message of Jesus.

Elijah and Daniel are both instances in which God’s sovereignty is displayed. In Daniel it is through resurrection that God overcomes the world’s violence. In the same way Jesus held back healing from Lazarus to show the greater miracle of the resurrection. Resurrection is the final healing for the world. It is the healing that overcomes violence. All healings are an effect of the resurrection. They have not only power but significance because of this. Their meaning is to show that the systems of the world that lead to violence and death have been overcome.

Journey with Jesus #16

Hello again! Haven't been posting for a while but now we're back on line. Here are the next two Journey with Jesus summaries. These are from our October meetings -on the theme of healing....

NT - Healing 10/08/09

Inherent in the way humans make things is some element of destruction. Humans make things by destroying things –even at our most artistic and creative. Our meals, art, and architecture involve the gathering and using of raw materials. Even the raising of children involves a subjugation of sorts, a surrender of your freedom for the good of the child. Violence is a deep part of the human imagination – how we see things, feel things. Even the way we heal others has an element of violence. We use pharmacotherapy to bring about a desired alteration in the way our bodily systems function –but often at the cost of adverse effects and interactions. Surgery can remove disease or repair bone, but is not without risk. It is in essence an assault on the body even though the results may be beneficial. Human life is a compromise – an agreement with death. We live but not fully. The light we live by has darkness in it –it is not yet fully light.

Some would say that is the nature of life. To be human is to affirm both death and life equally. Creation and destruction – an endless cycle, You have to accept the killing as well as the life. This is an ancient view that lies deep in human thought and experience. It also speaks to modern times – as is evident in the writings of Nietzsche.

Healing is common to all cultures – how is healing by Jesus different? He did not use shamanistic practices – no shouting, talismans, magic potions or ritualistic formulae. There was no violence in his practice of healing. He didn’t counter evil with violence but with absolute self-giving affirmed in the resurrection. In Mk 3:20 Jesus is accused of casting out demons by violent power – the power of Beelzebub, king of demons. Jesus replies with a parable -a house divided against itself cannot stand. Instead of attacking evil and trying to destroy it with lethal violence, he neutralizes it by tying it up. The same passage in Mt12:24-29 reinforces the point by turning it on his attackers: “By whom do your own exorcists cast them [evil spirits] out?” Satan cannot cast out Satan – if so you remain within the system of violence. His accusers accusations are based in the worldly paradigm – that violence is necessary to bring about good.

Jesus healing is always a sign of absolute life. It is connected to his overthrowing Satan.
An early healing is described in Mk 2:1-12. Jesus and his disciples are in Capernaum where he cures a paralyzed man. In this healing forgiveness of sin comes first. The paralytic’s alienation from God is what causes his illness. This was a totally shocking thing for Jesus to say – only God can forgive sins. Jesus doesn’t say he is God, but that he is bringing God’s forgiveness into the world. He overcomes illness by overcoming the alienation and darkness that cause illness and death. Death entered the world thru sin. It is this system of sin that prevents us from complete wholeness and endless life. Jesus illustrates his authority to forgive sins by asking the man to get up and walk –which is easier to say? So he does not forgive in a legal way, but in a direct life-giving encounter with the wounded person.

Jn 11 gives the account of the raising of Lazarus. Jesus refuses to go at first to heal his friend. Lazarus does not have the illness that leads to death. It is the fundamental illness that Jesus has come to deal with. This illness is the violence of the world which produces death. It is sin, the way we structure our lives that leads to death. Jesus talks of Lazarus’ death as sleep – he is going to wake him (and us) up. As he nears Jerusalem, Jesus approaches his final confrontation with the forces of the world.

The raising of Lazarus is the last and greatest of Jesus’ signs in John’s Gospel. His healing overcomes alienation and brings life. He is the resurrection and the life!

A popularly held perception is that if I am healed and whole I am right with the world. It is a worldly standard. Often this is perceived as a desire to be someone other than who we are: more athletic, more beautiful – the ideal of perfection. In this way healing and health become yet another commodity. Health is also understood as the absence of illness. We battle against cancer, struggle against disease. In contrast healing from Jesus’ point of view is being fully yourself. Instead of a stripping away – of disease, years, decay - healing is a taking on, a filling up with spirit, love and life. Love is more than enlightenment or bliss. It involves darkness and suffering. It is loving to the depths of Jesus that leads to joy. We have no competitive expectations from others, but are instead fed by our relationship with God. This relationship completes and fulfils us. Healing replaces alienation and we find endless life. Despite scientific advances that delay the aging process and make a disease-free existence a possibility, it is more important to make this spiritual change. Without love and real transformation prolonged life would be experienced as hell. Christian community creates space for true healing to take place. It is often the pilgrimage itself, rather than the final destination, that allows the healing process to occur. The journey and companionship create space, time and rest that let the whole person be healed.

Falling Pregnant

Fall is a mysterious springtime: there’s a feel of something arriving, of sudden light between the leaves. An old expression goes, “To fall pregnant.” Fall and falling may mean that new life is on the way, even as something old is dying.

Wood Hath Hope had a strange kind of summer. Some of my blogs now seem stratospheric. One was entitled “Summer Sublime!” Part of it had to do with completing the final chapters of my book and feeling the force of my own argument, like everyone had to be in on it. Now I know the published volume won’t hit shelves until the end of next year, it’s a little less the buzz for me. Another thing was some of us were committed to attending an evangelical reading group discussing Rob Bell and Don Golden’s Jesus Wants To Save Christians. For many this book was like being shot out of a cannon into completely new territory and it was exciting to be around the excitement. You could feel the world turning a little bit under you.

When the study came to an end we invited its members to attend a couple of Wood Hath Hope sessions billed as “An Introduction to the Bible as Peace.” The first thing to do it seemed was to set out the fundamental problem dealt with by the bible, its diagnostic so to speak. Was it “the disobedience of our first parents” and the personal attribution to us of guilt for their irresponsible eating habits? Or, was it/is it something more endemic, constitutive, part of the way we are self-set-up in chaotic desire and violence? Of course it was the latter that we presented, but sometimes it’s hard to let go of the inherited framework. When God is the judge and we’re all under judgment for a single huge fault then everyone knows where they stand and ultimate violence is the ultimate sanction. What’s not to understand about that?

Problem is Jesus didn’t talk this way. He didn’t begin from an enormous original fault that had to be atoned for. He began with a world of blessing, the kingdom of God. It’s only if you miss out on that that there is a problem. Missing out on the kingdom of peace will self-plunge the world into endless violence. And even then Jesus went to the cross to show the depths of the problem and the selfsame lengths he’s willing to go to in order still to call us out of them! Jesus absolutely does not begin from legal demerit that has to be paid out. If you want a diagnostic from Jesus go the Sermon on the Mount and you’ll see the problem is basically violence. But almost all of the time Jesus is simply active to change things in the here and now, to put things right in the dynamic core of our relationships, rather than discourse on what went wrong. (Yes, I know, there’s Paul also to think about—as if Jesus weren’t enough! But Paul is cool too and I will put something up in an On The Stump piece about "Paul and Adam.")

Anyway, you can see how the whole thing works. Inherited sinfulness is not the same as inherited guilt, but making it the same has given traditional Christianity enormous control over people’s identity and behavior. Except of course today that control is slipping and the question is whether we double down on the old methods, or reach out in the Spirit for a deeper understanding of the human condition and what Jesus so powerfully offers it today.

For Wood Hath Hope the studies were something of anticlimax. For a few weeks afterward there was only three of us, Heather, Linda and myself. But here’s the thing. This had the opposite effect from making us despondent. (Really!) We decided to double down on our own thing. It is not a matter of a doctrine or way of thinking which we want other people “to get,” but simply being true to ourselves, to the Spirit moving within us. So we decided to stop the talk and do something. We committed ourselves to sharing our evening meal and shopping for it together, splitting the expenses. Half the week one family would do the cooking , and half the week the other. (And we just bring the prepared food over to each other’s homes, each family dining on its own as usual.) We also figured out we would start a new study program in the New Year, but I’ll describe more of that in the future.

What is important is this change of attitude. We called it “making space for God.” Like prayer or fasting but in the area of food and table relationships. It’s the most natural thing in the world, sharing a table. But to do it as an act of surrender to a path of other-centeredness, this is to make space for God’s kingdom and the breath of God which moves it. And we try to do it with great humility, not as a big deal or as a gesture against contemporary social alienation and consumerism. Yes, it does amount to that, but we don’t do it for that reason, rather simply because it is what the Spirit is saying. We’re doing it to let God speak, and so for us to hear her beloved cadences of peace, forgiveness, gentleness, hope.

Perhaps this is what “fall” means, letting this new thing come to birth, as the old falls away.

Your brother,

Tony

Living in Atlantis

The old story of a city beneath the sea, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, fascinates everyone, me included. I’m very at home in the U.S. (Green Card in hand, the possibility next year of becoming a citizen) but of course I have strong memories of Europe, so I suppose my soul is somewhere between, like Atlantis. Not only that. I find that ancient fable to be a parable of our own time: a civilization alive but drowning. In the Greek version Atlantis was a military empire and was swallowed by a massive inundation in a night and a day. In the Hebrew Bible the sea is cosmic code for violence (think the Books of Jonah, Daniel). Putting those cultural clues together, Atlantis drowned in a tide of its own violence.

Humans are no more violent today than our ancestors. But we have accumulated the tools and images of killing to an unprecedented degree. We have devised a visual feast of violence in news, movies, computer generated images, video games. It’s something literally the world has never seen before. Violence is a 24/7 human percept. And that has a double effect. It makes our minds more accustomed to scenes of violence (what people sometimes call becoming desensitized) but also much more conscious of it as a theme in its own right. I just read a book, Hunger Games. It was tenth grade summer reading at my son's high school. It tells the story of a kind of reality TV in a post-apocalyptic era. What is striking is the brutal matter-of-fact way in which teenagers kill each other because they are ordered to and everybody expects it. There is hardly any compunction or moral conflict. And that’s clearly a reflection of the way people (especially young people) are used to seeing killing through the lens of TV, movies etc. It is not a moral question, but a perceptual one. It’s how we frame and feel our reality. Today we do it with enormous doses of imaged violence. On the other hand, because of this we are more and more aware of violence. People who read the book cannot help but think about it. It’s become something that is bigger than us, happening to us as a reality in its own right.

We live inside a giant permanent Coliseum games. But it’s obviously not just a game (no less than the original Coliseum was just games). Almost every week, and sometimes more than once a week, with sickening regularity, there is news of a group of people, a family, or simply random individuals, blown away by a man with a gun and a grudge. The plasma of violence—this thing in its own right—will grip an individual with uncontrollable power and he will pick up one of the guns lying around in our country like kitchenware and act out his fury. At the same time the U.S. exports a huge amount of violence to the rest of the world. I was recently hit by this statistic: two thirds of the arms sold in the world in 2008 were from the U.S., earning $37.8 billion. Again all this is not basically a moral question. It’s a human question, about how we structure our human life and in a way that comes round to destroying it, to wiping it out. If we were to imagine some final Atlantis style melt-down for our civilization it would make Plato’s strange folk memory/myth look like a cute fairy tale.

But that’s not the point of what I’m saying. This is not a scare piece. In fact it’s the opposite. The point of living in Atlantis is to learn to live underwater. All the stuff I just described is already happening so in so many ways we’re already right there. We’re swimming in the ocean of violence. For a Christian who understands this the reaction is not to seek even more violence—this time from an angry God who will come to punish all this evil. That is simply to see God in terms of the percept of violence which dominates the human eye. For a Christian it is rather a call to build the survivability of Atlantis within its moment of disaster. Because it’s only when the crisis builds to this level—when there is no middle way between the two alternatives—that a new humanity based in forgiveness as a way of life, as the true way of being human—not just an occasional “heroic” gesture—becomes apparent. It is in fact the moment of choice, the moment when the challenge of Christ begins to come home in an unavoidable way: either an entirely a new way of being human or the endless self-fueled crisis, either the pure eye of peace or the beam-in-the-eye of violence, either forgiveness or limitless recycling fire. Living in Atlantis therefore is enormously exciting and hopeful, the time when the Christian message can really come into its own.

As Jesus said, “the only sign that will be given you is the sign of Jonah,” a human being who could live under water.

Journey with Jesus #15

Sorry for the delay in posting this study from August. The Old Testament study that accompanies this one (Jesus and the smallest thing) will be posted in the next few weeks.
Wood Hath Hope will be interrupting it's "Journey with Jesus" to run a short two-week introduction to our Bible theology of non-violence. Our regular schedule will resume after this. Peace - Linda



New Testament - The smallest thing 08/06/09

In Luke 1:52 the Magnificat, Mary’s hymn of praise, announces the gospel’s concern for the small and weak. Mary proclaims that God has brought the powerful from their thrones and exalted the lowly. Again in Luke John the Baptist proclaims the overturning of the established order. He quotes from Isaiah 40: Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low.” High is low and vice versa.

Jesus’ parables are remarkable for their focus on small things. The parables are simple, to the point, and have the power to change your perspective. Matthew 13 is the great chapter for parables. In v.33 we have the parable of the yeast. The woman hides it in the dough. It is lost, no longer visible – and yet has the effect of causing the whole loaf of bread to rise. In v.44 another small thing is hidden – the treasure buried in a field, and in v.45. the small thing is a pearl of great price. These are all small, hidden things that once discovered shift your orientation. The world shifts and changes around you.

Perhaps the most well known “small thing” from the parables is the seed. The seed is a powerful image because it has a vitality and potency that produces newness and life. In Mt 13:31 Jesus uses the example of the mustard seed, “smallest of all the seeds.” This is the classic parable of the small thing that becomes the most important thing. In MK 4:26-29 another parable describes the seed growing secretly. The farmer does not need to do anything, does not even pay attention, yet the seed grows. In these parables Jesus shifts the established world logic that bigger is best.

In Luke 15:3-10 there are two parables of lost small things. The parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. Jesus recognizes the irrational amounts of time that we often spend in order to save the smallest coin (think coupon clipping, rebates). He taps into the human sense of having to find something that is lost; regardless of its intrinsic value it becomes the obscure object of desire. He translates these human foibles into a parable about the kingdom of God. That same feeling of joy that we have about finding something that has been lost is like the joy in heaven when one sinner repents. The parable of the lost sheep is highly counter- intuitive. The shepherd leaves the remaining ninety-nine sheep unprotected in order to search for the one lost sheep. Again there is joy when the lost is found. The parables tell us to pay attention to the small, lost, hidden element. This is where joy is.

In John 11: 49-50 Caiaphas, the High Priest, states that “it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed”. The Sanhedrin is trying to decide what to do about Jesus. Caiaphas’ position is that the Romans will use Jesus as an excuse to bring down violence on the people. This is a familiar theme in movies , cutting someone off to save the rest– e.g. the mountain climber who saves his friends by cutting the rope that connects him to them. This is also the human logic of war – we have to kill in order to preserve the peace. Eliminating the individual to maintain order is at the heart of sacrifice – a practice common to all traditional cultures. Jesus overturns this fundamental human logic. Sacrifice just perpetuates the cycle of violence. For change to take place the human heart needs to be transformed. We need to surrender our boxed-in way of thinking. Jesus says it is the single sacrificed thing that is important, not the crowd for which it is sacrificed. To think this way is to invert established human logic. And for Jesus to say this meant that he believed the things that box us in can be overcome, especially fear and fear of death which keep us in the old logic.

With Jesus the least and the last become first. Jesus shows us this in practice – he becomes that thing, the last, the least, the lost. He enters into the human process of sacrificing the weakest to save the nation. He says “see me, the hidden thing”. He asks us to pay attention to the least thing, the weakest thing and see its value. Salvation comes by transforming our established human logic. Jesus takes the process we use to save people (sacrifice) and turns it into something that really does save, by changing our whole viewpoint on reality.

In Lk 20:17-18 it is the stone that the builder rejected that becomes the corner stone. The stone is the rejected, the least, last, lost, the hidden –it is Jesus. But this little stone will destroy the kingdoms of this world. (A reference to the stone not cut by human hands which topples the king’s statue and becomes a mighty kingdom in Daniel 2:31-45.)

We are also ourselves the rejected thing that has been redeemed—whatever way in which he have been rendered small, disposable, Jesus makes this valuable. We have thus been given freedom and endless life because we are no longer defined by the world. Through Jesus we can turn away from selfishness and fear. This endless life is for all – God is not exclusive: he sends his rain on the just and unjust alike.

Summer Sublime

Somebody wrote me saying there was no recent news in my blogs. So, really, it’s been an eventful summer. And the first news popping up is that a few of us in Wood Hath Hope have been attending a study group run by a bunch of young evangelicals. They are using a book called Jesus Wants to Save Christians, A Manifesto for the Church in Exile by Rob Bell. Rob is the pastor of a church in Grandville, Michigan, and is something of an enfant terrible in evangelical circles. His previous book with the hip title of Velvet Elvis (referring to a supposed definitive artistic rendering of Elvis) attacked the rigid interpretation of biblical texts—the idea that you can know 100% of what the texts mean. He calls this “brickianity”—every bit of meaning is a brick in the wall.

In the book we are reading Bell lays out an unusual biblical pathway for evangelical faith, one not concerned with listing and enlisting God’s plan for spiritual salvation, but with the bible’s stringent critique of empire and how this applies blow for blow to the role of North America in the world. Christians in this country need take note of their situation in an imperial structure which uses the rest of the world for its power and pleasure.

The amazing thing about the study group is how seriously it takes Bell’s blasts. Outside the United States, or in seminaries or minority churches, people are perhaps used to this kind of thing as liberation theology, which is written for those at the receiving end of empire and oppression. For it to arrive at the level of the local church on main street America and as a matter of biblical faith seems nothing short of astonishing.

It makes me think that something really is up in our world of the wealthy. The Holy Spirit is prompting us to a new awareness and attitude about being Christian in the belly of the beast. I think the prompting goes well beyond a moral judgment on unjust North American lifestyles. If it was simply criticism nobody would be willing to pay attention. People are ready to listen because in fact they have already shifted to a new place in regard to a righteousness of nation and wealth and heaven thereafter. They have perhaps ended up too much on the down side of the American dream, or seen too much its dark side. So they begin to feel the reaching up in their hearts of an alternative, of a completely different goal intended by God. Bell and the group studying his book are prepared to look at this stuff not because it’s a guilt trip, but because it’s a ride to the humanly new. They’re not entirely sure what this new thing is but they’re definitely out there buying the tickets.

The second thing that has been going on this summer is that I have a book contract for my own ms., Virtually Christian, How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New. Well, yes, I was thinking of this right at the beginning but I had to show some decorum! I finally found a publisher, a British group called O-Books. They publish in the area of world religions and Mind/Body/Spirit and have expanded into theology. The contact came through a friend who has been an off-and-on member at WHH for the longest time and who himself had a contract with the same group. My friend’s thought is probably more framed by the Hindu religion than Christian faith and perhaps that contact, connecting to the publisher, says something. I’d tried most of the mainstream theological publishing houses in the U.S. and got turned down by them. So, what do you know, the kind of thing I’m trying to say theologically seems to fit better within a world religions framework! Why is that? It’s not because I take some vague multi-cultural approach. The particular of Christ is at the heart of everything I think and write: everything hinges on the figure of Jesus. I’m not entirely sure, but it could be because Christian thought is traditionally shaped as legal and normative—even Bell’s stuff is about what God wants from us—rather than transformative and holistic—what a creative God is actually doing! So trad Christian publishing can’t see it, but a MBS approach will. Where I go with theology is the already-embeddedness of Christ in culture, the way our humanity is deeply informed by his new humanity. We still very much have to make a decision for Christ, away from the chaos and destruction that a half-Christianization produces. But all the same the Christian message is organic to how we are as cultural beings (wasn’t it Tertullian who said “the soul is naturally Christian”?). So it is a matter of responding to an intense demand made on us from our human depths rather than to a terrible judge looking down on us from the outside. God is closer to us than we are to ourselves and the grace of Christ is borderless in human space.

And that brings me in a fairly neat sequence to what I’m doing much of the rest of my time—I go to the mall. To movies, to the stores, even once or twice to hang out and write. I suppose I’m a bit of a mall junky—public spaces generally. I have to say I get the strangest sensation in the mall. I get it in supermarkets too. Here’s the feeling: it’s like at first my heart is being pulled out of me, painfully, by a longing that goes way, way beyond me. It’s something to do with the enormous plenty on display. I think classically you’re supposed to get that feeling in front of wonderful vistas, of mountains, forests, seascapes, that kind of thing. It’s called the sublime, something so great it leaves you both captivated and flattened, at a total loss. Certainly you’re not supposed to feel the sublime in a mall—that’s ridiculous, inane. You can feel other things, and I have felt them, like a spaceyness from stimulus overload, or annoyance and anger at so many goods and so much greed produced at the expense of the poor; but not anything transcendent. Still the fact is I do have this feeling and then my immediate and almost automatic second-step is to give thanks. Paul said give thanks in everything. But I don’t go into the mall thinking to myself, ah yes, I’m going to practice Paul’s edifying advice. I just find myself doing it, because it’s the only thing I can do, and when I do there come peace and hope.

So here’s what I think. All the enormous plenty is a foreshadowing of God’s kingdom. It is indeed God’s desire that the earth be turned into plenty—but for all. The pain comes from that gap, from these immense blessings and the lack of awareness and love with which they are possessed. But immediately you give thanks, these things, despite the surface evidence, become what God wants them to be, free-flowing, given for all, the rich wonderful feast prophesied for all peoples (Isaiah 25). Then—alongside the actual goods and probably even more important— there is people’s desire. You’re swimming in it. You’re drunk with it. The sense of the sublime—if that is what it is—is now a very human collective one. It’s not the lonely romantic soul gazing at a sunset. Here you’re surrounded by the longing of thousands of people, sharing in their desire. We are all together reaching out for the unattainable. As I have pointed out in other blogs this liberated desire so characteristic of our global culture is already a Christian product. It has arisen through the progressive breaking of boundaries and taboos of all sorts in a history unleashed by the gospel. The desire, just like the goods themselves, is therefore an indirect reflection of Christ in the world, an unrecognized longing for the kingdom of life and love that he preached. Thus when I give thanks I realize this truth, at least in my heart, transforming the desire into love, purifying it and redeeming it. Yes, of course, this is all in my mind, in myself, but it is not illusion. It is a future reality happening now through Holy Spirit. Think, if all Christians practiced redeemed desire not as an occasional hot flush but as a matter of normal spiritual discipline how would that change the world! There would be no way of withholding the plenty of the mall—the plenty of the earth—from all the poor who are deprived of it. Then human joy would be uncontainable and the God of Christ be with us.

Journey with Jesus #14

Old Testament - Mountain 07/09/09

Exodus 19-20 is a key passage in the Torah. While Genesis gives the pre-history of the world and stories of the ancestors, Exodus begins the historical account of the oppression and liberation of the Hebrews. This is the foundational event of the Bible. It is a story of liberation and Law – the people set free to live a different way; led from slavery into the service of God. The theophany on Mount Sinai in chapters 19-20 is the first clear articulation of this.

The passage describes a fearful, primitive, sacred mystery. It is a classic account of an encounter with the holy. The holy both fascinates us and fills us with dread. In order to approach the holy we must first be pure, or risk destruction. The blood of menstruation and childbirth make women impure (hence the shock of Jesus’ interaction with the hemorrhaging woman who touched his cloak). Impurity –for example blood or dirt –is associated with violence and lack of order and is therefore dangerous. It is an anthropological phenomenon. Unlike other animals, humans are no longer restrained by instinct. We have become highly volatile with the potential for excessive violence. Religion is all about controlling this volatility. Priests, sacrifice and purity laws are ways to bring control, to harness and order the sacred power of violence. The anthropological dimension is illustrated in the Sinai story: if any person touches the mountain then they must be killed by the people. The Exodus account here uses these primitive themes to underscore the transcendence of God and the importance of the event. What is vital is what is happening: the mountain is the place where God reveals his law and desire for justice.

Later, in Exodus 24:9-11, a select group of elders are permitted on to the mountain to eat and drink with God. This account has pre-echoes of the transfiguration stories in the Gospels. It is a communion with God, but the depiction is of an extremely powerful and awe-inspiring divinity. This “classic Old Testament God” is also illustrated at Habbukuk 3:2-16. This is considered an early hymn describing YHWH who dwelled in Sinai (his fortress). He leads his people into the land and battle against their enemies with the same strength he manifests on his mountain top. This is a storm-God – a poetic description of a pre-scientific God imagined as a violent thunderstorm.

Daniel 2:31-45 (written in the 2nd century BCE) gives a different understanding of God’s action in history. The God of violence no longer works – the situation of the Jewish people cannot be changed through military might. Instead God becomes more mysterious and new. The story of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream illustrates how God can intervene in history in a new way. God is going to deal with the nations but not as storm-god. He chooses the small stone to strike the statue and this small stone then becomes a mountain that fills the whole earth. The mode of communication has changed from a hymn of power to something more mysterious, less tangible, a dream. It is less clear and needs interpretation. The Bible is reaching out to find something new. It is seeking the extra ordinary. Established human logic (of violence) has not solved the problem of oppressive nations, so it looks elsewhere.

In verse 34 the stone, not shaped by human hands (unlike the statue) becomes a mountain. It takes the space previously occupied by the statue –and more. The dream describes an action by God that brings down oppressive empires and builds a new kingdom. God’s power is not represented by the storm, but by the small single element, the exception. The mountain of Sinai is reduced to a single stone.

Jesus understands that he is the stone. In LK 20:17 he says that “the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls” This references Psalm 118:22 and also the passage from Daniel. The mountain as the symbol of power has been abandoned – the shift is to the stone – to Jesus who has come to destroy the old oppressive systems of the world. He does this not through the violence of the storm-god – rather through the power of something new, the single element, the exception that changes everything to itself.

Gucci and the Grace of God

What happens to the snorkeling business when humans grow gills? What happens to the village translator when the people learn the foreigners’ language? What happens to the Christian church when the world is catastrophically infected by the gospel?

These are questions which arise from my last few blogs. They are perhaps fantastic questions, unheard of questions, but they do really make sense. First, they make scriptural sense. In John’s gospel Jesus says the Holy Spirit will “prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment,”(16.8) meaning, yes, the Holy Spirit is making a continual argument to the world about the most basic human issues and the world cannot help but begin to see things the Holy Spirit’s way. Moreover, based on the epochal insights of Rene Girard I have given account of how the argument might actually go, showing that the major contemporary themes of freedom and desire and, along with them, compassion for the victim are trace elements of the Jesus story settling in the minds and values of humanity. Then I also said that these filtered elements of the gospel are enough to set the world spinning wildly out of control. Without the full conversion of love these things are only enough to make the human system mad with itself rather than fully transformed. That’s why the world is “catastrophically” infected by the gospel. At the same time “catastrophe” can also mean just a huge contrariwise movement, and that could yet mean that the world will adopt the full and true movement of the gospel. I say this in faith fully aware that facts on the ground might seem to contradict this possibility. No matter the desperate facts I still believe the Master of the gospel will have the final victory. Jesus says, “Have courage, I have overcome the world” (John 16.33); and this does not mean in a violent, beat-down-your-enemy kind of way—how could Jesus mean that?—but by unrelenting Holy Spirit truth-telling to the human situation.

Which brings me back to the snorkeling business. If the scenario just painted is only half true it’s got to mean something enormous for the traditional business of doing church. Why would the churches want to sell snorkeling equipment, perpetuating the condition of two worlds, one up above where the perfect spiritual air is and one below where we briefly live? Why would they do this if the world below is filled with Holy Spirit and, more and more, humanity is mutating to breathing Spirit in this actual world system? Why would they continue to speak of a heavenly other-world when, as Jesus taught, the sign of the gospel is the sign of Jonah, of God’s ability to bring life in the violent human depths of this world? And, most of all, how can the churches stay in the business of snorkeling when the gospel is getting people to grow adaptive gills and yet, at the same time, they are swept by catastrophic storms because the same people do not know how truly to breathe the Spirit in their depths? Is it not high time for the churches to accept their mission is teaching the transformed humanity of the gospel, rather than the alienated humanity that has been default up to now?

If the churches took this seriously there are many ways that it might play out, but the first and most important, I think, is a new sense of mysticism. What is needed is a mysticism of Christ’s presence in this world in order to affirm clearly and powerfully the ultimate reference of meaning given us by the gospel, rather than a hand-me-down Greek other-world. If Jesus is risen bodily that means he is still part of this human world but in the transformed state he is calling the rest of us to. Don’t be put off by the word mysticism. I don’t mean the old-fashioned perception of mysticism, something highly esoteric, because, naturally, other-worldly. I’m talking about the concrete and real sense of Christ in the world in the way I’ve been presenting. Mysticism means a direct connection with the divine, but even in the other-worldly sense of the divine that still has to come in the flesh and blood and thoughts of the saint. What I am saying is that now our human flesh and blood and thoughts are more and more affected and transfigured by the gospel and that is where we find Christ. Yes, I know that there is a tremendous amount wrong with our flesh and blood and thoughts—there is the self-destructive path of chaotic freedom and desire. But I am also saying that there at the bottom of this dangerously spinning human universe is the serene communion of love—the still point of the moving world, except it is only still in the sense of peace, but full of the vibrant movement of self-giving. This mysticism means that God is absolutely present to our cultural world as divine “self-othering” (the giving of the self to the other) fully manifest in Jesus and more and more manifest at the base of our crazed freedom as its true source. Of our crazed desire as its true desire. Of our offended victims as their resurrection through compassion and forgiveness.

Let me try one example: take a top brand advert, a Calvin Klein or Gucci, something completely “worldly” like that. It is bound to deliver an overwhelming presence of body, youth, sexuality. Obviously this advert is able to infect most people with its powerful immediacy, filling us with desire, making us want the product on display. The overbrimming sense is fraught with danger in its prompting of boundless desire. Yet at the same time the naked intensity unleashed by the advert reveals the immensity of love at work in the world which makes the intolerable display tolerable, which somehow gives it innocence and truth. Something made up purely of possessive desire without also a positive goodness would be socially untenable. I would say, therefore, behind every such display in our hyper-visual world is the image of the Crucified, making possible a universal release of desire, unbounded by exclusions of any sort (class, wealth etc.), because it communicates to the world a universal good. Of course—and again and again this has to be repeated—it is all deeply ambivalent. But this is precisely what is experienced as the fun, the thrill, the energy of our contemporary global culture. The whole of the postmodern world is a kind of Pompeii with Vesuvius poised above it, but now, in contrast, below it is the new creation of Christ. Christ is the mother giving birth to our cultural universe, over and over again, as limitless self-giving. If Christians can see this, can see Christ not as a distant metaphysical figure but as the engine of our actual experienced world, they can be energized to preach the gospel and with cutting-edge truth. Instead of the insatiable greed and cruelty at the surface of contemporary desire there is the love of God waiting to break through below and in it. This is not a God above, separate, alien to our world, but absolutely involved, up to her neck in our affairs, waiting for us just to see and surrender to her incredible birthing love.

Radioactive Christianity

My last post was deep and I think the only way out is to get in deeper still. I find myself in these two blogs presenting something of a programmatic argument. I didn’t really start out intending to, but now I’m in it up to my neck I must, as Doris said, “Just keep swimming.” So, please, continue to swim with me!

Last time I argued for the Christian sources of freedom, capitalism and romanticism. I did this in a positive sense, as the emergence of a gospel-based desire for the things of this earth. I did also point to what I called the dark side, the obvious respect of how destructive unbounded freedom and desire can be. Now, for some people that would be a pure “Oh Yeah??” because “The Christian sources of capitalism” would not represent simply a redundant statement but a sick joke too. They would say there is something systemic in Christianity which is destructive of the earth, and this would then turn my original proposition on its head: gospel-based desire rather than creating a positive relation to the earth creates an intensely destructive one. So here is a further, trickier aspect to the whole question and I need to follow where it goes. I must do so in order to understand more deeply the false Christianization of the world, including, in the scope of this phrase, official Christianity too.

A recent article in an online news service called truthout.org described the plight of indigenous peoples across the globe under pressure from the West. One particular example was arresting because a successful Christian-based feature movie has recently been made about them. They are the Huaorani, a tribe of hunters and gatherers inhabiting the rainforests at the headwaters of the Amazon. Numbering about 3000 they had no contact from the outside world until as recently as the late 1950's.

A leader by name of Moi Enomenga describes the situation provoked by a western oil company in their area: "First they drill, then they extract oil, then there is a highway, then there is colonization, then there are so many problems, because, here, the forest is clean, but when the companies enter, they destroy so much. The people don't have what they need to live, because the Americans don't respect much, because they take the oil, instead of letting us live. This is why the Huaorani ask for the oil-drilling to stop."

Encroachment by the oil industry took place in the last two decades. The original contact in the nineteen fifties was through Christian missionaries and, according to Enomenga, it was members of the Huaorani who had been taken away and educated at missionary schools who were bribed to facilitate the deal with the oil company. Ergo, missionaries are spies for the big companies and converts are their stooges.

As I say, all this was of intense interest because the Huaorani people and the initial group of missionaries were the subject of an effective mass-distribution film called “End of the Spear” (2006)—in fact we watched this movie on one of our WHH movie nights. The film told the story of the killing of five males from the missionary group and their nonretaliatory deaths. Subsequently it was the response of the wives caring for the people in the midst of a polio epidemic which seemed to have brought many to Christian conversion. The absolutely central theme of the movie was the gospel principle of nonviolence. The motivating factor driving the missionaries—in particular a central figure, a small-plane pilot with the providential name of Nate Saint—was the relentless cycle of warrior revenge among the Huaorani, which was driving them to extinction. Some time after the killings a Christian translator is asked by one of the tribe why the Christian missionaries (including Nate) did not use their guns when attacked. She replied, invoking the name for the tribal high god, Weangongi. She said the missionaries came to tell the Huaorani “that Waengongi has a Son. He was speared and didn't spear back, so that others would live well." Released in the wake of 9/11 retaliatory wars the movie seemed to me to have a powerful self-critical aspect. If this was the message of Christian missionaries from North America evangelizing a tribe of indigenous peoples, what should that mean for people in North America who called themselves Christian? The movie therefore seemed to me part of the steadily emerging alternative language of Christianity , which seems to come contextually, from a world subliminally informed by the gospel message, including popular culture, rather than formal doctrine. This idea is in fact at the basis of all my blogs, but especially the last two and this one. But let’s return for a moment to the Huaorani.

Here is Enomenga’s quite different assessment of the same events. "Twenty-five years ago, we were still living free. We didn't have borders. Our territory went from Peru into Ecuador. My father and grandfather always defended our territory … they guarded it very well. Nobody came inside. If people disrespected our laws and came to hunt on our territory, they would get killed. In 1957, American missionaries, five of them, showed up at the village of my grandfather on my mother's side. Those five missionaries were killed there. I always thought about this when my mother and father would tell me their stories. I thought when I turned twenty-five I would then defend my land. After the five missionaries were killed, more came and said we would be bombed if we didn't move. So they took us away from our communities and moved us to one area. Today there is a community where the missionaries took everybody. I always thought that this kind of thinking can't be permitted on our land. My father and grandfather defended our territory by killing. Now I have to defend our territory by making friends with people and organizing.”

Enomenga’s comments actually corroborate my overall argument of an alternative contextual language of Christianity. He says he can now have an impact by making friends and organizing, rather than killing. But this possibility has to be provided by forces prepared to listen to him, people who want to become his friends, who have a concern for the environment and for native peoples. These attitudes must be counted an oblique or refracted form of the gospel—i.e. contextual concern for the victim provoked by the gospel story and its crucified prophet, the man from Nazareth. What other historical-ethical figure could possibly give global political status to 3000 tribal people lost at the headwaters of the Amazon? At the same time it is small immediate comfort to Enomenga, and to many others in the world, when the natural environment in which they live is being raped and destroyed.

Enomenga then adds another aspect which is even more challenging.

"About 50 years ago, colonists came here, and brought diseases, and an enormous number of Huaorani died. This is why the Huaorani don't want them here in Ecuador. Here, we have a lot of history, stories about how the planet was born, how the Huaorani lived.... I would teach them about this, but they come here to educate us, but I don't want them to. The missionaries lie. I don't believe them. I believe in our own spirituality here: the forest."

The question is truly, do missionaries lie? In the movie when the explanation is given “He didn't spear back, so that others would live well” I don’t think they lied. I think they spoke bedrock gospel truth: that Jesus effected a radical shift in human being through profound nonretaliation. But what about the whole metaphysics in which a statement like this is usually embedded: of eternal salvation in another heavenly place, of a disembodied spiritual self that belongs there, of Jesus’ payment of a debt of sin, of faith as the prize lottery ticket to this other world, of resurrection of the body as a confusing and redundant afterthought? I think this is the highly fraught Christian religion and spirituality implied by Enomenga, a spirituality that goes along with the destruction of his forest, and over against which he prefers his own. His own, I’m sure, would have the forest as a place alive with meaning and associations, with stories of ancestors, of gods, of animals, of dread and blessing. It is the immediacy of the divine or the transcendent to the lived world that he was talking about, not a spirituality that displaces us to some nebulous space halfway between death and an invisible planet in the sky.

At any rate this alienated Christianity spirituality provides a very powerful counterthrust to a claim of positive Christian desire in the earth. It would in fact lead some people to say that the very idea is hogwash and Christian desire is almost always negative in the earth. It is because of this that the central structure of my argument here—and everywhere—is that there are in fact two very different Christianities. I have the courage to say this because I think these two are already separating themselves out before our eyes. There is the formal-doctrinal, most-often-preached variety with its default metaphysics of a heavenly hereafter, and there is the contextual, subliminal, infectious, historical and anthropological variety. The latter is the apparently unintended but true consequence of the gospel. It’s as if the gospel is a form of radioactivity, used formally for one set of purposes—we might say it’s locked up in the nuclear reactors of the churches for the sake of its power—but in the meantime it continues to render everything around it luminous and alive with positive desire, nonviolence, and compassion for the victim.

It all comes down finally to desire, to its highly fluid or volatile character. And I have briefly to state this in an analytic way to make everything plain. We all know desire can be destructive and violent whoever and wherever you are. There is conflictive desire in the rainforest just as much as in the salons of Paris or the streets of New York: nobody disputes the cycle of intense warrior revenge among the Huaorani. Desire is conflictive because it is mediated, because it springs from a relationship to the object in which a third party models for me that relationship.

Neuroscientists have recently discovered that even monkeys become very highly interested in an object when it is grasped or held by another monkey or by a human. Under these circumstances it is almost inevitable that the person who models to me the value of an object is going to become my rival, my enemy. I want precisely what he wants. In this light religion and spirituality can be broadly characterized as a means to control desire through sanctions and threats of punishment (religion) and as a creative mediation of a positive or nonconflictive relationship to the object (spirituality). But Christ is the only figure of mediation who seeks proactively to overcome all human violence in relationship, through forgiveness and love, and therefore ultimately to turn all religion into spirituality. The love and forgiveness demonstrated by Jesus renders religion redundant and makes the whole of life potentially constituted by intense spirituality. Here then finally is the secret of the truly enormous liberating effect of the Christian message. In Christ, at least in principle, all desire becomes good because all violence is transformed into love. In a world shaped by Jesus the world is literally everyone’s oyster!

This, as I say, is the final root of the enormous dynamic of Western culture. It is the root of the contextual, infectious radioactivity of the gospel, proclaiming first that all earthly objects are good, and then, more radically, inviting compassion for the victim and demonstrating through any number of ways, including movies, the path of nonviolence. What Christians have yet to do is catch up with their own dynamic spirituality. For, in this light, it is possible to understand historical Christian religion as an unhealthy hybrid of violence, metaphysics and Jesus, but today that hybrid is separating out progressively into its component parts. In Christ it is possible to have a mediation that gives us a relationship to every object filled with love, and this makes religion redundant and “the way” of Jesus truly everything.

The past Christian relationship with the earth has been an unhappy marriage of positive desire and restless alienation, leading to the typical smash and grab capitalism which is wrecking the planet, while promoting an other-worldly spirituality which says essentially “what the heck, we’re going to heaven anyway!” But now in the radioactive light of a new emerging Christianity I would say that in every berry on every tree there is God because of Christ. In every bird and every stream. And not just in the natural world. In every glass of Pinot Noir or Glenlivet or lemonade, in every fresh loaf of bread, in every chocolate ganache, in every pizza and dish of pasta, in every quesadilla and rich taco. And not just at the gastronomic level. In every shirt in the store, in every sweater and pair of pants, in every tube of toothpaste, in every perfume by Christian Dior, in every Toyota and Ford, in every Apple computer, in every Ipod, Christ is waiting to be seen. This is because true desire for them is authentically mediated by Christ. In Christ, and only in him, I can want all these things not for myself but truly for you—and by implication also for myself, as another you loved by Christ! I can truly desire them, for the sake of the great “You” of love which he announced in the world. So long as I begin to relate to a Christ-irradiated universe this kind of talk is not cheap grace. It means that the concrete human space is really filled with the endless nonviolence of Jesus. This is what makes it possible--that Jesus “did not spear back" and I know this in the depth of my soul. Because of Jesus everything is liberated for love. My brother, Enomenga, you, like the rest of us, are already half-Christianized, by radioactive Christianity. I hope you, and all of us, will live to see and know a full and deep Christianity by the progression of this astonishing radioactivity throughout our human community.