From Thing to Sign

In my spare time—of which I have a fair bit since I lost my job at the seminary (well, actually I didn’t lose the job, they closed the seminary, so my job was no longer there to be lost, it simply disappeared, ppfffttt, one fine morning)—anyhow, as I was saying, in my spare time I am writing a book of theology. On this book there also hangs a tale and I will give you a little because it is quite instructive about theology, and perhaps also about me (and that too leads back to theology, I suppose or would like to think). In the past my type of book would probably have been called “systematic theology,” or some attempt at it. That means it takes the various elements of Christian belief and fits them in a coherent pattern or whole with educated thoughts about God, the world and humanity.

I have been trying to write this book for, say, seven years. I had deceived myself on the apparent simplicity of the task and for two reasons. One, my first book got published so quickly and easily. Two, systematic theology is itself a tough thing to take on, and I didn’t actually think I was engaged in that when I set out. My first book, Cross Purposes, was an idea whose time had come. It accompanied other books in the field, just being published, and on a subject many people thought highly important. So, in a phrase, it was snapped up. As for this second enterprise, as I say I didn’t at first realize I was writing systematic theology. I thought the actual world we were living in, its rapid changes, its media stream, its violence, all this was enough “system” for anyone and it was simply a matter of placing Christian belief in that framework. I severely underestimated the conservatism of the traditional Christian worldview and how publishers look to that as the bottom line and do not believe the market can take anything beyond its recognizable borders. When I understood this there then began the ground-busting labor of trying to explain how our present world already represents a shift of meaning and why Christianity is a central agent of that shift. The argument becomes multi-leveled and the writing more dense, and, wait a minute, doesn’t that all sound like “systematic theology”? Uh-huh.

Theology like that is usually written for professionals and while I probably could do that I always wanted to reach a broader audience, in fact the contemporary audience which lives and breathes these changes day by day. I don’t want to give up on this, and while publishers have said my stuff is too sophisticated for the average reader I know that more complex ideas can be accepted when a dominant perspective comes to be shared by reader and author. I am sure that Luther’s arguments on justification were not comprehended by most but his attack on Rome surely was. Nowadays it is not a matter of attacking an institution but of demonstrating a new Christian worldview out of cultural elements that are already in the public space because of Jesus. Once people begin to get hold of this then my kind of systematic theology will get published. (Please say “Amen.”)

So, what might be this shift in meaning that (official) Christianity needs to catch up with? In a nutshell it’s a shift from the thing to the sign. Jesus, we might remember, dealt a lot in signs. But in his time there was almost no media—apart from the head on a coin or a statue (which good Jews would have avoided anyway) there were no visual stimuli beyond nature itself. Today what we call nature is crowded out by a blizzard of images, movies, TV, internet, print, hoardings, cellular phones, screens in offices, in public spaces, etc. etc. This means that our visual or virtual world is progressively more real than the real world. But what is communicated, what is the meaning of all this virtuality? So much of it is frenzy, desire and violence. But Jesus is in there too. Jesus was already a semiotic revolution in his day, leaving signs scattered around like the whole world was his artist’s studio. (Think a piece of bread, and “Here is my body…”) The shift in meaning for Christianity is to pay more attention to the signs of Jesus than to the way we try to fit him into a world of things: viz. ”Is it really his body? Is he really God? Of one substance with God? Is there really a place called heaven, or a place called hell?” Rather, in a world teeming with signs, the signs of Jesus take on their full value. They are an intended transformation of the way we see everything and, therefore, of the way we fundamentally relate to each other. Simple as that.

The dominant signs around us—for example, money, glamour, nation, president, gun—are gradually being eroded and edged out by the sign of the Son of Man, meaning forgiveness, peace, giving, nonretaliation, love, life. It comes down to a contest of signs, and Christian faith is on the frontline of changing the signs by which we live. In the following passage from Colossians it’s as if Jesus overwhelms the system of signs, including its most powerful form, the legal document. And he continues to do so in a vast public act of re-education or counter-meaning. “He forgave us…erasing the record [literally handwriting] that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them [literally “exposed them with openness”], triumphing over them in it [i.e. in the public demonstration of counter-meaning].

A public demonstration of counter-meaning. Ah, that sounds like a systematic theology worth googling!