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.