Virtually Christian, Chap. One

In the next several weeks the blog will cover a study course on the recent book by Anthony Bartlett, "Virtually Christian, How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New."

Summaries from the Friday night meetings of Wood Hath Hope. Blessings to all.

We started with signs: the human world is a world of signs. There is no human knowledge, no “things’ even, without signs to communicate them. Our meaning world is a sign world. Thinking about signs allows us to see that our meaning is produced, fluid, constructed for us.


Violence is a crucial element in the production of signs. The sign “God” has a huge amount of violence in it: all cultures have the support of their “god” when they go to war, including Christian cultures. The whole concept of “hell” associates great violence with “God”.

“God” is a sign—a dense one, a powerful one, a confusing one.

By discussing this together the thought of Jesus and his intervention began to come through more clearly and powerfully. The way in which he was changing the very character of our signs, and so of our human meaning. The gospel, the “good news” is a set of signs, of words, which changes human meaning, including “God”. He spins our world anew out of nonviolent love.

Understanding Jesus this way shows us that Christian faith is not about a ticket to another world, an insurance plan for when we die. It’s about a kind of human evolution, a kind of cultural evolution whose purpose, pressed forward by the Spirit, is new creation.

Because of Jesus humans are like lung fish crawling out of the slime, and learning to breathe on land a new meaning of nonviolence and love. Christians are those who see and believe this meaning, and choose it with their whole lives.

But the entire world is under pressure of the Jesus evolution. That is why everyone is “virtually Christian”, including also Christians. Because everyone is on the pathway of a change of human meaning.

The point, therefore, of this first chapter is change the orientation of theology from “upward” to earthward, which is the actual trajectory of the bible. It begins in a garden “in Eden, in the east” and ends with the New Jerusalem where God and the Lamb dwell with humanity on earth.

(P.S. “Hell” has to be understood as itself a sign, a metaphor, for the self-destruction of human existence when based in violence. Not a torture chamber personally supervised by “God”.)