Book Study, Virtually Christian, Chapter Seven: What Signs Did He Give?

The last chapter returns to the theme of signs but played out in the historical figure from whom the whole effect originally stems.

It is very difficult to come to firm conclusions about the historical Jesus but if there is a real change in the core human structure, from violence to nonviolence, this cannot happen at the level of just a pretty story. It must come from a real human events with a real human being. We can only learn to be humanly different from someone who is a different kind of human!

Signs occur in the natural world...a bird in springtime sings its insistent song to attract a mate; geese talk endlessly, probably to ensure their collective co-operation. In all cases there is a neural response. Thus at some level "sounds plus meaning" exist in and frame the animal world.

Human beings have vastly expanded this ability via the mystery of purely symbolic language, to the point where you could say the human world is completely made of signs. The human world is completely an artificial world (a "humiverse"), which does not mean unreal or even unnatural. It is natural for human beings to produce or create their world through signs.. With Jesus there is the use of human signs to change our basic programming as human beings.

It is possible to track Jesus' ministry, life and death in terms of signs. His words and actions were all full of sign value, so much so that "sign" is the word that John's gospel chooses for Jesus' miracles. And are not his parables masterful stories each of which is a single sign of the kingdom? "What parable or sign shall I give for the kingdom of God?" A parable or mashal (in Hebrew) is a compelling form of words that runs alongside an experience (a byword, e.g. "like father like son") which can then offer the meaning of that experience. What was special about Jesus' form of words or bywords is that they upset established meaning and proposed a radically new one. His words did not run by you a meaning from the past, but a new meaning that came from himself. His bywords were "mywords"!

The Pharisees and the crowd asked for a sign, and Jesus refuse to give them one in response. This seems to contradict Jesus' communication through signs. But that refusal was itself a communication. It said that the semiotics or sign-system which shaped their demand came from the old world of meaning, rooted in violence. In the chapter this argument is grounded in Jesus' relationship with John the Baptist who in so many ways was Jesus' mentor but from whom he decisively broke. Even though Jesus was baptized by John (and even shared in his baptism ministry, John 3:22) he left him and at a certain point engaged in a long explanation of the difference between their ministries ( Luke &:18-35). VC demonstrates this difference to be explicitly in respect of violence: of the kingdom coming through violence for John, but not for Jesus.

John sends messengers from prison asking whether Jesus is "the one who is to come". In the context this does not mean the Messiah but the figure of Elijah who was to return before the direct intervention of God to establish God's kingdom. Elijah is the classic biblical figure of divine violence (viz. the slaughter of the prophets of Baal), and John and just about everybody else was hung up on the return of Elijah to sort things out before the final day of the Lord. Jesus refused this pathway, opting instead for a ministry of healing, welcome and forgiveness, and that's why John doubted him, having initially thought of Jesus in the role of Elijah! But rather than claiming to be Elijah Jesus identified with Wisdom, a figure of welcome and nonviolence. This is proven by Jesus' actual practice, many of his sayings, and his discourse on John and its ringing conclusion--"Wisdom is vindicated by her children...."

Thus Wisdom is the core sign by which to understand Jesus in the gospels and by which in all probability he understood himself.

Jesus did in fact offer a sign in response to the Pharisees--the sign of Jonah! (Matthew 16:4) The chapter lays out in detail how the whole story of Jonah has to be understood in the key of violence--Jonah's violent anger, the violent anger of God expressed in the storm and from which God relents, the violence of the Ninevites from which they repent, and again the remaining violent anger of Jonah. The great fish is both a monster of the deep--the realm of chaotic violence in Hebrew mythology--and then the transforming agency by which Jonah is saved and the Ninevites converted. The book of Jonah is in fact a Wisdom prophecy and a parable or mashal in its own right. Jesus' adoption of "the sign of Jonah" works on all the levels of the story, as well of course in the central image of Jonah's descent into the abyss of violence and its wondrous transformation through God's action. Jesus is the willing and forgiving Jonah.

In the light of sign of Jonah Jesus' death and resurrection become a profound and final disruption of the human order of meaning based in violence and violent death. In its place a new order of meaning is begun, after "the sign of Jonah." If this is the case it means that the change in the human order of meaning is ongoing; it is not yet complete. We are all virtually Christian!

Book Study, Virtually Christian, Chapter Six: church...

The church is anywhere there are Christlike relationships--which means a sharing in the personhood of love brought into the world by Jesus. As the Latin hymn has it, "Ubi caritas et amor deus ibi est": where there is self-giving and love, there is God. And if God is there so necessarily is church.

Throughout the study we have discovered that Christlike relationships are in time and space, scattered through time and space. They are part now of the historical and cultural continuum. They do not belong to a strange "other" spiritual world which only the priests or ritual or private salvation can access. They belong to the actual world of human relationships carried by neural mirroring.

Saying this does not mean these worldly Christlike relationships are perfect or unmixed with other selfish or even violent modes (witness the medieval church itself, or in fact any formal church!). Perhaps more often than not they exist simply on the level of signs and meanings--but those signs and meanings can then inspire people, without them knowing it consciously, to act in a Christlike fashion. And if people do act in this way that is church!

Grace is broadcast freely in the world, which is the character of grace. (If we say, as some theology does, that grace is given to some and withheld from others, that is not grace but whimsical violence.)

But what remains then of preaching and teaching? What about Paul's "How are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?" The Good News is news, surely, so it needs teaching and preaching, right? Right!

The argument of Virtually Christian is simply that after 2000 years the figure of Jesus has so entered the deep structure of our general human culture that it preaches and teaches itself! It does not of course teach "salvation by faith" or "salvation by sacraments", or the "divine nature" of Jesus, that is, any of the formal doctrines of Christian tradition of whatever stripe. You need a formal institution to do that. What it does teach, however, is something those formal institutions often avoid or even negate: that Jesus has changed the primal conditions of being human, raising up the victim, and compelling human beings toward compassion as the true character of human life.

It is this message that is broadcast in the world, with innumerable effects in our actual humanity. At the same time, however, two other things are relevant. First the world system of violence is not indifferent to this message but fights tooth and nail to resist it. And its best resistance today is to distort and co-opt the message itself. In this light it is culturally possible even to claim to be "Christian" while espousing the most violent social relationships and politics.

Secondly and in contrast--and here we are really getting to the heart of what it means to be church today!--there are those who are led to turn their hearts and minds to the truth of Christ in the world. They come to believe that the Father/Mother God of Jesus is present at the heart of humanity, engaged in a long travail of giving birth to the creation she always intended. People who feel this way come together continually to renew in themselves the transforming personhood of love shared between Jesus and his Father/Mother. They celebrate, worship and love this communal personhood which is God.

Because Christ is in the world this sense of church must necessarily take place in close contact with the actual world. VC describes the practice in terms of "informal structures" and "inclusive boundaries." The approach demands almost necessarily small groups which can have a fluidity and living contact with local human communities , something which sunday churches seem to draw a line against (or at least demonstrate in terms of activism rather than deep organic transformation).

One standard contemporary situation may be used to sum up the relationship of these groups to the world. It's the local shopping mall! The mall seems a strange place to frame the meaning of church. Is it not the very temple itself of consumerism, hedonism, greed, exploitation? Yes and but! It is just these things that make it totally non-churchy and yet show the powerful impact of Christ in the world.

The argument of VC is that at root it is the liberating message of Jesus which fuels the anthropological power of capitalism and consumerism. Jesus spent his time breaking down boundaries, freeing the earth from taboos and negations created by violence. He declared "the sabbath is made for humanity, not humanity for the sabbath...", in other words he released the sabbath blessing of creation to and for all.

He did this for love's sake, for the purpose of a new creation. But while creation yearns and groans toward this end it is perfectly possible for human beings to use and abuse the freed-up world for the continual growth of private wealth it makes possible. The Christianity VC is talking about will recognize the mobilizing presence of Christ even in something as materialist as the mall. The mall has a Christlike relationship at its core! But to see and say this is not in order to bless blandly all the selfish forces present there, rather to commit oneself even more deeply to the anthropological engine at its root. 

It is possible for everyone freely to desire the goods of the world because Christ has released the force of desire in the world. For this reason desire for the goods of this world can and must be transformed into desire for the good of this world, because both come from the same deep matrix of Christ. The only difference is that in the former we take and seek to keep the good offered, and in the latter we want to give it away because we have come to understand that is its true nature! A big difference for sure, but one that requires the transformation of an existing mechanism, not the arrival of an entirely new "spiritual" otherworld.

To look at the mall in this way takes "mystical" eyes, a modern, historical, transforming mysticism which responds to the matrix of Christ in the world. Small groups which set out to be workshops of human transformation seek continually to reprogram meaning in this way. They are really weekday churches at the heart of the world, remembering that sunday for the Risen Jesus and the first believers was just the beginning of the working week...