Book Study, Virtually Christian, Chapter Five

Chapter Five is the book's "Dilithium crystals" of Startrek fame, the essential energy source at the core of all our crazy explorations through space and time. But we could never discover this precious ore unless we had first set out on the journey, the voyage through culture. Finding the source depends on the journey, but taking the journey also depends on the source.

This is a chapter on Christian doctrine, the classic Christian teaching on the two natures of Christ and the three persons of the Trinity. The ancient formulations run the risk of making the good news of Jesus an abstract scheme with little or no value to average humanity, except those initiated in seminary. The purpose here is to reveal their vibrant basis in human fact.

In so many words, there is a radical intervention made in our human situation by Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth. Jesus showed a complete absence of violence in his relationship to the Father and followed it through with a consistent practice of forgiveness and love, all the way to the absolute nonretaliation of crucifixion and its raising up in resurrection. Without this existential reality at thier root the development of the high doctrines is incomprehensible.

The absence of violence is the key. In all of our relationships there are elements of violence. Not in this one! Here there is full trust, peace, love, surrender...the core practice of Jesus which enables us have any concept of the Trinity at all.

The question is approached in three stages, under the title of "sign". "Sign" is the essential method of the book because sign is flexible and dynamic, allowing for human change. Beginning from fixed intellectual categories assumes we can get into this through our minds, but it will only get us hopelessly lost. We get to the truth in as much we are changed by it...by the signs associated with it which liberate us into a new reality.

The sign of Christ, the sign of the human, the sign of God.

The sign of Christ refers to the way Jesus changed the meaning of human existence, from inevitable violence, to one of absolute relationship in acceptance and love. As already said, it is Jesus' total relationship to the Father insisting on the endless forgiveness and nonviolence of God which is then raised up in resurrection. This total relationship becomes a real existential possibility for all human beings...communicated by signs. When Thomas finds it difficult to believe at the end of John's gospel Jesus shows him physical signs of crucifixion made into meaningful signs (of love) by being raised up. Thomas does not actually put his finger in the wounds--really a further act of violence if he were to do it--but he is invited imitatively into that space. His neurons are literally tuned in to the Risen Crucified. (On this also see below.) And the cry that is then wrung from him--"my lord and my god"--is not a metaphysical claim, rather it is pure exclamation at the total change that Jesus has brought in Thomas' awareness of everything, including God.

It is this experiential basis resonating through the centuries that produces the formulae of Nicaea and Chalcedon, claiming Jesus is of "one substance" with God and his "person and hypostasis" is the eternally begotten Son. In this latter case we have in fact the invention of a completely new concept, "person". It is twinned with the other word "hypostasis" to give it the strength and depth that it didn't have then (it meant "face", "mask" or "role"). Hypostasis meant "independent existence" but can today be translated better by "underlying identity" because of its association with person. And now of course person means a relational being deserving of absolute respect and value.

This then is the sign of the human. We can share the underlying identity of Christ because we are neurally imitative, able to pick up all the way to our depths the changed human value of Christ. The chapter describes this in terms of compassion, the "other" radical possibility of imitation, alternative to rivalry and violence. Because we are neurally imitative the response of Christ can be downloaded into any human being who pays attention to the system of signs associated with Jesus--the stories, the meals, the preaching, and all their repercussions in art, movies, songs etc.

It means that in and through Christ we can share the same "hypostasis" as Jesus, i.e. become "children of God" as the gospel of John asserts. The "sign of the human" becomes deeply Christian, the way human beings through the risen Christ can begin to take on the same divine nonviolence found in Jesus.

And finally it means a deep change in the "sign of God". God also imitates the hypostasis of Jesus, or the Son generates the Father as a human being! This has to be the case for two reasons.

One, the logic of the Trinity itself. To be equal in love they each have to give themselves completely and each following the other. As the books says, equality in love means that there is there is an undecidable priority in the Trinity: they all go first, and they all go last.

Two, Jesus demonstrates precisely this on the cross. "Abandoned" by the Father means that he entrusts himself without guarantee, without support, into an abyss. And the abyss becomes love for the other. This is indeed what it means to generate the other, letting the other be because of your absolute gift. And it means that the Father can do no less than imitate Jesus, abandoning himself/herself in love. Even so Jesus generates the Father on earth. But at the same time the Father generates the Son who is Jesus.

In this way the earth itself becomes part of the eternal dance of God!

Be Happy!

Here's how the deal went down for me.

I left the Roman Catholic priesthood for the joy of the gospel.

I spent a year in a community in Italy where there were a number of people gathered all facing big decisions. Some actually went on to join a religious order. But the final goal standing before everyone was the joy of the gospel. And it was with that experience shaping my decision I left the priesthood.

Later I quit a bureaucratic job and took a more menial one, again for the joy of the gospel.

You could say I was an addict for the stuff. What is it?

The joy of the gospel is the gospel in the earth not in heaven. It is what Jesus taught us to pray for, "Thy will be done on earth..."

It is divine springtime in the earth, a time of peace, nonviolence, life for all, above all for the poor and defenseless. It is the beatitudes, "Happy are you poor, Happy are you hungry!" Nothing can resist it. It makes the unbearable bearable, and in fact happy.

It says that even if things are grim economically, even if your enemies are pressing hard, even if you don't have a snowball in hell's chance, still you are happy because the good news is in the earth and like the seed of a mighty sequoia it will not stop growing. And this is so because the gospel has its own rules. It does not work by power and influence, by money and weapons. Its MO is hidden and oblique, filled with apparent dead spots where the cellphone of prayer gets no signal, no response. But that does not mean it is not working, and suddenly out of nowhere an answer will beak through loud and clear.

And even without that practical effect those who entrust themselves to it experience a completely different physics.

I believe this to be the case literally.

There is something called "neural plasticity" which means that if you use the brain in a certain way it begins actually to change and grow. A study was done on the brains of London taxi drivers who are obliged to accumulate what, in their trade, is called "the knowledge". This means a detailed map of every road and street in London carried inside their heads. The study noted a marked growth in a brain area known as the hippocampus, the part necessary for spatial memory and recognition. And the more time the taxi driver spent on the job, the more the area grew. And comparable changes can be noted for those who learn a second language, for musicians who practice every day, and--really no surprise--for people who pray regularly and strongly ( http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104310443 ).

Perhaps the joy of the gospel might be more difficult to detect--after all it is not a regular practice, more like an overall contextual sense, a vital impression connected to, well, everything. But we know that the brain contains about a hundred billion neurons and the connections or possible pathways between them approach the infinite. Scientists tell us a mere sixty neurons are capable of making more connections than the total number of particles in the observable universe. In other words, on a certain reckoning the brain is bigger than the universe, much bigger. And remember we have absolutely no knowledge of the world without the use of our brains. You could say practically speaking it does not exist apart from our brains. And in a way we construct it with our brains. So here's what I think.

For those for whom the gospel is in the earth--i.e. those who embrace with their whole selves the stupendous change in human history brought by Jesus--there is a clear sense in which their brains outguess the universe. Even though the world looks like it's being dragged down to death by all the violence within it those who live in the joy of the gospel already reconstitute that world by the transformed neural connections within them. Through the dead and risen Christ they knit the earth anew in terms of the neural shape they give it. They reorganize every informational element by virtue of the one who died and now has conquered death. They literally reboot creation inside their brains through love.

How and in what parts (or whole modalities) of the brain this happens remains to be detected, but from my own experience and especially observing others (those whom I have known who show a much greater constant joy than I can manage) I believe it to be a fact.

As a vision of Christianity this has serious consequences.

For the churches their gospel is too often in heaven not in the earth. They have directed our attention above, out of here, toward "the holiest in the height", because a transformed earth is just too counter-intuitive and it is much easier to believe in a "spiritual" other-world (one that does not interfere with the brain!).

But the pressure is on. The earth's actual survival is at stake. And the informational technologies now at work push Christians to find themselves in the concrete world, an urgent hyper-visual neurally alert world. So the churches with their gospel-in-heaven are dying and the new evangelical community churches with their bring-your-coffee, tweet-your-pastor and holy tattoo parlors seem to be thriving.

But the real challenge is the joy of the gospel. The media-hip churches may be simply celebrating the culture itself with a traditional overlay of joy-in-heaven hereafter, rather than truly teaching and experiencing the gospel-in-the-earth.

Because this gospel in fact continues to press us from deep within our humanity. Our communication and social media I believe are only a distant surface outworking of the profound relational movement unleashed in the world by Christ. (See my book Virtually Christian.) It is this movement that actually restructures our brain if we let it. 

Oh for the day when Christians will be recognized by the peculiar activity of their brains! This is what the earth is longing for, the revelation of the children of God!

Be happy!

Tony

God and the Jesus Bees

The following is slightly extended content of our meeting last Friday and serves as introduction to Chapter Five of Virtually Christian.

God is a word. What does the word mean?

Everybody thinks they know what the word "God" means. How many times do we hear it, "O God!" If everyone's saying it all the time, they must understand it, right?

Well, not so fast. Is "God" in fact Allah, or is he Krishna? Or Yahweh, or Zeus? Or is she Aphrodite?

"Oh well," others reply, "that's a very narrow pettifogging approach. It's evident those are just all the different names we give to the single Supreme Being, all different routes to the same truth which is revealed in different places under different aspects. And, by the way, this Supreme Being is very kind and good and wishes we would all just get along, and that means we have his/her permission to run all the names together."

Now hold it right there. Where are we getting this information from? People who claim it must be very smart, because there are other people who say very clearly only Allah is God, and that's it. And still others say there is no God at all. So they obviously don't have their hotline to the truth.

Is there a hotline at all?

Isn't it more likely that "god" is a sound we make to evoke a complex of human feelings and relationships to do with ultimate power and meaning, and that this is all we can know for sure. The anthropology of Rene Girard digs deep into this area and claims it was violence that gave birth to the primal word/concept "god' (or "deus" or "theos", etc.) and the word packs into itself a deep stratification of anger, fear, calm, peace, gratitude, all rolled up around a dim distant memory of a victim who was the incarnation both of all evil and all good. And then, later--I would add--there is probably a layering of Greek speculative metaphysics, about First Mover, Mind, the Highest Good, etc. So the primitive feelings are overlaid with some sophisticated ones.

"Come on," you say, "it's nothing like that at all! The thought of God as it has come to us in the West is highly specific and personal. God is a powerful Creator who has done a lot of concrete things in regard to his creation and holds out a promise of eternal happiness on the one hand and a threat of eternal damnation on the other. You can't get much more precise than that!"

But isn't this now in contradiction with what we were just saying above about a benign universal concept of a Supreme Being? You see what I mean? Really, we have very quickly looped in a big circle and it's a hard one to get out of. Either on the one hand we're diffusing the thought of God into vague generalities or on the other  we're making God highly personal and, with that, really rather demanding!

So are we not driven again back to the the idea simply of god as a word, a human production, full of human elements? Indeed if we look closer at this last received notion of God in the West we can see there is a very obvious human element or category at work, and that is "property" or "possession". And it has had a very definite role in making "God" seem so real and concrete.

God made us, and set everything up for our good, giving us a paradise to play in.

Then we screwed up badly and got thrown out.

Then this God sent his Son to save us literally from a fate worse than death, from eternal damnation which is the consequence of our screwing up. But now all we have to do is agree with the contract that God has made, by means of his Son, and bingo! we're good to go.

This scenario is all about property and things. We're things that belong to God. We stole this thing away from God. So God sent this thing, his Son, to pay the thing back. And now this thing that we are, is safe. Unless of course we don't get in on the contract and then this thing we are is doomed to go to a very bad place/thing, which is hell. And in the midst of all this God appears as the main thing.

The whole thing is thingified, because the meaning comes from one of the most basic human practices, barter or economic exchange, which is all about things. There's nothing that objectifies the world more than economic exchange. It's all literally about having or not having. I've got this thing which I'm willing to give up so long as you give me that thing you have. But should you renege on the deal, should you steal my thing or not give me what you owe, then all hell breaks loose. Exchange is very close to violence; in fact violence lurks behind it and gives every-thing involved in it its intensity and power. It makes everything involved in exchange a real thing!

So me, God, the blood of Jesus, heaven, hell, these are all incredibly real in Western imagination because of the power of exchange. But it's precisely the violence behind all that which causes disgust and then makes people back off into vague generalities and for which unfortunately there is no clear warrant.

But now think about it, and here we have come to the real point of the foregoing. What if an individual should come along in the midst of time, in the midst of human history, and claim that only he knew the Father God, and then proceeded to live and die in such a way to give evidence with his life, that this Father God is in fact Love, and all the way. Love that went to the bottom, no conditions, unto death and even beyond death....

What if a man should come into the world who lived and spoke, acted and died in such a way that the whole story about him continually changes your way of thinking? And not just in speculative terms, moving the pieces of furniture about inside your head, but in terms of the tools of thinking itself, giving you an entirely new set of furniture, a new set of signs, in fact a whole new house to dwell in?

What if this man lived and died in a way that was so profound he subverted the whole order of thought itself? What if every sign associated with him sets up a resonance inside you that begins to change the very construction of your mind and it does so in relation to others who are similarly being changed, because this meaning really can only work collectively, in love?

What if the signs associated with this man gradually began to isolate love and nonviolence as the best definition of life and so we begin to see him as a medicine for our meaning, establishing only the fluid relationship of love rather than the violent exchange of things? And especially rather than he himself as the supreme object of violent exchange! What if empties the universe of things entirely because in fact he empties it of violence and fills it with relationship alone?

Would not this individual then change the very meaning of God along with everything else, and he alone have the right to do so? Would he not in fact teach us that Godself is willing, and always was, to take the side of the victims of history--victims of a violence which is the huge and almost inevitable risk of human freedom? Would not God as Creator then be rightly understood, not as violent power, property and ownership, but, actually its reverse, a movement of self-surrender in love? And then last but not least, would not the one who showed us this himself evoke-- in a moment of recognition that he single-handed had changed the human-system including the meaning of God--the amazed exclamation, "my lord and my god!"

The only adequate image I can find for this thought of Christianity is the old one of the caterpillar and the butterfly. Except even that does not work entirely. But going with if for the moment we see the caterpillar does not have to have its soul saved and float off to a heavenly otherworld in order to become a butterfly. It simply goes into a deep self-reimagining, a deep self-deconstruction and reconstruction according to a code that it is somehow placed in the caterpillar-self. And shazam! a totally new beautiful creature. So good so far, but the code for a new humanity does not come organically inside of us but through the story and person of Jesus who is himself the code. Embrace Jesus and all the signs associated with him and shazam! a new humanity!

But even that is not entirely adequate, because it doesn't happen shazam! and it doesn't happen simply with individuals on their own. So perhaps we should shift our image to bees! Together they share a code that enables them to build a beautiful honeycomb filled with honey. None of them can fulfill the code individually, but they do collectively, and they do so over a period of long labor. Are not Christians the Jesus bees infected with the Jesus code which enables them cell by cell, drop by drop, to create a new universe? One filled with the truly divine honey of love! And because it is code, one developed through Jesus for humanity, it also means that other people who do not call themselves Christians can pick it up anytime anywhere. So perhaps that benign Supreme Being stuff is just a poorly articulated way of recognizing the Jesus revelation of honey!

Book Study, Virtually Christian, Chapter Four

The question at the head of this chapter is: if Christ has radically changed human culture through a mobilizing compassion, then philosophy--the practice of thought in relation to the world--would surely show some impact? The chapter gives evidence this is in fact the case, demonstrating the powerful contemporary theme of movement as a product of Christ in the world.

Philosophy came from the Greeks. It was the Greeks who invented the analytic method, the method of negation and affirmation. Remember we're talking about a method not the simple fact of negation and affirmation; of course every human being can do these things. But the Greeks pushed negation and affirmation all the way because they were interested in the final "whatness" of everything, the nature of being as such. They were not interested in an ambiguous interpenetration of things as in the Chinese thought of "yin and yang", nor did they seek an Eastern-style religious attitude where all things are experienced as "one". They sought instead an intellectual knowledge of the final nature stuff, of "what is". For Thales the ultimate reality was water. For Anaximenes it was air.

Plato invented the idea itself as the ultimate nature of stuff. How critical was this as a shift in human culture! His term is "eidos" which is commonly translated form, but also as idea, meaning the appearance of something to the mind. His "theory of forms" said that everything in the universe had a form or idea (eidos) which was in fact a copy of a pure eternal form or idea. The pure eternal form held the ultimate nature of everything. Bingo! Thus was born the other-worldly truth of the world!

This way of thinking has had an enormous influence on Western history, especially Christianity. Plato's notion of the eternal--changeless, motionless, nonmaterial perfection--has profoundly shaped our understanding of biblical "heaven", the "immortal soul" and "what happens when we die". Because of Plato ultimate Christian reality became other-worldly and nonmaterial.

Aristotle is supposed to have reversed the thinking of his master, Plato, giving it a more realist, material bent, but the truth is he still retained the intellectual attitude, i.e. ultimate reality was always perceived in and by the intellect. Thus the intellectual or "ideas man" has had enormous prestige in the West. And in Christianity especially this always slipped back into the Platonic other-worldly attitude. As Nietzsche said it, "Christianity is Platonism for the people".

But a significant change began in the 19th century, breaking from the Platonic world view and emphasizing a sense of "movement" rather than static mental truth. And as an experiential fact our contemporary culture is much more shaped by movement, both physically and now imaginatively via the internet, than unchanging heavenly realities. We live in a post-modern world full of flux, relativity, open-ended movement... But it is Christianity itself which at root has provoked this other kind of world, so undoing the millennial hold of Greek thought! This can be shown in two important areas.

Evolution is one vital area in which movement is stressed in our world. The broadly accepted cultural viewpoint--that the earth arrived at its present form of life over millions of years-provides an intense overall theme of movement. But is it Christian?Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit paleontologist who took part in numerous scientific digs in China and elsewhere, and during his long career of writing and research embraced evolutionary thought from a Christian point of view.

Teilhard saw a natural compatibility between evolutionary science and Christian faith because faith taught a movement in time toward Christ, the Alpha and the Omega. This is a perspective made possible by a number of biblical texts, above all in a passage like Romans 8:19 where it says: "The creation waits with eager longing for the revelation of the children of God..."

Scientifically Teilhard believed that consciousness was a natural accompaniment of the development of biological nervous systems (i.e. not a divine element of the soul coming from beyond). As such all of life is a reaching up toward consciousness, and thence to its perfection as love, what Teilhard calls the "Omega point". The recent science of mirror neurons is strong evidence for the basic accuracy of Teilhard's insight--the neural pathways that allow us to move and respond to our world are also able to "mirror" the same actions in others, putting us at once in the self-other relationship, something which is at the heart of consciousness.

Generally therefore the cultural theme of evolutionary movement does not have to be seen as a threat to faith. On the contrary it can be seen to have inspired by it. The argument is not that Teilhard was right in every respect but that, as he himself testified, it was his Christian faith that gave him confidence to propose this way of thinking. Here therefore we have a powerful example of Christian faith making possible the radical sense of movement expressing itself in evolutionary thought.

The other framework in which we read about movement is the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. This 20th century German philosopher is seen by many to be one of the greatest in Western history. His thought is an effective and real break with the Platonism and idealism of the past: a rooting of philosophy in actual human existence.

For Heidegger the human individual is the place or site or of a disclosure of Being via various key moods or conditions of existence. By far the most important is time: time indeed as a human movement. Because human existence is always moving toward its own death then Being is revealed. It's as if you were gradually being pulled on a rope over a cliff so that ever contact with the ground beneath becomes essential and real! His view is of course a little more subtle than that but this is essentially his vital contribution --situating our awareness of "what is" in direct dramatic human involvement, rather than abstract intellect.

But then numerous commentators agree that what first inspired the determining role Heidegger gave to time was--amazingly!--the New Testament. Heidegger taught courses on the New Testament and it was the early Christian sense of living in urgent anticipation of the coming of Christ (and how that affected immediate experience) which underlay his thought about the role of death. He just shifted the key horizon from Christ to death, and voilá! an extremely powerful philosophy of existence was created.

But then if that is the case it has two significant consequences: one) the tradition of Christian faith has shaped at its core the most influential philosophy of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st; and two) the most dynamic underlying truth of Christian existence is not the concept of "heaven" but movement in time through relationship to Christ. Christ mobilizes the present world in all sorts of ways towards its authentic future.

Heidegger's thought effectively shows us that the true philosophy and force of Christian faith is not some supposed perfect other-world accessed after death (or through rapture!) but a movement in time toward Christ whose meaning is so powerful he changes the condition of existence in the present. Change in the present may also come in terms of crisis, because of the world's unwillingness to accept compassion rather than anger.But then this simply intensifies the pressing need for compassion!

The more compassion the more crisis, but then also the more crisis the more compassion! 

Thus we can see that the overall thesis of the book--that the message of the gospel has radically affected human self-awareness and experience--is confirmed from the side of philosophy, in terms of the deep sense of movement released in the world by Christ. This means that the Christian message has actually broken its Platonic chains by its own natural power.