What happens to the snorkeling business when humans grow gills? What happens to the village translator when the people learn the foreigners’ language? What happens to the Christian church when the world is catastrophically infected by the gospel?
These are questions which arise from my last few blogs. They are perhaps fantastic questions, unheard of questions, but they do really make sense. First, they make scriptural sense. In John’s gospel Jesus says the Holy Spirit will “prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment,”(16.8) meaning, yes, the Holy Spirit is making a continual argument to the world about the most basic human issues and the world cannot help but begin to see things the Holy Spirit’s way. Moreover, based on the epochal insights of Rene Girard I have given account of how the argument might actually go, showing that the major contemporary themes of freedom and desire and, along with them, compassion for the victim are trace elements of the Jesus story settling in the minds and values of humanity. Then I also said that these filtered elements of the gospel are enough to set the world spinning wildly out of control. Without the full conversion of love these things are only enough to make the human system mad with itself rather than fully transformed. That’s why the world is “catastrophically” infected by the gospel. At the same time “catastrophe” can also mean just a huge contrariwise movement, and that could yet mean that the world will adopt the full and true movement of the gospel. I say this in faith fully aware that facts on the ground might seem to contradict this possibility. No matter the desperate facts I still believe the Master of the gospel will have the final victory. Jesus says, “Have courage, I have overcome the world” (John 16.33); and this does not mean in a violent, beat-down-your-enemy kind of way—how could Jesus mean that?—but by unrelenting Holy Spirit truth-telling to the human situation.
Which brings me back to the snorkeling business. If the scenario just painted is only half true it’s got to mean something enormous for the traditional business of doing church. Why would the churches want to sell snorkeling equipment, perpetuating the condition of two worlds, one up above where the perfect spiritual air is and one below where we briefly live? Why would they do this if the world below is filled with Holy Spirit and, more and more, humanity is mutating to breathing Spirit in this actual world system? Why would they continue to speak of a heavenly other-world when, as Jesus taught, the sign of the gospel is the sign of Jonah, of God’s ability to bring life in the violent human depths of this world? And, most of all, how can the churches stay in the business of snorkeling when the gospel is getting people to grow adaptive gills and yet, at the same time, they are swept by catastrophic storms because the same people do not know how truly to breathe the Spirit in their depths? Is it not high time for the churches to accept their mission is teaching the transformed humanity of the gospel, rather than the alienated humanity that has been default up to now?
If the churches took this seriously there are many ways that it might play out, but the first and most important, I think, is a new sense of mysticism. What is needed is a mysticism of Christ’s presence in this world in order to affirm clearly and powerfully the ultimate reference of meaning given us by the gospel, rather than a hand-me-down Greek other-world. If Jesus is risen bodily that means he is still part of this human world but in the transformed state he is calling the rest of us to. Don’t be put off by the word mysticism. I don’t mean the old-fashioned perception of mysticism, something highly esoteric, because, naturally, other-worldly. I’m talking about the concrete and real sense of Christ in the world in the way I’ve been presenting. Mysticism means a direct connection with the divine, but even in the other-worldly sense of the divine that still has to come in the flesh and blood and thoughts of the saint. What I am saying is that now our human flesh and blood and thoughts are more and more affected and transfigured by the gospel and that is where we find Christ. Yes, I know that there is a tremendous amount wrong with our flesh and blood and thoughts—there is the self-destructive path of chaotic freedom and desire. But I am also saying that there at the bottom of this dangerously spinning human universe is the serene communion of love—the still point of the moving world, except it is only still in the sense of peace, but full of the vibrant movement of self-giving. This mysticism means that God is absolutely present to our cultural world as divine “self-othering” (the giving of the self to the other) fully manifest in Jesus and more and more manifest at the base of our crazed freedom as its true source. Of our crazed desire as its true desire. Of our offended victims as their resurrection through compassion and forgiveness.
Let me try one example: take a top brand advert, a Calvin Klein or Gucci, something completely “worldly” like that. It is bound to deliver an overwhelming presence of body, youth, sexuality. Obviously this advert is able to infect most people with its powerful immediacy, filling us with desire, making us want the product on display. The overbrimming sense is fraught with danger in its prompting of boundless desire. Yet at the same time the naked intensity unleashed by the advert reveals the immensity of love at work in the world which makes the intolerable display tolerable, which somehow gives it innocence and truth. Something made up purely of possessive desire without also a positive goodness would be socially untenable. I would say, therefore, behind every such display in our hyper-visual world is the image of the Crucified, making possible a universal release of desire, unbounded by exclusions of any sort (class, wealth etc.), because it communicates to the world a universal good. Of course—and again and again this has to be repeated—it is all deeply ambivalent. But this is precisely what is experienced as the fun, the thrill, the energy of our contemporary global culture. The whole of the postmodern world is a kind of Pompeii with Vesuvius poised above it, but now, in contrast, below it is the new creation of Christ. Christ is the mother giving birth to our cultural universe, over and over again, as limitless self-giving. If Christians can see this, can see Christ not as a distant metaphysical figure but as the engine of our actual experienced world, they can be energized to preach the gospel and with cutting-edge truth. Instead of the insatiable greed and cruelty at the surface of contemporary desire there is the love of God waiting to break through below and in it. This is not a God above, separate, alien to our world, but absolutely involved, up to her neck in our affairs, waiting for us just to see and surrender to her incredible birthing love.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Radioactive Christianity
My last post was deep and I think the only way out is to get in deeper still. I find myself in these two blogs presenting something of a programmatic argument. I didn’t really start out intending to, but now I’m in it up to my neck I must, as Doris said, “Just keep swimming.” So, please, continue to swim with me!
Last time I argued for the Christian sources of freedom, capitalism and romanticism. I did this in a positive sense, as the emergence of a gospel-based desire for the things of this earth. I did also point to what I called the dark side, the obvious respect of how destructive unbounded freedom and desire can be. Now, for some people that would be a pure “Oh Yeah??” because “The Christian sources of capitalism” would not represent simply a redundant statement but a sick joke too. They would say there is something systemic in Christianity which is destructive of the earth, and this would then turn my original proposition on its head: gospel-based desire rather than creating a positive relation to the earth creates an intensely destructive one. So here is a further, trickier aspect to the whole question and I need to follow where it goes. I must do so in order to understand more deeply the false Christianization of the world, including, in the scope of this phrase, official Christianity too.
A recent article in an online news service called truthout.org described the plight of indigenous peoples across the globe under pressure from the West. One particular example was arresting because a successful Christian-based feature movie has recently been made about them. They are the Huaorani, a tribe of hunters and gatherers inhabiting the rainforests at the headwaters of the Amazon. Numbering about 3000 they had no contact from the outside world until as recently as the late 1950's.
A leader by name of Moi Enomenga describes the situation provoked by a western oil company in their area: "First they drill, then they extract oil, then there is a highway, then there is colonization, then there are so many problems, because, here, the forest is clean, but when the companies enter, they destroy so much. The people don't have what they need to live, because the Americans don't respect much, because they take the oil, instead of letting us live. This is why the Huaorani ask for the oil-drilling to stop."
Encroachment by the oil industry took place in the last two decades. The original contact in the nineteen fifties was through Christian missionaries and, according to Enomenga, it was members of the Huaorani who had been taken away and educated at missionary schools who were bribed to facilitate the deal with the oil company. Ergo, missionaries are spies for the big companies and converts are their stooges.
As I say, all this was of intense interest because the Huaorani people and the initial group of missionaries were the subject of an effective mass-distribution film called “End of the Spear” (2006)—in fact we watched this movie on one of our WHH movie nights. The film told the story of the killing of five males from the missionary group and their nonretaliatory deaths. Subsequently it was the response of the wives caring for the people in the midst of a polio epidemic which seemed to have brought many to Christian conversion. The absolutely central theme of the movie was the gospel principle of nonviolence. The motivating factor driving the missionaries—in particular a central figure, a small-plane pilot with the providential name of Nate Saint—was the relentless cycle of warrior revenge among the Huaorani, which was driving them to extinction. Some time after the killings a Christian translator is asked by one of the tribe why the Christian missionaries (including Nate) did not use their guns when attacked. She replied, invoking the name for the tribal high god, Weangongi. She said the missionaries came to tell the Huaorani “that Waengongi has a Son. He was speared and didn't spear back, so that others would live well." Released in the wake of 9/11 retaliatory wars the movie seemed to me to have a powerful self-critical aspect. If this was the message of Christian missionaries from North America evangelizing a tribe of indigenous peoples, what should that mean for people in North America who called themselves Christian? The movie therefore seemed to me part of the steadily emerging alternative language of Christianity , which seems to come contextually, from a world subliminally informed by the gospel message, including popular culture, rather than formal doctrine. This idea is in fact at the basis of all my blogs, but especially the last two and this one. But let’s return for a moment to the Huaorani.
Here is Enomenga’s quite different assessment of the same events. "Twenty-five years ago, we were still living free. We didn't have borders. Our territory went from Peru into Ecuador. My father and grandfather always defended our territory … they guarded it very well. Nobody came inside. If people disrespected our laws and came to hunt on our territory, they would get killed. In 1957, American missionaries, five of them, showed up at the village of my grandfather on my mother's side. Those five missionaries were killed there. I always thought about this when my mother and father would tell me their stories. I thought when I turned twenty-five I would then defend my land. After the five missionaries were killed, more came and said we would be bombed if we didn't move. So they took us away from our communities and moved us to one area. Today there is a community where the missionaries took everybody. I always thought that this kind of thinking can't be permitted on our land. My father and grandfather defended our territory by killing. Now I have to defend our territory by making friends with people and organizing.”
Enomenga’s comments actually corroborate my overall argument of an alternative contextual language of Christianity. He says he can now have an impact by making friends and organizing, rather than killing. But this possibility has to be provided by forces prepared to listen to him, people who want to become his friends, who have a concern for the environment and for native peoples. These attitudes must be counted an oblique or refracted form of the gospel—i.e. contextual concern for the victim provoked by the gospel story and its crucified prophet, the man from Nazareth. What other historical-ethical figure could possibly give global political status to 3000 tribal people lost at the headwaters of the Amazon? At the same time it is small immediate comfort to Enomenga, and to many others in the world, when the natural environment in which they live is being raped and destroyed.
Enomenga then adds another aspect which is even more challenging.
"About 50 years ago, colonists came here, and brought diseases, and an enormous number of Huaorani died. This is why the Huaorani don't want them here in Ecuador. Here, we have a lot of history, stories about how the planet was born, how the Huaorani lived.... I would teach them about this, but they come here to educate us, but I don't want them to. The missionaries lie. I don't believe them. I believe in our own spirituality here: the forest."
The question is truly, do missionaries lie? In the movie when the explanation is given “He didn't spear back, so that others would live well” I don’t think they lied. I think they spoke bedrock gospel truth: that Jesus effected a radical shift in human being through profound nonretaliation. But what about the whole metaphysics in which a statement like this is usually embedded: of eternal salvation in another heavenly place, of a disembodied spiritual self that belongs there, of Jesus’ payment of a debt of sin, of faith as the prize lottery ticket to this other world, of resurrection of the body as a confusing and redundant afterthought? I think this is the highly fraught Christian religion and spirituality implied by Enomenga, a spirituality that goes along with the destruction of his forest, and over against which he prefers his own. His own, I’m sure, would have the forest as a place alive with meaning and associations, with stories of ancestors, of gods, of animals, of dread and blessing. It is the immediacy of the divine or the transcendent to the lived world that he was talking about, not a spirituality that displaces us to some nebulous space halfway between death and an invisible planet in the sky.
At any rate this alienated Christianity spirituality provides a very powerful counterthrust to a claim of positive Christian desire in the earth. It would in fact lead some people to say that the very idea is hogwash and Christian desire is almost always negative in the earth. It is because of this that the central structure of my argument here—and everywhere—is that there are in fact two very different Christianities. I have the courage to say this because I think these two are already separating themselves out before our eyes. There is the formal-doctrinal, most-often-preached variety with its default metaphysics of a heavenly hereafter, and there is the contextual, subliminal, infectious, historical and anthropological variety. The latter is the apparently unintended but true consequence of the gospel. It’s as if the gospel is a form of radioactivity, used formally for one set of purposes—we might say it’s locked up in the nuclear reactors of the churches for the sake of its power—but in the meantime it continues to render everything around it luminous and alive with positive desire, nonviolence, and compassion for the victim.
It all comes down finally to desire, to its highly fluid or volatile character. And I have briefly to state this in an analytic way to make everything plain. We all know desire can be destructive and violent whoever and wherever you are. There is conflictive desire in the rainforest just as much as in the salons of Paris or the streets of New York: nobody disputes the cycle of intense warrior revenge among the Huaorani. Desire is conflictive because it is mediated, because it springs from a relationship to the object in which a third party models for me that relationship.
Neuroscientists have recently discovered that even monkeys become very highly interested in an object when it is grasped or held by another monkey or by a human. Under these circumstances it is almost inevitable that the person who models to me the value of an object is going to become my rival, my enemy. I want precisely what he wants. In this light religion and spirituality can be broadly characterized as a means to control desire through sanctions and threats of punishment (religion) and as a creative mediation of a positive or nonconflictive relationship to the object (spirituality). But Christ is the only figure of mediation who seeks proactively to overcome all human violence in relationship, through forgiveness and love, and therefore ultimately to turn all religion into spirituality. The love and forgiveness demonstrated by Jesus renders religion redundant and makes the whole of life potentially constituted by intense spirituality. Here then finally is the secret of the truly enormous liberating effect of the Christian message. In Christ, at least in principle, all desire becomes good because all violence is transformed into love. In a world shaped by Jesus the world is literally everyone’s oyster!
This, as I say, is the final root of the enormous dynamic of Western culture. It is the root of the contextual, infectious radioactivity of the gospel, proclaiming first that all earthly objects are good, and then, more radically, inviting compassion for the victim and demonstrating through any number of ways, including movies, the path of nonviolence. What Christians have yet to do is catch up with their own dynamic spirituality. For, in this light, it is possible to understand historical Christian religion as an unhealthy hybrid of violence, metaphysics and Jesus, but today that hybrid is separating out progressively into its component parts. In Christ it is possible to have a mediation that gives us a relationship to every object filled with love, and this makes religion redundant and “the way” of Jesus truly everything.
The past Christian relationship with the earth has been an unhappy marriage of positive desire and restless alienation, leading to the typical smash and grab capitalism which is wrecking the planet, while promoting an other-worldly spirituality which says essentially “what the heck, we’re going to heaven anyway!” But now in the radioactive light of a new emerging Christianity I would say that in every berry on every tree there is God because of Christ. In every bird and every stream. And not just in the natural world. In every glass of Pinot Noir or Glenlivet or lemonade, in every fresh loaf of bread, in every chocolate ganache, in every pizza and dish of pasta, in every quesadilla and rich taco. And not just at the gastronomic level. In every shirt in the store, in every sweater and pair of pants, in every tube of toothpaste, in every perfume by Christian Dior, in every Toyota and Ford, in every Apple computer, in every Ipod, Christ is waiting to be seen. This is because true desire for them is authentically mediated by Christ. In Christ, and only in him, I can want all these things not for myself but truly for you—and by implication also for myself, as another you loved by Christ! I can truly desire them, for the sake of the great “You” of love which he announced in the world. So long as I begin to relate to a Christ-irradiated universe this kind of talk is not cheap grace. It means that the concrete human space is really filled with the endless nonviolence of Jesus. This is what makes it possible--that Jesus “did not spear back" and I know this in the depth of my soul. Because of Jesus everything is liberated for love. My brother, Enomenga, you, like the rest of us, are already half-Christianized, by radioactive Christianity. I hope you, and all of us, will live to see and know a full and deep Christianity by the progression of this astonishing radioactivity throughout our human community.
Last time I argued for the Christian sources of freedom, capitalism and romanticism. I did this in a positive sense, as the emergence of a gospel-based desire for the things of this earth. I did also point to what I called the dark side, the obvious respect of how destructive unbounded freedom and desire can be. Now, for some people that would be a pure “Oh Yeah??” because “The Christian sources of capitalism” would not represent simply a redundant statement but a sick joke too. They would say there is something systemic in Christianity which is destructive of the earth, and this would then turn my original proposition on its head: gospel-based desire rather than creating a positive relation to the earth creates an intensely destructive one. So here is a further, trickier aspect to the whole question and I need to follow where it goes. I must do so in order to understand more deeply the false Christianization of the world, including, in the scope of this phrase, official Christianity too.
A recent article in an online news service called truthout.org described the plight of indigenous peoples across the globe under pressure from the West. One particular example was arresting because a successful Christian-based feature movie has recently been made about them. They are the Huaorani, a tribe of hunters and gatherers inhabiting the rainforests at the headwaters of the Amazon. Numbering about 3000 they had no contact from the outside world until as recently as the late 1950's.
A leader by name of Moi Enomenga describes the situation provoked by a western oil company in their area: "First they drill, then they extract oil, then there is a highway, then there is colonization, then there are so many problems, because, here, the forest is clean, but when the companies enter, they destroy so much. The people don't have what they need to live, because the Americans don't respect much, because they take the oil, instead of letting us live. This is why the Huaorani ask for the oil-drilling to stop."
Encroachment by the oil industry took place in the last two decades. The original contact in the nineteen fifties was through Christian missionaries and, according to Enomenga, it was members of the Huaorani who had been taken away and educated at missionary schools who were bribed to facilitate the deal with the oil company. Ergo, missionaries are spies for the big companies and converts are their stooges.
As I say, all this was of intense interest because the Huaorani people and the initial group of missionaries were the subject of an effective mass-distribution film called “End of the Spear” (2006)—in fact we watched this movie on one of our WHH movie nights. The film told the story of the killing of five males from the missionary group and their nonretaliatory deaths. Subsequently it was the response of the wives caring for the people in the midst of a polio epidemic which seemed to have brought many to Christian conversion. The absolutely central theme of the movie was the gospel principle of nonviolence. The motivating factor driving the missionaries—in particular a central figure, a small-plane pilot with the providential name of Nate Saint—was the relentless cycle of warrior revenge among the Huaorani, which was driving them to extinction. Some time after the killings a Christian translator is asked by one of the tribe why the Christian missionaries (including Nate) did not use their guns when attacked. She replied, invoking the name for the tribal high god, Weangongi. She said the missionaries came to tell the Huaorani “that Waengongi has a Son. He was speared and didn't spear back, so that others would live well." Released in the wake of 9/11 retaliatory wars the movie seemed to me to have a powerful self-critical aspect. If this was the message of Christian missionaries from North America evangelizing a tribe of indigenous peoples, what should that mean for people in North America who called themselves Christian? The movie therefore seemed to me part of the steadily emerging alternative language of Christianity , which seems to come contextually, from a world subliminally informed by the gospel message, including popular culture, rather than formal doctrine. This idea is in fact at the basis of all my blogs, but especially the last two and this one. But let’s return for a moment to the Huaorani.
Here is Enomenga’s quite different assessment of the same events. "Twenty-five years ago, we were still living free. We didn't have borders. Our territory went from Peru into Ecuador. My father and grandfather always defended our territory … they guarded it very well. Nobody came inside. If people disrespected our laws and came to hunt on our territory, they would get killed. In 1957, American missionaries, five of them, showed up at the village of my grandfather on my mother's side. Those five missionaries were killed there. I always thought about this when my mother and father would tell me their stories. I thought when I turned twenty-five I would then defend my land. After the five missionaries were killed, more came and said we would be bombed if we didn't move. So they took us away from our communities and moved us to one area. Today there is a community where the missionaries took everybody. I always thought that this kind of thinking can't be permitted on our land. My father and grandfather defended our territory by killing. Now I have to defend our territory by making friends with people and organizing.”
Enomenga’s comments actually corroborate my overall argument of an alternative contextual language of Christianity. He says he can now have an impact by making friends and organizing, rather than killing. But this possibility has to be provided by forces prepared to listen to him, people who want to become his friends, who have a concern for the environment and for native peoples. These attitudes must be counted an oblique or refracted form of the gospel—i.e. contextual concern for the victim provoked by the gospel story and its crucified prophet, the man from Nazareth. What other historical-ethical figure could possibly give global political status to 3000 tribal people lost at the headwaters of the Amazon? At the same time it is small immediate comfort to Enomenga, and to many others in the world, when the natural environment in which they live is being raped and destroyed.
Enomenga then adds another aspect which is even more challenging.
"About 50 years ago, colonists came here, and brought diseases, and an enormous number of Huaorani died. This is why the Huaorani don't want them here in Ecuador. Here, we have a lot of history, stories about how the planet was born, how the Huaorani lived.... I would teach them about this, but they come here to educate us, but I don't want them to. The missionaries lie. I don't believe them. I believe in our own spirituality here: the forest."
The question is truly, do missionaries lie? In the movie when the explanation is given “He didn't spear back, so that others would live well” I don’t think they lied. I think they spoke bedrock gospel truth: that Jesus effected a radical shift in human being through profound nonretaliation. But what about the whole metaphysics in which a statement like this is usually embedded: of eternal salvation in another heavenly place, of a disembodied spiritual self that belongs there, of Jesus’ payment of a debt of sin, of faith as the prize lottery ticket to this other world, of resurrection of the body as a confusing and redundant afterthought? I think this is the highly fraught Christian religion and spirituality implied by Enomenga, a spirituality that goes along with the destruction of his forest, and over against which he prefers his own. His own, I’m sure, would have the forest as a place alive with meaning and associations, with stories of ancestors, of gods, of animals, of dread and blessing. It is the immediacy of the divine or the transcendent to the lived world that he was talking about, not a spirituality that displaces us to some nebulous space halfway between death and an invisible planet in the sky.
At any rate this alienated Christianity spirituality provides a very powerful counterthrust to a claim of positive Christian desire in the earth. It would in fact lead some people to say that the very idea is hogwash and Christian desire is almost always negative in the earth. It is because of this that the central structure of my argument here—and everywhere—is that there are in fact two very different Christianities. I have the courage to say this because I think these two are already separating themselves out before our eyes. There is the formal-doctrinal, most-often-preached variety with its default metaphysics of a heavenly hereafter, and there is the contextual, subliminal, infectious, historical and anthropological variety. The latter is the apparently unintended but true consequence of the gospel. It’s as if the gospel is a form of radioactivity, used formally for one set of purposes—we might say it’s locked up in the nuclear reactors of the churches for the sake of its power—but in the meantime it continues to render everything around it luminous and alive with positive desire, nonviolence, and compassion for the victim.
It all comes down finally to desire, to its highly fluid or volatile character. And I have briefly to state this in an analytic way to make everything plain. We all know desire can be destructive and violent whoever and wherever you are. There is conflictive desire in the rainforest just as much as in the salons of Paris or the streets of New York: nobody disputes the cycle of intense warrior revenge among the Huaorani. Desire is conflictive because it is mediated, because it springs from a relationship to the object in which a third party models for me that relationship.
Neuroscientists have recently discovered that even monkeys become very highly interested in an object when it is grasped or held by another monkey or by a human. Under these circumstances it is almost inevitable that the person who models to me the value of an object is going to become my rival, my enemy. I want precisely what he wants. In this light religion and spirituality can be broadly characterized as a means to control desire through sanctions and threats of punishment (religion) and as a creative mediation of a positive or nonconflictive relationship to the object (spirituality). But Christ is the only figure of mediation who seeks proactively to overcome all human violence in relationship, through forgiveness and love, and therefore ultimately to turn all religion into spirituality. The love and forgiveness demonstrated by Jesus renders religion redundant and makes the whole of life potentially constituted by intense spirituality. Here then finally is the secret of the truly enormous liberating effect of the Christian message. In Christ, at least in principle, all desire becomes good because all violence is transformed into love. In a world shaped by Jesus the world is literally everyone’s oyster!
This, as I say, is the final root of the enormous dynamic of Western culture. It is the root of the contextual, infectious radioactivity of the gospel, proclaiming first that all earthly objects are good, and then, more radically, inviting compassion for the victim and demonstrating through any number of ways, including movies, the path of nonviolence. What Christians have yet to do is catch up with their own dynamic spirituality. For, in this light, it is possible to understand historical Christian religion as an unhealthy hybrid of violence, metaphysics and Jesus, but today that hybrid is separating out progressively into its component parts. In Christ it is possible to have a mediation that gives us a relationship to every object filled with love, and this makes religion redundant and “the way” of Jesus truly everything.
The past Christian relationship with the earth has been an unhappy marriage of positive desire and restless alienation, leading to the typical smash and grab capitalism which is wrecking the planet, while promoting an other-worldly spirituality which says essentially “what the heck, we’re going to heaven anyway!” But now in the radioactive light of a new emerging Christianity I would say that in every berry on every tree there is God because of Christ. In every bird and every stream. And not just in the natural world. In every glass of Pinot Noir or Glenlivet or lemonade, in every fresh loaf of bread, in every chocolate ganache, in every pizza and dish of pasta, in every quesadilla and rich taco. And not just at the gastronomic level. In every shirt in the store, in every sweater and pair of pants, in every tube of toothpaste, in every perfume by Christian Dior, in every Toyota and Ford, in every Apple computer, in every Ipod, Christ is waiting to be seen. This is because true desire for them is authentically mediated by Christ. In Christ, and only in him, I can want all these things not for myself but truly for you—and by implication also for myself, as another you loved by Christ! I can truly desire them, for the sake of the great “You” of love which he announced in the world. So long as I begin to relate to a Christ-irradiated universe this kind of talk is not cheap grace. It means that the concrete human space is really filled with the endless nonviolence of Jesus. This is what makes it possible--that Jesus “did not spear back" and I know this in the depth of my soul. Because of Jesus everything is liberated for love. My brother, Enomenga, you, like the rest of us, are already half-Christianized, by radioactive Christianity. I hope you, and all of us, will live to see and know a full and deep Christianity by the progression of this astonishing radioactivity throughout our human community.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Journey with Jesus #13
New Testament - Mountain 07/02/09
Here is the summary of last week's study aka Jesus and God and a big thing - Peace, Linda
Mountains are big, evident, and they fascinate people –we see a mountain and want to scale its heights. Edmund Hillary when asked why he climbed Everest famously replied “Because it’s there.” Mountains are supremely physical objects and the message of Jesus is deeply rooted in the world of things. Religion tends to be about getting out of here – leaving this world behind. The contemporary thought of “spirituality” has more of an intrinsic connection to the world. Jesus’ message is rather a “this-worldly spirituality” than a religion in this sense. The Bible— both in the preaching of the prophets and in Jesus – says that the world’s realm of life can achieve fullness in itself, instead of just redemption for an other-worldly soul. Endless, abundant life comes from overcoming violence, murder, destruction and death in all its forms.
Mountains are symbols of transcendence. In ancient mythologies gods lived on the mountain (for example Olympus). They are places that are easily defended, associated with superiority, power and authority. It was to a mountain top that Satan brought Jesus in the third temptation (Matthew)–offering him authority over all the nations if he would fall down and worship him. Mountains are the high ground, a place to look up to and close to heaven. This pre-modern world view still dominates religious thinking. In a scientific worldview space has no up and to say heaven is “up” is meaningless.
The Synoptic Gospels (Mathew, Mark and Luke) share a mountain story – the Transfiguration. In Mark’s account (Mk8:31-9:8) Jesus is transfigured so that his clothes became dazzling. In Matthew his face shines like the sun (17.2). This is noteworthy in that after his resurrection Jesus does not dazzle. In fact he is so undazzling that he is not even clearly recognized. So why at this point in his account does Mark describe such a scene? The answer lies in the context of the story. Jesus (at the height of his popularity) has just announced, for the first time, his decision to go to Jerusalem where he will be arrested, suffer and die. The gospel will repeat this announcement two more times. The transfiguration is a literary affirmation. Mark is “throwing a bone” to his readers to keep their attention and sense of assurance—that ultimately things are going to work out. The words of the Father “this is my Son, the Beloved” recall Jesus’ baptism and remind the reader that he has unique status before God. The literary function of the transfiguration does not mean that Jesus did not pray on a mountaintop, nor that he did not have ecstatic experience witnessed and even somehow shared by the apostles. What it does tell us is to beware of the default association of God with the vertical, the heavens etc. etc.
The journey back down the mountain underlines this by providing a powerful counterpoint to the mountaintop, foreshadowing the central meaning of the crucifixion to come. Jesus has a discussion about Elijah and the Elijah-figure of John the Baptist who was mistreated and killed—he is thereby the forerunner of Jesus’ own passion. There follows then in verse 14-29 a healing in which the crowd has a dramatic role as well as the scribes. The boy is healed of an evil spirit which convulses him and seeks “to destroy him.” Jesus is immersed in the same forces that will bring about his death. In this sense the mountaintop is immediately plunged into the abyss of violence.
In Mk 11:12-25, after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus retreats to Bethany. The next day he returns to the city and disrupts the business of the temple—he drives out the sellers and buyers of animals, overturns the money tables, and the seats of the dove-sellers, and stops all traffic of materials. Bracketing this account of Jesus’ attack on the temple’s sacrificial function is the story of Jesus cursing the fig tree. It is not the season for figs and the tree does not have any fruit to feed his hunger, so Jesus curses the tree. On their return to Bethany the disciples see the withered tree and question Jesus about it. He replies:
“Have faith in God. Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘be taken up and be thrown into the sea’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours. Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses”
The literary inclusion – the fig tree story – gives the meaning to its contents, to what lies within its brackets, i.e. the temple action. Like the fig tree the temple is out of season and does not bear fruit. It is not a house of prayer. Instead it has become a den of bandits/killers – the same word used for Barabbas, a person who engages in violent revolution (John 18:40, Lk: 23.19). The temple was not just the center of Jewish worship. Isaiah 2:2-3 describes the mountain of the Lord, Mount Zion, as the highest, the supreme point of the whole world. Mount Zion (Temple Mount) was a place of enormous political-religious significance. It was the one place where the Romans did not enter and so was the heart of Jewish resistance. Jesus understands that this violent mindset, this violent religion, is leading to an inevitable crisis of destruction. The Temple is going down. History shows us that within two score years of Jesus’ death, the Temple was completely destroyed by the Romans in reprisal for the Jewish uprising. The Temple was the last stand of the Jewish forces, and the Wailing Wall—part of the Temple’s foundations—is all that remains today.
In v.25 Jesus says that forgiveness, not sacrifice, is all that is needed to enter into a relationship with the Father. When he says “if you say to this mountain, ‘be taken up and be thrown into the sea’…it will be done for you,” he was not talking of some arbitrary act of supernatural power. Very likely he was looking at the actual Temple Mount, the focus of the Isaiah prophesy, when he said this. He says in effect if you have faith—i.e. relationship with him and his gospel—the temple mount can be thrown in to the sea – the place of chaos and primordial creation: a place of radical starting-over. Jesus points instead to forgiveness as the way to enter into relationship with the Father. He calls us to have the faith to surrender our temples, the institutional structures in which we place our security and our enduring violence, and receive the life we are searching for in prayer and in forgiveness.
Here is the summary of last week's study aka Jesus and God and a big thing - Peace, Linda
Mountains are big, evident, and they fascinate people –we see a mountain and want to scale its heights. Edmund Hillary when asked why he climbed Everest famously replied “Because it’s there.” Mountains are supremely physical objects and the message of Jesus is deeply rooted in the world of things. Religion tends to be about getting out of here – leaving this world behind. The contemporary thought of “spirituality” has more of an intrinsic connection to the world. Jesus’ message is rather a “this-worldly spirituality” than a religion in this sense. The Bible— both in the preaching of the prophets and in Jesus – says that the world’s realm of life can achieve fullness in itself, instead of just redemption for an other-worldly soul. Endless, abundant life comes from overcoming violence, murder, destruction and death in all its forms.
Mountains are symbols of transcendence. In ancient mythologies gods lived on the mountain (for example Olympus). They are places that are easily defended, associated with superiority, power and authority. It was to a mountain top that Satan brought Jesus in the third temptation (Matthew)–offering him authority over all the nations if he would fall down and worship him. Mountains are the high ground, a place to look up to and close to heaven. This pre-modern world view still dominates religious thinking. In a scientific worldview space has no up and to say heaven is “up” is meaningless.
The Synoptic Gospels (Mathew, Mark and Luke) share a mountain story – the Transfiguration. In Mark’s account (Mk8:31-9:8) Jesus is transfigured so that his clothes became dazzling. In Matthew his face shines like the sun (17.2). This is noteworthy in that after his resurrection Jesus does not dazzle. In fact he is so undazzling that he is not even clearly recognized. So why at this point in his account does Mark describe such a scene? The answer lies in the context of the story. Jesus (at the height of his popularity) has just announced, for the first time, his decision to go to Jerusalem where he will be arrested, suffer and die. The gospel will repeat this announcement two more times. The transfiguration is a literary affirmation. Mark is “throwing a bone” to his readers to keep their attention and sense of assurance—that ultimately things are going to work out. The words of the Father “this is my Son, the Beloved” recall Jesus’ baptism and remind the reader that he has unique status before God. The literary function of the transfiguration does not mean that Jesus did not pray on a mountaintop, nor that he did not have ecstatic experience witnessed and even somehow shared by the apostles. What it does tell us is to beware of the default association of God with the vertical, the heavens etc. etc.
The journey back down the mountain underlines this by providing a powerful counterpoint to the mountaintop, foreshadowing the central meaning of the crucifixion to come. Jesus has a discussion about Elijah and the Elijah-figure of John the Baptist who was mistreated and killed—he is thereby the forerunner of Jesus’ own passion. There follows then in verse 14-29 a healing in which the crowd has a dramatic role as well as the scribes. The boy is healed of an evil spirit which convulses him and seeks “to destroy him.” Jesus is immersed in the same forces that will bring about his death. In this sense the mountaintop is immediately plunged into the abyss of violence.
In Mk 11:12-25, after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus retreats to Bethany. The next day he returns to the city and disrupts the business of the temple—he drives out the sellers and buyers of animals, overturns the money tables, and the seats of the dove-sellers, and stops all traffic of materials. Bracketing this account of Jesus’ attack on the temple’s sacrificial function is the story of Jesus cursing the fig tree. It is not the season for figs and the tree does not have any fruit to feed his hunger, so Jesus curses the tree. On their return to Bethany the disciples see the withered tree and question Jesus about it. He replies:
“Have faith in God. Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘be taken up and be thrown into the sea’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours. Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses”
The literary inclusion – the fig tree story – gives the meaning to its contents, to what lies within its brackets, i.e. the temple action. Like the fig tree the temple is out of season and does not bear fruit. It is not a house of prayer. Instead it has become a den of bandits/killers – the same word used for Barabbas, a person who engages in violent revolution (John 18:40, Lk: 23.19). The temple was not just the center of Jewish worship. Isaiah 2:2-3 describes the mountain of the Lord, Mount Zion, as the highest, the supreme point of the whole world. Mount Zion (Temple Mount) was a place of enormous political-religious significance. It was the one place where the Romans did not enter and so was the heart of Jewish resistance. Jesus understands that this violent mindset, this violent religion, is leading to an inevitable crisis of destruction. The Temple is going down. History shows us that within two score years of Jesus’ death, the Temple was completely destroyed by the Romans in reprisal for the Jewish uprising. The Temple was the last stand of the Jewish forces, and the Wailing Wall—part of the Temple’s foundations—is all that remains today.
In v.25 Jesus says that forgiveness, not sacrifice, is all that is needed to enter into a relationship with the Father. When he says “if you say to this mountain, ‘be taken up and be thrown into the sea’…it will be done for you,” he was not talking of some arbitrary act of supernatural power. Very likely he was looking at the actual Temple Mount, the focus of the Isaiah prophesy, when he said this. He says in effect if you have faith—i.e. relationship with him and his gospel—the temple mount can be thrown in to the sea – the place of chaos and primordial creation: a place of radical starting-over. Jesus points instead to forgiveness as the way to enter into relationship with the Father. He calls us to have the faith to surrender our temples, the institutional structures in which we place our security and our enduring violence, and receive the life we are searching for in prayer and in forgiveness.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Journey with Jesus #12
Here is the next Bible Study summary - Peace, Linda
Old Testament - Desert 06/18/09
Numbers 14:26-35 tells of the Israelites refusal to enter the land by attack from the south and Yahweh’s displeasure. As a result they have to endure 40 years in the wilderness, and the Promised Land is withheld until that generation had died. This is how the people, in retrospect, made sense of their time of rootless wandering –it was a lesson from God . During those forty years, however, the slaves liberated from Egypt became the people of Yahweh. Yahweh becomes known to them, distinct from other gods - the God who freed them from slavery, a God of justice in whom alone they trusted. The years in the desert became a period of transformation and changed meaning.
Hosea 2:14-23 was written in the 8th century BCE. Here the desert is no longer portrayed as a place of punishment. That time is understood as a time of passionate, first love. Yahweh seeks to recreate the honeymoon time in the desert, a time of intense relationship. God is the lover who is going to lure, tempt and seduce his wayward wife back into this relationship - just as Jesus (“my beloved”) is later impelled to go into the desert after his baptism. In Hosea the result of this allurement is a peace with the natural order, a new fertility and a banishment of weapons. It is the transformation of the Earth from wilderness to paradise.
There is another, darker, association of desert in the Old Testament. In Genesis 4: 10 the life blood of Abel cries out from the ground for justice and revenge. The ground becomes a voice of accusation for Cain. Cain is cursed from the ground – the ground will no longer bear fruit – instead he will become a wanderer in a place where nothing grows. Cain wanders on the earth, finally settling in the land of Nod (which means “wandering”). He lives a nomadic existence in a human desert as a result of his brother’s murder. He forfeits his relationship with God who is “hidden from his face”. Eventually Cain creates the first city in reaction to the intolerable wandering. The city gives a sense of place and meaning, born out of murder and alienation. God places a mark on Cain to stop endless reciprocal killings. Later, in Genesis 4:23-24, his descendant Lamech (seven generations after Cain and a bad guy) describes the relentless multiplication of violence: “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged seven fold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” In other words the mark of Cain has only served to redouble violence. And cities remain centers of alienation and violence. The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) is another attempt to give meaning to human existence. The Tower will be so tall that it will be visible for miles. It will provide a center of the landscape and so everyone will know their place. Although it is not named as part of a city it is obviously a centerpiece of civilization. It makes a statement “we are important” – like sky scrapers today. The early stories of Genesis describe human alienation, the absence of relationship – the real desert experience inside all of us.
In Isaiah 40 the physical desert is the place that brings us back into relationship with God. It is the way home – something to be desired, a place of hope and regeneration. In 40:1 Second Isaiah begins with the words “Comfort my people”. The desert is a place of consolation. It becomes God’s way of returning his people from exile. The desert is made a highway, a pleasant pathway and a fruitful journey. The desert again becomes the place where meaning is changed – a bad hostile environment transformed into a place of redemption. Isaiah 35 gives this changed meaning of desert. Here it is described as a place of renewed relationship with God and the place from which redemption comes. A place where the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the deaf hear and the lame leap like the deer. The desert is the place where the brokenness, the alienation, the desert within us is transformed and healed. In all four gospels the figure of John the Baptist fulfills this theme, the “voice crying in the wilderness” with which the gospel begins.
Old Testament - Desert 06/18/09
Numbers 14:26-35 tells of the Israelites refusal to enter the land by attack from the south and Yahweh’s displeasure. As a result they have to endure 40 years in the wilderness, and the Promised Land is withheld until that generation had died. This is how the people, in retrospect, made sense of their time of rootless wandering –it was a lesson from God . During those forty years, however, the slaves liberated from Egypt became the people of Yahweh. Yahweh becomes known to them, distinct from other gods - the God who freed them from slavery, a God of justice in whom alone they trusted. The years in the desert became a period of transformation and changed meaning.
Hosea 2:14-23 was written in the 8th century BCE. Here the desert is no longer portrayed as a place of punishment. That time is understood as a time of passionate, first love. Yahweh seeks to recreate the honeymoon time in the desert, a time of intense relationship. God is the lover who is going to lure, tempt and seduce his wayward wife back into this relationship - just as Jesus (“my beloved”) is later impelled to go into the desert after his baptism. In Hosea the result of this allurement is a peace with the natural order, a new fertility and a banishment of weapons. It is the transformation of the Earth from wilderness to paradise.
There is another, darker, association of desert in the Old Testament. In Genesis 4: 10 the life blood of Abel cries out from the ground for justice and revenge. The ground becomes a voice of accusation for Cain. Cain is cursed from the ground – the ground will no longer bear fruit – instead he will become a wanderer in a place where nothing grows. Cain wanders on the earth, finally settling in the land of Nod (which means “wandering”). He lives a nomadic existence in a human desert as a result of his brother’s murder. He forfeits his relationship with God who is “hidden from his face”. Eventually Cain creates the first city in reaction to the intolerable wandering. The city gives a sense of place and meaning, born out of murder and alienation. God places a mark on Cain to stop endless reciprocal killings. Later, in Genesis 4:23-24, his descendant Lamech (seven generations after Cain and a bad guy) describes the relentless multiplication of violence: “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged seven fold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” In other words the mark of Cain has only served to redouble violence. And cities remain centers of alienation and violence. The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) is another attempt to give meaning to human existence. The Tower will be so tall that it will be visible for miles. It will provide a center of the landscape and so everyone will know their place. Although it is not named as part of a city it is obviously a centerpiece of civilization. It makes a statement “we are important” – like sky scrapers today. The early stories of Genesis describe human alienation, the absence of relationship – the real desert experience inside all of us.
In Isaiah 40 the physical desert is the place that brings us back into relationship with God. It is the way home – something to be desired, a place of hope and regeneration. In 40:1 Second Isaiah begins with the words “Comfort my people”. The desert is a place of consolation. It becomes God’s way of returning his people from exile. The desert is made a highway, a pleasant pathway and a fruitful journey. The desert again becomes the place where meaning is changed – a bad hostile environment transformed into a place of redemption. Isaiah 35 gives this changed meaning of desert. Here it is described as a place of renewed relationship with God and the place from which redemption comes. A place where the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the deaf hear and the lame leap like the deer. The desert is the place where the brokenness, the alienation, the desert within us is transformed and healed. In all four gospels the figure of John the Baptist fulfills this theme, the “voice crying in the wilderness” with which the gospel begins.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Jesus = Humanity Otherwise Than War
The world today is Christianized but not necessarily in a good sense. When I was doing my Ph.D. in religion professors and students used to talk about the imperialism of Christianity. What they meant was that from its base in the West Christian culture determined the terms of discussion of other religions and just about everything else in the world. The problem was that even as they protested this imperialism my colleagues invoked essentially Christian values to do so, i.e. recognition and respect for the stranger, the victim, the enemy. The reason the protest has any kind of effect was because it demanded basically a form of Christian repentance. So even as Christian imperialism is critiqued the Christian mindset is affirmed. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan echoes unacknowledged in the halls of academe.
However, this is only at a high abstract level of reflection. In the meantime what I see as the truly universal effect of Christianity is not at the level of academic principle but at the level of freedom and desire. And in this area the effects are acutely dangerous, including, yes, redoubling violence. In fact what you’re dealing with is a kind of cultural mutation, a genetic distortion of Christianity missing one or two essential bits of Jesus DNA. To understand this we have first to glance at the overall historical impact of Christianity.
The relentless rise of the individual, democracy and human desire has Christianity in its engine. The assumption that we somehow got democracy from the Greeks—from Athens—is as uncritical as it is prevalent. The barons who wrote the Magna Carta in England and first shared out the power of the king were not listening to the history of Athens when they came together on a regular basis to get a dose of human meaning. They were listening to the gospels, to Jesus who said, “Blessed are the poor, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice… ,” to Jesus who “calls his sheep by name and leads them...” In other words those precisely left out of the system are the ones who will be given status, and each individual has (at least potentially) a unique personal standing in the world. Moreover the barons already had a four-hundred-year-old presence of Benedictine monasticism at the heart of their culture, where the monks elected the abbot and together made up a council to guide the abbot in important matters. All the spiritual and human prompting necessary for democracy, therefore, was already present in medieval Christian culture. It goes without saying the barons were just as self-interested and ruthless as the king but—precisely—we’re not talking about personal morality but structural values and structural change.
Jesus also said things like, “If God so clothes [more splendid than Solomon] the grass of the field...will he not much more provide for you...?" He is suggesting that the things of this earth are both beautiful and available to all under the Father’s care. Oscar Wilde said Jesus was the first romantic because he made the ugly beautiful. The intense blessing communicated to this world by the Galilean is continually underestimated in the production of Western desire. Genesis already said everything in the world was “good:” Jesus proved it absolutely by healing human brokenness, feeding the hungry with multiplied bread, and forgiving human sin and alienation. Looked at over the long run this could not help produce a concrete culture where the material world becomes more and more secured in value, its objects of desire affirmed and multiplied, and our personal relation to them essentially celebrated and assured. Hence both capitalism and romanticism.
It is absurd to think that the vigor of Western democracy, capitalism and romanticism has nothing to do with the spiritual universe at the core of its culture. To say this is, on the one hand, a way for certain intellectuals and writers to claim they invented human progress out of their divine little heads, and on the other for the dark side of all this (which is increasingly dark) to hide itself from the radicalism of love that could make it all actually work. For of course—and this is where I’ve been driving—the release of freedom and desire in the world left to its own devices has nowhere to go except the destruction of resources and redoubled violence toward the other. Freedom and desire without service and love are a cultural mutation out of a gospel environment which is driving us a hundred miles an hour down a dead-end street. It is the paradox of Christianized freedom and desire—left to themselves they become relentless war.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that as the crisis continues to swell in the cancerous forms of freedom and desire the authentic gospel solution remains at its source and becomes itself steadily more apparent. The welcome of all to his single table is one of the most assured facts of Jesus’ historical ministry and its concrete human effect was a transformation of a mindset of sin into one of life and love. (This is the point of the wedding garment parable.) Then, at the term of his ministry, the sign of Jesus’ cross and resurrection becomes the transcendent anthropological instrument which challenges for all time the effects of violence with life-filled peace and peace-filled life. This radical solution is now culturally more and more apparent, standing behind Christianity’s historical mutation like a ghost of Christmas present seeking to replace the ghost of Christmas past. And if a mutated Christianity cannot see it then unprejudiced human minds can, demonstrating that the gospel of Jesus produces a cultural shift in and of itself. Here is just one from a continually growing casebook of examples.
On Killing, The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Back Bay Books, 2009) is a book by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. He is a former soldier who no longer dresses up war in some sort of heroic necessity or morality but calls it simply killing. He argues that apart from a few actual psychopaths ordinary men and women involved in war have to be brutally conditioned to overcome the natural aversion to taking another human life. The consequences of this murderous training are profound spiritual damage. “The dead soldier takes his misery with him, but the man who killed him must ever live and die with him. The lesson becomes increasingly clear: Killing is what war is all about, and killing in combat, by its very nature, causes deep wounds of pain and guilt.” At the same time, Grossman points out, we’re applying the same perverse teaching to the whole civilian population through violent movies, violent video games and violent role models. So on the one hand killing is traumatic and on the other we continually traumatize ourselves.
Now whether we agree with the particulars of his argument, or whether he has worked out all their implications, doesn’t matter. What is important is the way he is breaking down the boundary distinctions, between “justified” killing in war and killing pure and simple, between the neutral “job” of the soldier and traumatic psychic harm, and between the soldier and the civilian, between war and peace. This means, of course, an enormous crisis in the business of war and killing, in fact its progressive untenability as a human course of action. But from where can this genuinely anthropological crisis be derived? After all human beings have been in the business of killing since year one. Why should a professional soldier suddenly decide that his very business is humanly impossible? Grossman doesn’t mention Christ but he doesn’t have to. The only decisive anthropological intervention declaring our enemy to be our brother and his killing not to be a matter of fate but of persecutory human violence is the Risen Crucified. On this basis, therefore, we can see that subtly and implicitly, yet powerfully and irreversibly, the gospel of Jesus is provoking a crisis in cultural values and hand-in-hand proposing its true radical solution, that of forgiveness, nonviolence and love.
The gospel is the genuine alternative to the crisis the gospel itself has produced. The mutated cultural uptake of the gospel is untrammeled freedom and desire. But limitless war is their necessary consequence. Yet the gospel does not rest, and just as it revealed the possibility of freedom and desire it now discloses the human intolerability of violence. The initial cultural reaction to the gospel was largely a cancerous form, but the very volume of the cancer in the contemporary world turns our attention to the true regeneration at its source. What we are assisting at today is anthropological shift of unparalleled significance. And so progressively we have the choice of a dangerously half-Christianized world, a world at war, or a humanly Jesus-centered one, a world of forgiveness, peace and life.
Tony
However, this is only at a high abstract level of reflection. In the meantime what I see as the truly universal effect of Christianity is not at the level of academic principle but at the level of freedom and desire. And in this area the effects are acutely dangerous, including, yes, redoubling violence. In fact what you’re dealing with is a kind of cultural mutation, a genetic distortion of Christianity missing one or two essential bits of Jesus DNA. To understand this we have first to glance at the overall historical impact of Christianity.
The relentless rise of the individual, democracy and human desire has Christianity in its engine. The assumption that we somehow got democracy from the Greeks—from Athens—is as uncritical as it is prevalent. The barons who wrote the Magna Carta in England and first shared out the power of the king were not listening to the history of Athens when they came together on a regular basis to get a dose of human meaning. They were listening to the gospels, to Jesus who said, “Blessed are the poor, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice… ,” to Jesus who “calls his sheep by name and leads them...” In other words those precisely left out of the system are the ones who will be given status, and each individual has (at least potentially) a unique personal standing in the world. Moreover the barons already had a four-hundred-year-old presence of Benedictine monasticism at the heart of their culture, where the monks elected the abbot and together made up a council to guide the abbot in important matters. All the spiritual and human prompting necessary for democracy, therefore, was already present in medieval Christian culture. It goes without saying the barons were just as self-interested and ruthless as the king but—precisely—we’re not talking about personal morality but structural values and structural change.
Jesus also said things like, “If God so clothes [more splendid than Solomon] the grass of the field...will he not much more provide for you...?" He is suggesting that the things of this earth are both beautiful and available to all under the Father’s care. Oscar Wilde said Jesus was the first romantic because he made the ugly beautiful. The intense blessing communicated to this world by the Galilean is continually underestimated in the production of Western desire. Genesis already said everything in the world was “good:” Jesus proved it absolutely by healing human brokenness, feeding the hungry with multiplied bread, and forgiving human sin and alienation. Looked at over the long run this could not help produce a concrete culture where the material world becomes more and more secured in value, its objects of desire affirmed and multiplied, and our personal relation to them essentially celebrated and assured. Hence both capitalism and romanticism.
It is absurd to think that the vigor of Western democracy, capitalism and romanticism has nothing to do with the spiritual universe at the core of its culture. To say this is, on the one hand, a way for certain intellectuals and writers to claim they invented human progress out of their divine little heads, and on the other for the dark side of all this (which is increasingly dark) to hide itself from the radicalism of love that could make it all actually work. For of course—and this is where I’ve been driving—the release of freedom and desire in the world left to its own devices has nowhere to go except the destruction of resources and redoubled violence toward the other. Freedom and desire without service and love are a cultural mutation out of a gospel environment which is driving us a hundred miles an hour down a dead-end street. It is the paradox of Christianized freedom and desire—left to themselves they become relentless war.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that as the crisis continues to swell in the cancerous forms of freedom and desire the authentic gospel solution remains at its source and becomes itself steadily more apparent. The welcome of all to his single table is one of the most assured facts of Jesus’ historical ministry and its concrete human effect was a transformation of a mindset of sin into one of life and love. (This is the point of the wedding garment parable.) Then, at the term of his ministry, the sign of Jesus’ cross and resurrection becomes the transcendent anthropological instrument which challenges for all time the effects of violence with life-filled peace and peace-filled life. This radical solution is now culturally more and more apparent, standing behind Christianity’s historical mutation like a ghost of Christmas present seeking to replace the ghost of Christmas past. And if a mutated Christianity cannot see it then unprejudiced human minds can, demonstrating that the gospel of Jesus produces a cultural shift in and of itself. Here is just one from a continually growing casebook of examples.
On Killing, The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Back Bay Books, 2009) is a book by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. He is a former soldier who no longer dresses up war in some sort of heroic necessity or morality but calls it simply killing. He argues that apart from a few actual psychopaths ordinary men and women involved in war have to be brutally conditioned to overcome the natural aversion to taking another human life. The consequences of this murderous training are profound spiritual damage. “The dead soldier takes his misery with him, but the man who killed him must ever live and die with him. The lesson becomes increasingly clear: Killing is what war is all about, and killing in combat, by its very nature, causes deep wounds of pain and guilt.” At the same time, Grossman points out, we’re applying the same perverse teaching to the whole civilian population through violent movies, violent video games and violent role models. So on the one hand killing is traumatic and on the other we continually traumatize ourselves.
Now whether we agree with the particulars of his argument, or whether he has worked out all their implications, doesn’t matter. What is important is the way he is breaking down the boundary distinctions, between “justified” killing in war and killing pure and simple, between the neutral “job” of the soldier and traumatic psychic harm, and between the soldier and the civilian, between war and peace. This means, of course, an enormous crisis in the business of war and killing, in fact its progressive untenability as a human course of action. But from where can this genuinely anthropological crisis be derived? After all human beings have been in the business of killing since year one. Why should a professional soldier suddenly decide that his very business is humanly impossible? Grossman doesn’t mention Christ but he doesn’t have to. The only decisive anthropological intervention declaring our enemy to be our brother and his killing not to be a matter of fate but of persecutory human violence is the Risen Crucified. On this basis, therefore, we can see that subtly and implicitly, yet powerfully and irreversibly, the gospel of Jesus is provoking a crisis in cultural values and hand-in-hand proposing its true radical solution, that of forgiveness, nonviolence and love.
The gospel is the genuine alternative to the crisis the gospel itself has produced. The mutated cultural uptake of the gospel is untrammeled freedom and desire. But limitless war is their necessary consequence. Yet the gospel does not rest, and just as it revealed the possibility of freedom and desire it now discloses the human intolerability of violence. The initial cultural reaction to the gospel was largely a cancerous form, but the very volume of the cancer in the contemporary world turns our attention to the true regeneration at its source. What we are assisting at today is anthropological shift of unparalleled significance. And so progressively we have the choice of a dangerously half-Christianized world, a world at war, or a humanly Jesus-centered one, a world of forgiveness, peace and life.
Tony
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Hubble and Flight 447
If you go on the Internet and search Hubble space photos you get a succession of mind-blowing images. How can there be forms out there that look like wombs, fetuses, cells, eyes and heads?
It’s like the heavens have become a giant Rorschach card where we humans are able to project ourselves onto the dust clouds of space.
But are we projecting? Perhaps these images are in fact systemic, meaning that there really is some kind of continuity. That at some root level the structure of matter is the structure of life, and matter repeats that structure at ever greater levels of organization until you get actual life, and in fact human life?
But then again, would not androids see electric motors and micro circuits up there? Perhaps, but would that that make any real difference? So long as you’re alive and sentient you will see life and sense everywhere—no matter the specific formation it might take—because life and sense is what it’s all about. Right?
No, sadly, wrong. Because if life and sense is what it’s all about, how come we’re so darn good at blowing it all to kingdom come, and imagining ever more and more terrible models and images of violence. In the Star Trek movies, as the intrepid voyagers explore strange new worlds, what often comes up on “full screen” is a monstrous green crustacean, covered in scales and weapons, exuding galactic fury. Funny enough I didn’t see too many of these super-violent crustaceans up there in the Hubble images. But sci-fi movies are full of them. Why? Pretty clearly there’s something else at play, more than simple life and sense, something earth-grown, terrestrial, very human and deadly. When we imagine these new worlds, the thought of the enemy equipped with fearful violence comes unbidden. It must therefore lurk at the core of our human relationships, capable in a split second of turning the bright morning star into a nuclear holocaust. “Cain said to his brother, Abel, 'Let us go out to the field.' And when they were in the field Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.”
So the Hubble images cannot be the final conclusive sign of life and sense for us humans as we gaze uncertain into space. These cosmic images remain ambiguous, fuzzy, tricks of the eye and ego. The sign we really need, the one with real meaning, must be itself earth-grown, very human, and capable of transforming this lurking violence within.
And, yes, this sign exists and gets more and more airtime and power as the 21st century moves forward and becomes our time. We see it and hear it everywhere on the radio stations and TV channels of our contemporary world, the world of media that girdles the planet. What is this sign? It is the sign of the victim inviting compassion on a planetary scale.
French President Nicolar Sarkozy said it the other day. Commenting on Air France Flight 447 that went down in mid-Atlantic with the loss of all 228 people on board he said that most of the passengers were Brazilian and some forty were French. He then added: “It doesn’t change anything; they’re all victims.” Meaning the French President somehow had already given up the priority of national identity in favor of the universal category of the victim inviting compassion.
What Roman or Greek governor would have used that language? They would have said the fates decreed it, that the gods were angry. They would never have said, “They are all victims.” So where did this sign of compassion for the victim come from, if not from the Crucified, right there at the beginning of our 21 centuries? Jesus, the innocent one who died instilling terrestrial forgiveness and peace.
Tony
It’s like the heavens have become a giant Rorschach card where we humans are able to project ourselves onto the dust clouds of space.
But are we projecting? Perhaps these images are in fact systemic, meaning that there really is some kind of continuity. That at some root level the structure of matter is the structure of life, and matter repeats that structure at ever greater levels of organization until you get actual life, and in fact human life?
But then again, would not androids see electric motors and micro circuits up there? Perhaps, but would that that make any real difference? So long as you’re alive and sentient you will see life and sense everywhere—no matter the specific formation it might take—because life and sense is what it’s all about. Right?
No, sadly, wrong. Because if life and sense is what it’s all about, how come we’re so darn good at blowing it all to kingdom come, and imagining ever more and more terrible models and images of violence. In the Star Trek movies, as the intrepid voyagers explore strange new worlds, what often comes up on “full screen” is a monstrous green crustacean, covered in scales and weapons, exuding galactic fury. Funny enough I didn’t see too many of these super-violent crustaceans up there in the Hubble images. But sci-fi movies are full of them. Why? Pretty clearly there’s something else at play, more than simple life and sense, something earth-grown, terrestrial, very human and deadly. When we imagine these new worlds, the thought of the enemy equipped with fearful violence comes unbidden. It must therefore lurk at the core of our human relationships, capable in a split second of turning the bright morning star into a nuclear holocaust. “Cain said to his brother, Abel, 'Let us go out to the field.' And when they were in the field Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.”
So the Hubble images cannot be the final conclusive sign of life and sense for us humans as we gaze uncertain into space. These cosmic images remain ambiguous, fuzzy, tricks of the eye and ego. The sign we really need, the one with real meaning, must be itself earth-grown, very human, and capable of transforming this lurking violence within.
And, yes, this sign exists and gets more and more airtime and power as the 21st century moves forward and becomes our time. We see it and hear it everywhere on the radio stations and TV channels of our contemporary world, the world of media that girdles the planet. What is this sign? It is the sign of the victim inviting compassion on a planetary scale.
French President Nicolar Sarkozy said it the other day. Commenting on Air France Flight 447 that went down in mid-Atlantic with the loss of all 228 people on board he said that most of the passengers were Brazilian and some forty were French. He then added: “It doesn’t change anything; they’re all victims.” Meaning the French President somehow had already given up the priority of national identity in favor of the universal category of the victim inviting compassion.
What Roman or Greek governor would have used that language? They would have said the fates decreed it, that the gods were angry. They would never have said, “They are all victims.” So where did this sign of compassion for the victim come from, if not from the Crucified, right there at the beginning of our 21 centuries? Jesus, the innocent one who died instilling terrestrial forgiveness and peace.
Tony
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Journey with Jesus #11
New Testament - Desert 06/04/09
The desert is an important theme in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the Old Testament it is a place of foundation, of rebellion, of punishment and of purification. For forty years the Israelites wandered in the desert under the leadership of Moses. Through struggle, and by subsequent conquest or conversion of numerous small city states, they formed a people who believed in a single God, of justice– Yahweh. The desert was the place in which the group belief in this God first emerged. Subsequently the desert was seen as a place of punishment for disobedience, but also of purity of relationship and of preparation for settlement in the Promised Land
Later in the Old Testament – in the books of the Maccabees –the desert becomes a place of resistance against the Hellenistic invaders. It was the gathering point for those escaping from the imperial powers located in the cities. The Essene community near the Red Sea continued this tradition. Their community, founded a hundred years before Jesus, and still there during his life-time, was located in the desert just eight miles from the Jericho Road. The Essenes were reclusive, exclusive and intensely purist. From the Dead Sea scrolls we learn that they were biding their time waiting and preparing for the final, apocalyptic, battle. At this time God would send his angels to help them free the Land from its oppressors and to establish his reign.
In the Gospels, the desert is the place where Jesus’ ministry begins. In Mark’s Gospel everything starts in the desert. In Mk 1:1-14 the desert is mentioned four times: the quote from Isaiah tells of a voice crying out in the desert, John the Baptist appears in the desert, the Spirit drives Jesus into the desert, and Jesus remains in the desert for forty days. The actual Greek word here is eremos which means “deserted place”. It is in the desert that Satan finds Jesus to tempt him. In Mk 1:13 Jesus is “with the wild beasts”. This could reference that he is the coming Messiah who will bring peace – the lion will lie down with the lamb. However, there is a threatening feel to the words that links the violence of the animals to the wildness of the place. The wild animals could be a reference to the beasts from the abyss in Daniel 7 – a description of the violent principalities and powers that will be overcome by “one like a son of man”. It should also be remembered that Mark’s Gospel was written shortly after Nero’s persecution when Christians were thrown to the lions. The wild animals could symbolize these forces of violence and destruction.
Matthew’s Gospel, written after Mark, has an expanded account of the temptation of Jesus. In Mt 4:1-11 the temptations are described: to turn stone to bread, to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, and finally Satan offers him the kingdoms of the world. Temptation here is not so much persuasion or seduction but to put under trial. Jesus was under stress. The desert that holds so much significance for the people of Israel, becomes for Jesus a place of conflict.
Did Matthew use an oral tradition of the temptations as a basis for his account, or did he extrapolate the story by reflecting upon obstacles that Jesus dealt with during his ministry?
The three temptations are evident elsewhere in the Gospels. In Jn 6:26, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, Jesus says the crowd is looking for him not because they understood the sign but because they are looking for food. This is the temptation of welfare religion. It is not wrong to help people in need, but if this is all there is then it becomes a distortion of the gospel. In Mt 12:38-40 they ask for a sign that Jesus is the promised Davidic Messiah who will sweep away their enemies. This is the second temptation – the mind-boggling visual act of power, miracle religion. That Satan chose the pinnacle of the temple would suggest divine approval for this kind of religion. Jesus responds that no sign will be given but the sign of Jonah. In Jn 6:15 the crowd seeks to make him king, so he withdrew to the mountain by himself. This is his response to the third temptation, of imperial religion.
In Mk 8:1 is another clear account of the same temptation. Jesus rebukes Peter for first rebuking him, trying to stop him going to Jerusalem where he will be put to death. That Peter feels he can rebuke Jesus indicates a close relationship and that he was in a position of influence. Jesus tells him to “get behind me, Satan.” It is much harder to tell Satan to be gone when he is speaking through your best friend. Peter’s words reflect the world’s agenda. He speaks with a worldly mentality and concern. The temptation Jesus faced was not about doing evil. It was about how to do good. The temptation he rejected was to execute his ministry according to the ways of the world. The best political leaders promise to give the people what they want: i.e. food to eat; they will make use of wonderful signs (technology, publicity, space travel, anything that wows) to rally people to their side; they will always use military and violent power at their disposal to bring about good. People are always looking for a leader who can put things right – bring peace, order and security. In the temptations Jesus rejects these key anthropological pathways. Jesus sees that these human responses do not fundamentally change anything. He does not place his hope in them. In the desert – the deserted place – he can free himself of these basic human dynamics and allow the Spirit to guide him. The temptations are his rejection of these human ways. Jesus seeks to bring about human goals in an entirely new way.
In Mk 6:30-44 we have the story of the feeding of the five thousand (one of the few stories found in all four Gospels). It takes place in a deserted place. Jesus uses bread to feed the people, and also as a miraculous sign of the kingdom. He divides and organizes the people into groups – into cohorts or regiments. All three temptations are addressed and subverted here – feeding the hungry, wondrous sign and political space or empire. The deserted space is filled and transformed with a new humanity based in Jesus’ compassion and the community that comes from it. Human needs are affirmed but responded to differently – not as a project of violent power, but through and for the sake of compassion.
What is our relationship to the desert? We are in the human dynamic – the ways of the world surround us and are inescapable. The desert is the place where the dictates of the world can be stripped away, creating an empty space that the Spirit can fill. This process can be painful and scary, but also liberating, and cannot be avoided for spiritual growth.
The desert is an important theme in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the Old Testament it is a place of foundation, of rebellion, of punishment and of purification. For forty years the Israelites wandered in the desert under the leadership of Moses. Through struggle, and by subsequent conquest or conversion of numerous small city states, they formed a people who believed in a single God, of justice– Yahweh. The desert was the place in which the group belief in this God first emerged. Subsequently the desert was seen as a place of punishment for disobedience, but also of purity of relationship and of preparation for settlement in the Promised Land
Later in the Old Testament – in the books of the Maccabees –the desert becomes a place of resistance against the Hellenistic invaders. It was the gathering point for those escaping from the imperial powers located in the cities. The Essene community near the Red Sea continued this tradition. Their community, founded a hundred years before Jesus, and still there during his life-time, was located in the desert just eight miles from the Jericho Road. The Essenes were reclusive, exclusive and intensely purist. From the Dead Sea scrolls we learn that they were biding their time waiting and preparing for the final, apocalyptic, battle. At this time God would send his angels to help them free the Land from its oppressors and to establish his reign.
In the Gospels, the desert is the place where Jesus’ ministry begins. In Mark’s Gospel everything starts in the desert. In Mk 1:1-14 the desert is mentioned four times: the quote from Isaiah tells of a voice crying out in the desert, John the Baptist appears in the desert, the Spirit drives Jesus into the desert, and Jesus remains in the desert for forty days. The actual Greek word here is eremos which means “deserted place”. It is in the desert that Satan finds Jesus to tempt him. In Mk 1:13 Jesus is “with the wild beasts”. This could reference that he is the coming Messiah who will bring peace – the lion will lie down with the lamb. However, there is a threatening feel to the words that links the violence of the animals to the wildness of the place. The wild animals could be a reference to the beasts from the abyss in Daniel 7 – a description of the violent principalities and powers that will be overcome by “one like a son of man”. It should also be remembered that Mark’s Gospel was written shortly after Nero’s persecution when Christians were thrown to the lions. The wild animals could symbolize these forces of violence and destruction.
Matthew’s Gospel, written after Mark, has an expanded account of the temptation of Jesus. In Mt 4:1-11 the temptations are described: to turn stone to bread, to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, and finally Satan offers him the kingdoms of the world. Temptation here is not so much persuasion or seduction but to put under trial. Jesus was under stress. The desert that holds so much significance for the people of Israel, becomes for Jesus a place of conflict.
Did Matthew use an oral tradition of the temptations as a basis for his account, or did he extrapolate the story by reflecting upon obstacles that Jesus dealt with during his ministry?
The three temptations are evident elsewhere in the Gospels. In Jn 6:26, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, Jesus says the crowd is looking for him not because they understood the sign but because they are looking for food. This is the temptation of welfare religion. It is not wrong to help people in need, but if this is all there is then it becomes a distortion of the gospel. In Mt 12:38-40 they ask for a sign that Jesus is the promised Davidic Messiah who will sweep away their enemies. This is the second temptation – the mind-boggling visual act of power, miracle religion. That Satan chose the pinnacle of the temple would suggest divine approval for this kind of religion. Jesus responds that no sign will be given but the sign of Jonah. In Jn 6:15 the crowd seeks to make him king, so he withdrew to the mountain by himself. This is his response to the third temptation, of imperial religion.
In Mk 8:1 is another clear account of the same temptation. Jesus rebukes Peter for first rebuking him, trying to stop him going to Jerusalem where he will be put to death. That Peter feels he can rebuke Jesus indicates a close relationship and that he was in a position of influence. Jesus tells him to “get behind me, Satan.” It is much harder to tell Satan to be gone when he is speaking through your best friend. Peter’s words reflect the world’s agenda. He speaks with a worldly mentality and concern. The temptation Jesus faced was not about doing evil. It was about how to do good. The temptation he rejected was to execute his ministry according to the ways of the world. The best political leaders promise to give the people what they want: i.e. food to eat; they will make use of wonderful signs (technology, publicity, space travel, anything that wows) to rally people to their side; they will always use military and violent power at their disposal to bring about good. People are always looking for a leader who can put things right – bring peace, order and security. In the temptations Jesus rejects these key anthropological pathways. Jesus sees that these human responses do not fundamentally change anything. He does not place his hope in them. In the desert – the deserted place – he can free himself of these basic human dynamics and allow the Spirit to guide him. The temptations are his rejection of these human ways. Jesus seeks to bring about human goals in an entirely new way.
In Mk 6:30-44 we have the story of the feeding of the five thousand (one of the few stories found in all four Gospels). It takes place in a deserted place. Jesus uses bread to feed the people, and also as a miraculous sign of the kingdom. He divides and organizes the people into groups – into cohorts or regiments. All three temptations are addressed and subverted here – feeding the hungry, wondrous sign and political space or empire. The deserted space is filled and transformed with a new humanity based in Jesus’ compassion and the community that comes from it. Human needs are affirmed but responded to differently – not as a project of violent power, but through and for the sake of compassion.
What is our relationship to the desert? We are in the human dynamic – the ways of the world surround us and are inescapable. The desert is the place where the dictates of the world can be stripped away, creating an empty space that the Spirit can fill. This process can be painful and scary, but also liberating, and cannot be avoided for spiritual growth.
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