Somebody wrote me saying there was no recent news in my blogs. So, really, it’s been an eventful summer. And the first news popping up is that a few of us in Wood Hath Hope have been attending a study group run by a bunch of young evangelicals. They are using a book called Jesus Wants to Save Christians, A Manifesto for the Church in Exile by Rob Bell. Rob is the pastor of a church in Grandville, Michigan, and is something of an enfant terrible in evangelical circles. His previous book with the hip title of Velvet Elvis (referring to a supposed definitive artistic rendering of Elvis) attacked the rigid interpretation of biblical texts—the idea that you can know 100% of what the texts mean. He calls this “brickianity”—every bit of meaning is a brick in the wall.
In the book we are reading Bell lays out an unusual biblical pathway for evangelical faith, one not concerned with listing and enlisting God’s plan for spiritual salvation, but with the bible’s stringent critique of empire and how this applies blow for blow to the role of North America in the world. Christians in this country need take note of their situation in an imperial structure which uses the rest of the world for its power and pleasure.
The amazing thing about the study group is how seriously it takes Bell’s blasts. Outside the United States, or in seminaries or minority churches, people are perhaps used to this kind of thing as liberation theology, which is written for those at the receiving end of empire and oppression. For it to arrive at the level of the local church on main street America and as a matter of biblical faith seems nothing short of astonishing.
It makes me think that something really is up in our world of the wealthy. The Holy Spirit is prompting us to a new awareness and attitude about being Christian in the belly of the beast. I think the prompting goes well beyond a moral judgment on unjust North American lifestyles. If it was simply criticism nobody would be willing to pay attention. People are ready to listen because in fact they have already shifted to a new place in regard to a righteousness of nation and wealth and heaven thereafter. They have perhaps ended up too much on the down side of the American dream, or seen too much its dark side. So they begin to feel the reaching up in their hearts of an alternative, of a completely different goal intended by God. Bell and the group studying his book are prepared to look at this stuff not because it’s a guilt trip, but because it’s a ride to the humanly new. They’re not entirely sure what this new thing is but they’re definitely out there buying the tickets.
The second thing that has been going on this summer is that I have a book contract for my own ms., Virtually Christian, How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New. Well, yes, I was thinking of this right at the beginning but I had to show some decorum! I finally found a publisher, a British group called O-Books. They publish in the area of world religions and Mind/Body/Spirit and have expanded into theology. The contact came through a friend who has been an off-and-on member at WHH for the longest time and who himself had a contract with the same group. My friend’s thought is probably more framed by the Hindu religion than Christian faith and perhaps that contact, connecting to the publisher, says something. I’d tried most of the mainstream theological publishing houses in the U.S. and got turned down by them. So, what do you know, the kind of thing I’m trying to say theologically seems to fit better within a world religions framework! Why is that? It’s not because I take some vague multi-cultural approach. The particular of Christ is at the heart of everything I think and write: everything hinges on the figure of Jesus. I’m not entirely sure, but it could be because Christian thought is traditionally shaped as legal and normative—even Bell’s stuff is about what God wants from us—rather than transformative and holistic—what a creative God is actually doing! So trad Christian publishing can’t see it, but a MBS approach will. Where I go with theology is the already-embeddedness of Christ in culture, the way our humanity is deeply informed by his new humanity. We still very much have to make a decision for Christ, away from the chaos and destruction that a half-Christianization produces. But all the same the Christian message is organic to how we are as cultural beings (wasn’t it Tertullian who said “the soul is naturally Christian”?). So it is a matter of responding to an intense demand made on us from our human depths rather than to a terrible judge looking down on us from the outside. God is closer to us than we are to ourselves and the grace of Christ is borderless in human space.
And that brings me in a fairly neat sequence to what I’m doing much of the rest of my time—I go to the mall. To movies, to the stores, even once or twice to hang out and write. I suppose I’m a bit of a mall junky—public spaces generally. I have to say I get the strangest sensation in the mall. I get it in supermarkets too. Here’s the feeling: it’s like at first my heart is being pulled out of me, painfully, by a longing that goes way, way beyond me. It’s something to do with the enormous plenty on display. I think classically you’re supposed to get that feeling in front of wonderful vistas, of mountains, forests, seascapes, that kind of thing. It’s called the sublime, something so great it leaves you both captivated and flattened, at a total loss. Certainly you’re not supposed to feel the sublime in a mall—that’s ridiculous, inane. You can feel other things, and I have felt them, like a spaceyness from stimulus overload, or annoyance and anger at so many goods and so much greed produced at the expense of the poor; but not anything transcendent. Still the fact is I do have this feeling and then my immediate and almost automatic second-step is to give thanks. Paul said give thanks in everything. But I don’t go into the mall thinking to myself, ah yes, I’m going to practice Paul’s edifying advice. I just find myself doing it, because it’s the only thing I can do, and when I do there come peace and hope.
So here’s what I think. All the enormous plenty is a foreshadowing of God’s kingdom. It is indeed God’s desire that the earth be turned into plenty—but for all. The pain comes from that gap, from these immense blessings and the lack of awareness and love with which they are possessed. But immediately you give thanks, these things, despite the surface evidence, become what God wants them to be, free-flowing, given for all, the rich wonderful feast prophesied for all peoples (Isaiah 25). Then—alongside the actual goods and probably even more important— there is people’s desire. You’re swimming in it. You’re drunk with it. The sense of the sublime—if that is what it is—is now a very human collective one. It’s not the lonely romantic soul gazing at a sunset. Here you’re surrounded by the longing of thousands of people, sharing in their desire. We are all together reaching out for the unattainable. As I have pointed out in other blogs this liberated desire so characteristic of our global culture is already a Christian product. It has arisen through the progressive breaking of boundaries and taboos of all sorts in a history unleashed by the gospel. The desire, just like the goods themselves, is therefore an indirect reflection of Christ in the world, an unrecognized longing for the kingdom of life and love that he preached. Thus when I give thanks I realize this truth, at least in my heart, transforming the desire into love, purifying it and redeeming it. Yes, of course, this is all in my mind, in myself, but it is not illusion. It is a future reality happening now through Holy Spirit. Think, if all Christians practiced redeemed desire not as an occasional hot flush but as a matter of normal spiritual discipline how would that change the world! There would be no way of withholding the plenty of the mall—the plenty of the earth—from all the poor who are deprived of it. Then human joy would be uncontainable and the God of Christ be with us.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Journey with Jesus #14
Old Testament - Mountain 07/09/09
Exodus 19-20 is a key passage in the Torah. While Genesis gives the pre-history of the world and stories of the ancestors, Exodus begins the historical account of the oppression and liberation of the Hebrews. This is the foundational event of the Bible. It is a story of liberation and Law – the people set free to live a different way; led from slavery into the service of God. The theophany on Mount Sinai in chapters 19-20 is the first clear articulation of this.
The passage describes a fearful, primitive, sacred mystery. It is a classic account of an encounter with the holy. The holy both fascinates us and fills us with dread. In order to approach the holy we must first be pure, or risk destruction. The blood of menstruation and childbirth make women impure (hence the shock of Jesus’ interaction with the hemorrhaging woman who touched his cloak). Impurity –for example blood or dirt –is associated with violence and lack of order and is therefore dangerous. It is an anthropological phenomenon. Unlike other animals, humans are no longer restrained by instinct. We have become highly volatile with the potential for excessive violence. Religion is all about controlling this volatility. Priests, sacrifice and purity laws are ways to bring control, to harness and order the sacred power of violence. The anthropological dimension is illustrated in the Sinai story: if any person touches the mountain then they must be killed by the people. The Exodus account here uses these primitive themes to underscore the transcendence of God and the importance of the event. What is vital is what is happening: the mountain is the place where God reveals his law and desire for justice.
Later, in Exodus 24:9-11, a select group of elders are permitted on to the mountain to eat and drink with God. This account has pre-echoes of the transfiguration stories in the Gospels. It is a communion with God, but the depiction is of an extremely powerful and awe-inspiring divinity. This “classic Old Testament God” is also illustrated at Habbukuk 3:2-16. This is considered an early hymn describing YHWH who dwelled in Sinai (his fortress). He leads his people into the land and battle against their enemies with the same strength he manifests on his mountain top. This is a storm-God – a poetic description of a pre-scientific God imagined as a violent thunderstorm.
Daniel 2:31-45 (written in the 2nd century BCE) gives a different understanding of God’s action in history. The God of violence no longer works – the situation of the Jewish people cannot be changed through military might. Instead God becomes more mysterious and new. The story of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream illustrates how God can intervene in history in a new way. God is going to deal with the nations but not as storm-god. He chooses the small stone to strike the statue and this small stone then becomes a mountain that fills the whole earth. The mode of communication has changed from a hymn of power to something more mysterious, less tangible, a dream. It is less clear and needs interpretation. The Bible is reaching out to find something new. It is seeking the extra ordinary. Established human logic (of violence) has not solved the problem of oppressive nations, so it looks elsewhere.
In verse 34 the stone, not shaped by human hands (unlike the statue) becomes a mountain. It takes the space previously occupied by the statue –and more. The dream describes an action by God that brings down oppressive empires and builds a new kingdom. God’s power is not represented by the storm, but by the small single element, the exception. The mountain of Sinai is reduced to a single stone.
Jesus understands that he is the stone. In LK 20:17 he says that “the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls” This references Psalm 118:22 and also the passage from Daniel. The mountain as the symbol of power has been abandoned – the shift is to the stone – to Jesus who has come to destroy the old oppressive systems of the world. He does this not through the violence of the storm-god – rather through the power of something new, the single element, the exception that changes everything to itself.
Exodus 19-20 is a key passage in the Torah. While Genesis gives the pre-history of the world and stories of the ancestors, Exodus begins the historical account of the oppression and liberation of the Hebrews. This is the foundational event of the Bible. It is a story of liberation and Law – the people set free to live a different way; led from slavery into the service of God. The theophany on Mount Sinai in chapters 19-20 is the first clear articulation of this.
The passage describes a fearful, primitive, sacred mystery. It is a classic account of an encounter with the holy. The holy both fascinates us and fills us with dread. In order to approach the holy we must first be pure, or risk destruction. The blood of menstruation and childbirth make women impure (hence the shock of Jesus’ interaction with the hemorrhaging woman who touched his cloak). Impurity –for example blood or dirt –is associated with violence and lack of order and is therefore dangerous. It is an anthropological phenomenon. Unlike other animals, humans are no longer restrained by instinct. We have become highly volatile with the potential for excessive violence. Religion is all about controlling this volatility. Priests, sacrifice and purity laws are ways to bring control, to harness and order the sacred power of violence. The anthropological dimension is illustrated in the Sinai story: if any person touches the mountain then they must be killed by the people. The Exodus account here uses these primitive themes to underscore the transcendence of God and the importance of the event. What is vital is what is happening: the mountain is the place where God reveals his law and desire for justice.
Later, in Exodus 24:9-11, a select group of elders are permitted on to the mountain to eat and drink with God. This account has pre-echoes of the transfiguration stories in the Gospels. It is a communion with God, but the depiction is of an extremely powerful and awe-inspiring divinity. This “classic Old Testament God” is also illustrated at Habbukuk 3:2-16. This is considered an early hymn describing YHWH who dwelled in Sinai (his fortress). He leads his people into the land and battle against their enemies with the same strength he manifests on his mountain top. This is a storm-God – a poetic description of a pre-scientific God imagined as a violent thunderstorm.
Daniel 2:31-45 (written in the 2nd century BCE) gives a different understanding of God’s action in history. The God of violence no longer works – the situation of the Jewish people cannot be changed through military might. Instead God becomes more mysterious and new. The story of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream illustrates how God can intervene in history in a new way. God is going to deal with the nations but not as storm-god. He chooses the small stone to strike the statue and this small stone then becomes a mountain that fills the whole earth. The mode of communication has changed from a hymn of power to something more mysterious, less tangible, a dream. It is less clear and needs interpretation. The Bible is reaching out to find something new. It is seeking the extra ordinary. Established human logic (of violence) has not solved the problem of oppressive nations, so it looks elsewhere.
In verse 34 the stone, not shaped by human hands (unlike the statue) becomes a mountain. It takes the space previously occupied by the statue –and more. The dream describes an action by God that brings down oppressive empires and builds a new kingdom. God’s power is not represented by the storm, but by the small single element, the exception. The mountain of Sinai is reduced to a single stone.
Jesus understands that he is the stone. In LK 20:17 he says that “the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls” This references Psalm 118:22 and also the passage from Daniel. The mountain as the symbol of power has been abandoned – the shift is to the stone – to Jesus who has come to destroy the old oppressive systems of the world. He does this not through the violence of the storm-god – rather through the power of something new, the single element, the exception that changes everything to itself.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Gucci and the Grace of God
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.
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.
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
