As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written that you may believe: Encountering Jesus in the fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.
Background reading to study #7- Written that you may believe chapter 7.
The Gospel of John #7 – Being born again 06/03/10
The story of Nicodemus visiting Jesus by night is found in Jn3:1-16. It is a classic example of Johannine irony. It is so evident that Nicodemus doesn’t get it. He thinks in terms of re-entering the mother’s womb when Jesus is trying to get him to see a completely different level of meaning. This same surface reading occurs in the parallel story of the woman at the well in Samaria: “You have no bucket and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?”
Nicodemus is a representative figure – i.e. someone who does not see, one searching for understanding, but not willing to go the whole way. He is described as a person of some prestige – a Pharisee. In Jn 3:19-20 Jesus says “The light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.” This does not reflect well on Nicodemus who visits Jesus by night. There is a hint here that he was not living in the light. Coming to Jesus in the dark illustrates the lack of clarity in his understanding.
All the while Nicodemus recognizes Jesus as a teacher – the conversation is at the level of teacher to teacher. He is drawn to Jesus because of the signs that Jesus has done which he believes show God is with him. Yet he cannot make the radical shift necessary.
In v.3 Jesus says that to see the kingdom of God one needs to be “born again”. An equally possible translation is “born form above” – but the born again or “anew” is closer to the dramatic sense. The meaning is to start over, start again from the beginning or from the top (like a piece of music). Being “born again” is close – but is a heavily loaded phrase in our culture today. It has associations of judgment, fundamentalism, legalism, elitism, shallowness, narrowness and violence.
To try to understand what Jesus was saying we have to understand his words without the meaning that has been loaded upon them. So what was Jesus’ intention? Birth is the major human event. Being born again is to start over again in a big way. It is as momentous as birth.
Jesus says in v. 5 that we need to be born of water and spirit. Traditionally this has been interpreted in terms of baptism -the water of baptism being associated with being made clean or being put right with God.
For John’s Jewish audience water and spirit would have brought to mind the creation story – when the earth was a formless void and the Spirit hovered over the water. The Spirit stirred up the water and life was created. In John chapter 3, Jesus is calling for a second, new creation, a total transformation. This is what baptism symbolizes – not a legal making right with God.
Water is the primordial element of life. We come forth from the waters of our mother’s womb. In Jewish thought God’s Spirit gives life to the flesh. Here flesh is understood as the general human reality that we will ultimately die when God’s spirit or breath leaves it. Thus the Spirit blows where it will. You cannot know where it comes from or where it is going. It cannot be grasped intellectually within the present scheme. Trying to nail it down leads to legalism. It is unanticipated, uncontrollable and inexplicable. To be born of water and the Spirit means to let go of all the old constructs. The human transformation that Jesus is calling for is of our whole human reality.
Nicodemus shows up two more times in the Gospel.
In Jn 7:45 the temple police fail to arrest Jesus. When questioned by the chief priests and Pharisees they answer that “Never has anyone spoken like this”. They are accused of being taken in by Jesus. Nicodemus, who is identified as one of the leaders of the Pharisees, tries to defend Jesus using the Law. He is portrayed as a figure of the good religious person but who cannot commit. He wants to fit Jesus into the known, to make him acceptable. But the Spirit cannot be controlled and Jesus will go to his fate in a struggle against all established forms.
Nicodemus’ final appearance is after the crucifixion. In 19:38-42 he brings myrrh and aloes to anoint Jesus body. He is not identified as a disciple like Joseph of Arimithea. Again his nocturnal visit to Jesus is mentioned, suggesting that Nicodemus is still in darkness. The expensive ointments he provides are evidence of his wealth. John’s Gospel has another account of anointing in 12:1-8 when Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus’ feet. Here Mary assumes the prophetic role, anointing Jesus as Messiah.(The text adds that Jesus said she should keep the ointment for his burial, but then she is not mentioned in the subsequent anointing; and she has brought one pound while Nicodemus brings one hundred!) She stands in contrast to Nicodemus who does the religious thing – ritualizing death, creating shrines. He waits for Jesus to be safely dead then gives him glory. Religion is all about dead things – what happens to you when you are dead and rituals of death. People want the dead to be in a good place. Death is not an issue for Jesus – “let the dead bury the dead”. The time for transformation is now. Being born again is not about the hereafter. It is about the here and now. Mary anoints Jesus in the living present.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Gusher in the Gulf
I’m thinking there’s a metaphor here, and a many-sided one. Oil is spewing forth and nothing can really stop it. It’s too deep, too pressurized, too violent. The whole six hundred thousand square miles of sun-kissed Gulf is under threat and with that the Atlantic coast and who knows what else. Our human world is suffering a man-made eruption of subterranean filth into the biosphere, and it becomes an instant image of the upwelling of violent human desire into the human world, happening on an unprecedented scale, and no one can do anything to stop it.
When I first heard about the BP drilling catastrophe I was struck by the given name of the rig where it literally all went down: Deepwater Horizon. Down there, five thousand feet down, that was their horizon, that’s where their vision was. Most people don’t look anywhere near that deep, but BP did, Haliburton did. They’re tapping into the abyss, the place where in biblical cosmology monsters dwell and now those monsters are marching upward and onward toward the land, just like the book of Daniel saw it. These giant companies are driven by ruthless ambition and lust for profit and they are mobilizing forces of catastrophic proportions. But their abyssal vision after all is only a concentration and a focus of something we all share unconsciously, and across the whole face of the earth. It is the thing inside all of us that pushed them progressively to deeper and deeper levels of sea and land. They couldn’t have done what they did unless they were urged along by the universal human demand for objects of desire welling up from our collective human depths. BP didn’t make the gusher. We did.
But this terrible truth, while crucial, is not the final term of the metaphor. The amazing thing about the gospels is that there is nothing about the way human beings work which cannot be redeemed, and in fact already has. Jesus said the sign that he would give was the sign of Jonah: that is, of the prophet who was swallowed by a monster of the deep, and then that very same monster spewed him forth on the land as a prophetic sign of a final end to violence and killing in Nineveh—in other words a striking prophetic vision of conversion and resurrection. In the meantime, yes, after two thousand years of Christianity, human culture has gotten hold of a derivative and destructive notion of life freed from all restraints. Westerners have taken the shell of Christianity and made an ideology of limitless freedom exemplified by the once-macho-now-pathetic mantra of “Drill, baby, drill!” They took the demythologizing force of the cross—freeing the world from fear of all gods and monsters—and made it a divinely-given right to drill and grab, steal and deal, shoot and bomb as and when they wanted. They took the mother-of-pearl shell but discarded the wondrous oyster within, the truth of infinite self-giving love. And now all the oysters are dying.
And yet it is not too late. We are now fully in apocalyptic times and apocalyptic thinking and choices are required. Deeper than the gusher of desire lies the gusher of grace.The flood of oleaginous desire covering the earth could not be there unless the living water of grace had set it in motion in the first place. We have much preferred the murky pleasures of oil to the transparency of water, but now we are being brought to see that the first leads to death and is after all only a dumb short-circuiting of the second. It is in fact only a very short human journey, a simple anthropological twist, to bring us from outrageous desire to outlandish love. The deep source is the same—the infinite self-giving of Christ. In the deepest sense it is not we who made the gusher, Christ did, but a choice is built in to that distinction. It is a matter of going that little bit deeper to encounter the bottomless well of love at the core of all contemporary desire.
This short journey also demands what seems like a death-defying leap. It seems like everything that is meaningful for us, everything pleasurable, is going to die. But now—and here’s the really apocalyptic part—all the images on T.V. and internet tell us that it is dying anyway. All humanity has to do is understand the true character of its situation, understand that the real gusher in the gulf is the Jesus who was Jonah, the one who humanized all monsters, and in every sense. Jesus is the one who changed the co-ordinates of being human, making it possible to release the well-spring of human desire so that it one day have the true possibility of becoming the living fountain of love.
Sound like a tall order? Just turn the T.V. back on and check out the choices we have left. And in the meantime as Christians it’s really not our business to second-guess what the rest of humanity will do. The one thing required of us is to be completely faithful to the sign of Jesus in our times, the deepwater horizon of our world.
Tony
When I first heard about the BP drilling catastrophe I was struck by the given name of the rig where it literally all went down: Deepwater Horizon. Down there, five thousand feet down, that was their horizon, that’s where their vision was. Most people don’t look anywhere near that deep, but BP did, Haliburton did. They’re tapping into the abyss, the place where in biblical cosmology monsters dwell and now those monsters are marching upward and onward toward the land, just like the book of Daniel saw it. These giant companies are driven by ruthless ambition and lust for profit and they are mobilizing forces of catastrophic proportions. But their abyssal vision after all is only a concentration and a focus of something we all share unconsciously, and across the whole face of the earth. It is the thing inside all of us that pushed them progressively to deeper and deeper levels of sea and land. They couldn’t have done what they did unless they were urged along by the universal human demand for objects of desire welling up from our collective human depths. BP didn’t make the gusher. We did.
But this terrible truth, while crucial, is not the final term of the metaphor. The amazing thing about the gospels is that there is nothing about the way human beings work which cannot be redeemed, and in fact already has. Jesus said the sign that he would give was the sign of Jonah: that is, of the prophet who was swallowed by a monster of the deep, and then that very same monster spewed him forth on the land as a prophetic sign of a final end to violence and killing in Nineveh—in other words a striking prophetic vision of conversion and resurrection. In the meantime, yes, after two thousand years of Christianity, human culture has gotten hold of a derivative and destructive notion of life freed from all restraints. Westerners have taken the shell of Christianity and made an ideology of limitless freedom exemplified by the once-macho-now-pathetic mantra of “Drill, baby, drill!” They took the demythologizing force of the cross—freeing the world from fear of all gods and monsters—and made it a divinely-given right to drill and grab, steal and deal, shoot and bomb as and when they wanted. They took the mother-of-pearl shell but discarded the wondrous oyster within, the truth of infinite self-giving love. And now all the oysters are dying.
And yet it is not too late. We are now fully in apocalyptic times and apocalyptic thinking and choices are required. Deeper than the gusher of desire lies the gusher of grace.The flood of oleaginous desire covering the earth could not be there unless the living water of grace had set it in motion in the first place. We have much preferred the murky pleasures of oil to the transparency of water, but now we are being brought to see that the first leads to death and is after all only a dumb short-circuiting of the second. It is in fact only a very short human journey, a simple anthropological twist, to bring us from outrageous desire to outlandish love. The deep source is the same—the infinite self-giving of Christ. In the deepest sense it is not we who made the gusher, Christ did, but a choice is built in to that distinction. It is a matter of going that little bit deeper to encounter the bottomless well of love at the core of all contemporary desire.
This short journey also demands what seems like a death-defying leap. It seems like everything that is meaningful for us, everything pleasurable, is going to die. But now—and here’s the really apocalyptic part—all the images on T.V. and internet tell us that it is dying anyway. All humanity has to do is understand the true character of its situation, understand that the real gusher in the gulf is the Jesus who was Jonah, the one who humanized all monsters, and in every sense. Jesus is the one who changed the co-ordinates of being human, making it possible to release the well-spring of human desire so that it one day have the true possibility of becoming the living fountain of love.
Sound like a tall order? Just turn the T.V. back on and check out the choices we have left. And in the meantime as Christians it’s really not our business to second-guess what the rest of humanity will do. The one thing required of us is to be completely faithful to the sign of Jesus in our times, the deepwater horizon of our world.
Tony
Thursday, June 3, 2010
John #6
As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written that you may believe: Encountering Jesus in the fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.
Background reading to study #6- Written that you may believe chapter 5.
John and Commitment - 05/20/10
Commitment is a key theme in John, one that is linked to the early church’s relationship to “the Jews”. In this Gospel there is the most tension between the emerging faith in Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God and traditional Judaism. Judaism was beginning to define itself over and against this emerging faith. The gospel message had already moved into the Gentile world –apparent in the Synoptics, where the Jewish question is present but not as intense. In many ways they had already moved beyond this, focusing instead on the Greek and Roman world. In John, however, it remains a central question – and there is great pain in it.
Unlike the Synoptics and most of the Pauline works, the Jews are called “the Jews” rather than the more specific “chief priests”, “scribes”, or “people of Jerusalem”. Rather the whole body of the Jews is named. In our contemporary world this is very controversial. John’s Gospel, more than any other Biblical text, has led to claims anti-Semitism. There have even been calls to delete these passages in the text.
Schneider argues that John’s reference to “the Jews” is only to the chief priests and Jewish leaders. It is hard to make this claim from the text however. Judaism in Jesus’ time was a pluralist movement made up of many different sects. Among these were the Essenes, Pharisees, Sadducees and the early Christians in Jerusalem who originally attended temple - Messianic Jews. As the years went by opposition between Jews and Christians became more definite. It became even more emphatic after the destruction of Jerusalem following the Jewish rebellion (66-70 AD) when over a million Jews lost their lives. The Christians were making enormous claims about Jesus. He substituted for everything of importance to the Jews – Law, Temple, Land. As this became increasingly obvious Christians were forced out of the Synagogues. At the turn of the century there was a parting of the ways.
In John the person of Jesus is central to everything. He came from Judaism, yet the Jewish community rejected his message. “The Jews” in John refers to the body of people who are denying these Christian claims. It does not refer to a particular subset. In some ways Christianity created the current Western definition of “Jews” (i.e. the ones who are not Christians). The tension develops out of the emergence of Christianity. Christians and Jews have become like warring siblings. They cannot get away from each other, are in fact dependent on each other, because they are defined by each other. This is part of the sorrow and the trial of Christianity and Judaism. Contemporary pluralism tries to gloss over this--and is valid as far as it goes--but root tensions remain.
More than any other writing it is the gospel of John which launches this drama into the world. In John’s Gospel Jesus did not intend to set up something separate from Judaism – all Jews were called to follow Jesus. Many did not choose to do this. Those who refused Jesus were associated in John’s time with the “world”. They became the bad guys. The intensity of the Gospel leaves no room for middle ground. Being a true Israelite for John was not a matter of biology, but of faith. John’s Gospel has intensified the violence in Christian history because the text can be (and has been) interpreted in a violent way. John did not intend his gospel to be a manifesto against all subsequent generations of Jews, rather simply a definitive statement of the meaning of Jesus. This tension can only be resolved through complete fidelity to Jesus’ non-violence.
The clearing of the temple is placed at the beginning of John. It is his first public act (whereas in the Synoptics it is his last). John sets the scene by clearing the ground. Humans have always used sacrifice as a way of communicating with God and discharging violence. By clearing the Temple Jesus dismantles this mechanism, breaking the cycle of violence. He points to something new. Placing the clearing of the temple at the beginning of the narrative shows the enormous confidence of John. If you get rid of the temple then Jesus can take center stage.
The absolute importance of Jesus, what he means for the world, is made clear in the following passages:
In Jn 5:19-20 there is a visual communication with the Father: “The Son can do nothing on his own, only what he sees the Father doing”.
Jn6:42-45 “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father”. Any relationship with Jesus is initiated by the act of the Father. The Father moves directly to put you in relationship to Jesus. The initiative is with the Father.
Jn 7:16 “My teaching is not mine but his who sent me”. The validity of Jesus’ teaching will be evident to all who seek to do the will of God.
Jn 7:27-29 “I know him because I am from him and he sent me”. There is a direct link between Jesus and the Father.
Jn 8: 29 “I do nothing on my own, but I speak these things as the Father instructed me”. This shows a great intimacy, a unity of heart between Jesus and the Father. There is an intimacy and communion between the two. Jesus is “close to the Father’s heart”,(Jn1:18).
This language can sound metaphysical but this intimacy is always in connection to Jesus being “raised up” – his crucifixion and pouring himself out as breath and Spirit. His equality with the Father is only in this context.
This is illustrated after in the Gospel. As the crucifixion draws nearer, the initiative shifts from the Father to the Son. In Jn 14:6-7 Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. No-one can come to the Father except thru’ the Son. By knowing Jesus you know the Father.
In Jn 14:9 whoever has seen Jesus has seen the Father and in Jn15:23 whoever hates Jesus hates the Father. In Jn 16:15 “All that the Father has is mine”. And in v.23 “If you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you”. These passages build up the privileged relationship between Jesus and the Father. This relationship is often understood ontologically (an essentialist understanding). The Father and Son are of the same “substance” (Greek “homoousios”). Later the Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, would be included. It becomes an intellectual doctrine to explain three persons, one God.
The oneness that Jesus had with the Father is better understood anthropologically as resulting from a relationship without violence (without denying a final ontological truth—although intellectually this remains mysterious). There was no violence between them, only confidence, intimacy and peace. With everyone else some violence exists within the God relationship – a suspicion that God cannot love us absolutely. God is used against people. People fear God. Our relationship with God is implicated in violence. It is the relationship that Jesus had with the Father that enabled him to do what he did and is at the heart of John’s description of Jesus.
So the call to commitment in John is to jettison the old ways, the ancient traditions, in favor of this new relationship. It is this decision that the “Jews” were being asked to make. The price of this choice was religious rejection and persecution and having to leave behind beloved and familiar traditions. For Christians today any commitment that stands in the way of this relationship to Jesus becomes idolatry.
Background reading to study #6- Written that you may believe chapter 5.
John and Commitment - 05/20/10
Commitment is a key theme in John, one that is linked to the early church’s relationship to “the Jews”. In this Gospel there is the most tension between the emerging faith in Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God and traditional Judaism. Judaism was beginning to define itself over and against this emerging faith. The gospel message had already moved into the Gentile world –apparent in the Synoptics, where the Jewish question is present but not as intense. In many ways they had already moved beyond this, focusing instead on the Greek and Roman world. In John, however, it remains a central question – and there is great pain in it.
Unlike the Synoptics and most of the Pauline works, the Jews are called “the Jews” rather than the more specific “chief priests”, “scribes”, or “people of Jerusalem”. Rather the whole body of the Jews is named. In our contemporary world this is very controversial. John’s Gospel, more than any other Biblical text, has led to claims anti-Semitism. There have even been calls to delete these passages in the text.
Schneider argues that John’s reference to “the Jews” is only to the chief priests and Jewish leaders. It is hard to make this claim from the text however. Judaism in Jesus’ time was a pluralist movement made up of many different sects. Among these were the Essenes, Pharisees, Sadducees and the early Christians in Jerusalem who originally attended temple - Messianic Jews. As the years went by opposition between Jews and Christians became more definite. It became even more emphatic after the destruction of Jerusalem following the Jewish rebellion (66-70 AD) when over a million Jews lost their lives. The Christians were making enormous claims about Jesus. He substituted for everything of importance to the Jews – Law, Temple, Land. As this became increasingly obvious Christians were forced out of the Synagogues. At the turn of the century there was a parting of the ways.
In John the person of Jesus is central to everything. He came from Judaism, yet the Jewish community rejected his message. “The Jews” in John refers to the body of people who are denying these Christian claims. It does not refer to a particular subset. In some ways Christianity created the current Western definition of “Jews” (i.e. the ones who are not Christians). The tension develops out of the emergence of Christianity. Christians and Jews have become like warring siblings. They cannot get away from each other, are in fact dependent on each other, because they are defined by each other. This is part of the sorrow and the trial of Christianity and Judaism. Contemporary pluralism tries to gloss over this--and is valid as far as it goes--but root tensions remain.
More than any other writing it is the gospel of John which launches this drama into the world. In John’s Gospel Jesus did not intend to set up something separate from Judaism – all Jews were called to follow Jesus. Many did not choose to do this. Those who refused Jesus were associated in John’s time with the “world”. They became the bad guys. The intensity of the Gospel leaves no room for middle ground. Being a true Israelite for John was not a matter of biology, but of faith. John’s Gospel has intensified the violence in Christian history because the text can be (and has been) interpreted in a violent way. John did not intend his gospel to be a manifesto against all subsequent generations of Jews, rather simply a definitive statement of the meaning of Jesus. This tension can only be resolved through complete fidelity to Jesus’ non-violence.
The clearing of the temple is placed at the beginning of John. It is his first public act (whereas in the Synoptics it is his last). John sets the scene by clearing the ground. Humans have always used sacrifice as a way of communicating with God and discharging violence. By clearing the Temple Jesus dismantles this mechanism, breaking the cycle of violence. He points to something new. Placing the clearing of the temple at the beginning of the narrative shows the enormous confidence of John. If you get rid of the temple then Jesus can take center stage.
The absolute importance of Jesus, what he means for the world, is made clear in the following passages:
In Jn 5:19-20 there is a visual communication with the Father: “The Son can do nothing on his own, only what he sees the Father doing”.
Jn6:42-45 “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father”. Any relationship with Jesus is initiated by the act of the Father. The Father moves directly to put you in relationship to Jesus. The initiative is with the Father.
Jn 7:16 “My teaching is not mine but his who sent me”. The validity of Jesus’ teaching will be evident to all who seek to do the will of God.
Jn 7:27-29 “I know him because I am from him and he sent me”. There is a direct link between Jesus and the Father.
Jn 8: 29 “I do nothing on my own, but I speak these things as the Father instructed me”. This shows a great intimacy, a unity of heart between Jesus and the Father. There is an intimacy and communion between the two. Jesus is “close to the Father’s heart”,(Jn1:18).
This language can sound metaphysical but this intimacy is always in connection to Jesus being “raised up” – his crucifixion and pouring himself out as breath and Spirit. His equality with the Father is only in this context.
This is illustrated after in the Gospel. As the crucifixion draws nearer, the initiative shifts from the Father to the Son. In Jn 14:6-7 Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. No-one can come to the Father except thru’ the Son. By knowing Jesus you know the Father.
In Jn 14:9 whoever has seen Jesus has seen the Father and in Jn15:23 whoever hates Jesus hates the Father. In Jn 16:15 “All that the Father has is mine”. And in v.23 “If you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you”. These passages build up the privileged relationship between Jesus and the Father. This relationship is often understood ontologically (an essentialist understanding). The Father and Son are of the same “substance” (Greek “homoousios”). Later the Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, would be included. It becomes an intellectual doctrine to explain three persons, one God.
The oneness that Jesus had with the Father is better understood anthropologically as resulting from a relationship without violence (without denying a final ontological truth—although intellectually this remains mysterious). There was no violence between them, only confidence, intimacy and peace. With everyone else some violence exists within the God relationship – a suspicion that God cannot love us absolutely. God is used against people. People fear God. Our relationship with God is implicated in violence. It is the relationship that Jesus had with the Father that enabled him to do what he did and is at the heart of John’s description of Jesus.
So the call to commitment in John is to jettison the old ways, the ancient traditions, in favor of this new relationship. It is this decision that the “Jews” were being asked to make. The price of this choice was religious rejection and persecution and having to leave behind beloved and familiar traditions. For Christians today any commitment that stands in the way of this relationship to Jesus becomes idolatry.
John # 5
As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written that you may believe: Encountering Jesus in the fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.
Background reading to study #5- Written that you may believe chapter 4.
Symbolism in John 05/13/10
The Synoptic Gospels called Jesus’ miracles works of power, John calls them signs. Signs refer to something, show you something that you didn’t see before. They alert us to the deeper level of meaning in John. John was written later than others and has had a greater chance to reflect deeply on the meaning of Jesus. The author is thinking about how the message will be continued after the death of the primary witnesses. How can the message be preserved? The tools of communication he uses are the Word and Sign.
Today our world is exploding with signs. John’s sense of their importance is very contemporary.
The sign/symbol of water runs thru’ the Gospel – the water transformed into wine, the woman at the well, water and blood pouring from the pierced side of Jesus… Water on an ordinary human level has a powerful impact. It is essential for life. In the Gospel it becomes a means for communicating the teaching of Jesus. For example Jn 7:37-39 “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink…out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water”. Water becomes a symbol of Jesus himself. By taking in Jesus the believer experiences and becomes the source of living water. Water is associated with the Spirit of Jesus that will be fully experienced because of Jesus’ glorious death.
In the Bread of Life discourse (Jn 6:35-58) John uses another symbol. Jesus is the bread that comes down from heaven. John’s gospel does not have the institution of the Eucharist that is so pivitol to other three gospels and also to Paul. In the first part of the discourse (up until v.50) there is nothing about eating his flesh. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” The key thing here is relationship and belief.
At v. 50 the discourse slips in to something else – it talks of eating. Bread as symbol raises the idea of eating and here eating becomes the focus. “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life within you”. Traditionally these verses have been read literally and been understood in terms of applying to the physical sacrament of the Eucharist. From this understanding emerged the doctrine of transubstantiation in the 13th century. This inevitably returns us to the ritual and the sacrificial.
This literal reading overlooks the irony of John found elsewhere in the Gospel. For example when Nicodemus response to Jesus saying we must be born again – “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb?” In the same way the Jews would be asking how is it possible to eat this man’s flesh? This scandalous and shocking language pushes the metaphor of bread all the way so that we begin to understand.
Understood metaphorically—symbolically, by means of a sign—we are fed and sustained by the real person of Jesus and by his world-overturning death on the cross. Food, like air is essential for life. Unlike breathing, eating is a conscious act. What we choose to eat becomes a part of us. “Eating Jesus” is receiving God.
Jesus in fact is himself the core metaphor in John– the direct communication or sign of who and what God is. Jesus is there, center stage, all the time - the central figure of the Gospel. God becomes present thru’ Jesus. The Gospel in turn is the direct communication of Jesus –the whole thing is symbolic revelation through and through.
Schneiders differentiates between sign and symbol. For her, unlike a sign (which points to something else), a symbol participates in what it represents. For example a flag symbolizes patriotism and can evoke that emotion. It gives a deeper connection. In this way Jesus both shows us the divine and becomes the means to reaching the divine. This interpretation reflects traditional Western metaphysical thought: signs refer to the visible world, but the real is invisible and needs another communication – Jesus enables us to bridge the divide.
A different understanding focuses on human transformation rather than divine revelation as information. Jesus used signs to communicate meaning. In him our whole semiotic system—signs, symbols, what have you—is revolutionized into new communicated meaning—away from violence toward self-giving love. It is very difficult to transfer from one root human meaning to another, and so John acts a kind of dictionary or lexicon of translating signs, doubling over and over on themselves until we finally get it. Jesus acted to change human existence from within. He modeled a new way of being human. Jesus, the ultimate sign, did not point to heaven, but to the human heart. Jesus said look at me and you will begin to understand yourself and how you can be transformed. And you will also understand God. The cross as the supreme sign of Jesus is the only sign that matters. It reveals our violence and changes our world of meaning.
Background reading to study #5- Written that you may believe chapter 4.
Symbolism in John 05/13/10
The Synoptic Gospels called Jesus’ miracles works of power, John calls them signs. Signs refer to something, show you something that you didn’t see before. They alert us to the deeper level of meaning in John. John was written later than others and has had a greater chance to reflect deeply on the meaning of Jesus. The author is thinking about how the message will be continued after the death of the primary witnesses. How can the message be preserved? The tools of communication he uses are the Word and Sign.
Today our world is exploding with signs. John’s sense of their importance is very contemporary.
The sign/symbol of water runs thru’ the Gospel – the water transformed into wine, the woman at the well, water and blood pouring from the pierced side of Jesus… Water on an ordinary human level has a powerful impact. It is essential for life. In the Gospel it becomes a means for communicating the teaching of Jesus. For example Jn 7:37-39 “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink…out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water”. Water becomes a symbol of Jesus himself. By taking in Jesus the believer experiences and becomes the source of living water. Water is associated with the Spirit of Jesus that will be fully experienced because of Jesus’ glorious death.
In the Bread of Life discourse (Jn 6:35-58) John uses another symbol. Jesus is the bread that comes down from heaven. John’s gospel does not have the institution of the Eucharist that is so pivitol to other three gospels and also to Paul. In the first part of the discourse (up until v.50) there is nothing about eating his flesh. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” The key thing here is relationship and belief.
At v. 50 the discourse slips in to something else – it talks of eating. Bread as symbol raises the idea of eating and here eating becomes the focus. “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life within you”. Traditionally these verses have been read literally and been understood in terms of applying to the physical sacrament of the Eucharist. From this understanding emerged the doctrine of transubstantiation in the 13th century. This inevitably returns us to the ritual and the sacrificial.
This literal reading overlooks the irony of John found elsewhere in the Gospel. For example when Nicodemus response to Jesus saying we must be born again – “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb?” In the same way the Jews would be asking how is it possible to eat this man’s flesh? This scandalous and shocking language pushes the metaphor of bread all the way so that we begin to understand.
Understood metaphorically—symbolically, by means of a sign—we are fed and sustained by the real person of Jesus and by his world-overturning death on the cross. Food, like air is essential for life. Unlike breathing, eating is a conscious act. What we choose to eat becomes a part of us. “Eating Jesus” is receiving God.
Jesus in fact is himself the core metaphor in John– the direct communication or sign of who and what God is. Jesus is there, center stage, all the time - the central figure of the Gospel. God becomes present thru’ Jesus. The Gospel in turn is the direct communication of Jesus –the whole thing is symbolic revelation through and through.
Schneiders differentiates between sign and symbol. For her, unlike a sign (which points to something else), a symbol participates in what it represents. For example a flag symbolizes patriotism and can evoke that emotion. It gives a deeper connection. In this way Jesus both shows us the divine and becomes the means to reaching the divine. This interpretation reflects traditional Western metaphysical thought: signs refer to the visible world, but the real is invisible and needs another communication – Jesus enables us to bridge the divide.
A different understanding focuses on human transformation rather than divine revelation as information. Jesus used signs to communicate meaning. In him our whole semiotic system—signs, symbols, what have you—is revolutionized into new communicated meaning—away from violence toward self-giving love. It is very difficult to transfer from one root human meaning to another, and so John acts a kind of dictionary or lexicon of translating signs, doubling over and over on themselves until we finally get it. Jesus acted to change human existence from within. He modeled a new way of being human. Jesus, the ultimate sign, did not point to heaven, but to the human heart. Jesus said look at me and you will begin to understand yourself and how you can be transformed. And you will also understand God. The cross as the supreme sign of Jesus is the only sign that matters. It reveals our violence and changes our world of meaning.
John #4
As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.
Background reading to study #4- Written That You May Believe chapter 3.
Revelation in John 04/29/10
Revelation has traditionally been associated with the communication of knowledge. In the Roman Catholic tradition the focus of this knowledge is the sacred mystery of the trinity and the incarnation. The Protestant take on revelation is centered on the knowledge that we are saved and the acceptance of this truth.
In contrast, John’s Gospel understands revelation as an invitation to enter a relationship, a shared life. The revelation is exclusively of the person Jesus. It is not about information. Like falling in love, we get to know Jesus as we enter into a relationship with him. Once the physical Jesus and the first-hand witnesses to his life had gone, the Gospel became the way in which the person of Jesus was revealed. The written Gospel itself has the real effect of facilitating a relationship between the reader and Jesus.
John’s gospel does not begin with the words “in the beginning was God”. Instead John begins with the Word, with communication. God’s very nature is communication, and when we communicate in love – that is the start of everything. Language has always been more about relationship than communication of dogma or knowledge.
Language is human. It separates us from the primates. In Girardian thought the transition from primate to human is a moment of sacrificial violence, and from it emerges self-awareness and the birth of language. Humans have always been violent. God entered the world to reveal this violence, and to show us a different way of communication through the witness of the cross.
Jesus’ works of power, or miracles, are called “signs” in John’s Gospel. They are, therefore, understood as another form of communication, as a form of language. In parallel the long discourses in John contrast with the short pithy sayings by Jesus found in the Synoptics. These discourses are theological constructions by John to communicate the love of God for the world and to invite the reader to connect with God through Jesus. Anyone who has truly come to know Jesus knows the Father. Jesus communicates that God so loved the world that he poured himself into the world to save it. Salvation in John does not come through expiatory sacrifice--through exchange value by means of violence--but rather through relationship with God. It comes from connecting directly with God thru’ the absolute self-giving of Jesus.
Salvation takes place not by what we do but by plugging in and understanding the heart of God. It is not an intellectual idea, but a change that comes over us in the face of the cross. The crucifixion is Christ’s glory, the place where he is fully revealed and shown by God and as God. In the Synoptics this glory is displayed in the triumph or vindication of the resurrection. For John the resurrection is the not the vindication, but the point where we begin to see and to understand. It returns us to the meaning of the Word, to the cross as divine communication beginning right now.
The Spirit is the living presence of Jesus breathed out on the cross. Through the Spirit we enter into intimacy with God through Jesus. There is no need for ritual or sacrifice to enter into this relationship. In fact John’s Gospel does not even have a Eucharist (instead Jesus washes his disciples’ feet the night before he dies). This is perhaps a recognition by the Evangelist that the Eucharist had already become ritualized by the time he wrote his Gospel. For John, salvation is all about our relationship with the Father through Jesus, and his Gospel is the living revelation of this.
Background reading to study #4- Written That You May Believe chapter 3.
Revelation in John 04/29/10
Revelation has traditionally been associated with the communication of knowledge. In the Roman Catholic tradition the focus of this knowledge is the sacred mystery of the trinity and the incarnation. The Protestant take on revelation is centered on the knowledge that we are saved and the acceptance of this truth.
In contrast, John’s Gospel understands revelation as an invitation to enter a relationship, a shared life. The revelation is exclusively of the person Jesus. It is not about information. Like falling in love, we get to know Jesus as we enter into a relationship with him. Once the physical Jesus and the first-hand witnesses to his life had gone, the Gospel became the way in which the person of Jesus was revealed. The written Gospel itself has the real effect of facilitating a relationship between the reader and Jesus.
John’s gospel does not begin with the words “in the beginning was God”. Instead John begins with the Word, with communication. God’s very nature is communication, and when we communicate in love – that is the start of everything. Language has always been more about relationship than communication of dogma or knowledge.
Language is human. It separates us from the primates. In Girardian thought the transition from primate to human is a moment of sacrificial violence, and from it emerges self-awareness and the birth of language. Humans have always been violent. God entered the world to reveal this violence, and to show us a different way of communication through the witness of the cross.
Jesus’ works of power, or miracles, are called “signs” in John’s Gospel. They are, therefore, understood as another form of communication, as a form of language. In parallel the long discourses in John contrast with the short pithy sayings by Jesus found in the Synoptics. These discourses are theological constructions by John to communicate the love of God for the world and to invite the reader to connect with God through Jesus. Anyone who has truly come to know Jesus knows the Father. Jesus communicates that God so loved the world that he poured himself into the world to save it. Salvation in John does not come through expiatory sacrifice--through exchange value by means of violence--but rather through relationship with God. It comes from connecting directly with God thru’ the absolute self-giving of Jesus.
Salvation takes place not by what we do but by plugging in and understanding the heart of God. It is not an intellectual idea, but a change that comes over us in the face of the cross. The crucifixion is Christ’s glory, the place where he is fully revealed and shown by God and as God. In the Synoptics this glory is displayed in the triumph or vindication of the resurrection. For John the resurrection is the not the vindication, but the point where we begin to see and to understand. It returns us to the meaning of the Word, to the cross as divine communication beginning right now.
The Spirit is the living presence of Jesus breathed out on the cross. Through the Spirit we enter into intimacy with God through Jesus. There is no need for ritual or sacrifice to enter into this relationship. In fact John’s Gospel does not even have a Eucharist (instead Jesus washes his disciples’ feet the night before he dies). This is perhaps a recognition by the Evangelist that the Eucharist had already become ritualized by the time he wrote his Gospel. For John, salvation is all about our relationship with the Father through Jesus, and his Gospel is the living revelation of this.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Unchained Christianity
First, just a little history.
In the year 313 the Roman Emperor made Christianity a licensed religion. Constantine said licet, let it be permitted. For the first time in its history the movement of Christianity had official and final Roman approval, and it was already older then than the present U.S. Republic. Imagine that: 275 years without any secure government recognition, without having a king or an emperor at your back, without a sure place in society, without public symbols and celebrations to declare your right to exist. 275 years of civic contempt, mixed with oblique influence when people of status became Christian, then punctuated at other times by outbursts of lethal persecution.
When Constantine gave state permission to Christianity he had just won a decisive battle in which he had invoked the Christian god—a voice had spoken to him in a dream (in a later account it became a vision) telling him that he should emblazon the heavenly sign of Christ on the shields and helmets of his soldiers. He thus began the process of the militarization of Christian faith. True, there were already Christian soldiers in the Roman army, but they were there because they had been pressed into service, and seemed faithfully to adhere to the church’s absolute prohibition on killing--if not why was there no hint of a rebellion when Christian soldiers were subject of a harsh purge from the army under Diocletian about twenty years before? In other words they were there as a formal fill-up-the ranks presence, ready the moment the war was over to abandon the profession. Constantine realized somehow that it would be possible to enlist the support of this radical yet influential movement by calling a halt to the bitter persecution of his predecessors and then progressively according rights and privileges to the church, and at the same time creating the self-serving myth that the Christian god had spoken to him directly pledging his support. Christians of course had to want the end of persecution, and they probably shared a general desire for the peace of Roman society rent by continual civil war. Whatever the reasons the combination of Constantine’s moves got the Christian movement to accept the deal he offered and progressively they saw all this as the work of God. (There is at least one monumental image of Constantine’s vision adorning the walls of the Vatican.) A fateful hour had dawned, the seduction of Christianity by the state and its military apparatus. Within the space of one year the bishops were ordering Christians to remain in the army (Council of Arles, 314), within a decade there were religious wars with Christian orthodoxy on one side and heresy on the other, and within a century Augustine had formulated his doctrine of “just war”. The rest is history.
Or a kind of history.
When the emperor says licet Christianity is licensed. It’s allowed to exist by the say-so of the archaic human system built on the death of the victim. And then very quickly it appears that Christianity agrees reciprocally with the state’s mode of existence, with its violence. Christianity becomes franchised by the state, by a human system of violence. And in return Christianity franchises the state, its relentless natural violence. A separation-of-church-and-state motif does not overcome this, rather it effectively masks it. Within the separation lies a mutual collusion. And if biblical people invoke Romans 13 (submit to civil authority) as proof of apostolic support for this situation they conveniently overlook both the vastly different condition of Christianity at the time of Paul’s writing (a tiny apolitical group) and Paul’s more basic theological distinction between the Christian body and the wrath of this present world order.
As is obvious all this has been hashed out before. The discussion between the Christian peace tradition and the position of the mainline “just war” churches is old, bitter and unresolved. What I’m saying, however, wants to add something different. The franchising of Christianity by the state is breaking down from within. The crisis of violence in our 21st century world is of itself dissolving the implicit alliance of Christians and the state, instead opening up a new space where Christians are unfranchised, unlicensed, unofficial…unchained.
A new possibility is emerging, created by our contemporary historical crisis of elective wars that never end and the parallel systemic experience of destruction of the environment. The world system can be seen to be terminal and this puts people in a new situation, especially Christians who can recognize that this new situation is, in an amazing upside-down way, the transforming work of Christ. If Christians have colluded with the state and its just wars, Christ and the gospel of the forgiving and innocent victim never have. And so the more and more the world resorts to violence the more and more its violence is seen as...violence. The act of violence becomes implausible, inconclusive, inept, crazy. Our history is spinning into greater and greater chaos because of the refusal of the true answer--the forgiveness and compassion of Christ, which at the same time become the more evidently necessary the more they are refused. Thus Christ has opened up a new opportunity for his followers to return to their original unfranchised, unchained state, to find the gap in the world order where they can truly exist.
In this gap the gospel is free to speak itself in boundaryless transformative terms, without distinction of friend or foe, terrorist or freedom fighter, us and them, righteous and impure. I quote Scott Hutchinson, from his comment on the previous post. “The forgiveness at the heart of gospel life removes barriers, loosens bonds, unburdens, sets people free, leads to the mutuality of gifting and being gifted. Exhilarating, fulfilling, and terrifying! The source, of course, is God, whose radical self-giving transforms and endlessly offers life.” And progressively the actual space that Christians occupy is no longer demarcated by the built walls of their franchise but by this new open unmediated space that Christ has created in our time, dissolving the historical nexus of 313.
In the year 313 the Roman Emperor made Christianity a licensed religion. Constantine said licet, let it be permitted. For the first time in its history the movement of Christianity had official and final Roman approval, and it was already older then than the present U.S. Republic. Imagine that: 275 years without any secure government recognition, without having a king or an emperor at your back, without a sure place in society, without public symbols and celebrations to declare your right to exist. 275 years of civic contempt, mixed with oblique influence when people of status became Christian, then punctuated at other times by outbursts of lethal persecution.
When Constantine gave state permission to Christianity he had just won a decisive battle in which he had invoked the Christian god—a voice had spoken to him in a dream (in a later account it became a vision) telling him that he should emblazon the heavenly sign of Christ on the shields and helmets of his soldiers. He thus began the process of the militarization of Christian faith. True, there were already Christian soldiers in the Roman army, but they were there because they had been pressed into service, and seemed faithfully to adhere to the church’s absolute prohibition on killing--if not why was there no hint of a rebellion when Christian soldiers were subject of a harsh purge from the army under Diocletian about twenty years before? In other words they were there as a formal fill-up-the ranks presence, ready the moment the war was over to abandon the profession. Constantine realized somehow that it would be possible to enlist the support of this radical yet influential movement by calling a halt to the bitter persecution of his predecessors and then progressively according rights and privileges to the church, and at the same time creating the self-serving myth that the Christian god had spoken to him directly pledging his support. Christians of course had to want the end of persecution, and they probably shared a general desire for the peace of Roman society rent by continual civil war. Whatever the reasons the combination of Constantine’s moves got the Christian movement to accept the deal he offered and progressively they saw all this as the work of God. (There is at least one monumental image of Constantine’s vision adorning the walls of the Vatican.) A fateful hour had dawned, the seduction of Christianity by the state and its military apparatus. Within the space of one year the bishops were ordering Christians to remain in the army (Council of Arles, 314), within a decade there were religious wars with Christian orthodoxy on one side and heresy on the other, and within a century Augustine had formulated his doctrine of “just war”. The rest is history.
Or a kind of history.
When the emperor says licet Christianity is licensed. It’s allowed to exist by the say-so of the archaic human system built on the death of the victim. And then very quickly it appears that Christianity agrees reciprocally with the state’s mode of existence, with its violence. Christianity becomes franchised by the state, by a human system of violence. And in return Christianity franchises the state, its relentless natural violence. A separation-of-church-and-state motif does not overcome this, rather it effectively masks it. Within the separation lies a mutual collusion. And if biblical people invoke Romans 13 (submit to civil authority) as proof of apostolic support for this situation they conveniently overlook both the vastly different condition of Christianity at the time of Paul’s writing (a tiny apolitical group) and Paul’s more basic theological distinction between the Christian body and the wrath of this present world order.
As is obvious all this has been hashed out before. The discussion between the Christian peace tradition and the position of the mainline “just war” churches is old, bitter and unresolved. What I’m saying, however, wants to add something different. The franchising of Christianity by the state is breaking down from within. The crisis of violence in our 21st century world is of itself dissolving the implicit alliance of Christians and the state, instead opening up a new space where Christians are unfranchised, unlicensed, unofficial…unchained.
A new possibility is emerging, created by our contemporary historical crisis of elective wars that never end and the parallel systemic experience of destruction of the environment. The world system can be seen to be terminal and this puts people in a new situation, especially Christians who can recognize that this new situation is, in an amazing upside-down way, the transforming work of Christ. If Christians have colluded with the state and its just wars, Christ and the gospel of the forgiving and innocent victim never have. And so the more and more the world resorts to violence the more and more its violence is seen as...violence. The act of violence becomes implausible, inconclusive, inept, crazy. Our history is spinning into greater and greater chaos because of the refusal of the true answer--the forgiveness and compassion of Christ, which at the same time become the more evidently necessary the more they are refused. Thus Christ has opened up a new opportunity for his followers to return to their original unfranchised, unchained state, to find the gap in the world order where they can truly exist.
In this gap the gospel is free to speak itself in boundaryless transformative terms, without distinction of friend or foe, terrorist or freedom fighter, us and them, righteous and impure. I quote Scott Hutchinson, from his comment on the previous post. “The forgiveness at the heart of gospel life removes barriers, loosens bonds, unburdens, sets people free, leads to the mutuality of gifting and being gifted. Exhilarating, fulfilling, and terrifying! The source, of course, is God, whose radical self-giving transforms and endlessly offers life.” And progressively the actual space that Christians occupy is no longer demarcated by the built walls of their franchise but by this new open unmediated space that Christ has created in our time, dissolving the historical nexus of 313.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
The Gospel in a Time of Drones
Recent media comment on the Times Square bomb attempt (May 1st) underlines the background to this particular piece of terrorism is Taliban, not Al Qaeda, and a stand-out cause of radicalization of individuals in this context is the U.S. campaign of aerial bombing by drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Whether the confessed bomber, Faisal Shahzad, is giving a sincere account of his motives or not, he has presented this as the justification of his actions. The conclusion by a number of bloggers and opinion-makers: the aerial campaign has had as its consequence not the suppression of terrorism but the opening of a new seam. You don’t say!
Nothing enrages and radicalizes more than aerial bombardment. It had that effect in Britain. I remember the bomb sites when I was a child, still there in the late fifties. Aside from not having much money the British were in no hurry to clean them up because in their own stark way they were a monument to bitter resolve and victory. They said you may bomb us to the ground but we will never give in. Bombardment creates a Promethean will to defy whatever god comes from the sky to force us to submit. (You really have to kill everyone—or at least show you’re willing—to produce defeat from the air; hence the bumper-sticker logic “Nuke ‘em all!”.)
Bombardment from the air is one of those things that stops war being a gentleman’s game as it seems to have been viewed before, and gets everyone involved. This is a key part of Girard’s argument in Battling to the End—whole populations are mobilized psychically and physically in modern war so there is nowhere to escape bottomless rivalry between peoples. Thus we truly are battling to the end. But where is Christianity in all this?
In the same book Girard’s answer is that historical Christianity has failed. The gospel has removed sacrificial restraints but Christian churches have failed to persuade people to abandon rivalry in favor of forgiveness. I think this is the world-weariness of a thinker who has thought long into the night and is carried away on the tide of his own thoughts. Human logic cannot trump the gospel. Historical Christianity is historical Christianity. Contemporary Christianity is something else, and that is what is failing but it has not yet failed.
Contemporary Christianity is under a unique set of challenges, such that it really cannot look to the past for answers. Benedict XVI said recently that the most serious attacks on the church come from within and I think that is the most infallible thing he ever said. His words go way beyond the pedophile crisis and resonate with the accommodations that Christians have made with a world of violence. Christians look back to arguments of just war, of separation of church and state, of “spiritual” things being their concern and the world having a different set of rules. But a world that has been radically destbilized and deconstructed by Christianity cannot have its own rules. It can only survive with Christian “rules”, i.e. forgiveness, compassion, nonviolence. At the moment, however, formal Christianity seems to be the last to understand this. As a result Christianity today fails to come to the level of its own meaning in the world. In a world where the core cultural dynamic is the revelation of the victim the only future is to turn the other cheek. You would think that Christians who read the Sermon on the Mount would “get this,” but they are so filled up with the tortuous compromises that have defined the church since Augustine they cannot grasp the intense relevance and vitality of their own message.
But as Benedict hinted “the center cannot hold” and all those old formulations are failing. In their place something new is coming, a direct encounter of the ordinary average Christian with the text and spirit of the gospel in all its historical rawness, challenge, wonder and power. Small groups are springing up and they are engaged with the gospel in its full re-creative significance at the heart of the contemporary crisis. They are springing up everywhere and they alone are the way forward. As the drones pollute our skies with the rumor of total war the gentle wind of the Spirit speaks to the hearts of Christians the promise of new heavens and a new earth.
Nothing enrages and radicalizes more than aerial bombardment. It had that effect in Britain. I remember the bomb sites when I was a child, still there in the late fifties. Aside from not having much money the British were in no hurry to clean them up because in their own stark way they were a monument to bitter resolve and victory. They said you may bomb us to the ground but we will never give in. Bombardment creates a Promethean will to defy whatever god comes from the sky to force us to submit. (You really have to kill everyone—or at least show you’re willing—to produce defeat from the air; hence the bumper-sticker logic “Nuke ‘em all!”.)
Bombardment from the air is one of those things that stops war being a gentleman’s game as it seems to have been viewed before, and gets everyone involved. This is a key part of Girard’s argument in Battling to the End—whole populations are mobilized psychically and physically in modern war so there is nowhere to escape bottomless rivalry between peoples. Thus we truly are battling to the end. But where is Christianity in all this?
In the same book Girard’s answer is that historical Christianity has failed. The gospel has removed sacrificial restraints but Christian churches have failed to persuade people to abandon rivalry in favor of forgiveness. I think this is the world-weariness of a thinker who has thought long into the night and is carried away on the tide of his own thoughts. Human logic cannot trump the gospel. Historical Christianity is historical Christianity. Contemporary Christianity is something else, and that is what is failing but it has not yet failed.
Contemporary Christianity is under a unique set of challenges, such that it really cannot look to the past for answers. Benedict XVI said recently that the most serious attacks on the church come from within and I think that is the most infallible thing he ever said. His words go way beyond the pedophile crisis and resonate with the accommodations that Christians have made with a world of violence. Christians look back to arguments of just war, of separation of church and state, of “spiritual” things being their concern and the world having a different set of rules. But a world that has been radically destbilized and deconstructed by Christianity cannot have its own rules. It can only survive with Christian “rules”, i.e. forgiveness, compassion, nonviolence. At the moment, however, formal Christianity seems to be the last to understand this. As a result Christianity today fails to come to the level of its own meaning in the world. In a world where the core cultural dynamic is the revelation of the victim the only future is to turn the other cheek. You would think that Christians who read the Sermon on the Mount would “get this,” but they are so filled up with the tortuous compromises that have defined the church since Augustine they cannot grasp the intense relevance and vitality of their own message.
But as Benedict hinted “the center cannot hold” and all those old formulations are failing. In their place something new is coming, a direct encounter of the ordinary average Christian with the text and spirit of the gospel in all its historical rawness, challenge, wonder and power. Small groups are springing up and they are engaged with the gospel in its full re-creative significance at the heart of the contemporary crisis. They are springing up everywhere and they alone are the way forward. As the drones pollute our skies with the rumor of total war the gentle wind of the Spirit speaks to the hearts of Christians the promise of new heavens and a new earth.
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