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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Study, Virtually Christian, Chapter Five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be Happy!

Here's how the deal went down for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I believe this to be the case literally.

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

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

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

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

As a vision of Christianity this has serious consequences.

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

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

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

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

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

Be happy!

Tony

God and the Jesus Bees

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

God is a word. What does the word mean?

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

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

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

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

Is there a hotline at all?

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

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

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

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

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

Then we screwed up badly and got thrown out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Study, Virtually Christian, Chapter Four

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virtually Christian, Chap. Two (Part Two)

As Cathy said during the meeting, it’s a very hard thing to translate a piece of Spanish poetry into English. How much more challenging is it to start an entirely fresh language based in an entirely new principle of meaning, and carry the old language across to that!

This is what Jesus did. The gospels are littered with evidence of his word-spinning, his signal-giving, his soul-searing mind-bending significance-shifting. How could the Pharisees possibly ask him for a sign when they were surrounded by so many? They could not have been paying attention at all. Or, rather, because the source code for the language he was evolving was so utterly foreign to their own program, they were blind to all the signals he produced.

John’s gospel in particular is thick with signs, and awareness of their pivotal function.

“In the beginning was the word…” This has been read within an eternal framework, talking about the eternal Word of God made flesh in the person of Jesus. But to read it in purely a high doctrinal light takes away so much of its dynamism. We can also read it as: In the beginning was word, communication, sign, and this is with God and is God! And the beginning is absolute beginning, now, with this word/sign....

We remember where we came in on this last time. Human signs are manufactured items, all of them. The very first, original sign is the sound wrung from the awed lips of our distant ancestors when they became collective murderers of the first human victim. That noise signified the first abstract meaning— one not directly connected to a physical stimulus. Rather it signified the total complex of feelings (rage, violence, fear, peace) generated by terrible crisis of imitative desire and its wondrous resolution by the killing of the single victim. It was a sound of and for the sacred, the transcendent realm of meaning beyond direct satisfaction of needs. It also generated the name of a god representing the deceased victim, but who was not remembered as a victim, rather an all-powerful being responsible for both all the terror and all the peace. Then, from this first sound and its power of meaning all other words and significations got their start, like cells multiplying out from an original life form. Because once proto-humans “got” the trick of “sound + meaning” it would be almost automatic to imitate the same basic formula for every other experience in the actual world. (Remember how imitative the brain is: it can surely also imitate itself.)

And so again, if Jesus enters into the role of the primary victim but does so with infinite forgiveness and peace—which then becomes the meaning of the event rather than the anger and violence of the persecutors—then the words and signs spilling out from this event, the “good news”, is the beginning. It is an absolute beginning of human meaning, relationship, culture. And the beginning is even more primal than the ancestral beginning of human language and culture, because it undermines the “older” beginning with absolute life now, absolute giving now. Therefore, “In the beginning was the word….”

We also remember that the binary system of language came from the origins of culture (“all the terror / all the peace”), but in this astonishing new beginning there is only affirmation, only “yes”. We said, therefore, “Jesus took the ‘no’ out of life!” It was objected that “no” is still very important, e.g. “no to torture” or “no to slavery”. We then discussed how these vital “no’s” were part of a wider “yes”, and that a theology of no, protest or resistance against injustice, is still a necessary witness and ministry. The key thing is not to be infected by the violence against which we are protesting, to have the purity of heart to always affirm everyone, and the world too, even as we’re saying “no” to the systemic violence in it.

But back to signs. Here, for example, is a piece of bread. “This is my body for you…” Oh boy, the audacity and genius of this sign! We’re not talking about some strange ontological miracle whereby this “really, really” is Jesus’ body even though it still looks like bread (transubstantiation). Neither are we talking some peculiar “spiritual” reality coming from a different, spooky, non-material world. Nor are we talking about a depressing plain memorial, some empty theatre of the one atoning sacrifice of Christ. Rather, this is a sign, as sign, that subverts every other sign! It invokes Jesus’ intervention at the very root of our sign system and holds itself up as primordial, reconstituting sign. “Do this in memory (as a concrete sign) of me! Everything for us humans is sign and I want you to recall again and again that I have changed the very roots of our signs, out of violence into love: and this particular “sign” springs that truth up into our hearts and world, over and over.” The eucharist is the sign of the reinvention of signs by Jesus.

But, if this is the case, if Jesus is this radical intervention in our sign system, evidence surely has to show up also in the vast array of signs around us. There has to be a profound disturbance in our semiotic universe. Last week we looked at evidence from the Middle Ages. How about in our own time when we are surrounded by an ever expanding galaxy of signs? The argument of Virtually Christian is that, yes, indeed, there is evidence, and it shows up powerfully in contempoary movies and songs. There is the presence of what the book call “the photon of compassion”. This particular metaphor was chosen because a “photon” in physical terms is the elementary particle of light, but it is also a wave (like a wave in water). In other words it is a dual reality, both an observable “thing” and a relationship. The effect of Christ is both an identifiable reality at the heart of our sign world and yet a relationship that can only be properly appreciated in relationship.

Next week we will look at a number of examples of the photon of Christ but we ended this session with one highly telling example, the Disney cartoon, Wall E. This movie tells the story of a small, grubby robot left alone on earth to clean up the huge mess of a trash-covered planet. Meanwhile all the humans have taken off into space, literally cruising around the heavens and reduced to endlessly-entertained, obese parodies of human beings. The only one with any real humanity is the little robot, Wall E of the title. And we know in fact that Wall E is the new Adam because he falls in love with another robot called Eva and together they re-inspire humanity to return to earth and behave as real humans! Wall E is killed in the process and resurrected by Eva for good measure. In other words this is the story of the compassionate Christ but told without one mention of religion and more effective for that. Watching the movie the divine/human photon of compassion falls luminously from the screen into our hearts. And it does so because of the original refiguring of our sign system by Jesus.