A Tale of Two Anthropologies

I've heard it before and thought before it was worth reflecting on: the claim of two radically different versions of Christianity. Not just different churches, with divergent doctrines and customs--we're drearily used to that--but actually different Christianities.

The latest comes from the pen of William Rivers Pitt, a compelling, passionate writer who produces regular pieces for Truthout, an online journal of progressive opinion, investigation and analysis.

In a recent article he declared himself a Christian. He did not do this so much in spiritual or theological terms as to situate himself personally against what he sees as distortion of traditional faith and practice.

He complained with typical fire about "...this hideous, necrotic 21st century version of Christianity...you know, the version that has little if anything to do with what You tried to tell us in those four friendly books at the beginning of the New Testament. Do Unto Others has been replaced with Do Others In The Throat..."

He later added, "It is brutally hard to be a Christian in America these days. Some of us Christians take that bit about doing unto the least of us deeply, deeply seriously. Some of us Christians think that it is wrong, sinful, and in fact a brazen form of Apartheid to deny certain Americans the rights enjoyed by other Americans based upon who they love. Mostly, some of us think Christianity in America has gone barking-mad insane."

I once heard Marcus Borg say he thought there really were two religions named Christianity, the one that Pitt is denouncing, and another, more critically disposed, gentler, kinder, more embracing.

I think a more useful and transforming way of describing the situation is not two religions but two anthropologies. If we make a distinction of religions we are at once on the ground of conflicting gods, of religious warfare in fact, which would be the very ground a nonviolent Christianity is trying to avoid. If we make it instead a matter of anthropology we can give a genetic explanation which in its way involves us all.

What Pitt describes acidly as the "necrotic 21st century version" is from an anthropological viewpoint the product of the breakdown of the violent sacred within traditional Christianity. When Christianity entered the world of paganism it eventually found itself cutting a deal with the old generative human culture of violence. The ancient root of culture that chooses its victim and builds a regime on the victim's exclusion if not outright killing, this is so deeply part of normal human business it was inevitable widespread territorial Christianity would meld with it. But progressively the Gospel has undermined its own cultural Christian foundations, leading to secularism on the one hand and a loss of strict boundary identities and falling church membership on the other. The truly creative work of the Gospel is the emergence of new face-to-face groups dependent on generative relationships of love rather than pre-set boundaries. I will return to this shortly.

Against a loss of Christian foundations a "natural" human reaction is to circle the wagons, raise the drawbridge, tip the boiling oil, that kind of thing. In other words to double down on the old cultural foundations in violence. Pitt is absolutely right. It is necrosis. But the crucial thing to recognize is that we're talking about anthropology--the-way-humans-do-business--not religion in its usual metaphysical sense. Still less are we talking about something coming from Gospel revelation.

The latter has itself provoked a human crisis, but it only has a relation to the crisis the way a virus relates to the immune system. The virus provokes the reaction but it is not itself the "cytokine storm" that will potentially prove fatal. (The storm is a phenomenon in which the body produces a feedback loop of immune cells so overwhelming it will block the airways and kill the patient outright. Necrotic, like the man said!)

The difficulty of being a Christian today is the difficulty of expressing the love of Christ when liberal secularism may seem to have a better grasp of it than Christian churches, and liberal churches lack the will and inspiration to express Christ's love in a thorough-going, evocative lifestyle. We have grown used to churches as big cruise ships where we can lounge about on the way to heaven with thousands and thousands along for the ride, giving us a sense of worldly power in addition to the heavenly docking rights.

But what if being Christian today is about a key relationship style that can only be expressed in a face-to-face community, within a small group that takes this thing totally seriously? What if Pitt's problem is that he expects the cruise ship when really he's already in his rowboat with a bunch of hairy disciples, and this, dear Pete, is it! What if it's precisely the success of the gospel which has destroyed the churches--via both secularism and the violent immune reaction we have described? And now what is required are small groups willing to live in the strange new space of a world deeply affected by the transforming love of Christ even while it violently resists it? What if the new "church" is being asked to show the world what that love looks like, just for the heck of it!

We really are talking about a different anthropology, the alternative to the old one which has failed both in humanity generally and in Christianity in particular.

Tony Bartlett TinR

Good Friday

It took a cross. A Roman instrument of torture and public execution.

Around this the whole of human history seems to turn. But why this? Why this extremity of suffering and humiliation?

Why would Jesus have imagined this as his end?

Did he caught a glimpse of one when he was a boy and the Romans put down a rebellion,

crucifying thousands on the roadsides? And he knew this someday would be his fate too?

Possibly. But why? And how?

How would it turn out that the Romans arrested him and sentenced him to death as a political criminal, a terrorist?

How would that happen if Jesus' teaching had always been non-violence, "Turn the other cheek"?

Standing in front of the cross countless millions have felt the indescribable vibration of something new. A completely new human possibility.

So new that it has been given transcendent names like "grace" and "Holy Spirit." Surely these names are not wrong. The scripture itself uses them, and they signify an entirely new relationship with what we call God, with the divine.

But the new relationship could not be experienced apart from the frame of life in which we all exist. Apart from the body, from humanity. It took a human nerve cell to tell the centurion that here was the Son of God!

It takes a human nerve cell to vibrate before a piece of wood and the blood that drips on it.

It takes a human nerve cell to feel the earth move under our feet while the cross stands upon it.

Which perhaps begins to explain it.

Jesus embraced the cross because his own nerve cells told him here was the place where the deepest human vibrations gather to hide, in the body of another. Hatred. Anger. Fear. Power. Cruelty. Pity. Revulsion.

If he were to embrace this instrument of destruction and speak into it his indestructible word of truth, peace and forgiveness, then all would be made new. It only took the courage to decide to do it.

And that's what the gospels are, basically the story of his decision. They tell how by a supreme act of courage and wisdom he got the authorities to do what they naturally do, to collude against him and bring him to the cross.

No one had ever done this before. No one had dared. Jesus did. And for that reason God gave him a name that is above every other name.

And, reciprocally, Jesus changed the name of God. He spoke into the name of God the very things he spoke into the the cross. Truth. Peace. Forgiveness. No longer, therefore, could humanity freely make the dark vibrations within the cross the shadow face of God.

Entirely the reverse. Because the nerve cells are made new, so is God!

All is now new! All is grace! All is Holy Spirit! All is possibility, of a new nonviolent humanity! 

Good Friday. Really!

Tony Bartlett, T&P Theologian-in-Residence

"Peeta, I have prayed for you." Christ & The Hunger Games

A movie can be evaluated by its internal features, things like dialogue, cinematography, acting. It can also be assessed by its connection to the wider culture, the way it reflects and resonates with its contemporary world and moment. On the first metric The Hunger Games is nothing out of the ordinary, I would even say fairly pedestrian. On the second it is absolutely gripping, a total phenomenon for our present human landscape.

Our collective relationship to this movie makes The Hunger Games an unprecedented cultural event.

It is the only movie I have been to that was still sold-out on the second weekend of release and with four screens showing in the multiplex. It looks well on track to finish its U.S. run with $350 to $400 million in ticket sales, topping the first Twilight and Harry Potter films. It ended its first full week with about $190 million, a record for a non-sequel. From the opening frames you feel a visceral audience reaction, a kind of complicity brought by the public into the cinema, prompted from the advance publicity and buzz about the film.

The story is a relentlessly brutal sacrificial progression from start to finish. Set in a post-apocalyptic future it tells how a capital city populated by a privileged elite requires annual "tributes" of young people from outlying districts. These young women and men fight to the death within a digitally-controlled hi-tech arena where the action is televised at every point for the entertainment of the populace. That much everyone knew before their ticket stub was handed to them, so as the movie opens there is a palpable sense both of dread and fascination.

But there is something more besides. There is also a recognition of our actual cultural condition. We too have a sacrificial celebrity culture played out against a backdrop of distant arena wars: in each instance a steady supply of young people are sacrificed to the machinery of death. We watch this movie to experience virtually what we already experience...virtually.

But is that the only pay-off? It has been noticed that there is no religion in the movie (and none in the trilogy of books by Suzanne Collins behind the movie). Diana Butler Bass in an article in The Washington Post said this was because the books rejected any religion of collusion with sacrificial empire. She believes that "(U)ltimately 'The Hunger Games' argues for a human future of love and non-violence." Diana identifies the character of Peeta in the movie as the figure representing this hope.

In the books, however, the narrative is always told from the perspective and voice of the female protagonist Katniss, and Peeta is there essentially as her foil. Yes, he is the character suggesting an alternative of compassion, but this role and the potential of this emotion are never developed. Peeta never exercises any plot agency beyond his consistent resolve to help and protect only Katniss. For this reason the structural message of the books seems to remain the brute human destiny of sacrificial killing.

In itself this is a huge revelation. The cultural event of The Hunger Games is a massive disclosure of the sacrificial principle. It is many, many times more significant than Shirley Jackson's short story, The Lottery, published in 1948, with which The Hunger Games has the key device of a terrifying sacrificial lottery in common. As a cultural phenomenon it far eclipses Jackon's piece which is recognized as one of the most famous short stories of American literature. Now with The Hunger Games just about everyone knows clearly about sacrificial killing as a fundamental way of ordering society.

At the same time, however, I believe the movie cannot not just be about sacrifice. Despite its bleak formal structure the cinematic event implies the compassion of Christ standing behind it. It is the cross of Christ that has relentlessly brought the sacrificial principle to the surface and made a liberating consciousness of it tolerable. Peeta is not in the story by accident and I do not think it is a coincidence that his name is a form of Peter. Peeta is the point where the full character of Christ's revelation threatens to break through. He is the Christological nonsacrificial principle, repressed in the narrative, but nevertheless dynamically essential to make the disclosure of sacrifice work. Christ stands behind Peeta and the Hunger Games like the radio-opaque dye in an MRI, rendering the isolation and identification of the cancer possible.

Diana Butler Bass is therefore not wrong. The Hunger Games looks toward "a better world based not in sacrificial violence but in sacrificial love." But it does so not out of any ideological principle, rather because of the deep revelatory and transformative agency of Christ himself bringing to birth the possibility of a new way of being human on earth.

Tony Bartlett, Theologian-in-Residence

Hot Sticky Life

This is not a blog about hell, that topic's been done to death...

But there is a flip-side to the discussion and it's about life. Absolute life.

Remember when we were kids, playing all day on long summer days, until the sun went down? Remember our hot sticky bodies, and how they ran and ran and hid and ran again, and never felt they could or would ever stop?

A child's body is programmed to exponential growth. It is flush with healthy cells dividing and redividing, pumping out growth all over the body and on a nonstop basis. I think this is one reason death so often comes as a shock to children. It literally does not fit with their body-world and has to be explained to them.

The news can be devastating. This is why we invent comforting tales like, "Don't worry Grandma is in Heaven, looking down on us, smiling and happy."

On a recent visit to the family dermatologist (don't worry, only a minor problem!) the doctor was eager to talk about his specialism. He said contemporary research showed there were lots of stem cells in the adult body, capable in principle of providing fresh growth for all the body's organs. But they remained inactive, while the aging, defective and dead cells accumulated. Preventing aging, he said, could simply be a matter of "taking out the garbage."

Whether this is true or not it sheds light on the unrelenting medical interest in curing us of...death.

Is this a theological concern? Does it perhaps derive its roots from the Hebrew and New Testament notion of life?

The Book of Wisdom tells us "God created us for incorruption....but through the devil's [the adversary's] envy death entered the world" (2:3-24). Jesus said, "I came that they may have life and have it to the full." (John 10:10). If Christ overcomes the devil (the adversary) then he fulfills God's created project of life....

Western Christians are not used to thinking about this human body-existence as one day over-brimming with life. Rather we have the default thinking from which the Grandma story above derives: a two-tiered cosmos with some other heavenly space above this one constituted by a totally other, nonmaterial, purely "spiritual" existence--that's where we will find "life"...

Yuk.

I say "yuk" really for three reasons. First, it is contradicted at multiple points by the biblical vision of life: e.g., the Lord who "formed the earth and made it...didn't create it a waste, [but] ... formed it to be inhabited," (Isaiah 45:18). Second, the mental construct of that perfect world above can only be created by negative pairing and opposition, "spiritual" against "material," "heaven" against "earth." Essentially it's a mental trick and a perverse one. Thirdly and simply, it goes against our first fresh instinct that life should live and not die. It contradicts those hot sticky bodies filled with fun and hope and joy. After that primordial child-time any concept of death is going to be a contradiction to the body-self, and I don't think a good Creator would make that sensed contradiction a false sense!

The very first systematic theologian of Christianity was a man named Origen who lived and taught in Alexandria, Egypt, in the early part of the third century. His thought was framed in the Greek philosophical world, especially Middle Platonism. Despite the formally eternal, other-worldly horizon of this thought (again think Grandma's heaven...) Origen was a superb biblical exegete and sought in all things to be faithful to scripture. That meant he maintained the truth of resurrection (which is absurd in Platonism). But more even than that he believed in the final restoration or return of all things to God (apokatastasis), including even the devil! In which case of course hell itself must be non-eternal. In fact Origen held to the medicinal or restorative character of all spiritual suffering including that of the "damned." As he put it, "Each sinner kindles his own fire...," and God achieves nothing by force or imposition, but by discipline, persuasion, instruction.

What a tragedy that the horizon of salvation thinking in the West would not be Origen's redemptive, scriptural and holistic vision, rather Augustine's narrow, legalistic and punitive one! I think we can reasonably ignore Origen's Greek metaphysical framework and re-read him in a materially grounded, culture-and-body process (one in which all the violence of human relationships is undone and overcome). But it is much more difficult to separate Augustine's concept of individual election from an other-worldly framework. A private legal decree by God can never be known in any final real or historical way, so the matter of who is saved must, by definition, find its answer in another world. This world, this earth, goes by the by.

It's telling that one of the figures who tried to get Origen's view condemned in the East was the Emperor Justinian: from the absolute state's perspective if you get rid of absolute punishment how can you possibly endure? Augustine's theology fits the interests of the state much better. But now people are less and less willing to be coerced either by God or by the state, but they are open to being persuaded by life and its immanent meaning.

In which case Origen's affirmation of life as absolute may be due for revival. Perhaps we should be thinking of taking out the theological garbage as well as the biological! 

Tony Bartlett, T&P Theologian-in-Residence

Answering Santorum (Or Five Talking Points for a Peace Christianity)

It's a truism in the Mimetic Theory community that liberals and conservatives start imitating each other when they get mad. They say opposite things but they say them with the same reciprocal and scapegoating anger.

 "You are taking away my freedom! No, you are taking away my life!"

In fact they are not saying all that much opposite things. When it gets down to it each side sees the other as threatening what is of absolute value. (Where in fact would you chose to put liberal and conservative either side of the paragraph above?) At all events the visceral anger is a recipe sooner or later for murder.

And that puts the socially committed Christian in a considerable bind. Indeed a long time before the situation gets to murder a Christian is aware of Jesus' teaching that all kinds of name-calling are against the meaning of the Kingdom and incur the same end-times judgment. To call someone a "fool" brings the whole world crashing down, in the end...

So what do you do as a Christian to raise your voice, to get a hearing, when the stakes are so high and the only voice to get heard is the last one to say the loudest, cruelest thing? How really do you present something that has enough force and strength to get heard and yet does not re-enter the Colosseum of name-calling?

Jesus was a fantastic speaker and preacher. He used stories that often had a very sharp bite to them (think the parable of the talents, and of the laborers in the vineyard, the virgins and the lamps...). He spoke a clear and present critique of wealth and hypocrisy, plus issued harsh apocalyptic warnings. The sweet Jesus meek and mild can too easily be stripped of these elements. But can we speak like him?

Our situation is complicated because so much of Jesus-style language has been hijacked by fundamentalism, lacking the profound disclosive truth of his own personal journey, and it comes off simply as violent. We are all too aware of how righteous language slips so easily into righteous rivalry.

And yet the need for effective language becomes critical when national politicians employ theology to claim higher ground and do so denying legitimacy to their opponents. Rick Santorum suggested recently that Barack Obama promotes “some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible." Specifically, Obama has "a world view that elevates the earth above man."

Apart from the fact this is holy war politics Santorum also invokes some of the worst elements of popular dualist theology to discredit Obama's policies. His deformed viewpoint can be well answered by those in the theological know but how can it be countered on a more general or populist level? How can we do the kind of thing Jesus did, addressing multitudes?

One answer is to provide a different positive language to people and to do so by insisting in season and out of season on this new language. Then it's not a matter of kicking up dust in Santorum's face down in the arena but gradually making a way of thinking and speaking so familiar and persuasive that it acts on its own to disqualify his words. What is needed is a new fabric of language that holds together at so many edges that it becomes a dynamic world view in its own right.

To this purpose I offer five theological "talking points" below. They can be added to, changed or reduced: they are not, as the saying goes, set in stone! MT people will recognize the anthropological underpinning and they will surely know how and where all have already been addressed by Girardian scholars. The purpose here is to try to give the language in some bare essentials so that it, or something like, can perhaps progressively become a kind of native theological tongue.

1. Christianity is about a death which catalyzes earthly compassion, not a legal transaction for the sake of eternity. Salvation is a different human relational basis, and grace and the Spirit are the divine agents of a new humanity.

2. Interpretation begins from the end-term of scripture which is God's character as revealed in Jesus, not from a punitive atonement which colors the entire narrative with deep violence. Revelation therefore has its own history. It is seen as a struggle for understanding leading finally to the transformed eye of Jesus' gospel. In this understanding apocalyptic metaphors are not elevated into metaphysics (viz. hell) but are judged both as part of the ongoing struggle for understanding and, again, in the final light of the character of God.

3. Love is the definition of election, election is not the definition of love. Augustine and Calvin introduced a destructive principle into Christian thought by placing sovereign election as a principle superior to love. This is entirely intelligible to a Roman-law mindset, but does not reflect the mystery of self-giving love which is the end light of revelation.

4. Compassion and solidarity are the core anthropology of biblical revelation. Solidarity is not the same as state socialism which may be seen as a vertical force. Solidarity is an upwelling of unity with other people "from below" and realizes a higher (more human) form of freedom. Solidarity is inherently democratic and seeks to enshrine itself in policy for the sake of a transformed earth.

 5. Our after-death destiny is understood as an earth-based "sleep" which is a survival of our basic identity in communion with Christ. It is perhaps a kind of "cosmic life support" which is not full consciousness, but neither is it extinction. At all events it looks toward the restoration of full bodily existence in Resurrection which is the true New Testament goal (rather than "immortality of the soul").

Tony Bartlett TinR Theology & Peace

This Pound of Flesh

OK it's true, it's been too long since the last one. I apologize.

A blog is supposed to be something on a quick tempo, a smart, digital-style frequency, not every new moon!

I would really love to do that. But somehow I can't. It goes with being a theologian-in-residence of a radical new theological movement: you need time to let the coffee percolate. It's partly the subject matter I must choose, and partly the method or style in which I comment on the material. The first is challenging, the second has been called (well, once anyway, to my hearing, and not to mince words) "ponderous..."

Take for example what I want to talk about right now: death overcome by resurrection. That's a challenge. The Greeks laughed at Paul for even bringing it up, and it's still foolishness (and a scandal) to most philosophers. So then, how shall I approach the topic? Well, I want to root it in human and material possibility, not in the sheer miraculous. And at once you see what I mean. To move away from the mythical and the fairy tale and the imagined supernatural, is to stretch people's thoughts further and deeper then they often want to go. It is indeed asking them to ponder, to think more deeply, to weigh the matter with all its mass and gravity. And if this thing is weighty, or heavy to lift with the mind, the easy option is to dismiss it, to drop it. But then if you let it drop nothing changes. There is no new vision.

And yet there really is a new vision to communicate, and it is always my dream and desire to do so, So let me see, one more time, if I have lightened the load if only a smidgeon, enough to tempt you to bear the burden of my blue-moon blog!

In all the recent firestorm over the existence of hell, or "eternal conscious torment" as its juicily called by true believers, there was very little mention of resurrection. This is strange because resurrection is the New Testament selling point to the pagan world, the new deal that beat out several existing versions of the afterlife. John says the wicked are raised to judgment (5:29, an open-ended concept which is not the same as a sentence to eternal torment) but you'd wonder why God would bother at all if the wicked are already in conscious hell (judged spiritually at point of death, as the broad Western tradition has it), unless God was particularly sadistic and wanted acute bodily agony added to the spiritual pain of perdition. However, putting all that aside, the point is something happens to the WHOLE of humanity and this is consistent with the restoration of all of creation as Paul describes it (Romans 8: 19-21).

So what happens? What, you could say, is the deep meteorological forecast for that glorious day of resurrection?

According to Karl Rahner there is no rigid distinction between the material and the spiritual. As he explains it the "spiritual" is simply the possibility of matter to "return" to itself in relationship. Matter is always bent in or over on itself and ultimately the reason for this is that matter is rooted in an absolute relational ground which is God. Again according to Rahner, the first place we know the singleness of matter and spirit is in the human. So good theology does not invent a scheme of essential forms of being and then fit humanity to it, as the Greeks did. Rather it lets humanity itself teach the radical unity of matter and spirit.

The discovery of mimetics by Rene Girard powerfully underscored the human unity of matter and spirit. You could say imitation is the spiritual. The fact that I become so totally identified with the "other", either in violence or compassion, is the event of the spiritual. There is nothing else to it. And the discovery by neural science of the actual neurons which make this happen--the repetition within our own nervous systems of motor signals received from outside ourselves--demonstrates conclusively the identity of the spiritual and the material.

We know that this kind of imitation also happens with animals, but recent experiments show it happening even at some level in plant life. Plants emit chemical signals for self-defense which other plants are then able to imitate. It seems beyond doubt that material nature is constantly wired into itself, repeating the "other" in itself and in relation to itself, all the way up and down the chain of complexity, from human to atom and back to human again.

In a framework like this resurrection is simply the time and place where the relation of matter to itself reaches an intensification which is completely generative. It is the point where human beings imitate an unending, boundless form of life, and all creation does the same with them. The ideal of "hard" science is always to find the indestructible, the infinitely powerful, the bottomless well of energy. This is a distorted copy (read violent) of the true current of life which is so astonishingly gentle, so nonviolent, so loving, as to be virtually invisible to normal human culture born in and through violence. The biblical story is of a millennia-long struggle to shape a space and an experience that can provide the authentic signals of this other life. The person of Jesus is the masterpiece of this process, the definitive set of signals corresponding to genuine endless life, and the cross is the single summary of those signals. It makes perfect sense that the cross and Jesus' death into the depths of the earth should translate in the space of thirty six hours into resurrection.

Both Paul and John used the figure of seed and sowing for resurrection. In doing so they intuitively cast this event in its most natural and correct frame: "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit...." To be a Christian is to imitate in life and death the revolutionary material transformation brought by Jesus.

And so, yes, the challenge is to think like this rather than some magical supernaturalism. The power of the resurrection is truly divine, but it is not Thor-like, a lightning strike from an angry above. There is a God-given potential in material nature for infinite life, but it is founded in a mystery of absolute nonviolence and self-giving and that is the deepest challenge of human existence, as well an absolute scandal to manipulative science. It has taken aeons of inconceivable gentleness folding over on itself finally to become the astonishing message of the gospel.

Most Christians I have encountered much prefer the lazy thinking of supernaturalism. They want ghosts, spirits, a world beyond, and some fairy-tell scene of resurrection essentially redundant to the afterlife. It is this supernaturalism which in fact has fostered the fractious and cruel idea of the "Rapture": resurrection as an other-worldly event for the the privileged few followed by disaster on earth. A true regard for gospel resurrection cannot but place it at the heart of the material realm, which God created as good and for the sake of final Sabbath blessing. And, oh yes, in this context "the resurrection of judgment" could easily mean a dramatic and painful crisis of truth for anyone who died in willful violence. What the outcome would be afterward is hidden from us. But it seems hard to believe that with creation transformed in explosive life before their eyes anyone would still choose not to be part of it.

So, how is that for pondering?

And I'm telling myself now the word ponder is related to "pound," i.e. sixteen ounces. To ponder like above is to weigh and value the "pound of flesh" God has given us. It is the only medium in which we can possibly know the ultimate amazing mimesis of resurrection!

Tony Bartlett TinR Theology & Peace

Millennial God

Imagine this. A man arrives in a small, isolated village. He teaches the people a song. It is very beautiful and they sing it almost all the time, together and individually. Communications improve and people come from far and wide to hear the song. Strangely no one else learns to sing it except the villagers. But everyone loves to hear it sung and it plays continually on the radio, on the internet, in movies, on iPods, on planes. After a while everyone is so used to it that they forget entirely that it came from the villagers. They dispute as to which radio station or media conglomerate owns the rights to the song, and the disputes are never resolved. In the meantime the song continues gaining in popularity and people play it over and over. One day a Ph.D. student doing research discovers where the song came from. Her research is definitive and proves the song belongs to the villagers. Even more importantly she goes to seek out the village. But strangely she finds it deserted. There is no one there. Possibly they all died. Or, perhaps, they just dispersed and are now spread throughout the world. But to all practical purposes they no longer exist, so they cannot claim the song. To whom then does the song really belong?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In a recent blog Richard Beck--a featured speaker at our next T&P conference--said "many churches are jerk factories" (sic). A little later in the piece he softened his stance and said he was exaggerating of course.

In one of my own blogs about a year ago I compared Christianity to a bomb that had gone off in the world, changing everything, and the churches were little more than a cultural relic from a time before the bomb was fully exploded. As such they provided a kind of Sunday vacation from lived-world reality, which in fact no longer needed or wanted their institutional program. I found myself later telling a concerned pastor I had likely exaggerated.

Yet another magazine blog I came across asked why the Millennial generation seemed to be abandoning the churches, including evangelical churches. The writer concluded it was because when they go to church, "instead of hearing about how to live with those who’ve been kicked to the curb, how to be Christ to a world caving in on itself, they hear about how the church’s job is to maneuver itself into positions of power, respectability, relevance, etc". Along the way the writer had also reflected on an apparently more comfortable explanation given by some within the churches. The Millennials have been seduced by an essentially secular culture, their youthful passion and idealism now recruited by a world that sees itself simply on its own terms without the need for an outside meaning (i.e."transcendence").

I think in fact there is truth in both answers given and from a radical perspective. It is certainly more than possible to challenge Christian practice and its lack of human credibility, and this is Beck's point too. But in the background it is also undeniably true there is an entirely different set of cultural references for young people, and these are not the same as the ones traditionally relied on by Christianity to get people coming to church. The idea of eternal salvation, or its opposite, becomes less and less insistent when compared with the pressing concerns and possibilities of the actual world and actual human history. The reason why it was possible to be Beck's "Christian jerk" was because the major meaning of life in the churches has always been to get to a heavenly elsewhere, and if one way or other you had paid your way then you were golden, further discussion closed. But now that scenario is much less plausible or acceptable if progressively the sensed meaning of life is life itself--i.e. how to make life on earth succeed. And so the issue of Christian credibility comes round to join the issue of cultural sensibility. The culture itself demands a different kind of Christian.

But here is the kicker.

What if cultural change is precisely the effect of Christianity? What if the ability of our world progressively to condition its own meaning, without reference to a God of the afterlife, is itself the outcome of the gospel? What if over long years and on multiple fronts the worldview instilled by Jesus has set the earth free to be more and more its own authentic space of human life--even and paradoxically as that space builds up greater and greater threats to itself? What if we take the Lord's prayer at its word, that Jesus came to fulfill the project of creation through the Father's kingdom here on earth? Or the text of Daniel employed by Jesus, that the coming of the Son of Man, the Truly Human One, is dynamically opposed to all the false kingdoms of history which disfigure the human? What if our era is in fact a time when all this is becoming implicitly understood, when the space of the earth is implicitly embraced as the final space of God's design?

Of course the great majority of people do not see it as God's design in this way.

God is out of the equation. Philosophers have spoken, influentially, of the death of God, the flight of God.

But what if "God" has died, or taken flight, because really and truly our concept of God was terminally faulty, and little by little we've come to understand this, again because of the gospel? You can only get a jerk-factory church if God himself is a jerk. And he has pretty much earned the reputation: an alarming dual personality, with a sadist readiness to fry his creatures for all eternity, and heck, we all better get used to it; and, on the other hand, a mawkish sentiment of love for those on his good side. No wonder people like this God, and then rapidly go off him. He is entirely within our image, manipulable according to the deepest human template We can use him to hate, and then we can twist him to love.

John's gospel tells us "No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known" (John 1:18). Which suggests that really we have no categories for God except whatever is derived from Jesus, and that leaves the question much more mysterious and mystical. We are called to encounter our "God" as the endless gentleness of love, so profound and so radical we can hardly imagine it. In order to come anywhere near we must hang around Jesus continually. The incommunicable God is communicated only by the absolutely powerless one.

Which suggests in turn that the church is both less and more than it ever was. Less, because it does not have a privileged business line to the truth--it does not own the song any more. And more, because it can, against the background of a song sung by all the world, begin to realize the deepest human meaning of the gospel. The church may possibly learn to sing the song in and among its own members rather than simply listen to recordings which it claims legally to own. Instead of the factory churning out products people respect less and less, it might become a laboratory for the breakthrough of a new human life for which all are longing

The role of the christian is not to set up a church as place, as essential freehold for salvation, but to live more intensely than the world the change that is taking place in the world. The God of the new millennium is in the future, our future, because the past is always structured out of violence. Love (and the song it sings) always belongs to and gives birth to the future.

Tony Bartlett