Counting the Cost, or Provoking Persecution?

This morning’s sermon was from Luke 14, in which Jesus turns to the large crowds following him to Jerusalem and says “Whoever doesn’t hate…family…their own life…and give up all their possessions cannot be my disciple” (paraphrased).  His use of hyperbole here is just pointing out that these are things that are important enough to us that they might compete with the truth and life that Jesus preached.  Jesus knew that he was on his way to his own execution, and he was pretty sure that these eager followers weren’t quite aware of that fact.  So he told them two stories about people who were committing to large undertakings (building a tower, or fighting a battle) who had to “count the cost” of their endeavour.  Basically, Jesus was saying “are you sure you know what you’re getting into by following me?”

I think this is a great story, but I usually feel a little strange reading it in my own context.  There is no persecution of Christians in Canada, and  I won’t have my belongings seized if I’m seen going to church (which is something that happened to early Christians).  But then, in Jesus’ own day there was relative religious freedom as well: as a Jew, Jesus had the freedom to worship in ways not permitted to other peoples conquered by Rome.  And Jesus kept the feasts, attended synagogue, and upheld every other mainstream religious observance of the Jews.  So did his disciples and apostles.  The only things they did not do were the pious observances of the Pharisees, and lots of people didn’t do those things; surely that was not why Jesus was killed.

I come from a Christian family, so there’s no need to `hate` my family; I haven’t lost relationships due to my allegiance to Christ, and in fact I seem to have gained the respect of even my atheist friends because of the little bit that Christ shines through me.  And while I’m  willing to give up my worldly possessions, I don’t have many of those – and we all know that we should probably give more, but don’t anyway.  So there don’t seem to be real connections in most of this section to my actual life.

This troubles me.

This troubles me because I know that the system that nailed Jesus to a cross still exists in many different ways.

I’ve heard a lot of preachers talk about how the gospel is supposed to be “offensive” and that if we aren’t being persecuted it’s because we aren’t actually preaching the gospel.  Now, most of the time the people preaching this imply that the gospel will make us offensive to our neighbours because they will not appreciate our moral lifestyles.  This strikes me as disingenuous: Ned Flanders is annoying, but people don’t persecute him and his family because they’re honest and kind, even when it’s seemingly to a fault.  But this is the only sense we can make of the New Testament if our religious framework is entirely moral.  It says that people will persecute Christians, so if Christianity is all about being moral, then people must hate us for our morality, right?  But what if, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggested, Christianity is profoundly ethical but distinctly amoral?  Or, barring that, what if morality simply wasn’t what Jesus died for?

While I feel strange reading this text in my own context because there’s nothing in my world that will persecute me just for being a Christian, it makes me look at Jesus’ context too.  As I said earlier, he was actually free to worship the way he wanted, just because he was Jewish.  He irritated people by his morality, but more often than not it was his seeming lack of morality that infuriated his enemies – because he ate with sinners and the unwashed poor.  No, what got him killed was not his religious identity or his religious morality, it was his religiousethics.  This passage about counting the cost doesn’t make sense outside of the ethical question.

So I’m  left with the question: why am I not persecuted?  I was told today that it’s quite possible for God to place me in a context in which I don’t need to be, and I’m thankful if that’s simply the case; but as I said earlier, the system that nailed Jesus to the cross still exists.  Governments haven’t become perfectly just; economies are still extremely unbalanced, moreso now than they have been in quite a long while; and there are still theologies floating around that ensnare people in a web of legalism, or materialism, or other things that blot out the freedom of Christ.  If Jesus were here and now instead of in ancient Palestine, I’m  not sure his story would end all that much differently (though he probably would have been on terror watch lists and eventually imprisoned and held without charges, rather than arrested and immediately executed).  But Jesus isn’t here in the same way he was there; I’m  here in his place, but I’m not doing what he did.  Jesus was teaching the people how to get out from under their oppressors, and when questioned, he openly denounced the systems that oppressed them.  He didn’t join any particular movement or party, but he spoke out for what was right, no matter the cost.

My moralist theology doesn’t require that of me, and so I am not persecuted.  The implication of this is that, if I’m  not doing what Jesus did, then I may not even be a disciple – because when I count the cost, I get zeroes in every column.  Being a Christian has cost me nothing, mostly because I don’t actually do anything.  It’s not that I want to be persecuted – I sure don’t! – but that by Jesus’ standard I haven’t actually followed him through the parts of discipleship that are costly.  I’m one of the people in the crowd who’s excited to go to Jerusalem, not knowing that it’s a death march because I haven’t actually been paying attention to what Jesus has been doing, and I haven’t actually committed to doing likewise.

I recognize, of course, that I don’t have the public profile that Jesus had – that because I don’t have his level of influence I should not expect the same level of backlash.  Of course I recognize that.  My circles are almost entirely Christian, so there isn’t much of a culture clash to deal with.  I live in the middle of Mennonite territory, so when it comes to being counter-cultural in regard to worldly systems of economy and materialism I’m  a rank amateur.  I may live my entire life in relative obscurity, and the suggestion that I count the cost may always end with a low tally; if that’s what God has for me, so be it!  But what troubles me perhaps more than my recognition that Jesus’ ethics are the costly part of discipleship and that I haven’t been living them is that the only backlash I get as a Christian is for suggesting this very thing, that we be willing to live with such radical ethics that they draw the attention and backlash of the system.  I don’t feel persecuted by Christians, but sometimes people roll their eyes when I tell them I bought a book by Noam Chomsky or Elizabeth May, or kindly warn me against any sort of radical ethic and remind me of the goodness of God in that I’m  not persecuted.  We’ve become used to a theology that demands much of us personally and almost nothing publicly, and by suggesting otherwise I suppose I’m  rocking the boat.  I’m  very far from persecuted, but my answer to Jesus’ ethic is too radical to be comfortable, so it provokes some opposition.  I imagine that if I were to continue to insist upon a more radical ethic, the opposition would get stronger.  I pray that this is not the case.

Jesus’ first opposition was from his own people too.  I don’t find that particularly comforting.

 

Gods and Gaming: A New Kind of Hero

Another comment on an old post about gaming made me decide to post this here.  Let me know what you think!

_______________________________

In the beginning, Tiamat the elder goddess of chaos found the younger gods to be noisy and annoying, and planned to kill them.

Terrified, they looked to the strongest among them, Marduk, to save them.  But Marduk was also crafty, and added a condition: if he saved them, he would be king of the gods.  They agreed, and he went to face Tiamat in battle.

The battle was suitably epic.  Faced with a much larger, older, and more powerful foe, Marduk managed to overcome the odds.  He let his guard down for a moment, and when Tiamat (often portrayed as a sea monster, Leviathan) opened her massive jaws to finish him, he used his godly power to force the wind down her throat, blowing up her belly like a balloon; then he shot her in the belly with an arrow, popping that balloon.

You know, like how Richard Dreyfuss killed the shark in Jaws.

From the messy corpse of Tiamat, Marduk crafted the world and its inhabitants.  And so you see, order comes from the forceful suppression of chaos, and life is born out of violence.

This is the Babylonian creation myth, and it’s inescapably woven into our culture.  From it, we get our concept of what it means to be a hero: be stronger and craftier than your enemies, meet violence with greater violence, and rely on your ideals and virtues to justify your actions.  Violent suppression of violence, in the name of peace.  Theologian Walter Wink refers to this narrative as “the myth of redemptive violence”.

Of course, it sounds negative when you say it like that.  But really, that’s the story we’re told over and over again, in novels and comics and movies, but perhaps more in video games than anywhere else.  Video games involve us like no other medium: while a movie or novel lets us act out the part of the hero vicariously, video games put us in that role almost completely.  We get all of the hero action, with none of the mortal danger!

But our desire to be part of this hero narrative isn’t just in our cultural media.  We do it in church, too.  I’m writing this on a Sunday night, and I have a song from this morning’s service stuck in my head: “You are a mighty warrior, dressed in armour of light!  Crushing the deeds of darkness, lead us on in the fight!  Through the blood of Jesus, victorious we stand!”  We hold evangelistic “crusades”, we practice “spiritual warfare”, and we sing “Onward Christian Soldiers!”  We seem to incorporate the Babylonian myth of redemptive violence even into our religion.

We’re not the first.  The Bible occasionally refers to God in this sort of way – we call it “the divine warrior motif”.  But there’s a very important distinction to be made: when the Bible portrays God as a divine warrior, it’s usually being ironic.  It’s giving a nod to the myth of redemptive violence, acknowledges that it’s there, and then sweeps its legs out from underneath it.  Here’s how.

First, the myth of redemptive violence is based on a sense of struggle that goes all the way back to creation: the world was created from the bloody corpse of an elder goddess, and from a violent matricide all mortal life is born.  All creation myths of the Ancient Near East have some form of this, except for Israel’s: our God creates the universe with a word.  Our God is not an underdog who must overthrow the oppression of chaos by violent means; God is the perfection of power, and there are no forces who can stand against God except by the grace of God’s mercy.  Peace and order do not come from violent struggle, but from the character of the God who creates them and continues to will them.  Violent struggle is not something that we inherit from God, but something that we create for ourselves.

Second, it uses violent symbols and images, but subverts the violence of those symbols with non-violent content.  Revelation portrays Jesus as riding on a white horse (classic symbol of [violent] good: the white knight) and leading armies to victory with a sword.  But the armies he leads are made up of the saints, who are wearing the white robes they were given for being willing to be martyrs – that is, they walked to their own execution for the sake of pledging allegiance to Christ rather than to the oppressive empire.  These are not warriors!  And Christ, the “rider on the white horse”, has a sword that comes from his mouth.  Our God doesn’t use violence to create the world, but words; our Lord doesn’t use violence to destroy his enemies, but words.  Revelation says that we have overcome Satan “by the blood of the lamb and the word of their [our] testimony” (12:11).  We don’t use violence to overcome evil, we use words.  So the form of the literature is violent, and in that way it fits right in with the myth of redemptive violence; but the meaning of the text undercuts that violent mythology.

So what does this mean for us?  We’re surrounded by the myth of redemptive violence: American culture in particular is deeply rooted in it, and it finds its way into the church and even the Bible itself.  Obviously we can’t avoid it, but should we embrace it?  The Bible uses the form of the myth to undermine the myth, and as long as we do too, it’s not particularly bad or harmful.  The trouble is, we have a long history of seeing the form and missing the meaning; we use the tongue-in-cheek violence of the Bible as justification for real-life violence against others, forgetting that we serve a God who’d rather die for what’s right than fight for it.  We let the myth get under our skin, and buy the lie that says that violence is the only way we can really protect the light, the good, even peace itself – as if those things are anything but the gift of God, freely given.  All good things come from God; do we need to protect God?

As for video games: they allow us to act out the role of the violent hero, and that can be good or bad.  We seem to have a built-in desire to be this kind of hero, even when Christ (our true hero) is the opposite.  But when I say built-in, I don’t mean we’re born with it, but rather that we’re taught it from our first G.I. Joe action figures.  Maybe gaming is a positive outlet for this urge, and playing Battlefield is keeping us off of real battlefields.  Maybe gaming reinforces the myth of redemptive violence, and keeps us looking for heroes like Marduk rather than like Christ.  Or maybe it’s all in good fun, just a rush, and has no real effect on us.  In order for that to be the case, we need to remember what kind of a hero we serve; we need to remember that we are not literally “Christian soldiers” armed with a “sword” and buffed for battle by the blood of the lamb; we need to remember that a true hero walks to his or her own death for the sake of truth and justice, not just to battlefields to fight about it.

Maybe when we can get this idea of heroism into our heads, our games will change because the violence won’t feel so justified and satisfying anymore.  In the meantime, play critically: what’s the meaning behind the violence in your games?  There are plenty out there that are full of meaning, but there are also many that are seemingly meaningless.  Are we just taking on the role of Marduk, again and again?  Or are our games, like the Bible, using the form of violence to undermine the myth of redemptive violence?

Holiness vs. Action in The Name of the Rose

(Note: this post wanders a bit.  To cut to the chase, jump down to the break.)

In reading Umberto Eco’s celebrated novel The Name of the Rose today, I came across an interesting and troubling passage.

Adso, a young novice, pupil of the protagonist, and narrator, is trying to find the difference between orthodox orders of monks and heretical groups he keeps hearing about.  His master, a Franciscan named William of Baskerville, has given up his post as an inquisitor because of the frequent ambiguity between orthodoxy and heresy, recognizing that “heretics” are very often just regular people who don’t understand the subtle differences of doctrine that can have such power over their fate.  While the other monks in the book are quick to brand groups, and even fellow monks, as heretics, William is careful not to judge too quickly.  This is confusing to Adso, as William (styled after Sherlock Holmes or Father Brown as a shrewd investigator) has such profound judgment in other matters.  So Adso seeks out the advice of another monk, who tells the tale of the worst of these heretical groups.

In this lesson, Adso is quick to see the similarities between this heresy and the established, orthodox orders.  Ubertino, the monk instructing him, always replies that the heretics have erred somehow in how they conceived or applied an otherwise orthodox teaching, but a recurring theme is that the established orders are fettered by the hierarchy or social structure of their world, and are not able to practice the full extent of their own convictions and teachings.  This leads to Adso’s thoughts, which trouble me:

But I was beginning to wonder, especially after that afternoon’s conversation with William, if it were possible for the simple people who followed Dolcino [the heretic] to distinguish between the promises of the [orthodox] Spirituals and Dolcino’s enactment of them.  Was he not perhaps guilty of putting into practice what presumably orthodox men had preached in a purely mystical fashion?  Or was that perhaps where the difference lay?  Did holiness consist in waiting for God to give us what His saints had promised, without trying to obtain it by earthly means?  Now I know this is the case and I know why Dolcino was in error: the order of things must not be transformed, even if we must fervently hope for its transformation.  But that evening I was in the grip of contradictory thoughts.
-p.227-228

I, like Adso, am “in the grip of contradictory thoughts.”  To boil this down a little, it appears that he is saying that the role of Christianity is to hope for something to happen that we dare not actually cause to happen.  That holiness is to recognize the good that our world is supposed to be, hope for it, pray for it, but do nothing to try to bring it about.  This troubles me, not only because it seems contradictory and a huge cop-out, but also because a) we can see this attitude in the Church today in a big way, and b) there is a ring of truth to part of it.

First of all, it is contradictory.  There are many good things that we are fully capable of bringing about in the world, and there are social orders which are inherently evil and ought to be demolished.  Many would say that this is in fact a duty of the Church and a continuation of the ministry of Christ on Earth.  If we do not practice what we preach, are we not hypocrites?  Then we must modify our preaching, so that it only applies to our inward spiritual devotion and personal morality, rather than to the life of the community and the social order.  But even if this does not contradict the teachings of Christ, which had very serious and direct implications for the social order and the life of the community, it creates an impossible situation for the believer: I must then be separated from my community by my personal piety and morality, or else I must separate myself into two people so that I can be personally moral and at the same time part of an immoral social order.  Neither option is feasible, and Christ did neither.

Second, it’s a cop-out.  Inevitably, we can blame this doctrine of doing nothing on human frailty and sinfulness.  “This,” we say, “is something that only God can do.”  And then we gather together on Sunday morning and sing the words of the apostle, “And if our God is for us, then who can ever stop us?”  We insist that we are filled with the Spirit of God, empowered in the same way (or a similar way) as Jesus Christ himself.  What are we empowered to do, then?  Be moral in our personal thoughts?  We do nothing to change the social order because we are afraid to fail, and because of this fear we justify doing nothing and call it holiness.

I see this in the Church all the time today, and it bothers me.  There seems to be a clear divide between groups.  First, the so-called “Christian Left” or “Social Gospellers” who appropriate secular culture and water down their theology, all the while actually working to help the poor and overturn the social order.  I hope you can tell that this is a caricature; these are the modern-day equivalent to the “heretics” Ubertino was talking about in the book.  Then there is the “Christian Right” or “Moral Majority” who are primarily concerned with inward personal morality and are quick to call others heretics, because for them salvation is entirely based on orthodoxy.  This too is a caricature, but they correspond to the inquisition-happy monks in the book.  At their extremes, one side follows Jesus’ teachings about the social order more than his teachings about morality, and sometimes even forgets about Jesus himself, turning to a general sense of goodness informed by many different religions; the other side preaches hellfire and damnation, and that God helps those who help themselves, and that global climate change is not a threat, because we as humans are incapable of actually affecting the world and order that God has established and so we should do nothing.  Both groups end up being self-contradictory, but there does seem to be a connection between social action and weak theology on one side, and between fiery preaching and little or no care for social issues on the other.  Why does it seem impossible for a socially-minded, theologically-orthodox Christian to exist?

And finally, somehow this doctrine of the impossibility of affecting social change rings true a little bit.  I would be remiss not to mention this.  It seems like almost every example we can come up with in which people changed the social order for the sake of the gospel or teachings of Christ has failed badly.  People argue about the true meaning of “separation of church and state,” but let’s review: the papal states, the Crusades, Geneva, the religious wars both before and after the Reformation, and even the American war of independence, were largely the result of people applying scripture (often poorly) to the social and political spheres of their day.  The difference between the heretic groups and the orthodox orders in The Name of the Rose is the same as the difference between government forces and rebels in any number of conflicts today: two social spheres colliding in an effort to overturn a social order.  Maybe I’m guilty of the same cop-out, pointing to our failures in responsibly living out the social ethic of Christ as evidence of why we should not try.  Fortunately, I can’t find any words of Christ that dis-empower us in these efforts; there aren’t passages saying “Do the right thing individually, but refrain from doing so collectively, because only God can do good on a large scale and he just won’t help you with that.”

So is true holiness defined by what we believe, or what we do?  This is what it seems to come down to.  With James, I would argue that if we don’t do anything, then we must not really believe anything either.  The chance of failure is no reason not to try.  And should our actions be personal, or collective?  I certainly won’t argue against personal morality and ethical action, but we need to be acting corporately to affect positive change in our social systems as well.  What is better, to feed the poor or to deal with the system that made them poor?  If we have a just social system our individual problems will be fewer and easier to deal with, and it is our duty as followers of Christ to challenge the system as he did.

————————————————————————————————————————-

I feel like I’m wandering, but what may be the crux of the problem of socially active Christianity has just occurred to me.  The reason that we fight religious wars, the reason that we must separate church and state today, has everything to do with whether we direct ourselves inward or outward.  The “orthodox” or conservative Christians are concerned with personal piety and conformity of beliefs, and the rest of us fear the notion of them mixing religion with politics because they would enforce their beliefs on others.  This is why religious wars were fought in the past, and why there were inquisitions: to kill those who disagree, and to reinforce conformity of belief.  In this sense, the “separation of church and state” is a positive thing, demanding that we keep our religious beliefs personal, i.e. that we don’t force them on anyone else.  At the same time, the other side is very concerned with not forcing their beliefs on anyone else – but in so doing, they usually take on a multiplicity of beliefs that waters down their orthodoxy.  The first group, the “orthodox,” find themselves unable to hold their beliefs without forcing them on anyone else; and the second group, the righteous “heretics,” find themselves challenged to hold their beliefs at all in their concern not to force them on anyone.  And so the answer we’ve come to is that we should divide ourselves, inwardly holding beliefs while outwardly doing nothing, or outwardly doing something without inwardly holding strongly to our beliefs.

I’ve already mentioned the problems with dividing ourselves into two people, one with inner convictions and one with outward actions.  Our convictions and our actions should align, or we’re hypocrites.  But to avoid forcing our beliefs on others by political or military means, we still need some sort of division.  We need to be able to be corporate without assuming that everyone else who is involved in this corporate life is just like me.  We need to make a contribution of the good of our beliefs without enforcing those beliefs on others.  And this is where I join the “heretics”, I suppose, and my gospel is watered down, right?  After all, Jesus talked about Hell, and condemned people for their sin, etc.  Am I only preaching half the gospel here?

The difference is that I’m not preaching.  We’re very accustomed to our only interaction with non-Christians being some sort of evangelism, and evangelism must be overt, right?  If I’m serving without preaching, I’ve left the gospel out entirely.  Or maybe my service is my preaching: “preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary, use words,” right?  And if my actions are my preaching, then my actions must reflect the condemnation of sin that my preaching would (if it’s preaching the WHOLE gospel), right?  There’s a logical connection between all of these things, to be sure, but there’s a problem: Jesus didn’t behave like this.

There were times when Jesus was preaching, and there were times when he was acting, and both were very meaningful – but they were different contexts.  He preached to those who followed him, and he condemned those who claimed spiritual superiority and yet were still sinful (i.e. hypocrites), but when he interacted with “sinners” he stopped preaching, and just cared for them.  Even when he urged moral change in people who weren’t his followers, it wasn’t “join us or else,” it was “go, leave your life of sin,” and he left it at that.  He set the highest possible moral and ethical standard by his own example, and held no-one to it except those who held themselves to it first and claimed to surpass it.

In short, Jesus’ beliefs and teachings had incredible personal & moral implications as well as incredible collective & social implications – but he forced them on no-one.  Why do we find that so hard to emulate?

To sum up: rather than holding on to strong doctrine and attempting to enforce that upon others, or alternatively to put our faith to work in positive ways while incorporating the beliefs of everyone else, with the result that we either create a division between our public and private selves or water down our private selves to match our sterile public secularity; instead, let’s create a division between what we believe and do and what we expect everyone else to believe and do.  In fact, let’s get rid of expectations altogether, except for the expectation that Christ in us will make the world a better place.  If that makes me a “heretic”, so be it.

Faith Through Art

I recently posted some musings about faith and art.  Here’s a paper I wrote about their necessary intersection (with examples from Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein!).  I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it!  I’d very much like to hear your thoughts, but be warned – it’s a long post.

*****

Introduction: Asking the Right Questions

What makes art or entertainment acceptable for Christian viewers?  Should we as Christians avoid the so-called “secular” arts in favour of works that explicitly reinforce our religious beliefs?  These questions are prevalent in the North American Church today, and many responses to these questions have proven problematic.  Speaking of controversy around this issue, one scholar writes:

In the spirit of the “culture wars”, many [people] divided movies, music, and television programming into either “Christian” or “secular” categories with an artwork’s merit riding on simplistic moral, theological, or ideological evaluations.[1]

Focus on the Family, one of the largest Christian media groups, devotes an entire publication (Plugged In) to this process, rating the products of popular culture based on their merits (“pro-social content”) and their demerits (“objectionable content”).  General affirmations of love, peace, and other Christian values get positive points, while explicit Christian content – being evangelistic messages, testimonies, or worship – gets an automatic pass.  Objectionable content includes, among other things, a cuss-count (how many cusses is considered acceptable?), nudity, sexuality, violence, spirituality that is not Christian, and even criticism of the President of the United States.[2]  The message that Plugged In and publications like it ultimately send is that media and culture is only considered to be Christian if it is explicitly evangelistic or worshipful, while “secular” culture (i.e. everything else) is something that Christians must be protected from.  At the same time, the “art” that is produced for Christian consumption tends toward flaccid imitations of “secular” works, pasted over with overt and often cheesy messages of Christian evangelism and worship.

While there is some merit in the above questions about art, they only approach art from one perspective – namely that of wary consumers seeking to place limits on our consumption of art and culture.  There are other questions that get to the root of the Christian relationship with culture: What is the relationship between faith, serious theological reflection, and art?  How has the Church traditionally produced and interacted with art?  Is art important for our faith?

It is my conviction that the arts – literature, music, visual arts, and performance arts – are not only important for the life of faith, but that they are essential to it.  The more that I reflect on these questions, the more I relate to Madeleine L’Engle when she said “I am beginning to see that almost every definition I find of being a Christian is also a definition of being an artist.”[3]  Without realizing it, Christians rely on their ability to engage with art in its many forms as a part of their understanding and worship of God.  We interact with art in our engagement with the sources of our faith, the articulation of our faith, and the expression of our faith.  With examples from “secular” literature, I will explore this relationship between faith and art, and find that ultimately our faith comes to us and through us in artistic forms.

The Sources of Faith: Scripture and Story

The Church has long argued over the sources of our faith.  Protestants stand on the principle of sola scriptura, seeing the Bible as the only authoritative source of theological truth, while the Roman Catholic Church has long held to two books, the Bible and the traditions of the Church.  What we often fail to note in this argument is the nature of the source materials: the Bible is entirely literature of different sorts, while tradition may also include music, visual arts, and even performing arts.  Perhaps their positive affirmation of the traditions of the Church is one reason that Catholics seem to have a greater appreciation for and acceptance of the arts.  But it is the artistic nature of the Bible itself that we will now examine.

It is interesting that fundamentalists often seem to be the most averse to the arts, considering one of their central tenets, the authority of the original autographs of scripture, reveres the text in its original form.  While our modern mindset places value on the conceptual content of texts over their form – the message, rather than the medium – the doctrine of the infallibility of the original autographs of scripture places a distinct importance on the medium as well: God has inspired the text in such a direct way that it was written exactly as He wanted it to be, completely infallible in its original form.  That the original form of the text is that of literature in the form of myth, story, epic verse, sensual poetry, song, parable, and testimony somehow fails to get much attention.

That the artistic form of the Bible is overlooked by North American Evangelicals is most likely due to our general insistence on a literal reading of scripture, which fails to recognize any of the literary genres and their associated devices that make up the Bible.  This method of interpretation flourishes in conservative Evangelical circles, particularly those whose heritages include the camp meetings and anti-intellectualism that swept through Protestant America in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  It is a quite understandable extension of the Protestant insistence on people being able to read the Bible in their own vernacular, as well as the Evangelical belief that anyone can understand the saving message of the Gospel.  While these beliefs are good on their own, their extension to a strict literalist interpretation of scripture has removed the art – and much of the meaning – from the Bible.

Even if we misread the scriptures as a literal, historical handbook for life, our reading of the text does not change its nature as literature.  Nor can we claim that the subject matter of this literature is always explicitly “Christian” in the same sense that we seek in popular culture today.  Scripture deals with sexuality, non-Christian spirituality, violence, and sin in unflinching and gritty portrayals of the lives of our heroes of the faith.  We are not sensitive to the graphic nature of the Bible only because we face a barrier of language and culture that makes us unable to understand the original text in the same way we do a modern novel or television series.  Even the Bible’s most explicit portrayals of faith often have ambiguities and raise troubling theological questions – and often do so deliberately.  The book of Job, for example, deals with the struggle of a righteous man whose theology of providence makes it clear that his suffering comes from God; this book raises the problem of evil and the question of whether God performs or approves evil acts, whether He is just or unjust, and leaves the reader with no answer.  Art, as the book of Job certainly is, often serves the purpose of forcing its audience to ask difficult questions for themselves, rather than feeding them the answers.  The Bible does this very frequently, and we should not deny its nature by insisting that it is a book of answers.  After all, if the Bible answered all of our questions, we wouldn’t need theology to articulate its theological content.

The Articulation of Faith: Theology, Art, and Inquiry

For thousands of years, Christians have been writing theology.  Whether in the form of commentaries on scripture, creeds, didache, epistles of instruction and exhortation, or in the form of theological treatises and papal decrees, we have found the need to clearly articulate exactly what it is we believe about God and the world He has created.  These types of writings usually fall into the category of science rather than art, utilizing conceptual or philosophical language and frameworks for the sake of precise and unambiguous articulation of beliefs.  Today more than ever, theology is the subject of an entire publishing industry, whose scope of subjects and issues expands while its methods and materials are refined.  Theology is, and has always been, tremendously important for the Church: it helps us to affirm our common beliefs, articulate them to others in evangelism and debate, and defend them against those who would profit from their misuse.

North American Evangelicals tend to favour Biblical Theology, as it affirms our doctrine of sola scriptura while at the same time attempting to explain the subtle complexities of scripture.  While mainline Protestants or Roman Catholics may look to the great theologians of history for guidance, we prefer a good study Bible or a commentary, usually to clear up issues of language and context; after all, if the message of the Bible is clear to anyone who reads it, all we must do is eliminate the barriers to the reading of it!  Evangelical theologies go so far as to compile the texts which deal with specific theological issues (e.g., take scriptures from Daniel, Ezekiel, Joel, Thessalonians, and Revelation in order to formulate an eschatological timeline), and many attempt to solve theological questions (e.g., Arminian free-will vs. Calvinist predestination), but very few commentators or theologians deal with the artistic and rhetorical issues of a text except in a brief introduction.  In short, as noted above, we are much more concerned with what the Bible says (the message) than with how it says it (the medium), and our commentaries and theologies are much more concerned with helping us know what it said than with helping us to actually read it.

This should give us pause.  Our method of articulating our faith involves distilling the powerful and often ambiguous stories and poetry of the Bible down into the cold, conceptual, and precise language of science, so that they can better be communicated to a wider audience.  This may be a clear and concise way to communicate intellectual information to which one may give intellectual assent, but this does not constitute sharing our faith, nor is it able to convey an accurate understanding of the messy complexities of life.  It is not clear that conceptual language is even up to the task of describing, much less explaining, the truths of God in Christ.  If conceptual language could clearly describe, for example, the salvific power of the death of Christ and the nature of the cosmic transaction that took place, why would we need to resort to metaphor?  In this instance, we have the metaphor of Christ as an atoning sacrifice for our sins, Christ as redeeming us from slavery to sin, and Christ as being subjected to execution in our place, among others – all used to describe the spiritual implications of the event of the execution of Jesus Christ by the Roman and Jewish authorities of Judea on charges of treason.  We rely on the literary device of metaphor because a scientific description of events cannot capture the significance of those events – neither the cosmic, historical, spiritual, or personal significance.  And when we try to communicate these metaphors to others we use “illustrations”, or stories, to do it.  Inevitably, we turn a story into bare concepts before turning it back into a new story, all in an effort to articulate a thought more clearly than the original story allowed.  That we do this without realizing it should also cause us to reflect on the inescapable presence of story and art in our life and faith: we cannot hear about or describe God apart from story.

Even when Evangelicals consciously write new stories to articulate our faith, we are very careful to make our stories line up reverently with the Bible.  “Christian fiction” tends to feature pious heroes (or wretched sinners who convert into pious heroes) and themes and morals that are explicit to the point of being preachy.  We do not allow ourselves to write variations on Biblical stories – at least, none that vary too widely.  Just as we used to violently oppose the critical study of the Bible, we continue to oppose critical re-imaginings of it.  Writers who use too much subtlety when dealing with Biblical themes are relegated to the realm of the “secular”, no matter how clearly their work articulates matters of Christian life, or even theological issues.  Madeleine L’Engle’s novel A Wrinkle in Time is banned from many Evangelical bookstores to this day, yet I can find no better depiction of the difficult biblical concept of Powers and Principalities, much less written in a book that children both understand and adore.  Literature and other arts have a powerful ability to show, not just to describe, complex theological truths: allow me to use an analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to illustrate the importance of artistic reinterpretations for the sake of our understanding and articulation of our faith.

Faith and Frankenstein

Madeleine L’Engle once wrote,

“I often seek theological insights in reading science fiction, because this is a genre eminently suited to explorations of the nature of the Creator and creation.  I’m never surprised when I discover that one of my favourite science fiction writers is Christian, because to think about worlds in other galaxies, other modes of being, is a theological enterprise.”[4]

Though it does not deal with other worlds in other galaxies, Mary Shelley’s contribution to early science fiction, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus provides a serious and powerful examination of the nature of the Creator and creation, in a story that has been re-told many times since.[5]

In the story of the creation and fall of mankind in Genesis, God creates human beings who, being deceived, disobey God; this is marked as the cosmic event that led to all evil in the world.  Human beings are cast out of the garden of Eden, symbolic of their separation from God, and are doomed to eventually die.  Medieval theology and art reinterpreted this event: if the serpent who deceived Adam and Eve represents Satan, then Satan must have already fallen before he caused human beings to sin.  John Milton’s classic epic Paradise Lost places the reader in the company of Satan as he plots to spite God by turning His own creatures against Him.  For centuries, Milton’s account of this has informed our imagination of the events of the Fall, and indeed of the character of Satan.

In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s central character is Victor Frankenstein, a scientist who becomes obsessed (as many scientists and alchemists before him) with creating life, and tells his tale in the first-person.  This allows us to identify not with the creature as we do in Genesis, or with Satan as we do in Paradise Lost, but with the creator, seeing the classic creation narrative from a different perspective.  This change in perspective, of course, does not only reflect on God but also very strongly on the nature of humankind by way of contrast: God creates with a word and for the sake of love and order, while Frankenstein creates in an obsessive fervour and for the sake of knowledge and self-fulfillment; everything that God creates is good and has a place and a purpose, while Frankenstein’s creation is a hideous monster who has no place in this world; God loves His creatures, and banishes them due to their own disobedience and moral failure, while Frankenstein despises his creature from the moment it begins to live, and projects evil deeds and intents onto the “daemon” (as he calls it even before it could possibly have done any evil deeds).  So though we are forced to relate to the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, and though he is a completely different type of creator than God is, through this we are able to better relate to God by gaining insight into His character through the contrast with Frankenstein; Frankenstein is a foil for God.

As the story moves on, the creature is allowed to tell his tale to his creator.  The creature has been outcast for two years, and in that time has learned to speak and read.  One of the books that has a great impact on his conception of himself is Paradise Lost, and so we are again drawn back into the story of creation and fall from yet another perspective; though perhaps not the one we expect.  Indeed, when the creature confronts his creator, he says “Remember, that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed…I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.  Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”[6]  In Genesis, Adam blames Eve for his sin, Eve blames the serpent, but all three are held responsible for their actions and cast out of the garden; here, we see the response that the serpent did not give in Genesis – to blame God Himself.  It is easy to think that this is the response that Satan would give to God, being warped and evil as he is, but thus far in the novel we have witnessed no evil from the creature, and much hatred toward him from his creator, Frankenstein.  Like Paradise Lost, Frankenstein invites us to think about the events in Heaven that preceded the fall of humankind in the Garden, and perhaps even feel a little sympathy for the Devil.

While this may not be a comfortable notion for many Christians, it is a real question that comes out of Genesis, and deserves to be answered: why did the serpent tempt Eve?  And later, why does Satan seek to destroy Job?  And why, in both cases, does God allow it?  Scripture is silent on this matter, but literature is unafraid to explore that silence.  Perhaps this is one reason that Christian traditions which favour systematic theology also tend to favour the arts: while Biblical theology is content to articulate the message of the books of the Bible, to describe what they say and remain silent where they are silent, systematic theology asks questions that the Bible does not always answer, but on which the arts are free to speculate and inquire.  And inquiry, after all, is such a powerful and necessary part of engagement with the Bible, and with God, that we should embrace it wherever possible.

The Expression of Faith: Worship and Witness

Worship is an area of Christian life whose connection with the arts is rarely questioned, as music has long been a central element of most church services.  Mainline denominations and Roman Catholics have long adorned their church buildings with beautiful and symbolic stained glass depicting the saints and heroes of Christianity, and symbolic icons have been a major aid to prayer for the Orthodox Church for millennia.  It should be pointed out, however, that none of these elements of worship (as much as they are taken for granted in their popular settings) are without controversy.  The Great Schism between the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Churches had much to do with iconoclasm (the destruction of icons, as they were thought to be a form of idolatry), and that attitude toward images eventually led many Evangelical churches to their current state of bland, blank walls, the only adornment being an empty cross.  Attitudes toward music vary, from Brethren churches that do not allow musical instruments, to chanting monks, to churches that only allow hymns to be sung, to the modern choruses of Evangelical and Charismatic churches.

In the past few decades, churches in North America have begun to embrace the visual and performing arts within their services: theatre is promoted as a means of evangelism and growing a church, while visual arts are seen as an act of worship in itself.  Many churches now host annual art shows featuring the paintings and photography of their congregants, and a friend of mine has been known to set up an easel on the stage during a worship service, painting while we sing as an alternative act of worship.  What all of these expressions of art have in common is that they are, with the exception of the art galleries, explicitly Christian; there is little subtlety in them, nor is any required in such a context.  The content of worship music is obviously Christian (naturally), and the plays shown in churches are almost always explicitly evangelistic.  And as for my friend’s paintings, if the content of her paintings were not explicitly Christian I’m not sure how they would be accepted in that context.  That said, this branching out from traditionally accepted art forms in the context of Church is a huge step forward, because it recognizes human creativity as God-given, and the expression of that creativity as an act of worship.  Slowly, the sphere of “worship” is widening out to embrace much more of Christian life, with creative arts being a primary method of extending worship outside the bounds of music and Sunday services.

Why do we use the arts to worship God, when we do not seem to be comfortable using them to learn about God?  We avoid the arts in our articulation of faith, because the arts are so subjective; but in our personal response to God, subjectivity seems not only acceptable, but somewhat necessary.  The arts allow us to express the inexpressible, relying on music to inspire and direct our deepest emotions toward God, picking up the meaning where the words of the song end.  A canvas with unformed strokes of colour can resonate in our spirit in ways we cannot describe, much as the Holy Spirit does; and symbolic representations of Christ allow us to meditate on him in ways our mental projections of the concept of the invisible God cannot facilitate.  A friend of mine recently made a powerful (and somewhat shocking) comparison: that music and art allow us to express the inexpressible in the same way that Paul describes speaking in tongues.  Speaking in tongues is a way for us to connect with God beyond words and conscious intellectual articulation, as facilitated by the Holy Spirit; perhaps we should think of art in similar terms?

An area of the life of faith that most people do not consider to be art is that of witness.  Worship and witness are the two primary ways that we respond to God, and both terms are rather expansive, collectively covering every area of Christian life.  If worship is an expression of our faith to God, then witness is how we express our faith to the world around us.  Traditionally, we tend to think of this in terms of either explicit evangelism and personal testimony, or in the lived-out expressions of a Christian life well-lived.  It is rather strange that this part of our faith is rarely connected with art considering how deeply dependent it is on story, or how well-represented it is in art.

Evangelism is rarely subtle: evangelists quote scripture and attempt to persuade people (ideally non-Christians, though crusades are inevitably populated primarily by Christians) to give their lives to Christ.  Passages often preached in evangelistic sermons usually include Bible stories or parables such as the parable of the Lost Sheep or the Lost Son – using story to express spiritual truths.  Often just as powerful (or even more powerful) than reading scripture to others is the practice of telling your personal story of redemption – your testimony.  We love telling testimonies because they communicate a truth about God to someone through a story that is true; and though it is explicit, it is not usually considered to be “preachy”, as it makes no demand of its audience.  These two points, being true and not being preachy, are essential to a testimony; the former because we want to show the truth of what God is doing in the world, and the latter because people generally do not respond well to messages that are personally challenging, or worse, condescending.

What we often fail to recognize about testimonies is that our audience is not automatically convinced of the truthfulness of our claims, nor are true stories always the most effective stories for the communication of truths.  Considering our awareness of the poison pill of preachy proclamation, we ought to make the connection to our use of stories to spread the gospel: our lack of subtlety regarding our evangelistic intent or the religious or theological content of our testimonies often comes across as condescending at best, and just plain unbelievable at worst.  Regardless of the truth of our testimony, the message we are trying to deliver suffers for our heavy-handed approach.  The testimonies that we tell are usually without sufficient context or character development to resonate with the audience; they are to a story what an advertisement is to a television show – a quick dump of product information, presented in a way designed to elicit a sense of need in the audience.  Rather than giving commercials to try to “sell” God to people, perhaps we should think of our testimonies more as movie trailers, which only show a small part of a greater story and engage their audience by leaving something to the imagination.  What a good story shows, a testimony only tells, and showing is always better than telling because it forces the audience to discern the message for themselves.

Strangely, though much of English literature either includes or resembles Christian testimony, we tend to label all but the most explicitly evangelistic works as “secular”.  What is the difference between Charles Dickens’ works and Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps?  Both are the product of the Social Gospel in England, and both portray Christians having powerful impacts on the lives of the poor around them through acts of Christian charity and kindness.  Dickens’ work is without doubt far superior, and the message of both is equally “Christian”, yet In His Steps is considered a “Christian classic” while Dickens’ works are considered classics by all lovers of literature.  In His Steps’ lack of subtlety makes it almost unreadable toward the end, while Dickens requires his readers to discern the message themselves; this is the difference that makes Dickens accessible to everyone, yet earns him the “secular” label from Christians.

We ought to better recognize the power of the arts, and particularly literature, to bear witness to God’s work in the world in ways that are intriguing and believable, and to use them accordingly.  But more than that, we need to recognize how much the arts are already bearing witness to God’s work in the world.  Our evangelism can only get easier when we learn to recognize God at work everywhere, and learn to help others to see that as well.  In this regard, allow me to illustrate with a brief examination of the first English-language novel, Robinson Crusoe.

Robinson Crusoe: A Testimony of Providence

Daniel Defoe’s classic novel Robinson Crusoe is a first-person account of the misadventures of a 17^th-century English Protestant who seeks a life at sea rather than follow the good advice of his parents.  When he sets out on his first voyage to another port in England, little does he realize that his route home will be through storms and shipwrecks, slavery and salvation, taking him to Africa and Brasil before depositing him on an uninhabited island for twenty-eight years.

The religious messages of the book are far from subtle.  The book serves on one hand as a travel narrative, and on the other as a Christian testimony.  This latter purpose is laid out explicitly in the preface:

The Story is told with Modesty, with Seriousness, and with a religious Application of Events to the Uses to which wise Men always apply them (viz.) to the Instruction of others by this Example, and to justify and honour the Wisdom of Providence in all the Variety of our Circumstances, let them happen as they will.[7]

 

Crusoe’s adventures before being shipwrecked alone on the island involved a predictable pattern of facing danger, praying for deliverance and bargaining with God, and then promptly forgetting all about his bargain once the danger had passed.  It was only after his deliverance from the shipwreck that killed his entire crew that he began to see the hand of God, or Providence, in his physical salvation – and even then, it took a frightening fever dream to bring him to repentance:

…I found my Heart more deeply and sincerely affected with the Wickedness of my past Life: The Impression of my Dream reviv’d, and the Words, All these Things have not brought thee to Repentance, ran earnestly in my Thought…I cry’d out aloud, Jesus, thou Son of David, Jesus, thou exalted Prince and Saviour, give me Repentance![8]

 

Throughout the rest of the book, Crusoe periodically reflects on the theological implications of the events that have just transpired.  After a long description of his work on the island he would reflect and see the hand of God, or Providence, providing for his every need.  As the book goes on his account of the time of his sojourn compresses, so the theological reflections become more frequent and lengthy.

Crusoe frequently makes allusions to the book of Proverbs, describing himself as the foolish child who does not heed the good advice of his parents, and thus making the biblical moral of his bad example clear.  At the same time, his industrious work on the island is a positive example that brings to mind other passages from Proverbs.  When he finally does encounter other human beings and finds them to be cannibals, his first response (a desire to kill them all in disgust) is tempered by his growing awareness of the providence of God, and his inspired prudence is to his profit.  Throughout the book there is a balance between relying on (and most of all being grateful for) Providence, and working to make the most out of what is provided.

Defoe wrote to portray the ultimate Christian of his era: 1) not a “Catholick”, or “papist”; 2) brave and hard-working; 3) deeply repentant and thankful to God; 4) conqueror and lord wherever he goes; and 5) using his power and influence to convert others to Christ.  Though we would look on Crusoe as being barbarically colonialist, racist, arrogant, and with no regard for animal life, in his own time he was a Christian ideal, an example of the transformation that overtakes those who are repentant and truly thankful for the opportunities that Providence grants.  Particularly to its original audience, this book is a powerful testimony of what God is doing in the world, encased in an exciting adventure to give it even more appeal and wonder.

But the identity of the audience is a key point here.  Defoe wrote to an audience that was most likely almost entirely Puritan Christian; he was, in a sense, preaching to the converted.  While testimonies are valuable for Christians to hear, they hope to inspire a response in those who need to hear it, i.e. the unsaved or the backslidden.  Since Christianity was a state religion in all Western European countries in Defoe’s time, those two categories were one and the same.  His audience, then, would have no problem picking up an explicitly Christian book with blatant religious messages.  Audiences today are not so eager to pick up religious propaganda, so like Defoe, our testimonies (as valuable as they are) only preach to the converted.  This is especially true of our fictional testimonies, otherwise known as “Christian fiction”, to which a non-Christian would typically find it very difficult to relate, and in which the obvious moral messages are the only thing of value.  As Madeleine L’Engle once said, “If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.”[9]  As blunt as Defoe is in his pious subject, he was innovative in his art form; what kind of religion do the writers of today’s “Christian fiction” promote?

Robinson Crusoe shows us how powerful a Christian testimony can be, particularly for other Christians; but it also shows us what not to do, because we know that, even if its language were updated, Robinson Crusoe would not command so wide a readership today.  We can take a lesson from it by telling intriguing stories about how God is at work in the world; and we can improve upon it by refusing to allow the message to overpower its artistic medium, losing all credibility in the process.

 

Conclusion: Faith through Art

We can’t escape art, and we can’t dress it up in pious clothing in an attempt to sanitize it.  We are concerned that art will make fiction or falsehood seem true; but when we attempt to subordinate our art to a particular message, that message comes across as false, no matter how true it is.  We interact with art at every point in our Christian life, and doing so not only enriches but also simply enables our life of faith.  It is the primary medium through which we receive, understand, and express our knowledge of and relationship with God.  Art is not safe, or sterile – but neither is God.  Let us co-create with God, not out of obsession and fear like Frankenstein, but out of the joy and love of abundance that God shares with us.  Let us proclaim the providence of God, not as an object lesson like Robinson Crusoe, but as an expression of the reality in which we live.  Our attempts at crafting “Christian art” continue to fail; let us instead simply be Christian, and allow our art to express our Christian selves naturally.

 

WORKS CITED

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Ed. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Michael Shinagel. 2d ed. New York: Norton, 1994.

 

L’Engle, Madeleine.  Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art.  Toronto: Bantam Books, 1982.

 

Romanowski, William D.  Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture.  Revised and Expanded Edition.  Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2007.

 

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818. Ed. D. L. MacDonald and Kathleen Scherf. 2d ed. Peterborough: Broadview, 1999.

 

---

[1] William D. Romanowski, Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture, 2^nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2007), 31.

[2] For example, see Plugged In’s review of the Beastie Boys album “To the 5 Boroughs”: http://www.pluggedin.ca/music/albums/2004/beastieboys-tothe5boroughs.aspx

[3] Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1982), 189.

[4] L’Engle, 134-35.

[5] Notable re-tellings of this same story in the science fiction genre include I, Robot, the Terminator series, The Matrix trilogy, Battlestar Galactica, and the Ultron saga of the Marvel comic book series The Avengers.

[6] Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, D.L. MacDonald and Kathleen Scherf, Eds., 2^nd ed. (Peterborough: Broadview, 1999), 126.

[7] Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719 Ed., Norton Critical Edition, Michael Shinagel, ed., 2^nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1994), 3.

[8] Ibid., 71.

[9] L’Engle, 14.

 

On Story and Christianity

I’ve written before about the possibility that some, or even much, of the Bible is myth, and how that’s okay; somehow, something being fiction does not necessarily make it untrue.  Now I’m taking a course called Religious Themes in Literature, and the first assignment is to write about how faith and art intersect.  There’s so much to talk about here that I don’t know where to begin, so I went to Maeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, but she wanders so much in her own thought that I’m having a hard time keeping it straight.  So I’m drawn back to the only place I can ever seem to make sense of anything: the keyboard.

This course is being taught by Dr. Michael Gilmour, who writes scholarly articles about the religious content of The Far Side and Shakespeare and Iron Maiden in such worldly venues as The Huffington Post.  He approaches the concept of God in “secular” art very gingerly, because he knows that it is a controversial notion (at best) to some in the Church.  He asks us to ponder the question of whether “Christians [should] ignore the so-called secular arts in favour of cultural productions that explicitly reinforce their religious convictions?  Is there a middle ground?”  He seems eager for us to see God’s presence in the wide world, rather than exclusively in the little box of our particular church, and I’m very thankful for that – but I think I dare to go even a step further: while Dr. Gilmour aims to show us that God can be experienced in story, I would go so far as to say that God must be experienced through story, at least to some degree, and that story is the most important way that we experience Him.

God revealed Himself fully in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  I know this because I read a story about Him. Interesting thing about Jesus: “Jesus was not a theologian.  He was God who told stories.” (quoted by L’Engle in Walking on Water, Bantam, 1982, p. 54)

I’m not sure what comprises more of the Bible, narrative or poetry, but between these two classes of literature it’s clear that the vast majority of Scripture is literature.  It’s not cut-and-dried, scientific, scholarly, history textbooks.  There are a few sermons, and a hint of systematic theology (though Pauline scholars are divided over whether or not we should consider Paul a theologian).  Even in the epistles, it’s rare that the writers stop to explain why they say something – and those passages are usually the most obscure and divisive (e.g. some people died because they took communion unworthily, an aside that breaks up the otherwise narrative explanation of the practice of Communion and has been the source of much speculative and confusing theology).  The most theological-sounding texts seem like they should be the most important, but really it was just a few church leaders trying to derive good practices from the stories that formed their entire basis of understanding.

Have you ever noticed that very few people preach from the Old Testament regularly?  And when they do, an Old Testament sermon is usually a character study, analyzing the central figure of a story to try to explain why God said or did whatever it was God said or did?  I know half a dozen different ways that David was “a man after God’s own heart”, and I know all about Moses’ stutter, and Gideon’s self-consciousness, and Ruth’s faithfulness.  Sometimes it seems like these sermons are really grasping at straws, looking for more specific details to explain a story, because preaching from story involves a reversal of the typical mode of preaching.  Preachers deliver speeches which explain an issue and inspire us to do something about that issue – and they use short stories to drive their message home or begin to apply it.  They’re long on explanation, short on story.  The Bible is long on story, which it almost never explains; how do you preach from that?  The reason I know so much about the small details of every Old Testament character’s lives is because those are the only parts that even lend themselves to explanation, much less require it.  If a preacher really wanted to get to the point of an Old Testament story, they’d end up just reading the story.  In my church this is a common occurrence, and nobody complains when Pastor Ed lets the story preach itself.  It’s fully capable.  On those mornings Ed is a tour guide of the city of Nineveh as Jonah is passing through, an assistant to the narrator whose primary job is to translate the story as accurately as possible through time and language and culture, so that we the audience can hear the story speak clearly in its own words.

It struck me the other day that if we could read the Bible with as much wonder and excitement as we derive from Harry Potter, we’d be better Christians: better theologians, and better people.  I’m not sure that we can read the Bible in that way as long as we are dissecting it for nuggets of wisdom (with our pithy sayings and quotations of single verses out of context, are we Christians the source of our culture’s dependence on the sound bite and the tweet?).  I’m not saying that scholars should not read Scripture critically; I think that the conservative disgust with critical methods of interpretation is a good impulse with a poor implementation.  I think that people who are afraid to study the Bible critically could have made a very good case if they had stuck to the Bible as story; instead, they had nothing but an argument that “the Bible is holy, so we shouldn’t ask too many questions about it”, and today just about everyone in the Church reads the Bible critically.  Our scholars absolutely need to study the text critically, but that doesn’t mean that text criticism makes for a good sermon, or that all Christians need to be experts on hermeneutics.  It seems that we learn in school to read texts critically and scientifically (which can be a very good thing), but in the process forget how to actually communicate.

I heard a great interview with a Rabbi who only spoke in parables and stories.  It wasn’t Jesus, by the way, though that was his primary mode of teaching too.  If I tried really hard, I bet I could remember the gist of half a dozen sermons that I’ve heard in my life – maybe a dozen.  But I can quote some films start to finish with about the same effort, and my mind’s eye can see the walls of Helm’s Deep as clearly as it saw them when I first read Tolkien’s The Two Towers for the first time in grade 5; without conscious effort I can feel the winds of Perelandra (Venus) and the shifting and tilting of its islands as they ride the massive waves of that world’s great ocean, and know the magnitude of the potential loss if the Eve of Perelandra falls prey to the deceit of Satan in the body of Dr. Weston.  There is something about story that allows us to understand things intuitively, and in small bits, so that our understanding grows simply through hearing and seeing, and every fresh hearing brings a greater resonance of that understanding.

They say that the Bible is alive, “the Living Word”, and I struggled with this for years.  It supposedly teaches us something new every time we read it.  This idea seemed somewhat magical to me, as though the text itself would change with each fresh reading, or that the Spirit would enlighten me in a new way with each successive perusal of the same text.  Having spent the last 7 or 8 years reading the Bible analytically and critically, I can tell you that the words of the Bible don’t change between readings, and after a while it’s quite possible to run out of new perspectives to see the text from.  For some parts of the text that I’ve studied most, I’d probably have to discuss them with people from another culture or religion to get a new look at them in that sense.  I’ve been trained to strip a text down to its phonemes and analyze every possible meaning of every word, and then every possible meaning of those words put together in grammatical constructions, until I get to the meaning – and this is a very good thing!  But the meaning is not new every morning, and while I might think of new ways to apply it, the possible meanings and connotations of particular words in the original language, or textual variants, or syntactical possibilities, do not resonate within me and grow my identification with and recognition of God.  Story does that though.

Not only is the Bible story, and not only must we read it as story to really understand it, but we need story to explain it too.  I don’t mean sermon illustrations, though they are helpful.  But try to explain the Holy Spirit, or the Trinity, in scientific or systematic terms.  The Trinity is a concept born of story, and cannot be properly reduced to less than story.  The Powers and Principalities, which I hope to write my thesis about, defy systematic explanation; no theory fits all of the evidence or all of the texts – yet Madeleine L’Engle made generations of children understand them in her most famous book, A Wrinkle in Time (another book that was banned, if only from Christian book stores!).  We need story, even myth, to truly understand God.  Even God in human flesh needed stories, and his disciples still didn’t (and still don’t) understand Him.

Dr. Gilmour asks “Should Christians ignore the so-called secular arts in favour of cultural productions that explicitly reinforce their religious convictions (the Bible, devotional writing, etc.)?”  In class, he throws Left Behind in with that group.  We Christians like to designate some literature, or television, or film, or music, as “Christian” and therefore acceptable.  L’Engle talks about this phenomenon in Walking on Water:

Christian art?  Art is art; painting is painting; music is music; a story is a story.  If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject. (14)

…

Basically there can be no categories such as “religious” art and “secular” art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore “religious.” (25)

…

…we call the work of such artists un-Christian or non-Christian at our own peril.  Christ has always worked in ways which have seemed peculiar to many men, even his closest followers…so we need not feel that we have to understand how he works through artists who do not consciously recognize him.  Neither should our lack of understanding cause us to assume that he cannot be present in their work. (30)

A few times, I’ve made the (surely heretical) admission that I’ve had more “religious” experiences reading The Chronicles of Narnia than I have reading the Bible.  Most people I tell this to agree with me, and I wonder if they feel that same guilt that I feel, thinking that something could be more interesting or more edifying to a Christian than the Bible itself!  Of course, this  is the Chronicles of Narnia, that great Christian work of allegory (though it’s not).  It fits into the “Christian art” category, so it’s more acceptable.  CS Lewis is part of the Protestant canon, after all.  Would it be as acceptable if I were to admit in public that I’ve had similar experiences reading horror novels by Stephen King (Needful Things is my favourite), or the demented, sex-ridden stories of Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Choke)?  That one of the most positive impacts during a particularly rough patch of my teenage years was reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, which contains a very intimate scene in which a boy lets himself be kissed by another boy?  This isn’t a coming out (it wasn’t for the boy in the book either), but it’s content like this that led to The Perks of Being a Wallflower to be banned in thousands of schools in the US (and probably in Canada too).  And yet it taught me something about love, and being loved, and being forgiven, that I had never learned in Church.  Surely Christian themes, even in such a strongly “non-Christian” book.

I think that the thing that makes a book “Christian” or not is how explicitly “Christian” it is.  I think that this amounts to a self-conscious self-labelling.  If you have to tell someone that you’re a Christian, are you really?  Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps is only a classic among Christians, and not a very good read; Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a cherished classic of English literature; while both are products of the social gospel, the most notable difference is that In His Steps tries so hard to be explicitly Christian that it gets cheesy, if not painful, while Dickens is more subtle (and a better writer) – yet one is “Christian” and one is not.  And does using Christian terms and labels actually make you in any way good, or Christ-like?  The writers of Marvel Comics rarely use biblical allusions, much less quotations, yet I’ve recently pointed out just how much the story of Ant Man and his robot Ultron parallels the story of the Fall and the Flood – a powerful story that has been replayed many times, including I, Robot, The Terminator series, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and most famously (I can’t believe I forgot to mention it in my Ant-Man post) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which we will be studying this semester in class.  None of these books or films would be in any way considered “Christian”, yet they all replay one of the most important Bible stories for our understanding of human nature, in ways that we understand much better than the ancient Hebrew text.  Reading “secular” literature helps me understand who I am before God, sometimes better than the Bible does.

Finally (sorry for going long), finding God in the “secular” makes me redefine “secular”.  “There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation” (L’Engle, 50).  Finding God in the “secular” reminds us that He has redeemed all things unto Himself, that nothing in this world is untouched by Him, and that few things fail to give Him glory.  God is everywhere, and speaks everywhere, and though we preach this truth we are often quite selective about where to listen to Him.  And to paraphrase L’Engle, if we can’t see God in “secular” art or art composed by people of other religions, then we’ll miss seeing Him in those works composed by Christians, too.

So read a novel, for God’s (and your own) sake!

Ant Man, Noah, and the Value of Life

I’ve heard it said (many times) that there are many English Literature professors who are bemoaning the lack of biblical literacy in our society, because it’s difficult to understand English Literature if we do not understand the Bible.  As the argument goes, the dominant themes and issues that our culture reflects on come from scripture, which has shaped our culture and the literature we produce.  Today’s English majors don’t get the biblical allusions and theological themes that pervade our culture’s great works of literature – but it goes beyond that: scripture is everywhere.

I’m excited to be taking a course next semester called Religious Themes in Literature, but in the meantime I’ve been thoroughly enjoying finding religious themes in comic books, video games, television, and film.  This morning at church our school’s theatre troupe, Prov Players, performed a play that dealt with the topic of suicide and the value of life.  It made me think about Ant Man, and Ultron 5, and Noah.

Allow me a brief synopsis of a story line that unfolded over years of comic books.  Dr. Henry Pym is a brilliant scientist who develops technology that allows him to shrink to the size of an ant (presumably smaller, if he so chose) or to tremendously large sizes (he later sometimes goes by Giant Man).  His original self-experiment shrunk him to ant-size, which was quite dangerous for him; he thus developed technology to allow him to communicate with ants – hence the name, Ant Man.

Ant Man and his girlfriend, Wasp, are two of the original Avengers:

Anyways, enough back story.  Of all of the Avengers, Ant Man is the most reluctant crime-fighter.  He’s a pacifist, and fights for the sake of defending the world.  He hates it.  He would much rather help the world through creating new advances in science and technology, rather than locking up super villains one at a time.  One of the things that he did to help the world is to create a tiny prison for super villains, all shrunk using his technology.  The guards of this prison were robots called Ultron, created in a joint effort between Dr. Pym and Tony Stark (AKA Iron Man).

Ultron was Dr. Pym’s masterpiece, with artificial intelligence based on a map of the human brain – Dr. Pym’s brain, to be exact.  Ultron inherited some of Pym’s ideas, as well: a drive to create a peaceful world, for example.  But during an incredible threat to the planet, Ultron became acquainted with violence.  From that point on Ultron was no longer a pacifist, but still shared Pym’s desire to create a peaceful world.  From that point on, Ultron became convinced that it was only violent life that stood in the way of peaceful existence.  Considering that even his own creator and supposed pacifist, Ant Man, was frequently very violent, Ultron became convinced that the only way to have a peaceful world was to have a world without life – so he set about to destroy all life on earth.  If you’re a sci-fi fan, you’ve heard this story before (for example, the defense computer system, SKYNET, tried the same thing in the Terminator franchise; it also shows up in I, Robot).

Being a synthetic being who was never technically alive, Ultron didn’t realize that there was inherent value in life itself.  He failed to grasp the fact that a peaceful world is pointless without living creatures to enjoy it.  After an epic battle that seemed to be impossible to win, Ant Man gave Ultron an update in his logic: for a truly peaceful world, Ultron could not exist either (at least, according to the 2010 Avengers cartoon series, which condenses decades of comic storylines into a single season).

We of the Abrahamic faiths share a similar story.  God desired to create a perfect world, and created humans in his image in order to help him achieve this goal.  In this story, like the story of Ultron, it is the created ones who turn on their creators; however, in this story the creator is perfect, while the created ones are flawed (while in the Avengers, Ultron is trying to accomplish what Ant Man was too flawed to accomplish).  Human beings rebelled against God, gradually becoming more and more evil, to the point where God’s intended perfect, peaceful world seems impossible to achieve so long as there are people left alive on it.  So God, like Ultron, thinks that perhaps it would be better if human beings did not exist, and plans a flood to wipe out life on earth.  Many environmentalists today muse about this as well; it seems that we’re the only species that doesn’t fit into the ecosystem.  The Matrix dealt with this thought too, as Agent Smith (a computer program) calls human beings a “virus” because we go from place to place, staying only long enough to deplete the resources and destroy the environment before we move on, all for the purpose of our own self-replication.

Unlike Ultron, God is very reluctant to destroy all life on earth.  He sees the inherent value of life, and acts to preserve it.  He gets the last righteous man on earth to build a giant boat, in which he can keep two of every type of animal safe from the flood he’s about to use to destroy the planet.  With these animals, and with Noah and his family, earth will get a second chance.  Ultron offers no second chances: he knows that human beings will always have it in them to be violent.  God knows that too: even after the flood, Genesis tells us that God knew that the desires of humans’ hearts were evil – and yet he gave life another chance anyway.  God goes further, and says that he will never again destroy humanity, even though he knows we’ll be evil again.  Because life is inherently valuable, even when it is evil, destroying life is not a solution to the problem of evil.  Instead, God sets about destroying the evil that is inside the person.  As you may have noticed, this is a long process!

Different versions of this story show up over and over again throughout human history.  In this story, the only difference between a good result (a second chance for the world) and an evil result (elimination of all life) is a sense of inherent value to life itself, no matter how large or small, good or evil, it may be.  The ethical implications of this are numerous: killing, while it may seem to solve many problems, is not in itself a satisfying solution.  This notion affects our understanding of suicide, assassination, abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, etc.  But going beyond concrete ethical problems, this contributes to our answer to the philosophical problem of evil: if God is good, and all powerful, why is the world evil?  A big part of the answer is simply that life’s inherent value, when combined with sinful humanity, leaves God in a bit of a Catch-22.  Life is an end in itself, and without it peace is meaningless – thus, human beings will go on killing one another until something within us changes, because even violent existence is better than none.

I know I’ve been writing about comics a lot lately, first as the new Apocalyptic a few months ago, and more recently to muse on notions of heaven (my previous post).  What I hope you take away from this is that scripture is everywhere, and Jesus is everywhere.  If you’re looking for Him, you can’t miss Him – and yet so often we fail to see Him at all.  Pick up a comic book, or pop in a movie, and spend some time with Jesus

In Heaven, Can We Fly?

A short thought about heaven.

I’ve long noticed that our cultural notion of heaven doesn’t align very closely with what scripture says about it.  When I was a kid, I thought that heaven was a place in the sky, maybe on the clouds or maybe just beyond them, where everyone can do whatever they want.  I thought that I would be as young or as old as I wanted, forever.  I thought, surely, that in heaven I would be able to fly, and breathe underwater, and do whatever else I’m not able to do here on earth.  After all, heaven is a place where everyone is happy, right?  What could make us all happy other than getting what we want all the time?

Sometimes I still think this way.  I think sometimes we all do.

A fun thought experiment about this is a comic series in the Marvel universe called “House of M.”  A  brief synopsis: The Scarlet Witch has lost her mind, and used her reality-altering powers to create a world in which all of her friends get what they’ve always wanted.  Mutants are no longer feared or hunted by regular humans; her friends have their dream jobs; romantic relationships that were complicated in the real world are loving and functional.  Spider-man’s uncle Ben is alive, as is his first love, Gwen Stacy, and rather than being considered an outlaw vigilante he is instead a celebrity who doesn’t have to hide his face.  It seems as though everyone gets whatever they want.

But what Wolverine has always wanted is to remember his own past.  Now, suddenly, he not only has the memories he’s been searching for, but he’s also the only person in the world who seems to realize that there’s something wrong.  That this reality really is too good to be true.

We quickly discover that this world is far from perfect.  Mutants are no longer a hunted minority; they seem to be a majority, and have all of the power and respect that the worst of them had once craved.  The premiere family in this world is the House of Magnus – that is, Magneto, the Scarlet Witch’s father.  Non-mutants with powers (like Spider-man, Iron Man, the Hulk, etc.) are respected, but non-powered, regular people form an underclass that is highly discriminated against.  Homo Sapiens (as opposed to “Homo Superior”) are called “Sapes”, and treated worse than apes.  There is a complete reversal in the balance of power, and while it seems that most of the main characters have completely perfect lives, this world is far from perfect.

Heaven as a place where everyone gets what they want is far from the biblical picture of heaven, but more than that, it’s an impossibility.  Even if God were to bend reality to meet all of our desires, our desires inevitably conflict: as soon as I want what someone else has, we run into problems.  But worse than being impossible, this notion of heaven is harmful to us.  It feeds our individual desires, perhaps even giving us a sense of entitlement: “when I get to heaven, I’ll get whatever I want.”  Imagine a person who’s been told that all of their life, arriving in heaven.  What a child they would be!  Even aside from the fact that what we want is rarely good for us, Christ teaches us that it is in what we give away that we find our significance and purpose.  It is in what we are willing to give up that we can find true happiness.

Put another way, promoting one right demands relinquishing another.  My right to worship God in total freedom also requires that I allow others to do likewise; if I tried to control the religions of others, I would be violating the same right that I held dear.  The right to freedom precludes the right to control; the right to live precludes the right to kill.  The only way that I could get absolutely everything that I wanted in heaven would be if I were there by myself.  Ultimately, this view of heaven is the ultimate in self-absorption and hedonism.  It’s hard to find God in that.

Scripture paints a very different view of heaven.  It’s a place where God rules, where justice is guaranteed, where nobody is poor, and where everyone is in right relationship with their neighbour and with God.  There’s nothing in there about never having to work, or about having superpowers, or anything else like that.  It’s always earth, but it’s earth the way it was always supposed to be – back to the Garden of Eden, in a sense.  It’s an ultimate second chance for us all.  What’s truly amazing about this view of heaven is that, to some extent, it’s possible.

God has already healed the relationship between human beings and Himself, by becoming a human being in Jesus Christ.  Sustainable living and poverty alleviation are possible in theory; human sin just gets in the way.  Revelation says that sin and death are the final enemies, and that they will be destroyed some day; in this we find the difference between this earth and the new earth (usually referred to as heaven).  The only difference between this world and heaven is the presence of sin in us.

Remember, at times we see glimpses of heaven.  Whenever someone gives of themselves in a selfless act, whenever someone cares for someone else, whenever we live peacefully in community – in short, whenever we act like Jesus – we see what the Bible calls “the new earth” or “the kingdom of Heaven.”

Flying, it turns out, is a moot point.  Loving, after all, is much better.

On Myth in the Bible, and Bultmann

We use the term “myth” to refer to things that are not true, but this is not the literary definition.  Myth is a genre of literature that, like all ancient literature, focuses on the significance of an event rather than the event itself.  The difference between an ancient myth and an ancient history is the degree to which the event recorded has been interpreted.

I’m sure I’ve talked about ancient histories here before, but let’s go over it again briefly.  Our modern notion of history is that we attempt to write an objective and accurate account of events in order to preserve those events for future knowledge and analysis.  For a modern historian, video clips are a wonderful invention: they preserve the events just as they happened, without obvious interpretation (media majors can argue about interpretation’s presence within a photograph some other time   Modern history wants to see what really happened, in minute detail.

Ancient history, on the other hand, is much more concerned with interpreting events rather than recording them accurately.  Sure, they record events, but they tell the story of those events in a way that includes their interpretation of those events.  They feel quite comfortable assigning meaning to the events, and even portraying the events in certain ways so as to really bring that meaning or significance to the forefront.  They might even embellish the story, quite liberally, to really highlight the significance of the events.  An ancient history is thus not an objective account of historical events, but rather a people group’s account of their history for their purposes.

Myth goes even further, using symbols and imagery to describe “events” that may not have actually happened at all in a physical, modern-historical sense, but represent the meaning and significance that the writer wants to portray.  This is probably why there are so  many creation myths: nobody was actually there for creation, so there’s no chance of having a modern-historical account of the events, or even an ancient-historical account with its interpretation embedded in the story.  The writer of myth has to start with the significance, rather than the event, and write about an event that represents the significance.  Or, it may be that the writer of the myth started with an historical account that has been so heavily interpreted over such a long period that the details have been altered or have even disappeared.

Let’s be clear about something: this does not mean that the events described in a myth never happened!  We can’t actually know.  All it means for sure is that those events have been so heavily interpreted that the details that a modern historian would look for are long, long gone, leaving only the interpretation of the events behind.  Powerful interpretations do not appear out of nothing, and we know that there is a basis in historical events for many myths, so that even if an ancient writer were to start off with the significance and craft a tale to describe that significance, that significance still came from the interpretation of an event at one point.  An important point to remember is that ancient writers never intended to write modern histories, and they saw their own stories as true – mostly, I think, because the truth they were trying to communicate was not the events themselves, but the significance of those events as they had been interpreted.

Confused yet?  Let’s think of a compass, with one axis forming a spectrum between “fact” and “fiction”, and the other forming a spectrum between “objective” (without bias and interpretation) and “subjective” (with obvious bias and interpretation).

Forgive my crude drawing, and please note that this is based entirely on my own understanding.  Feel free to refute my placement of any of the dots!  The point is that our understanding of history comes from the Modern era, which tried to be completely objective and factual (and for a while, they thought there actually were).  Modernists saw myth as completely fictional and subjective, and ancient history as only slightly less so.  What’s important for us to understand (and isn’t represented on the chart) is that ancients weren’t concerned with objectivity or subjectivity at all; I’m not even sure they had such categories.  So in a sense they were totally subjective, and didn’t care!  And as for the genre of myth, it doesn’t actually attempt to be “factual”.  At times, it’s not even sensical!  But in the sense that it is true, it is completely true – and that’s the only sense it’s concerned with.

Now picture another spectrum, with one end being “Biblical Myth” and the other being “Biblical History.”  At the “myth” end, we’ll find texts that are full of significance, but light on actual historical accuracy; on the “history” end are texts that are telling us about real events, but with some interpretation embedded in the story itself; and in between we’ll find stories that probably refer to real events but may have been embellished for the sake of the significance of the story.  There are some parts of the Bible (such as Genesis 1) which is quite obviously myth, and there are other parts (such as the accounts of the kings) that are quite obviously ancient history.  But there are other parts that are much more difficult to place!  For example, where do we put the book of Jonah?  It’s written as a straightforward, mostly literal account of a series of events featuring the prophet Jonah – but it’s also written in the apparent style of an ancient novella, with a very clear moral to the story.  Is it entirely fictional, entirely factual, or some mix of fact and fiction?  See below as I’ve placed some Bible stories on the spectrum (fully my own opinion!):

Sorry the text is so small, but I think you can get my drift.  This is how I would classify these particular Bible stories, and to some extent where I put these stories on this spectrum says as much about me as it does about the texts themselves.  For example, we can tell just from the text itself that Genesis 1-11 is in the genre of myth, just by its very style, so in this case my choice to put it on the “myth” end comes from the text itself; similarly, the kings lists in the Bible fit in perfectly with those of other nations at that time, and are way too dry to be called “embellished” in any real sense.  The novella-style of Jonah and the Joseph story in Genesis suggest that they may be fictional, yet I’ve put Joseph far closer to history than Jonah, which I’ve put firmly as myth.  I placed Joseph there because the Joseph story is somewhat integral to the history of Israel, whereas the history of Israel is unaffected by Jonah, whether he existed or not – and there is no other record of Nineveh’s repentance, so obviously it didn’t affect their history either.  So in this case, my choices are mostly based on the text, but also on my appraisal of it.

As for Joshua-Judges, they are important for the history of Israel, and I’ve placed them where I have partly because of that and partly (I admit) because I want to believe that they are factually and not just symbolically or thematically true.   Modern historians would tear me apart on that point (probably quite rightly).  The Gospels are documents that we know an awful lot about, and though Gospel is a different genre than ancient history, we know that it’s quite similar and that they are quite reliable.  At the same time, the four gospels each present the events in different order, include different stories about Jesus, and show very obvious intent to present a particular image of Jesus.  Modernists would say that the Gospels are full of miracle accounts, which obviously must be mythological because miracles are impossible; I believe that miracles are possible, and so I don’t feel the need to classify miracle stories as myth, and thus the gospels can be much closer to history than myth.

What prompted this reflection is that I’ve read a little bit of Rudolph Bultmann recently.  I was warned off of him in Bible college because he doesn’t believe that the resurrection of Christ (or the miracles of Christ) was a historical event – for a Pentecostal, this was tantamount to atheism!  Over the years I didn’t think much about him, until earlier this year when a Seminary professor described Bultmann as a Christian of very deep conviction who cared passionately about preaching the gospel.  My atheist picture of Bultmann was rocked.

What’s fascinating about Bultmann is that he held a theology that interpreted all miracle stories in the Bible as myth, but did so in a way that had not been done very well before.  A century before Bultmann, modernist scholars had rooted out all of the “myth” in the Bible and simply discarded it as superstitious nonsense, and were left with a few moral sayings and not much else.  Bultmann, on the other hand, recognized that myth was an ancient way of explaining significance and interpreting historical events.  “Basically, the mythological talk seeks to do nothing other than to express the significance of the historical event” (New Testament & Mythology and Other Basic Writings, 1984, p.35).  He lived in a thoroughly modernist, scientific society in which stories of miracles were simply unbelievable – so in service of the church and a desire to make the Bible relevant to the modern era, he set about finding the significance of all of those stories in order to still be able to preach the gospel – whose spiritual significance was still quite true! – to the modern world.  In Bultmann’s theology, it really didn’t matter that he believed that none of these miracles – including the resurrection! – occurred; the significance was true, and dearly important to the world.

I disagree with Bultmann on a lot of things.  I live in the post-modern era, where we don’t believe that objectivity really exists in a meaningful way, and we don’t believe that science always gets things right.  I have no problem with the notion of miracles, even if science says they can’t happen.  That’s simply what makes it a miracle   I don’t always agree with all of Bultmann’s existentialist readings, and I don’t think he gives proper credit to all of the books of the New Testament, and I think he’s wrong to think that we can only interact with Jesus through the text (as a Pentecostal with somewhat incarnational ecclesiology and an appreciation for the sacraments, I believe that I interact with Jesus through the Holy Spirit, the Church, and the Eucharist in significant ways quite regularly).  But even though we don’t see eye to eye on so many important issues, I’m tremendously grateful to Bultmann for his work: he’s shown me that there is more than one level of truth (literal/historical and spiritual/existential/symbolic) and that all levels of truth are incredibly valuable!  He’s shown me that having a historical understanding of the resurrection is not enough on its own to generate real faith in Christ.

If Bultmann were alive today, I’d say to him “I’m glad to know that the truths of Scripture do not depend entirely on their historicity; but nevertheless, I believe that their historicity gives them a powerful, concrete element that adds so much value and strength to my faith, and moreso to my relationship with the God who truly and literally became like me so that I could really know Him and become in turn like Him.  I do not need to be physically resurrected in order for the significance of my life and death to be complete, yet nevertheless I long to see the end product of God’s salvation in the restored world to come.  I do not need to see miracles to understand and appreciate God’s nearness to me, and yet I know that my concrete experience of God through the miraculous has forever changed me.”  In short, thanks for revealing another layer of meaning that is sufficient for faith; but the fullness of Christ is far more than just sufficient!

On Sacrament and Participation

Sacrament.  What a loaded word.

For much of my Christian life, it was a dirty word.  It spoke of the domination of Christians by a legalistic hierarchy with a dubious history.  It referred to going through the motions of empty ritual in an attempt to earn salvation.  It represented everything that was wrong with the Church, and even when us good Evangelicals perform the same practices, we use a different word (ordinances).  “Sacraments” was a dirty word.

Or so I thought.  So I was often told, implicitly even more than explicitly.  It doesn’t help that sometimes there’s some truth to that dismal view.

In the past few years I’ve become attracted to sacraments, and the more I learn about them, the more attracted to them I become.  Not any particular sacraments: I still hold to the two “acceptable” ones, Baptism and Eucharist (Communion), and while I appreciate the other five Catholic sacraments (when I can remember what they all are), I don’t think they have the same weight as the main two in terms of the regular practice of the Church.  My interest in sacraments is better worded as an interest in sacrament (no “s”), and this is something I should explain.

There is a very, very old notion that this visible world is not the only world that exists, but that there is also a spiritual world that is connected, or in some way corresponds, with our world.  Traditionally, we refer to these worlds as Heaven (the spiritual reality) and Earth (the physical reality).  Many religions have developed quite specific ideas about these two worlds and the ways in which they are interrelated: some see these two worlds as being somehow in conflict, with the physical world being evil while the spiritual world is good, and we are sparks of spiritual light trapped in physical bodies of darkness.  This is called Gnosticism, and it got really popular right after the Church began.  That’s not what I’m going to talk about.  I want to talk about how the Christian Church sees this interrelationship.

Jewish concepts of the spiritual world and the physical world were much closer: God lived among Israel in a tent, and He marched out to war with them in the spring time, and the gods of other peoples and territories feared Him.  This is getting a little bit closer to the Christian notion.  The Jews saw spiritual forces in the concrete events of history, and there was nothing ethereal about the actions of these invisible, spiritual beings.  Yet at the same time, God’s throne was in Heaven, even if His house was a tent in Israel’s camp.

Early Christians inherited a mixed bag of ideas about heaven and earth, from Jews and Hellenists (Greeks) and Persians and everyone else in the cosmopolitan Roman Empire.  They certainly saw heaven and earth as two realms, distinct but highly interrelated.  Jesus told Peter that whatever he binds on earth will be bound in heaven; there is a strong notion that heaven and earth mirror each other imperfectly.  Historically, people have seen earthly events as being a result of events in heaven, as though earthly history is a copy of what goes on in heaven (note that this is the opposite of what Jesus said: what Peter binds on earth will be bound in heaven).  The important point is that there is an interrelationship, and even more importantly, that Jesus spread ideas that went way beyond a mere correspondence between heaven and earth.  Jesus, in the Jewish traditions of prophecy and apocalypse, talked about Heaven breaking into Earth, the two realms colliding and becoming one.  He described this collision and the order that would come from it in a sort of contradiction in terms, a blending of heaven and earth: the Kingdom of Heaven.

To the Jews, the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven would mean that God would live among them again: Jesus certainly meant this when he used the term.  The strange thing was that he used the term to refer to the things he was doing rather than with the appearance of God in a pillar of fire.  He spoke of the Kingdom being present (already!), even in the midst of Roman Palestine, but there was no sign of a new state or world order – only a man healing the sick and feeding the poor, sometimes in miraculous ways, often in very ordinary ways.  He spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven when he cast out demons and performed miracles, but he also spoke of it when he commented on how his disciples were arguing with one another over petty things.  This Kingdom of Heaven was surely a mix of heavenly and earthly things!

The really tricky thing about this Kingdom is that sometimes it’s here, and sometimes it’s not.  Sometimes Jesus talked about it in the future tense, sometimes in the present.  This has led theologians to talk about the “already/not-yet” of the gospel, sometimes called the “eschatological reserve” because it refers to the fullness of the Kingdom that will, according to Paul, come when Christ returns.  Right now, he says, we only get a glimpse of it – like a down payment, or a pledge, of what’s to come.  It’s an enticing idea, but it’s not entirely what I want to talk about either.  Here’s the good part:

We get to participate in this pledge of a new Kingdom.  Just like Jesus did, we get to do certain things that actually transform our entire reality, if only for a moment, into the Kingdom of Heaven.

There’s this great TV show called Fringe that’s all about “fringe science,” and a key plot point in the whole series is that there is more than one dimension.  These two dimensions are mostly alike, but not entirely.  A few fringe scientists discover how to open a portal between these two worlds, these realities, and the results shake up both worlds.  But the image I want to impress on you is that, to cross between these two worlds, these scientists do something that causes these two similar but slightly different worlds to vibrate on the same frequency, so that for a few moments these two places become one and the same place.  There is an overlap that occurs, and for a moment, one world appears in the other.  Just a glimpse, but enough to allow elements of one world to pass into the other.

In this scene, a bridge appears in a place where the bridge has been destroyed.  This is because, in the other dimension, the bridge is still there; it was never destroyed.  In that moment and that particular place, the two worlds were becoming one (until Peter stopped it).  What Jesus did, and what Jesus still does through the Church, is make much more than a bridge appear: he makes Heaven (which is very often used as a euphemism or symbol for God Himself) appear.  And we get to participate in this action.  One of the ways that we do this is through the sacraments.

Sacraments are in a very strong sense an acting-out of the Kingdom of God.  We rehearse regularly for this future world, and in so doing we represent it here on earth in symbolic ways.  In Baptism, we are symbolically identifying ourselves with Christ in his death and resurrection, dying to the old earthly life and rising again to new life in the new Kingdom.  In the Eucharist we not only remember the concrete Christ of history, but we also identify with him by partaking of his body and blood, becoming one with him in flesh as we do in Spirit, simultaneously remembering his death and committing ourselves to follow him to that very death.  We are, symbolically, making ourselves identical with Christ; we’re making a crossing-over point, and Jesus is walking across that bridge.  In the sacraments, we act out the Kingdom of Heaven; in so doing, we make it appear in our world.

What a beautiful thing!  We are not just singing about what Jesus did, we are participating in it! (albeit in a symbolic sense).

But as beautiful as sacraments are, they’re not enough.  Jesus’ actions didn’t make the Kingdom of Heaven present in a symbolic way.  He made it present in a very concrete way, through his ethical action.  At this point I’ll turn it over to Jurgen Moltmann, who says it better than I can paraphrase in Following Jesus Christ in the World Today:

Christian messianic ethics celebrates and anticipates the presence of God in history.  It wants to practice the unconditioned within the conditioned and the last things in the next to last.  In the economic dimension, God is present in bread; in healing, as health.  In the political dimension God is present as the dignity of the human being; in the cultural dimension, as solidarity.  In the ecological area, God is present as peace with nature; in the personal area, in the certainty of the heart.  Every form of his presence is veiled and sacramental; it is not yet a presence face-to-face.  God’s presence encounters human persons in the concrete messianic form of his liberation from hunger, oppression, alienation, enmity and despair.  These messianic forms of his presence point at the same time, however, beyond themselves to a greater presence, and finally to that present in which ‘God will be all in all.’

God’s real presence as bread, as freedom, as community, as peace and as certainty thus have the character of exploding the present.  To act ethically in a Christian sense means to participate in God’s history in the midst of our own history, to participate in the comprehensive process of God’s liberation of the world, and to discover our own role in this, according to our own calling and abilities.  A messianic ethic makes people into co-operators fo the kingdom of God.  It assumes that the kingdom of God is already here in concrete, if hidden, form.  Messianic ethics integrates suffering people into God’s history in this world; it is fulfilled by the hope of the completion of God’s history in the world by God himself.

Messianic ethics makes everyday life into a feast of God’s rule, just as Jesus did.  The messianic feast becomes everyday life.  As Athanasius once said, ‘the resurrected Christ makes life a feast, a feast without end.’  As we celebrate the presence of God’s kingdom by identifying with and serving the needs of the poor, the downtrodden, the lonely, and the powerless, Christian ethics becomes a sacrament.  Then in our normal daily life in the world, politics becomes worship (Rom. 12:1-2).

Jesus the Activist, and the Importance of Non-Violence

I have a friend who always says that Jesus was completely a-political.  In some sense I suppose she’s right: he always avoided partisan issues (e.g. Pharisees vs. Sadducees).  But is the realm of politics limited to discussing which party or system of governance we follow?

Today I was driving a feed truck, but I really wanted to be in Winnipeg.  On any other day, Winnipeg is one of the last places I would want to be.  But today, Winnipeg hosted two major events that I had hoped to attend: the Slut Walk, in which people protest the horrible idea that the way a woman dresses makes her responsible for her own rape; and most of all, Occupy Winnipeg, the Winnipeg counterpart to Occupy Wall Street.  This movement started on Wall Street, as people gathered in public spaces, “occupying” them by their continued presence, as a reminder and a statement that these spaces are indeed public–that our country belongs to us.  Since then, Occupy has become a movement that’s spread to Europe, Asia, and Australia.  Today, Occupy protests occurred in many major Canadian cities, with thousands gathering in Toronto and hundreds here in Winnipeg.  This has become a global movement, and a major impetus for social change.  Does Jesus have anything to say in situations like this?

Perhaps we’re more comfortable with Jesus speaking to people’s needs: feeding the poor, healing the sick, touching the untouchables.  Nobody has a problem with associating those things with Jesus.  They were his M.O., the things that characterized his life and, to a large extent, his legacy.  Consider this, then.  The things that the people at Occupy are protesting include: injustice in regard to economic crimes; promised jobs that have not materialized (i.e. the poor are growing in number, and need to be fed); a medical system that exploits the sick; and a growing class distinction, as the middle class disappears into poverty and the rich get richer.  Among other things.  It isn’t very difficult to draw lines between these social/political movements and what Jesus did and taught.

Do we have trouble seeing Jesus as political because he was a religious figure, rather than a politician?  Trick question: in Jesus’ day, there was no distinction.  Religion was politics and politics was religion, not just because the Emperor claimed to be a god; it was not the pride of the emperor that caused the religious and political systems to mix, but the mixed religious/political system that enforced the pride of the emperor.  The “separation of church and state” is useful, but we’re naive to think that these two spheres don’t overlap in their demands on us.

Do we have trouble seeing Jesus as political because he didn’t protest?  Because he didn’t engage in civil disobedience?  Because he didn’t advocate direct resistance to the powers that be?  In point of fact, he did all of those things.

Jesus protested against the unjust religious system that held his people in bondage.  He taught against this system, and called its leaders (the Pharisees and Sadducees) to account, to their faces.  This religious system victimized people financially (through heavy temple taxes) and spiritually (through intense legalism), creating a class division between the rich and pious religious leaders, and the poor sinners.  God had set up a system that would have guaranteed a more just and equitable society: every 50th year was called a Year of Jubilee, in which all land which had been sold reverted to its original owner, and all debts were cancelled.  Jesus proclaimed a Year of Jubilee when he read the words of Isaiah:

And the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. And He opened the book and found the place where it was written,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”
And He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him.
And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” – Luke 4:17-21

Jesus engaged in civil disobedience.  He marched into the outer temple court (the court of the Gentiles, the only place Gentiles could come to in the Temple), which the religious authorities had allowed to become a marketplace for the selling of sacrifices and the changing of money, and he turned over the tables of the merchants, driving their animals out of the Temple courts with a whip.  Don’t think that the merchants were breaking the rules by being there, or that Jesus’ action wasn’t a type of active resistance to an oppressive regime.  The religious authorities were getting rich off of the religious observances of the people, and the court of the Gentiles was where the financial transactions all took place.

Jesus engaged in active resistance to unjust use of authority, and he taught others to do likewise:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer, But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.” – Matthew 5:38-41

We tend to see this as “be a doormat to whoever picks on you,” but it was actually instruction on non-violent direct resistance.  A Roman soldier or citizen could treat non-citizens however they liked, so they treated them inhumanly: it was common practice for them to slap a non-citizen with the back of their hand.  A right-handed person’s backhand slap would fall across your right cheek, so by turning your left cheek to them, you were forcing them to slap you forehand, which was a strike reserved for other human beings.  Rather than passivity, it was actively (and non-violently) reinforcing one’s status as a human being.  In this, Jesus counselled his followers to resist social oppression.

Similarly, the instruction to give your cloak to the one who sues you for your coat is not generosity, but active non-violent resistance.  A court in that day was a public place, and elders or representatives of some higher authority would hear the complaints of the people.  In 1st century Palestine, the land was controlled by the state, the religious authorities, or rich landowners.  If someone couldn’t pay the many taxes, or their rent, or any other debt, they could be sued; if they still didn’t cough it up, they’d go to prison or sell themselves into slavery to pay the debt.  In Jesus’ example, picture a wealthy landowner suing someone for their coat – presumably, the last of their possessions.  All the person has left now is their “cloak”, which is a euphemism for their undergarment.  In this situation, Jesus suggests that this poor person also remove their undergarment and give it to the one suing them, showing everyone in this public place how the rich have taken absolutely everything from the poor.  In this, Jesus counselled his followers to resist financial oppression.

Finally, a Roman soldier could demand that a non-citizen carry his pack for him for up to one mile – and no more.  Jesus suggests that, if asked to carry the pack of his oppressor, a Palestinian non-citizen should offer, even insist, to carry it two miles.  An act of kindness, but have you ever heard of “killing them with kindness?”  This act of kindness would put the soldier in danger of being court-martialed for abusing his power, on the one hand, and should make him see the non-citizen as a person more worthy of respect, on the other.  In this, Jesus counselled his followers to resist political oppression.

Is there any question of why they killed him?

The early church carried on being political after Jesus ascended.  The phrase “Jesus is Lord” was a direct riff on the imperial slogan “Caesar is Lord.”  The Apostles were preaching about Jesus’ death and resurrection, against the direct orders of the religious authorities, who had the authority to imprison and torture them.  The Apostles simply said “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God.  For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:19-20).  Paul was imprisoned over and over again, and was ultimately executed (as were several of the other Apostles).  These men were deemed enemies of the state, because they carried on Jesus’ message.

So yes, Jesus has something to say about protests, civil disobedience, and non-violent direct action!  Rather than wondering at the notion of Jesus being political, we should be wondering at the notion that the Church today is not.  Again, this does not mean that we should be picking a “Christian party” to rule our country, but rather that we should be speaking out against injustice and insisting on the full status and rights of human beings (and I would add our environment to this as well).  This is a very exciting time to be a Christian, because there are so many people who are finally willing to stand up for something.  In some ways, the people down at Occupy are more like Jesus than most Christians – scandalous!  Theologians talk about the scandal of the gospel (that God would become a human, serve humans, and die for humans).  The scandal of the gospel today is that it actually demands that we stand up for others and make a difference in our society!  We should be out there with the Occupiers, because they need us.  We have something that they need.

When I look at movements like Occupy, I see a lot of angry people who want to see change, but their demands and their grievances are all over the map.  These movements are not overly organized, and tend to collect people from every imaginable group of the oppressed, dispossessed, disenfranchised, and disturbed, including every special interest group you can name.  To make real change, a movement needs focus – a list of real demands, a manifesto if you will.  We have one, as taught by the Son of God.

Another downside to large protest movements is that they often make the mistake of incorporating violence.  All it takes is one person taking a swing at a cop, and suddenly there are mass arrests, beatings, and new legislation to crack down on protests.  Tonight I watched a documentary called Capitalism Is the Crisis, and it was quite good for the first half.  The second half seemed to be advocating anarchism and violent resistance.  Ironically, when it comes to protests the anarchists seem to be the best organized, and groups like the “Black Bloc” turn peaceful protests into firebombed police cars and broken shop windows.  Last summer in Toronto this gave the police all the justification they needed to perpetrate the largest mass-arrest in Canadian history, arresting over 1100 people and holding most of them for several days without charge, subjecting them to all kinds of abuse.  Any time someone speaks out against it, though, it’s easy for the government to paint all protestors as violent thugs, and thus justify their actions.

Jesus was not just an activist, he was a brilliant activist.  He broke a lot of laws, but only unjust ones.  He paid his taxes, and never used violence.  He was, in a word, blameless.  That is what gave his teachings authority: because he was right!  All governments, even dictators, govern by the consent of the people, because if the people rise up then no government can stop them.  All governments, therefore, have to at least pretend to be legitimate and just.  So if a law is obviously unjust, they can’t be publicly seen to be punishing people for doing the right thing by disobeying it!  Jesus was a public figure, so any mistreatment of him by anyone would be widely reported; his execution seriously undermined the authority of the political and religious regimes that ruled Palestine, and spawned a movement that ended up taking over the world’s greatest empire.

Today, we’re all public figures.  There are cameras everywhere.  Protestors are catching on, chanting “the whole world is watching” whenever police start abusing their power.  Each and every one of us has more chance than ever of joining in Jesus’ civil disobedience and non-violent resistance.  If we’re doing what is right, then we’ll expose the “authorities” as being unjust, and any force they use against us will only further judge them.  Any time we resort to violence, we enter into a personal, human conflict; but every time we’re non-violent, the struggle is one of truth vs. injustice.

So this is my call to the Church: don’t pass up this opportunity.  People are trying to act like Jesus, so let’s show them how it’s done!