Plato's famous observation in The Symposium that both progeny and publishing can be considered gestures toward creating something immortal has always been insightful. As unquestionable founder of Western arts and letters (and I'm not talking here about the Bible which can hardly be termed "belletristic"), Plato was probably on to something. And I'm sure he considered flesh-and-blood productions "ontologically" inferior to books, or literary works, that "live forever." Plato was an "idealist." The Symposium was not about learning how to, as Stephen Stils might say, "love the one you're with" or the kid(s) you've got, but about transmuting base metals into gold, so to speak through art.
But what if art and life in the Platonic sense become not so much indistinguishable as interchangeable? What if your own progeny makes the same gesture by publishing something "immortal" himself? And what if he is immortalizing someone, or something, that isn't simply either "real" or "ideal", but (as Jacques Derrida would call it) impossible. The Derridean "impossible," as the now immortal philosopher of postmodernity and so-called "deconstructive" readings of texts employs the term, has nothing to do with not being able to do or accomplish something. It has to do with discerning the presence of a space of meaning and signification that is neither here nor there, neither within nor without, neither internal nor internal, neither physical nor spiritual, neither (to use big philosophical words) "immanent" nor "transcendent".
The impossible is, as Derrida suggests, a specter. It haunts us. Like all specters, it is a force that impinges constantly on our lives without ever really manifesting, or materializing. Like the ghost of Hamlet's father in Shakespeare's "immortal" (I won't keep pushing that trope, I promise) play by the same name, Derrida's specter "manifests" at times of transition, confusion, doubt, "in-betweenness", when the "times are out of joint." Derrida develops the notion of the "specter" in his book from the late 1980s entitled Specters of Marx. The specter haunts us because it vaguely reminds us of the past, but also intimates something which we can feel in the air, which is both now and therefore, as Derrida would say, "messianic." The Kingdom of Here is both now and not-yet. It is both present and "to come."
The impossible haunts us at in such ways in such in-between and out-of-joint-times, at "such a time as this". And this book is definitely haunting at this time.
The young hero of The Book of Samuel (a book about a kid named "Samuel," Samuel Gerard) is himself an "in-betweener," or "tweener" for short. The book adopts the actual title of an in-between book of the Bible, which is about the time in-between the golden age of ancient Israel's tribal democracy and the worldly and increasingly corrupt monarchy. The book is set in an aging, lower middle class, almost exclusively white, pre-gentrified neighborhood of Denver, Colorado during the early 1980s, in the salad days of what conservatives nowadays nostalgically dub "Ronald Reagan's America."
We used to refer to tweeners as "pre-teens," but now we know that this age for both boys and girls is equally about being "pre-" and "post-." It is also post-childhood. The no longer and not yet. That's why a little over a generation ago we started renaming every "junior high" as a "middle school." This strange combination of "pre-" and "post", this no longer yet still to come, or "to become", is often described as the time of "coming of age." Indeed, that's how many of the somewhat formulaic blurbs or reviews of this book online have described it - a "coming of age novel."
What exactly does it mean to "come of age"? Usually, it's about losing one's innocence and discovering sex. It can also involve a sense of being suddenly marginalized in terms of emotions and physical appearance, of entering "the awkward age," to employ a threadbare and quite inconsequential standard descriptor. But it's not merely coincidental that pre-literate - and sometimes even highly literate - societies have ancient ceremonies performed at this time of life for "coming of age," what are known as rites of passage. The very concept of "passage" implies transition, in-betweenness.
The famous anthropologist Victor Turner characterized these ceremonies as accentuating what he called the "liminal space" of life at this time. The word "liminal" derives from the Latin limen, which can mean "threshhold" or "boundary line." In this space of in-betweenness it is sometimes almost impossible to distinguish order from chaos, and the confusion is deliberately and strategically enshrined in the rites themselves.
In the Roman empire the word referred to the invisible boundary line (usually a river) between "civilization" and the "barbarian" realms. Roman legions were garrisoned there (modern European cities such as Frankfurt and Vienna were originally such outposts) in order to prevent order from absorbing chaos, or barbarism from penetrating the limina that marked the boundary of civilization. It is the very nature of a limen, however, to be temporary, to collapse in the face of penetration by the threatening "other" from "over there", beyond the limen. In The Book of Samuel the liminal "river" is what the middle schoolers term "the gulch" (actually, the Harvard Gulch, which is not a river so much as a drainage area that separates certain neighborhoods in South Denver), and the "other" are what the boys deliberately refers to, both generically and provocatively, as "the Mexicans."
The gulch is where Samuel and his two young friends, Jesse and Jonathon, go to enjoy the "innocent" sport of bike jumping, in which they've engaged throughout grade. It is a place all their own that is betwixt and between, away from school, away from parents, away from the dysfunctionality of white, working class family life which the book often portrays, humorously as well as poignantly, in the manner of the old "Archie Bunker" series from the same era. But the gulch is haunted with the specters of change. Jonathon is the angry and the defensive one, the one that senses the change, who acts as the garrison against the growing onslaught. Jonathan goes to the gulch routinely not just to have fun, but to "fight" the onslaught.
"I'm sorry about today," he said, finally. "You're like my best friend. You don't want to fight. Some things you can't change. You don't want to fight. Okay."
"He stood.
"Where are you going?"
"This doesn't feel like my gulch anymore."
"Why? Because of the Mexicans." (p. 256)...
There were so many Mexicans now, all gathering around. More and more. Gravitating.
'Jonathon.'" (p. 257)
In the book "the Mexicans", a phrase that will grate on the politically correct and hypersensitive but is necessary to underscore the rigidity of the false sense of "otherness" that occupying the limen without any awareness of its liminality fosters, are the specter of how this in-betweeness comes to be resolved in the surprise ending, in a powerful way.
But The Book of Samuel has far less to do with the sociology of transition, and the intractability of race prejudice, than it does with the "liminality" of the spiritual rites of passage of our age - from Jesus-freak, reformed-hippie, Bible-quoting, evangelical Christianity to one which is now and not yet, that is avenir (in French-speaking Derredese) "to come." It is the passage of the Christianity which, culturally speaking founded the Reagan era and reached its apogee in the age of George W. Bush, but now finds itself awash in a strange, culturally diverse, globalized, world-flattened, increasingly upside-down, spectrally threatening, morally ambiguous, and increasingly violent environment.
It is an "impossible" Christianity, which Samuel at first and rather unsuccessfully seeks to find in the mutterings - somewhere between prophetic and purely apocalyptic - of his post-Sixties, Jesus-freak father, who has quite his job as a psychology professor to "save the world", but in the end discovers unintentionally and in an unforeseen way through his own unplanned "apocalypse."
I will have more to say about this kind of Christianity in a soon-forthcoming, follow-up post as well as in a future meditation about what the novel says about my generation, and the generation that is supposed to now succeed it. I've always been a critic of my own generation - the Boomers and self-righteous post-Vietnammers - but I've also been a critic of the much vaunted "millennials", who were supposed to save the world too. The author, my son, is neither a boomer or a millennial. He's an "X"er, that undesignated "liminal" generation that we can't easily make sense of. The Xers are now approaching middle age, another "in between" time, so whatever wisdom they can offer to us has to be read between the lines of the always-to-fail conventional wisdom.
The Book of Samuel was designated by the publisher as a "teen novel," but it really goes beyond that. It's really an "in-between" novel that can be read with relish by 20-somethings, 30-somethings, and 40-somethings alike. It's easy to read. And it compels. Furthermore, it grows on you, and you have to re-read it. Your kids can read it and perhaps chuckle at the pure juvenalia of it all, as in that other Colorado creation known as "South Park." Or you adults can read it and begin to unpeel the deeper layers of irony and meaning.
Samuel Gerard is indeed a present day, postmodern Huck Finn. And like Mark Twain's immortal character (shoot, I said it again) he is not only a mischievous, irrepressible, hormone-saturated argonaut of his own times, but the secret conscience of our age. I'm not sure what the "religious" people of our day will do with the book (none of the "Christian" publishers were remotely interested in it). Nor am I sure what the fashionably non-religious will do either (it doesn't glorify any of our stock, identity-political victim heroes, nor villify any of our stock, identity-political, "oppressor" bad guys). There's no theology in the book, just truth. It's only in those in-between spaces that truth, God, or the meaning of life can be genuinely discovered.
But what do I know? I'm just in-between the book and the author - somewhere.
Tom Scott, 27, who calls himself a "postmodern Christian", was born in Leicester, England, grew up in
Peterborough, England and went to the Nazarene Theological College,
University of Manchester. He spent a year studying English Literature in London before returning
home to reconsider his degree choice. He then spent a year as a Christian
Schools Worker on a volunteer basis with The CROPS Trust, Peterborough,
England, which involved working trips to South Africa, Ecuador, Romania
and the Ukraine. Tom currently lives in Ireland with his wife Nina and children. He works as a Special Needs Assistant in St. Anthony's Primary School,
Kilcoole, Co. Wicklow, as well as running his own photography business called
Scottvision (www.scottvision.ie). He can be reached at tomcscott@mac.com
European Christians need to learn to become culturally relevant? Why? Because although we could do well in embracing the current changes in the US regarding the nature of Christian communities, there is a real need to appreciate how any such change in Europe must reflect the indigenous population. A population so close, but so far apart from, that in the US requires a careful, intentional approach from those hoping to instigate something of the positive reformatory ideas currently growing in other parts of the globe, especially in the US.
Europeans have a love hate relationship with Americans. Many have been on holiday there, absorbed its media in all its forms, duplicated its fashions, consumed its style of food and so on. Many also ridicule the stereotypical picture of the overweight, overzealous, overstressed and, in a nutshell, over-the-top, American. Then, just for good measure, Europeans have ‘the Christian thing’ to add to the picture. This cuts a Deep South figure, funny accent, "turn or burn" theology, fundamentalist views, and, unfortunately at present, is embodied in the President of the entire country – the most powerful political figure in the world.
European Christians have a similar relationship with the US. The books, films, programmes, church-models, worship music – they all come primarily from the US, every month, every year since Evangelicalismi found its feet in the European context. This is a problem. As Europeans juggle their way through what they like and what they don’t like about American influences, the European Christian juggles also, but with the added ball of a particular brand of Christianity. The point is to ask questions as to how aware we are as European Christians that we are juggling at all. You see, when we take anything from the Christian ‘scene’ in the US and try to plug it into our churches and communities here in Europe we are taking teachings and songs and styles and influences that are being practiced in a specific time and a specific space.
Don’t get me wrong, some things transcend the differences that remain between cultures – just as indeed differences between European countries are transcended. The line of questioning explored here relates to how aware we are as European Christians and what issues our questioning will highlight. America is a very different place. Different to anywhere else. Just like any country. All countries have an image. All countries have an image problem. All countries continually define their image, every day, of every year. The American image is one of opportunity, safety, power and patriotism. The American image problem is a perception of arrogance, violence, greed, fear and corruption. At the moment the definition it is giving itself is doing little to promote a positive image and much to exacerbate the image problem.
The American Christian image is one of large, healthy and influential churches which are led by charismatic men. It's nice. The American Christian image problem is one of the born again, damnation driven, moralising, self-involved and hypocritical church-goer. Not so nice. America is a different place. An American Christian has a different profile. American churches are different. And that’s great! The fact that I am having to use the word different here is key. I’m having to use it because I am writing about a place that is … not here.
Here, by the way, is Europe. More specifically, its Ireland. As citizens of countries we all choose to adopt or deny certain values from other countries, other cultures … from those that are different from me, from us. As European Christians I think we are less discerning than the average citizen when it comes to the adoption of new, foreign ideals. As European Christians we take a book from the shelf, a recording through the post, a programme from the next-big-thing, and we live it – instantly. Without thinking about where something has come from, why it worked in certain places, who it helped in specific ways – we take it, snatch it, hold it as our own.
What are we dealing with here? The most recent Britney album, the latest style of Levi Strauss jeans, the newest iPod? No. Yet we treat the latest interpretation of Jesus’ teachings in the same way. You want purpose, here’s how. You want growth, here’s how. You want apple pie Jesus? (makes you warm and mushy inside), here’s how. Take it. Snatch it. Hold it as your own. This picture defines what things have been like since the upsurge of Evangelical activity from America into Europe over the last 30 years.
Things are changing. Changing for the better. The growth of the emergent conversation in the US since the start of the new Millennium is offering (but not giving definitively) something new to the Christian faith. It is practicing this in the US, with success and failure and praise and criticism. So, is this the next trend to copy? Take, snatch, hold – all over again? I don’t think it is. Yes, there is scope for this to happen. Yes, the fact that so many different bodies are aligning themselves with emergent thought does make the ground difficult to assess. Yes, there are more questions than answers (Amen?!).
But what matters here is the approach. Intentional, authentic, gracious, open, inclusive – you get the picture – and if this can be continued there could be much to gain for the European Christian and the communities they represent.If difference is now defining the Church, then difference can be embraced and translated across all borders.Those who seek to learn from their brothers and sisters can do so in unity but without denying who they really are.
Who we really are really matters. As soon as a person, or a group of people, feel that they cannot be who they really are (in the full sense of reality, of God) they are trading on something false. When we trade on something false, something that is not true, we are in a dangerous place – especially if we are exposing ourselves as Christians – especially if Christ is who we live to serve and embody. Think of a time when you really wanted something. You wanted it so bad. You dreamt about it. You had to have it. Then you got it. And you felt nothing.In fact, you felt worse than nothing, you felt empty. The thing that had been so important in your head was in fact very little in reality. The idea meant more than the actual object or possession.
We all do this. But what’s worse is that we all do this with ourselves. We seek to be a certain way, to adopt a particular trait, to achieve this, or succeed in that – and sometimes we get … there.And we feel … nothing. In fact, we feel worse than nothing, we feel empty.You see, when we look to the next programme, the next big thing, the next revolutionary idea, the next … the next … the next. When we do this we end up with a momentary emptiness and then we seek the next fill, asap.
Like fast food. We hunger for it. We consume it. It fills us up … for a while. Then we want some more. This is not God, this is fast food.The God of slow food. God is a God of slow food. The meal he has prepared for us all had taken time, it has a history, and it will continue to take time. And as with any appreciation of where we are today, where are heading tomorrow, we have to know where we were yesterday.
And yesterday here doesn’t just mean 24 hours ago. No, history here refers to the story we are all a part of, the grand-narrative, the over-arching reality of Creation, of God. Can you consume the Scriptures in one go? Can you wrestle the complexities of God in one sitting? Can you deal with the realities of Christian living through a shake in the morning, one for lunch and a proper meal in the evening?
No.No you cannot. You have to chew. And chew. And chew. Chewing transcends difference. Fast food is not available everywhere. But wherever there is food (which I think Jesus would hope is everywhere), there is chewing.
Wherever there is something joyful, loving, upsetting, something true - then there is chewing. There is the wrestling (steak), the doubting (muscles in garlic butter!), the celebration (phish food), the pain (indigestion). Chewing contradicts everything around us. Chewing takes time, helps us to digest, keeps our teeth sharp, helps us taste the flavours, keeps us quiet for a minute (!), it requires the food to be prepared for this experience, it is not cheap, easy or modified.
Fast food is cheap. It is wasteful. It pays poor wages. It is everywhere and yet nowhere at the same time. It’s chewed, but chewing requires something of substance, not substandards. As I just said, chewing transcends difference. Listen. It really does.I can start talking to someone who doesn’t want to chew and immediately we’re in a situation where the meal will be short. Short on subject, short on time, short.
But you know, if I sit down with someone who wants to chew, something’s going to happen. It has to – we’re chewing.You can’t chew something and not have a reaction or a response. Does it taste good, does it taste bad? Does it fill you with passion, does it make you want to vomit? Chew, chew, chew – what are you getting? And sometimes this is uncomfortable – ever see a child spit out the chewed contents of their mouth onto their plate? Not pretty. But why did they do this?
Think of the relationships we value most. At some point I bet there was a spitting on the plate episode. You’d tried to chew something for so long but you just couldn’t do it any longer, and so, with the person you trust present, you spat it out. There is was. On the plate. Bare, ugly, chewed.
But how much better you felt! How you were joyful just because you had stopped trying to digest the indigestible and you had expelled what was harmfully within! You had trusted in someone and they had not run a mile. You had discovered something poisonous to your soul and you had been cleansed. And this was just one meal. What about the others? So much that is good, that is bad, that is ugly, that is painful, that is harmful – what are you getting? Mealtime.
The problem here is not the food, i.e. the realities of life, the problem here is the meal – the venue, the company, the menu.
If I were to set up a restaurant here in Ireland I’d have to think about some very specific details before opening up for business. Most important in all of this would be who I was seeking to serve. If no one around here is willing to travel to a certain place, eat a certain food, pay a certain price, then questions have to be asked, problems overcome, solutions found.
And it’s the same when we as Christians, American or European (or from anywhere else for that matter), seek to create environments for chewing. I shouldn’t ask an Irish person to consume the American way, no more than an Irish person should force an American to cut peat for the fire or drink Guinness (although it beats a Bud any day!).Now, maybe the Irish person is happy to consume the American way, and so they do. And maybe the American wants a pint of Guinness, great. They adopt this way and that is fine for them, so they continue.
But here we’re not primarily dealing with those that are already consuming a certain way, we are looking to those that are not yet at the table to experience mealtime. Mealtime is beautiful. Mealtime is social, is laughing, is crying, is sharing, is open, is generous, is hospitable, is spacious, is family, is opportunity to chew in delight of all the senses, all the time. This is a time for agenda to sleep and for the Spirit to unravel. This is hearts opening, trust building, reflection happening, mystery embracing, and all in the quest for the deepest levels of reality, for God.
For too long the problem has been of one foreign company, distributing one menu, no choice, no variety, no change. For too long mealtime has been controlled, from the preparation to the after dinner mint, everything has been strangled by institutional diets and the Christian penchant for blandness.
Nobody wants a food fight. Well, that’s not actually true, some people do. But not everyday, at every mealtime. What we’re talking about here is not just a free-for-all, its not about more unnecessary clearing up. The key here is getting creative in the kitchen.No, even better, both in the garden and the kitchen.
We all have this garden to go into and search, its called the history of God. But so few of us venture into this space, so few hunt its undergrowth, or climb its trees. But its there, all the time, through all time. And what we find here needs to be brought back to the kitchen, we cannot afford to just throw the things we find in the garden onto a plate and serve it up. The kitchen is key. It is in the kitchen that we find our instruments and our preparation for chewing to take place.
But you know what, people don’t just need to have their meal brought to them without knowing anything about it. This is going to have to be a special kitchen. In our local town there is a restaurant that serves many kinds of Asian food. For a price, you can request a special table in the restaurant where the chef cooks your food in front of you and you are a part of the preparation of the meal.
This is something like the mode of practice we need to adopt. We need to get those waiting for their food … into the kitchen. Hey, blow it! Once there in the kitchen, take them to the garden, show them where the produce came from. Let them know this is their garden, their kitchen, their mealtime too. But whatever you do, let them try everything as they feel compelled – its their choice, its their right under God (especially in the garden, right?!).
When you’re walking the garden guide them around. Everytime you go – I guarantee this will happen – you will see something new as well. And when you do, you too can bring it back to the kitchen with them, work something out together, experience it at mealtime in unity, beautiful. Maybe it’ll taste great. Maybe you’ll vomit. There’s only one way to find out. Chew.
While we’re on the subject of transcendent aspects of the Christian faith it would be helpful to consider what it is we can offer those around us. What is it that we can offer the materialist, the atheist, the fundamentalist, the disillusioned Christian? In 2004 the Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann set out 19 theses (or convictions that he had) in his address to those in the Emergent Theological Conversation event of that year.ii
A summary of his ideas may read something like this:
Everybody lives by a script, whether they are aware of it or not. This script is adopted as we grow in our respective cultures and sub-cultures. The script teaches us that what is most important is the technology we rely on, the therapeutic treatments we indulge in, the military means we rule by and the consumerist profile we seek to escape through.
It is Bruggemann’s argument that this script promises to make us safe and happy, and, that this script has failed. If we are to see progress in our societies this script needs to be given up, turned away from, in the pursuit of an alternative script. And who is responsible for introducing an alternative script? Those in ministry. It is their role to patiently unravel the old with the intent of introducing the new.
The alternative script is found in the Bible and is put into action through the action of the church. If authentic, this counter-script, or counter metanarrative, will offer something alternative to the self-satisfying script that the majority live by. The key character in this counter-script is the God of the Bible, who we name Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This counter-script is not one seamless account, but a ragged collection of divinely inspired accounts. As such, there are many who have argued and continue to argue in their pursuit of smoothing over the ragged tears, it is here that the main claims of the counter-script are missed and abused.
In denouncing the old script and seeking the new script a gulf is created between the two. In this gulf there are questions and uncertainties and doubt and courage. It is here in this gulf between the two scripts that faith is adopted and working together in the uncertainties of life should then define the Christian practice of Christian people who are empowered by the spirit. For it is in these uncertain environs that the spirit is needed, responds and is exalted to the glory of God.
My son has a book that he’s has since he was a baby. Its called ‘Yes. No.’ Its one of those small, hard paged children’s books that baby’s seem to like chewing. The content of the book is not complicated. Each page contains a word and an image, on the next page is the opposite. Yes, no, fast, slow, alive, dead, in, out, under, over, off, on, light, heavy, young, old, up, down, before, after. And that’s it, end of book.
If you ask a Christian what the opposite to a Christian is what will they say? A non-Christian, a secular person, a sinner … the damned?! Yet, is there such thing as someone who is opposite to a Christian? Opposed maybe, but opposite? Surely if we understand what God’s purposes are then we are looking at a very warped picture if we are trying to see differences between us and them, the saved and unsaved, the found and the lost.
One writer refers to ‘the lost’ when he’s recounting something he saw in Jesus doing.iii The lost. Traditionally this has been associated with those that have no direction. Lost. Yet there is something worse than not having a direction, isn’t there? Have you ever thought you knew where you were going only to find out that you were going the wrong way? Frustrating isn’t it?
That feeling, turning back on yourself, retracing your steps, setting out again. Its hard. Pride swallowing is hard. Drawing extra reserves of energy is hard. Being lost is one thing. Thinking you were in a certain place and finding out that you’re … lost, that’s quite another. The writer Luke gives an account of Jesus meeting a man called Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus is straining to see Jesus through the crowd because he is short, so he climbs a tree. When Jesus sees him he calls him by his name and invites himself to Zacchaeus’ house. Zacchaeus was very excited by this.
Now I think when Zacchaeus woke up that morning he thought he was in a certain place. I don’t think he thought of himself as being lost.Zacchaeus was a tax-collector – or sinner as everyone else referred to him! When Jesus went to visit him all the other people present were displeased. In the presence of Jesus Zacchaeus felt compelled to renounce his corrupted ways to date. What’s more he said that he’d give away half his wealth and repay anyone he has wronged four times the amount he conned out of them.
Jesus responds by announcing that salvation has come to Zacchaeus’ home and tells everyone that he came to seek and save those who are lost. Save is such a great word – I think here ‘save you the hassle of living how you’re living’ would be appropriate! (Especially for a tax collector, brilliant!) But, at the end of this event, who is the lost Jesus refers to? Zacchaeus is no longer lost, why would Jesus need to mention it after seeing this change in the tax-collector’s life?
Let’s go back to those grumbling on the side-lines – the crowds who heard Jesus invite himself into Zacchaeus’ house. Do you think they were still hanging around? The self-righteous, waiting for a moment to seize, and prove, and be vindicated in their disapproving ways. Can you see it? The lost?
The tax-collector is not lost. He saw the tree, he ran ahead, he climbed the tree (committed hey), Jesus saw him, they spoke, they cleared a few things up, Jesus left. Ever have a relative do that trick on you, they point to your chest and ask ‘What’s that?’. You look down, ‘What?’. They flick your nose, ‘Gotcha!’. We’ve all had it done to us. We’ve all done it! Its too easy … isn’t it? Those that were crowding Jesus, those thought they knew where they were going, the sin spotters. What’s that? What? Gotcha!
The lost? Who, me? Surely not!
Notes
i For a concise but clear explanation on the difference between evangelicalism and Evangelicalism See McClaren, Brian D., A Generous Orthodoxy, Zondervan 2005. ii The full recordings from this event can be downloaded via the link at www.emergentvillage.com
His 19 theses, or convictions, were as follows: 1. Everybody lives by a script – implicit or explicit, recognised or unrecognised 2. All of us are scripted through the process of nurture, formation and socialisation 3. The dominant scripting in our society is a script of technological, theraputic, military, consumerism (TTMC) that socialises us all liberal and conservative 4. That script promises to make us safe and to make us happy 5. That script has failed. It cannot make us safe and it cannot make us happy 6. Health for our society depends on disengagement from and relinquishment of that script of TTMC. 7. It is the task of ministry to descript that script [… more here] 8. The task of descripting, relinquishment and disenegagement is accomplished by a steady patient intentional articulation of an alternative script 9. The alternative script is routed in the Bible is enacted through the tradition of the church. It is an offer of a counter metanarrative, counter to that of TTMC 10. That alternative script has as its most distinctive feature its key character, the God of the Bible, who we name as Father, Son and Holy Spirit 11. That script is not monolithic, one dimensional, or seemless, it is ragged and distjunctive and incoherent, partly because it has been crafted over time by committees (J, E, D and P!), and because the key character is illusive and irrasibile in freedom and in sovreignty and in hiddenness and, I’m embrarrased to say, in violence, which is a huge problem for us 12. The ragged, distjunctive and incoherent quality of the counter script to which we testify cannot be smoothed or made seamless because when we do that (systematic theology) it gets flattended and domesticated and it becomes a weak echo of the dominant script of TTMC. Whereas the dominant script of TTMC is all about certitude, privelege and entitlement, this counter script is not about these things, thus care must be taken to let this script be what it is, which entails letting God be God’s irrasible self 13. The ragged disjunctive character of the counter-script to which we testify invites its adherents to quarrel amongst themselves (liberals and conservatives) in ways that detract from the main claims of the script and so to debilitate the force of the script 14. The entry point into the counter-script is baptism, whereby we say in the old liturgies, ‘Do you now renounce the dominant script?’ 15. The nurture, formation and socialisation into the counter-script with this illusive, irrasible character is the work of ministry. We do that work of nurture, formation and socialisation by the practices of preaching, liturgy, education, social action, spirituality and neighbouring of all kinds 16. Most of us are ambiguous about this script. Those with whom we minister, and those of us who minister, most of us are not at the deepest places wanting to choose between the dominant script and the counter-scirpt. Most of us in the deep places are vascilating and mumbling in ambivalence 17. This ambivalence between scripts is precisiely the primary venue for the spirit, so that minsitry is to name and enhance the ambivalence that liberals and conservatives have in common that puts people in crisis and consequently that evokes resistance and hositility 18. Ministry is to manage that ambivalence that is equally present among liberals and conservatives in generative, faithful ways in order to permit relinquishment of old script and embrace of new script 19. The work of minsitry is crucial and pivotal and indepensible in our society precisely because there is no one, see if this is an overstatement, there is no one except the church and the synagogue to name and evoke the ambivalence and to manage a way through it. The role of minstiry then is as urgent as it is wonderous and difficult.
I find the review most interesting, and of course it is very favorable. I realize that calling attention to the intimate interconnection between the global and the postmodern is something supposedly radical and new for a lot of American (and perhaps European) readers. But it should within a short amount of time become a kind of "duh, now I get it" sort of phenomenon.
I'm really happy that Andrew Jones, whose name is a household word among "new kind of Christian" types of bloggers, is slated for one of the first series of talk-backs on the Baker-related (it's not supposed to be officially an advertising site for the publisher) blog.
I love Andrew's vision and perspective...and his down-homineness, even if he is a New Zealander (for a long time in my youth, even though geography was my favorite subject, I thought that was part of Antarctica where the penguins spoke with clipped British accents) living on the Orkney Islands with his kids somewhere in Britland. Consult Google Earth to find out where that is. I'll tell you more about meeting Andrew in a future post. He's funny and faithful - and he's also deep, something that might sound like a contradiction in terms, if only to an American.
Anyway, the reason I really admire Andrew is the same I treasure my newfound friendship with Tangible Kingdom author Hugh Halter, who unlike Andrew I can see regularly since he lives in Denver. For some reason Hugh seems to like me, even though he refers to me as the professor with his high-minded philosophy writings he doesn't try to understand. It's probably because both of us like to drink beer, but neither of us has the kind of sophisticated beer-snobbery that seems de rigeur these days if you want to be more than just a postmodern wannabe.
I really like Hugh because his TK book and his MCAP movement is about as being real as you can be when it comes to calling oneself a "postmodern Christian". He's already doing in reality through his ministries lwhat I talk about "theoretically" in GloboChrist, at least when it comes to the "radical rhizomatic relational" networks that we are going in the future to mean by the word "church." I've recommended his book now to far more people than I've recommended his own, and they've all coming away saying "wow" (including my wife Sunny, who's a self-proclaimed blonde and an artist, and says she can't understand my books - like Hugh - though she can understand Hugh's book. BTW Sunny's language is visual; her neo-figurative and abstract art is chocked full of powerful uses of colors and signs, very Deleuzian, that get Christianity across in ways that words can't).
In Hugh's latest blog post he describes his experiences in bringing The Tangible Kingdom to Beirut, Lebanon. I resonate with that, particular ly his concluding remarks, because it calls our attention not only to the emergent global Christianity that is postmodern, but not in the sense that you're probably used that word. It's a call to us to radical obedience to Christ, and it's not just about being hip and playful. If trying to do "tangible kingdom" stuff in the same neighborhood as Hezbollah is what he blogs about, I can heartily concur, which is why I call attention in my new book to what I call "the clash of revelations." Islamic militancy is challenging all of us to take our Christianity more seriously than we've ever taken it.
Rhizone is about the spread of Christianity worldwide and the growth of its emergent, global frontier.
The tag "Dispatches from the Next Christendom" captures the sense of what is happening on a planetary scale and derives from the title of a book by historian Philip Jenkins. Jenkins' The Next Christendom , published by Oxford University Press in 2002, projects the accelerating, future growth of Christianity, which is no longer really a Western phenomenon, but a global one. Christians in the West still have little clue. According to the book blurb, "the explosive southward expansion of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and
Latin American has barely registered on Western consciousness. Nor has
the globalization of Christianity--and the enormous religious,
political, and social consequences it portends--been properly understood."
While Christianity is spreading rapidly in Asia and Africa, it is also undergoing some radical and long-term shifts in the West itself. The sudden decline of the evangelical establishment in America with its almost single-minded focus on "family values" and "social issues" such as abortion and gay marriage has been offset by the growing influence of socially conservative Christians in the global south, as the recent fracturing of the Anglican church's worldwide communion suggests. At the same time, American evangelicals are becoming more socially "progressive," or at least not so lockstep when it comes to the traditional issues that their leaders have espoused.
The so-called "emergent church" - which is now a catch-all label for new, experimental, and youth-based forms of Christianity in the West - may have seeded the current trend in Western evangelicalism. But in many ways all the different varieties of emergentism for the most part tend to be the mirror image of the old guard against which they are reacting. What they have in common is a preoccupation with social and political issues, the gist of what was once called the "culture wars," and a kind of choleric take on how the other half represents itself. In many ways the emergent movement, broadly conceived, has defined itself as simply the "alternative" to the now senescent evangelical empire of the 1980s and 1990s. Traditional evangelicalism favored mega-churches and "church growth." Emergents have concentrated on small gatherings, even "house churches." The "religious right", as embodied in the influence and agenda of Jerry Falwell, was for years on its high horse about the takeover, which happened in the Sixties, of mainline Protestantism by liberals and social activists. The new evangelical "religious left," personified in Jim Wallis and his Sojourners movementa presidency and the all-out push for an Obama, seems to want to turn the hands of the clock one more time again.
By and large American Christianity across the political, cultural, and theological spectrum remains focused on what faith "can do for me and my lifestyles," an outgrowth of consumer capitalism which Americans pioneered and perfected over the last half century. It is what I have called "Burger King Christianity," which coined the marketing slogan "have it your way." But consumer capitalism is currently going through a crisis that it has never in the past experienced. Oil shocks, credit crunches, offshored jobs, and generalized economic Angst without any immediate prospect of a turnaround are the bitter harvest of decades of consumerist self-absorption. The idols everywhere are now falling.
If Christianity during the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century was forced to disentangle itself from the Constantianian heritage of Christ as Caesar (what historians call "Caesoropapism"), Christianity in the new millenium will find itself forced to separate from the legacy of consumerism. Consumerism is about "me" and "what I want." Christianity is about "God" and "what God wants." God and self cannot be served any more than God and Mammon can.
When Christ rose from the dead, he bid his followers to "make disciples of all nations." He did not say "start churches that will appeal to people and grow because of that appeal." Nor did he say "figure out what you want in life and go for it." He said "make disciples of all nations." That bidding has come to be known as The Great Commisson. Scripturally, the Great Commission is the practical imperative corresponding to The Great Commandment - "love the Lord your God with all thy heart and your neighbor as yourself."
The new Christians of the global south are likely to lead the old Christians of the super-indulged west into what is truly the next Christendom. The next Christendom will be the realization of the Great Commission.
In our next post we will begin to explore more fully what that means, and what the word "rhizone" means for the next Christendom.
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