Divine Plagiarism

There are hundreds of thousands of weddings worldwide on any given day. That fact is generally lost on those who are having a wedding on that given day. To them, it is a completely new thing, unlike anything that has ever happened before. While it may be the thousandth wedding for the church, and the hundredth wedding for the pastor, it is the first wedding for the couple. It is different from every wedding, because it is their wedding. The novelty found in the immediacy of the experience is part of the magic, part of the joy‘s foolishness. But sometimes joy’s foolishness can turn into plain old foolishness. Certainly, every couple is unique, but none are so unique that they cannot benefit from the experience of older and wiser couples. So the foolish couple, losing themselves in their own uniqueness, ceases to seek the council of others.

In some ways, we take the foolish couple’s approach to history. On some level, this is a consequence of the teleology bequeathed to us by Augustine. The City of God progresses ever upwards, following its diagonal slope upwards to the inevitable end of history. So each day is new, completely unlike any other day. No one has ever been here before, no one will ever be here again. And we are the pioneers, pushing back the frontier of history; alone and unafraid, with only our wits to sustain us. But I wonder if we didn’t lose some deep truths when we broke from the confines of the cyclic view of history. Each year is different from the last, but each year has spring, summer, fall and winter. The days of a man’s life follow a path, but that path is composed of ten thousand cycles of sunrises and sunsets. Perhaps history is Ezekiel’s wheels within wheels, corkscrewing their way up Augustine’s slope along Salvation History. Perhaps we progress in cycles, and all things return in their changed form.

New school versus old school, I think it goes. Still, the new school inevitably gets old. In this is the great irony of revolution: after they win, the revolutionaries find themselves the new enforcers of the status quo. There is a certain stability to the cycle. The old school defines themselves according to existing power structures, and the new school defines themselves in opposition to those same structures. And in this, both schools end up needing each other. Plagiarizing Andy Crouch’s brilliant comment, the younger generation’s abandonment of bourgeoisie values is financed by the profits of the older generation’s bourgeoisie values. One can almost imagine an Aboriginal ritual wherein the father trains his son to grapple, so that one day the son can overcome his father in a wrestling match and claim his independence. In the same way, the old school and the new school are inexorably intertwined, and history is written in the steps of their grappling bout.

We think of new names for things, and rightfully so. It is the first time these things have happened. Still, it looks a lot like the last time these things have happened. Listening to a symphony, you hear the same theme repeated many times, yet new each time it is new; once piano, another forte; one minor chord resolves, another does not. Even if only by its placement, each time the theme is played it is different than the last, even as it is the same each time. So our names are now Modernity and Post-Modernism. And it is new. Just as it is old. Recognizing the novelty of it all, let’s listen to the symphony and see if we can hear the same theme again.

If ever there was an experiment in modernity, it was the Soviet Union. The state religion of ‘Scientific Socialism’ was built upon a faith in progress. It was a teleological faith, teaching that history led inevitably to a Communist utopia. It was a faith of miracles, first bringing running water and electricity to serf villages, ultimately escaping the Earth’s gravitational field. And a faith of hierarchies, centrally planning the economic and political life of the faithful. Therefore, it is all the more surprising that this pinnacle of philosophical modernity would give rise to many of the post-modern movements of the twentieth century. Che Guevara, spoken of so highly by Sartre, was ultimately resourced by the Soviets. The ‘National Liberation’ movements were the post-modern external expression of the modernistic Soviet vision. FARC, Red Army Faction, Sendero Luminoso, and the Khmer Rouge; emotional, relational and low-tech, these all bear the marks of post-modern thought. So, intertwined, modernity finances post-modernism. In turn, following Mao’s revolutionary model, post-modernism develops into modernity. Modernity and post-modernism intertwined, they feed off of each other.

Rebellion is one of the hallmarks of post-modernity. Question the existing paradigms. Fight the power. I am reminded of the Rebel Alliance. Overthrow the oppressive, fascist structures of the evil Galactic Empire. And replace them with what? In this we find the intertwining, once again. The rebels are hardly the nihilistic Bader-Meinhoff Gang. Led by the Old Republic Senator Mon Mothma (yeah, I’m a Star Wars geek,) the Rebel Alliance fights for the New Republic. In the remembrance of the order that once was, the Rebels bring about chaos in the existing order to create a new order. Order collapses, bringing chaos, which in turn brings order.

This dialectic plays out daily in our headlines. The majority of the American armed forces are organized along conventional, modernistic lines. Heavily reliant on command, control, and advanced technology, they are the modern experiment with teeth. While tremendously successful in the highly modernistic Gulf War, the conventional forces find themselves mismatched to the post-modern insurgency. Relationally based, driven by an inchoate mix of ideologies, the rat seems to continue to exhaust the elephant. Still, the modernist experiment does not capture the entirety of the military. Special Forces express a strong sense of post-modernity both in structure and in outlook. Forgoing heavy armor for language and cultural training, excelling in relationally driven solutions to ill-defined problems, SF have been described as ‘masters of chaos.’ Ad-hoc solutions often take precedence over regulations, and command structures generally are much more horizontal and much more flexible. Not surprisingly, these post-modernistic forces find themselves quite relevant in our present conflict. Still, there is a dialectic: without the conventional forces, the unconventional forces would have a difficult time sustaining themselves for extended periods of time. (Though not a conflict-free dialectic, as evidenced by the constant squabbling for funding.)

Broadening our horizons beyond history and myth, we see the same dynamics in engineering, philosophy and physics. Chaos and order must be intertwined in order to create motion. Igniting fuel releases entropy and enthalpy, which must be directed through a system of pistons and shafts in order to do turn wheels. The structure alone is dead, the chaos alone is meaningless, yet together they accomplish work. The intertwined corkscrew that propels history is reflected in the systems we use to propel cars. In an engine, pistons push against each other in order to create motion in a perpendicular dimension. In the same way, thesis and antithesis push against each other to create a synthesis. The dynamic tension propels structures toward evolution. Maxwell’s Equations tell us that electricity and magnetism move in opposition to each other, causing a wave to propagate along a perpendicular axis: the intertwined corkscrew, yet again.

Therefore, it should not surprise us the same dynamics exist in the church: the Body of Christ is grows amidst the tension of cycles. Too many times, a lack of reconciliation within that body has caused that tension to tear churches apart. The church faced a vast change of culture five hundred years ago. The new school and the old school find themselves at odds, and neither side could find the humility to understand each other. The tragic consequences of that collision still haunt us today. One wonders how different history would have been if both sides abandoned their pride.

It is hardly a new question. Paul talks at length about the consequences of the ecclesial cultural collision in the early church between the Jews and the Greeks. The Greeks see the world through Aristotelian eyes, ordering their cities and their lives along rational lines. Understandably, they bring that same mindset to their understanding of God. The Jews see the world through the eyes of prophecy, where God is experienced through eyes of awe, not dissected through equations and logic. It is not surprising that the two groups would come into conflict, neither is it surprising that the fault lines would extend to the political and the economic (such as providing for widows.) Though there is one Gospel, Matthew tells it with an undeniably Jewish flavor, while Luke tells it as a Greek. In the reconciliation of that collision of cultures, the church is all the richer. As Lewis tells us, Christianity calls both the mystic and the logistician outside of themselves: an English academic is called to participate in a ritual of blood sacrifice, while an African tribesman is called into a ordered system of ethics. Theology alone is dead, praxis alone is chaos, but in their fusion in the fullness of our faith. So now we are the Baptists and the Emerging Church; the suburban modernists and the young urban post-moderns. We collide now, but we have always collided. Yet there is a difference between a dance and a rugby scrum. And the tension and passion in a dance may make it all the better.

[Christ Himself embodies this power of paradox. The carpenter who is the King of Kings. He is fully God, and fully man, infinitely intertwined. Perfect Justice and Perfect Grace, all at once. The clean perfection of the old law, completed with the warm embrace of the new.]

How, then, should we live? I think of Paul. A Greek to the Greeks, a Jew to the Jews, he took the time and effort to learn relevance to both cultures of his time. Whether invoking his Roman citizenship or a Pharisee’s privilege to preach at a synagogue, Paul becomes a hundred things to spread the Gospel. Still, we are not all so gifted as he. I, for one, cannot quote Greek poets in one breath, and in the next the prophet Isaiah. So we must rely on each other. If I cannot be a Greek to the Greeks, then I will pray for my brother who is a Greek. If I cannot be a Jew to the Jews, then I will support my brother who is a Jew.

So perhaps we are Jews and Greeks again, perhaps Moderns and Post-Moderns. But we are reconciled in Christ, and we are both necessary. In recognizing that fact, we learn to support each other. The moderns provide the stability for the post-moderns to flourish. The post-moderns provide the energy to revitalize the moderns. The cycle will inevitably continue, as the emerging church becomes the established church, from which another emerging church will come.

There is always re-discovery. The Emerging Church finds the monastics of old, their lessons relevant to contemporary and ancient culture. Yet the next emerging church may glean lessons from our establishment churches. Culture and economics are forever intertwined, and the age of industrialization that nurtured modernity is rising in the two-thirds world, even as it sets in the West. We would do well not to discard so lightly blades that were forged at such cost, we would do well not to forget the rational apologetics refined in a hundred years of combat. Certainly they will have to be adapted, just as we are adapting Brother Lawrence. We do well to unearth medieval treasure troves, to rediscover the sacraments, to learn from the great mystics. Yet the next generation may do well to unearth Lewis, Zacharias and Stroebel. After all, who would have thought that the first major land battle of the twenty-first century would have been a charge on horseback? Today’s anachronism may be the key to tomorrow’s victory.

I’ve heard many discussions of North America as a missions field. I wonder what every tribe and every tongue looks like in a post-industrial economy. Where a mountain range would have sundered one agrarian people into two, we live in the same space but are sundered by class and career. In terms of cultural norms and language, the people of Suburbia may be as different from Urbanites as Chaldeans are from Kurds. So we must reach both groups. The most effective missions models empower indigenous believers to reach their own cultures. We should do the same, and should support each other in the effort. We self-select into our tribes and tongues, and they become our missions field. So to the Harvard Sociologist, the Post-Moderns they feel comfortable with. And to the Civil Engineer, the concrete disciples of Modernity. This is not new. To the Jews, we go as Jews. To the Greeks, we go as Greeks. And always we go as Christ.

We are the Body of Christ, and we are here today, in the Emerging Churches and the Established Churches. Our story is neither as new nor as unique as we think it is. We live in a collision between cycles of Salvation History. We were Jews and Greeks once, and we transformed the world. We were the East and the West once, and it was a tension we could not manage in our sinfulness. We have been here before and we have seen different endings. The endings we find together are always the best.