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21 June 2007
Somewhere Between Hosea and Jonah.
‘It’s not my fight.’ They generally say it when the protagonists need them the most. Han Solo says it to Luke Skywalker, leaving him to face the suicidal trench run alone. Francis Marion, on the eve of the great battle in ‘The Patriot,’ decides his course is run. Theoden of Rohan asks why Rohan should ride out for those who did not ride for them. The story rarely ends there, though; something always happens to pull the characters back into the story. So Theoden, upon seeing the beacon of Gondor, decides to ride to wrath, to ruin, and the world’s ending. Marion, finding the flag that his son was mending, returns in time to turn the tide of the battle. And Solo, remembering a loyalty he had long forgot, buys Luke enough time to destroy the Death Star.
Our myths reflect the One True Myth. God calls the most unlikely of heroes to leave behind the lives they knew and enter into His story. Some go easily. With just a word, Simon Peter leaves his nets behind to become a fisher of men. On command, Hosea takes a leap of faith and enters into a relationship he knew would break his heart. But more often than not, God seems to draw his characters from the ranks of the unwilling. Saul, the great persecutor of Christians, is dragged into his role kicking and screaming. Jonah runs as far and as fast as he can, and God is forced to beat obedience into him with the waves of the sea. Ultimately, both Jonah and Hosea find their places in His story. And even though Hosea’s scars of righteousness stand in sharp contrast to Jonah’s scars of stubbornness, God still uses scars to shape them, breaking and remaking them until they can be used by Him. So it is Peter and Paul, Hosea and Jonah. I think most of us fall somewhere in between.
Allow me to provide some narrative. Five years ago, I arrived in Cambridge. Providing a bit of context, I am a suburban-raised middle-class conservative Evangelical white male who serves in the military. Take every category that is popular in Cambridge, and imagine someone who is the diametric opposite of all of them. That’s pretty much me. So within weeks a nascent sense grows into a full-fledged realization: something along the lines of ‘everyone [else] is welcome here.’ I had hoped against hope to find a place where it was safe to be smart, where it was safe to be myself without having to give a whit about what was popular. For someone who had dreamt of finding kindred spirits in the self-proclaimed intellectual Mecca of the country, this was a dagger. Soon enough, though, I realized there was a reality much deeper than my thwarted desires for belonging: there was a war, and I was very far behind enemy lines. And every ethics class, every bumper sticker, every curbside protestor was bound and determined to make me feel it.
I’ve heard a friend tell me that I couldn’t understand what it was like to be hated for the way you looked. I’m not so sure that’s true. I’ve worn a uniform through Harvard Square a few times. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many faces disfigured by scorn in a row. Of course, I can take off my uniform much more easily than that friend could leave behind their melanin, but I can no more put aside my identity as a soldier than they could put aside their race. For a warrior, service is identity; in a very real way those who I serve with are my people, and I am theirs. The phrase ‘brothers and sisters in arms’ is not said in vain. We have our own language, our own culture, our own language, our own rituals, and our own values. First amongst these is honor. We‘ll return to this in a bit. I remember a friend stating in Leadership class, ’I like Dave, he’s not like most military guys.’ Imagine this phrase in any other context: ’I like you because you’re not like the rest of your people.’ Even in something intended as a compliment, the message came through loud and clear: ’your kind isn’t welcome here.’
I have always turned to the Body of Christ for community and belonging. After all, we are supposed to be family. So I found myself involved in the various Cambridge ministries, in the same way I had been involved in the various Colorado Springs ministries before. To one whose identity is under attack, a safe place to be yourself is prized above all. And this is what I sought in Bible Studies, in Church, and Christian conferences. Yet, even there, the same message was whispered. At Bible Study, I still sensed some degree of discomfort with who I was and what I represented. In context, though, those are my friends and sometimes friends disagree. And I truly appreciate the grace they showed in their disagreements. I suspect that I challenged them as much as they challenged me. At Church, though, the message was not so much whispered as spoken. In their depiction of Stations of the Cross, the station where the soldiers stripped Christ was presented interspersed with images of soldiers in Iraq. ‘This is who you are. You are not the Centurion. You are hurting Jesus when you go into Iraq.’ At an InterVarsity graduate student conference, the message was not just spoken, but screamed. Marva Dawn, addressing systemic evil, told the gathered crowd to ‘remember the American government and military interests who pay for your education, for they are the principalities and the powers.’ It may not have occurred to her that some in that crowd may have been of the house of the Centurion and the house of Caesar. The principalities and the powers, in a scriptural context, means the forces of Satan. So the message, to any soldier who happened to be there, is ’you serve Satan.’ Uncharitable, at the very least. Devastating to someone looking for somewhere where it was safe to be real. I understood the entirety of the experience as something akin to being behind enemy lines. And just as a POW has little interest to returning to the land of his tormentors, I had little interest in returning to Cambridge. It became my Nineveh, a land that hated my people. So as soon as I got my degree, I ran as far and as fast as I could.
In a way I could have never understood at the time, it was the last Cambridge wound that would bring me back. The deepest wounds always strike at our identity. Some wounds attack our people as a whole, but the crueler wounds tell us that we are not of our people. Those who have been deeply wounded draw from their wounds when they want to hurt another. And she did that day. So the warrior, whose honor is his identity, is told that he has no honor. ‘A white girl with a tan,’ with a decade of compounded interest. The message is the same: ‘you are not of your people.’ There were reasons, of course. There are always reasons. The teenager who wounded her a decade ago had reasons, too. ‘Why does this weird girl keep bothering us? I wish she would leave us alone.’ All the way back to the garden there were reasons. ‘If you hadn’t given me this woman…if the man was doing what he was supposed to do…’ So we are trapped in the physics of a fallen world, we are the slaves and the slave-owners, all at once; the wounded wounding others in a never-ending cascade of brokenness reaching all the way back to the fall. We spend our days trying to equalize brokenness, hoping to find some sort of balance in an equitable distribution of pain. But there can be no balance in brokenness… it must itself be broken. And I was broken that day.
You can only teach someone when they are ready to learn. I don’t know how long God had been waiting to teach me. But at long last, that day I was ready to learn. No more running, no more hiding, no more wrestling Him for control, I came to Him as my only hope. I came to Him with simple prayers, and I came intending to pray until He answered. And in that brokenness, He began to teach. Thus began the most fruitful year of my life.
Sometimes you don’t realize what He has been teaching until He has already taught it. I had been praying for reconciliation for a year. It wasn’t until I returned to Cambridge that I realized how much reconciliation He had taught me. So I am sitting across from my friend, talking about the things that divide us, dreaming and praying for unity. Colorado Springs and Cambridge united for the Great Commission. I felt passion and purpose flowing through us, and it was the most natural thing in the world. And it strikes me, on the walk back to the car, that two years ago it would not have been the most natural thing in the world. I’ve heard it said that God never wastes a hurt. I believe it. In praying for two people to be reconciled to each other, He helped me to understand how many people could be reconciled to each other. Healing me and humbling me, He had been preparing me for a story that I had previously not wanted any part of.
As individuals, we reflect our communities, even as our communities reflect who we are as individuals. It is then appropriate that she and I, both of us in many ways the archetypes of our factions, fractured along the same fault lines that divide our communities: race, class and politics. It seems that God often leads us into the brokenness of communities through brokenness between individuals. Hosea comes back to mind.
Upon first reading Hosea, many years ago, I remember feeling that God treated him cruelly. Destroying a good man’s life, breaking his heart over and over just to write a case study, these didn’t seem to me the actions of a compassionate God. I consigned his story to the closet of ‘things I don’t understand about God,’ assuming that He would explain things in time. A few years ago, when I began to understand vulnerability, Hosea’s story started to come into focus. As Theologically problematic as it may be, I wonder if there is some flavor of ‘God’s loneliness’ in this story. I know all the Aquinas: simple being, necessary, complete and all of that. But I also know Lewis’ brilliant passage in the Four Loves, telling us that to love at all is to be hurt. I imagine an image of God in pain, inviting His friend Hosea to come and dwell with Him in that place. That feeling, relational God is infinitely different from the Aristotelian watchmaker god writing Aesop’s Fables in our blood and tears that I had so feared in the first reading. At the very least, God invites Hosea into a place where he can understand the ways we hurt Him. In this is a paradoxical vulnerability; an infinitely powerful God gives us the latitude to cause Him pain. I cannot see Zeus or Thor enduring the insults of mortal men, yet the God of Everything chooses to do so out of love.
Walking with my friend, though, the picture of Hosea was completed. When He invites us into Him, He always sends us back out. God invites Hosea into vulnerability in order to prepare him for his ministry. There is no way that Hosea could have ministered as the prophet of God to Israel unless he intimately understood the feelings of God for Israel. So God gave him Gomer. And the man who brought his wife Gomer back home each time became the man who brought his people Israel back home time and again. Hosea was forged by his scars, as a sword on an anvil. Yet in his obedience he experiences grace, just as the sword being forged is immersed in cool water from time to time. And this is the difference between Hosea and Jonah.
Like Hosea, Jonah’s life is turned upside down by his calling. Like Hosea, Jonah finds vulnerability and brokenness, though he almost breaks a ship in the process. Like Hosea, Jonah is prepared for his ministries by his scars, though his are almost entirely self-inflicted. There is a certain comic irony to the whole story: Jonah’s platform for reaching Nineveh resulted almost entirely from the unpleasant consequences of his disobedience; he stumbles right into the middle of their mythology. How better to reach a people who believed in a fish-god than to make your entry from the gullet of a fish? I’m sure that a man bleached to the color of porcelain by a whale’s digestive enzymes made a pretty fearsome spectacle to the astonished city, especially when he pronounces impending doom. It would be easy to say things worked out, but really, things were redeemed. Where God would have forged Jonah with scars of righteousness, He instead allows Jonah to be forged from the scars of rebellion. While Jonah misses out on the grace that would have come with obedience, God nonetheless grants him grace as He redeems Jonah’s foolish choices. In the same way that He redeems mine.
Hosea is a hero. Jonah is a fool. God redeems the stories of both. I‘ve heard it said, ‘de loco, poeta, y tonto, todo sabemos un poco.’ I had the last one covered. I don’t know about the first two. So I was a Jonah, running and running. I thank God that He brought me to a place of brokenness where I could learn obedience. Where He could make me into a Hosea. I am still somewhere in between.
God never wastes a hurt…even when we cause them. I will rejoice in His grace, and I will treasure these lessons and passions that He had been trying to give me for so long. Even if He had to pry my hands open in order to give them to me.
10:10 Posted in Faith | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
10 June 2007
Definition by Negation.
‘I’m not like you.’ This may be the most impoverished form of identity possible. I am me because I am not you. It is an identity borne of fear, an isolationist impulse which precludes any further understanding. Perhaps there is one worse. At least ‘I’m not you’ involves some degree of Martin Buber’s ‘I and Thou.’ So then, ’I’m not like them.’ The very nadir of identity. I’m not like ’it.’ I’m not like the bogeymen and the monsters. I create an antithesis to justify whatever thesis I desire, and in doing so, I abandon all desire to understand. This principle has given rise to too many oppressive governments, and has stunted the growth of too many easily-scared people.
When describing themselves, a Christian friend of mine described himself very emphatically as ‘not CCM.’ Attending a Christian conference, I remember the speaker describing the mega-church movement with disgust, a sentiment received with much applause by the gathering. I recall many a time hearing in conversation Tim LaHaye’s apocalyptic fiction mentioned with derision. Opinions are one thing, and surely there are valid critiques on the style or effectiveness of these things. Yet, in the shrillness one starts to hear statements about identity. Once the objections reach a certain volume, they stop sounding like ’this isn’t my preference,’ and start sounding like ’I’m not like them.’
Religion vs. Relationship; the Christian-ese culture vs. Christianity. Mankind likes stability and comfort. This is not inherently a bad thing. We stake out land, tame the wilds, and build a home. In that home, we know how and where things go, and sometimes they even go according to plan, and all is right (or at least comfortable) in the world. Mankind in community does the same thing by making cultures. We find an idea strong enough to create an identity, and we begin to build along with the others congregated around the idea. Over time, repetition creates stability in ritual; norms hold the community together. It should not be then be surprising that an Idea as powerful as Jesus Christ creates a culture, even as He transforms culture. But we need to throw the variable of human fallenness into our Christian culture equation. Power, control, pettiness, ignorance, we express all of these in community, as we do individually. Mix in some history, geography and economics, and we get American Christian-ese culture. Just as no individual Christian has a corner on the Jesus market, Christian-ese culture is not the summation and totality of who Jesus is. It should not surprise us, then, that many true Christians choose to pursue Him outside the often-constricting confines of Christian-ese culture.
There is a difference between fealty and loyalty. I may not recognize the Papal claim of authority over the Body of Christ, but I certainly will recognize Pope Benedict XVI as an honored and holy brother in Christ. Only a fool abandons all loyalty and fellowship with Catholic brothers and sisters in the course of disputing Catholic doctrine. Even while I may not see eye to eye with Catholic thought, even while I may find some Catholic beliefs unnecessary or even unhelpful, I will not build my identity around those differences. Telling people why I am Christian is a far better investment of my time than telling people why I am not Catholic. Ultimately, it is a question of loyalty between siblings, and a question of priorities. So let us apply the same rules to Christian-ese culture.
I understand the critiques. In many cases, I agree with them. I don’t really listen to that many CCM-type artists. Top-40 never was really my preference. Corporate music, Sunday School lyrics, maybe. I don’t listen to enough to really know. I must confess the same for ‘Left Behind.’ The two books I read seemed to have one-dimensional characters and a constant undertone of preachiness, so I stopped reading there. That said, I would not feel comfortable condemning Narnia after reading only Prince Caspian, so I will embrace my ignorance about LaHaye’s series in the same vein. On Mega-Churches, though, I can speak with some experience. For almost two years, I took part in ‘The Mill,‘ the College group at New Life Church. Sitting atop the Christian cultural Mecca of Colorado Springs, New Life was in its prime. The pastor served as the spokesperson for the entire American Evangelical community, the praise team was full of soon-to-be national level recording artists, the brand new World Prayer Center ambitious in its scope. I found that there was a ‘New Life’ type of person, who thought and felt the way the church did, and there was ‘non-New Life’ type of person. The former found their way into leadership, into internships, into ministries. I was the latter. To me, the endeavor seemed somewhat artificial, somewhat impersonal, somewhat consumeristic. But I knew many good people who bought into the church, people who believed passionately in perfecting worship music as an art form, people who thought that an unpracticed talk expressed sloppiness, not vulnerability. So while I may not feel New Life merited my allegiance, I will still give them the loyalty of a sibling.
Once upon a time, Brandon Ebel started an underground record label called Tooth and Nail Records. You see, there were a lot of good Christian bands who didn’t fit nicely in Christian-ese culture. (There is a question of capitalism and labeling, as most contemporary Christian labels are subsidiaries of larger secular labels. I‘ll leave that to someone more involved in the industry.) Most Christian punk bands don’t have a lead singer that a Christian-ese suburban mom would think ‘looks Christian,’ and most Christian punk bands couldn’t find enough chords to put the Plan of Salvation in each song at least three times. So, back in 1993, Tooth and Nail creates a niche for underground Christian music, and fifteen years later, it’s the Christian underground bands that are impacting mainstream music for Christ (P.O.D. from Rescue Records; Switchfoot from Five Minute Walk; Chevelle, Underoath and Blindside from T&N. Lifehouse was independent until signed by the mainstream.) The thing I find intriguing about the whole story is that Tooth and Nail never felt it had to define itself as ‘not a mainstream Christian label.’ They simply did their thing, more or less independent of what other people were doing, and God blessed it.
It is easy to understand the desire to break free of the confines of Christian-ese culture. But I wonder how free someone truly is when they need to constantly prove to others how free they are. The adolescent defines his independence vice his parents, openly defying their rules. The adult defines his independence in and of himself, and has no need to prove it. The adult has the wisdom and humility to understand the intentions and goodwill of his parents, even if he chooses to disagree with them at times. The Dove award is the highest accolade in the Christian music industry. Therefore, it is not surprising that accepting that award would mark someone as a member of the culture that supports that industry. The lead cheerleader wins the Prom Queen crown, and Nicole Nordeman wins a Dove award. Yet, Jennifer Knapp, an artist with a far different journey and far edgier subject matter wins one as well. Still, she ministers primarily within the bounds of the culture, so it is appropriate that culture honors her for her music. The band POD finds themselves in a much different position. They feel called outside the bounds of that culture to impact the mainstream culture. Self-identifying with a set-apart subculture interferes with their ministry, therefore when approached with a Dove award, they decline it. But they do so with grace. In stark contrast is Evanescence. Their first tours are with explicitly Christian bands, and they are largely supported by the fiercely loyal Christian underground scene. Yet, when they break through to the mainstream, they describe the Christian scene with four-letter words, and demand that their music is removed from the shelves of Christian bookstores. Theirs is not just a lack of charity, but a failure of basic human loyalty.
Modern music, though, is not really a relevant concern to most of the Christians who vilify Christian-ese culture. Let’s look at books. Most Christian publishers, like Christian music labels, belong well within the bounds of Christian-ese culture. And for every ten editions of the latest Christian rendition of pop psychology or dieting, there are one or two copies of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy or Pilgrim’s Progress. The recent resurgence in interest in the great mystics exists almost exclusively in a Christian niche market. If you look through your local bookstore for the ‘Practice of the Presence of God,’ you will most likely find it in the ‘Christian Inspiration’ section, or something of the sort. This section exists largely as a function of Christian publishers making books for Christian-ese culture. Harvest Books, a Christian-ese subsidiary of Harcourt, keeps many of C.S. Lewis’ books in print. The reality is that many of the great Christian works stay in major circulation as a function of the Christian publishing industry, which in turn exists as a function of the Christian-ese culture. IVP’s Likewise Books specializes in edgy, Emerging Church-type, post-Christian-ese works. Yet, the shelf space for these books exists because larger Christian-ese publishers continue to prove that Christian-themed books are economically viable. There is a dialectic, and both sides need each other.
That dialectic is surely not without tension. Without a doubt, both sides sometimes get in each other’s way. The almost-pharisaical Christian-ese political pundits immediately come to mind. As do the almost-syncretistic neo-Social Gospel types. I think of an interesting conversation I had at an InterVarsity graduate school conference a while back. While talking to a full-time staffer, the topic of policy came up. While tremendously passionate on the injustice of American tariff policy, they became somewhat fidgety when abortion came up. Not so much that they were pro-choice, far from it. More that they just didn’t like those on the national forefront of that issue, and they didn’t like being associated with them. ‘They make us look bad. They get in our way. We’re not them.’
It is not really an issue of convenient causes. Persecution and derision is not necessarily a sign of the prophetic voice. Surely we all know enough Jerks for Jesus to prove that one. So just because it’s a Live 8 cause doesn’t make it illegitimate. But there is a temptation in supporting a popular cause: the popular crowd who support that cause may invite you to join them. Often, acceptance by that crowd is preconditioned on the rejection of those who support unpopular causes. These are the vicissitudes of pop culture. We do well to remember the words of Our Lord: ‘be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men.’ There are times we will have to be unpopular if we are to represent Christ. Not the ‘fight the power’ anti-establishment popular ‘unpopularity.’ Actually unpopular, Sermon on the Mount-style ‘insulted, persecuted, and falsely spoke evil of’ unpopular. Even if we are not faced with our own ‘white martyrdoms,’ (ref. John Paul II) we are called to solidarity with those who are called. There are different battlefields, certainly, and different tactics. We may be called to step out of the crossfire of one fight to engage in another. So be it. But we need to at least remember that we are brothers in arms, and give our brothers and sisters the benefit of the doubt.
Really, it is a question of relevance v. popularity. The scriptures constantly call us to relevance, they call us to preach the whole Gospel to the whole world. Christ embodied humility as He became relevant to humanity, laying aside His throne for the stool of a carpenter. We are called to do the same, to step outside our stability and our comfortable worlds and enter into the lives of others. This often means that we step outside of our Christian communities and cultures. But when we conquer the temptation of the comfort of Christian culture, we are faced with the temptation of comfort with the world. A good warning sign of this temptation is a growing revulsion toward those who endanger your popularity with the world through their association with you. Consider your allegiances. If you cannot find love and grace for your brothers and sisters in Christ, how can you pretend to have it for the world? Lust for popularity is a sin of identity. When we look to culture (popular or Christian-ese) for identity, we will forever grasp at approval, acceptance and popularity. Our identity is in Christ, and that identity should lead us to relevance. We cannot have it the other way around. Love justice, practice mercy, and measure yourself in God’s sight even as you build bridges to the world.
What does it say about a family when the siblings constantly say ‘I’m not like my brother,’ and ‘I’m not like my sister?’ It is natural that siblings differ, even that they build their identities in contrast to each other. The sisters in Sense & Sensibility are quite different from each other. But they never forget that they are sisters, nor do they abandon loyalty, even when they frustrate each other. There will always be intramural differences. I can imagine that Roman Christians and Jewish Christians had some pretty significant policy differences in the first Century. Yet, they managed to stay one church, and they managed to remember that the Name that bound them together was thicker than the names that tore them apart. Surely the family of God is better served talking about the glories of the Father rather than the differences between the siblings. We are not the only ones listening.
(As a final note, there is always a place for internal discussions. I think of Frank Peretti’s ‘The Visitation.’ Largely an indictment of contemporary Christian culture, he takes strong issue with certain aspects of Pentecostalism, Mega-Churches, and church politics. His purpose, though, is to minister to those ground under the wheels of that culture, not to condemn that culture to the world. He writes it for a very specific audience, he confines his critique to that audience, and he identifies himself strongly with the group being critiqued. He writes for relevance, not for popularity… I doubt his indictments earned him positive secular reviews.)
20:52 Posted in Thoughts | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
Of Baptists and Jedi. (Categories in Synthesis.)
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.
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