God of All Things?
Speaking at a Christian Men’s Breakfast fellowship in October, I suggested that the deeper issue surrounding the widespread political disillusionment in America today is a religious issue. Across the country, we have been experiencing the inadequacy of an emerging new idolatry: the politicization of all of American life. For several decades, I said, there’s been an increasing drive for us to turn to the instrumentality of the state, with its apparatus of law and politics, as an institution for solving all of our public problems.
In other words, we are assigning impossibly high expectations to government, to election, to politicians, and to political processes to solve problems of education and the economy, science and technology, the arts, the family, the elderly, minorities, what have you. Even issues of religion. The problem is serious, and it is something that the Old Testament person would immediately recognize, but which we modern Christians do not: life is too big and complex for an idol to save. And when it tries to, its clay feet inevitably become evident.
I’m not sure how my audience took to this principle, but evidently someone from Newsweek must have been listening in. In its cover story titled “Hail to the Chiefs” (Nov. 22), Daniel Stone analyzed the problem, albeit using secular language and categories, by showing significant ways in which the U.S. presidency has grown inordinately since the second world war. As a result, it has become “the most impossible job in the world,” precisely because the president now has far too many pots to juggle.
But what really caught my attention was not Stone’s take on President Obama as the current White House high priest. It was the cover of Newsweek itself, which I have now clipped and saved. The cover shows a six-armed President Obama precariously juggling far too many things, including the world itself, and looking remarkably like the Hindu goddess Shiva, the destroyer. The title of the image? ”God of All Things.”
I must apologize for the “off topic” appearance of my previous post, which was actually directed to Bill Gordon’s final query in his post dated December 4, 2010.
No problemo on the “off topic” appearance. We’re all still getting used to the way the engineering on the site let’s us “talk” directly to one another, so to speak. You’ve probably now figured out that if you had clicked on “Reply” next to Bill Gordon’s name, at the top of his December 4, 2010 post, you would have been “talking” to him (the site indents such comments to help other visitors know that). Keep in mind, however, that anyone at all who has made a comment on a particular thread and who has ticked the box “Notify me of future comments” will be notified. It’s a pretty cool set-up, in my view, because it gives folk diverse opportunities, such as to see that a conversation is going on and to jump into that conversation (such as between you and Bill), or not; or to start a new conversation on the same thread. Anyway, you’ll see that to help other visitors to this thread, I’ve tweaked your “off topic” post a bit. C.S.
When Jesus walked the earth, were Jews capable of “waking up?” Such a question implies: Jews, as a corporate body, could hear Jesus’ message; Jews possessed sufficient unity to alter theological course after hearing that message; and there was an “authentic Judaism” in existence at the time. As a student of Jewish history I would address those three assumptions by answering: No, Absolutely Not, and Open To Debate.
Here are some facts of history related to my answers: 1) Nazareth is only 4 miles from Sephoris, the District Capital of Galilee, yet the gospels never mention that Jesus went there. He preached in rural Galilee, which was populated by poor, illiterate Jews (the literacy rate was only 10 to 15 percent of the general population, at best, and most “men of letters” were in Jerusalem or the district capitals). Thus, his miracles and message could have only been seen and heard in isolation. 2) While the historian Josephus describes four basic divisions among the Jews of the time – Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes and the Fourth Philosophy (radical religious nationalists) – history has proven that underneath these four, broad headings, there were many different “sects,” whose leaders were often preaching violence, racism and intolerance (messages that resonate with listeners to this very day). Jesus was just one more isolated voice among hundreds, if not thousands, of isolated voices being heard throughout the region. 3) During the siege of Jerusalem by the Roman army under Titus in 70 CE, more Jews were killed by other Jews than were killed by Roman soldiers. That means the Jews (people of Judea) hated one another as much as they hated the foe. How can you define what is “authentic” and what is not, when there were so many religious divisions and radical political/cultural beliefs circulating at the time?
When I taught my Sunday school class on 2nd Temple Judaism at the Methodist Church in Ridgely, TN, where I attend, I stressed that the history of Judea during those centuries was nothing more than a history of the human race in microcosm. As I often quipped to my dozen listeners, “Jews are, with the exception of a very few, Homo Sapiens, not space aliens.” Thus, they behave like all other Homo Sapiens have behaved throughout the eons.
Will Protestant Christians in America, as a corporate body, ever awaken to the full message Jesus? No, because they can’t, any more than the mythological Jewish collective could have awakened to the message of truth when Jesus was physcially with them. During his lifetime, Jesus only persuaded a few individuals to follow him. Yet, look at the outcome over time. To me, that is the real message of his ministry. That is the model to follow.
THE LITTLE (OR MINUSCULE) FLOCK
I can understand John’s rear-guard theology on this sensitive point. When the church and thr truth of Christ falls on hard times, is in decline, split by heresy and church politics, accommodated to the world-spirit of the age and when the world itself seems increasingly handed over to the pride and machinations of the devil…there are different attitudes we can take to that.
The first is a potentially elitist but also pessimistic ‘little flock’ mentality which can verge on escapism and Gnosticism. The other is much more optimistic and involves praying for revival and finding new and innovative ways of actively working towards holistic reformation of oneself, the church and society as a whole with an expectation that God will move by His Spirit His wonders to perform through us and in OUR generation but also for the flourishing of life on this planet.
I am glad the Great Evangelical Disaster has happened because now many people who love God were, without realising, ready and waiting for a ‘wake up call’ now have it ringing in their ears.
I am also glad about the Muslim immigration into Europe which serves as a godly provocation to Christians to be more clear about where they stand on key issues. The Koran exhorts ‘to kill the polytheists ‘ and to fight and if need be to kill those Christians and Jews who refuse to submit to Islam and Muslim rule. Jesus, on the other hand exhorts us to love our enemies and to bless and pray for those who seek to kill or persecute us. The contrast could not be be more stark or illuminating.
St Paul exhorts us to ‘fight the good fight’ (2 Tim 4:6-7) and by that he did not mean picking up arms or killing people. He also meant a lot more than simply preserving or defending our own individual faith or even the church or ‘the little flock’ however defined.
I have stated, tongue in cheek, to speak of the RIGHT & LEFT as the EVIL TWINS. If we can break free from their seductive embrace I am sure we will begin to see the whole contemporary landscape in a different light and in different perspective.
But this require a deeper more solid connection with THE DIVINE WISDOM.
There is still hope for all the good Christians men lying comatose in the affluent suburbs flirting with Sarah Palin. The task is to help people break free from the hypnotic reverie of the American Dream.
Not an easy task I admit.
Bill
Bill, I am neither an escapist nor a Gnostic, and I am not fighting a rear-guard action . . . I have turned my back and walked away from this particular battle.
I live in rural Tennessee, where the words of Sarah Palin or FOX commentator Glenn Beck (whose conspiracy theories border upon the weird) are afforded equal status with those of the Apostles. Their followers aren’t affluent Christians dozing in the suburbs. These are poor, angry, ill-educated, overworked, underpaid, blue-collar men and women devoted to political agendas that, if enforced, would cause harm to themselves, members of their families and their communities. They are marginalized economically and socially. They are watching the superpower status of their nation fade; and they are looking for someone to blame. Demagogues, left or right (mostly from the right in the South), provide those scapegoats.
In the rural South, “Christians” are taught to distrust the government officials they elect, to be suspicious of higher education, to advocate violence as a tool of diplomacy, to despise voices in opposition to their own and to obey their leaders, whether political or religious, without debate. There is no more room for negotiation with the majority of conservative Southern Protestants that I know than there is with a devout Muslim. Neither is complacent. Both are fiercely wed to their convictions.
My retreat from engagement with conservative American Protestants is based upon the simple fact that discussion is pointless. They are as convinced of their righteousness as a devout Marcionite, Gnostic or Ebionite from St. Paul’s time. The egocentric, selfish, snarling brand of Christianity I hear most every Sunday in the South is a mockery of Jesus, in my opinion. Perhaps it is time for British Christians to stop engaging and to simply stand in opposition.
There is not any kind of one-to-one correspondence over here in the UK with the USA Right & Left nor with the kind of accelerating politicisation of every aspect of life that is happening within the States now.
Even the Tory’s, insofar as they remain loyal to key aspects of the ‘welfare state’ such as their commitment to the NHS and to in principle not penalising the poor for the mistakes of the rich, position UK Conservatives well to the ‘left’ of American Republicans and the LibDem/Tory Alliance even more so….
In one way the USA, from its very foundation has been Utopian in its political aspirations and it has inherited all the frustrated ‘utopian’ dreams of the European Enlightenment concerning the perfectibility of the human race via reason, science, the free market and the generation of unlimited wealth in alliance with a libertarian democratic political process passionately dedicated to the “pursuit of happiness”. Of course the ‘pursuit of happiness’ now means a preoccupation with unlimited economic growth and material progress in the service of conspicuous consumption of material goods and the freedom to have and enjoy these whatever the cost or consequences to other nations or to the planet as a whole. This world-view (with the USA as the centre, the pivot around which the world turns) engenders a culture of narcissism is exported everywhere as ‘The American Dream’ and it inspires envy or hatred everywhere because of the covert agenda of world domination. But it is generating a nightmare scenario captured so well in the sci-fi film Blade Runner.
British politics since the loss of its Empire is becoming increasingly less Utopian and more pragmatic. It as if K Popper’s basic thesis in seminal The Open Society and its Enemies has been taken to heart.
As I see it, the Wikileaks are simply adding fuel to the fire and increasing American pain and sense of spiritual-moral dislocation as the gap between the official view of the world and the reality people actually experience continues to widen and ‘harden’ even as it is exposed and officialdom rants and raves and disapproves.
As an ageing baby boomer all I can say is ‘told you so’. Has it not always been so? Was this not the foundational destabilising insight of those of us who grew up the late 50s and 60s?
The question one has to ask here is authentically Christian America capable of ‘waking up’ at all, after having seduced by the Political Right…..or Left? Or has USA Christian moral and spiritual investment in American Nationalism and the American Dream and American ‘exceptionalism’ as God’s elect Nation and the “End of History” rendered the majority of good-hearted Christians more than half dead, with its best minds and most loyal sons ands daughters, both Protestant and Catholic lying comatosed in the suburbs, rather than merely asleep?
The Great Evangelical Disaster prophesied by Francis Schaeffer many decades ago has turned out to be far greater than we had ever suspected and that ‘sell out’ and disaster has now started breeding monsters of the mind…….