rusty cellar

Today I read W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio.  I am struck by its powerful imagery.  I have tried to read Auden before but was very bored.  Now I stumble on this jewel!  He is so good with words and imagery that describe the ordinariness of life.  Auden’s imagery challenges me to live now in light of what is yet to come…

Well, so that is that.  Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes –

Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic.

The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,

And the children got ready for school.  There are enough

Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week –

Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,

Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully –

To love all of our relatives, and in general

Grossly overestimated our powers.  Once again

As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed

To do more than entertain it as an agreeable

Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,

Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,

The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,

And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware

Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought

Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now

Be very far off.  But, for the time being, here we all are,

Back in the moderate Aristotelian city

Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry

And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,

And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.

It seems to have shrunk during the holidays.  The streets

Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten

The office was as depressing as this.  To those who have seen

The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,

The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.

For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly

Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be

Grew up when it opened.  Now, recollecting that moment

We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;

Remembering the stable where for once in our lives

Everything became a You and nothing was an It.

And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,

We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit

Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose

Would be some great suffering.  So, once we have met the Son,

We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;

“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”

They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form

That we do not expect, and certainly with a force

More dreadful than we can imagine.  In the meantime

There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,

Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem

From insignificance.  The happy morning is over,

The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:

When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing

Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure

A silence that is neither for nor against her faith

That God’s Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,

God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.

Gustavo Gutierrez in his book On Job writes, “It is important that we be clear from the outset that the theme of the book of Job is not precisely suffering-that impenetrable human mystery- but rather how to speak of God in the midst of suffering.” (13)

I find these words very helpful in thinking through the nature of pastoral involvement with human suffering.  When I walk through a deep valley I need wise companions who will help me wrestle with how I speak of and to God rather than explain the problem of evil.  The intellectual aspect is significant but the relational component of the struggle seems to take the lead.

This morning I was pondering these words by Hauerwas in A Community of Character,

“Good and just societies require a narrative which helps them know the truth about existence and fight the temptation to self-deception.” (1

What does it look like for a local Christian community in a small place to embrace the narrative of Jesus?  How do we tell that story among our friends in a way that we get to participate in it?

In his book Live to Tell Brad Kallenberg offers a fresh look at conversion. He writes, “Simply put when viewed through a postcritical lens, conversion can be understood as entailing the change of one’s social identity, the acquisition of a new conceptual language, and the shifting of one’s paradigm.” (32).

While the first and third seem very obvious, I am very intrigued by Kallenberg’s second point. Seeing conversion as acquisition of a new conceptual language in my mind flies in the face of modern attempts of contextualization that shows up in various shapes, forms, and under different names.

Kallenberg relies on the writings of George Lindbeck in making this point. According to Lindbeck our religious world is constrained by the conceptual language we have at our disposal. Lindbeck states, “It is necessary to have the means for expressing an experience in order to have it…The richer our expressive or linguistic system, the more subtle, varied, and differentiated can be our experience.” (40). Kallenberg argues that Lindbeck’s thought here implies on more basic level that there are no parallels for notions such as sin or answered prayer in the secular conceptual language. He writes, “The only way one can conceive human depravity correctly is by being schooled in the use of the term sin within sentences spoken in the Christian language. And only those who are fluent in the use of terms and phrases such as grace and answer to prayer can see a set of circumstances as an answer to prayer rather than as a remarkable coincidence. If Lindbeck is correct about the significant role language plays in enabling religious experience, then it follows that religious conversion necessarily includes the acquisition of the appropriate conceptual language.” (41).

Over time Western civilization had acquired a common conceptual language based on the Judeo-Christian worldview. One could appeal to concepts like sin and answered prayer and assume that it would be properly understood. Walsh and Middleton in their book The Transforming Vision document the rise of the secular culture where the elements of supernatural, sacred, and spiritual have been excluded from the basic conceptual and linguistic paradigms. In Subversive Christianity Walsh levels this verdict, “We are coming to the end of the cultural epoch.” (44).

Many today have detected the truth of Walsh’s verdict. The blog-world as well bookstores are teeming with proposed solutions for evangelism in the age where old shared linguistic foundation is gone. The general trend seems to be going in the direction of the translation of the Christian faith into the language of the secular culture. For example, Brian McLaren in his The Secret Message of Jesus suggests rewording the Lord’s Prayer. “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” becomes “May your dreams for this world come true.” I also sense a general trend to replace the concept of sin with the concept of woundedness. Works for Larry Crabb could have indirectly led us here. I do believe that the psychological issue of wounderness plays a big role in the spiritual formation today. It is an area that has not been explored and addressed from a pastoral perspective before. We have made big strides, but it seems to have become a substitute for something else. A dichotomy has been created. We call wounded people to come to the Healer. We no longer call rebels to lay down their arms and surrender to the King whom they have offended.

My conclusion, sparked by Kallenberg’s book is that we have given up too much by moving to the foreign land and translating our faith into the vernacular of that culture. We have a work cut out for us in bringing the balance by teaching curious outsiders the new language. That is what the catechesis was for in the early church. Kallenberg points out that the baptism and first communion were delayed till the Easter after a person had completed catechesis. Ultimately our goal is the mastery of and fluency in the language of faith rather than a smooth translation work.

NOTE: Here is a great article that summarizes Kallenberg’s view

I just came across this article by James M. Houston. It is very challenging and thought-provoking. Though I would not fully embrace all of it, I still find it very significant read:

Principles to Live By

Prepared by: JAMES HOUSTON

My basic convictions as a Christian have remained the same all through my life, but the attentions that I have paid to certain issues have altered. Personal priority to the nurture of individuals has long been a basic concern. In this regard, the tutorial system at Oxford for twenty-five years was formative for me. Then the move to help found Regent College in 1970, was motivated by the desire to see that intelligent/professional lay Christians have an equally informed Christian faith, as they had in their professions. But a third perspective, since the student revolts of 1968 onwards, has opened my awareness to the relativism of Postmodernism which has occurred since then. Before that, modernism was about rationalism, and even our Evangelical heritage was friendly to the Enlightenment. “Your mind matters” was a bias that tended to overlook our emotional life and of the need of more personal nurture, which I have long sought to redress. Now the “Po-Mo” – as Postmodernism has been nicknamed – emphasizes relativism as a regulative principle, which denies the validity of truth claims. In place of ‘orthodoxy’, which implies truth claims, moral relativists now interpret any expression of absolutes as ‘fundamentalism’.

The Protestant world is poorly prepared to confront this “cultural tsunami” of subjectivism. But the election of Cardinal Karl Ratzinger as the new Pope highlights this crucial challenge to Christian orthodoxy. For since 1981, as head of the Congregation of Faith and Doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, he has been the world’s most respected voice against neo-pagan relativism. Since so much of our religious institutional life in the Protestant world is semi-secular and relativist, Evangelical Christianity itself is compromised. We may not even be aware how much departure we have made from early Christian orthodoxy, since the Protestant world has no “concilium” to act as a watchdog of our faith, such as Cardinal Ratzinger has controlled so effectively within his own church.

Even sixty years ago, C.S. Lewis was aware that the lapse of Western civilization into a post-Christian ethos, as we have just summarized, was a more traumatic cultural change than that from a Roman pagan society to early Christianity. “Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian”(C.S. Lewis). For one thing, the sense of the ‘self’ was much more porous then, in interdependence, in openness to the spirit world, and therefore of need of exorcism from ‘bad daimons’, or in contrast, of living so profoundly “in Christ”. Whereas the effect of the Renaissance, then of the Enlightenment, and now of our Technological society in Post-modernism, has been to increasingly close up the ‘self’, in alienated self-sufficiency. It is far less ‘open’ to any other ‘spirit’ than its own. The irony of a contemporary culture of ‘spirituality’ is that it has less ‘spirit’ than ever before, for it is all about ‘my spirit’. So again C.S. Lewis concludes, “It really is the greatest change in the history of Western Man”. For the dictatorial power of subjectivism refuses any truth claim, which is why liberal secularism is itself a power struggle as ‘fundamentalist’ as any other ideology.

The inter-penetration of the human and the divine, what is reasonable and yet also revelatory, implies a tension, or a dialectic/dialogue between God and human beings. So the book I have completed, Joyful Exiles, describes some of these dialectical principles of faith:

1. It a life “hid in Christ”, yet it is not “underground in pride”.

2. It a life “open to God”, and yet it is not credulous in superstitions.

3. It is public, yet this can be very surreal, unless it is deeply interior in its spirituality.

4. It is expressive of being a ‘person’, who is not merely and ‘individual’.

5. It is integrated in community, and yet is transmitted to future generations, because it is intrinsically sacrificial.

Such a synthesis is not Hegelian, of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, because “Jesus Christ” is “the true synthesis”, as the God-Man. So always our tensions of apparent contradictions are resolved “in Christ Jesus”. But when our religious institutions, which we now inherit, are compromised by Modern and Postmodernist influences, we find ourselves incapable of combating the relativism of our society. Cultural narcissism is a corollary of cultural relativism, so we need to affirm Christ-centeredness ends egocentricity. Re-living the Psalms with Christ changes our emotions, to focus upon worship of God. Walking through the Gospels with Christ, changes our behaviour, to virtue and service. Living in the Epistles, leads to relationships with Christ and his Church, that educate our enjoyment, and thus give joy to others. Hoping in the book of Revelation, leads to humility and peace, as one entrusts one’s future to God. Small communities such as the ‘Desert Fathers’, or the early monastic communities, brought reform to the Constantine Church in late Antiquity. Perhaps today, small study/retreat centers, personal nurture, network of friendships in Christ, will facilitate a ‘Relational reformation of the Church’, to live with a much more radical consciousness that truly is ‘Christ-like”.

Reading James M. Houston’s book Joyful Exiles I came across a few words by W.H. Auden. He wrote, “To a Christian the godlike man is not the hero who does extraordinary things, but the holy man who does good deeds. But the gospel defines a good deed as one done in secret, hidden, so far as it is possible, even from the doer, and forbids public prayer and fasting in public.” (34)

These words challenge my soul. In the age when the West experiences a complete collapse of standards and conventions, when fashion models replace moral models, when ethics becomes a dirty word that is seen as imposing and shackling, when celebrities shape our souls rather than sages- I sense the need for heroes. Heroes like Augustine, who would bare his soul in his writings, and live courageously in public. The whole notion of Christian Life as hidden from the world is very hard to swallow. The activist in me wants it to be out there for everyone to see, hear, and experience.

Houston’s words provoke me, “The Christian life has nothing to hide, yet its efficacy is bound up in being hidden from the world. The incarnation cannot be seen by the world, only by the eye of faith.” (34)

Again from Auden, “It is impossible to represent Christ on stage. If he is made dramatically interesting, he ceases to be Christ and turns into a Hercules.” (34) Maybe what I really long for is a Hercules? Am I any different from Jesus’ first disciples who longed for a Jewish Alexander who would come in might, blast the Romans, and restore the nation to its pristine glory? What else is all modern day ministry but an attempt to make Jesus dramatically interesting and palatable for the Western world? Are not all our new strategies and methodologies a response to the current spiritual fads and preferences?

Here are few excerpts from Craig Gay’s book “The Way of the (modern) world:

“The essence of “the world”- and hence of “worldliness”- is not personal immorality and/or social injustice as such, but is instead an interpretation of reality that essentially excludes the reality of God from the business of life.” (4)

“Secularization describes a process in which religious ideas, values, and institutions lose their public status and influence and eventually even their plausibility in modern society.” (19)

“…the connection between the secularization of modern society and culture and the impersonal quality of modern social and cultural life can perhaps not be overemphasized.” (16)

Reading this book leads me to construct the following shifts in the Western world:

Pagan Religiosity=>Christendom=>Secularization=> Postmodernity/?

Gay’s book is very significant for me. While much is written today about Postmodernity, this is the first book that I am reading that wrestles with the modernity. I picked it up in order to get a “history lesson”. But I was in for a surprise. Much of what Gay writes about the modernity seems to fit right with what I read about postmodernity. How can this be?

Many evangelicals today parrot the death of Christendom and the dawn of postmodern era. While I can see much wisdom in these statements, Gay’s book forces me to do a deeper analysis. It seems that most evangelicals skate right over the stage of secularization as they move from grossly simplified notion of Christendom right into haphazardly defined stage of Postmodernity. Gay’s discussion about the secularism of the modernity makes me wonder if the Christendom quietly passed away long before evangelicals started to broadcast its obituary over the blog-world. And maybe, just maybe, we are not entering the postmodern world, but rather witnessing the modernity come to its full bloom.

So are we living in the days of birthing pains the postmodern world or days of maturing and blossoming modernity?

In their thought provoking reassessment of the objective truth Walsh and Keesmaat quote Phillip Kenneson,

“Too often appeals to the objective truth of the gospel have served as a means for the church to evade its responsibility to live faithfully before the world. In short, Christians insisted that the gospel was objectively true regardless of how we lived. The paradigm I am advocating frankly admits that all truth claims require for their widespread acceptance the testimony of trusted and thereby authorized witnesses…What our world is waiting for, and what the church seems reluctant to offer, is not more incessant talk about objective truth, but an embodied witness that clearly demonstrates why anyone should care about any of this in the first place.” Quoted in Colossians Remixed, p.128

These words made me wonder about this notion of “embodied witness”. It seems to work in other areas of life. For example, how much willing suspension of disbelief would be required for me to hire as my investment advisor a person who is in jail for mishandling finances and has declared bankruptcy? Would I ever get over his economic praxis in order to hear his words?  It would take me a long time…

Mel Gibson’s recent fiasco shows how modern day evangelicalism seeks to place our beloved celebrities into positions that we refer to as “platforms of influence”. In the postmodern context that we are in, we inadvertly play into the derridian signifier-signified conundrum. When Mel Gibson speaks about his religious faith while making Hollywood cash-machine, or when Ralph Reed is implicated in the casino deals- these individuals become signifiers for the ultimate signified, God.

Many purport the death of Christendom these days. The unfortunate alliance of the Christian faith with the political structures of its day has been portrayed as the core reason for its decline and marginalization. Our analysis demands much more nuanced and careful evaluation. In our opinion, the crisis of Christianity in the Western world can be summed up as the failure of religious signifiers and of the mode of legitimation of our signifiers.

Our task as a church is two fold. First, we need to keep fighting this trend of “funding the cultural imagination” with idols and keep insisting that the only signifier that we have is Jesus. He alone can and should shape our concept of God. Second, we need to take hard look whether our methodology for ministry is adequate in our postmodern context. Here too the life of Jesus preserved in the memory of his followers serves as an evocative model.

As I write my paper for “Postmodern Hermeneutics” class, I just finished reviewing my notes on Terry Eagleton’s “The Illusions of Postmodernism”. I hope it is of interest to some of you. Eagleton was a professor of Engish at Oxford. He is a devout marxist, who believes that Marxism needs to be given a chance since what took place in the Soviet block was not a true picture of marxism, but an abberation. I still have to process and synthesize all that I have read. Here are few of Eagleton’s thoughts that challenge me:

1.Postmodernism as a The Postmodern theory is leery of “linear tales”. It does not see itself coming after or emerging out of modernism, but rather to be standing outside of any other system “in the great symphony of History”. Eagleton quotes Peter Osborne, “The narrative of the death of metanarrative is itself grander than most of the narratives it would consign to oblivion.” This seems to make Postmodernism the most elusive metanarrative that we have ever seen.

2. Fallacy of universalizing the case against universals : Eagleton sees it being very dogmatic of Postmodernism to “universalize its case against universals” and conclude that concepts of a shared human nature are never important. Here is throws one case where they would be significant, the practice of torture.

3. Mistake of confusing hierarchy with opression. According to Eagleton, taken in its broader sense everyone subscribes to some hierarchy, though not everyone is an elitist. As an example he uses the fact that Democracy values the interest of people as a whole over the interests of anti-social power-groups. He also argues that the postmodern belief that values are constructed “fares better with Gorky than it does with genocide”…which is very hard to argue with.

4. Postmodern aversion to Postmodernism sees our appeal to shared human nature as trampling of its sacred idol of particularism. Eagelton argues that it is by virtue of shared human nature that we can make ethical and political claims upon one another. Freedom, justice, happiness and political equality are ours by the virtue of our shared humanity. Yes, these issues have been abused and neglected in the practice of global Capitalism, but these abuses should not deter us from seeing the good that appeal to our shared humanity brings. The alternative is devastating, as Eagleton points out that it was the tendency of oppressive regimes to insist on difference, where you were treated based on where you ranked in society. Eagleton aptly points out that here two of Postmodernity’s values come to clash, namely anti-elitism and anti-universalism.

5. Postmodern Ethics : Postmodern thinkers like Rorty believe that moral values are just embedded in “contingent local traditions”. Eagleotn with his classic tong-and-cheek approach agrees that this would be fantastic, if Rorty can find a way of distancing himself from fellow anti-universlist who “believes that murder is wrong for everyone except for those whose time-hollowed traditions happened to sanction it.” He then goes on to close his book by pressing the issue of fascism up against the Portmodernist’s face asking, “How are you going to resist this evil?” He finds some good in Postmodern thought like its opposition to racism, oppression, and destructive nature of power. But, ultimately, he sees Postmodernism as weak and defenseless against evils like fascism…

To sum it up: Eagleton has a love/hate relationship with postmodern thought. It seems like in the face of worldwide collapse of Marxism he is trying to find allies, or at least a place to park till the brighter days. “The humanist notion of the self-determining agent, and the postmodern conception of the multiple subject, are not finally at odds”(p.66). The key word is finally. They want the same thing, but Eagleton is outraged by the postmodern naiveté or laziness to fight for it. In his mind postmodernity is too closely tied with consumerism to undertake the struggle. They are too busy “wishing to locate utopia in the present” (66).

A side thought: How does a tenured Marxist professor in British academia envision seizing the means of production? Is he really ready for some barricade action? Or will he go down as his grand-pepe Marx who would pontificate about the working class in the coolness of his study with no real contact with any ordinary representative of the proletariat or ever seeing those “means of production” in real life at the factory? OK, I admit I am a bit harsh, but at least I can plead that this is a case of an amateur use of the deconstruction tool…

Does Eaglton’s critique of postmodernism sound convincing?