February 10, 2012 at 2:36 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: apologetics, dissertation, essays, love wins, lst, postmodern, rob bell, theology
Here it is. The big one – I know at least a few of you have been waiting to have a chance to read this, I hope you find it as interesting to read as it was to write. Despite the unassuming title, the subtitle gives away the potential controversy in the content of the dissertation:
A Critical Apologetic Appraisal of Rob Bell’s Love Wins
Despite the huge furore of early 2011, I’ve chosen not to focus on the argument over heaven and hell that erupted over Love Wins and take a rather more holistic view of the book. I particularly wanted to put it in its context and assess on its own terms whether it met its aim. On reading (and re-reading…) Love Wins, I suggest that the best way to read it is as a work of postmodern apologetics, which is something that the reviewers I read either ignored (most of them) or denied as a possibility (a very tiny minority). This means taking in both its postmodernity in style and context and its apologetic content, realising that the book is aimed at those on the fringe of Christianity, wondering if they could ever be/remain a Christian because of some of the beliefs that are described as Christian. Bell wants to show that there can be different Christianities, that it is a ‘broad stream’.
My approach to assessing whether Bell has done an effective job of encouraging those postmoderns on the fringe of Christian faith that there is a home for them within is based on a ‘Triangulation’ from Kevin Vanhoozer. In an article entitled ‘On the very idea of a Theological System’, he describes the three points of ‘the Spirit’s speaking in Scripture, the belief-practices of the church, and the world made new in Jesus Christ’, which must be kept in view, triangulated, in Christian life.
If you take nothing at all from my dissertation, if your mind is made up on Rob Bell, or if you just don’t care at all, at least take this bit seriously. We have to keep in view the three points of triangulation to live a balanced and full Christian life – what God is saying through the Bible, the way the church (in its many forms) is acting and thinking and the culture around us, with all its potential for transformation and redemption in Jesus. Under-rating any one of these leads to serious defects in our spiritual life and our witness will suffer.
Taking the three points as section headings, I look at how Bell’s book can be seen in these three contexts, how well it sits in them. I took in a wide range of sources, as you would expect in writing a 20,000 word dissertation, from those who stridently opposed Love Wins to others that leapt to Bell’s defence, from postmodern philosophers to reformed theologians. I look at the way he uses scripture – both which passages he selects (and, tellingly – as is so often the case – ignores) and how he handles exploring them. Then I explore how Bell relates to the church, contemporary and historical – those whose writing he has borrowed from, those who agree with him and those who have opposed him. Finally, I explore how postmodern apologetics seeks to convince contemporary culture of the believability of Christianity, and how Bell fits in with this.
My conclusion was to draw out some strengths of Bell’s writing and suggestions for how other apologists might take his work further in giving reasons for faith to those at the edge of Christianity.
Bell’s understanding and interaction with the world is certainly a strength. He reads the concerns and questions that those on the edge of the church have and paints a picture of God in a style that they recognise that emphasises the aspects of His character that they want to see. Doing this has a high apologetic value as it removes obstacles to faith, showing that Christianity makes sense for postmoderns.
Bell’s handling of scripture and the traditions of the church have some greater weaknesses, however. He is not always honest in his selection of scriptures and his depiction of the sources he has used, which at least raises questions over the conclusions he comes to in some chapters.
Bell has met many of the suggestions made earlier in the paper on what postmodern apologetics should be like. He writes to postmoderns as a postmodern using a postmodern style. However, we can suggest that a stronger apologetic could be written based on the analysis of Love Wins in this paper.
Firstly, Bell’s overemphasis on experience can be balanced with other epistemological bases; revelation, reason and faith. This is not to say that Bell ignores them, but developing them more could strengthen the apologetic. This has particular application when Bell is using scripture; in the terms of our triangulation, it would strengthen his apologetic case if he made sure that scripture was seen to be privileged over experience.
Secondly, apologists must take care in their interaction with the church. While we can learn from Bell’s positioning as inside the church yet sitting beside those at the edges, his treatment of some of his sources, especially those that cannot be considered contemporary leaves something to be desired. Honesty is required in naming some views as traditionally fringe, while others were mainstream and clearly showing where your ideas invert that.
Love Wins can be seen as transforming apologetics, demonstrating a new approach to making Christian faith seem plausible and believable in the postmodern world. Our desire is to see more postmoderns creating apologetic works that take seriously the Spirit speaking in scripture, the belief-practices of the church and the world being transformed by Jesus.
I have published the dissertation as an ebook – on Amazon for Kindle and on Smashwords for other e-readers (also including Kindle, as well as .pdf and other formats for easier consumption). For a limited time (a couple of weeks), you can download it from Smashwords for free if you use the code WT94F (enter the code at the checkout). 
February 6, 2012 at 3:39 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: drama, essays, improvisation, lst, postmodern, theology, wisdom
Semester 2 was a different beast to the first one. Two new modules, a new direction in the core and beginning to think about the dissertation (more of which later!)
The core Wisdom module moved from the Old Testament to the New, then on to look at how Christian Wisdom is found in later years, taking in philosophy, art, music and science. While it’s hard to pinpoint how the module could best be improved, given that the first essay had to be ‘biblical’ and the second had to connect wisdom with a more contemporary discipline, I feel that the balance of sessions was not quite right – and I know it has been altered. I had not opportunity to write about the connection between the New Testament writings and Wisdom because the fascinating NT sessions (on Jesus and the Beatitudes and on how Paul’s writings draw on the Wisdom books of the Old Testament and Apocrypha) came after the Semester break. I think there’s a lot there that I would have found fascinating to write about, but my eventual choice of essay title came closer to my more usual interest in the postmodern:
In your opinion does biblical wisdom resonate best with a premodern, modern or postmodern worldview? What implications arise for a transformative use of the Bible in the current postmodern worldview?
With just 3000 words to play with again, I think I took the ‘route A’ approach of looking at premodernity, modernity and postmodernity, giving a very broad characterisation of how each connects with wisdom. However, with the last third of the essay I went off in a more unusual direction: drama. It was a thought sparked by reading Grenz and Vanhoozer among others
“In a sense, the theater is perhaps the most appropriate artistic venue for the expression of the postmodern rejection of modernism … Postmoderns view life, like the story being told on the stage, as an assemblage of intersecting narratives.” (Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism, p26)
This multiplicity of narratives acts as a check or even a deconstruction of the metanarative(s) derived from scripture, as an acknowledgement of the nuanced approach to life that is needed – it is wisdom.
But I went further than drama, suggesting that there is an inherent danger of just re-running the struggles of those who have played their part in the ‘theodrama’. Improvisation, whether musical or theatrical provides and extended metaphor for how we live the Christian life with wisdom in a postmodern era of ‘suspicion of metanarratives’, where each ‘church’ or community of improvisers works out their response and continuation of the drama of God.
On reflection, this reminds me of the ‘five act play’ metaphor that N.T.Wright often uses (for example, see halfway through this essay on the authority of scripture)
Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play whose fifth act had been lost. The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged. Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own. Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves.
I can’t believe, thinking about it now, that I (a) forgot about N.T.Wright having said it all before and (b) got away with not including it – how did the markers not call me out on that one! Still, it’s this discussion of drama and improvisation that is the most valuable part of the essay and has shaped my thought a lot on how to live the Christian life, especially how we relate to the Bible. My characterisations of premodernity, modernity and postmodernity are undeniably flat and one-dimensional, partly because of the constraints of words and what I wanted to say about each in the essay.
Wisdom Essay 2 - Download a .pdf file of the full essay.
This essay by Jon Rogers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.jonrogers.co.uk.
February 1, 2012 at 5:05 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: book review, Doug Pagitt, Evangelism, gospel, postmodern, theology
Evangelism has become a dirty word to some people and cultural changes are happening across the world, ones that I would normally label as ‘postmodern’, which raise new problems with how we share the Christian message. It’s these issues that Doug Pagitt tackles in his new book Evangelism in the Inventive Age.
‘Inventive Age’ is what Pagitt uses to describe the cultural shift we are experiencing – a new era that follows the ‘Agrarian Age, the Industrial Age and the Information Age’. For all the talk of ‘missional church’ and ‘evangelicalism’, how can we possibly tell people about Jesus without sounding like we’re bible-bashing, forcing people into a mold they don’t want to be in? Pagitt’s suggestion is that it is resonance that best describes what we aim for when we are evangelizing – not conversion. The key to this kind of resonance is framing the good news of Jesus in a way that connects with people, and Pagitt looks at this from two perspectives. Firstly, a very contemporary idea, the enneagram is used to show the primary passions and fears of the nine types of people it describes. Each of these is embraced by the good news, each of them has ‘points of connection’, resonances with the biblical story. Secondly, Pagitt looks at eight ‘vignettes ‘ (or stories) in Acts that show the values in evangelism that he suggests are appropriate for the Inventive Age.
This is the fourth book in Pagitt’s series on the ‘Inventive Age’, which I found out is actually aimed at church leaders. At about 110 pages it’s not a long or difficult read – Pagitt doesn’t presuppose that you’ve read all his other books or studied theology for decades to understand his references. This means that it’s very accessible to a wider audience than just church leaders – anyone with an interest in sharing the good news of Jesus who finds that it’s not as easy in 2012 as just pulling up a soapbox in speakers’ corner.
Read the rest of the review at Provoketive.com
January 30, 2012 at 2:07 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: apologetics, essays, lst, postmodern, theology
Transforming Contemporary Apologetics, though not a core module to the MA was taken by every student in my entry year. It had by far the heaviest reading load of any of the modules and it covered a lot of ground – taking in a range of apologetic techniques from across the centuries (but mainly Western), looking at contemporary approaches, especially relating to postmodernity. As you might guess, postmodernity was the bit that appealed to me the most and was what I focused my essay on.
Explore the transformative function of apologetics in postmodern society. Your essay should include key ways in which today’s context is different from other historical periods, the contemporary challenges and suggestions for transformative action.
I relied on a schema from Leithart to describe how postmodernity is different to other historical ages: its actions are ‘intensifications, inversions and unmaskings’ of modernity. I drew on Brian McLaren to describe the values of postmodernity, values that many Christians see as a threat, but that I see as not antithetical to faith. The four are:
- Postmodernism is sceptical of certainty.
- Postmodernism is sensitive to context.
- Postmodernism highly values subjective experience.
- For postmoderns, togetherness is a rare, precious, and elusive experience.
Finally, I spend the remaining bulk of the essay detailing four ways that postmodern apologetics might function, with four short maxims giving practical ideas.
- Uncertainty: Embrace uncertainty to profoundly encounter God.
- Conversation: Engage in two-way conversation where both parties grow.
- Stories: Tell and be part of stories that connect, engage and encourage further development.
- Celebration: Celebrate God’s presence with anyone who will join you.
I don’t believe that postmodernity is something to be feared or fought. It just is. It’s not a perfect context to think as a Christian, but that perfect context does not exist. Rather, we engage with the context we are in and seek to redeem it, to transform it.
On reflection, however, I’m not sure I really answered the question – despite the good feedback from my tutor who marked it! How do we transform the way we defend the rationality of faith in a context where rationality is not only no longer the only criteria, but downright mistrusted? I think my suggestions go towards how evangelism or mission might work in a postmodern context, but apologetics is a different beast.
A few brief ideas now, a year on: acknowledge irrationality, avoid argument and power plays. Postmoderns will not be battered into the kingdom by the most powerful arguments or logical trickery (I think it slightly suspect to assume that anyone really was. There’s always something else going on beyond rational convincement – the Holy Spirit, even if nothing else!) Accepting that there is more to life (and new life) than deduction or 1-2-3 arguments is essential if we are to make an impact on this generation. Arguments often look like the power plays that we’re so sick of in politics – who really care about ‘town hall style’ debates between candidates? The papers and those who see the world as a fight between us and them (whether ‘they’ are pinkos or tories!) Postmoderns don’t want to watch a husting or a far-off panel debate, they want to be drawn into conversation – and that needs to be genuine dialogue, not a contrived method of forcing ‘capital T Truth’ down an unwilling neck.
So I was wrong – apologetics isn’t mission or evangelism; it’s more specific and focused and still important. Treat postmoderns with respect and some will listen. Apologetics alone will not save them, I suppose that’s part of what I tried to say in the essay, but then it never did save anyone on its own. But in it’s job as removing the intellectual barriers that keep people from faith, it must continue, though different from the apologetics of my parent’s generation if it is to succeed.
Apologetics Essay - download a .pdf file of the full essay.
This essay by Jon Rogers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.jonrogers.co.uk.
January 27, 2012 at 2:03 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: essays, lst, postmodern, theology, wisdom
Christian Wisdom and Transformation is the long title for the core module, which we all called Wisdom. The task over two terms was to explore Christian Wisdom, how it draws on the Old Testament and its potential for transforming Christians today. The first semester started by talking about what we might mean by ‘wisdom’ and where it’s found in the Old Testament, primarily the books that are called ‘wisdom books’: Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.
My title was:
Is wisdom only contained in restricted sections of the Old Testament or is it possible to argue that there is a sense in which wisdom permeates the whole of it? How does this affect the transformative potential of Old Testament Wisdom?
Phew! Quite a mouthful! In the essay, I sought to show that limiting the influence of Wisdom to those three books alone is not the best way of reading the Old Testament. I looked at various sections of scripture: Pentateuch, Psalms, Prophets and narratives in Genesis and Esther; looking to see if Wisdom was a them or a shaping force in their writing. My conclusion is that Wisdom did indeed shape the Old Testament, perhaps through redaction from a wisdom school, perhaps though those schools as a force in ancient society.
I also had to spend some time looking at how this would influence Christians today. I suggested that finding wisdom throughout the Old Testament was a very powerful way of reading the Bible as many of the values associated with Wisdom resonate so much with postmoderns. I concluded the essay in this way:
In seeking the wisdom of Scripture, we have found practical advice on living, centred around God. It
appears throughout the Old Testament, in all the sections we have examined. It includes the worship of God
and study of Scripture, but recognises the limits in understanding and experience and is comfortable with
the issues of God’s apparent absence and the abundance of suffering. Wisdom seeks answers, but finds
paradoxes. Wisdom has much to speak into the culture of today when we recognise that simple, dismissive
answers characterise the fool, and the honest hard work of seeking through an enigma suits the wise woman
or man.
Wisdom Essay 1 - download a .pdf file of the full essay.
This essay by Jon Rogers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.jonrogers.co.uk.
October 14, 2011 at 4:01 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: ideology, opinion, philosophy, postmodern, science
I made the mistake of confusing Tim Ferriss with Timothy Ferriss, so I was surprised to be disappointed with an article on Wired, “Timothy Ferriss: The World of the Intellectual vs. The World of the Engineer”. I often read Tim’s blog, I’m fascinated by his approach to self-experimentation. So the over-simplification and scientism of the article surprised me.
The comments of other people on the article itself are interesting – both supporting and criticising Ferriss.
The title sets up the binary that Ferriss pursues through the article: intellectual bad, engineer good. Taking a rather unique definition of intellectual (“Being an intellectual had more to do with fashioning fresh ideas than with finding fresh facts.”) in order to contrast it with scientists and engineers who dealt only with hypotheses that they could check with lab tests. Ferriss goes on to intellectuals sought only to create ideologies that were based on imagined utopian dreams rather than any real experience and that they were all failures. He takes a slightly different route to the standard critique of modernity but ends at a similar place: modern ideologies are empty and we must leave them all behind. The have (without exception, apparently) only caused damage to humanity, while technology and science have exclusively benefited us.
There’s plenty to critique in his argument (which my summary has probably not perfectly represented – which, as you’ll see, will be deeply ironic!) Some commenters have been upset with people saying there are straw men to be found in the article. A straw man is a weak or misrepresented summary of someone else’s argument or work, which then makes your argument look strong. It’s an analogy from somehting like martial arts, where knocking down a straw man is easier than taking on a real opponent.
An example (one of many) is Ferriss’ treatment of Marx. “Karl Marx studiously ignored the improving living standards of working-class Londoners — he visited no factories and interviewed not a single worker — while writing Das Kapital, which declared it an “iron law” that the lot of the proletariat must be getting worse.” Now I’ve not studied Das Kapital, but to suggest that Marx was anti-fact and did not research seems a very unfair accusation. Imperial Russia allowed the publication of Das Kapital because it was not just ideology, but a ‘scientific’ work of political economics. Marx should be seen as one who straddled the binary of this article – mixing ideology and scientific technique, as many scientists do, especially those who are pioneering new fields. And Marx cannot be blamed (as Ferriss later suggests) for the failure of communism in the Soviet bloc – commenter Jon Munger says that’s like blaming Darwin for eugenics.
The article is even more flawed than just containing straw men. Ferriss’ style of argument and his shallow treatment of sources puts him firmly in the camp of idealogues (which he conflates with intellectuals), ironicaly arguing that this approach (the one he is practising) is fatally flawed. He is constructing a new ideology, not based on verifiable hypotheses that can be falsified by experimentation, but constructed from a few opinions and comments of hearsay. Scientism (the ideology that science and technology provide unrelenting progress and benefit for humanity) has been in doubt for decades. The ultimate demonstration of the power of science to affect people are the nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of the early and middle part of the last century. Scientism is just as dangerous as any ideology in the hands of people who will do absolutely anything to defend or advance their way of life.
When we talk about the end of ideologies, the lack of resonance there is now with the big ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries, we need to be careful how we do it to avoid creating new (or re-stating old) ideologies that are just as flawed. We choose the direction we take our world in, science is just one tool (one particularly effective tool) to move us in that direction. Science is not morally superior to other approaches, nor is it the only tool we should use, as Ferriss proves. As a writer I am sure he knows that his rhetoric is not scientific. It is a tool, we must choose how we use all the tools available to us to do good, rather than harm.
August 24, 2011 at 6:12 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: lst, metanarratives, philosophy, postmodern, theology
Read the previous ‘Metanarratives’ posts: 1, 2.
In my first post on metanarratives, I said that one of the defining features of postmodernity was the suspicion of metanarratives. What I never wrote about was why the postmodern is outright hostile to the giant stories. In a historical sense, it could be that postmodern philosophy was born from the disappointment of ex-communists with the student rebellion of the 60′s. But the more reasoned answer is because of the inherent violence in the application of a metanarrative.
Now the postmodern conversation uses violence in a slightly different sense to how we might common speech – it’s pretty much any time that someone is forced into something they would not freely choose, whether through actual injury, implicit force and threats or just the weight of a system pushing them into compliance. I’m sure I don’t need to explain how communism was violent in its desire for revolution. Freudianism tries to explain all human behaviour and thought in one single system, and in this reductionism does violence to the multiplicity of impulses and desires that we have. The metanarrative of romantic fulfilment that I wrote about before does violence to both parties as they use each other to ‘see if they’re the one’ and are then broken by the failure of the night. Without exception, metanarratives are seen as bringing violence as they try to eliminate ‘the other’ who is not part of the plan. It appears to be a side effect of their ‘totalizing’ nature, the fact that they claim to explain all human behaviour, everywhere in one simple rule.
And so to Christianity – the violence of Christianity is seen by many as its biggest failing – how can I be part of a religion that excludes women/gays/racial groups, that caused the crusades and the inquisitions, that inspired George W Bush? Just look at the Bible, it’s full of violence, even genocide at the call of God – not to mention the way hell is portrayed as the ultimate violence and exclusion of the other!
As a Christian, I can humbly confess that my faith has been used in horrifically violent ways, it deserves to be called out on every single one of those. Where repentance is required, it must happen and we must reject the violence of the ways the Christian story has been used. However, there are two points to be made about the Christian story and violence. Firstly, the Scriptures themselves challenge the use of Christianity (and Judaism for that matter) in a violent manner. Secondly, while the violence of the Cross is central to the uniquely Christian message, it is an inversion of violence, which must change how we view the bigger story. I’ll fill in some more details of what that means in another post.
August 14, 2011 at 9:06 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: lst, metanarratives, philosophy, postmodern, theology
Read the previous ‘Metanarratives’ posts: 1, 2, 3
Previously I said that though postmoderns reject metanarratives (in favour of smaller, local narratives) on account of their violent totalizing, my view of scripture is that it does not have to be read as presenting that kind of metanarrative. Here’s why.
We can discern two metanarratives woven through both Old and New Testaments. There is an Empire narrative, the ‘violent redemption’ narrative - we can’t pretend that it’s not there, especially in Joshua, Judges, the Samuels, Kings and Chronicles. But secondly, there’s an anti-Empire narrative of redemption and grace. It’s at play in Exodus in the freeing of the people of Israel, not by their power and skill in war, but God’s wisdom (though we see through the Old Testament that the two stories interweave). In Leviticus, it sets out Jubilee provisions for debts to be broken after 7 years (whether this actually happened or not, the story is there). In Samuel, the blessing of God is on the fugitive, David, not King Saul, but David refuses to fight him or hurt his enemy, despite being a better fighter (again, interwoven with the violence of the struggle with the Philistines). The prophets again and again cry out against the ‘empire’ tendencies of Israel/Judah, the way the poor are exploited because they are weak. In the New Testament, the ultimate anti-Empire manifesto is set out in the Sermon on the Mount – Jesus says that the only way to beat the Empire is to refuse to play its games, to be different. The Zealots were just the same as the Legions of Rome, no better for worshipping God. The only way to win was to play a different game, one where love scored points, not hatred.
So without doubt, you can find passages that legitimate violence and the destruction of enemies. But if Jesus is the pinnacle of revelation to the Christian, we must take his words most seriously. Someone has taken Brian McLaren‘s analogy of Scripture as a library of books further, let’s imagine looking at Scripture as a collection of films, the lifetime’s work of one Director. There are different script-writers, different actors, different ‘SFX’, different storylines, locations, morals, but in all the films the same creative genius and vision. There are repeated themes. There are hints, references and in-jokes (just like JJ Abrams does). Each film has to stand alone in some way, even if it’s part of a series within the wider picture. Each one should change you, in a different way for each one, a different way each time you see it. McLaren describes an unfolding revelation and understanding of God though the scriptures – each writer understood God in different ways, we must see their writing as reflecting their individual understanding and interaction with God. This in no way counts out inspiration, unless by inspiration you only mean ‘autowriting’ as Muslims understand the Koran was given. It rather has a realistic view of the human involvement in writing scripture. Everything is interpretation (that’s the postmodern philosophy of Derrida), but it is guided, shaped, guarded and passed on by a community of faith, in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Most metanarratives we come across are ‘univocal’, that is they have one voice, a narrator. The Bible is different – ‘multivocal’ with so many speakers and voices from inside, outside, the rich, poor, men, women – each is represented. These voices are often misunderstood and diminished, but the very structure of Scripture delegitimates its own use to oppress and exclude. The bigger structure backs this up, tending towards the reconciliation of all things in Jesus; a reconciliation not of violent oppression but loving acceptance. I know there is much more to deconstruct in how we actually realise this and bring it into being, and much more to repent of, but that’s my reading of the Christian metanarrative.
Secondly, above I said that the violence of the Cross is real and central to the Christian message, but that it is an inversion of violence. Art and films like ‘The Passion’ emphasised the brutality of the killing of Jesus, but it was preceded by another violent act, the incarnation. Peter Rollins (in his upcoming book ‘Insurrection’ and other places) talks about the kenosis, or ‘emptying’ of Jesus and its place in Christianity (drawing on the work of Gianni Vattimo). The kind of violence that is accepted, even encouraged in Christianity is the dying of self, the identification with Jesus on the cross. This is two fold (probably more, but not fully worked out in my thinking) – one, in our identification with Christ crucified, all the power of sin on our lives if broken, dead; two, we become open to the possibility of joining in the transforming work of Jesus when we too empty ourselves of all that we count as value and instead dedicate ourselves, even if for a moment, to the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God, the actualisation of the reconciliation of all things.
It’s the violence of death that brings us life. In that death, all that crushed us and separated us from life is killed. In that death we find we are able to live a life that is truly alive. In paradox, violence inverts itself when we empty ourselves and choose not to take the way of violence to others but accept it upon ourselves, destroying it in the process.
August 5, 2011 at 3:53 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: lst, metanarratives, philosophy, postmodern, theology
In my last post, I mentioned the story of Redemptive Violence as one of the dominant metanarratives that the media feed to us. I am sure you will recognise it when I describe it – it is the basis for every action movie ever! Whether the story takes place in history, in space, or in some other context, there’s a set pattern to the metanarrative. There is a hero, who we are made to identify with, who loses something to an enemy – either of his own or his communities (yes, usually it is a he). After a long and dangerous quest, he and a band of valiant warriors defeat the enemy who has caused this loss in a violent and surprising fight. The story ends with some kind of depiction of the wonderful state of peace and goodness that this battle has brought about.
It is right for postmodernity to deconstruct this story, for a quick historical review can show how it is the story of Empire and oppression. Wired is far from the first to talk about the Babylonian gods’ relationship with contemporary action movies. The myths that were used to explain the origin of earth and Babylon in particular, that legitimated the rule of the King and priests were all about war between the gods. Violence solved the problem in the story, and violence was the way the empire expanded. Successive empires ruled the near east, ending with the Romans. When an ideological difference emerged, heroes stepped up to take charge and deployed as much violence as they could to take over the supreme position. The era of the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Empire (Julius Caesar and all that…) typifies the internal wars that would plague the empire for centuries.
What does the Bible say about redemptive violence? There are many Christians who struggle with the stories of violence in the Old Testament, especially books like Joshua, Judges and Samuel-Kings. Whole cities and tribes are wiped out, seemingly at the order of God. If we read the Bible as an account of how people have engaged with God, we can read these as an example of how violence is not, in fact, redemptive. The ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Canaan does not bring peace to the Israelites. The wars against Moab and Philistia do not bring peace. Even the great conquests of David do not bring lasting peace. In fact we find that the war-like nature of David makes him unfit to build the Temple of God – violence and worship of God are characterised as incompatible.
Violence was an metanarrative that the people of God had to deal with as they were conquered by Babylon and others. For me, scripture engages with it as a possibility and shows that it is flawed. The most cutting critique is in the life (and death) of Jesus himself. If there was ever a case when violent resistance of tyranny in God’s name was justified, Judea in the first century was up there. Galilee was a hot-bed of anti-Roman activity and freedom fighters – within a generation of Jesus it was devastated by war. Yet Jesus chose a different way, rejecting the dominant metanarrative of violence. He took a deliberately different approach, ‘laying down his life’ and practising forgiveness with his last breaths.
Yet there are some who believe that this approach was only temporary, that the second coming of Jesus is in violence and destruction. I am convinced that this is a mis-reading of the character of Jesus and the kind of ending and redemption that he seeks. I think that passages that speak of a conquering Jesus are supposed to point us back to the way that victory was won – in the ‘defeat’ of the Cross. If we really consider the cross to be important, we will reject any kind of power-play and empire building that seeks to conquer through power instead of weakness.
June 30, 2011 at 9:43 am · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: lst, metanarratives, philosophy, postmodern, theology
Some of my friends joke that I can get the word ‘metanarrative’ into any conversation. Probably true. Warning: this series of posts may have an overdose of the word ‘metanarrative’!
This first post in my metanarrative series will try to define what I’m talking about for those who don’t try to slot it in to every conversation! A narrative is just a story. There are two kinds of stories that we might be talking about with the word narrative – our own personal life story and the stories we tell each other about other people, real or fictional. The first order, personal stories are experienced rather than told – lived out and shared rather than dictated or written out. The second order stories are the ones we were told as children, the novels we read, the articles in the newspaper, the dramas of movies, the ‘reality shows’ of television. They hide within them hints of third order, meta stories. Meta as a prefix can mean beyond or above or about, so a metanarrative is the story of the story. Metanarratives chart the way the world is, the way things happen, how the story is supposed to go.
We absorb metanarratives mainly subconsciously – like a ‘worldview’ we forget that they’re there most of the time, even when we’ve conditioned ourselves to examine them and their effects. But they act as ‘legitimation stories’ – like a foundation, they help us to make decisions by acting according to the storyline we expect to play out. They act as a shortcut in our minds, one we cannot eliminate if we try.
Postmodernity has been famously (and frightfully reductionistically) defined as ‘suspicion towards metanarratives.’ Lyotard is responding to the collapse of faith in Communism, especially in the European academic world, which for him takes down all metanarratives, exposing them as socially constructed and fatally flawed. While there is a great deal of suspicion of metanarratives around (economic progress is inevitable? Really…?), the reality is that we still have some of these stories buried so deep in us that they are still driving our decisions and perspectives.
The media have always been the source of metanarratives, but the sheer volume of media we are able to consume in this always-on, wirelessly-connected, socially-networked, sci-fi present day has not really changed the limited variety of metanarratives we encounter.
‘Rags-to-Riches’ stories emphasise the ‘American Dream’ of Capitalism – economic progress is inevitable if you work hard enough for it. Even people like Bill Gates are characterised as ‘a college dropout’, minimising the fact of his ultra-privileged upbringing and the unique opportunities it afforded him. Conspicuous consumption might not be quite as popular right now in ‘austerity Britain’, but we only need look at supermarkets discussing the rise in ‘premium brands’ to show it is not far away. We might be suspicious of what politicians are telling us about the future, but we harbour not-so-secret hopes that they will be right, at least for us.
One type of movie I tend not to watch has a metanarrative of Romantic Fulfillment. It’s the myth that finding the right person to be with will solve all your problems and heal all your hurts. It’s a story that says the next person you meet could be ‘the one’ and that settling for who you have now might mean missing out on the most important person. It creates holes of dissatisfaction with the present and brings unrealistic dreams of the future closer than is possible, feeding off the tension that is partly released vicariously when we see it all go right on the screen.
The metanarrative of Empire is the use of violence as a redemptive force. I’ve written before about how this story has been around for a long time, and in action movies, it’s the only story going. When our government wants to take the country to war, the presupposition that Hollywood has etched into our thought patterns is that the only way to solve this problem – be it genocide, revolution, terrorism, drugs – is to send guns and bombs to destroy it, for only once the enemy has been defeated can peace happen. My next post will dig more into the myth of redemptive violence and looking at it from a Christian perspective. I also want to discuss how the metanarratives perceived in Scripture should be seen in the postmodern world.
I also need your feedback: what are the important metanarratives fed to us by the media that we tacitly accept? Why do you think it matters that we look at the inherent violence of them?
Here it is. The big one – I know at least a few of you have been waiting to have a chance to read this, I hope you find it as interesting to read as it was to write. Despite the unassuming title, the subtitle gives away the potential controversy in the content of the dissertation:
