On innumerable occasions a whole Christian community has been shattered because it has lived on the basis of a wishful image. Certainly serious Christians who are put in a community for the first time will often bring with them a very definite image of what Christian communal life should be, and they will be anxious to realize it. But God’s grace quickly frustrates all such dreams. A great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves, is bound to overwhelm us as surely as God desires to lead us to an understanding of genuine Christian community. By sheer grace God will not permit us to live in a dream world even for a few weeks and to abandon ourselves to those blissful experiences and exalted moods that sweep over us like a wave of rapture. For God is not a God of emotionalism, but the God of truth. Only that community which enters into the experience of this great disillusionment with all its unpleasant and evil appearances begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together
Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 5)
Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Picture a small band of socially awkward “techies”, graced by unabashed enthusiasm for a technology of obsession, rising the Vulcan Finger Split salute in perfect solidarity.
This is the glory of the modern technology “User Group”, all the power of the Black Panthers and as graceful as a local church congregation.
Every once in a while I forget how big of a nerd I am, but every time I return to the user group setting and find myself completely enthralled in a discussion of software check boxes, the future of the internet, the rise and fall of Microsoft, and the next evolution of digital whatever… I know I am being myself, and it feels really good.
I actually facilitate and participate in a variety of “User Group Meetups” focused on everything from internet technologies to creative writing, and I love it.
There is something special for me about these types of meetings, they are beyond mere affinity and yet they are focused on something in common that draws everyone outside of themselves to share information, expertise, and knowledge in such a way that the entire community is lifted and in so doing a greater movement is supported.
I recently watched a small documentary entitled MacHeads that took a tongue in cheek fanboy look at the infamous subculture of Apple computer worshipers.
This film went through the typical history of the modern PC revolution and followed out a few personalities as they travailed the ups and downs of Mac loyalty through the recent decades of iEverything coming to the masses.
But towards the end of the film, the conversations and focus took a peculiar inward turn to highlight the stalwart role of the “User Group” in preserving Apple through the tough times and the strange obsolescence of such groups in the good times.
It is hard to appreciate now just how vital a local user group was in the pre-internet era. There was a time when access to knowledge was limited to printed literature, perhaps a few video tutorials; but the majority of the learning and sharing happened in these user groups of embodied presence.
A few of the veteran Mac users who founded the original user groups spoke of their now defunct status with a sense of loss that I do believe is more profound than simple nostalgia. Once the users were connected online and the information flowed freely between servers, meeting lost its point… and communities were slowly disbanded without any justifiable purpose. All the information is online, so why bother getting together…
…with the internet I have the concern that people go out, they find their answer, and then they don’t come back, they don’t build a community of lasting connections. It will be different, it won’t look like what it used to look like.
~Mac User and Founder of now disbanded User Group of 15 years
…the internet killed us, I was losing that sense of human contact because you are meeting people that you would never have an opportunity to meet otherwise. When you go to Google to find an answer to a question, all you find out is the answer to that question, very difficult to get that random connection and information that you had no idea existed but it will change your life as soon as you hear about it.
~Mac User and Former User Group Member
I think the community is bigger than ever, but it is in a different form because it is all online. There are so many community websites, forums, and blogs…
…what the hell is a Mac community, there is kindof no need for a Mac community, I think it would be cool if there was one.
~Cool young new Mac users
It is very interesting to see these types of conversations compound on top of each other. The old users have seen something of a glory moment of solidarity that they now long for and the new users know something is missing that they can’t quite put their finger on.
I think there is something else to consider here, and I find this especially poignant. These people are not Luddites, iconoclasts of technology, or scoffers of progress. These are all people on the front lines of engaging technology in all walks of life, and yet they experience a loss with the success of their pursuits. A good idea can be taken too far and push into territory that should remain pure.
I have discovered a litany of modern thinkers that have lamented this seriously enough; Wendell Berry, Marshall McLuhan, Steve Talbott, Maggie Jackson, and Albert Borgmann to name a few.
Many of these authors push beyond the mere practicality of physical meetings and the pragmatic utility of why it is good for us to be physically present with each other, and into a discussion of something that is rooted much deeper inside the human need for communion and our spiritual need for embodied connectivity.
C.S. Lewis still describes for me with profound insight the practical first step of communion in the Body of the Church, the original holy user group.
Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realize that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighborhood looking for the church that “suits” him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches. The reasons are obvious. In the first place the parochial organization should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology together in the kind of unity the Enemy desires. The congregational principle, on the other hand, makes each church into a kind of club, and finally, if all goes well, into a coterie or faction. In the second place, the search for a “suitable” church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil. What He wants of the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise—does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going. (You see how groveling, how unspiritual, how irredeemably vulgar He is!) This attitude, especially during sermons, creates the condition (most hostile to our whole policy) in which platitudes can become really audible to a human soul. There is hardly any sermon, or any book, which may not be dangerous to us if it is received in this temper. So pray bestir yourself and send this fool the round of the neighboring churches as soon as possible. Your record up to date has not given us much satisfaction.
I have not read a page of Ayn Rand and I could hardly present what her philosophy of Objectivism is or means, other than to say that she believed that reality existed and it did not depend on our minds to do so.
Regardless, the title of her book Atlas Shrugged was the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw this image in a recent article on the Architecture of Saint Patrick’s cathedral in New York City.
Curiously, in the same public square, directly across Fifth Avenue and in his own confined enclosure, crouches one of the most aggressively pagan responses to the Christian faith ever promulgated by the arts. In direct alignment with the cathedral’s great western doors, long center aisle, and high altar of sacrifice, the long-shelved Titan Atlas struggles in obsolescent effort to carry creation. We thank Atlas, for his constant vigil lends unintended richness to the Christian tradition of penitential veneration.
The story of Atlas may have appeared as early as the 6th century BC, placing it well before the birth of Christ and Christianity.
I was recently amazed to learn of the nature of Augustine’s conversion being built upon the pre-Christian writings of Plato. When he read the theology presented in the gospels he saw immediate congruence with the wisdom of Plato, it made sense… it was rational. He was not trying to bend his mind into another dimension, he could just be honest about what he knew to be true already…
As a preliminary way of showing me how ‘the proud you rebuff, while favoring the lowly,’ and how great is the pity you show to humans on the lowly Path of your ‘Word made flesh in order to live with men,’ you brought to me a man, himself inflated with raging winds of pride, to acquaint me with certain books of the Platonists, translated into Latin from the Greek. What I found in reading them no precisely in these words, but saying the same thing in varied and very convincing ways, was this:’At the origin was the Word, and the Word was in God’s presence, and the Word was God. This was at the origin with God, and all things were made through it, and nothing was made without it. In it, life was made, and the life was men’s light, and the light shone in the darkness, and darkness could not control it.’ Further, that the human soul, however it may bear testimony to the light, is not itself the light. God’s word is ‘the true light that gives light to every man who arrives in this world’ Further, that ‘He was in this world, and the world was made by Him, and the world did not recognize Him.’
but this I did not read there: ‘He came among His own, and His own did not accept Him, but to all who accepted Him, who believed in this title, He gave the right to become God’s sons.’
~St. Augustine, The Confessions
Confessions (Penguin Classics)
Author: Augustine
It sounds familiar and it should, it’s basically John 1…
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was with God in the beginning.
3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
Anyone who is conscious knows that there is a struggle going on in this world; externally and internally, its nothing new but it bears down fresh on every generation of humanity… “the weight of the world.” This is something every human can attest to, even with a pagan polytheistic cultural environment. But there is more, and this is what Augustine admits to as well…
but this I did not read there: ‘He came among His own, and His own did not accept Him, but to all who accepted Him, who believed in this title, He gave the right to become God’s sons.’
~St. Augustine
The scriptures brought him Christ. And in some way this photographic perspective of looking through the hollow atlas at the Church with a small yet centered cross is our continual testimony, mission, and commission. It is what the Church can do that mere philosophical or scientific speculation can not…
28″Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Go ahead and try to hold up the world, try to fix everything in your own power… and when the banks fail, the ecology gets plundered, the noise is unbearable, and the loneliness is palpable even with 500 million friends… when you are truly weary and burdened… perhaps then you can shrug, drop the world, kneel even, and crawl across the street and into Communion…
18I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that[i] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
26In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. 27And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.
I hope no reader will suppose that ‘mere’ Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions… It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. but it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and shares and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable. It is true that some people may find they have to wait in the hall for a considerable time, while others feel certain almost at once which door they must knock at. I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless he sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. but you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for the light: and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling. In plain language, the questions should never be: ‘Do I like that kind of service?’ but ‘Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular door-keeper?’
when you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. if they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.
Is our time at an end, and has the gospel been given to another people… to be preached perhaps with totally different words and deeds?
How do you view the indestructibility of Christianity given the situation in the world and our own lifestyles today?… How is one to preach such things to these people here? Who still believes in these things? The invisibility is killing us… To be continually cast backwards to the invisible God is insane; we can no longer accept it.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together
Bonhoeffer was unable to hide his aversion for attempts to etherialize the church into structures of empty ritual and perfunctory services that merely fronted for what purported to be an essentially “invisible heavenly reality.”
~Geffrey B. Kelly, Life Together Introduction
Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 5)
Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I did a brief tour of Europe about 3 years ago; including Berlin, the place from which Bonhoeffer was speaking when he asked the question…
Is our time at an end?
There is a good collection of survey data that would concede that the Christian faith is at best languishing in Europe and at worst, it has come to an end.
During my backpack gallivanting tour, I spent a fair amount of time visiting church buildings, mostly cathedrals of exquisite craftsmanship and enduring historical heritage.
Every city seemed to have at least a couple of landmark church buildings that were in the midst of some form of preservation. These buildings were spectacles of architectural wonder and beauty. But, I was left with the overwhelming impression that all of these buildings were now a relic of the past, preserved only for their tourist attracting capacity. There was not much evidence of the Church happening in these ornate facilities… it was invisible.
A fully etherialized church was a great fear of Bonhoeffer. But this is not to say that he was in any way against a well reasoned and articulated set of orthodox Christian beliefs, he just wanted to make sure that the things he believed were livable.
This is where I encounter a difficulty or even dichotomy between pragmatism and heretics. In many ways, folks who present a view of Christianity that is completely compatible with secular progresivism and humanism arrive at something that seems perfectly livable, sensible, and compatible with modern enlightenment. An enlightenment that can go to work immediately in the most visible forms of work on every conceivable front of social justice. But in a twist of irony, some of these folks need to etherialze Christian doctrine in the process, a bodily resurrection of Christ is somehow problematic to an embodied and enlightened Christian faith.
When one reads the New Testament in the order in which these books were written, a fascinating progression is revealed. Paul, for example, writing between the years 50 and 64 or some 20 to 34 years after the earthly life of Jesus came to an end, never describes the resurrection of Jesus as a physical body resuscitated after death. There is no hint in the Pauline corpus that one, who had died, later walked out of his grave clothes, emerged from the tomb and was seen by his disciples.
What Paul does suggest is that Easter meant that God had acted to reverse the verdict that the world had pronounced on Jesus by raising Jesus from death into God. It was, therefore, out of God in a transforming kind of heavenly vision that this Jesus then appeared to certain chosen witnesses. Paul enumerates these witnesses and, in a telling detail, says that this was the same Jesus that Paul himself had seen. No one suggests that Paul ever saw a resuscitated body. The Pauline corpus later says, “If you then have been raised with Christ, seek the things which are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.” Please note that the story of the Ascension had not been written when these Pauline words were formed. Paul did not envision the Resurrection as Jesus being restored to life in this world but as Jesus being raised into God. It was not an event in time but a transcendent and transforming truth.
Somehow the proclamation as metaphor, “Elvis has left the building” seems especially applicable to this sort of revisionist theology. If the bodily resurrection of Christ leaves the church and all you are left with is a spiritual metaphor of “transcendent and transforming truth”, well maybe you will end up with a bunch of hollow architectural shells of an out-moded faith that no longer “works”.
Before the effects of such beliefs are contemplated, the historical accuracy and probability of the resurrection can be defended by scholars quite readily, N.T. Wright is the name that currently contends against this sort of allegorizing of the resurrection.
I have not spent a lot of time with all of his arguments, but I think the crux of it is that the bodily resurrection of Christ is the best explanation for the history of Christianity and it is something that completely took the Jewish theologians by surprise… they would not have been able to make it up.
…the foundation of my argument for what happened at Easter is the reflection that this Jewish hope has undergone remarkable modifications or mutations within early Christianity, which can be plotted consistently right across the first two centuries. And these mutations are so striking, in an area of human experience where societies tend to be very conservative, that they force the historian… to ask, Why did they occur?
The mutations occur within a strictly Jewish context. The early Christians held firmly, like most of their Jewish contemporaries, to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world. ‘Resurrection’ is not a fancy word for ‘life after death’; it denotes life after ‘life after death’.
Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.
~Frank Budgen, friend of James Joyce
ULYSSES by James Joyce
Author: James Joyce
This little bit of character analysis is revealed in the forward to James Joyce’s modern epic Ulysses. Apparently Jesus was grounds for inspiration on the gentleness front, but came up short on the overall search for an archetype hero. I have barely scratched the surface of Ulysses, but I have already received the fair warning of it being a lengthy drudge through filth. In fact, it was a literary work initially rejected all together and earned the nefarious recognition of being a “banned book”.
Ulysses is a spider’s web of allegories and mythological reminiscences… it is a dung-heap swarming with worms, photographed by a movie-camera through a microscope.
~Karl Radek, 1934 US book ban
Regardless, this book is now honored by many literary scholars as being the greatest work of the last century. I don’t know if I will ever finish reading it, but I will certainly nod to those who praise its intricate plot structure intertwining mythic lore with common experience. I still have not seen Pulp Fiction, but enough people have told me how amazingly clever it is… that I guess I believe them now. So Joyce and Tarantino are super geniuses, I concede. But they still may miss the obvious while shaping masterpieces out of refuse.
I have to admit that I found the aforementioned quote about Jesus’ lack of human experience via bachelorhood interesting all over again. A good portion of Christian Theology is focused on the assertion and defense of Jesus’ humanity. He was fully human and he experienced every temptation and trial that is common to man. This is the quick apologetic that comes with handy scriptural support.
15For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.
So there it is Joyce, look the B.I.B.L.E says so! And if that is not good enough for you, then you can turn to Dan Brown and the gnostic gospels and read all about Jesus and his wonderful marriage to Mary Magdalene! Well, maybe hold off on the later.
So yes, I do get the accusation and observed discrepancy with the orthodox view of Jesus, His life, and His humanity. An orthodox Christian response to this grievance with Jesus and his unsympathetic bachelorhood life probably falls along the lines of Jesus being presented in scripture as the bride groom of the Church.
22Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
And this is where the “spiritual” allegorizing of Christianity can get dicey. What does it actually mean for Jesus (as a man) to be married to the church while he was here walking around on earth?
Well, I do believe that if that question is explored at any depth (the gospels would be a decent place to start) one does begin to see the embodied acts of love and commitment that would constitute a healthy marriage with all of the joy, friendship, love, pain, and suffering that comes with such a relationship.
McLuhan makes a couple of observations about communication that appear to be both ironic and insidious. But his critique of modern communications seems to be less a condemnation of the medium forms and more a rebuke to our lack of awareness and our belief that content and delivery mediums could somehow be separated without changing the message in the process.
The message is inextricable from the medium and the medium will change (massage) you in the process of receiving the message, regardless of what you do with the message. There are no messages devoid of mediums.
Shane Hipps takes on the challenge of working out some of McLuhan’s insights in regards to modern Christian faith in his book, Flickering Pixels.
Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith
Author: Shane Hipps
If we are going take so much volition and control over the delivery of our messages in the modern world we should at least be aware of the natural bend of each mode of communication.
It would seem that all of humanity has a split that runs directly down the center of our brains, no joke but maybe a pun, left and right brain hemispheres. In some sort of strange patterning, life itself seems to continue this extension of division in most every form culture and practice.
The East and West divide would appear to take all comers; religious, political, economic, educational, etc… and split them up into two big buckets of propensity.
19″Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Will it all burn, is this physical world the place where moth and rust reign only to be destroyed by fire in the end? Is the best we can do to get right with God and await the end? Is this the hope of hopes for Christianity?
What happens when one strand of reality is singled out and stretched too far is hardly surprising. Wider reality springs back and has the last laugh. Pressed too far, for example, reason becomes rationalism and rebounds into mysticism; or freedom becomes anarchy and rebounds into authoritarianism. We thus become masters of irony and connoisseurs of the art of the side effect, the unintended consequence and the unknown aftermath. Reality rebounds, and things turn out the opposite of what they seem and what people expect. Strength becomes weakness; love becomes pornography; pleasure becomes boredom; and so on.
We have had classic successes with this tactic in the lives of individuals. You might call it the “Samson Syndrome”, because you see the cycle so clearly in the namesake. Trace the line from Samson’s early promise, to his extraordinary exploits, to his careless delinquency and ultimate downfall. Samson could become prodigal only because his strength was prodigious. When his gifts become his master, they were the key to his undoing. Et voila, strength turned to weakness. “All men that are ruined,” said Edmund Burke, “are ruined on the side of thier natural propensities.”
~Os Guinness, The Last Christian on Earth
The Last Christian on Earth: Uncover the Enemy’s Plot to Undermine the Church
Author: Os Guinness
The space of the church is the place where witness is given to the foundation of all reality in Jesus Christ. The church is the place where it is proclaimed and taken seriously that God has reconciled the world to himself in Christ, that God so loved the world that God gave his Son for it. The space of the church is not there in order to fight with the world for a piece of territory, but precisely to testify to the world that it is still the world, namely, the world that is loved and reconciled by God. It is not true that the church intends to or must spread its space out over the space of the world. It desires no more space than it needs to serve the world with its witness to Jesus Christ. The church can only defend its own space by fighting, not for space, but for the salvation of the world. Otherwise the church becomes a “religious society” that fights in its own interest and thus has ceased to be the church of God in the world. So the first task given to those who belong to the church of God is not to be something for themselves, for example, by creating a religious organization or leading a pious life, but to be witness of Jesus Christ to the world.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from Ethics 63-64
A Year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Daily Meditations from His Letters, Writings, and Sermons
Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Not sure where I stand on this guy… it would be very difficult to stay somewhere were I never received any blessings in the form of encouragement, fulfillment, purpose, or fellowship. But at the same time I think it is impossible to search out a place that will deliver blessings and then go there. The first problem is my own discretion; I don’t even know how to choose good blessings for myself. The best things in my life I certainly did not give to myself. If someone doesn’t think they have any blessings and they don’t have anything to be thankful for, then there are probably other issues at play. That said; I do believe that the local church should be a place where God’s people can be blessed in dynamic ways that are usually mysterious to everyone, including the person that is blessed. That is to say that your blessings should not amount to a health and wealth gospel that you can pile up in your garage and show all of your friends. But perhaps that comment goes without saying. I guess I struggle with this one, I would say that I do expect to be blessed but I also expect the blessings to come after I have suffered for a while and maybe it will seem like a long while to me. I think this is one of those conditional promises of God that works out in strange ways.
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