Millennial God

Imagine this. A man arrives in a small, isolated village. He teaches the people a song. It is very beautiful and they sing it almost all the time, together and individually. Communications improve and people come from far and wide to hear the song. Strangely no one else learns to sing it except the villagers. But everyone loves to hear it sung and it plays continually on the radio, on the internet, in movies, on iPods, on planes. After a while everyone is so used to it that they forget entirely that it came from the villagers. They dispute as to which radio station or media conglomerate owns the rights to the song, and the disputes are never resolved. In the meantime the song continues gaining in popularity and people play it over and over. One day a Ph.D. student doing research discovers where the song came from. Her research is definitive and proves the song belongs to the villagers. Even more importantly she goes to seek out the village. But strangely she finds it deserted. There is no one there. Possibly they all died. Or, perhaps, they just dispersed and are now spread throughout the world. But to all practical purposes they no longer exist, so they cannot claim the song. To whom then does the song really belong?

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In a recent blog Richard Beck--a featured speaker at our next T&P conference--said "many churches are jerk factories" (sic). A little later in the piece he softened his stance and said he was exaggerating of course.

In one of my own blogs about a year ago I compared Christianity to a bomb that had gone off in the world, changing everything, and the churches were little more than a cultural relic from a time before the bomb was fully exploded. As such they provided a kind of Sunday vacation from lived-world reality, which in fact no longer needed or wanted their institutional program. I found myself later telling a concerned pastor I had likely exaggerated.

Yet another magazine blog I came across asked why the Millennial generation seemed to be abandoning the churches, including evangelical churches. The writer concluded it was because when they go to church, "instead of hearing about how to live with those who’ve been kicked to the curb, how to be Christ to a world caving in on itself, they hear about how the church’s job is to maneuver itself into positions of power, respectability, relevance, etc". Along the way the writer had also reflected on an apparently more comfortable explanation given by some within the churches. The Millennials have been seduced by an essentially secular culture, their youthful passion and idealism now recruited by a world that sees itself simply on its own terms without the need for an outside meaning (i.e."transcendence").

I think in fact there is truth in both answers given and from a radical perspective. It is certainly more than possible to challenge Christian practice and its lack of human credibility, and this is Beck's point too. But in the background it is also undeniably true there is an entirely different set of cultural references for young people, and these are not the same as the ones traditionally relied on by Christianity to get people coming to church. The idea of eternal salvation, or its opposite, becomes less and less insistent when compared with the pressing concerns and possibilities of the actual world and actual human history. The reason why it was possible to be Beck's "Christian jerk" was because the major meaning of life in the churches has always been to get to a heavenly elsewhere, and if one way or other you had paid your way then you were golden, further discussion closed. But now that scenario is much less plausible or acceptable if progressively the sensed meaning of life is life itself--i.e. how to make life on earth succeed. And so the issue of Christian credibility comes round to join the issue of cultural sensibility. The culture itself demands a different kind of Christian.

But here is the kicker.

What if cultural change is precisely the effect of Christianity? What if the ability of our world progressively to condition its own meaning, without reference to a God of the afterlife, is itself the outcome of the gospel? What if over long years and on multiple fronts the worldview instilled by Jesus has set the earth free to be more and more its own authentic space of human life--even and paradoxically as that space builds up greater and greater threats to itself? What if we take the Lord's prayer at its word, that Jesus came to fulfill the project of creation through the Father's kingdom here on earth? Or the text of Daniel employed by Jesus, that the coming of the Son of Man, the Truly Human One, is dynamically opposed to all the false kingdoms of history which disfigure the human? What if our era is in fact a time when all this is becoming implicitly understood, when the space of the earth is implicitly embraced as the final space of God's design?

Of course the great majority of people do not see it as God's design in this way.

God is out of the equation. Philosophers have spoken, influentially, of the death of God, the flight of God.

But what if "God" has died, or taken flight, because really and truly our concept of God was terminally faulty, and little by little we've come to understand this, again because of the gospel? You can only get a jerk-factory church if God himself is a jerk. And he has pretty much earned the reputation: an alarming dual personality, with a sadist readiness to fry his creatures for all eternity, and heck, we all better get used to it; and, on the other hand, a mawkish sentiment of love for those on his good side. No wonder people like this God, and then rapidly go off him. He is entirely within our image, manipulable according to the deepest human template We can use him to hate, and then we can twist him to love.

John's gospel tells us "No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known" (John 1:18). Which suggests that really we have no categories for God except whatever is derived from Jesus, and that leaves the question much more mysterious and mystical. We are called to encounter our "God" as the endless gentleness of love, so profound and so radical we can hardly imagine it. In order to come anywhere near we must hang around Jesus continually. The incommunicable God is communicated only by the absolutely powerless one.

Which suggests in turn that the church is both less and more than it ever was. Less, because it does not have a privileged business line to the truth--it does not own the song any more. And more, because it can, against the background of a song sung by all the world, begin to realize the deepest human meaning of the gospel. The church may possibly learn to sing the song in and among its own members rather than simply listen to recordings which it claims legally to own. Instead of the factory churning out products people respect less and less, it might become a laboratory for the breakthrough of a new human life for which all are longing

The role of the christian is not to set up a church as place, as essential freehold for salvation, but to live more intensely than the world the change that is taking place in the world. The God of the new millennium is in the future, our future, because the past is always structured out of violence. Love (and the song it sings) always belongs to and gives birth to the future.

Tony Bartlett

Note to Mimetic Theorists: The 1% are not Scapegoats, the 99% are

Sometimes I wake up and the earth is flat. My body is convinced that the earth stretches out more or less indefinitely on either side, and up above is a very big benign God who is going to put everything right totally pronto with an infinitely fine sense of justice and, yes, love too.

Then I stand on the floor, everything whirls round and gravity shifts like a roller-coaster, and I know with terminal clarity that I'm on this tiny piece of rock with a molecule-thin layer of air hurtling through space at unimaginable speeds, and I've really got to figure it all out myself. It's Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks, not The 10 Commandments with Charlton Heston. That's when the normal day gets going.

A moment later someone switches on some micro apparatus out of which pours an unbelievable volume of noise and the words are mostly to do with some person being incredibly angry about something and somebody. That's when I know I am a human being.

But then I remember I have a Ph.D. and have studied mimesis. So I can do this! I can work the problem, just like Tom.

In the late twentieth century a number of converging pathways showed that the human ape is radically imitative (mimetic), to the extent that imitation provides a powerful explanation for his near-limitless violence and also the way he always finds scapegoats to excuse and displace it. And, oh, yes, one of the converging pathways was, amazingly, the Christian bible which showed itself an acutely accurate demonstration of these phenomena, and at the same time, by natural implication, that Christ offers a decisive way out.

So, you bet, there's a chance of saving this ship, and I and a number of brave folk have set to tinkering with what we think is the instrument panel on the strength of the theory. The earth may not be flat and there is no big God in the sky box, but we can rescue this spinning rock at this eleventh hour because there is a germ of gospel hope in the rock itself, in its human components touched by the Spirit. Like good old Tom, and with the help of Houston (Risen Jesus) we can re-rig the space capsule for a safe landing. We might even make it into a completely alternative life system, a life-star, so to speak, full of peace, love, solidarity and joy.

I sit down at my desk and log on to the planetary computer, the thing we call the internet, and the way so many of us eager astronauts communicate and try in our way to fly the planet. And then all the earth's spinning and flailing and yawing and pitching hits me like an explosion. Wow, this thing is waaay out of control! There are wars and uprisings, hurricanes and earthquakes, hunger and thirst, lies and arrests, suffering, hatred and death.

What to do? Really? What to do especially if you have a theory of everything?

Well, first perhaps a little recent history. Rene Girard is the father of mimetic theory. His major book, his Das Kapital in a manner of speaking, is Things Hidden since The Foundation of the World. It was published in English in 1987, and is coming up for its English-speaking 25th anniversary. (It was first published in French in 1978.) The impact of this work, along with his previous development of his thought and his subsequent writing, led in 1990 to the foundation of an academic association dedicated to his theory, the Colloquium On Violence And Religion (acronym Cov&r). This organization is responsible for the ongoing academic application and exploration of what is called the mimetic model. The academic world of course is an intellectual world and fosters pure thought and research. Girard's last full-length work, a book called Battling to the End, by its very title confesses quite a pessimistic view on humanity's ability to pull out of its favorite sport of killing.

Ahh, a further increase in the angular velocity of our crazy spinning rock! This time nudged onward by the very author who laid out the main diagnosis of the problem, along with its inherent solution! Or is he in fact trying a desperate gamble, like a man accelerating a car toward a cliff in order to prevent his friend in the passenger seat shooting him with a gun? Who knows? I for one am definitely looking forward to the last-minute swerve, if not from Girard certainly from the spinning rock.

A number of other organizations have sprung up dedicated to mimetic theory. One of these is our own Theology & Peace, for which I am writing here. We were formed in 2007 as a conference organization, after a number of people, myself included, felt that Cov&r, with its broad academic purpose, did not offer enough pro-active concern in theology to stimulate growth in faith and practice. So, yes, let's take the medicine on the road.

But then there is more to theology than a particular conference organization and 2011 has surely provided the most powerful external jolt to in-house reflections. A different wobble has been introduced into our spinning rock by popular protest movements from the Arab Spring, through indignados of Spain, to the Occupy phenomenon here in the U.S. Largely and consciously nonviolent these uprisings of the downtrodden and dispossessed have brought to political consciousness younger generations previously unvoiced and they have raised a flag to theologians aware Jesus likely has a stake in this somewhere.

As I now finally get into my day, fiddling on the keys of my laptop while drinking coffee at my imaginary social club (which is actually a bookstore), where for a moment I kid myself that everything in the world is about writing or chatting, and hence words, gentle biddable words, I come to the point I have wanted to make since I got out of bed. And from hereon this blog might get perfectly serious.

There has been a "Girardian" reaction to Occupy, also heard in some evangelical circles, which I find both intellectually superficial and functionally Pharisaical. To the Occupy language of "We are the 99%, oppressed by the 1%" it objects that for Christians it is always "We are the 100%", no exclusions. Hence, yes, we feel sympathy with the situations and sentiments expressed, unemployment, indebtedness, loss of homes, loss of faith in the political process, but no, this language of social differentiation is definitely not the gospel. So stop it, please, at once!

And the mimetic concept of the scapegoat is turned like a huge cannon on the protesters and in one shot their moral claim is blown away. End of game. Mimetic Theorists 1, Occupy 0.

There is so much wrong with this it's hard to know where to begin.

From an historical, structural, social and economic perspective the 1% are those who excluded the 99%. You don't have to be an economist and understand the mechanisms of capital accumulation to know that those already with money have an enormous leverage which average people don't and that leverage came from somewhere. Beginning from aristocracy whose forefathers grabbed land by force (Normans in England provide a casebook example) and continuing through factory and business owners who drive down wages and stash the proceeds, wealth is always structurally tainted ("unrighteous mammon" as Jesus precisely called it). But if you also factor in the credit derivatives which caused the 2008 crash, opaque instruments where no one really had to guarantee anything while making huge profits (check bank bailouts for final liability), the Occupy case is spectacularly correct. The great majority have been scapegoated by the gilded few.

This is counter-intuitive for a Girardian mind to accept but it is intelligibly, mathematically the case. Now, of course, if Occupy was to go on a rampage down Wall St. stringing up financiers from the lamp posts then, yes, these would immediately also be scapegoats, victims of crowd mimesis and violence. But isn't it absolutely, painfully plain that the majority of people in the Occupy camps strove mightily to avoid this outcome and so preserve the clear structural truth of the 1% as scapegoaters?

To abandon the structural truth is to turn mimetic theory into a cookie-cutter formula, a shibboleth claiming pious validity but masking a deeper human reality, viz. the poor. It is to make Girardian thought a right-wing social armor. Which brings us in turn to Pharisees.

I do not use the word "class" readily, because it has been infused with violence by Marxist rhetoric. It is a word easily conflated with violence. But if we take it in a purely sociological or taxonomic sense there can be no doubt that Jesus in the gospel of Matthew, chapter 23, addressed the Pharisees as a class and launched a stinging critique of them as such.

Why? Because Jesus saw the structural features of Pharisaism as deeply antagonistic to the gospel. In Luke he launches a similar but shorter critique against the wealthy, in the "woes" of chapter 6. It is the attack on the Pharisees which is by far the most blistering. This class of men represented a severely demanding response to the law, but in the process they missed the simple radicalism of the gospel, and their concern with minutiae was precisely what blocked them from that radicalism. Could we say that Jesus scapegoated the Pharisees? No, not unless he wanted to hurt them and kill them at the same time as he exposed their systemic avoidance of his truth. But of course this is not the case. Rather he attacks their practices and ideas trenchantly and deeply and thereby carries through a class critique. A class in this instance is the accumulation of power and violence in a particular group made available through the generational build-up of sacred order around them. The Pharisees were probably a religious 1% (only six to seven thousand of them according to Josephus) but they were highly influential and Jesus as a teacher and preacher of the in-breaking of God's newness was obliged necessarily to take them on.

To object to a nonviolent critique of the 1% therefore runs the risk of siding with Pharisaism and being itself functional Pharisaical, which is the appearance of goodness but the denial of its radicalism.

Gospel radicalism is expressed in solidarity with those who do not have power, those who are poor and downtrodden. Solidarity places the individual's bodily life somehow on their side, at their side. Solidarity is what saves nonviolence from superficiality and pharisaism. A coruscating piece written by a desperately ill and indebted woman and shared on facebook by a fellow gospel astronaut, demanded solidarity from progressive evangelicals. These evangelicals seem to have had something of the same reaction to Occupy as some mimetic theorists. It was this piece that pushed me into writing the above, seeking one more time to nudge along our spinning rock within its own crazy dynamics.

Ah well, I'm back home and it's almost time again for bed and sleep. For the comfort of a flat earth!

Tony Bartlett, T&P Theologian-in-Residence

Pitch Your Tent!

As George Orwell said, one of the first victims of tyranny is language. But, conversely, one of the first flowers of freedom is the refreshing of language. And that means not just language but our sign system generally.

With the shutting down of the Occupy Wall Street camps in Oakland and at Zucotti Park, New York, there is perhaps a sense among the well-thinking that authorities have drawn a containing line around a posturing parade which has no attainable goal. Sure the protesters expressed a valid point and they had the right to do so--it does seem outrageous that a small segment of people both helped create the financial crisis and were able then to profit from it. But camping out on the doorsteps of the centers of power, making temples of capital look like refugee camps, well that quickly became offensive to good taste and a threat to established order. The application of crushing force (police in riot gear, use of "bean bag" projectiles, choke holds, pepper spray, multiple arrests, exclusion of journalists and cameras, the trashing of a voluntary library and other property) all this was the minimum necessary to return people to their senses. The protesters--who according to right-wing talk radio are just commies and hippies living in their mothers basements--will be sufficiently discouraged and return dejected to their dwellings.

Apart from the fact that the Occupy movement seems to have no intention of going quietly, but is constantly finding new places to gather and protest, this reading of the events fails completely to grasp the truth of what is going on. "Occupy" was never about a program on a mainline political stage or even a standard mobilization of public opinion on the streets. It was about something much more primordial, changing the very ground on which we stand. It was and is about changing meaning itself. And the rise of such a movement in our time has literally a "significance" which cannot be overstated. Nobody alive today in the U.S, will forget that in 2011 there came to public attention the leaf-shoots of an epochal growth in our collective human possibility.

Occupy Wall Street is a renewal of cultural language. It has given a vivid new currency to a number of words, like "occupy", "people's microphone", "ninety nine per cent". But even more than spoken language it is its concrete language of tents and tarpaulins, drums and bodies, associated directly, but in non-business terms, with centers of high finance that has interjected new meaning. Here are human beings intruding themselves as real actors in an arena where they are not supposed to be, and just by doing this they have changed the meaning of those places. They have taken the cheesy T.V. immediacy of the reality show and applied it creatively and subversively to Wall St. And this is what really causes the outrage. How dare they! They have no right to be here, here is where we are, invisible to everyone! Not them and their drums. But, no, they intend to remain, intruding real bodies which are undergoing real and painful real world-effects, into a sacred space supposed to be isolated from those effects. No wonder that the movement has been compared to Jesus' action in the temple!

And that brings us directly to the heart of it all. The argument in my book Virtually Christian is exactly the way the figure and story of Jesus have infiltrated the sign system of the world so that, whether it knows it or not, it begins to repeat gospel motifs of compassion and nonviolence. This effect is not one of legal personal salvation but of long-term human infiltration and transformation. The Occupy movement is one more aftershock of the gospel, exposing and challenging the principalities of this world in the way of Jesus.

What I'm saying represents no intention religiously to canonize the movement or anyone in it. In human affairs there is endless opportunity for things to go wrong, and they very probably will. But this does nothing to take away the the catalyzing role of Jesus in the semiotic veins of Occupy. The effect of Jesus at this level has no formal relation to doctrinal belief, or church membership, but it is working consistently to change the root construction of human meaning.

For many people such a concept may remain unrecognizable, or for some even heretical. I am not concerned here to try and answer such responses with amplification or rebuttal, but purely to reflect a sense that what is happening has everything to do with what it means to be Christian today.

There was something very appropriate about the way the U.K. version of OWS found a home on the land outside St. Paul's Anglican Cathedral, London. And what happened there represented the enigma that official Christianity now find itself facing. The proximity of the camp brought the resignation of two high-profile churchmen, attached to the cathedral. First Canon Giles Fraser, because he could not countenance the possible use of force to evict the camp. The second was the Dean of the Cathedral, who had agreed unnecessarily to shutting the doors of St. Paul's for the first time since the 2nd World War, and subsequently found himself in an impossible position. There was clearly an enormous tension set up between the fluid language of the gospel celebrated by the tents at the door and the traditional meanings of an established church formed in massive stone at the heart of London's financial district.

The vibrant tension in meaning caught the eye of others in England and another group set up camp outside Exeter Cathedral two hundred miles away from London. Bishop Michael Langrish complained."This is pure copycat, they have been outside one cathedral, now they are outside another." What the bishop painfully missed was the obvious fact that language is copycat, and that's what was happening! The spontaneous camp outside his ancient cathedral had seen the electric arc of meaning between the cathedral and the tents, and they wanted to relay it further!

Christianity today is called to make a massive conceptual shift to see that its ultimate reference is not the eternal beyond, but the very world around them as infected with the new meaning of Christ. Its own most proper language--Jesus and his nonviolent forgiving death realized in startling new life--has become unbound in the world, beyond anyone's magisterial power to control or monopolize. The result is at once both disorientation and a thrilling reorientation. The Bishop of Exeter was disoriented, those who pitched their camp outside his gothic walls were discovering, like Israel in its tents, a radically new orientation.

In some crazy way the world had become the church, growing the language of nonviolent change, freedom and compassion, while the church has become the world, speaking the old language of hierarchy, heaven and a business of brokering the ticket to get there.

But what does this mean for those who want to practice "church"?

It is possible that some ministers and leaders situate themselves conceptually in the new emerging matrix. They may be motivated personally by the concrete transformation brought by the gospel. But so long as pastors have not significantly transferred the focus of their operations to the symbolic boundaries, to the border areas of this world-become-church, then no one is going to notice anything new. The difference might be clear in the pastors' minds, but if they do not set about changing the signs of their work, in resonance with the way Jesus is changing the root language of the world, then they may as well be preaching the theses of medieval scholasticism.

The church's metaphysical function is so deeply entrenched that its default role is precisely that of the guardian of metaphysics, and it is almost impossible for people to see past that. What I am describing is called organized religion and, one way or another, it invokes the stock religious piety of the grand old God sitting above the clouds dealing with sinful humanity by means of his "exotic financial instrument", the death of his Son. Jesus bailed out our debt--you could say God, like one of the big banks, sold it to him--and so long as we agree to that, by confession or some form of regular practice, our souls are preserved from an immortality of torture and promised instead an immortality of bliss. Our mortgage will be paid for us and we'll get our mansion in the sky...

Only a consciously elaborated new set of signs can change this discredited-but-still-dominant notion. Only a new set of signals can get people to enter a new paradigm. Some possible examples include: non-traditional or discovered meeting spaces, names and images that make what is familiar appear strange, use of the body in worship that places us in an undefended relation to the Spirit, and above all communicative programs that present the human condition of violence and its transformation by Jesus as the meaning of the biblical story.

But don't let the blog tell you what signs to create! The whole point of a new language is that it generates itself exponentially, exactly as the "tongues of fire" descending on the first Christians enabled them to communicate to each person "in his or her own language" without need of prompting. Go pitch your tent on the borders of the church somewhere, in the place where the world-become-church perhaps already has set up camp. For the Word is made flesh and he tents among us!

Tony Bartlett, at AAR 2011 San Francisco

Living in the Luminous Shadow!

In my book Virtually Christian I described a world radically infected by Christ. There has been a two millennial drip, drip, drip that has soaked our culture in the compassion and forgiveness of Christ, like soaking a Christmas cake in brandy!

You don't see it? You think things are worse, more violent, more unjust, than they have ever been? And has not Christendom (Christian Culture) been one of the main culprits of the heedless violence in the world?

But how would you know that unless a source of compassion had made you exactly that degree more aware?

My argument is not that things are objectively better or worse. My argument is that our minds have been changed by Christ. And now because of that things can and may become better!

The underlying logic is no different from Rene Girard's basic thesis, that the gospel has intelligently revealed the victim at the source of human culture. All I have done is added the necessary layer of Christ's compassion as the "luminous shadow" that throws this victim into relief. Plus the narrative of that shadow in culture, showing how it has progressively provided the sign and seed of transformative meaning throughout our world.

Especially in his latest work Girard accents the negative transformation. In Battling to the End he says that "The Passion brings war because it tells the truth about humanity...The Passion leads to the hydrogen bomb..." Ever since the gospel revelation of the victim humanity has lost its ability effectively to blame the scapegoat and so re-found the human order on violence, yet at the same time it has refused to renounce violence. Placed in an untenable situation by the gospel humanity continues to have recourse to violence, desperately and in larger and larger doses, until it finally unleashes nuclear war.

This is a highly negative gospel reconstitution of human history, and there is no doubt truth in it. But if the Passion leads to the bomb, that is the case from the perspective of the old unreconstructed humanity. Even more surely and powerfully the Passion and Resurrection are producing a new human way, a new creation. This has to be the case because the negative effect can only be provoked by the prior radical presence of positive meaning. The problem is in recognizing its effectiveness. At first sight it does not seem able to change political or economic patterns, nor most social or intellectual ones. It takes place in cracks in the system and can easily seem to evaporate when you would most like to see it work. But the luminous shadow is necessarily there, underlying all the travail of our modern world, prompting a progressive turn toward compassion, forgiveness, sharing, nonviolence.

Once you develop an eye for it you begin to see it more and more readily. I continue to be amazed at the act of the British Government in 2010 apologizing for the massacre in Derry, N.Ireland, in 1972, known as Bloody Sunday. This was one of the main triggers provoking the violence of the IRA with the support of the Catholic population, leading to over twenty five years of urban warfare. Those acquainted with the history of the two major islands off the coast of Europe are used to hearing of 800 years of English attacks on Ireland. Bloody Sunday could be seen as just one more in an interminable list of murder and wrong visited by the greater military power on the weaker. But then for the British government to turn around and apologize so resolutely and fully on something in living memory indicated suddenly that a new contemporary principle is at work. The healing effect was enormous.

Robert Downey Jr.'s recent appeal for forgiveness for Mel Gibson also ranks as a clear case of the luminous shadow. Gibson's pariah status in the film industry is well known, first having made a movie about Christ that pushed Jewish (and other) sensitivities to the limit, and then offending directly with a drunken rant against Jews on the occasion of his arrest for drunk driving. Robert Downey told how Gibson had given him work about fifteen years ago when he too was a pariah and no one would cast him because of his record of drug abuse. Gibson did so then on the condition that Downey accepted responsibility for his actions and was ready to offer forgiveness to the next person. As it turned out that person was Gibson. Downey appealed to an audience of Hollywood's great and glitterati :"Unless you are without sin, and if you are you are in the wrong (expletive) industry, you should forgive him and let him work.”

The cuing of Christ's compassion, to the degree of a direct quote, was unmistakably part of the appeal (and ironically layered into the situation by Gibson's own movie) and it exploded around Twitter and the blogosphere in a wildfire of fascination. Could/would Hollywood respond to this sign of the gospel? Whatever the answer there can be no doubt that multiple signs of Christ's compassion were lit up in people's brains, whether they agreed or not.

And that's the point. At the level of sign, of meaning, the compassion of Christ is irrepressible, irrescindable. It's never going to go away! It can be rejected of course. But it will keep returning, more and more insistently, and at some point it can and must be accepted. "If I am raised up I will draw all humankind to myself!"

The effect of the sign of the Cross is a geological sedimentation that over the years creates a new human landscape. It is like all those billions of tiny shells that produce limestone and over time are pressed upward by the earth to form great mountain ranges. Every individual shell is a shift in the neural structure of the human brain impacted by the sign of Christ's compassion. Little by little all those shifts are giving rise to a new humanity. To what forces can the largely nonviolent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt be attributed if not some profound change in human sensibility? And what is the seemingly leaderless and inchoate, and yet intensely communicative and symbol-producing activity of worldwide Occupy Wall Street if not to a tectonic rumbling in the deep structures of human meaning?

The gospels themselves use images of large-scale organic change. They say the Kingdom of God is like leaven which completely transforms the shape and constitution of a huge batch of dough. Or they show Jesus at a wedding changing a vast quantity of water into wine, in one stroke morphing the concrete senses of a human community from horrible failure to amazing success.

What it would be like if Christian churches lost their purpose of brokering eternity and supplying a sense of metaphysical worth, to being schools where people learned this new meaning of humanity; period?

But even if the churches don't do this it is still happening any way. Happening all round us.

In many ways the feeling of actual contemporary Christianity comes more authentically outside of church than in it. Outside has a resonance of a new transforming humanity but inside can almost completely lack it. The inside's traditional symbol system refers intimately to another, heavenly world and the rightness communicated from it. It was developed over thousands of years, both the time of Christianity itself and of other thought worlds preceding it into which Christianity tapped. So going into church with the watershed change I'm talking about in mind is to discover this place is actually designed not to represent it! The experience of the churches could in one sense be compared to walking into pagan temples in the first century while the message of Christianity was running around on the streets outside!

But when Christian communities begin to understand that their key meaningful context is not another world to which we are destined after death, but in fact this one--because it is pivoting on the compassion of Christ--then all the symbolic references change of themselves. And when Christian communities live fully in a transformed symbol system like this, well, what will that mean? Nothing less than the rebirth of Christian faith!

Tony Bartlett, TinR

Money, it's a Crime: Jesus and the Banks

It must have gotten pretty bad out there.

For folks to begin invoking Jesus as a solution to the world of finance, the end of the world itself must have arrived.

Recent posts on Facebook and images of street-theater in the finance district of London U.K. have depicted Jesus casting out the traders and money changers from the temple. The surface message is that Jesus does not like investment banks and derivatives, but to get Jesus in on the act really suggests something quite a bit more serious.

It is a hint of a very profound disillusion with the world of financial speculation, and a shaking that goes to the foundations even of profit-driven capitalism itself.

If you check Jesus in the gospels he does not talk of reform of money or wealth. Rather he's about a root and branch stripping away of these things as principles of human organization. He replaces "get" with "give", and a worldview of scarcity with a lifeworld of abundance. "If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return....Give and and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put in your lap." (Luke 6:34-38)

Bringing Jesus into the discussion on the banks is like setting a camp fire in the built-up California canyons during the Santa Ana winds. You're asking to burn the whole place down.

People's willingness to mention Jesus in this connection, therefore, does seem like sign of the end of the world, or at least of a world. It is one of those "stars falling from the skies" things, a portent of the imminent breakdown of the established order as such.

The whole history of Christendom (actual Christian culture) is a series of unhappy compromises between the radicalism of Jesus and the actual way human beings do business and wish to continue doing. This is evidently true in regard to the issue of violence, but it's also the case in respect of money.

The latest and perhaps most effective compromise in connection to money involves a theme of personal election, whereby enormous wealth is given to a few by a form of divine decree. This can be expressed as economic dogma: the rich must be allowed to be rich for they are the only true generators of wealth. Or, it can come in Christian terms for Christian voters: a version of Calvinist election mixes with prosperity gospel to supply a God-given right to unconditioned wealth.

And then, by a perverse but watertight logic, the wealthy truly are entitled, while those who depend on Social Security have a false "entitlement" attitude. The first have the purity of divine right behind them, and the second only sinful human resentment.

But there is a crucial piece missing from the whole discussion, a piece that changes the entire perspective by which we judge wealth. And once again we have the epoch-making insights of René Girard to thank. He has given us the concept of mimesis which tells us that we value things according to the eyes of the other. It tells us our desire is mediated. (And his insights have recently received clamorous backing from the discoveries by neural science of "mirror neurons.")

If wealth was in any way simply objective, like a mountain of twenty thousand feet, or a river ten feet deep, then we'd be able to draw a measure and say yes, that is wealth. But there is an intrinsically comparative element in wealth. People with houses in the Hamptons or the D.C. suburbs probably look pretty wealthy to the rest of us. But living in those places they always have their own differentials: the size of the frontage, the number of rooms, the yacht, the private jet. And then, for the people with all those things, there remains the truly astonishingly rich. The ones who can book rooms in Dubai at $25,000 a night, who have art collections with Van Goghs and Renoirs, who can purchase newspapers, T.V. stations, private islands, football teams, and much more, more than we can imagine!

Definitely all these things have a material elements--you can't play without marbles--but they exist within a framework of being seen by others, of a shared desire that gives them their final and truest value. Even the most exclusive private yacht visited by a handful of privileged guests is seen and desired by them, and behind them stands all the lesser yachts seen by everyone else. Those billions of glances of desire are implied in the glances of the privileged few who have also shared those other glances, and carry them with them, and so say on behalf of everyone "this really is the best possible yacht in the world." Through them the eyes of all the world are trained on the most private, privileged of possessions, giving it its worth.

If this is in fact the case then it is humanly impossible--anthropologically impossible--to claim that wealth is individual and not shared. Everything is shared; it's simply in my hand not yours! But neurally and humanly it's in both our hands!

This anthropology of the mirroring of wealth then becomes the reason why a certain brand of theology has to be called in service to create a fiction that wealth is really individual. "God" is in people's minds the only unaccountable, incomparable, unmediated being. And so to give wealth its rights it has to have the backing of such an incomparable entity.

But apart from the fact that this is Greek essentialist theology and not a Trinitarian God, it is fundamentally not human. It does not respect, it does not look to, humanity.

Because here's the thing: if wealth is shared neurally or psychically between us, it means that in a fundamental human sense it belongs to everyone. That's where it's meaning comes from, from everyone. It is a common good! You can't have wealth without the other person, and without all the other persons. Wealth is something we create together and thus by its internal human logic we have to dispose of together. We can dispose of it using Greek theologies of election (i.e. the rich must stay rich) which necessarily involve endless rivalry, struggle and, in the end, plain insanity. Or we can dispose of it by a New Testament gospel of gift, something which changes the inner dynamic of mimesis from rivalry to love.

How this plays out in practical detail is a matter for actual politics. But the principle is clear and can only have clear results. We live in a shared universe. We can make that a matter of constant absurd rivalry, always seeking to expropriate what can never be expropriated. Or we can come into the space of God's intention, having created such a shared world in the first place. We can come into the space of Jubilee, the Israelite institution whereby all debts were rendered null on a systematic periodic basis (every fifty years). We can come into the area of the Lord's prayer where the same action is a condition of the prayer itself, and in a permanent present tense: "Give us today our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors..."

We can come into the space of a compassionately shared world, rather than a violently shared one. At least, that would seem to be the case once you bring Jesus into the picture!

Tony Bartlett, Theologian in Residence

9/11 : Ritual In Perpetuam?

As the tenth anniversary came and passed I hesitated within myself how to approach the topic.

I did not join my voice to those who mourned the victims or mourned the missed opportunities for peace, or both. I am not insensitive to either. Of course not. The anguish for the people in the Towers touches everyone in New York. Everyone knows someone who had a friend there or who was herself in the immediate area. Then came the wars, and their anguish is ever and overwhelmingly present, the defining U.S. narrative of the 21st century.

But there is a dimension to the whole thing that happened that day which has always exceeded the standard ritual commentary, and which has continually bothered me. How could I voice it evenly, or intelligibly, when the whole world was weeping?

Only now perhaps when thoughts and emotions have settled into the everyday, and yet the commemorations still echo, may I propose a small unsettling postscript...

"Ritual commentary," and right there I said it. Not everything human beings do is spontaneous. In fact very little is. A great deal of it is programed by the group, by responses the group models to us and expects from us. Ritual is a broad and rich name for this collective programing. One of the huge things about Jesus is the way he talked and the way he acted broke across this programing, like a rip current breaking against a tide, creating enormous historical disturbances and counter eddies. Perhaps what Jesus did was the only truly spontaneous event in history!

When the first plane struck the North Tower at 8.46 a.m. I was on my way to teach a class in the Department of Religion at Le Moyne College, Syracuse. The title of the class was "Ritual Performance." I heard the news on the car radio and at that point of time, probably a few minutes after it struck, there was still speculation that this could be a small private aircraft that had veered badly off course. When I arrived at the college I remember saying immediately to a colleague, that I hoped it was indeed an accident and not a terrorist attack. He shook his head down at his desk as if I were idiotically naive. At 9:03 a.m. the crash of the second aircraft into the South Tower proved him entirely correct.

Classes were canceled for the day, as numerous students and teachers began anxiously checking on friends who may have been in Lower Manhattan. Other students and professors stood around the hallways watching events unfold on the T.V. monitors. And there perhaps was my first clue.

As the course syllabus said, "The central question of this course is the value or power of ritual today." We were using a book called "Liberating Rites" in which the author, Tom Driver, argued ritual was a basic form of ordering and re-ordering the world and which did not depend on a prior rationality. It creates its own reason. "Rituals are primarily instruments designed to change a situation. They are more like washing machines than books..."

As people drifted about in a state of half-disbelief and the T.V. relentlessly screened the towers falling, people fleeing, firemen fainting, the crashing of two more planes, it felt just like that: we were in the middle of some wildly beating laundry machine that had erupted from the sky and whether we liked it or not we were being shook. showered, rinsed, spun, wrung out, and we would never be the same. All that was left was to expect the continual repetition of these events, in imagery, in words, in memorials, and the full scale reality of a world-making ritual was upon us.

My special contribution to the course was an attention to movies. Again according to the syllabus: "Movies act as a kind ritual, in some ways far removed from ritual and yet highly ritualistic in phenomena they present." What I meant, and of course presented to the class, was the violence of movies, the unquenchable stream of blood and death in so many films. Rituals provide us with a repertoire of primary signs, so often rooted in violence, and movies continually exploit and re-energize those signs. So, again the images on T.V....on-screen intense moving signs of planes and fire, of fear, destruction, death.

Returning home that day my overpowering sensation was "This was cinematic, far too cinematic..."

The choice of city, the Big Apple, famed New York, setting of hundreds and hundreds of movies... The attack on the WTC and its Twin Towers, symbols themselves of modernity, the Western economic and cultural system and the heaven-scaling character of its architecture... And the weapon, a plane! The icon of international power and success, yet always containing an element of fear, now turned entirely into a threat, a missile. There were direct echoes of the 1996 movie, Independence Day, in which giant spaceships flown by hungry nomadic aliens vaporize skyscrapers and whole cities, and the White House, the target of the fourth 9/11 plane. Or the 1998 movie Armageddon, in which a rain of meteorites the size of "Basketballs and Volkswagens" unleash disaster on New York city, including a shot of the Twin Towers themselves, one of them on fire with its top blown away.

All of 9/11 represented a coding, a dense, sophisticated, electronic set of signs whereby some of the things most dear to Americans, to their self-image--and the images of that self-image and to those images already under threat within themselves--all of this got replayed in real time and living history as real catastrophe. How could this fiercely cinematic ritual not embed itself like a multiple barb in the national psyche? How could it not infect us like some devilishly designed mental virus loaded with fear, pain and anger? And how could it not provoke the re-ordering of everything in unhesitating retaliatory violence?

These were my thoughts, confused, jumbled, inchoate, but very, very real. I was asked to speak on a panel of religious figures hastily assembled by some churches. I tried to express myself in these terms, but I don't think anyone understood. Perhaps they still won't. But the forces that brought about the attack in this sense of a total event, its mise en scène of the truly terrible, were truly intelligent in their ability to reorder our world. And it is precisely this intelligence I resist in the spontaneous counter-current made possible only by Jesus!

Driver quoted Shakespeare's King Lear, suggesting the possibility of terrible violence done by humans for its own sake. "I will do such things,--what they are yet I know not,--but they shall be the terrors of the earth." In Driver's view killing is the performance of something absolute which is also a ritual beginning and a beginning of ritual.

René Girard goes deeper and his thought was also a key part of the course. Girard tells us that we don't have ritual or performance first and then killing. Human culture, humanity itself, is birthed out of catastrophic violence that creates a sacrificial victim that creates a ritual that creates a world. Both Driver and Girard would agree that 9/11 was a ritual beginning but Girard would be more systematic, seeing it as "the renewal of sacrificial resources". And Girard goes further still. He teaches that Jesus and the gospels manifest that whole process back to us. They shine a light on it. So that we know it and can choose an entirely different way, a nonviolent way, of ordering a world--a riptide of grace founding the world in compassion, forgiveness, peace, life.

But part of the gospel's shining a light on the process is that human beings have to a lesser or greater extent all become knowledgeable of what the whole thing is and how the whole thing works. And that is why the terrible intelligence that actually designs a total event like 9/11 is possible. In some fearful appalling way 9/11 is a radically Christian event. The violent manipulation of our symbolic space in order to produce a new ritual resource could only happen in a Christian universe. It could only happen in a world where Satan had to some extent been demystified so that Satan now acts with a devilish degree of conscious designer cunning. As the movie has it, "The devil wears Prada." Or, to say it another way, in the 21st Century Satan is also Christian!

But then that also means, in Ignatius of Loyola's famous discernment advice, he must leave his tail sticking out. The intelligence, the design, shows. We are no longer blind pawns in a primordial eruptive event, participating without consciousness. For if Satan is conscious all of us are! Satan can't outsmart Satan. We know, deep down, we are being played, and the fury of reaction that often follows when something like this is suggested, shows that those invested in the ritual know it too.

Jesus with his counter tide of grace has set us free from a universe built on founding violence. Whatever and whoever the particular agents of 9/11 the cosmos birthed by Jesus does not conform to its twisting of the world into a new sacrificial framework. Jesus said "I have seen Satan fall like lightning" and his revelation continues to destabilize all violent ritual, including this one.

It is not a comfortable situation for the world in general or the U.S. in particular, and I believe the progressive destabilization of the North American political space flows from an already-punctured attempt to give it a new sacrificial foundation. There is no other political way forward except a new shaping of society on the gospel pattern of compassion, forgiveness, peace. The ever more desperate movement to negate these values politically is itself a last frenzied attempt to shore up a Jesus-embarrassed archaic world order.

There can be no longer any ritual in perpetuam. There is only the blessed disturbance of grace.

Tony Bartlett

Brief Notes on Love

Love is a wine that flows in the veins of all things, in the dust of the planets no less than the song of the robin.

God is love, is this love, a fire which reaches round the world, given to all without discrimination.

God who is love is a solar flare exploding into space engulfing the planet, sending her signals into every smallest gap of unseen particles, into every shadowed space of human awareness.

But love can only really show itself at the cost of itself, and that cost fools the proud human observer into thinking all there really is is darkness, violence and chance. And normal human perception within a world of violence will no less conclude that the world only gives birth to love exceptionally, as doomed to failure.

In the story of Jesus, the God of love could only revealed be by being thrown out of the world. But in the process of exclusion this love is seen clearly, visibly, by those with eyes.

Subtly that exclusion becomes the most profound entry, overture and overturning, of everything...

Human culture built for the interests of the violent continues to disfigure all concepts of divinity.

In some ways it is worse in official Christianity. The legal payoff and punishment notions of salvation have dulled and disfigured the fire of love out of recognition.

But the bottomless passion of the divine is unconquerable, the beat of its heart, the timeless rhythm of the deep, beyond all quelling. The more intense and intoxicating this divine passion is the more it is deep, hidden, soundless and humble. But its hiddenness and humility are the product not of weakness but exactly of strength, of amazing ultra-strength.

To pay attention to divine love, to plunge to the level of its hiding, is to be amazed beyond words. To be struck dumb and senseless. And to emerge a completely different kind of person.