Critiquing Babylon

If I haven’t already been asked this question before, I am sure I will be asked it again: “Why are you reading… that?” Or, as I prepare to leave Chicago and head off to Seminary, I am already expecting the moment: we have our new friends over at our place, we’re enjoying a game of Carcassonne, and someone – one of the bookish ones – looks over my bookshelf as asks, with true curiosity and true concern, “Why is this on your shelf?”

As Christians, we have a set of authors that we tend to think as authoritative and representative of our beliefs and values. No one questions if you have Augustine, Luther, or Calvin on your shelf, even if they themselves are not really Augustinians or Lutherans or Calvinists. (I have all three, on that note.) But what do you do with that Christian friend (me) who on their shelf has names of an atheistic or even brutally anti-Christian bent, like Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, or Jean-Paul Sartre? Worse yet, what do you with that Christian friend who is not opposed to using those writers and thinkers to make a point? (For instance, my most recent blog posts have been, in no particular order, about Cicero, Sartre, and Foucault.)

If you look at my bookshelf, the level of blasphemy and heresy is pretty astounding. Nietzsche believes that man must make his own moral universe, Sartre believes that man is morally free to do anything (and he lived a life of that too), and Foucault says that every claim and revelation of truth is a manifestation of power and control (he’s not actually wrong; but there’s another essay to be written about how God’s truth doesn’t fit his paradigms). Marx looks at the face of capitalism and laughs, and conservative Christians think for that alone he is to never be read. Althusser (who I quote profusely) maintains that we are subjects by interpellation and, thus, maybe we shouldn’t be subjects at all (re: antihumanism). And the list goes deeper if I include the novels and literature on my shelf: Hesiod’s Theogony, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Beckett’s Molloy. Each of these reject, in their own way, the biblical claims and truths that I base and build my life upon. Why read them?

I’ve been enjoying this week a sermon series from a year ago at Door of Hope (the church that Josh White pastors) on the Book of Daniel. It’s a timely set of messages about how Daniel and his friends live faithfully even under the reign of Babylon, and the messages echo beautifully the Bible Study in Daniel that I led our small group through during the MAPH year. Daniel is a challenging and provocative book for academics: here we see that our call is not to remove ourselves from the learning process, but to invest even deeper and, yet, with faithfulness to the Lord. The tension isn’t between learning Babylonian languages and literatures (the Hebrew youths all receive [effectively] Ph.D.’s in Babylonian, according to Daniel 1) and serving the Lord; the tension is how one serves Babylon and serves the Lord simultaneously.

The great tension and arc of the Book of Daniel is the story of how Babylon thinks of itself in a hegemonic manner: it is all-powerful, it is an eternal kingdom, it is the world empire. The Lord, of course, rejects this notion altogether: He sends a dream to Nebuchadnezzar to remind the king that he is a part of a larger order of kingdoms, that his kingdom will not last, and, even moreso, that the Lord will bring a Kingdom that will never perish to destroy all the other kingdoms.

The reminder for the people of God is that Babylon will eventually crumble. And this is a great theme throughout Scriptures, where the eternal battle between two cities - Zion and Babylon - is continually and regularly waged. Babylon, "the world," Egypt, Rome, Tyre, Sodom and Gomorrah... these are all shorthands for the Tower of Babel, that power that men exerted in order to make themselves into gods. We know, according to Revelation, that Babylon will eventually fall destructively, and that all of Creation will rejoice when that happens; but for now Babylon still exists.

This brings me back to my atheists. The reason I love to read the atheists is because they are all particularly accomplished as critics of Babylon. Foucault critiques the power of Babylon, Marx the commodities of Babylon, Althusser the ideology of Babylon. For these writers their concern is first and foremost "there is something at work here that sets man's power over other men, and something about that manifesting power is dangerous and destructive." They are atheists, so they aren't interested in describing the eternal machinations of that power; instead they simply take their observations and describe the temporal machinations of Babylon.

This is incredibly useful for the Christian person. Provided that the arguments are coherent and follow a logical line of thought - and many of them do - then the Christian person is given a tool to observe the machinations and powers-that-be unveiled and defamiliarized, reified in some corporeal manner before themselves, so that the Christian person might be allowed to make a good judgment. Oftentimes the atheists refuse to make judgments - or when they do the judgments feel flat (Foucault in particular avoided doing this) - but Christians have access to Truth in some measure which allows us access, again in some measure, to good judgment.

So often we judge quickly or rashly and we do not consider the machinations of Babylon. Through reading these atheists, I have learned, little by little, how to avoid those quick judgments and how to uncover the powers that operate and then hold those powers to account in light of a Christian critique. This is how I operate as a Christian intellectual: I observe the critiques (from atheists and from Christians) of this-or-that manifestation of Babylon, and then I hold that manifestation up to the light of the Christian revelation. The combination of this tactic allows for a precise level of critique that I do not think most Christian writers today have demonstrated themselves able to do. This is a needed work: if we do not know how Babylon operates, how will we know whether or not we are bowing down to idols of gold made for its worship?

This, to put it quickly, is the value of Christian humanism, and, for my blog, the value of being a Christian mythologist.

Rethinking Community

There’s a scene that occurs in a few TV shows and movies that strikes me as particularly foreign to us, although we do not often recognize it. It occurs whenever characters from one relatively isolated group (say, a family, or a school) interact with characters with whom they would not otherwise interact with if it were not the occasion or situation.

One great example for this is the various town interactions that occur in Stars Hollow in Gilmore Girls. One expects Lorelai to interact with the people at work – Michel and Sookie – and one expects Rory to interact with her peers at school – Paris, for example – and one expects them both as regulars at Luke’s to befriend Luke himself. But who is the figure of Kirk? Or Taylor Doose? Where do they fit in?

Obviously they are figures that aid in our understanding of Stars Hollow itself, a place that exists somewhat independent of Lorelai’s inn and Rory’s school, and, surprisingly enough, a place that exists with its own economy and its own spirit. It is a place that represents a community that truly does exist in all of its quirkiness. The increasing presence of Kirk as the series goes on is an expression of the increasing importance of Stars Hollow as a character for the season (Stars Hollow, of course, personified in the character of Kirk).

But at a realistic glance, one might ask a following question: When do all these people find time to be a community? And why? The TV has cast a spell on us: we recognize that a town existing as a community is a beautiful thing, a quirky thing, and a valuable thing. There’s this quote from G.K. Chesterton in which he observes that the family is a romance because we have no control who our family is; but for Gilmore Girls, Stars Hollow is a romance because these characters have literally no reason to relate or connect with one another at all, not even family relations. Kirk has no relational or identity reason for connecting and engaging with the Gilmores time and again, he doesn’t even have an occupational reason for doing so, since he works a different job nearly every episode. He is neither coworker, nor peer, nor friend (at first at least), nor diner-owner, nor romantic interest, nor circumstantial encounter, even. He just is and he is for no “purpose.”

I’ve been thinking about the problem of community a lot lately. The word is a difficult word to bring up in discourses, probably because it holds with it, in recent parlance, some measure of “left-ness.” In the politicization of the world, “community” is categorized to the left while “individual” is categorized to the right, a false dichotomy that ought to be deconstructed if I’ve ever seen one.

The problem is particularly tricky for the Church. The Church also ought to be a romance, following Chesterton’s terminology. Here we have people who come from every walk of life and in every stage of life who come together to worship the God who has met them all in some, miraculous, incredible manner. These people are called “the Body.” They are not called, if we use the similar language that Paul provides us in Romans and in I Corinthians, “the diverse Body Parts” or “the Members,” although we might refer to an individual at times a “member” of “this or that church.” But the word that the Scriptures use is that this Church is a Body, thus it is a Community.

But we have a hard time being a Community. Individualism dictates that we each must come and each must play our own part, and that if we do so then that is a community: sovereign individuals playing their part on the assembly-line Church. But an assembly-line cannot make a Community any more than it can make a Church, and often in churches that are more individual-focused (think: megachurches that are so big that worship is a wholly private affair because one can get lost in the mass of people) we find that parishioners often have no personal connection with the Church’s mission, or its purpose, or its goals, or even with other people. I have known churches where members come in, they dance for the service, they worship in the privacy of their own seats, and then they leave shortly before any can catch them. It is as those worship is a private matter only. I wonder what coming to church means for these folks; couldn’t they have the same experience from the privacy of their own couch? (And don’t televangelists serve this same demographic?)

Yet stories like Gilmore Girls draw our attention and our hearts, and if we pay attention we might see that they are drawing our hearts for a reason. There is something incredible about being a part of a living Community.

While we have lived in Hyde Park, we have languished – on one hand – because Hyde Park itself is a very dysfunctional “community.” It is not geographically segregated, but it is culturally self-segregated: there are community members and there are university members, there are Christians and there are seculars, and we interact with one another, at most, when we are in the act of purchasing. Our social relationships have become material ones.

But – on the other hand – my wife and I have joyed in our church community. Church of the Shepherd is a small church, a small community, and it has all of the joys and struggles that a small church formed mostly of graduate students has: a revolving door of comings and goings, little sets of resources to accomplish our mission, and the constant dynamism of ever-changing worship. Yet still, somehow, we have found a way to be a community. We are inter-connected with one another’s lives. We celebrated a friend’s birthday party last weekend, we mourned in Ash Wednesday this morning, we will eat after service sometime again soon, I am sure.

I do not know how to explain the feeling that I am attempting to explain, nor the spiritual wealth of being in the midst of a community that “gets” community. How can I? I do not have the appropriate language – individualism has robbed me of the ability to communicate it. But here are a few sketches:

+ Our worship is a worship of the Church, not a worship of private individuals. We do worship together; not pretending to be together but worshiping alone. It is a delight. One of the ways we accomplish this is by serving each other in the service – one reads the Scriptures, others lead the songs, others lead the prayers, others take the offering. Liturgos literally means “work of the people”; our liturgy is a work of our community.

+ Our Bible Study is a study of the Church, not a study of private individuals. The pastors prepare together and prepare in the context of commentaries and various evangelical theologians (I get to join them sometimes); and we wrestle with questions rather than lay down solid facts. This gets us into the Word more deeply, and we leave with both the refreshment of the Scriptures in our studies, but also with the refreshment of having wrestled through the Scriptures as a community.

+ Our sermons are of the Church, not of private individuals. The pastors work as a team in preparing sermon series, and members of our church serve one another by preaching from time to time too. We make it a practice to represent various theologians and voices in the messages so that we are embedded not just within our own theological tradition, but also within the “great cloud of witnesses” that has gone before us.

+ We also eat together. A lot.

These sketches serve as introductory thoughts in what it looks like for a Church to become a Community. It is hard to nail down, however, precisely what will and will not work for a given Church; they’re all very different. The crucial thing, however, is that we recognize Sunday worship not as a space for us to have our individual experience with the Lord, but for us to participate in worship as a Body together in His presence. Individual prayer and worship is a thing for daily devotionals or morning Bible studies; Sunday is a time for us to come together as a Community. That distinction seems like a crucial one that is worth making.

Beyond this, too, I am also thinking about what general community – the Community of the town, etc. – ought to look like in a culture as individualized as ours. That will need to be another blog post, once I have thought it through more. For now, however, I will observe that being a Community as a Church is also evangelistic: the world outside is dying for relationship and dying for community, and we have the ability to be that Community for them. Let us be the Body: that in itself is a prophetic declaration.