Against the Stream

Destined Not for Darkness, but Light

Below is an exerpt of a sermon that I preached during Christmas season a few years ago, which is relevant to the #progGod conversation about incarnation, so I thought I'd share it.

One common lament during the Christmas season, particularly as preached from the pulpits of Christian churches, and even at the heart of the classic Charlie Brown Christmas special, is that we’ve made Christmas too materialistic. And of course that’s true, in that we spend much too much of our time using the celebration of the birth of Christ as an excuse for the buying and spending. But in another sense, our celebration of Christmas is not materialistic enough! We dwell on the angels and the miracles, the flash, the splendor, and the lights, while forgetting that here born to a young woman in poverty, surrounded by livestock, was a small, vulnerable, and very human baby. This is how God chooses to appear to us – not clothed in glory and coming on the clouds, but swaddled in rags, born in fear and pain and blood, as all infants are. God con carne, in the flesh, the King who was promised, yet born in anonymity, obscurity, and exile. Martin Luther put it this way:

I have said this often enough and I say it again: 'Whoever would recognize God and speculate about Him without danger, should look into the crib and take good note of the Virgin Mary' son, who was born in Bethlehem. See how He lies in His Mother's lap. See how He is sucked.' Such a man will then come to realize who God is. And this realization will soon cease to be terrible, but will be precious and a source of consolation. Therefore you must beware of exalted, high-flown thoughts. Beware of using them to climb into Heaven without this ladder, that is, the ladder of Christ's humanity, as it is so simply described in the Gospel. Hold fast to this and do not allow reason to bring you away from it. This is how you will truly apprehend God.      

 God comes to us, in our sin, in our alienation, in our loss and grief and fear, not as a Superman, bulletproof and invulnerable to harm, but as the weakest, most vulnerable, and neediest of beings – a baby – and in coming in this form, in sharing our lot as human beings to the very smallest detail, Christ overcomes our sin, alienation, and loss. To those who grieve he says, “be comforted.” To those who fear, he says, “I am with you.” And to all of us he says, “I have come to walk with you on your journeys, to share your burdens, to be your companion – literally to share your bread; and in accompanying us in every facet of our humanity, Jesus Christ lifts from us the burden of sin, of guilt, and of death, replacing them with the knowledge that we are loved by a loving God, chosen as members of a new family, a new community, rooted in friendship and self-giving love.

The baby in the manger has come to bring us a message, a message of freedom and hope, the knowledge that God does not want to live apart from us, but longs to share with us, and in sharing, to heal the breach of sin, drawing together the bonds of reconciliation, so that we may live lives of fearless love. Bound to God, we are no longer slaves to violence. Bound to God, we are no longer slaves to consumption. Bound to God, we are no longer slaves to the principalities and powers of the world, which seek to transform us from the image of God into their own distorted image. And this is why Luther says that, in gazing at the baby in the manger, we come to realize who God is, and not to fear. In Christ, God does not negate our humanity, but fulfills and perfects it, so that we may share in the Grace of God toward all of creation. Truly the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light, the light of Jesus Christ! In him, the rod of every oppressor is broken, in him, every promise is fulfilled, through him, every yoke is lifted, and by him, the chains of hatred, war, and violence are broken so that all humankind may become one family.

There is a well-known story, about a night, a Christmas Eve, in 1914, in the first year of the First World War, when during a lull in the fighting, the German troops began decorating their trenches for the holiday, and began singing: “Stille Nacht, Heil’ge nacht,” and, from the other side of No Man’s Land, the British troops picked up the refrain, “All is calm, all is quiet,” and then the French: “Le saint couple seul veille/ Sur l'enfant qui someille.” Soon the song had been picked up and carried across the trenches throughout the battle zone, and troops began singing more carols, and shouting Christmas greetings to one another across the battlefield. Eventually, soldiers stood up, and ventured into no man’s land, to shake hands, exchange gifts, and celebrate Christmas together. As one soldier reported the event:

"I wouldn't have missed that unique and weird Christmas Day for anything. ... I spotted a German officer, some sort of lieutenant I should think, and being a bit of a collector, I intimated to him that I had taken a fancy to some of his buttons. ... I brought out my wire clippers and, with a few deft snips, removed a couple of his buttons and put them in my pocket. I then gave him two of mine in exchange. ... The last I saw was one of my machine gunners, who was a bit of an amateur hairdresser in civil life, cutting the unnaturally long hair of a docile Boche, who was patiently kneeling on the ground whilst the automatic clippers crept up the back of his neck."

 The sad reality, however, is that the truce didn’t last. When the officers in the rear got wind of the truce, they sent word to both sides demanding that they begin killing one another again. And so, with final embraces and words of farewell, the soldiers returned to their trenches, and their commanders fired their pistols in the air, signaling that once again the bloodshed should commence.

It’s easy to romanticize a story such as this, just as it’s easy to be cynical about it. Our human capacity withstand the lure of evil has not expanded significantly since that night, long ago, when Mary sat suckling her newborn infant. The sad truth is that there is plenty of sin still to go around in this world, and try as we might, we are not an the road to perpetual moral and spiritual improvement.

Yes, there was a truce! But it ended. But there was a truce! For a brief moment, the soldiers on both sides saw that in Christ, there was more that bound them together than drove them a part. For a moment they saw that they were joined together in the common Christian family, sharing the same celebration, and even singing the same songs. Perhaps, limited and fallen creatures that we are, it is too much to hope that those moments might flower forth into a genuine and lasting peace, but those graced moments are glimpses of a larger truth, if only we have eyes to see it, that we are not only fallen and limited creatures, but are also children of the living God, created for love and community, destined not for the darkness, but for light.

Cur Deus Homo?

The incarnation is the mystery at stands at the heart of Christianity. For many theists of other traditions, it is, as the Apostle Paul wrote, a stumbling block, a barrier that prevents entry into the Christian faith. It may be possible to believe in God, but to believe that God would choose to become human, and not only human, but merely human. Not a superman, not a king, not even particularly noteworthy in any conventional sense, but simply, unadornadly human. This is too much to contemplate.

Yet, for Christianity, it is perhaps the one non-negotiable distinctive dimension of Christian doctrine. Without the incarnation, Christianity ceases to be Christianity. It may be many good and wonderful things, but in the absence of the incarnation, it simply becomes one theism among others, and Jesus becomes simply one prophet or holy man among others. It is only because Jesus Christ is understood to be in some unque sense the presence and power of God made manifest in human form that Christianity exists at all.

But all this said, why is the incarnation so central to the Christian faith? What does it signify? If it is a mystery, what does it gesture toward? What truth does it reveal?

Of course there are lots of theories about what the incarnation is about, the most famous of which is probably St. Anselm's "Cur Deus Homo" ("Why a God-Man?"). Anselm argues that the incarnation was necessary because humanity had incurred through sin an infinite debt that could only be expiated by a being of infinite righteousness. Since the debt was incurred by humanity, only a human could pay it, but because the debt was infinite, only God was capable of paying it. The solution wa thus for God to become human in order to pay the debt. This solution may have been convincing in the context of a medeaval fudal system of honor and obligation, and it is apparently still very convincing to many Christians today, since it's frequently invoked as though it were a compelling explanation of both the incarnation and the atonement. Yet in the absence of that fudal context, it seems increasingly absurd and unconvincing, making God a capricious and arbitrary Lord, taking his pique out on his vassals for minor infractions.

St. Athanasius may have a better solution, arguing that the incarnation was necessary in order to overcome the curse of death. Because human nature is mortal and divine nature immortal, God sought to bring immortality to the human condition by bringing his divine and immortal nature to the human condition. Thus Athanasius argues, "He became as we are that we might become as he is." In effect, God's humanization is the precondition for our divinization.

I tend toward the view that the incarnation is not the solution to a problem caused by human sin or death. Rather, the incarnation is an expression of the divine solidarity with the human condition in all of its dimensions. God became human in Christ so that God could share the divine love with us in every aspect of creation. It is in this regard to the fulfillment of God's creation of the universe, through which the divine love flowed forth in time and space. In Christ, the divine love indwells creation itself, and in Jesus Christ, divine love is given its fullest expression in his ministry to those left outcast by human sin.

In Christ, we see where God's love is located: With those on the margins, on those who are oppressed and victimized by the powerful and wealthy, since it was those with whom Christ chose to dwell. And in this regard, the cross is an expression of God's solidarity with the human condition in every dimension of foresakenness and alienation, even Godforsakenness. Christ dies horribly so that God's love may extend to us in the midst of every suffering, every death, and every damnation. This is the theological significance of the idea of Christ's descent into hell -- that God's desire to save, God's solidarity with us in our lostness, extends even to the depths of the most profound despair.

So, why incarnation? Perhaps unsurprisingly, I will let Jürgen Moltmann have the last word:

“When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man's godforsakenness. In Jesus he does not die the natural death of a finite being, but the violent death of the criminal on the cross, the death of complete abandonment by God. The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment, rejection by God, his Father. God does not become a religion, so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings. God does not become a law, so that man participates in him through obedience to a law. God does not become an ideal, so that man achieves community with him through constant striving. He humbles himself and takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him.” -- The Crucified God

People Who Play Dungeons & Dragons Know That Succubi Are Not Real

A Paladin In Hell

I clearly have not been doing my part to drive traffic to Slacktivist lately, but today I'm going to try to atone. So let me begin at the intersection of religion geek and gamer geek, a place where I not only hang out but pretty much live.

Slacktivist points us to two articles, the first, as you can see here, is thearticle on succubi from the Forgotten Realms wiki. It's pretty much the standard Dungeon & Dragons definition of a succubus. viz. 

Of the many demons that exist in the universe, the succubus is the one most often encountered in the mortal world. This is due to her extraordinary beauty and carnal desires; traits that attract mortal spellcasters to summon the demoness forth to use for their own debased desire. Succubi delight in causing suffering by manipulating the desires of mortals and tempting them into depraved acts that they would normally avoid.

OK, with me so far? If you're not a gamer geek, I want to make this point absolutely clear: To D&D players, a succubus is a fictional monster that exists to be resisted, fought, banished or otherwise defeated. The key phrase there being "fictional monster."

Thsis brings us to the second article, entitled "Can You Be Raped By the Devil." Here is the key passage from that article:

The two most identifiable sexual demons are the incubus, which is a male sexual demon that traditionally assaults women, and the succubus, which is a female sexual demon that assaults men. Sometimes they also lure people into homosexual behavior.

Adams notes that one evangelist, whose name she would not divulge, was so troubled by the sexual pleasure the succubus gave her that she even contemplated suicide.

Adams says the succubus spirit that used to attack her confused her so much that she contemplated becoming a lesbian.

"Unless you're strong enough to rebuke it, they'll keep coming back," she says. "You must speak the Word of God, knowing you have power in the name of Jesus."

There are remarkable similarities between the two passages, no? The key difference, as Slacktivist notes, is that "people who play Dungeons & Dragons know that succubi are not real."

To which I can only reply by saying that Slacktivist has clearly never played a paladin in a campaign with a rat-bastard DM, who continually throws succubi at you in order to tempt your character into a transgression of the Paladin's Code. Have that happen to you often enough over the course of a campaign, and you begin to believe, if not in the existence of sex demons per se, at least in the fundamental evil at the heart of every Dungeon Master.

Church for Freaks IV: Return of the Son of Church for Freaks

I am going to be returning in the next couple of days to the elements of this "church for freaks" idea that I've been playing around with. But in a brief free moment that I've got right now, I thought it might be useful to think a bit more about what I mean by the term.

In a sense, what I'm trying to get at is the very old idea that the church is the community of and for the outsiders. If Jesus came to preach to the poor, the homeless, the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the colonized, then he came, most profoundly, to preach the kingdom of God to the outsiders of the world. He didn't show up in the center of Rome to proclaim a kingdom to supplant Rome, he came to the margins, to preach a kingdom coming to be within the existing kingdoms of the world. And Jesus' kingdom would supplant and subvert those earthly kingdoms.

But of course, this presents a bit of a problem, one that I try to get at jokingly when I refer to the Emergent Church as "Christianity for hipsters." Hipsters are, in a sense, outsiders, but they wear their outsider status as a sort of fashion statement. A hipster is a freak for whom freakishness is a style choice. Christianity though, embraces the outsider as a vocation.

And for someone like me, a relatively affluent, straight, white male in the United States, that is a difficult vocation to embody. In that sense almost everything about me is emphatically anti-Christian. What I might experience as freakishness, as monstrousness with regard to the larger social context in which I dwell, is ultimately a question of what identity I choose to put on. And it is easy enough for me to change identificational coats. 

And that, I think, is one thing that must by definition separate what I'm talking about from those who are genuinely attempting to do Christianity from the margins. What I mean is: Those who do not marginalize themselves, but rather are marginalized by society are the real heart of the gospel proclamation. Folks like me may desire solidarity with them, and may work in cooperation with them, but we always have the choice to opt out, and that is a problem for any Christian who wants to stand vocationally for the outsiders, but who is him or herself in one way or another inescapably on the inside.

Related articles

Church for Freaks III: Culture and Aesthetics

Church For Freaks II: Theology

Church for Freaks I

"My work really means just the opposite of what everyone thinks"

 

Mike Morrell has a post up about Thomas J. J. Altizer's "Death of God" theology as seen throgh the lens of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizik. It's fascinating to read and to watch Zizik's analysis (Zizik is always fascinating to watch perform). I was struk particularly by Altizer's assessment of his project, saying that it means "the opposite of what everyone thinks."

Unfortunately, the Emory Magazine article in which the quote is contained doesn't offer much further elaboration on the nature of the "opposite" character of Altizer's theology, but it does offer a useful primer on the "Death of God" theology moment in the 1960s, along with this helpful summary:

On a most basic level, Altizer studies God not as a separate presence but as a historical force that has been transformed by death. This God began giving himself to the world at its creation and ultimately died through Jesus Christ, whose earthly demise in turn poured the spirit of God into the world. Altizer calls for a dialectical form of faith that acknowledges the coincidence of opposites: through God’s death, the sacred becomes profane, and vice versa; one cannot exist without the other. Only in modernity, Altizer believes, can we fully realize the paradox of the death of God—that the very absence of God signifies God’s presence in all things.

This is clearly very different from Moltmann's approach in The Crucified God, which continues to rely on more traditional theological categories, but it is a useful reminder that there is often a difference between what is said and what is meant, particularly when what is said is framed in highly abstruse theological and philosophical language.

That said, clearly the core of this is the idea of the via negativa, the idea of encountering God in the midst of negation, which in our very positively oriented society, is always an important qualification.

We think we can know God, but ultimately any God worth knowing must be by definition beyond our capacity to truly know. That paradox stands at the heart of all things Christian.

Related articles

Is God dead? Or perhaps just hiding?

Theology and Science Fiction

Unapologetic Theology

theothanatology (idea)

In the Service of God, whose Son was Exceedingly Unwarlike

I was surprised to come across this in a letter written by Kurt Vonnegut:

This attitude toward killing is a matter between my God and me. I do not participate much in organized religion. I have read the Bible a lot. I preach, after a fashion. I write books which express my disgust for people who find it easy and reasonable to kill. 

We say grace at meals, taking turns. Every member of my family has been called upon often to thank God for blessings which have been ours. What Mark is doing now is in the service of God, Whose Son was exceedingly un-warlike. 

This came as some surprise to me, as it expresses a religious perspective that I had not expected to find in Kurt Vonnegut. I've always admired the wit and compassion embodied in his writing, and his attitude towards war and violence is manifest to anyone who has read Slaughterhouse Five.

I guess it serves to demonstrate that there are always dimensions of others' lives that remain hidden from us, until something offers us a glimpse inside.

And so it goes.