We Don't Need a New Christendom.

In the 1970's, when I went to seminary, the important book to read, or at least become aware of, was The Shape of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn.  Kuhn observed that science moved forward by holding on to established patterns of thought until a critical mass of contradictory data was attained, forcing a shift in the operative paradigm.  This insight got applied to culture generally, and of course to the Church.  We started talking about being in the midst of a "paradigm shift."  An influx of new data was challenging old orthodoxies everywhere.

I had actually been exploring this idea since college, having read books like The End of the Modern Age by philosopher, Allen Wheelis.  We were moving away from a culture defined by the values and structures that have been in place since the Renaissance/Reformation/Enlightenment/Industrial Revolution, which we called "Modernity."  And we were entering... something else, as yet undefined.  It was beginning to be called "post-modern," for want of a better term.

Maybe growing up in a suburban New Jersey I found to be oppressive had something to do with it, but I have always been deeply frustrated with Modernity.  The theology of Karl Barth inspired me because he consciously and intentionally broke with this ruling "liberal" consensus after witnessing the horrors of World War I.  That civilizational exercise in breathtaking murderous cruelty and stupidity revealed the emptiness and venality of Modernity as a whole, forcing many to reassess that whole paradigm and start exploring different ways of living.  Gradually, many started to notice the pervasive substructure of violence and injustice that held Modernity together, manifest in slavery, capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, and a lot of other corrupt institutions, rooted in greed, gluttony, lust, anger, fear, and expressing a basic narcissistic nihilism.

The former main-line Protestant churches had hitched themselves to the Modernity paradigm early.  Indeed, they are largely indistinguishable from it.  The Reformation itself was not the recovery of a pure and true Christianity, as it thought of itself, but rather an expression of Christianity thoroughly flavored, colored, and permeated by the values and practices of the new paradigm forming and congealing in the 16th-18th centuries.  To put it bluntly, Protestantism was geared to appeal to a new market, that of middle-class, property-owning, white men, who did not want to be told what to do by either kings or bishops.  Indeed, they wanted to figure out things for themselves and held all communities in suspicion.  They were about "freedom," for themselves.  Thus, getting on board with the latest new thing, and being market-driven and customer-oriented, is part of the Protestant DNA.  In other words, Protestantism tells itself it is all about following Christ, when in reality it is about following the market.

  

Now that Modernity is in crisis, what happens to the churches, not to mention all the other institutions, that based themselves on this way of thinking and acting?  Obviously, we need a paradigm shift!  It seemed reasonable to assume that we need to get on board as soon as possible with whatever the next thing will be.  This search for the new paradigm has been a characteristic of life in the church for my entire 40-year career.   

Fifteen or so years ago, I got excited about something called the Emerging Church Movement.  This was an attempt to get ahead of the curve and anticipate the kinds of changes that were already happening in culture and society, and begin to retool the church according to what we saw beginning to, well, emerge.  Most EMC founders came out of evangelical churches.  I think they, consciously or not, followed the pattern of the Reformers in setting out to hear and apply the gospel anew.  That was exciting!  But I worry that there was also a pull to conform to the cultural patterns they saw beginning to take shape.  

The more conventional and institutional churches were thinking along much the same lines, obsessing about the need for "adaptive change" and so forth.  Indeed, we came practically to fetishize change itself, celebrating every "new thing" and expressing vast impatience with anything perceived to be old or traditional.

What we did not question, or even really recognize, is the wisdom of letting culture define the church in the first place.  What if we do manage to retool the church to fit into the next civilizational paradigm?  What do we do when that turns out not to be the Kingdom of God, or even a measurably better life for most people, but just another in a succession of expressions of Empire?  What if all these secular civilizational regimes are just successive temporal expressions of the same Empire, going back to Egypt or Assyria or whomever, and now passing through another of the major revolutions Phyllis Tickle observed happening every 500 years or so?  What if we are just hitching ourselves to the new boss, without understanding that it is, as Pete Townsend predicted, "same as the old boss"?  Or, for all the explicit rejection of Constantinianism and Christendom that is going on, what if we are simply making deals with the next emperor?  

I remember being very hopeful about some evolutionary visions of this paradigm shift, like Spiral Dynamics or the philosophy of Ken Wilber.  These models remain instructive in many ways.  I still listen to many who see a great spiritual advancement on the horizon.  Hopefully, that's true.  Certainly, many more are on spiritual paths of various kinds than 50 years ago.    

However, the succession of disasters we have had to deal with over the last few years, from the misguided and failed Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to the Great Recession, to the rise of neofascist Trumpism, to our inability to do anything positive about the climate crisis, to the mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic, to the Ukraine War, might lead us to lose confidence in whatever new paradigm might be emerging.  

Maybe this is just a rough patch and progress will resume.  Maybe this just means the paradigm shift was never going to be easy, that it would, as with all such transitions, meet strong resistance and retrenchment from those most invested in the old order.     Or maybe the next paradigm will not be the clear leap forward into a new world of justice, equality, and peace that we are hoping for.     

In other words, why should we trust the new paradigm, whatever it is, to be significantly better than the old one?  I mean, the new paradigm is being developed by the same class of leaders in business, politics, economics, science, technology, and so forth, who developed and led the old one.  They are largely motivated by the same concerns for making money, having influence, and being famous.  So far, is the new civilizational paradigm coming from people who are significantly more wise, psychologically integrated, spiritual, selfless, humble, compassionate, and self-aware?  Or is it still mainly white men, even if many are "woke"?  

Einstein once famously said that problems cannot be solved by the same mindset that created them.  Has our mindset changed that much?  

Looking at some of the charts describing and contrasting the old paradigm with what appears to be coming, a lot of it looks very exciting!  But it always does, I suspect.  I mean, we are intrigued by the new anyway.  Forecasts by 17th century optimists were also very rosy: freedom and prosperity everywhere!  Capitalism, science, and democracy will save the world!  Colonialism brings enlightenment!  Progress!  We were still being fed this propaganda as recently as my school days.  And for 500 years it did work very well... for rich white men.  With some necessary, limited trickle down over time to others.  But for still others, including Africans, indigenous peoples, and the planet?  Not so much. 

Now we're being assured that block-chains, robotics, advanced batteries, electric vehicles, and DNA sequencing will liberate us.  Really?  The manifestation of Empire that really seems to be "emerging," as distinct from the blissed out predictions of the Age of Aquarius, does not look like much of an improvement over the paradigm that is passing away.  So far, better technology has mainly led us over the cliff of ecological catastrophe.  Will even better technology have any different result?  Indeed, will we have time to find out before the climate crisis demands our full attention?  There is a reason why science-fiction writers who peer into our future have trouble squeezing out anything not utterly dystopian.    

Our human tendency towards egocentricity, expressed in imploded and imbalanced personalities, means that we will continue to make decisions based on fear and anger applied in violence and lies.  We will continue to be tribal (the more recent word is "identity" driven) in the worst sense of that word.  If anything, our 500 year sojourn into individualistic materialism has only made this situation worse.  I suspect that the average European peasant in 1500 had a far more sophisticated level of spiritual awareness than the most highly educated people today.  We have zero evidence that the new paradigm will be any more humane, just, beneficial, or wise than the old.  Humans will find a way to use their wealth and power to do bad things, even in some new "teal," "Integral" age.     

There is hope, though.  The Christ-tradition has strong, if habitually ignored, bones.  It is inherently anti-Imperialistic.  The New Testament is not content simply to advocate for a new and improved Empire.  It awaits a new heaven and a new earth, which is to say, the revelation of a creation above, beneath, and within the creation, which we humans can't perceive because of our strong tendency towards egocentricity (which Empire both aggravates and seeks to control).  

The characteristics of the Kingdom of God are antithetical and toxic to Empire, and they include: deep democracy, radical equity/equality, and true freedom/justice under the sovereignty of the Creator Spirit.  We can tell we are calcifying into another version of Empire when power and wealth are congealing among a few, and the biosphere is being degraded.  Remember that the whole point of Empire is the destruction of creation.  While the meaning and mission of God's Kingdom is the emergence of the Beloved Community throughout creation.

The Christian Scriptures are not written by or for those at the top of any society who set the civilizational agenda.  They take the perspective of the people at the bottom, beginning with the motley band of slaves who get liberated from the Egyptian Empire; and they are fulfilled in Jesus, a teacher and healer who is executed for sedition by the Roman Empire.  The Bible is inherently and constitutionally opposed to any and every Empire that plows ahead over ordinary people and communities in its drive to make a few individuals wealthy and powerful.    

Jesus does not have us focus on how well the successful are doing.  He turns our attention on the ones we inevitably require to pay for all this "progress" with their own blood, labor, tears, land, dignity, and lives.  

The question for the Church now is not about adaptation to the emerging new civilizational paradigm.  Rather, it concerns how we witness to the good news within this current upgrade of Empire?  How will we necessarily make use of new languages and institutions, but also how will we stay faithful to God in spite of and in resistance to a new regime?  More importantly, how will we adapt to God's Word and will in changing times?  

I have emphatically to affirm that attempting to go back to some earlier version of the same damned Empire is the worst option.  That is the conservative reflex, to restore the church of 1956 or the Medieval period, or the Byzantine Empire, or whenever.  It's all just Empire in different historical guises.  

We don't need a new Christendom.  

And we don't need to exhume an old Christendom.  

We need to be about living into the Reign/Commonwealth of God.  

 

This has to mean that the Church attends first to Detox.  We have to get Empire out of our heads by addressing our egocentricity.  Second, we have to get Empire out of our societies by instituting polities of justice and love, inclusion and equality, compassion and humility.  In other words, repentance, metanoia, living into a new way of thinking, and thinking into a new way of living.  

I do think we can get to a civilization that values and teaches those virtues, that sees itself as a network of communities, where all are loved and accepted, with an economy based on sharing, where the Creator is worshiped in infinitely different ways, and creation is respected.  The Church is the place where this has to start.  It is supposed to be the representative anticipatory community of God's reign/commonwealth.  That is our mission.

In other words, we have to follow Jesus together. 

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Rev. 2

Revolution.

"You say you want a revolution?"

(John Lennon and Paul McCartney)

"Meet the new boss; same as the old boss."

(Pete Townsend)

Revolution is Empire's way of operating.  Revolutions offer the illusion of significant change; in reality they merely change the surface of society.  At best, they rearrange the furniture.  Revolutions do not change anything except the names of the small group of people getting rich off of the people's forced labor.  They do not budge the grip that Empire has on humanity and the planet.  Indeed, they tighten it.  They promise great progress and hope for human liberation.  But at best revolutions merely deliver Empire in a slightly different configuration.  

The manifestation of Empire we have been under for five-hundred years is Modernity.  Modernity thrives on periodic revolutions in technology, and also of course in politics.  We have, and more importantly, we celebrate, these revolutions all the time.  How many breathlessly optimistic predictions begin with "this is going to revolutionize..." whatever?  Political, economic, and social revolutions promise great improvements in people's lives.  They  are supposed to indicate on the one hand that life just keeps getting better.  And they often do deliver superficial and unequally distributed alterations in the way we live, and indeed, sometimes these are improvements for some of us. 

Revolutions have winners and losers; they claim to be about "regime change."  But the revolution itself always wins.  For even if the contras, the conservatives, the reactionaries, the restorationists, etc., "win" the revolution by putting down the rebels, change still happens.  Life after the revolution is always significantly different from life before, no matter who is victorious.  There is no going back.  There is no becoming "great again."  Revolutions always produce something superficially new.

On the other hand, let's not forget that the whole reason that people hope in revolutions is that at some level they are not content now.  Yet, no matter how many revolutions we go through, people still come out of them frustrated, exhausted, resentful, disappointed, angry, and depressed... with the exception perhaps of the lucky few who wind up on top.  For all the changes (paid for in their blood), people remain frustrated.  The lofty goals of leaders on both sides of the revolution are never met.  Therefore, the new bosses have to blame someone (other than themselves) for this.  So the central characteristic of Empire, in particular Modernity, continues to thrive by stoking discontent, dissatisfaction, and resentment, and generating enemies; promising all the while that things will be better after the next revolution, purge, pogrom, election, reform, innovation, policy, adaptive change....  The conflict -- the death, suffering, disruption, and destruction -- is not a means to some other end; it is the whole point.   

Revolutions do not, and indeed cannot, heal the core areas of dysfunction in human life.  Not only are they not designed for that, they depend on and intensify these pathologies.  This is why revolutions will always miss the mark and cannot deliver real transformation. 

The Christian gospel 

is far more radical 

than the mere going-in-circles 

which is the literal meaning 

of the word, "revolution."  

For Christianity (and other authentic traditional religions) has to do with real, fundamental, basic, and essential change, which happens in the human soul.  These traditions, practices, stories, and disciplines change the very orientation of human life itself.  It is analogous to reversing the direction of a river.

Christianity concerns metanoia, a different way of thinking by which we turn from an egocentricity in which we imagine ourselves as isolated, independent, alienated, and at-risk individuals, who approach the world by craving, acquiring, hoarding, fighting, and consuming, whose souls are discolored by fear, shame, and anger, generating the classical deadly sins -- greed, envy, lust, gluttony, sloth, and so forth -- which in turn get expressed in acts of violence.  Instead, in authentic spirituality we turn to see ourselves as participants in interconnected and interdependent networks of inter-nesting communities which are elements of a larger unity.  Such participation is expressed in an economics of giving what we have and receiving what we need.  The values here are compassion, generosity, empathy, humility, gratitude, equality, inclusion, forgiveness, sharing, communion, joy, and unity.  These values are antithetical to Empire.

Change in Christianity is therefore apocalyptic, and always has been.  For it has to do with coming to live together into the revelation of a human nature and a common life that is already here waiting for us in creation.  This is what Jesus means by "the Kingdom of God," which is already "near" and "among/within" us.  It is the main agenda of his whole ministry.  The Kingdom of God is the antidote to Empire.

The vocation of the Church as the gathering of disciples, the communion of believers, the witnesses to and participants in the good news, is to offer and embody this alternative community of wholeness and unity.  It is to live together according to these values expressed in Jesus' commandments, summed up in "love God; love one another."  

This is the only way to break the deadly revolutionary cycles endemic to Empire, which are spinning us to the oblivion of a wrecked planet and a lost civilization.

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The Bones.

When we ignore, discard, or otherwise mess 

with the bones of a tradition

we place our personal agenda ahead of 

spiritual continuity and integrity.

This is a kind of colonialism in which a dominant power

takes the liberty of separating a tradition from its ancestors,

ripping off its skin to be used for its own purposes.

Appropriation is the extractive skinning of a tradition.  

In her excellent book, The Shamanic Bones of Zen, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel talks about the roots of Zen Buddhism in ancient Shamanic practices.  As an African-American woman who is an ordained Zen priest, Manuel has a unique, remarkable, and refreshing perspective.  Her experience is considerably wider than Buddhism, and much of what she says resonates with well with Christianity.

Part of what she means by "the bones" is the importance of recognizing and respecting our ancestors in faith.  Just as the bones are the invisible framework of the body, attention to ancestors and tradition serves to ground, form, and empower a living tradition.  Our bones hold us together.  Manuel finds the bones of Buddhism in the rituals of offering commemorating the ancestors that are a part of Zen practice, ceremonies that go back to pre-Buddhist times. 

We Presbyterians, of course, do not explicitly venerate ancestors.  Neither do we have recognized historical "saints" like some branches of Christianity.  For Protestants, more than anything else, I suspect, this function is filled by the Bible and the Sacraments.  Our Christian ancestors also heard and cherished these stories and practices, and were guided by these insights.  When we pray the Psalms, we are praying not only with our Christian forbears, but with Jesus himself and the Jewish tradition.  The basic rituals of Christianity in which Presbyterians share also constitute the bones of our lived faith.  Mainly, of course, these are the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist, which are obviously rooted in Scripture and authorized by Jesus.

Our Book of Order recognizes this by allowing and encouraging innovation and adaptation in many areas.  But we recognize basic limits to this flexibility.  Presbyterian worship without the Bible is unthinkable.  And the Sacraments retain certain minimum required elements, including that they be authorized and authenticated by the recitation of specific Scriptural words.      

This is why I get deeply concerned about attempts to undermine, compromise, or unrecognizably alter Scripture or the Sacraments.  All kinds of things about our worship, theology, and mission may change, shift, and evolve.  But the deep, structural bones which make us who we are remain.  These at some level finally do not change.  They are what hold us together with each other, with our ancestors, and even with the Earth.

Speaking of her own Zen tradition, Manuel says, "When we ignore the bones, we appropriate.  With appropriation, we don't see the practice as one of enhancing interrelationship but one of personal improvement....  And we don't see that there is an opportunity in ritual and ceremony to activate justice through collective awakening with the help of ancestors...." (p. 54)

In other words, when we ignore, discard, or otherwise mess with the bones of a tradition we place our personal agenda ahead of spiritual continuity and integrity.  This is a kind of colonialism in which a dominant power takes the liberty of separating a tradition from its ancestors, ripping off its skin to be used for its own purposes.  Appropriation is the violent and extractive skinning of a tradition.  For us this is usually done for the sake of some form of commercial Capitalism.  We have seen this happen repeatedly with Native American and Asian traditions which are taken by white people and adapted to fit a self-help model and commodified for sale.  

And it even happens to Christianity when the faith is disconnected from its bones, roots, and history, and refitted for profit.  This whole idea that everything is on the table for me to appropriate and customize to my personal preferences is a Western, Imperialist, colonialist approach that violates the integrity of indigenous, ancestral, organic traditions.  This can be done for the sake of marketing; or it can be done for reasons of ideological purity and correctness, sometimes even labeled "inclusion" and "justice."     

Where the limits of this may be set is a matter of conversation within those traditions.  But Manuel points out that harmful appropriation begins when we stop honoring the bones of the ancestors, that is, the basic and fundamental framework of the tradition.  When we do this, no matter the rationale, whether it is from within the tradition itself or from outside, we break with the essence of that body and invent something new.  

I wonder if Manuel's observation, that we find the deepest roots of what became Zen in an ancient and nearly forgotten Shamanism, which nevertheless remains in its bones, applies to all religion.  For instance, Christianity emerges from an Israelite religion embedded with Shamanistic elements.  There is research that brings out the relationship of Jesus to Shamanism as well.  (See, for instance, The Life of a Galilean Shaman: Jesus of Nazareth in Anthropological-Historical Perspective, by Pieter F. Craffert.)  And Shamanism is deeply grounded in the Earth, creation, and different forms of life.

If we dig deep enough into the bones of our lived faith, we will find ourselves digging in the dirt.  For all authentic religion is grounded in and emerges from the Earth of which humans are made.  The essence of the Earth, which resonates with the voiceprint of the One who spoke it all into being, is giving.  Authentic religion is therefore the sinews, tissues, and organs built on the bones constituted by the ultimate and original self-offering of the Creator in love.

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