Transfiguration

Glory, Postmodernity & Transfiguration

“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory” Luke 9.32

It was a residential Board of Trustees meeting in midsummer, and my first mistake was to suggest that we held the after lunch session out on the lawn.

My second mistake was deciding not just to sit on the grass, but to lie down on the grass. And the third was when I thought ‘I’ll just close my eyes, but I’ll still be able to concentrate’.

I might just have got away with this had I not: one – been Chairman of the Board; and two - started snoring.

We’ve all had those situations where we are desperately struggling to stay awake – I’ve been with some of you at Glyndebourne after the dinner interval!

We would not have had this account of the Transfiguration of our Lord in the Gospels, if the disciples had succumbed to sleep.

And as they reflected on it after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, they realised what they had seen

· They saw Moses the lawgiver and Christ as the fulfilment of the Law.

· They saw Elijah the chief of prophets and Christ as the One to whom all the prophets pointed.

· They heard the voice of Almighty God, reiterating Christ’s Baptismal affirmation that this was his beloved Son and that they should listen to him.

· And they saw the Shekinah cloud, a theophany of the God of glory, and the reflection of that glory in the face of their teacher, Jesus the Messiah.

There’s a little Jewish joke here as well - a sort of pun. Blink and you miss it.

The Hebrew word for ‘glory’, ‘kabod’, was the word for weight, heaviness, gravitas. Here the disciples are weighed down with sleep, Luke tells us, but they remained awake and so were weighed down with glory.

One of my fellow students at theological college was good at everything. And he knew it. So nobody liked him very much. So there was much Schadenfreude when he was rusticated for a term for driving a mini car through the front doors of the college.

He was good at Hebrew of course as well, so someone pinned a large notice above his door with the single word in Hebrew: Ichabod - the glory has departed.

It was the name given to Eli’s grandson Ichabod, who was born just after a particularly crushing defeat by the Philistines who also stole the Ark of the Covenant which represented the glory of God – atheme running through all the readings and prayers today.

[In fact it’s a rather tragic story that the Jewish writer turns into another little joke at the end.

“And it came to pass, when the messenger made mention of the ark of God, that Eli fell from off the seat backward by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died: for he was an old man, and heavy.” (I Sam 4)

So the grandson, born at the same time is called Ichabod, the glory has departed - the Ark of the Covenant has been carried off. But it could mean, the heavy one has departed - the fat man has died!]

Ichabod might be a suitable epitaph for the last 25 years: postmodernity as we are coming to call this period of history.

There’s much spiritual interest but little spiritual depth or weight. Believe but don’t belong. (70% of people claim to be Church of England – they believe, but they don’t belong to our congregations in any meaningful sense.)

Postmodernity describes, not so much a movement, as a mood in contemporary society. It is image with attitude; inner emptiness covered up by all the good things money can buy. Tesco ergo sum - I shop, therefore I am. Retail therapy doesn’t give meaning, but it makes me feel better!

The loneliness and ennui is eased by friendships and music, sex, alcohol and other drugs; and lots of idle humour. Veni, vidi, velcro - I came, I saw, I stuck around. Try and think of an advert that doesn’t use humour.

And one of the characteristics of postmodernity, is that it denies transcendence. So there is little focus to all that spirituality around, and indeed often a denial that there is any objective ‘other’ - the transcendent God of Glory. Spirituality is seen as something purely internal, subjective and personal.

Because of this absent substantiator in postmodern society; an absence of the One who gives weight to human existence, there is a lack of solidness in society, of glory, of weight.

We are in danger of becoming all surface and image.

Let’s go back to our Gospel – the transfiguration of Jesus.

As Jesus goes down the mountain with the disciples, he speaks to them of his impending suffering and of his resurrection. And he has already told them, although they do not understand, that his Passion will be the greatest display of God’s glory. That’s why we read this Gospel passage always on the last Sunday before Lent.

We celebrate this Mass to the Glory of God. As we bring the gifts of the world at the offertory - our bread and wine and money - so we celebrate God’s glory in all he has given to us.

And as we lift up our Lord’s broken body, so we celebrate his victory over death and the glorious hope he has given us.

It is hard to celebrate the glory of God when we are suffering, in body mind or spirit; or watching those whom we love suffer. Yet as we look at the suffering of God in Christ, and remember that we will share in his resurrection glory, then even suffering and death become part of the path to glory.

The Westminster Catechism reminds us that “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever.”

Secular drowsiness, the stupor and busyness of 21st century life, must not rob us of seeing God’s glory and delighting in his creation. Part of the reason for the disciplines of Lent is to keep ourselves spiritually awake and alert.

And here at the mass, as Christ is present in another Transfiguration, not with Moses and Elijah, but with bread and wine; here is weight and depth in an increasingly light and shallow culture. Let us be awake to the presence of the Glory of God.

“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory” Luke 9.32

Remembrance Sunday

Remembrance Sunday

“Do this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22.19)

Last weekend was my little sister’s 50th Birthday and so 25 or so of our extended family spent the weekend celebrating in a Chateau outside of Cherbourg.

We spent a cold and grey Sunday on Omaha beach where on D-Day in 1944 the Allies had made the bridgehead into France.

My great nephew James was old enough to clamber over the gun emplacements and run down into the grassy shell craters.

My nephews Neil and Jason were older than most of the 4,200 men who died there that day. They were just old enough to have seen Saving Private Ryan when the film came out ten years ago, with the horrific opening sequence of the Americans landing on Omaha beach.

The rest of us were old enough to remember the barbed wire and tank blocks of our childhoods on the beaches and rivers of Sussex.

What will each of us remember of the family day on Omaha beach in 20 years time, and will great nephew James remember any deeper significance of the place in the bloody history of the 20th century?

Memory is a strange but very important human ability. It creates the substance of our being. There can be no ‘What I Am’ without the memory of ‘What I have been.’

In human evolution, it was the creatures with memory that won over those early creatures with no memory.

It is the foundation of all our deep relationships: shared history; shared memories. How often in our conversations with friends do we start a sentence with “Do you remember?” It is the stuff of family get-togethers – for better for worse!

Remembering where we have been, helps us to make sense of where we are now. So music has no beauty without the memory of what was. The resolution of the chord or the conclusion of the book is meaningless without the retention in your memory of what has gone before.

The short-term memory is the most vital and sometimes the most fragile. Sentences begun but unended with ‘what was I saying?’

Perhaps you suffer like me, from phone memory syndrome? You push a single phone memory number, and in the ten seconds the call takes in connecting, your mind wanders to other subjects and other things to do; so that if someone finally answers simply with ‘hello’, you’re left wondering ‘who have I telephoned?’

Long-term memory is even more of an enigma. A cameo appearance of an old friend 40 years ago is there in all its vividness: the flares, the knitted tie, the bicycles on the tow-path with the Sturmy Archer 3-speed gears.

But what happened in 1964 when you were in the fourth form? The entire year is a complete blank!

Then there is communal memory, which is what today is about, passed on from one generation to another.

The Bible and the Church have always placed a strong emphasis on the integration of our communal memory - commonly owned history - into the present reality.

Indeed there can be no present reality without a sense of what was.

These vestments, the liturgy, the music, the art and symbols of recent and long past centuries - these all give greater reality to the ‘now’.

Why has Remembrance Day become arguably of greater significance in the last decade than, say, in the 60s and 70s? You'll remember there were calls for its abolition back then.

Many of us now have no direct memories of the world wars, yet the act of remembrance - the liturgy at the Cenotaph, the poppies, the veterans, the engraved walls, the war poems - all these give substance to the reality of the war dead, and a poignancy to the new struggles with terrorism and the daily casualties in Iraq or Afghanistan or the Congo.

These yearly community remembrances; the counting of the decades of uneasy peace; these 63 years of nervous optimism that we will never fall into another world-wide conflagration; these ceremonies of thankfulness and hope...

...they help to give expression to our inner longings for peace and a better society, for an end to violence and hatred. They are a shared history which guides us in shaping the present.

Of course there are cultures whose communal remembering is rooted in vengeance and hatred which prolongs the relentless cycle of bloodshed. This sort of remembering must be expunged if the culture is to survive. And once it has taken root, it is difficult to remove.

Increasingly fewer of us now have direct experience of the two Great Wars, but of course none of us have direct and experiential memories of the man Christ Jesus; who lived and died and rose again these two millennia past - 50 generations ago.

Yet we believe that our remembering of this man, deeply affects our present - and our future.

Catherine Pickstock at Cambridge wrote a startling but difficult book a few years ago entitled After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. It is an attack on the floating, postmodern self, detached from history and memory. She wrote of this service, the mass:

“… the worshipper’s forward journey is precisely its journey towards memory: the occasion of our meeting God is our memory of him.” (p.231)

“Do this” says Jesus, “in remembrance of me.”

I remember, as a young teacher, standing in the memorial cloister of Lancing College at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 35 years ago.

And looking at the 500 young men and masters around me, and then at the 500 names etched in the cold November walls in front of us. The lesson needed no words of explanation.

Today we remember and honour the war dead. We give thanks for their sacrifice and pray to God that we will not let such carnage happen again.

It is Remembrance Sunday. Our communal memory encourages us to work for a better present reality – and if we remember rightly, it brings that reality into being.

Which is why for Christians every Sunday is Remembrance Sunday.

Our communal memory allows God to make himself a reality amongst us in bread and wine and fellowship.

So, a deep understanding, a deep sense of who we are; what we are doing on this war-riven planet; why our relationships have any value; how the suffering and death of God in Christ nearly two thousand years ago affect us today...

...the conviction that the Risen Lord is with us now, and that we will be with him and all those who have gone before; and the hope that 63 years of peace will lead to that time when the lion will lie down with the lamb, and they will study war no more…

…this is all bound up in the profound utterance of our Lord which we and the Church Universal repeat in every hour, of every day, of every century:

“Do this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22.19)

Trinity - Dancing with Angels

Trinity - Dancing with Angels

Preached at Hertford College Oxford

“This grace of the Holy Spirit enables them... to dance with the angels.” St Basil the Great On the Holy Spirit (Divine Office Bk II p.670)

I went to the sort of old fashioned boys grammar school that taught ballroom dancing to the Upper Sixth. It was the nearest we got in the 1960s to sex education.

We hated it. Yet there was, and is, something immensely enjoyable in the social patterns of dancing: the partnerships, the community, the shared knowledge, the complementarity of the steps, the public intimacy.

What else could explain the resurgence of that absurdity known as Line Dancing? Or the fact that almost as many people voted in Graham Norton’s Strictly Dance Fever as in the General Election!

Some have argued that contemporary, club-scene dancing is yet another sign of postmodernity: individualism and self-expression; no rules and no partners; the breakdown of social coherence and mutual responsibility.

They see the difference between modernity and postmodernity as the difference between Foxtrot and Industrial Techno; The Little House on the Prairie and Sex in the City; or, if you’re into it, the difference between the original Star Trek & Deep Space Nine.

But clubbing is supremely a social pursuit with codified rules of conduct and dress, not obvious to the outsider - but that is why they are an ‘outsider’. It serves the age-old purposes of waltzes and Morris dancing; of Stripping the Willow and Charleston; of ballet and ballroom.

Wherever we turn in the world, in whatever age, there is an instinct both to worship and to dance. Perhaps with the exception of the Southern Baptists. The old Texan joke: “Why are Southern Baptists against sex standing up? Because it may lead to dancing!”

So what of St Basil’s contention that “This grace of the Holy Spirit enables us... to dance with the angels”.

In the early discussions of the church fathers, one of the words used to describe the interrelatedness of the Trinity was ‘perichoresis’: the inter-animation of the persons of the Trinity.

The late Professor Colin Gunton at King’s London took up the word again more recently. In “The One, The Three and The Many” he writes that the word ‘perichoresis’ is “heavy with spatial and temporal conceptuality, involving movement, recurrence… and a dynamic, mutual reciprocity.”

We might put it more simply than the good Professor - dancing. The ‘choresis’ of perichoresis, comes from a similar root to choreography - the mapping of dances.

The dynamic of the Christian God, whom we honour today as Blessed Trinity, is the loving dance of eternity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit caught up in the wordless communication which we mimic in all our human dances.

You find it in mediaeval poetry. In the Christmas Carol, Tomorrow shall be my Dancing Day, as Christ talks about his incarnation:

Then was I born of a virgin pure,
Of her I took fleshly substance;
Thus was I knit to man’s nature,
To call my true love to my dance.
Sing, O my love, my love,
This have I done for my true love.

Or here is Evelyn Underhill writing in the middle of the First World War in Theophanies:

Heaven’s not a place…
No! ’tis a dance
Where love perpetual,
Rhythmical,
Musical,
Maketh advance
Loved one to lover.

Then of course there is that old Shaker favourite, Lord of the Dance:

Dance then wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the dance says he…

And as we are drawn into the sacred choreography, so we take on the characteristics of the other dancers in the Trinity. Dancing is a great act of solidarity, of togetherness. That’s part of the buzz of clubbing, of dancing, of being part of the throng of people.

And in that solidarity with the Holy Trinity, the fruit of the Spirit produces in us the traits of the Father and the Son: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Then the charismata, the gifts of the Spirit, reproduce in us the works of the Father and the Son.

So together as the people of God we bring healing and wholeness, wisdom and truth, freedom and justice to a world that remembers how to dance, but has forgotten why it dances.

I had a message on Facebook yesterday from one my old students. His fellow students all called him affectionately Gammy Gav because he had a wonky leg. He never wanted to come dancing with us. (I taught a course on theology and culture and it was de rigeur to go clubbing on Friday night.)

We finally persuaded him, but he stood at the edge, watching. Then a gaggle of girls pulled him into the dance - and he danced!

And he realized that we all look a bit gammy when we’re dancing. And he didn’t look too gammy at all! It worked wonders for his self-esteem.

The God we worship, the Holy Trinity, is a loving fellowship of three in one.
He is not remote and alone, but an intimate community. They are so wrapped up in each other, that they are indistinguishable. One in three and three in one.

But not so wrapped up that they have no time for us. Easter was when Jesus the Son, came to call us into the dance of the Trinity.

And although we feel all unworthy, and spiritually akimbo, gammy, in comparison, yet God the Father’s love draws us into the fellowship, into the dance.

And as we are caught up in the joy of the Blessed Trinity, we are transformed into the likeness of God: we become noble humankind and not brutish animals. Or as St Basil puts it, with great theological daring:

"So is their joy unending… so do they acquire likeness to God, so - most sublime of all - do they themselves become divine."

Ezra Pound once remarked: “Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance.”

Christianity begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the unpredictable dynamic of the Holy Trinity.

So, don’t sit around the edges of the dance: the cynical onlookers of church life. We have enough of those. You’ll atrophy! You have been baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

“And this grace of the Holy Spirit enables you... to dance with the angels.”

The Lamb Blake/Tavener

The Lamb

Trinity 2 & Adult Baptism

In the order of service sheet:

The Lamb

Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice:
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.

And mentioned in the sermon

The Tyger

Tyger Tyger. burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes!
On what wings dare he aspire!
What the hand, dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger, Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and praise!” Revelation 4.12

My maternal grandmother lived with us until she died. I remember asking my mother when I was about 11, what granny Steele’s maiden name was. “Steele”, my mother replied somewhat curtly. In what was probably one of my last acts of childhood innocence I reasoned out loud: “so she was called Steele and then she married someone called Steele.”

I won’t give you my mother’s exact words of reply, but it was a strong suggestion that I was stupid and that I should grow up. Of course, it was unthinkable to me that this little old lady had conceived 3 children out of wedlock in the 1910s.

I began to realise that the world of adults was anything but straightforward, and that many things, in my family, among the neighbours, at church, were not what they seemed to be. And, horror of horrors, neither was I.

Loss of innocence is a gradual process, but most of us can remember some defining moments. The Bible traces the loss of innocence of Adam and Eve in the Garden, through the violence and injustice of tribal humanity that culminates in the death of the one innocent man – our Lord Jesus Christ - to the final book, Revelation, which looks to a new and different age of innocence.

In my sermon this week and in a fortnight’s time, I want to explore this Bible theme through the offertory motets. Today it is William Blake’s The Lamb.

William Blake was absorbed by this idea of loss of innocence. He grew up during the turbulent 18th C, with all the uncertainties of revolution and war in Europe. He was a London journeyman engraver. But he was more than that. He was an artist and a free thinker. His Christian views were shaped by his own mystical visions and a strange romantic mythology that he developed in his later writings.

When he was barely 30 in 1789 he published his first, very unusual book, comprising 31 colour plates of poems intertwined with design and illustrations. It was called Songs of Innocence and was influenced by Rousseau’s belief that children are free and innocent until society corrupts them.

But in Blake’s peculiar belief system, there was also a more traditional Christian understanding of a fallen creation. Blake and his wife, practised nudism, as a gesture towards returning to the innocence of Adam and Eve. They would have been at home with the 1000 naked cyclists who were here yesterday!

In the early church, baptismal candidates, both children and adults, went naked into the waters, and were then clothed in white as they emerged to a new innocence in Christ – it is a theme in the baptismal liturgy. (Time will not permit me to tell you of an adult baptism by immersion that I carried out while wearing white, designer cotton trousers, which turned transparent as I walked down into the water of the baptistry!)

In The Lamb, Blake draws a picture of an innocent child... and of an innocent God. The engraved and then painted illustration in his book shows a small naked, androgynous child, talking with an attentive lamb, in a rustic setting.

Here are two of God’s creations, harmlessly wandering in a paradisial idyll - “and was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen?” - well here, at least, it was.

Christ became a little child, and became known as the Lamb of God, meek and mild. Blake wonders at the beauty and simplicity of it all; the resonances between Creator and created; the sheer grace of God experienced in the delight of nature.

The child senses his kinship with the Lamb and all creation, and with the great God who made them all, and yet who is immanent within his world, walking in the garden with his creation. The child sends up the simplest of innocent prayers - “Little Lamb, God bless thee!”

This is the sweet innocence that haunts us throughout our adult life. If only our life could be full of simple pleasures and simple childlike trust. But it’s not.

Blake was wrestling with those age-old questions:

How do we retain our innocence, and yet grow up and gain experience?
How do we gain worldly-wiseness, and yet retain a childlike trust and sense of wonder?
How can God be all loving and all good, and yet create a world red in tooth and claw?

In 1794 Blake published Songs of Experience. The perspective of the child in Songs of Innocence is now replaced with the perspective of an older and more bitter man, who has seen the evils and suffering of the world. The poems in these two volumes run in loose parallel and the corresponding poem to The Lamb is The Tyger. (Which Tavener also set in a complementary setting to The Lamb.)

Who dared frame the tiger’s ‘fearful symmetry’? Was it the same God who made the little lamb?

Blake is unequivocal in his answer. Yes, it is the same God. There is no escape into a dualism which places blame elsewhere – in some other god of chaos. Luther’s striking words encapsulate the problem for Christians:

“Always remember the devil is God’s devil!”

The Tyger is about having your reason overwhelmed at once by the beauty and the horror of the natural world. "When the stars threw down their spears / And watered heaven with their tears" – a couplet from The Tyger.

For Blake, the stars represent cold reason and objective science. Blake greatly appreciated the explosion of scientific knowledge during his era, but he was hostile to any attempts to reduce all phenomena to chemistry and physics – such as we see in the current writings of Richard Dawkins.

Blake's contemporary "rationalists" who had hoped for a tame, gentle world guided by kindness and understanding must face the reality of the tiger.

To change the historic setting to our own, postmodernity with its ironic and wry take on the world has nothing to say to the jackboot or to the brutal rawness of nature. It has no power to tame the tiger within or the tiger without. Pure rationalism, the enlightenment project, has failed. As all the recent surveys show, human beings are irrepressibly religious. There is more to life than what we see, and it is that which humanises us and gives us hope for a second innocence.

John Tavener, who composed the musical setting of Blake’s poem, is a Russian orthodox convert and is making a similar point as he describes the icon-like nature of his compositions:

'There is in ikons an uncontrolled wildness, a coarseness almost, a deep sense of the untamed ferocity of the desert… I try to recreate today in my music just this uncivilised and surrealistic wildness'.

Our text today, comes from a passage which attempts to paint an impressionistic picture to help us in our understanding of innocence and experience. In the Revelation of St John the Divine we see the central figure as the Lamb, slain yet standing.

John has in his mind the writings of the Old Testament pseudepigraphal book, the Testament of Joseph (19.8f), in which the lion and the lamb appear together: the Lion is the Messiah from Judah and the Lamb is the Messiah from Aaron. And in this Testament of Joseph, the Lion and Lamb are not contrasting figures, they are different ways of looking at the same victorious and righteous God.

St John takes the conflation of the images one step further and proclaims Christ as both priest and victim; Passover lamb of sacrifice and the Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes who opens the seals and judges the world; the crucified, risen and ascended Lord, the lion of Judah.

There is no loss of innocence in Christ, only a carrying forward of that innocence into experience. ‘He who knew no sin became sin for us’ as Scripture puts it.

And so the Christian path becomes for us not so much a loss of innocence - our childhood is still with us, sometimes in very positive, and sometimes in very destructive ways – not loss, but a maturing of innocence.

In Emperor Constantine’s time, the 4th century, it was common practice to delay baptism until the deathbed, in the hope of passing through death in pristine innocence.

This was a mistaken understanding of baptism and forgiveness. Rather, as baptized Christians we must persevere until that time, after death, when we join all those who have struggled through innocence and experience, both in themselves and in their understanding of God.

Here in this life, we must keep on trusting even when our trust is sometimes rejected.

We must keep on loving, even when the love is not returned.

We must keep on forgiving, even as God constantly forgives us.

Then, in the life after death, at last our innocence will be restored and will make perfect sense of all our experience, and of all that we do not understand about God. Then we will join the unnumbered host and proclaim:

“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and praise!”

Remembrance

“Do this in remembrance of me.” 1 Cor 11.24

The fourth Harry Potter film is upon us. Another classic battle between good and evil.

Central to the Harry Potter books is the theme of Harry recovering his memory - his personal history - and in so doing realising who he really is and the powers that he has.

Memory is a strange but very important human ability. It creates the substance of our being. There can be no ‘What I Am’ without the memory of ‘What I have been.’

In human evolution, it was the creatures with memory that won over those early creatures with no memory.

It is the foundation of all our deep relationships: shared history; shared memories. How often in our conversations with friends do we start a sentence with “Do you remember?” (It binds us to people of our own age-group. Fireworks yesterday.)

The short-term memory is the most vital and sometimes the most fragile. Sentences begun but unended with ‘what was I saying?’ There is, by the way, a fascinating website called shorttermmemoryloss.com which celebrates at the moment the 60th Anniversary of Housmans Bookshop in the Caledonian Rd by King’s Cross – it’s been the home of the peace movement for these past 60 years. “60 years of peace” it proclaims “but little quiet”. Indeed more have been killed in wars over these past 60 years of peace than in the previous two terrible World Wars.

Remembering where we have been, helps us to make sense of where we are no. So music has no beauty without the memory of what was. The resolution of the chord or the conclusion of the book is meaningless without the retention in your memory of what has gone before.

Long-term memory is even more of an enigma. A cameo appearance of an old friend 35 years ago is there in all its vividness: the flares, the tie, the bicycles on the tow-path with the Sturmy Archer 3-speed gears. But what happened in 1964 when you were in the fourth form? - the entire year is a complete blank. [Of course my older sisters say that if you remember the 60s then you weren’t there?!]

Then there is communal memory, passed on from one generation to another. Two Millennia seems half of the age of the earth. But the age of the earth is in fact about two million times two millennia.

The psychology of historical recall means that 500 years ago has as much relevance to our three score years and ten lives as 500 million years ago. Shakespeare is as alien to us as dinosaurs.

There is another complication. We live in an accelerated culture where the rate of change in so many aspects of our daily lives is always increasing. Young people now suffer from premature nostalgia. The nineties is already ‘retro’ - history. There have been more inventions and changes in these last 60 years of peace than in the previous 5,000 years! The slide-rule that got me through Cambridge engineering is now in the Science museum!

And we all know the experience of looking at old family photos. There is a 17 year old you, in braided jacket with a school prefect’s badge. But how is that you/me? I’m a stranger to myself. Every cell in my body has changed many times since then and half my brain cells have already died - and the other two are feeling queasy.

The Bible and the Church have always placed a strong emphasis on the integration of our memory - commonly owned history - into the present reality. Indeed there can be no present reality without a sense of what was. The postmodern assertion that yesterday is another country, is a denial of the Christian view of personhood and Heilsgeschichte - Salvation History – which shapes our present.

These vestments, the liturgy, the music, the art and symbols of recent and long past centuries - these all give greater reality to the ‘now’.

Why has Remembrance Day become arguably of greater significance in the last decade than, say, in the 60s and 70s? There were calls for its abolition back then.

Many of us now have no direct memories of the world wars, yet the act of remembrance - the liturgy at the Cenotaph, the poppies, the veterans, the engraved walls, the war poems - all these give substance to the reality of the war dead, and a poignancy to the new struggles with terrorism and the daily casualties in Iraq or the latest location of indiscriminate violence.

These yearly community remembrances; the counting of the decades of uneasy peace; these 60 years of nervous optimism that we will never fall into another world-wide conflagration – these ceremonies of thankfulness and hope. They help to give expression to our inner longings for peace and a better society; for an end to violence and hatred. They are a shared history, which guides us in shaping the present.

Of course there are cultures whose communal remembering is rooted in vengeance and hatred which prolongs the relentless cycle of bloodshed. This sort of remembering must be expunged if the culture is to survive.

Well few of us now have direct experience of war, but of course none of us have direct and experiential memories of the man Christ Jesus; who lived and died and rose again these two millennia past - 50 generations ago. Yet we believe that our remembering of this man, deeply affects our present and future.

Catherine Pickstock at Cambridge wrote a startling but difficult book a couple of years ago entitled After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. It is an attack on the floating, postmodern self, detached from history and memory. She wrote of this service, the mass:

“… the worshipper’s forward journey is precisely its journey towards memory: the occasion of our meeting God is our memory of him.” (p.231)

“Do this” says Jesus, “in remembrance of me.”

I remember, as a young teacher, standing in the memorial cloister of Lancing College at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 32 years ago.

And looking at the 500 young men and masters around me, and then at the 500 names etched in the cold November walls in front of us. The lesson needed no words of explanation.

Today we remember and honour the war dead. We give thanks for their sacrifice and pray to God that we will not let such carnage happen again. It is Remembrance Sunday. Our communal memory encourages us to work for a better present reality – and if we remember rightly, it brings that reality into being.

Which is why for Christians every Sunday is Remembrance Sunday. Our communal memory allows God to make himself a reality among us in bread and wine and fellowship.

So, a deep understanding, a deep sense of who we are; what we are doing on this war-riven planet; why our relationships have any value; how the suffering and death of God in Christ nearly two thousand years ago affect us today; the conviction that the Risen Lord is with us now, and that we will be with him and all those who have gone before; and the hope that 60 years of peace will lead to that time when the lion will lie down with the lamb, and they will study war no more…

…this is all bound up in the profound utterance of our Lord which we and the church universal repeat in every hour, of every day, of every century:

“Do this in remembrance of me.” 1 Cor 11.24

Time & Eternity

Eternity in their Hearts

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” (Eccles 3.11)

Today’s readings need little explanation. Jeremiah is about lying prophets, Romans about sin, and the Gospel about generous hospitality. God is against the first two and for the last one.

So that gives me time to think about our verse from Ecclesiastes.

Now it’s no secret that tomorrow is a significant birthday for Fr Alan. In fact I overheard a conversation the other day when a small boy, awed by his mature gravitas, asked him: “Were you in the ark?” “No” chuckled Fr Alan. The thoughtful young boy looked quizzically at him and asked “Then why weren’t you drowned?”

The last 40 years have seen a significant shift in the philosophical climate of our society. It is nearly 40 years since Alan Bennett wrote Forty Years On, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Fr Alan belongs to that demographic group called ‘Generation X’ who grew up in the 60s & 70s. I bought (for 1 shilling & ninepence!) the book ‘Generation X’ published the year before Fr Alan was born. The year Mandela went into prison on Robben Island.
Those 40 years also saw the emergence of ‘postmodernity’.

Although written two and a half thousand years ago Ecclesiastes is a fascinating book. Its famous opening words could be paraphrased: “Vanity of vanities, all is postmodernity.”

Postmodernity describes, not so much a movement, but a mood in contemporary society. It is meaninglessness with attitude; emptiness covered up by all the good things money can buy. Tesco ergo sum - I shop, therefore I am. The loneliness and ennui is eased by friendships and music, sex, alcohol and other drugs; and lots of idle humour. Veni, vidi, velcro - I came, I saw, I stuck around.

“Yet” says the Preacher in our verse, “they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

Postmodernity is one of the most exciting, painful, challenging, opportunity-filled, anxiety ridden, faith building, depressing, faith destroying, enjoyable and contradictory of times to be alive. Postmodernity is the cultural climate that is increasingly pervading the world, spreading like a virus through TV, the arts, popular culture, ‘new’ politics and designer religion.

What would the Preacher of Ecclesiastes make of it all?

He would most certainly speak from the point of view of identifying with, and being part of, the culture. This can be one of the church’s biggest stumbling blocks, because most Christians are firmly locked into modernism, the outgoing philosophical climate; yesterday’s weather.

Worse still, many of us feel that there is something inherently Christian about modernism, despite the fact that it has only been around for a century or so, although the Judaeo-Christian faith has been around for at least 35 centuries.

However, “She who marries the spirit of the age is sure to be a widow in the next”. So we must not ‘marry’ either modernity or postmodernity. But we must be so in touch with our culture that we feel its pain and know how to apply the balm of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Increasingly in our society, purpose is giving way to play; design to chance; founts of wisdom to pools of knowledge; Reason to reasons; the metanarrative, the Big Picture, to the micronarrative, the local story - the soaps, Big Brother. Primary school children know far more about the world of Pokemon and Harry Potter, than they do about the Christian Gospel that shaped their culture and gave them their school.

Dominic Crossan puts it this way in The Dark Internal: “There is no lighthouse keeper. There is no lighthouse. There is no dry land. There are only people living on rafts made from their own imaginations. And there is sea.”

But eternity is firmly set in our hearts, says the Preacher: a divine uncomfortableness, a dis-ease with what is.

Postmodernity is a way of coping with that dis-ease. It does not make sense of life, but it helps you cope.

Christianity is also a way of coping and making sense of life. Not complete sense, for now we see through a glass darkly.

How then should we live? How carry out the Great Commission to make disciples of all?

Well, evangelism has never been easier; but discipleship has never been harder. This is why 70% of our population claim to be Christians but our churches grow emptier by the week. (Although the picture is more encouraging in London, where numbers are increasing and where yesterday in a completely packed St Paul’s Cathedral, 34 men and women were ordained deacon.)

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts,” says the Preacher.

We need to let God grasp people’s hearts and imaginations before God can transform their minds. And we must learn to live with uncertainty. Yet we still have a Gospel to proclaim, even if we must do so with confident hope rather than fundamentalist certainty. Faith is, as Kierkegaard put it, a passionate commitment made in objective uncertainty.

As Christians we assert that we are not alone in the universe, because the Bible, the Church and Reason call us to believe that there is a ‘transcendent’ God, who is before and beyond all things.

Many postmoderns are sick of themselves. But where can they look but to themselves if there is no ‘Other’?

We must present clearly the intimations of transcendence that God has planted throughout his universe – the ‘eternity in our hearts’.

Beauty and love, order and satisfaction, suffering and meaninglessness, the mystery of the Mass, the splendour of this music and liturgy - all point to an Utterly Other.

We believe that the ‘eternity within’ is no less than ‘Christ in us’, the hope of glory, the imago dei, the image of God.

God, the Holy Trinity, is community, and in that community of love we find our identity in the postmodern sea of shifting images and personal fragmentation. Jesus’ command has never been more relevant: “Love one another as I have loved you… by this everyone will know that you are my disciples.”

Part of the tragedy of the rifts that have been dug deeper this week at the Anglican Consultative Council is in the animosity shown by some of the participants.
If we cannot demonstrably love one another, then we are failing the Christ whom we seek to follow.

It is as we worship and love in our Christian communities that we mirror, albeit imperfectly, the eternal God.

At best, the Church’s response to whatever intellectual climate it has found itself immersed in, has been - not a renewed set of dogma, not more resolutions and rules - but a renewed love of God through our worship, and a renewed effort to love and serve one another.

We all get older, and the death of dear friends and our own failing powers remind us that although “He has made everything beautiful in its time,” as Ecclesiastes reminds us, its time to fade will surely come.

Yet “he has also set eternity in their hearts” and in its time, if we will let it, this will blossom into a newer and fuller life which starts now, and which will grow on into the eternity of paradise.

Ecclesiastes

Introduction to Ecclesiastes
(Willesden Clergy Conference October 2003)

A church member who was a devout golfer came to talk to his priest one day and said “Father, I have one really Big Question about the faith. Are there going to be golf courses in heaven? I have to know."

"Well," said his priest, "I'm not really sure, but tonight I'll say a special prayer and see if God will tell me the answer."

The next Sunday, when the service ended and the congregation was shaking hands with the priest on the way out, the golfer cornered him again. "Did you get the answer, Father? Are there going to be golf courses in heaven?"

Well, George," the priest replied, "I've got good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first?"

"Tell me the good news first," George said.

"The good news is that, yes, there are golf courses in heaven. Beautiful courses, where the sun is always shining, the rough is not too deep, there are no sand traps, and you never have to wait to tee off."

"Hey, that's great!" exclaimed the golfer excitedly. "But what's the bad news?"

"Well, the bad news is that St Peter has you down to tee off this coming Tuesday morning at 8."

Ecclesiastes deals with the one Big Question - the Meaning of Life, the Universe & Everything. (42 - v 42 of Eccles).

And it comes up with Bad News (quite a lot of it actually) and Good News.

There will be two parts to this Bible Study this morning: a general introduction; and a short sermon on one verse that attempts to recontextualise Ecclesiastes for the present Western culture.

The Offices - take you through the great sweep of Scripture: the good bits, boring bits, bloodthirsty bits - and the puzzling bits. Ecclesiastes is one of the puzzling bits that nearly didn’t make it into the canon.

Scholars have suggested a number of different authors (they would wouldn’t they) from Solomon (unlikely - no mentions of King of Jerusalem are probably a literary device to emphasise the wisdom of the preacher) to as many as 9 different authors within the book. (JEPD chant at Div Faculty.) Qoheleth - Hebrew root, to assemble. So assembler of wise sayings or (more likely) assembler of the people, the president, the one who calls the ecclesia together (hence Ecclesiastes).

Yet despite these supposed diverse authors and themes, at it’s simplest, there is an underlying unity to the book: Qoheleth looks at our puzzling, repetitious lives, that relentlessly and universally lead to death, and says: “Even if we do not clearly understand, there is something deeper going on.”

Or put in another way: the Bad News is that there is not much point looking for meaning “under the sun” (a phrase used 39 times); the Good News is that by implication there is a God and meaning “beyond the sun” (the unknown God, a common theme in ANE religion - talk to John Chapman about wife’s PhD) (Shemesh - Gen 1 etc)

Lady Helena Levy story from last Parish Mission: lady with cocktails answers door: “I’m afraid I’m an atheist.”
“O my dear, I am so terribly sorry.”

Qoheleth could not have been that modern and strange aberration, ‘the atheist’. He was a theist, trying to make sense of things.

Stephen Pinker & Fraser Watts interview in Third Way (Oct 2003) - still discussing Eccles (Pinker’s favourite Bible book - some have mischievously argued that Eccles 10.2 is Blaire’s favourite verse...) - Pinker & Watts trying to make sense of the brain and human consciousness. Pat of Qoheleth’s Bad News is that we are just like the animals (3.12-21). Pinker on the contrariness of atheism quote.

So in a way, Qoheleth is in a similar position to us - not dealing with people who don’t believe there is something else there
- but dealing with people who act as if the only important things are those that make them secure in secular society, here under the sun
- this he asserts is vanity, futility and a chasing after the wind.

But at the same time, like most of the Wisdom literature, Job and Jonah, Proverbs and some of the Psalms - he won’t let us get away with trite, easy answers. (5.1f)

My faith became more credible to my siblings when it became messier!

Qoheleth raises two other, ever contemporary problems:
The Problem of Knowledge & Wisdom (1.17f) He moves from enlightenment pursuit of knowledge to the madness and folly of Dada-ism, absurdism, the trippy 60s - drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll. And it is all a painful dead end.

The Problem of Evil - oppressors prosper! (4.1f) Postmodernity has no answer to the jackboot. One of the problems facing the West today, and Christians in particular - we do not know the answer of how to deal with violent evil. (Iraq & terrorism etc)

For Qoheleth, all these puzzles and mysteries, all these disturbing realities of life under the sun, leave no other choice than (12.13f): “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil.”

Thank goodness that we have more to go on than Qoheleth; that like Paul we can say” “What a wretch I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God - through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Rom 7.24f)

George Herbert toyed with some of these issues in his poem The Pulley that plays on the Pandora’s box theme - but instead of chaos being unleashed and only hope remaining in the box, God keeps ‘rest’ in the bottle - there is never a complete and satisfactory answer to Life, the Universe and Everything - we can never be wholly at rest.

The Pulley

When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by;
Let us (said he) pour on him all we can:
Let the world's riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.

So strength first made a way;
The beauty flow'd, then wisdom, honour, pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone of all his treasure
Rest in the bottom lay.

For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be.

Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.

ETERNITY IN THEIR HEARTS

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” (Eccles 3.11)

Why do so many 20 somethings still live at home with their mum? My two nephews, 20 & 23 are prime examples.

Well, there are probably lots of perfectly good reasons, but Douglas Coupland’s book Generation X has a little cartoon of a 20 something son talking to his clearly exasperated father: “It’s like this dad. You can either have a mortgage, or a life. I’m having a life.”

Although written two and a half thousand years ago Ecclesiastes is a fascinating book. It’s famous opening words could be paraphrased: “Vanity of vanities, all is postmodernity.”

This captures something of the mood of contemporary society. It is meaninglessness with attitude; emptiness covered up by all the good things money can buy. Tesco ergo sum - I shop, therefore I am. The loneliness and ennui is eased by friendships and music, sex and sometimes drugs; and lashings of humour.

“Yet” says the Preacher, “they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

Postmodernity is one of the most exciting, painful, challenging, opportunity-filled, anxiety ridden, faith building, depressing, faith destroying, enjoyable and contradictory of times to be alive. Postmodernity is the cultural climate that is increasingly pervading the world, spreading like a virus through TV, the arts, popular culture, ‘new’ politics and designer religion.

What would the Preacher of Ecclesiastes make of it all?

He would most certainly speak from the point of view of identifying with, and being part of, the culture. This can be one of the church’s biggest stumbling blocks, because most Christians are firmly locked into modernism, the outgoing philosophical climate; yesterday’s weather.

Worse still, many of us feel that there is something inherently Christian about modernism, despite the fact that it has only been around for a few centuries, although the Judaeo-Christian faith has been around for at least 35 centuries.

“She who marries the spirit of the age is sure to be a widow in the next”. So we must not ‘marry’ either modernity or postmodernity. But we must be so in touch with our culture that we feel its pain and know how to apply the balm of the Gospel.

Increasingly in our society, purpose is giving way to play; design to chance; founts of wisdom to pools of knowledge; Reason to reasons; the metanarrative, the Big Picture, to the micronarrative, the local story - the soaps, Big Brother. My primary school children know far more about the world of Pokemon and Harry Potter, than they do about the Christian Gospel that shaped their culture and gave them their school.

Dominic Crossan puts it this way in The Dark Internal:

“There is no lighthouse keeper. There is no lighthouse. There is no dry land. There are only people living on rafts made from their own imaginations. And there is sea.”

But eternity is firmly set in our hearts, says the Preacher: a divine uncomfortableness, a dis-ease with what is.

Postmodernity is a way of coping with that dis-ease. It does not make sense of life, but it helps you cope.

Christianity is also a way of coping and making sense of life. Not complete sense, for now we see through a glass darkly.

So we need to let God grasp people’s hearts and imaginations before God can transform their minds. And we must learn to live with uncertainty. Evangelism has never been easier; discipleship has never been harder.

How then should we live?

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts.”

As Christians we believe that we are not alone in the universe, because the Bible, the Church and Reason call us to believe that there is a ‘transcendent’ God, who is before and beyond all things.

Many postmoderns are sick of themselves. But where can they look but to themselves if there is no ‘Other’? We must present clearly the intimations of transcendence which God has planted throughout his universe - the eternity in our hearts:

Beauty and love, order and satisfaction, suffering and meaninglessness, the mystery of the Mass, the splendour of music and liturgy, the depth of Christian fellowship - all point to an Utterly Other. We believe that the ‘eternity within’ is no less than ‘Christ in us’, the hope of glory, the imago Dei, the image of God.

God, the Holy Trinity, is community, and in that community of love we find our identity in the postmodern sea of shifting images and personal fragmentation. Jesus’ command has never been more relevant: “Love one another as I have loved you… by this everyone will know that you are my disciples.” If we cannot demonstrably love one another, then we are failing the Christ whom we seek to follow.

It is as we worship and love in our Christian communities that we mirror, albeit imperfectly, the eternal God.

At best, the Church’s response to whatever intellectual climate it has found itself immersed in, has been - not a renewed set of dogma - but a renewed love of God through our worship, and a renewed effort to love and serve one another.

The death of dear friends and our own failing powers remind us that “He has made everything beautiful in its time.” But it’s time to fade comes.

Yet “He has also set eternity in their hearts” and in it’s time it will blossom into a newer and fuller life which starts now and which will grow on into the eternity of paradise.

Future of Christianity

The Future of Christianity
(Intro to a series)

“Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” Col 3 14

It was GK Chesterton who once remarked that: “At least five times the faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. In each of the five cases it was the dog that died.”

The last two years have seen a number of significant books speculating on the future of Christianity. I suppose the Millennium is a good time to take stock; to look back over our modest successes (from 12 to over two billion in two thousand years) and some spectacular failures (100 Hymns for Today).

Over the coming year I have invited a number of Christian leaders to address us on the subject: The Future of Christianity. And today I want to set the scene and do a little public ruminating of my own.

Alastair McGrath is an Anglican priest, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford and Principal of Wycliffe College. After a brief dalliance with liberal Christianity at theological college, he returned to his evangelical roots and has championed reasonable evangelicalism over the past 20 years.

Just over a year ago he published The Future of Christianity which was both scholarly, interesting and speculative: a rare combination.

He starts by looking at some of the human atrocities of the twentieth century; events like the Armenian genocide, the Communist persecutions, and the churches' failure to confront Nazism.
He argues that the liberal, ‘modernist’ Christianity of the 1960s grew out of these disasters and adjudges that it completely failed to bring people back to faith.

And I would agree that mainline liberalism, has suffered from what Gabriel Fackre calls “Christological heart-failure”. People returned to traditional forms of the faith, and to evangelicalism and fundamentalism.

He concludes that there are four branches of the church which, on the track record of the past 50 years, appear to have any hope for the future: Roman Catholicism, Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism and somewhat more speculatively, Eastern Orthodoxy.

McGrath is not all optimism and worries at the McDoladisation of the faith, whereby it is turned into a slick, easy-to-believe and shallow commodity which has lost most of its historic roots.

Dr Peter Ward, a lecturer at King’s London, takes the analysis of where we’re going several steps further on.

Last week his book came out, entitled, Liquid Church - I can see some of you are already keen to sign up...

You’ve heard of Modernity and the buzzword of the last decade or so, Postmodernity. Ziegmunt Bauman’s recent book, Liquid Modernity (2000), was a new way of looking at the globalisation which is affecting every area of our life together on the planet.

Pete has used this metaphor to look at what is happening in the church. He argues that there is still much solid church around - corresponding to solid modernity - buildings and congregations, parishes and church structures - all the things that have been part of Christianity for centuries.

But then there is a growing pool of Liquid Church - the loose networks of Christians who may or may not occasionally darken our doors, but who feel part of the Body of Christ, connected through informal fellowship, by TV, radio or internet, in alternative worship groups, or simply in association with other Christian friends.

They feel no loyalty to the structures. Some may think they are irrelevant. Others are happy to pop in from work for a lunchtime mass, or turn up on the major Feasts, or just look in out of interest from time to time.

They may go to a mums and toddlers’ group run by a church. They may be one of the tens of thousands who went to an Alpha course but then felt uncomfortable identifying too closely with the church.

Of course Anglo-Catholicism has always had it’s fair share of these. I’ve finally got round to reading Rose Macaulay’s book, The Towers of Trebizond, with that wonderful character ‘the Revd the Honorable Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg’ whom she describes as ‘an ancient bigot who had run a London church several feet higher than St Mary’s Bourne Street’.

The narrator says “I too am high, even extreme, but somewhat lapsed, which is a sound position, as you belong to the best section of the best branch of the Christian Church, but seldom attend its services.”

And then there is that great host of Anglo-agnostics who are out there in the liquid church and occasionally look in.

Pete illustrates three ways in which traditional, solid church, has mutated to try and adapt to the shifting certainties and moralities round about it.

There is ‘Church as Refuge’, where the congregation tries to become an all absorbing sub-culture, with lots of meetings, an emphasis on togetherness and family. This gives a sense of safety, and especially in the United States, mega-churches have grown up, with their own schools, restaurants, bowling allies, gyms, weightwatchers - I have seen the book ‘Slim for Him’.

Then there is ‘Church as Nostalgic Community’. It constantly laments over an imagined past, when rich and poor, young and old, flocked into church. Although there is some truth in this, the facts and figures of the past don’t generally bear it out.

Yet it is a powerful myth the church likes to believe about itself and by constant repetition it avoids having to take into account and act in the light of the very changed circumstances of today’s society.

Finally there is ‘Church as Heritage Site’. Pete Ward writes: “Far from being a turn-off, for some people the weekly visit to church is attractive precisely because it offers a slice of living history... As the tradition of the church is mutated by liquid modernity, the minister slowly turns into curator... Ministers and people are willing to see gradual change, but every effort is made to respect the weight of tradition.” (p.27)

Pete argues that although these islands of solid church will remain for some time yet, it is the liquid church that is growing in Europe and North America and many solid churches are melting into it. Alan Jamieson catalogued this process in his fascinating book, A Churchless Faith.

So what of the future of the church? Well my guess is that in the short-term, say the next 20 years or so, the solid core is going to get a little smaller but more significant. And the broad liquid aurora will become larger - I hope much larger - and slightly more coherent as a loose network, perhaps with solid church acting as nodes of information and tradition, and sustainers of the network.

And beyond that? I have no idea, but I am sure that God does not lose sleep over it.

Nevertheless, all the commentators and future-watchers draw some similar conclusions. Namely, the urgent need for all churches to grow through mission rather than by merely hoping to survive. In this respect all the books offer the same message: evangelise or die.

And another common conclusion is, that we need each other. Those who are spiritually hungry in our world are not particularly interested in denominational labels or styles of worship. If they go anywhere regularly, or drop in occasionally, they will go where they feel nurtured and loved. It is a very basic human need.

In the government guidelines for the relationship between school governors and the Head Teacher, they are described as ‘critical friends’. We cannot ignore differences or pretend we don’t hold opinions, but we must at the very least be critical friends. And this applies within a single congregation, as well as across the denominations and wider.

We have misunderstood the Gospel if we have made it a Gospel of exclusion. Our Lord always wants to include those who seek after God and truth. This is the message of today’s Gospel parable.

To demonise those with whom we disagree, in our own congregation or in another denomination, is frankly unchristian.

They drew a circle that shut me out
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win
We drew a circle that took them in
(Edwin Markham)

The Future of Christianity, our adventure into the unknown, can only be in following our Lord’s way of faith, hope and love.

“Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” Col 3 14

Review - idoru - William Gibson

idoru
William Gibson, Viking, 1996

I like William Gibson’s books. I was bowled over by his first novel, Neuromancer (1984), which won the Hugo, the Philip K. Dick Memorial, and the Nebula awards - in case you’re not into the genre of Science Fiction (SF), these are all very prestigious. He coined the term “cyberspace”, envisioning both the internet and virtual reality before most people had even heard of them, and Neuromancer was hailed as the “Christ-child of cyberpunk”, (a genre of SF which became self-conscious during the 80s, first characterized as Radical Hard SF, or Neuromantics, or the Mirrorshades group. At its best, it describes with all the linguistic style of the modern novel, a hi-tech future which is sometimes a drug-induced nightmare, sometimes a surrealistic New Age, always just beyond the cutting-edge of physics and metaphysics.) At 48, Gibson is an American draft-dodger who has been living in Canada since he was 19 and has picked up the best of both cultures. His subsequent novels are Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, the best-selling Virtual Light, and his short stories collected in Burning Chrome.

I surfed the net (653 matches to “idoru” found by my HotBot search engine) to give you a flavour of both the man and his writings: “Gibson's stuff is the reactor core steam of all tomorrow's parties breathing down your neck today. Not so much an imaginary future as a highly specific look at a present in midstage adrenaline OD.” (Spin) “Gibson brings to the surface the beast that lurks behind the dense surreal surface of pop culture, simultaneously as meaningful and empty as a video screen.” (The Nation) “Gibson distils a technopunk sensibility with the kick of white lightning and the clarity of white light.” (Village Voice)

So what of Idoru? I was disappointed. If you have never read any Gibson, then start with Neuromancer - and persevere beyond the baffling first pages.

Idoru (a Gibson neologism) is an advanced software program meaning idol-singer or idol-guru. The idoru is an ‘imaginary’ pop star, a cybernetic Madonna of the future - although the Japanese are already creating these as I write. The action is in a new millennium Tokyo, after The Quake, with new self-building buildings, a new mafia, smuggled nano-technology and a couple of innocents-abroad in a big bad technoworld. Colin Laney has a ‘gift’ due to early drug experiments, of fishing for patterns in the dense texture of computer web information. He sees ‘nodes’ and discovers narratives intuitively by accessing the net. For me this was the most interesting feature of the book, as it mirrors contemporary preoccupation with narratives and stories, and the ways that these can convey more than the sum of their parts. In this virtual, holographic future, Gibson is pushing the frontiers of the Flesh made Word which helped me to ponder the Mystery of the Word made Flesh.

The sub-plot concerns Chia Pet McKenzie who is active in the fan club for Lo/Rez, a superstar rock duo. She is bundled off to investigate some new rumours about the plans of Rez, one half of the band, to marry Rei Toei, an “idoru”. She is inadvertently used to smuggle illegal nanoware to the Russian criminal underground and gets caught up with a nice boy-next-door Japanese computer nerd who guides her round the Virtual Walled City and helps save the day. The Famous Five on Acid.

Third Way (not sure they ever published it!)

Article - Postmodernity & Rationality

Postmodernity & Rationality

The Final Credits or just a Commercial Break?[1]
[From Antony Billington, Tony Lane & Max Turner, eds., Mission & Meaning: Essays Presented to Peter Cotterell (Paternoster, 1995)]

Introduction
Postmodernity is a delightfully slippery word; a lexicographer’s nightmare. Rather like the sub-atomic particle dutifully obeying Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, it refuses to be pinned down. The literature is so littered with “probably” that it rivals the lager adverts. As far back as 1987 The Independent was advising hip culture vultures that “This word has no meaning. Use it as often as possible.”[2] Postmodernity is already passé within its own terms, for the concept becomes outmoded as soon as it is articulated. Postmodernity - a word to be preferred to postmodernism[3], which is a self-contradiction, for there are no more “isms” - is a condition[4] and not a philosophy. It is an all-pervasive mood and not a rational structure; a shift in sensibility;[5] a Weltstimmung and not a Weltanschauung. Postmodernity passes the death sentence on the Cartesian project of self-authentication through self-knowledge and it marks the final abandonment of the Enlightenment’s promise of self-determination. It describes a world full of contradictions and fuzziness in whose very paradoxes and pluralities personhood is affirmed.

Protestant Christianity has long been the bastion of Enlightenment rationality and in so doing has always been in danger of dethroning the suprarational God of the Bible. Despite the warnings of the Wisdom literature and some of the hard sayings of Christ, there has always been the irresistible temptation to sytematize and so tame and control the Lion of Judah. In it’s championing of the rational mind mastering God’s rational world[6], it has unwittingly fashioned and honed weapons for its enemies. They have built the secular city and banished an objective and transcendent God to the realm of personal preference and inner reality; the god who is within; the god-whatever-you-conceive-him/her-to-be. Don Cupitt and the Sea of Faith group have openly acknowledged this and sought to build a Brave New Christianity on this premise.[7]

But postmodernity sweeps all this away and in this respect, it is the most profoundly Judaeo-Christian epistemology since the Garden, because it implicitly acknowledges that we cannot work anything out for ourselves. It confesses that, if indeed we are limited “to our poor reach of mind” then the fragmentation and meaninglessness portrayed in Ecclesiastes is all we can expect.

Definitions
The first use of the word can be traced back to Frederico de Onis in the 1930s although its contemporary employment dates only from the 1980s.[8] There are different usages at different times over the past forty years in music, architecture, literature, theatre, the sciences… Charles Jencks notes with wry humour the beginning of the postmodern era in architecture at 3.32pm on 15th July 1972 when the Pruett-Igoe housing development in St Louis, the prize construction of high modernism, was blown up on account of its being uninhabitable.[9]

In the 1940s the noted historian Sir Arnold Toynbee undertook a massive overview of the history of civilisation. He used the word in the early 1950s, but in the sense of the decadent, anarchic and irrational. Nonetheless, there are striking similarities with present descriptions of the postmodern condition and it is worth mention. Patricia Waugh summarizes Toynbee’s prophetic characterization of what would follow the post-war decade during which he wrote.

“For Toynbee, the postmodern age would be the fourth and final phase of Western history and one dominated by anxiety, irrationalism and helplessness. In such a world, consciousness is adrift, unable to anchor itself to any universal ground of justice, truth or reason on which the ideals of modernity had been founded in the past. Consciousness itself is thus “decentered”: no longer agent of action in the world, but a function through which impersonal forces pass and intersect. Art becomes not so much an expression of human spirit, but another commodity. Like knowledge, therefore, it can no longer be critical but only functional. Moreover, we are in the postmodern condition and, implicated in a culture where all knowledge is produced through discourse, we can no longer seek transcendence. There is no position outside of culture from which to view culture. There is no Kantian ‘view from nowhere’, no conceptual space not already implicated in that which it seeks to contest. There can only be disruption from within: micropolitics, language games, parodic skirmishes, irony, fragmentation.”[10]

It is dangerous to set up any sort of polarities between modern and postmodern, but so long as it is recognised that the present mood is something of a tension between the two poles; a synthesis, an acknowledgement of one in the light of the other - then the exercise is of some value. Hassan’s schema is one such attempt to voice equivocal dichotomies.[11]

Modernism - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Postmodernism
romanticism/Symbolismc - - - - - - - - - - - paraphysics/Dadaism
form (conjunctive, closed) - - - - - - - - - - - antiform (disjunctive, open)
purpose - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - play
design - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - chance
hierarchy - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -anarchy
mastery/logos - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - exhaustion/silence
art object/finished work - - - - - - - - - - - - process/performance/happening
distance - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -participation
creation/totalization/synthesis - - - - - - - decreation/deconstruction/antithesis
presence - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - absence
centring - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -dispersal
genre/boundary - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - text/intertext
semantics - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -rhetoric
paradigm - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -syntagm
hypotaxis - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -parataxis
metaphor - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -metonymy
selection - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - combination
root/depth - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -rhizome/surface
interpretation/reading against - - - - - - - -interpretation/misreading
signified - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -signifier
lisible (readerly) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -scriptible (writerly)
narrative/grande histoire - - - - - - - - - - - anti-narrative/petite histoire
master code - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - idiolect
symptom - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - desire
type - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -mutant
genital/phallic - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - polymorphous/androgynous
paranoia - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - schizophrenia
origin/cause - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -difference-difference/trace
God the Father - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -The Holy Ghost
metaphysics - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -irony
determinacy - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -indeterminacy
transcendence - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - immanence
cataphatic - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - apophatic
Apollonian - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dionysian
Roman - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Celtic
Martha - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Mary

The Postmodern Mood
One of the drawbacks of trying to convey the feel of postmodernity is the limitation of words. So in this next section, in the manner of the ‘stream of consciousness’, beloved of late modernity, I want to try and affront you with The Post. Ideally, you should be listening to floaty, ambient music like The Orb or Enigma, Leftfield or Enya, or the theme music of Twin Peaks. John Tavener would do at a push, or Officium… Alternatively, put the radio and the TV on at the same time.

The degree to which you are disturbed by this section is a measure of how much you have been influenced by postmodern culture. If you find it disorientating and confusing then you are very much a Modern. You probably don’t like those TV programmes where several things are happening at the same time as text is appearing on the screen (like Def II) and you don’t like ‘alternative worship’. (I went to a service where the Latin Tridentine Mass was being said against a heavy House rhythm while slides of icons were displayed on a high nave screen and several abstract videos were running on banks of TV screens.) You have probably never read novels by William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Martin Amis or Don DeLillo and you have never watched Trainspotting (that’s a film). Most over 50s are firmly entrenched in modernism, and almost all who have grown up in the church of whatever age.

But first some terms which both set the scene and help to create the mood of ‘pessimistic wishful thinking’ or ‘nihilism with a smile’[12]....

The Post - Postmodernity, Pomo, or high modernism, or late modernism or Pre-postmodernism, or post-Fordism, or Late Capitalism, or Modernism-Not. The present intellectual and artistic climate in Britain, arguably, as discussed above. It is the quasi-philosophical and cultural accompaniment to the New Age, experienced in one way or another by most who live in the silicon cities of the West and the US. It is only discussed by intellectuals dispossessed[13] of a role in the ‘new’ techno-rational society: “the implosion of intellectual vision” as Bauman puts it.

Cyberpunk- a genre of science fiction (SF) which became self-conscious during the 80s, first characterized as Radical Hard SF or Neuromantics[14] or the Mirrorshades group.[15] At its best, it describes with all the linguistic style of the modern novel, a hi-tech future which is sometimes a drug-induced nightmare, sometimes a surrealistic New Age, always beyond the cutting-edge of physics and metaphysics. The Frank Herbert Dune series (also a film) is a very accessible way into the mind-set. The discourse of cyberculture is certainly impacting our academic institutions as well as street life.[16]

Cyberspace - the ‘place’ where we can live in virtual reality. “There is no ‘there’ there.” I was ‘sitting’ in a cyberspace restaurant (actually I was sitting at my computer console) talking with an academic from the West Coast of the US who was bored at 3am their time and decided to look around one of the cyber-cities you can visit by way of internet[17]. One of our other lecturers ended up doing some bereavement counselling with someone he met in cyberspace from - who knows where they are from. In virtual reality anyone is from anywhere…

Generation X - post-boomers, twenty somethings, baby busters, the 38 million Americans born between 1963 and 1977 made famous by Douglas Coupland’s book[18].

MTV - A Music Television Channel (also on VH1), which shows contemporary music videos 24 hours a day worldwide. There are some regional variations, but in general, this is the lifeblood of youth culture around the world.

Zine - a magazine or fanzine. Glossy and expensive like Mondo, Wired, or cheap FAXed and Xeroxed. The guys in my house produce Heartbreak Hotel every term. Look along the magazine racks in the ‘pop’ or ‘techno’ or ‘culture’ section of Tower Records, or a big HMV or Our Price. In the right shops there are zines to cater for every taste, whether Knitting Patterns, Latex Sex, Black Poetry or Chicken World.

Metanarrative - Some overall story or set of ideas which binds all cultural activities together in a project or system which proposes to make sense. Christianity is such a metanarrative - postmodernity denies the possibility of such Grand Narratives, or Macronarratives.

Structuralism focuses our attention on the text itself, and the understanding of a text in its cotext and context.

Deconstructionism is the daughter of Structuralism and concentrates on the reader-response to a text. All ‘meaning’ or authorial intention breaks down.[19]

So drift through this…
See Appendix 1

Some Aspects of the Postmodern Condition
Lists always get too close to ‘defining’, and we have seen that there can be none of that in the pursuit of postmodernity. Sampson put it well concerning his own essay:

“The classification which follows is… open to the objection that it snatches at a shadow, but it does have the virtue of mapping the ground on which the shadow lies.”[20]

Frederic Jameson paints a Small Picture:

“If the great negative emotions of the modernist moment were anxiety, terror, the being-unto-death, and Kurtz’s “horror”, what characterizes the newer “intensities” of the postmodern, which have also been characterized in terms of the “bad trip” and of schizophrenic submersion, can just as well be formulated in terms of the messiness of a dispersed existence, existential messiness, the perpetual temporal distraction of post-sixties life. Larger virtual nightmare, the sixties gone toxic, a whole historical and countercultural “bad trip” in which psychic fragmentation is raised to a qualitatively new power, the structural distraction of the decentred subject now promoted to the very motor and existential logic of late capitalism itself.”[21]

1. Non-rationality
It is not that postmodernity denies rationality, for to do so would be the death of discussion. Rather it holds loose to connected rational systems, to Grand Narratives, to any notion of the Big Picture. “Reason is displaced by reasons, each within its own discourse and for its own public. None is privileged.”[22] It is in this sense post-structuralist and post-deconstructionist.[23] This is an area where Christians need to do some more hard thinking. We rightly want to defend rationality and the power of verbal communication, and yet we sometimes seem to be saying that the cosmos is rationally coherent. And, as we experience it, it is not.

2. Blank Irony
The use of humour in general and irony in particular has been a feature of Modernity for most of this century[24]. But blank irony[25] is irony without arrogance. It is irony without self-importance. Moderns are still contemptuous enough to use irony as a tool for mocking that which they have ‘ridden above’. The ironist assumes privileged access to an objective point of view. He lives in the Big Picture. But the blank ironist has no such luxury. She lives in an incoherent and pluralist world. You can see this in films like Blazing Saddles or Airplane, in series like Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Red Dwarf, or more recently, Wayne’s World or Beavis and Butthead. “So let me get this straight. Young people go into stores, and buy heavy metal videos, and take them home and play them. And then they kill their friends… So what’s the problem?”[26] This is part of postmodernity’s discomfort with any representation that appears to be ‘saying’ anything or taking a moral stance. So there is in art and literature (and the adverts) constant self-mockery: what various writers have called playfulness, pastiche, jokeyness, stylistic promiscuity, eclecticism, self-parody.

3. Consumerism
Why do we need 83 different breakfast serials to choose from? Why must I be wearing this season’s fashions? Why do so many millions in the West worship in the mirrored Temples of Shopping Malls every Saturday and Sunday? Because it is in choosing and in buying that I find identity and acceptance. “Goods are valued for what they mean as much as for their use, and people find meaning in the very act of consumption. Advertising and product image become goods consumed for their own sake, rather than as representative of real products.”[27] This is the illusion of freedom which late capitalism offers us. It builds on the premise that “the love of money” is the only dynamism by which the world economy can function. So if I cannot choose and buy, because I am ‘under-privileged’ then I must look for identity and acceptance elsewhere, or else despair. The ‘elsewhere’ can be religion, or drugs, sex and rock‘n roll, or violence, or any mixture of these.

4. The Return of the Repressed[28]
Violence has itself become an exploratory tool of postmodernity and an icon of the modern film. Tarrantino’s films: Reservoir Dogs, True Romance and Pulp Fiction all exemplify a society fascinated by the fragility and ultimate worthlessness of life, while outraged at the institutionalised violence and brutality demonstrated by regimes throughout the world. Other examples of this can be seen in Francis Ford Coppola’s earlier Vietnam film Apocalypse Now and in Oliver Stone’s more recent Natural Born Killers. This is an artistic preoccupation with blood, the boundaries of sanity, and the limits of law, which offers an opportunity for voyeurism to a society that has carefully sanitized itself of death, insanity and criminality: these have been institutionalised so that most citizens need rarely, if ever, brush with them. Each year I ask students (of average age 29) how many of them have seen or touched a dead body. Apart from the medics, the affirmative answer represents only about 2%.

Violence is sometimes seen as a way to liberate the oppressed and empower the marginalised in postmodern constructed morals. (I.e. morals constructed by society for some reason or another.) Veith explains “power reductionism”, a sort of postmodern reworking of a discredited[29] Freud, in these terms: “All institutions, all human relationships, all moral values, and all human creations - from works of art to religious ideologies - are all expressions and masks of the primal will to power.”[30] The rage of the oppressed and the assertion of being through power seems to give special euphoria to some (especially within academia) postmoderns. This is of particular relevance to postmodern politics, but there is no time to develop this here.[31]

5. Plurality of Beliefs
Postmodernity has seen the commodification of belief structures. I buy into a belief and use it to feel good. If it doesn’t make me feel good, then why bother to buy into it? Because of the death of the Macronarrative, I can permute some acceptable combination of Micronarratives which give me a gentle euphoria. No matter that there is a rational conflict between any of these Micronarratives. Non-rationality takes care of that. In this way people build up sets of ‘free-standing’ self-referential beliefs. Cotterell has often pointed out the illogicality of trying to say that, for instance, Islam and Christianity are both ‘true’. “If we take this issue more generally, when Christianity claims that Jesus died on the Cross, and Islam… insists that Jesus was not crucified… must we make a choice between the alternatives?”[32] For postmoderns, the answer would be “no!” Within the self-referential system of Islam, you can believe what you choose. Within the self-referential system of Christianity, you can believe what you choose. And you can swap minute by minute between the two (or more) without worrying your head about the clash of logical truth claims. It is only transcendent truths which would bring conflict. But as there is no Objective Other, no transcendence, then everything is possible.

6. The Media
This is the central nervous system of the postmodern body. It communicates culture. The inescapable air waves shape our thinking from cradle to grave. “Media is man-made weather,” says one of the characters in Oliver Stone’s film Natural Born Killers. And there is always weather. Satellite TV has arguably been a major factor in the crumbling of communist superstates and the fascist dictatorships. The capitalism portrayed in the glossy adverts, in Dallas, Dynasty and Bay Watch, in MTV and the Hollywood Blockbusters, doesn’t look nearly as bad as the totalitarian regimes paint it. There is of course a close connection between advertising and the media, which is financed in most parts of the world by advertising - and no doubt soon will be in Britain. This leads to the conclusion that Capitalism is the engine of culture. It is pure profit that drives the cultural machine. This has led Camille Paglia to comment that “Capitalism is the mysticism and glamour of things which take on a personality of their own… the West objectifies persons and personalises objects.”[33] Postmodernity is also therefore, the death of High Art and the death of the Dignity of Life. It is only those who have an Other World objectivity, a worldview based on transcendence, who can exercise high art within their own sphere of expression.

7. Technology
I was ‘ink monitor’ at my primary school, mixing up the ink from the blue powder and topping up the ink-wells on each child’s desk. The ‘nibs’ we stuck on to our wooden ‘pens’ cost one old penny each. Now, 35 years on, I am sitting in a MacDonald’s (again!) in Washington DC, with my lap-top on the table, having just checked the correspondence which I downloaded from Postmodern Christian, an internet subscriber group which I accessed via the phone line in my friend’s house last night. Our capitalism/media driven culture is only possible because of technology. The printing press was one revolution, the cheap microchip has been another. And machines humble us, because they never make mistakes and they remember everything. Indeed, in the world of artificial intelligence, the capacity for error is now a measure of humanity. It is observable generally that, the more there is for humans to remember, the less they remember. I used to learn telephone numbers. Now all my phones ‘know’ the numbers of my friends. The ironically named “virtual reality” is becoming more convincingly real by the day and cheap technology is opening many new doors into cyberspace.

8. The Significance of Insignificance
The Enlightenment Project and history as the history of success has failed. The history of failure is what matters. Humanity has dethroned itself from the high ground of cosmic significance. Museums are often reluctant now to set out their displays as the history of ‘progress’ for that suggests success and ‘right direction’. It implies an objective viewpoint. Rather the past is observed as a non-judgmental collage of what was.[34] From a Christian perspective, this ‘history of failure’ is a profoundly Biblical view of the world and of Heilsgeschichte - God’s saving acts in the light of humanity’s constant failure.

9. Different Relationship to Space and Time
The Copernican Revolution marked the opening up of Space and Time to the mind-boggling proportions that post-Einstein cosmology has now given us.[35] Postmodernity has recognised the fact that for most people the idea of “150 years ago” and the idea of “15 thousand million years ago” are equally impossible to grasp; Saturn, a few million miles away, might just as well be at the edge of Hubble’s known universe a trillion, trillion, trillion… miles away. Then there is also a paradox that the faster things happen, the longer waiting takes. When it took a week to go from London to New York, an hour’s delay in departure hardly mattered. Now an extra hour in the departure lounge warrants a letter to the airline. This is the apparent compression of space and time. There is now a lack of any chronological perspective as we have moved from the diachronic to the synchronic. So postmodernity espouses a new consciousness of time and space, a new way of relating to how things were and of the spaces in which we live and interact. Everything is in effect viewed through the timeless ‘here and now’. There is no history and no future. This is not the existentialist ’now’ of self-authentication through decision. This is an acknowledgement that all history is a history of the present.[36] Nostalgia can be another good trip. You can see this experimenting with time in the work of writers like Martin Amis, Vonnegut or Foucault, and in films like Sally Potter’s Orlando or in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series.

10. The Waning of Affect
The ability to feel deep emotion is spasmodic and brief. This is partly due to information overload and partly due to the fragmentation of consciousness. We have to cope with so many emotions in so short a space of time each day. The TV culture and sound-bite sensations have coarsened the human spirit. There has been a loss of depth and more than that, in postmodernity there is a denial of depth. Jameson describes the loss of an ‘inner self’ that is able to feel, claiming that postmoderns’ “feelings (Lyotard “intensities”) are now free-floating and impersonal and dominated by euphoria.”[37] Edward Munch’s famous painting The Scream is a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation.[38] In postmodernity there can be no cathartic, wordless scream. There is only humour and another day.

11. Image as Identity
In the loss of any objective ‘other’ and of any sense of progress, there is a fragmenting of the personality; a controlled schizophrenia in which “the unity of the “I” is more like the unity of a story than the unity of a thing.”[39] This is a persistent theme through all postmodern theatre, literature and film. Madonna is the iconographic example of this in contemporary culture. She is all surfaces and image; performances and pastiche; sexual machine, controlling superfemme, vulnerable Monroe, exploitative capitalist. There is no identity ‘behind’ the image. She is the sum of them and the collective consciousness of all her roles.

12. Cultural Cohorts
We used to talk of the generation gap (young and old ), and then of generation gaps (from 14 upwards at roughly 7 year intervals). But a more accurate picture of our presently fragmenting society recognises cultural tribalism or postmodernisms. “Society is splintering into hundreds of sub-cultures and designer cults, each with its own language, code and life style.”[40] Many people participate in various microcults each week: the cult of the work place, the modern management cult, the Club cult, the pub cult… Some of these commonly overlap, for instance the work cult and the pub cult. Others rarely do. So there are few from the world of banking amongst the neo-punks - although there are some - I have met them! Advertising recognises the need to aim for target audiences. Satellite TV and the Fanzine scene has made this task easier. But for the church at worship and play, this presents a considerable problem. When I am asked to speak at a ‘Youth Service’, I wonder “which youth?” For there is a host of subcultures in the 15 to 25 age group.

Postevangelicalism for Postmodernity?
As I have already hinted, I think that the postmodern world can be a very fertile soil for the Gospel if the church will but grasp the opportunities and venture through the open doors. We should not mourn the loss of arrogant modernism. But what will come in its place? As Toynbee recognised, the symptoms are those of decline and fall. Although the threat of nuclear apocalypse has receded with the unexpected thaw in the Cold War, computer technology has made the threat of economic collapse in the West an ever present danger. Will there be a resurgence of the Right and fascism, of the Left and ideological authoritarianism, of militant religious fundamentalism, or of servant Christianity? If we are in what Northrop Frye describes as a low mimetic period of history, then there can follow (says Frye) either chaos or a return to high myth. Although it is much more, Christianity is certainly high myth, and the stage could be set for a new revival. Evangelicalism in its present dying form will be unable to play a dominant role on its own. Postevangelicalism[41] which will be able to integrate more readily with broader traditions of historic Christianity, could play a major role in shaping the world which will emerge, God willing, from postmodernity.

These are early days yet, but perhaps we can see some characteristics of postevangelicalism emerging which will help us with the Dominical Gospel mandate.

1. Making Sense of Things
Postmodernity is a way of coping with life. It does not make sense of it. There is none. Christianity is a way of coping and making sense of life. Not complete sense, for now we see through a glass darkly. It is a metanarrative, but it is not exhaustive and Christians should beware of claiming too much. “Part of the responsibility for the modern fragmentation of culture, and especially for its loss of a coherent sense of meaning and truth, is to be laid at the door of Christian theology’s traditional tendency to a monolithic conception of God and of truth.”[42] Biblical faith forces humility and a degree of agnosticism on us, lest we presume again to eat of the tree of knowledge. Traditional, rational apologetics was fine for modernism, although even then it tended to share modernism’s arrogance, but it will become increasingly irrelevant to western postmodernity. We need to let God grasp people’s hearts and imaginations before we can restore their minds.

2. Story & Hope[43]
Postmodernity sees that personal identity, in as much as there is any, is experienced in the story of life, unfolding moment by moment, crossing the lives of others, with shifting images and shifting beliefs. (Short Cuts is a good cinematic example of this). The people of God have glorious beliefs and a magnificent story to tell. But we must learn how to relate to those round about us at the level of our common humanity, and not, at first, at the level of schematized dogma. Douglas Coupland concludes his latest book, Life After God, with these poignant words of challenge:

“My secret is that I need God - that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.”[44]

So why, like many of my friends and family, is he not looking to the church to find God? Largely because we have become implausible and such an introverted sub-culture that we cannot communicate with our contemporaries. We must learn to give a reason for the hope within us in a way our friends (if we have any unchurched friends) can understand.

3. Community
God, the Holy Trinity, is community, and in that community of love we find our identity in the postmodern sea of shifting images and personal fragmentation. Jesus’ command has never been more relevant: “Love one another as I have loved you… by this everyone will know that you are my disciples.” If we cannot demonstrably love one another, then we might as well pack up. Colin Gunton and others are right in stressing the importance of Trinity as foundational to our faith, practice and mission.[45]

4. Transcendence
Many postmoderns, like Coupland, realise the need “To break the holds of power and institute research into a new collective subjectivity and a revolutionary healing of mankind. For we are sick, so sick of ourselves.”[46] But where can they look but to themselves if there is no “Other”? We must present clearly the intimations of transcendence which God has planted throughout his universe. Beauty and love, order and satisfaction, suffering and meaninglessness - all point to an Utterly Other, to a gently compelling mysterium tremendum et fascinans. (Otto) Theologically, Gunton has argued for ‘open transcendentals’ and ‘trinitarian transcendentals’ which maintain the dynamism in our God-given faith and guard us from another round of reformation-stultification.[47] But once a postmodern has encountered Christ and believed the incarnation, she can never be ‘properly’ postmodern again. For if we are not alone, then there is a fulcrum for meaning, rationality, progress and morality.

Worship is an important part of this witness to the transcendent God. A vibrant corporate spiritual life, whether charismatic, Toronto-blessed, Anglo-catholic or Alternative worship, points to human creatureliness and the otherness of God which postmodernity denies but which our image-of-Godness yearns after. “You have set eternity in their hearts…” says Koheleth[48]. Furthermore, liturgy and the liturgical year, tradition and sacramental re-enactments, all help us to regain our place in space and time. This has always been a function of cultic worship.[49]

5. Radical Holiness
The evidence of God in our own lives is one of the clearest signposts to transcendence. It is not by setting up a dull and irrelevant Christian counter-culture, but by affronting society with ‘godly’ living, that we challenge people to consider the immanence of the transcendent Christ. ‘Holiness’ must not be confused with ‘niceness’. To counter postmodernity’s anti-hero we need Christian heroes: men and women who will be Rough Knights for the High King.

6. A Theology of Pleasure and Desire
The Old Testament perhaps extols pleasure more than the New, but the New does not deny it in giving it a firmer basis in joy. We should receive with thanksgiving all the exciting things and experiences that postmodernity brings to many of us, while demonstrating that we are citizens of heaven with a greater hope. Postevangelical Christianity must be more life affirming than denying. Although with CS Lewis we should remember that “All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status, always reminds, beckons, awakens desires. Our best havings are wantings.”[50] Our desire for God, the giver of all good things, can never be satisfied this side of death. It is the Love of perpetual longing. Mark Seem is indulging in wishful thinking when he suggests that desire alone in some way can replace the transcendent.

“A politics of desire would see loneliness and depression as the first things to go… the anti-oedipal strategy: if man is connected to the machines of the universe, if he is “anchored”, he ceases to worry about the fitness of things, about the behaviour of his fellow-men, about right or wrong and justice and injustice. If his roots are in the current of life he will float on the surface like a lotus and he will blossom and give forth fruit … The life that’s in him will manifest itself in growth, and growth is an endless, eternal process. The process is everything.”[51]

7. A Transformed Western Church
We have tried all manner of techniques and reforms in the church in the past fifty years and seen a steady decline in the West. Perhaps the new thing that God is forcing upon us through postmodernity will better equip us to work with Christ in discipling a generation who are ‘open’ but do not know where to turn.

“Generation X has come into young adult maturity in a cultural and moral ‘whirlwind of barbarism’… We believe that the characteristics for which generation X has received such bad press are the very qualities that will render them most effective as pioneers of a revitalised Christian faith. Their pragmatism and skepticism, their sharp-eyed assessments of life and above all, their search for community and personal relationships are exactly what the emerging era requires.”[52]

If postmodernity is just a commercial break then we should work and pray for a Kingdom programme to follow… until the Final Credits.

(Origin, 6/94 Last Revisions, 3/07)

Endnotes

[1] This article by Nick Mercer (without the bibliography and slightly modified), is published in Antony Billington, Tony Lane & Max Turner, eds., Mission & Meaning: Essays Presented to Peter Cotterell (Paternoster, 1995), chapter 18. The title is from an idea by my research assistant Mark Carter.
[2] The Independent, 24th December 1987 quoted in Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (Sage Publications, 1991), p.1.
[3] Philip Sampson offers a slightly different explanation for preferring ‘postmodernity’ in ‘The Rise of Postmodernity’, Philip Sampson, Vinay Samuel & Chris Sugden eds., Faith & Modernity (Oxford: Regnum Lynx Books, 1994), n.1,p.50.
[4] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) and Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984).
[5] A Huyssen, After the Great Divide: modernism, mass culture, postmodernism (Indiana University Press, 1986) p.181.
[6] From another point of view, a belief in a rational God who created a rational universe has underpinned much of the post-reformation expansion in scientific knowledge. See R Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972).
[7] E.g. David A Hart, Faith in Doubt: non-realism and christian belief (London: Mowbray, 1993).
[8] See Featherstone op.cit. p.7ff and Antoine Compagnon , The 5 Paradoxes of Modernity (New York: Columbia University,1994), p.114ff. Although I noted Virginia Woolf in 1928 in Orlando (Penguin, p.19) compairing the black and whitness of the Elizabethan age to our age: “The withered intricacies and ambiguities of our more gradual and doubtful age were unknown to them.”
[9] Harvey op.cit. p.39.
[10] Patricia Waugh, Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), p.5 quoted in Gene Edward Veith, Guide to Contemporary Culture (Leicester: Crossway Books, 1994) p.45. I suspect that Waugh brings some of her own postmodern mind-set and language to this summary which tends to postmodernise Toynbee.
[11] I Hassan, ‘The culture of postmodernism’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.2(3)(1985),123f. Some of the terms in this chart will be unfamiliar to some readers. A helpful, fun, but well informed and illustrated commentary on all these terms can be found in Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt, Postmodernism for Beginners (Cambridge: Icon, 1995).
[12] Gardner and Rietkerk quoted in Sampson op.cit. p.30.
[13] This is part of Zygmunt Bauman’s argument in Intimations of Postmodernity (London:Routledge, 1992).
[14] After William Gibson’s classic Neuromancer, (London: Harper Collins, 1984, 1993).
[15] Bruce Sterling edited a cyberpunk anthology, Mirrorshades (London: Ace Books, 1986, 1988), which contains a good editorial Preface outlining the history of cyberpunk.
[16] See the illustrated Mark Dery, ed., Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1994)
[17] There are always articles and TV programmes about the global information superhighways, ‘surfing the net’ and so on. E.g. Timothy C Morgan, ‘Cyber Shock: Can the church keep pace with the new information culture?’ Christianity Today Vol.39,No.4(3 April 1995),pp.78-86 and Peter Farrington, ‘Inklings of God on the Internet’ Alpha (May 1995),pp.38-40.
[18] Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture (London: Abacus, 1992). And see William Mahedy & Janet Bernardi A Generation Alone: Xers Making a Place in the World (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP, 1994).
[19] That great ironist Lewis Carroll illustrated the point well:“When I use a word,” said Humpty Dumpty scornfully, “it means what I want it to mean, neither more nor less.”
“My dear old thing,” said the March Hare, “there’s no more to it than that. When you say or write something, you’ve got to reckon that you can’t keep tabs on it. Other people might take what you say quite differently from how you meant it. It’s like setting a bird free. Once it’s gone , it flies where it wants.”
See Michael Ovey, ‘Deconstruction: Gagging the Speaking God?’ Cambridge Papers 2/4(1993) and for a fuller discussion and bibliography on structuralism and deconstructionism see Veith op.cit. ch.3.
[20] Sampson, op.cit. p.36.
[21] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p.117.
[22] Sampson op.cit. p.40.
[23] Partly, this is what Valentine Cunningham discusses in In the Reading Gaol (OUP, 1994).
[24] See Karl-Josef Kuschel Laughter: A Theological Reflection (London: SCM, 1994).
[25] A term that Frederic Jameson uses in op.cit..
[26] A line from a Denis Leary comedy routine. Woody Allen is also full of blank irony.
[27] Sampson, op.cit. p.31.
[28] A phrase used by Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity (London: Polity, 1991).
[29] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, (London: Athlone, 1984). This is an extremely dense book, but perhaps marks the way ahead for postmodern philosophy?
[30] Veith op.cit. p.158.
[31] But see Veith op.cit. ch.9.
[32] Peter Cotterell, Mission and Meaninglessness (London: SPCK, 1990), p.33.
[33] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (London: Penguin, 1991 ), p.37.
[34] See Sampson op.cit. p.51,n.18.
[35] Stephen Toulmin & June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (London: Pelican, 1967) and The Architecture of Matter (London: Pelican, 1965) are still very readable accounts of this.
[36] See Harvey op.cit. Part III.
[37]Jameson op.cit. p.15.
[38] Ibid. p.11.
[39] Harre quoted in Sampson op.cit. p.45.
[40] Philip Elmer-Dewitt, ‘Cyberpunk!’ Time (8 Feb 1993),p.62.
[41] There will be a spate of books on this subject in the coming few years, of which Dave Tomlinson’s, The Post-Evangelical (Triangle, 1995) is one of the first. Jim Packer’s exhortations to “co-belligerence” in North America and the widespread move in British evangelicalism towards a radical self-appraisal of essentials is already paving the way.
[42] Colin Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many (CUP, 1993), p.129.
[43] See also Andrew Walker, Telling the Story (SPCK, 1996)
[44] Douglas Coupland, Life After God (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p.359.
[45] Gunton op.cit.
[46] Mark Seem in the introduction to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, op.cit., p.xxi.
[47] Gunton op.cit. ch.5.
[48] Eccles.3.11.
[49] See for example Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959).
[50] WH Lewis, Letters of CS Lewis (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966), p.289. Letter to Dom Bede Griffiths dated 5/11/59.
[51] Mark Seem in the introduction to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, op.cit., p.xxiii.
[52] William Mahedy & Janet Bernardi, A Generation Alone: Xers Making a Place in the World (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP, 1994)

Select Bibliography

* Represents a good starting place • Worth serious study

Ronald J Allen et al, Theology for Preaching: Authority, Truth and the Knowledge of God in a Postmodern Ethos (Abingdon, 1997).
* Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt, Postmodernism for Beginners (Cambridge: Icon, 1995). An amusing, secular, well-illustrated diversion.
Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).
• Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992). A definitive and very much respected sociological study.
Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Deceiving The Twentieth Century’ The New Statesman (1 Apr 1994),p.24.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
Tom Beaudoin, Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1998). A fascinating analysis of spirituality and church.
Antony Billington, Tony Lane & Max Turner, eds., Mission & Meaning: Essays Presented to Peter Cotterell (Paternoster, 1995).
Harry Blamires, The Post-Christian Mind (London: SPCK, 2001).
John Bowker, Is God a Virus? (London: SPCK, 1995).
Andrew Boyd, Life’s Little Deconstruction Book: Self-Help for the Post-Hip (Penguin, 1999). Lots of repeatable one liners!
• Antoine Compagnon, The 5 Paradoxes of Modernity (NY: Columbia, 1994). An elegant argument describing the fragmentations of postmodernity as consequences of paradoxes in modernity. It concentrates mainly on visual art and architecture.
Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture (Oxford:Blackwell 1992).
Robert Cook, ‘Postmodernism, Pluralism and John Hick’ Themelios Vol.19,No .1,(Oct 1993).
* Douglas Coupland, Generation X: tales for an accelerated culture (London: Abacus, 1992). This novel will give you the flavour of postmodern life.
Douglas Coupland, Life After God (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994). And his more recent novels.
Valentine Cunningham, In the Reading Gaol (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
Mark Dery ed., Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1994).

* Don DeLillo, White Noise (London: Penguin, 1984). DeLillo is increasingly recognised as the best analyst in fiction of contemporary culture.

Don DeLillo, Mao II (London: Penguin, 1992).
Terry Docherty, Postmodernism: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1993).
David S Dockery, The Challenge of Postmodernism: An Evangelical Engagement (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1995).
Terry Eagleton The Idea of Culture (Blackwell, 2000).
Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1992).
Mike Featherstone ed., Theory, Culture and Society Vol.5,Nos.2-3(June 1989).
Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992).
William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Harper Collins, 1984).
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).
Stanley Grenz, Primer on Postmodernism (Eerdmans, 2000)
Colin Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many (CUP, 1993).
Jürgen Habermas ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’ in New German Critique No.22(1981).
*• David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). A thorough analysis.
Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light (London: Routledge Comedia, 1988).
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992)
J Ingleby, ‘Postmodernism: A Laid-Back Pluralism’ Third Way 15/4(1992),p.25.
• Frederic Jameson, Postmodernity: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). Definitive book for postmodern literary theory from a neo-Marxist perspective. Quite difficult. First chapter is the important one. Deeply right at times although, overall, deeply wrong.
* Alan Jamieson, A Churchless Faith (London: SPCK, 2002). A revealing qualitative piece of research on why people leave church.
Paul Lakeland, Postmodernity: Christian Identity in a Fragmented Age (Fortress, 1997).
Scott Lash, Sociology of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1990).
David Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland (Polity Press, 2000). Heavyweight and sociologically chewy with some nice bits about Christianity's role as a cultural resource.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984).
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth 1993).
William Mahedy & Janet Bernardi, A Generation Alone: Xers Making a Place in the World (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP, 1994).
* J Richard Middleton & Brian J Walsh, truth is stranger than it used to be (London: SPCK, 1995).
Leslie Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society (London: SPCK, 1989).
Christopher Noah, World Postmodern Fiction (London: Longmann, 1993).
* Kevin O’Donnell, Postmodernism (Oxford, Lion, 2003)
Michael Ovey, ‘Deconstruction: Gagging the Speaking God?’ Cambridge Papers 2/4(1993).
Gérard Raulet, ‘From Modernity as One-Way Street to Postmodernity as Dead End’ New German Critique No.33(Fall 1984).
J Reader, ‘Theology, Culture and Postmodernity: Response to Graham, Walter & Newbigin’ Modern Churchman 34/5 (1993),p.58.
Mike Riddell, Mark Pierson, Kathy Kirkpatrick, The Prodigal Project (London: SPCK, 2000). This has an intereactive CD-ROM, and explores new patterns of church.
* Philip Sampson, Vinay Samuel & Chris Sugden eds., Faith & Modernity (Oxford: Regnum Lynx Books, 1994). A good collection of essays coming out of a Lausanne Committee of World Evangelization conference held in Uppsala, Sweden in 1993. Sampson’s essay is very helpful.
Philip Sampson, ‘Why Stick to the Script?’, Third Way 19/4(May, 1996), p.21
B Smart, Modern Conditions Postmodern Controversies (London: Routledge, 1992).
• George Steiner, Real Presences (London: Faber, 1989). A profound and ultimately theological overview of Western cultural history putting this century in context.
Dave Tomlinson, The Post-Evangelical (Triangle, 1995).
Kevin Vanhoozer, The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (CUP, 2003)
Gene Edward Veith, Guide to Contemporary Culture (Leicester: Crossway Books, 1994). This is an excellent Christian analysis from someone who knows the literature well.
Andrew Walker, Telling The Story (SPCK, 1996).
* Pete Ward, Liquid Church (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2002). A very provocative book about changing patterns of church.
Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburgh, T& T Clark, 2000).
World Evangelisation Vol.18,No.65, (December 1993).
Transformation Vol.10.No.4, (October/December 1993).
The Way Vol.36.No.3, (July 1996).
* Third Way Vol 19.No.3, (April 1996).
Magazines: Mondo, Wired, Viz & other fanzines.
Films: American Beauty; Blazing Saddles; The Player; Barton Fink; Short Cuts; Reservoir Dogs; Jacob’s Ladder; Something Wild; Mad Max; The Matrix; Orlando; Twelve Monkeys; Trainspotting. Most recent films directed by David Lynch, Peter Greenaway or Robert Altman
See also on a TV near you: MTV, The Simpsons, Friends, Sex in the City, Family Guy, Malcolm in the Middle, Little Britain, Ugly Betty

Appendix 1

Stream & Databites

I have been to MacDonalds in Berlin, London, NY, SFO, Manila, Hong Kong, Paris, Stockholm, Worthing, Johannesburg, Athens, Madrid, Brugge, Toronto… They are PSZs (Personal Security Zones - Toffler) in our turbulent Global Village. There was a time when churches were PSZs. Now they are menacingly unpredictable, even in the Home Counties.

I am a compulsive consumer - you are a consumer - of this lecture - of worship services and articles and sermons and Goods.

Productivity has collapsed into the black hole of consumption.
Tesco, ergo sum - I shop, therefore I am.

I am a compulsive producer. We are trapped in the cash-nexus and bind of consumerism: every time you spend money, you’re propping up systems you loathe; the structural sin that so tightly binds.

I am a target market. Somebody wants to sell me something, somebody who knows my needs, desires and anxieties, and will use this knowledge as a crow bar to alter my behaviour and therefore open my wallet… or am I paranoid?… or cynical… or grateful?

Of all the ‘somethings’ I am supposed to buy, I am to keep buying more of them. So they are obsolete or out of fashion almost as soon as I buy them.

The Global Village - Universal Culture. Driftwood shanty towns, with TVs and satellite dishes. Two billion people can view Baywatch.

The Post is cultural white noise - makes no sense, but it is on TV.

Democracy increasingly makes false promises.
Politicians are more concerned with image than integrity.
So the media, the Image Makers, control the political machine, while claiming they are serving the democratic process.

You must be bored again.

The Post is a Soup of floating cultural fragments - Scientific Revolution 17th Century… Enlightenment 18th Century… Romanticism 19th Century… Modernism 20th Century… Postmodernism 21st Century… Relativity (Einstein) Uncertainty (Heisenberg) Incompleteness (Gödel) Chaos (Mandelbrot). And a backcloth of General Synod reports.

“Fake it ‘till you make it.” We all have to look the part, to consume our images.

Stop Waiting for Godot.

Images are the most ephemeral of commodities, shifting fashions keep us purchasing in an accelerated culture.

Shopping Malls are the temples of creativity and diversity. Tescos that look like churches with clocks on Towers and soaring columns pointing to the Great Retailer in the Sky.
They give meaning. But no comfort.

“People bind themselves into numbered seats and fly across time zones and high cirrus and deep night knowing there is something they have forgotten to do.” Don DeLillo.

Integrate globally. Disintegrate locally.

The Space/Time compression of the last 20 years. Breakfast in London; lunch in New York. (Luggage in Munich.)

Take irony for granted.

Practise one-liners.

This week 70s funk, next retro-punk. And we eat in shiny new 1940s restaurants decorated with expensive memorabilia we threw away in the 1950s.

Premature Nostalgia - do you remember the 90s?

Fragmentation and surfaces, shifting personal identities - these are the essence. Relationships - not depth or permanence - unless you want them…

Participate without belonging

Clubbing, Techno, Garage - Coke, “E” - Drugs are simply states of mind - Coenaesthesis (Emotional Anaesthesia). Altered States of Consciousness. It’s the only way To Be. Or Not To Be. Good Choruses will do the trick. Or a soothing Mass. Or laughing in the Spirit or being Torontoed. Or anything that can unbind our future-shocked and stressed emotions.

“When there is enough out-of-placeness in the world, then nothing is out of place.” Don DeLillo.

Vote anyway.

Virtual Reality merges with reality. “The world looks suspiciously like a 20-channel satellite TV with a madman holding the remote control; before you have time to make sense of the story, the screen beams other images, to be replaced with yet other images, before you begin to know what they are images of; and all comes from nowhere and melts into nowhere again.” Zygmunt Bauman

Control the remote.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” WB Yeats

Humour is serious. Irony rules - Humour is the White Man’s burden.

If you can’t say something serious while laughing at yourself, then you cannot be serious.
The Failure of the Enlightenment Project. Cogito ergo sum, cogito.
The Enlightenment Project was to illumine everything.
It has turned everything into the material and realised that nothing is knowable.
Come in Humanism, your time is up.

“This statement is unprovable” Kurt Gödel

The Xerox Revolution - The Zine Scene - proliferation of small circulation/highly specific publications.

Death of the Importance of the Individual - Ochlocracy - Crowd Rule.
The crowd wear Levis and are thin and are for abortion and against the government.

It’s hard to belong to anything now, unless it’s against something.

The Breakdown of Cultural Coherence - social fragmentation and lack of metanarrative.

Be profoundly superficial.

The church is the plausibility structure of faith.

God is Community.

Everything you know is wrong.

“It’s like this dad. You can either have a house or have a life. I’m having a life.”

Why have the stress and responsibility of a proper job?
I’d rather have time and a McJob.

Deconstructionism is logical positivism ad absurdum.

The good thing about The Post is it takes apart ideologies - communism and churchianity. The bad thing is The Post denies transcendence…

“In the twilight of the gods, men came forth like giants.
In the twilight of the men, all the gods came back again.
But is it dawn or dusk, or just a smoggy day?” Rob Draper

Belief in history is a step of faith, which having taken it, proves reasonable.
Belief in rationality is a step of faith, which having taken it, proves rational.
Faith is risk.
The Holy Spirit is the witness to transcendence and the inspirer of risk.

“When there is the ‘death of God’ in a culture, it becomes increasingly hollowed out, ‘weightless’” Nietzsche.

Truth is relative. That may be true for you, but it is not for me.

Jesus is either mad, bad or who he said he was - so what?

“At least five times the faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. In each of the five cases it was the dog that died.” GK Chesterton

Databites

Dip into Nihilism
Manoeuvre between Pastiche & Mishmash
In panicked Defence of the Sacred - Embrace Fundamentalism
Need What Didn’t Exist
Pretend to be Real
Implicate Yourself in Every Interpretation
Write More about Less
Worship in a Building that Quotes Other Buildings
Take Irony for Granted
Participate without Belonging
Practise One-Liners
Purchase Genuine Imitations
Have Beliefs but don’t Believe
Be as Different from the Joneses as you can Afford to be
Debt-Finance Immediate Gratification
Give me ambiguity… or give me something else…
Cats know how we feel. They don’t give a damn, but they know.
Postmodernity is nascent, or infantile, or convalescent modernism. (Baudrillard)
Lottery - a tax on people who are poor at mathematics
The modern Western culture in which most people over 45 in the UK grew up saw everything as decided by reason
All change is perceived as loss
The future isn’t what it used to be
No persecutor or foe in two thousand years has wreaked such havoc on the church as has modernity
All generalisations are false
Ontology has collapsed into epistemology
Dead at 30; buried at 70 (Bart Simpson)
The media is modern society’s central nervous system
My karma just ran over my dogma
Postmodernists generally regard reason’s ability to organise and systematise as coercive and repressive
The answer to everything is a sort of blurry thing
For most evangelicals God was functionally irrelevant
Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy
Capitalism, the state and the knowledge industry have deeply affected the way the church in the west has expressed the Gospel
If you don’t watch the violence, how will you get desensitized?
We have tried to use the forces of modernization to serve us, but unwittingly we ourselves have been shaped by them
Veni, vidi, velcro. I came, I saw, I stuck around
The Post is the death of the individual and the birth of neo-tribalism
Postmodernity makes evangelism easier yet makes discipleship harder
Postmoderns are rightly suspicious of postmodernity
Ozmosis: the inability of one’s job to live up to one’s self-image
Time is an illusion. Lunch-time doubly so
Look closer see less
The Post is the awareness of how much faith you need to believe that anything is real
We are born naked, wet and hungry. Things go downhill from there
Postmodernity is nothing to be proud of. It is a cultural virus, like AIDS. You catch it by watching TV.
A bird in the hand is safer than one in an aircraft engine
Data in, rules out. The future is looking increasingly fuzzy
Make it idiot-proof and someone will make a better idiot
A bishop never more resembles Jesus Christ than when his mouth is closed
(St Ignatius of Antioch, AD 37-107)
Things and meanings have imploded. All boundaries and distinctions have become blurred
A curved line is the loveliest distance between two points
(Mae West)
You are unique, just like everyone else
Very funny Scotty, now beam down my clothes
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana
Things go right gradually; they go wrong all at once
Jesus! Protect me from your followers
The ultimate factor in the church’s engagement with postmodernity is the church’s engagement with God
Modernity’s replacement of ‘top down’ God-centred living with ‘bottom up’ human-centred living
Dogs come when called; cats take a message and get back to you later
Christianity survived for many people by retreating to the inward
How much uncertainty can a person take?
The Post hurts