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Editorial:
Doing what it says on the tin Comment:
Stat crux dum volvitur orbis p.s. Seeing red and feeling blue The
elusiveness of trust on the ethnic frontier Beliefs,
values and spirituality Citizenship Creating
Community Interview
with Jose & Marizete Lara: Laboratory for mission Transforming
Culture That's
not fair! Review:
A Heart to Listen Review:
How to Detox your Spiritual Life in 40 Days Review:
Praying in Exile |
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Beliefs, values and spirituality I WANT TO EXPLORE what I think of as the two great opponents of Christian beliefs, values and spirituality that face us today. It seems to me that authentic Christian experience always walks a tightrope between the secular syndrome and the idolatry impulse. Here in Northern Ireland, I believe the preoccupations with political order and the seductions of ethnic identity have obscured the degree to which these two forces have bitten into the fabric of our society. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche saw himself as the destroyer of idols as he addressed the task of unmasking morality and exposing it as nothing more than a human impulse to exercise power over others. We may find the vehemence of Nietzsche’s language offensive but his critique of Christianity powerfully reminds us that religion can be a work of the flesh. If we are serious about Christian beliefs, values and spirituality, I believe we will have to take seriously the challenge that Nietzsche inaugurated. The Secular
Syndrome Now this is a profoundly secularising move, and one that is widespread today. Let me mention two ways in which this mood surfaces: first, in science and, second, in society. The first I call reductionism, the second, preferentialism. When Nietzsche described Christian faith as a neurosis, a sort of psychological disorder, he anticipated what Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, would say more than a century later when he described faith as ‘a kind of mental illness’.1 Fundamentally, this is the idea that everything about us – from love for our children to personal loyalty to a feeling of wonder or a sense of God’s presence – is just the activity of our genes or some kind of neural twitching or electrical flickering. This view is gaining currency these days as science progressively breaks down the distinction between human and machine, and maps the very material substance of life. The suspicion is widespread that everything about us – including our beliefs, values, and inclinations – is somehow or other packed into bits of DNA. We are just organised chunks of recycled star stuff and nothing more. Where this view does not prevail, another equally sinister – though more socially fashionable – idea has taken hold. This is the notion that moral values and principles are simply a matter of personal preference, there is nothing compelling about them, at least in any general sense. You do your thing and I’ll do mine. So as long as you are true to yourself, as long as you get in touch with your feelings, as long as you feel good – no problem. This radical individualism – often presented in the guise of human rights – afflicts modern society. It mistakenly supposes that moral principles and ethical virtues are mere matters of opinion, of personal choice, of individual taste. We pick and choose our morality, just like we pick and choose our after-shave or hairstyle. It’s just a question of which flavour you prefer. Religion and morality boil down to taste or disposition. What has tended to reinforce this trend is a whole series of social changes that are often sloppily referred to as ‘postmodernism’. People used to see themselves as part of a larger order locked into a specific place, role and station in life. But these have all broken down or been discredited. People now live out their lives in a variety of fragmented spaces, and this has led to an absorption with the self and personal identity. Identities are no longer fixed or rooted; rather, they are dispersed. We are told that answering the question ‘Who am I?’ is just the same as asking ‘What space am I occupying at the moment, and which persona am I adopting?’ So it is no surprise that ours has been characterised as the ‘me generation’. This has led directly to moral relativism and the fragmentation of the self. Human beings see themselves less and less as bound to fellow citizens in common projects and allegiances, instead they are social atoms. This atomization is most clearly marked in our use of language. We all resort to different linguistic codes, different modes of expression, depending on the space we currently occupy – home, church, work, sports field and so on. In these arenas, we are told, we are really different people, and it is for this reason that Frederic Jameson uses the metaphor of schizophrenia to capture the modern spirit of the self.2 These assaults on Christian morality are clear enough. But we ought not to leave the challenge there. It seems to me that Nietzsche is on to something profound when he begins to uncover what really goes on behind religious language. Here we need to sit up and listen. For we indeed have an inclination to deceive ourselves into thinking that we are being virtuous when really we are trying to look good, or to impress somebody else, or to exercise power over somebody, or simply engaging in spiritual one-upmanship. Neal Plantinga calls this species of thing self-swindling. Evil, he says, does its best to look good.3 Evil spends a lot on make-up. In order to survive, vices have to masquerade as virtues: lust pretends it is love, sadism disguises itself as military discipline, envy poses as righteous indignation, domestic tyranny presents itself as parental concern. To this we might surely add many more: talk of God’s blessing can become a cover for material greed, offering help to a colleague might be nothing more than a subtle means of undermining their confidence, concern for doctrinal purity might be just a way of dressing up deep-seated prejudice, hatred can pose as standing up against falling standards. Because evil masquerades as good, because vice poses as virtue, because pride disguises itself as piety, we’ve got to be on the alert. Lewis Smedes is surely on the mark when he notes, ‘First we deceive ourselves, and then we convince ourselves that we are not deceiving ourselves.’4 It’s a common practice. Nazi leaders could do unspeakable things to other people by telling themselves that their actions were in the best interests of society. Parents who batter their children can convince themselves that it’s really in the kids’ best interests. Activists for justice can commit outrages against others. Haven’t orthodox believers torched heretics? When you dig below the surface of those who are most enthusiastic for capital punishment, for example, it is usually easy to detect a message like, ‘Let the scum fry.’ Let’s face it, people bring dirty weapons to holy wars. So, when Nietzsche tells us that moral language is only a mask for more sinister things, we’ve got to honestly ask ourselves if he’s right. And when he is, as Westphal insists, Nietzsche turns out to be one of the great secular theologians of original sin. Why? Because in exposing self-deception, he is revealing to us the real depths of human fallenness. Of course, this doesn’t mean Christian faith is never anything other than the lust for power dressed up in Sunday gear. It doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as genuine love of God or neighbour. But it does mean that every act of piety is human – all too human, and that when we look closely enough at it we just might find it serving the very sins it is meant to strangle. Piety, morality, spirituality – these are not exempt from scrutiny just because they go on in church. Sin doesn’t stop and turn away at the church door. When Heaven sorts out sheep and goats, virtue and vice, its knife slices through human society at an unexpected angle. The Idolatry
Impulse We’ve got idols thick on the ground: sleek cars, sure-shot diet formulas, mobile telephones, sex kittens, gilt-edged mutual funds, the lust for new culinary delights. The crass materialism of these is obvious enough. But the trouble with idols is that they are usually things that are not just all right in themselves, but actually good. Let me give a few examples. Ours is a profoundly health-conscious world. The body is big business these days and is adored, pampered, petted, reverenced, venerated. It’s an idol worshipped in the suburbs, that modern paradise where cleanliness, prosperity, safe suntans and brimming animal vigour are what life is all about. For many Christians the mirror is their only daily shrine. Ours is also a sex-obsessed society. The goddess of sexuality has many worshippers. Some years ago Theodore Roszak presented a telling critique of this modern sexual revolution, ‘In the affluent society, we have sex and sex galore...[This Playboy] sexuality is, ideally, casual, frolicsome, and vastly promiscuous. It is the anonymous sex of the harem. It creates no binding loyalties, no personal attachments... Finally, as a neat little dividend, the ideal of the swinging life... gives us a conception of femininity which is indistinguishable from social idiocy. The woman becomes a mere playmate, a submissive bunny, a mindless decoration.’5 This was written thirty years ago but we can see just how prophetic its author was – things have come a long way since then. I don’t think the church has remained unaffected. Ours is also a profoundly home-dominated age. On one level, of course, the home is under profound attack these days. Many forces are disrupting an institution that under-girds much of the stability of social life. But it has become an idol. Take a look at the magazines of the glossy, country, ideal-home variety. There’s a market for them somewhere, for they are the temples of the middle-class. What is more in many of our modern western cities, the middle classes have become so obsessed with preserving their domestic shrines that they literally fence off their neighbourhoods from other social groups. It’s not just in the material realm that we find home-worship. We find it in the tendency to pour all our thought and love and time into our own family relationships. I’ve heard it said that the way to be sure of selling a product is to convince people that their family will suffer without it. When people tell us that the home is a haven in a heartless world, we can be pretty sure that they are substituting personal cosiness away from the world for Christian engagement with it. The body and health, sexuality, the home and family – these are all good gifts from God. But they can too easily become idols from which we need to be liberated. But further, amongst churchgoers we can find the most insidious idol of all – religion itself. Of course we have a whole herd of new spiritualities baying for our loyalty today: New Age hocus pocus, eco-magic, what’s called the new Paganism, civic religion, ethnic obsessions, manic holy nationalisms of one stripe or another. The forms of Christian spirituality, feelings of devotion, abandonment in worship, can all be mistaken for signs of grace. The great American theologian and philosopher Jonathan Edwards grasped the profound difference between enjoying religion and loving God. It’s like the difference between reading romantic novels and being in love. To mistake sentimental spirituality for encounter with God is to be engaged in idolatry. Now I don’t know what your idol is. For some of us, it might be mundane, like money, or fast cars, or Humphrey Bogart, or a golf handicap, or 1952 die-cast model Fords. Maybe it’s more grandiose like culture, or haute cuisine, or Russian literature. Maybe it’s just work. Maybe it’s even church life or experiments in spirituality. Maybe it’s more subtle, like projecting an image of Christian zeal, or enjoying a sense of spiritual superiority, or the self-conscious piety that is really furtive self-glory. Whatever it is, it needs to be unmasked, brought out from behind sanctified language and exposed for what it is. And then, we can really begin the job of personal liberation. Facing in
Two Directions The answer, at least in part, is to get back to a radical agenda. To be radical, of course, means going to the roots, getting to the bottom of things. And to be radical today will mean getting back to basics. We need to face in two directions. We must engage with the future but in order to do this with integrity we have to dialogue with the past. This, of course, is deeply unfashionable. Modern society, as Tom Oden once put it, is ‘xenophobic toward [the] past... lt adores today, worships tomorrow, disavows yesterday, and loathes antiquity.’6 My own sense is that we need to retrieve Christian roots, or – to put it another way – to recover tradition. Now don’t misunderstand me, I’m not calling for traditionalism. Jaroslav Pelikan’s distinction is valuable here. Traditionalism, he says, is the dead faith of the living; tradition is the living faith of the dead.7 The idea is that if we are to confront modern society, if we are to speak to it, if we are to live authentically in it as Christians, then we need to call upon the entire resources of our Christian heritage. We need to engage in a massive retrieval. Many of us, I suspect, know what team is at the top of the Premier League, many could tell me what Britney Spears’ latest song is and what’s been happening in recent episodes of ER. It’s important to be in touch with our culture. But, suppose I asked you. What is the thrust of the book of Amos? How is it different from Ezekiel? What is the main difference between the First and Second letters of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians? How did Augustine transpose classical culture into a new Christian culture? How did Jonathan Edwards transform Christian thinking in America? What was distinctive about Hudson Taylor’s missionary endeavours? How would we do? We’re in touch with contemporary culture. Are we in touch with our Christian heritage? I don’t think we are, but I think we have to be. We have to attend seriously to the catechising of the Church in our own time. We owe Church members something more than pop psychology and alterations of consciousness by music or chemistry. We need to listen to Paul speaking to the Romans, to Cyprian on martyrdom, to Wesley writing journal entries at the end of interminable days on horseback. Because without a strong sense of the biblical tradition, we will easily mistake woosy sentimentality, super-spiritual mush and evangelical muzak for transcendental encounter with God. If we aren’t rooted in biblical values, we will confuse ‘getting in touch with my feelings’ with appreciating that our identity is to be found in our relationship with God. To achieve this is to be genuinely radical. According to Tom Oden, ‘We have blithely proceeded on the skewed assumption’ that in Christian things, ‘just as in electric toothbrushes or automobile exhaust systems – new is good, newer is better, and newest is best.’8 It seems to me that the great danger in not facing in both directions is that Christians will be so mesmerised by modernity’s seductions, its shallow sentimentality and its secular spiritualities, that the faith will be reduced to mere entertainment. Christian worship will be reduced to the worst of tele-evangelism. When that happens, as Neil Postman puts it, ‘everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and, above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence.’ In this environment, a flashy entertainment-preacher, or a sleek worship leader, are tops; and ‘God comes out as second banana.’9 Is it mistaken to suppose that an unbeliever, having accidentally stumbled into a church service, might walk away thinking, ‘Well now, I must say I got it wrong. I thought Christianity had a dark side. I thought it was about confession, self-denial, sin, about taking up the cross, about being willing to lose one’s life for the sake of Jesus Christ. But now I see that I had the wrong end of the stick. Christianity isn’t about struggling to preserve the truth; it’s not about discipline or mortifying the flesh. It’s mostly about celebration, and fun, and personal growth, and how to boost my self-esteem. It’s about entertainment. But, to be honest, it doesn’t do it half as well as The Fly, The Boom-Boom Room, or Paradise Lost.’ Whether this diagnosis is fanciful or perceptive, I leave for you to judge. NOTES This article is an edited version of ‘Beliefs Values and Spirituality,’ a Patmos Paper published by the Centre for Contemporary Christianity from a paper given at the conference ‘On The Edge: A Radical Agenda for a New Era’ on Wednesday 19th January 2000 in Belfast. The full Patmos Paper can be found here: www.contemporarychristianity.org/resources DAVID LIVINGSTONE is Professor of Geography and Intelectual History a the Queen’s University of Belfast. |
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