The typical function of the Blogging medium is to promote a sort of recency bias, ordering things chronologically rather than logically. This is ok. I guess. But, the nature of, say, a sermon series presented in ‘chapters’ is that each chapter builds upon the previous. So. For completeness, here is a Table of Contents. There was a logic shaping the movement from chapter to chapter — it developed along the lines of Genesis 1 to 3, unpacking things we learn about our humanity in its ‘ideal’ setting and how that all fell apart, and Genesis to Revelation, while also exploring ways the ‘disintegrating’ forces of our world and ‘integrating’ practices grounded in church traditions aligned with these bits of the story. Each talk also explored the way Jesus is presented as a new Adam and a solution or fulfilment of our ‘origin story’ (the series also drew on the work I’d done in Genesis, Matthew, and Revelation that I’ve previously posted as articles here — although I didn’t finish posting up the Matthew series as I stopped posting things for a bit).
I’m also about to start posting up the next ‘book’ — think of this as a sort of trilogy I guess, where each integrates. The next series (preached a couple of years after Being Human) was an exploration of a different way of viewing and participating in reality called Before The Throne, and the third installment was a series called Inhabiting which was about cultivating practices to live life as those simultaneously located on earth, and united by the Spirit, to Jesus so that we live before the throne of God. I had planned to write some other things about church and life and formation — and I still will, but recent events online have made me want to build out a system of thinking that is reflective and contemplative and principled — cold takes ultimately — from which I can then process other phenomenon more carefully.
Being Human was an attempt to sketch out an anthropology grounded in the story of the Bible — incorporating creation, fall, our redemption and re-creation in Jesus and union with God’s life by the Spirit, and our telos — towards new creation. It was an attempt to recognise tensions and paradoxes — the relationship between our hearts and what we point our hearts to in worship and the external systems (and beings) who might work to shape our hearts in ways that disintegrate us.
I believe that any truly theological anthropology begins with the nature of God, not our own nature. So that’s where we began. Anyway. Here we go.
Chapter One — The Trinity — The universe is created by a God who makes himself known in relationship. Modern conceptions of humanity that do not start with a God who is love end with a limited picture of human existence.
Chapter Two — Connected Individuals — We are individuals, and, exist in relationships and community with one another — while being created for communion with God.
Chapter Three — Made to be Makers — To be made in God’s image is to be made with imaginations; as those who make tools and shape the world and tell stories; this capacity to make can see us ‘cultivate’ life in the world, or create idols that bring death.
Chapter Four — Life in the Cloud (Is Transhumanism the Answer) — We are made not just with bodies, but as bodies — life as humans, forever, involves our bodies — visions of the future that involve harp playing cloudy Spirits, or digitised consciousness pull us away from what it means to be human.
Chapter Five — Sense and Sensuality — We are made with bodies that have desires and emotions wired in to our reaction to beauty and goodness. This desire — sexual or otherwise — is created for us as image bearers who are made for intimate relationship with God and one another, but can also go haywire when we dehumanise or objectify others or ourselves.
Chapter Six — A world of (im)pure imagey-nations — We are made with eyes that recognise beauty, and the capacity to picture realities in our head and work towards those. Where we set our eyes and hearts and imaginations will shape the way we use our bodies. Where we look for life matters.
Chapter Seven — The Jig is up. Habitats shape habits — As embodied humans we are placed in spaces. We shape our spaces (or they are built by others) and our habitats shape our habits, which shape our hearts. Many spaces (and tools) in our world have been created to make us consumers and addicts using techniques of ‘scripted disorientation’.
Chapter Eight — Being true-ly human in an age of deception — There are forces — algorithms, agendas, and propagandists, at work doing the work of the deceiving serpent who said ‘did God truly say’, in order to lead us to destruction. Being truely human means learning to recognise and speak and live by truth.
Chapter Nine — What’s the story: mourning glory? — Life this side of Eden involves longing to get back, but living in a world of violence and destruction as people try to carve out Edens for ourselves. In the modern west, much like in Babylon, this looks like the ‘myth of redemptive violence’ in the presence of a system some call the ‘Military Industrial Complex’. We need a better story to guide us back towards Eden.
Chapter Ten — On mean(ing)s and end(ing)s — We can work out how we should live now by knowing how the story ends; the purpose or ‘telos’ of our humanity is connected not just to our beginnings, but to the end of the world (and the beginning of a new world through Jesus). Just as Jesus is the ‘telos’ of the story of the Bible — and is the ‘telos’ of history, becoming like Jesus as those united to him is the ‘telos’ of our humanity.
This is an adaptation of the tenth talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, unfortunately, due to a technical error, there was no video for this week.
It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter.And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.
We have put ourselves in various moments in time this series—imagining the past, and the future. This time round I want to take you all the way to the end.
How is the world going to end?
Now, of course, as Christians, we have an ending described for us in the book of Revelation. Jesus is coming; he will reward his people with life with him and the tree of life (Revelation 22:12–14). But I am wondering how much difference that ending makes in how we think about being human—and how you live.
What difference would it make to your life without that ending? If you believed every part of the Christian story to be true but there was nothing about the future—about what happens after death or at the end of the world—how would you live? If you knew God revealed himself and his character in the crucifixion, but we had no resurrection or return, would you live differently today?
You might be here this morning still not convinced about the whole Christian story. This might actually be where you are at. I am going to suggest this end makes all the difference—that it is the end of the world’s story and the human story as we know it—and this is meant to shape how we understand being human.
And just for a moment I am going to try to put us in the minds of people who do not buy that ending, using Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, where in book two there is a time travel service that will take you to the restaurant at the end of the universe, so you can sit and watch the world end with a ‘Gnab gib’ — the opposite of a big bang — and go back to your life knowing that all that comes after death and after history ends is the void; oblivion. The point of this book series is to offer a deliberate guidebook to a technological world without God. He creates a galaxy to show how if life in time and space is all there is, the hunt for meaning is meaningless. It is not “42;” it turns out that is the answer to the wrong question—and the whole point of the books is pointlessness. It is to stop people looking for meaning, so that we are not crushed when we find out there is none. There is this device, a Total Perspective Vortex in the books, that shows you as a tiny dot in an infinite universe, and it crushes anyone who thinks there should be a meaning in life or the world—anyone not totally self-centred. You are better off not looking.
The ideas of the end of the world and the purpose of our lives in it are deeply integrated.
When we see the world ending with the void—or life ending with death—and no God in the picture, we are left figuring out what our own life is for; how we should use it. I reckon most of our neighbours reckon we are facing the void, or just adopting the “she’ll be right, mate” idea that everything is going to pan out. And so life in the modern, disenchanted world ends up being the expressive individualism we have talked about, where you are responsible for making your own purpose, even if that comes from connecting yourself to some bigger agenda. Adams ends up being a prophet for this disenchanted world.
In theology land the way we talk about the end of the world is with the word eschatology—it is from the Greek word for last. And the way we talk about the purpose of human life—the ends, like in “the ends justify the means”—is the Greek word telos, which means something like living towards the fulfilment of a purpose. If you are a Presbyterian and I say “the chief end of man is…” you will say “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” That “chief end”—that is a telos. It is the built-in purpose that guides our actions.
That guy Alisdair MacIntyre, who says we are story-telling animals who “need to know what story we are living in to know how we should live, as we saw last chapter “can only answer the question ‘what am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”; he also reckons we have been left feeling like life is meaningless because we have lost a sense that our lives are headed towards a telos. This ‘end’ or purpose for our lives came from understanding our lives as living in a story that came from beyond ourselves, that was pointed somewhere beyond ourselves, but life facing the void, where we are left trying to make meaning and find a purpose from within ourselves—maybe, like the author of Ecclesiastes suggests—that sort of life is meaningless, if it just ends in death.
“When someone complains that his or her life is meaningless, he or she is often and perhaps characteristically complaining that the narrative of their life has become unintelligible to them, that it lacks any point, any movement towards a climax or a telos.”
— Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
The Christian story suggests life is not meaningless, that it has a telos. We might be inclined just to look back to our origin story, to Eden, to figure out what we are made for—and we will do that—but we have also got to look to the end of the story to find our ends. So we are going to try to hold this tension—these furious opposites—and maybe see how the Bible holds it for us, because when we integrate our lives with God’s story, its beginning and its ending, we find our telos; we find life; we find what it means to be truly human.
Back in Genesis we saw how the image of God is not just a static thing in us (Genesis 1:26); it is not just a noun that describes us; it is a verb we are made to be; a vocation. It has a telos built in—to be truly human is to rule his world, representing his rule, his kingdom.
This idea is built from what images of gods were in the ancient world, and off the work of scholars like John Walton who suggest what it meant to be something in the ancient world was not just to have material qualities, it was to belong in a system, with a function; it was to have a telos.
“People in the ancient world believed that something existed not by virtue of its material properties, but by virtue of its having a function in an ordered system.”
— John Walton
But not only is the image of God not just a static thing in us, it is not a static thing only defined in Genesis; our understanding of what it means to bear God’s image, this function, develops with the story of the Bible. We do not just look back; we work out what it looks like as we see characters breaking it; it is frustrated as people sin—falling from this function—and are exiled from God’s presence. And we see it restored, and developed, as God creates a priestly people, Israel, to represent him in the world, and then kings who are meant to be representative rulers of his image-bearing people.
And so we come to Psalm 8—which we looked at lots in our Genesis series—where we are told it is a Psalm of David; where we are told humans have been crowned with glory and honour (Psalm 8:4–5). That God made us rulers over the work of his hands; there is a Genesis 1 reference happening here (Psalm 8:6).
Now, we have this tendency to democratise the Psalms, to jump to making this about us—there are just a couple of steps I think we need to take before we do that. We can also democratise it by looking back to Genesis, but we should be careful here too.
Now, I have quoted stacks of scholars this series, and they can feel distant and overwhelming. So today I am quoting a biblical scholar who is the opposite of distant. In this article by Doug Green, our Old Testament scholar in residence (well, not quite — note for readers, Doug is an elder in our church), Doug invites us to consider that with this Psalm of David, which could be a Psalm about David, we are meant to imagine David wearing a crown like the first readers would. So these words are not so much about all humans, but the dignity and worth and glory and honour of true humanity: humans living and ruling in a way that represents God, which is Israel’s role in the world, and David’s role in Israel as the true human.
“Psalm 8 is less interested in the dignity and worth of humanity in general, and more concerned with the dignity and worth, the glory and honour, of the true humanity, Israel, and the true human, David (and his descendants).”
Doug reckons the Genesis creation story works to teach Israel what true humanity looks like; how to live as replacement Adams—humans—after Adam and Eve’s failure. Israel is a new humanity, but more than that Israel’s Davidic king is presented as an image-bearing ruler.
“But this story is a background for the real focus of the Old Testament: Israel’s role as the replacement for the First Humanity of Genesis 1, and David’s role as the replacement for the First Human (Adam) described in Genesis 2 and 3.”
— Doug Green
This king will either lead people to life with God, or death and exile. And this Psalm is about someone—it could be a son of Adam—crowned with glory and honour, which is, as Doug points out, royal language.
“The Davidic king was thought to be a second Adam, Adam reborn, as it were… True Man is crowned—can you hear the royal language?—with God’s glory and honour!”
— Doug Green
Doug reckons as we read this Psalm knowing David’s failures we are meant to read it eschatologically—wondering where in the future we will meet a true human, a divine image bearer. Someone who fulfils the purpose, the telos, humans are made for.
“But once I interpret this psalm in connection with Israel and especially Israel’s king, I am now bent in an eschatological direction. The stories of Israel and David are covenantal stories and therefore stories with a telos, or destiny.”
— Doug Green
Our idea of an image bearer gets developed in contrast with the failures of would-be image bearers as we keep waiting for a true human to turn up at the climax of history.
“The primary thrust of Psalm 8 is not creational and static (what all humans are in Adam) but re-creational and eschatological (what Israel and ‘David’ will become at the climax of history).”
— Doug Green
The writer of Hebrews reads it this way too; when they quote this Psalm (Hebrews 2:6, Psalm 8:4), they say, you know we do not see this everywhere, it is not the general pattern for human life. But we do see it in Jesus, the fulfilment of this Psalm; a true image-bearing human crowned with glory and honour, because he suffered death—that is the whole cross-shaped kingdom thing from last week.
“But we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honour because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”
— Hebrews 2:9
He is the Son of David, the Son of Adam, the true human image bearer, who does not fall to the powers. And he brings many sons and daughters—many true humans—with him to our glorious telos; to being able to function as those who represent God (Hebrews 2:10). The telos, the purpose of humanity, is to reflect—to radiate—God’s glory. Hebrews calls Jesus the pioneer of our salvation, made perfect—these are significant words. The word here for pioneer could be translated author in your Bible; it is this word archegos—it means first, or model, or archetype. And this word perfect—it is the word teleiosai—it is the word for fulfilling your telos; being made complete according to your purpose. Jesus is the model telos-fulfilling human, the true human, through his suffering and his resurrection, through representing God’s glory.
Hebrews will come back to these same two words when it talks about how we should live; how we should run our race towards an end, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter (Hebrews 12:1), the model and telos-fulfiller, the true human, the new David, the new Adam, who because of the joy set before him—not because the cross revealed God’s character, but because of the glory to follow—endured the cross, and then sat down at the right hand of God, crowned and glorified.
These words come up a few more times in the New Testament. John uses these same words in our passage in Revelation, where Jesus does not just say he is the first and last and beginning and end (Revelation 22:13), but arche—the model—and the telos—the fulfilment (Revelation 22:14). And the last in verse 13 is actually eschatos; he is the fulfilment of the human—our telos—and the eschatological human who brings the new creation. He is the one the Scriptures have been waiting for since Adam.
We covered 1 Corinthians 15 earlier in the series—where Paul says the first man Adam was a living, breathing image of God, and Jesus is the last Adam, literally the eschatological Adam, who brings God’s Spirit (1 Corinthians 15:45). Those who are united to Adam, that old image, die, disintegrating into dust. But those who see the fulfilment of the image in Jesus, seeing his true humanity, those belong to him as the new David, the king—we will follow him into his glorified life, bearing his image (1 Corinthians 15:49). When we are united to Jesus, his story becomes ours—we live under his rule, waiting for our new life to be made whole; for the Spirit working to produce fruit in our mortal bodies to be matched with spiritual, immortal bodies, waiting for the defeat of the last enemy, literally the eschatological enemy: death (1 Corinthians 15:24–26). This will happen when Jesus returns to make all things new.
Living in this story—with this ending and telos—shifting from the old Adam to the new, is how we become truly human, images of God. It is how we share in his glory, which is what Paul is on about in Romans 8 (Romans 8:16–17). Our becoming truly human as we receive the Spirit and are re-created and liberated, in a way that gives our life meaning, even when we suffer.
The Spirit, Paul says, makes us heirs of God, his children, his image-bearing people who will share in the glory of Jesus. We become truly human as our telos becomes to become like Jesus, and our future is secured. And this gives meaning to our sufferings now, both as we take up our cross, following Jesus’s example (Romans 8:18–19). Suffering is not an end in itself; it is not our telos; our destiny. We might hear it said that “to be human is to suffer well,” to bear the weight of being. But to be truly human is to suffer with the hope of glory; that is our new destiny. Our suffering—whatever it is, whether it is the cost of curse, or what we experience as we follow our crucified king—is not our purpose or destiny. It is incomparably small compared to the glory that is ours as we become truly human through Jesus.
Our lives are shaped by a new image of the fulfilled human life where death leads to resurrection, and a new destiny that is not just for us, but for the world. Creation itself joins in the expectation of liberation from bondage to decay, as it is brought into the freedom and glory we are brought into (Romans 8:20–21). Just like creation itself is anticipating liberation, we live hoping for the redemption of our bodies. We live lives shaped by hope, knowing that God is working for our good, that he has called us according to his purpose—that is actually a different word to telos—that we have been chosen to be conformed to the image of his Son, to become truly human, so that Jesus might be the first of many brothers and sisters, bringing us to glory as we are conformed into his image (Romans 8:23–24, 28–29). This is the trajectory we are now on—as chosen and justified people with failures forgiven, one where we are re-created as true humans and glorified (Romans 8:30). So that Jesus’s present and future becomes ours, so in him we are more than conquerors, people who cannot be destroyed by death, or demons, or the present or future, or the powers that we have seen at work in the world. Nothing will be able to separate us from Jesus, from God’s love, from being truly human (Romans 8:37–39). Because, as Doug puts it:
“It is only as we are united to Christ and indwelt by his Spirit that we humans can claim to be bearers of the divine image, crowned with glory and honour.”
— Doug Green
Now—we are on the home stretch in this series. And here are our take-homes for today, and for the series. Being truly human means living lives integrated with God’s story. This story gives us, and the world, a telos—to be an image bearer is not simply to suffer, even as we take up our cross—it is to reflect God’s glory, to glorify God and enjoy him forever you might say. And we see this telos fulfilled in the end of our story. The Bible’s story about humanity, this story tells us who we were made to be, and what our destiny is, and invites us to be truly human. This ends, and this ending give us meaning, and the means we should employ as we become characters in God’s story.
We are not hitchhikers in the galaxy, facing oblivion at the restaurant at the end of the universe. In Jesus we are sealed, and seated at the banquet at the end of the universe, and it lasts forever. We are not insignificant, finite nothings, just made to suffer and die, but immortal and glorious and loved by God.
C.S. Lewis talks about this in his sermon The Weight of Glory. He reckons we are too quick to embrace self-denial and suffering as ends, as though that is our purpose, when we are actually made to follow Jesus into glory and to have our desires satisfied.
“The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire.”
— Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Lewis says we need to live knowing we are not small and insignificant, but that we will outlast anything earthly. Nations, culture, art — those things that seem big and significant are tiny compared to our glorious future.
“Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit…”
— Lewis
This means it is actually other people — those with God’s Spirit — immortals — who are truly significant. We should see ourselves this way, as gloriously beloved by God, and it should change the way we see others. This capacity is in every human, and already at work in those gloriously united with Jesus.
He says that other than when we recognise Jesus in the sacrament — which is what’s happening, in his theological frame, during communion — other than the presence of Jesus in us, your neighbour is the holiest object in your life, holy in the same way as Jesus because Jesus, the glorifier and the glorified, the archetype and the telos, is hidden in them.
“Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If they are your Christian neighbour they are holy in almost the same way, for in them also Christ the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.”
Lewis, The Weight of Glory
But what difference does all this talk of glory make? I reckon we can be a little obsessed with still seeing ourselves as sinners — and we are — but not as those being re-created and liberated by the Spirit — which we are.
Killing our sin — what gets called mortification — is part of our transformation, but we could do more to remind ourselves that this is who we are in Jesus; holy and being made glorious and being transformed by God’s Spirit in us. We might see our new life not just as putting sin to death, but also cultivating new life, in what gets called vivification. You — if you belong to Jesus — are no longer a slave to the flesh; no longer the old Adam. You are the new Adam, and God’s Spirit is at work in you conforming you to the image of Jesus, revealing God’s glory in your life. That’s your telos, and where your story is going.
And this means our lives can be marked by hope — not just in the face of death, but hope about the future that we enact in our life now. We can see our longings — our desires — as parts of us pulling us towards our end goal.
Both C.S. Lewis and his friend Tolkien had this hope in ways that made their stories remarkably different to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That was disenchanted science fiction about purposeless life in a material universe that ends in the void, while Lewis and Tolkien wrote fantasy set in enchanted worlds, shot through with longing for glory. Tolkien talks about how our longings are a product of life exiled from Eden, and his stories are about finding the answer to these longings.
“Certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature… is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile’.”
— Tolkien
Lewis talks about passing beyond the natural world into the glorious splendour where we will eat from the tree of life — straight out of Revelation:
“We are summoned to pass through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects. And in there, in beyond Nature, we shall eat of the tree of life.”
— Lewis
This is an image he evokes at the end of The Chronicles of Narnia, where the characters enter a new eternal story:
“All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
C.S Lewis, The Last Battle
As they go further up and further in into a garden paradise:
“Further up and further in… So all of them passed in through the golden gates, into the delicious smell that blew towards them out of that garden and into the cool mixture of sunlight and shadow under the trees…”
C.S Lewis, The Last Battle
Tolkien has Frodo and the Elves sailing to a land in the west featuring white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise. And in his brilliant short story Leaf by Niggle, he describes Niggle — a painter — finding life in the garden paradise of his painting coming to life, as he goes further and further upwards towards the mountains:
“He was going to… look at a wider sky, and walk ever further and further towards the Mountains, always uphill.”
— Tolkien, Leaf By Niggle
Both Tolkien and Lewis had more than an inkling. They understood how the end of our story should shape our desires, and their stories — like their lives — were attempts to evoke these desires in us, to pull us further up and further in. We would do well to soak our imagination in enchanted stories of hope, because this is our story.
And cultivating the hope of glory has to shape how we live as a hopeful witness to those following the old Adam towards a destiny of dust and death. Some people reckon thinking eschatologically runs the risk of having us so set on heaven we are no use on earth, but the theologian Stanley Hauerwas reckons how we see the end of the world — eschatology — is the basis for Jesus’ ethical teaching, as he calls us to our telos; our re-created purpose.
“…we mainline Protestants have charged eschatological thinking with being ‘other worldly,’ ‘escapist,’ ‘pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by’ thinking… the biblical evidence suggests that eschatology is the very basis for Jesus’ ethical teaching.”
— Stanley Hauerwas
Hauerwas says Christian ethics — how we live — is built on Jesus being the eschatological Adam, the new David, who launches God’s kingdom in the world now, and that the Sermon on the Mount describes the end of the world as it was — the world of Adam and Satan, that ends with his crucifixion and resurrection — and a new way of life, the ends we should live towards.
“There is no way to remove the eschatology of Christian ethics. We have learned that Jesus’ teaching was not first focused on his own status but on the proclamation of the inbreaking kingdom of God… In the Sermon [on the Mount] we see the end of history, an ending made most explicit and visible in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus… The question, in regard to the end, is not so much when? but, what? To what end?”
— Stanley Hauerwas
Hauerwas reckons living in this story makes us resident aliens, as he calls us — an adventurous and hopeful colony, a community living in a society of unbelief. In his diagnosis our culture has not just lost a telos, but a sense of adventure, because we have turned in on ourselves as we have lost this big story.
“The church exists today as resident aliens, an adventurous colony in a society of unbelief… As a society of unbelief, Western culture is devoid of a sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks belief in much more than the cultivation of an ever-shrinking horizon of self-preservation and self-expression…”
— Stanley Hauerwas
This community, embodying and telling this story, is where Christian ethics makes sense. The world tells us being truly human is about self-expression, because this is all it is, but our eschatological messianic community tells us that to be truly human involves self-denial with our eyes fixed on the eternal rule of King Jesus, and being united to him.
This community — the church — is where we tell each other the Gospel; truthing in love.
“The ethic of Jesus thus appears to be either utterly impractical or utterly burdensome unless it is set within its proper context — an eschatological, messianic community, which knows something the world does not and structures its life accordingly… A person becomes just by imitating just persons. One way of teaching good habits is by watching good people, learning the moves, imitating the way they relate to the world.”
— Stanley Hauerwas
This community is where we find examples to imitate as we learn what a life shaped by our ends, shaped by Jesus the true human, looks like. It is where we are formed in order to be sent into the world. It is where we run the race together as we learn to fix our eyes upon Jesus.
It is hard for us to set our eyes on Jesus in a literal sense, given that he is seated in heaven. We can do that in prayer, and in what Paul calls the eyes of our heart, but we can also fix our eyes upon Jesus in a way that teaches us to be human by looking at one another, finding examples who are living in this story to imitate.
Before they say this, the writer to the Hebrews has just told the church to keep meeting together, spurring one another on, before they say run the race by fixing our eyes upon Jesus.
Part of pursuing our telos is seeking to be those who follow the example of Jesus, and this might involve watching and observing and imitating those around us who already are. Those whose lives are marked by hope, those whose lives express the fruit of the Spirit, those who are living adventurous lives of self-denial because their hearts are set on heaven, and because they know that to be truly human, in Christ, is to have conquered the powers, and anything in creation that wants to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.
This is an adaptation of the ninth talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter.And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.
Content warning — we are going to be talking about violence; and I am going to touch on the way that violence is gendered, especially around family violence, and I do not want that to take people by surprise.
If I asked you to describe the stories you have been consuming lately in a sentence, how would you do it?
Here are a few of mine:
An elite soldier’s unit and family are killed as a result of a deep state conspiracy involving the military and big pharma, so he goes on a rampage, killing everyone involved.
Or…
A retired military police officer hitchhikes around the U.S. and manages to stumble into a deadly conspiracy; he uses his investigative skills and capacity for violence to solve it.
Or… and this one was a favourite… A folk-singing spy with PTSD, whose father works for the CIA, is sent undercover in an engineering firm so he can prevent the election of a pro-nuclear Iranian presidential candidate, or failing that, assassinate him; he sings his way through his trauma and questions about the cost of participating in violence.
At the time of preaching this series, Amazon had just launched the new Rings of Power Tolkien epic, which is fascinating because Tolkien thought very carefully about stories and their power — and about technology and the way it changes us.
In a letter about Middle Earth he explains that magic in his world — especially the destructive magic of Mordor — was a picture of the machine in ours.
“He will rebel against the laws of the Creator — especially against mortality. Both of these will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective — and so to the Machine (or magic).”
— Tolkien
The machine is operating through:
“… all use of external plans or devices instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents — or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills.”
He sees this as the operations of “the enemy” — who he calls the “Lord of Magic and machines.” He says:
“The enemy in successive forms is always ‘naturally’ concerned with sheer Domination, and so the Lord of magic and machines.”
This created stuff warps us — like the One Ring warped Gollum — and anyone who wields it, and perhaps like swords and weapons shaped those who wield them; coming with a cost — the sort that get explored through the violent battle for Middle Earth.
The thing about stories is that they are powerful; they shape our understanding of the world — they shape our imaginations and desires, just like images — stories are part of what Charles Taylor, and Jamie Smith (who was the guy who wrote You Are What You Love), call the social imaginary — the background to our beliefs; the stuff that shapes our imagination.
“A social imaginary is not how we think about the world, but how we imagine the world before we ever think about it… it is made up of, and embedded in, stories, narratives, myths and icons.”
— James K.A. Smith
It is not just architecture and images that shape us — stories do as well. They help us make sense of the world; stories are what help us figure out what data we receive as “truth,” and what we do not.
“These visions capture our hearts and imaginations by ‘lining’ our imagination, as it were, providing us with frameworks of ‘meaning’ by which we make sense of our world and our calling in it.”
You could argue that telling stories — whether it is history, or fiction, or the myths — the big stories we live by — is part of being made in the image of the God who has structured history, and his word, as a story; that one of the things that separates us from other living creatures is that we tell stories — you do not see koalas building libraries.
Stories also shape the way we live — they teach us how we should live. There is a philosopher, Alisdair MacIntyre, who reckons the modern world has become a bureaucratic machine, where asking “how should I live?” gets reframed as “what is the most efficient way to make things happen.” He reckons the way out of the machine is to recognise the place of story in our lives, and in cultivating virtue; and that we can only know how we ought to live in this world if we can understand ourselves living in a story — knowing our origins, our beginning, our setting, and our destination — and who we need to be to get there.
“I can only answer the question ‘what am I to do?’ If I can answer the prior question: ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” — Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
The “machine” means we often treat “non-fiction” — facts — as more important than stories, but this is making the mistake of treating us more like robots than humans; we live and breathe stories.
We spent some time previously unpacking Israel’s origin story — the creation story in Genesis — and imagining how it shaped the life of God’s people, not only living as God’s priestly image-bearing people in the Eden-like promised land, looking after the temple —
but imagining how that story might have shaped Israel to live differently in Babylon, where life was defined by an altogether different story — we dug into it a bit — the Enuma Elish — the story of the gods of Babylon creating the world through violence, from the bodies of dead and defeated gods.
Last week we talked about the powers and principalities that the New Testament describes operating to keep us captive; these spiritual powers are the animating forces behind the systems that make us less than human as we get swept up in them so that we are imprinted by them to represent those powers; to live, so to speak, as characters in their stories (Ephesians 6:11-12). In Babylon the powers operated through an idolatrous regime that celebrated violence.
Walter Wink was a Pentecostal theologian — he wrote a book called The Powers That Be about these systems that we can observe in the world. He was probably less inclined to see spiritual beings pulling the strings behind these observations, and more inclined to see collective human rebellion against God — but he talks about how the same story that animated Babylon, through its creation story — the idea that killing is in our genes; that to be human is to fight against evil, to destroy enemies, with violence — animates the empires of the modern West. He says of the way this story permeates our imaginary:
“The implications are clear: human beings are created from the blood of a murdered god. Our very origin story is violence. Killing is in our genes.”
— Walter Wink
It is this story, that he calls the myth of redemptive violence — the idea that whatever the problems we face, at the end of the day victory will take violence — heroic standing up against the forces of evil and triumphing, throwing them back into the abyss while wielding a sword.
“This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today.”
— Walter Wink
It is this story, not the Gospel, that shapes the politics of a post-Christendom world; and is the dominant religious story in our world; it is behind how we “imagine” the world before fleshing it out.
“By making violence pleasurable, fascinating and entertaining, the Powers are able to delude people into compliance with a system that is cheating them of their very lives.”
It is the myth you will find making violence entertaining — in The Terminal List, and Reacher — and even in Rings of Power — deluding people into compliance with a deadly and dehumanising system. Our stories are a little more complex — all these stories are critiquing violent conspiracies and evil, even embodied in a deep state — but they are offering violent solutions, even if, like in Patriot and Middle Earth, the stories leave us asking questions about the cost of wielding the sword. These powers — idol machines — do not just use one story, but this myth of redemptive violence is built into our world, and it is destructive.
Wink reckons there is more going on under the hood in our entertainment, the stories we consume, than we realise. He says in this story politics becomes ultimate; the state and its armed forces are responsible for throwing chaos into the abyss, and those who buy the story will offer themselves up for holy war.
“Salvation is politics: the masses identify with the god of order against the god of chaos, and offer themselves up for the Holy War that imposes order and rule on the peoples round about. Peace through war; security through strength: these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient historical religion, and they form the solid bedrock on which the domination system is found in every society.”
This myth props up what the former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex as he left office in 1961. We talked about this back in our Revelation series.
He was worried about the rapid development of an arms industry as a product of the Cold War. He said American factories once made ploughs, but they had learned to make swords, in a permanent industry of vast proportions designed to supply the armed forces.
“American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well… We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions…”
He reckoned people had to be really careful about the way people making money from this industry would chase power and influence, because it had the potential to change the economic, political, and spiritual makeup of the country.
“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.”
And this seems a world away from us, here in a small church in a city across the world, but the degrees of separation might be smaller than you think. Our military industrial complex is a lot smaller than the U.S. We look at their gun culture as an idol, while consuming the same stories that justify those cultural norms — the same stories that prop up this idea that nations solve problems with violence — and these stories also prop up the idea that individuals should use violence to solve problems, and especially that men should; they shape how we understand masculinity.
Did you notice that the three shows I started out talking about all have violent men as heroes? There is a certain view of the world that sees masculinity as being about male power — the capacity for violence — so they can be protectors, and so women can swoon over such masculine men.
It is not just our entertainment — so much of our Christian content, the books we read, the stuff we listen to or watch, comes from the U.S. And the church in the U.S. has shown itself, in the last few years, to be marching in lockstep with the dominion system. This same myth of redemptive violence is used to justify grabbing hold of political power to win a culture war, or any sort of conflict against your enemies.
There is a writer in the States, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, who wrote this book Jesus and John Wayne, exploring how this same myth has embedded itself in the church.
We are products of our culture; of what we consume, she says:
“The products Christians consume shape the faith they inhabit.”
She traces the way that the modern church has developed a sort of “militant masculinity” — idolising power and the capacity for violence, militant heroes like the western star John Wayne.
“For many evangelicals, these militant heroes would come to define not only Christian manhood but Christianity itself… Wayne modelled masculine strength, aggression, and redemptive violence… Little separated Jesus from John Wayne. Jesus had become a Warrior Leader, an Ultimate Fighter.”
This is a picture of our “social imaginary” preconditioning us to read the Gospel stories in a particular way that is more Babylonian than Biblical.
She has the receipts — she quotes a guy named Doug Wilson, who, thanks to the Internet, enjoys a pretty wide readership in Australia. In one of his books, Wilson says it is essential for boys to play with swords and guns; to meet a deep need to have something to defend, something to represent in battle. You might have heard stories like this; that there is this inbuilt capacity for violence that is necessary in case you have to save someone.
“… it is absolutely essential for boys to play with wooden swords and plastic guns. Boys have a deep need to have something to defend, something to represent in battle.”
— Doug Wilson
Note: since preaching this series in 2022, Wilson’s infamy and influence has increased and in a recent “no quarter November” he was selling branded flamethrowers.
For Wilson, to beat our weapons into pruning hooks too soon — to not be part of the military-industrial complex and buying the myth of redemptive violence — that will leave us fighting the dragon with a pruning hook.
“And to beat the spears into pruning hooks prematurely, before the war is over, will leave you fighting the dragon with a pruning hook.”
— Doug Wilson
Like Eisenhower, he has this passage from Isaiah in mind — where God will bring restoration and a transformed world, replacing war, violence, with peace, so that instead of making weapons people will make farming tools, pruning hooks and ploughshares.
“He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.”
— Isaiah 2:4
Folks like Wilson do not think that day of the Lord has come yet. For them we should still be armed and dangerous, with the weapons of the world.
Du Mez also points out just how angry Wilson got at the idea women might be warriors, for a bunch of reasons including that they are not as good at the “important work of violence.” Now, you have probably got your own thoughts about women becoming soldiers, but that is not the point. When you make the enemy someone who can be stabbed, you rob women of their place in the battle against the powers.
“… they were a sexual distraction to male soldiers, they could get pregnant, they distorted ‘covenantal lines of authority,’ and they were not as good as men in ‘the important work of violence.’”
When Eve is created as Adam’s helper (Genesis 2:18), it is the word ezer; a word with military connotations — more like ally — that is used of God throughout the Bible. Ultimately this myth of redemptive violence, that wants men wielding swords and fighting people, is the myth of redemptive patriarchy; a myth of redemptive male violence.
It is a myth built on the cursed pattern of relationships in Genesis 3 where “he” rules over “her” — not where they rule together and she is an ally in the cause. And we do have a problem with the myth of redemptive patriarchy and male entitlement through power here in Australia. It is expressed in the rate of family violence perpetrated by men in our country, and the soaring numbers of sexual assaults perpetrated by boys in our schools. This does not come from nowhere; it is supported by narratives that paint heroism as using power to make the world what you think it should be. Domination, rather than the sort of dominion we were made for, is built into our lives at a societal level, and an individual level.
I am not sure these folks going on about taking up the sword, with a vision of masculinity that sees an inherent capacity for violence, have read their Bibles, where our enemy is not flesh and blood, but the devil, and his schemes, these powers, spiritual forces (Ephesians 6:11-12) — a real gun is not going to be much more useful than a toy one at this point.
And the “armour of God” we use in this fight — it is not armour geared towards violence; the sword in this war is the word of God; get your kids to play with it. And the way of life that prepares us for this fight is not playing with guns, it is prayer (Ephesians 6:17-18).
Plus, even though our enemy is the dragon-serpent — if we take up the sword and respond with violence, the story of the Bible seems to be that we defeat ourselves and choose his side — and the victory over the dragon comes through non-violent redemptive sacrifice.
Satan enters the scene as some sort of legged serpent, a dragon (Genesis 3). And then, when Cain is angry at Abel, God says sin is crouching at the door — like some personified wild animal, a power, desiring to have him (Genesis 4:7). And when he gives in to that power, he gets violent; he kills his brother (Genesis 4:8). This is a thread we traced through Genesis; to Nimrod, the violent killer who built Babylon and Assyria (Genesis 10:9-12).
The temptation Satan offers through the powers is the same one he offers Jesus in the wilderness — as we saw in Matthew — the temptation to grab hold of the kingdoms of the world with power (Matthew 4:8-9); to play the Babylon game; to run a domination system, or enjoy its rewards. To bow down to the dragon and serve his kingdom, embracing his way of death. And Jesus does not grasp. We do not actually fight the dragon — we are not the hero. Jesus does. Jesus is. And he tells us his kingdom features peacemakers (Matthew 5:9), that his people will reject violence, and turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39), and love our enemies (Matthew 5:44), and he tells his disciples to put away their swords, because those who draw the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52).
The whole point of his life was to model something different to a life under the powers, the power of Satan — the violent dominion systems, because he came to model the kingdom of God, and invite us to join him in it. Even if Revelation depicts him defeating the dragon, his victory is won at the cross, through the blood of the lamb (Revelation 12:9, 11). He confounds the beastly myth of redemptive violence and provides an altogether different story for us to live by, just like Genesis did for Israel. And he calls us to put away our swords, deny ourselves, and take up our cross — following him (Matthew 16:24). Jesus invites us to life not under the powers — the power of Satan — the violent dominion systems, but in the kingdom of God. He invites us to life in a different story — the story told in the Old Testament from start to finish — from Moses to the Prophets — Jesus says he is what holds the story together (Luke 24:26-27). He says the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets — the whole Old Testament — are written about him; that he has come to fulfil them (Luke 24:44), and that this fulfilment is not found in wielding a sword, but suffering and death on a cross, by being crucified by those who wield swords, so that he might bring forgiveness of sins and new life by the Spirit (Luke 24:46-47). His death and resurrection are the climax of history, and of the integrated collection of books in the Old Testament.
The whole story of the Bible is a story that invites us to be truly human by resisting violence and domination and the powers, and finding life in God’s kingdom.
In this story we are not the hero. We cannot save ourselves or fix the world, and the military industrial state cannot throw back the forces of chaos, because they are often aligned with the forces of chaos, even as God appoints them as the sword. Heroism in this story is not about the sword; the sword is deadly. It does not just kill our enemies as we swing it, it destroys us with every blow; violence disintegrates us, taking us further away from the life of love we were created for, that Jesus embodies.
The way of life that comes with the story of Jesus is to take up our cross. It is the life Paul describes in Philippians 2 (Philippians 2:5). A life shaped by Jesus and his story, because his story is now our story, and it provides the pattern for all our relationships. And I want to suggest that life in this story is going to involve two commitments that change how we engage in the world in ways that make us truly human — first, a commitment to being better readers of stories, and second, committing ourselves to living in God’s story, the story of Jesus, and so embracing non-violence as we embody the story of Jesus.
This will mean becoming better readers of the Bible — the sword we are meant to wield — and participants in its ongoing story, so it shapes our lives and actions (Ephesians 6:17). I reckon, often, we are not great readers of the Bible, and part of the key to reading the Bible well, especially in narrative bits, is not just to see Jesus as the fulfilment of the story, but to ask “am I seeing behaviour that is like Jesus in this story, or like the pattern of the dragon, or cursed relationships?”
The Bible is full of descriptions of violence, but that violence normally gets destructive and out of hand rather than being redemptive. So we will celebrate David slaying his giant — explicitly without a sword (1 Samuel 17:50) — but not notice how violence becomes embedded in his family system and basically destroys everything as his sons go to war with him, and each other (2 Samuel 12:10). And somehow we will say Christian men need swords or guns or violence (or flamethrowers). The story of the Bible exposes the problem with our hearts, and with the idea that we can turn to violence to solve our problems.
Being better readers of stories might also mean reading better stories. Karen Swallow Prior, who I mentioned last chapter, is a professor of literature. She has written a book called On Reading Well, about how the stories we choose to engage with can be paths to cultivating virtue, because stories do actually teach us how we should live. She reckons stories work better than facts, or other forms of education that focus on techniques, because they let us imagine different experiences so we can explore new ways to live.
“Literature replicates the world of the concrete, where the experiential learning necessary for virtue occurs. Such experiential learning does not come through technique.”
We see characters reacting to situations in ways that are concrete where ideas might be abstract. So the sorts of stories we watch, and the sort of characters that shape our imagination — that matters. As we judge the characters we encounter that shapes our own character.
“… the act of judging the character of a character shapes the reader’s own character. Through the imagination, readers identify with the character, learning about human nature and their own nature through their reactions to the vicarious experience.”
But this will also mean being more sensitive to the formative power of stories around us — not just the myth of redemptive violence, but visions of the good life built on grasping and consuming and being the hero of our own story — so we can spot the powers and disarm them, and expose them to rob them of their power over us and others; and that we might even choose stories that cultivate virtue in us.
And maybe we need more Inklings — more Tolkiens and Lewises telling stories — whether in books, or TV, or video games, or just to our kids at night — that subvert the powerful myths of our world, that offer escape, and even what Tolkien called “the eucatastrophe” — the unexpected happy ending.
“The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale… the consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn.’”
— Tolkien, On Fairy Stories
Tolkien believed our hearts desire this eucatastrophic moment because we are created to experience the unexpected happy ending caught up in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
“The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels… among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable Eucatastrophe.”
So that is the first bit. The second bit is a commitment not just to believing the story of Jesus is true, but to living in it — which will mean letting it provide the shape of our life. That will mean rejecting the myths offered by our world, by the powers, including the myth of redemptive violence, and arming ourselves instead with the sword that is God’s word by taking up our cross and following Jesus. This is harder than it sounds, but it is also less abstract than it sounds, because it is exactly what Paul is describing in Philippians 2. This is, in MacIntyre’s words, the story that teaches us “what we are to do” in any moment. The death and resurrection of Jesus are the culmination of the story of the Bible — the story that reveals the truly human life to us, both the way to life and a way of life.
The theologian Michael Gorman has been mega-helpful to me with this stuff, and he reckons Philippians 2’s retelling of the Gospel is both the central organising story of Paul’s life, and of our life as Christians. He says in the cross and resurrection Paul sees God revealing that faithful and holy opposition to evil — redemption — is not found through inflicting violence, but through absorbing violence and death, turning the other cheek.
“Covenant fidelity, justification, holiness and opposition to evil are not achieved by the infliction of violence and death but by the absorption of violence and death.”
I want to be careful here, because I am not saying that if you are being abused by the sort of person who believes that violence is a legitimate answer you should stay subject to that relationship, or the violence. What I am saying is that responding with violence, taking up the sword, produces a vicious cycle, and to forgive and relinquish that right to take up the sword and destroy your enemy is to embrace the way of Jesus. Wielding the sword, turning to violence, will always shape us, and it will shape us to believe and participate in a story that is counter to the Gospel. This also does not mean we do not let those whom God has given the sword — the government — pursue justice.
But this is where we go wrong when we think the idea for raising masculine men is teaching boys to play with guns and swords, encouraging them to kill the giants or dragons in their lives, to be the hero, and teaching girls to look for a violent protector, rather than teaching them to fight evil not by repaying evil with evil, but by embracing life in God’s story.
In this story the dragon loses as God’s power is displayed in the weakness of the cross, in Jesus’ refusal to grasp power the way Satan tempts us to, and as the full weight of the violent dominion system is brought against Jesus, God is liberating humans — his violent enemies — by forgiving us instead of crushing us and destroying our rebellion.
“The normal human temptation to squash enemies, to eliminate the impure other, is not the response of God in Christ. Instead, God reaches out to reconcile: people to God, and people to people.”
This is not the myth of redemptive violence but the story of redemptive love and grace. Our normal human impulse to squash our enemies is not the way God works. God works, through Jesus, to reach out and bring reconciliation; between us and him, and between us and each other.
This experience of love as the story of the Gospel becomes our story shapes how we live as disciples of Jesus; as we take up our cross, not because we have to throw the forces of chaos back into the abyss, but because we recognise that this is how Jesus did it, this is how he resisted the powers. He did not grasp, or embrace violence, but gave his life, suffering death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-8).
Gorman says these verses are showing us what true humanity looks like, in contrast to Adam, and what true divinity looks like, as we seek to bear God’s image in the world. He says to be truly human is to be Christlike, which is to be Godlike — and for Paul, and for Gorman, this means to be crosslike in our life in the world.
“The incarnation and cross manifest, and the exaltation recognises, Christ’s true humanity, in contrast to Adam, as well as his true divinity. Therefore, to be truly human is to be Christlike, which is to be Godlike.”
The Gospel is a story that does not just restore our relationships from a pattern of sin, to a pattern of godlikeness, it transforms the way we see masculinity, or femininity — our humanity — it reshapes all our relationships, and how we understand life imitating our hero as we are transformed into his image. It calls us from violence and into communion and love and a life of reconciliation and peacemaking.
He says the church is a community that inhabits the life of God by inhabiting God’s story, as God inhabits us by his Spirit and transforms us into people who reveal his character in our lives. Our life story, in relationships pursuing the way of Jesus, embody and proclaim the story we are part of. The participation in this story and retelling of this story shapes us because it becomes the story that shapes our actions in the world.
“The church inhabits this triune, cruciform God, who in turn inhabits the church. Thus the church’s life story embodies and thereby proclaims the narrative identity and gracious saving power of the triune God.”
God is inviting you into his life, and into his story — to leave the stories of the powers behind, the violent ways of death and destruction, and find life together with him, and so to become truly human. Will you keep living as people shaped by his story as we dwell in it together?
This is an adaptation of the seventh talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter.And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.
We have done a few “go back in time” exercises so far; this time I want you to imagine yourself in some present-day places — and I’ll use photos to help — I want you to imagine you’re in Paris, at the airport.
This shouldn’t be hard, because all airports look the same; there are certain architectural features — like check-in desks, security, and those arrival and departure boards that are basically the same.
Which means the airport looks the same in London.
And in Brisbane.
It is the same with train stations… Paris
Looks like London…
Except for the bears…
Looks like Sydney…
Supermarkets also look the same everywhere — France…
… England…
Australia… in a global market you will even find the same brands everywhere you go.
And then there is the Swedish embassy… IKEA. Which looks the same in Stockholm, in London, and in Brisbane…
Have you thought about the architecture of these places; what they do to us? Whether that is the places we go to go somewhere else that all look the same — airports… train stations… or the places we go to consume — to buy?
Even if you haven’t — others have — very deliberately. What about the shopping centre? Like Garden City…
The first ever shopping centre was created by the architect Victor Gruen as somewhere people would go to lose themselves in the bright lights and the indoor gardens with fountains and the mazey design, while finding themselves through buying stuff.
The exact moment that you lose yourself and start buying things you didn’t really want is called the Gruen Transfer; it is where you reach what is called “scripted disorientation” — you have lost yourself, but you are following someone else’s script.
Disorienting scripts shape the layout of the supermarket; like how at the shops the milk is up the back, so you have to go through the chocolate or biscuit aisle to get there. Even where things are put on shelves and what is at eye level is calculated to make you spend more…
IKEA is built as a maze, so you have to walk through the showroom maze, and then the buying maze, walking past stacks of stuff you weren’t going to buy…
This is choice architecture — a deliberate shaping of consumer habitats to shape our consumer habits so we will buy more.
The philosopher Matthew Crawford wrote a book, The World Beyond Your Head, showing how spaces are shaped to sell us stuff by grabbing our attention.
He tells two stories — one from Korea, which is kind of “in the future” for us — where buses come equipped with “flavour radios” that pump the smell of Dunkin’ Donuts into the bus, as an ad for donuts plays over the speaker, as the bus pulls up outside Dunkin’ Donuts…
And he talks about airports — this picture is from the site selling advertising space at the Brisbane Airport — where every space is covered with advertising — even the security trays — and your attention is demanded at every turn by people selling stuff…
That is, unless you pay for silence in the corporate lounge; where the sorts of people who create the habitats where our consumer habits are formed as we are bombarded with noise, pay for silence so their attention is free from distraction.
Crawford reckons our attention is our most valuable commodity.
“I would like to offer the concept of an attentional commons… Attention is the thing that is most one’s own: in the normal course of things, we choose what to pay attention to, and in a very real sense this determines what is real for us.”
Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head
He reckons we should create an attentional commons — we should see public space as common space for the common good and cut out advertising noise so we are able to pay attention and not be scripted and disoriented in public spaces like we are in shops. He makes a distinction between nudges — made famous by this book — and jigs…
“In general, when we are faced with an array of choices, how we choose depends very much on how those choices are presented to us (to the point that we will choose against our own best interests if the framing nudges us that way).”
Crawford
Nudges operate below the surface, framing how we approach decisions — like an IKEA floorplan — so we think we have decided ourselves. They can be good if they point us to things that are good for us.
Jigs are how we set up our environments to produce the actions we want — like a carpenter who uses jigs to make repeat cuts, or a chef who has set up their workstation just right for their task.
“A jig is a device or procedure that guides a repeated action by constraining the environment in such a way as to make the action go smoothly, the same each time, without his having to think about it.”
Crawford
And if character is stamped on us by repeated action — jigs make character-forming actions easier.
“The word ‘character’ comes from a Greek word that means ‘stamp.’ Character, in the original view, is something that is stamped upon you by experience, and your history of responding to various kinds of experience…”
Crawford
If we want to build character we might choose to shape our habitats to produce the habits we desire, or other people will do it for us. Because we are matter in space; spaces matter.
“Places have at least three characteristics in common. People want them to be places of identity, of relations and of history.”
Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Super-Modernity
They are where we go to understand and perform our identity; to relate to a community, and to be connected to history — to a shared past, and a shared story.
Architects of places deliberately structure them so people can act according to these characteristics. Churches in medieval villages were places like this; they were cross-shaped buildings, with a steeple reaching up to heaven; they would host festivals and saint days and inside there would be a pulpit, where a story was preached, and stained-glass windows and art telling stories.
You would receive communion, with your community; while the graves of dead people from the church would be just outside.
Going to church meant participating in that place; that story; with those people — living and dead. It was not just to create roots, but grow from roots created by others… And there is something pretty cool for us City South folks about the relationship our Church of Christ family have with this space, and a privilege we might grow into as we share this space and cultivate life in it together.
Church spaces were once at the centre of city life; but now — well, they are still there — just surrounded by transport hubs and places of commerce and outdoor advertising. City squares are now non-places.
Non-places are the opposite of places — they are fast-paced places where we do not belong but move through as transient anonymous individuals.
“A space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.”
“The real non-places of supermodernity are the ones we inhabit when we are driving down the motorway, wandering through the supermarket or sitting in an airport lounge waiting for the next flight.”
Marc Augé
The spaces we enter as driver, or consumer, or passenger — they are spaces where we are bombarded with advertising imagery that reinforces transience in the place of transcendence. Augé reckons they are inherently narcissistic, and they leave us simultaneously “always, and never, at home…”
We increasingly do not live where we are born, around familiar landmarks and people; we will not be buried in a graveyard next to our churches… we spend so much time in transient non-places; we live as pilgrims or exiles; disconnected from place and community and history.
Home is where we feel understood and known and connected, but transient people in non-places can feel home because they are familiar. If you are a traveller feeling disoriented in a foreign country, being in your car as an individual on a motorway, or walking through big stores — IKEAs — or staying in familiar hotel chains…
“But that we encounter the world as travellers creates a ‘paradox of non-place’ — where ‘a foreigner lost in a country he does not know can feel at home there only in the anonymity of motorways, service stations, big stores, or hotel chains.’”
Auge
Shopping and seeing brands you know can feel like a relief; these act like landmarks giving us a sense of connection…
“But that we encounter the world as travellers creates a ‘paradox of non-place’ — where ‘a foreigner lost in a country he does not know can feel at home there only in the anonymity of motorways, service stations, big stores, or hotel chains.’”
Victor Gruen’s original vision for shopping centres was a response to non-places — he wanted to create hubs where people could live and work and play locally — he hated cars and roads, which he called:
“avenues of horror, flanked by the greatest collection of vulgarity — billboards, motels, gas stations, shanties, car lots, miscellaneous industrial equipment, hot dog stands, wayside stores — ever collected by mankind.”
In other words, non-places. When his vision was not realised he moved back to Vienna, where a brand new shopping centre was being built… he had created a giant shopping machine…
“My creation wasn’t intended to create a giant shopping machine. I am devastated…”
Victor Gruen
He said he wanted to make America more like the village he had left, but had made Vienna more like America. He wanted the end of the shopping centre.
“I invented the shopping mall to make America more like Vienna and now I ended up making Vienna more like America. I hope all shopping malls end up neglected, abandoned and forgotten.”
Gruen
But now they are everywhere — as churches have moved to the margins, we have shopping centres. And as the theologian Jamie Smith points out; shopping centres function as temples; offering visions of the good life complete with routines and liturgies and priestly salespeople. Now — I just want to throw one other sort of physical space in the mix — another modern temple to the gods of fortune; the casino.
Casinos are designed to disorient… and worse — Natasha Dow Schüll wrote this book about modern gambling called Addiction by Design. She compares common places designed to build community rhythms and practices with casinos. One design style is wide and open and well lit.
“While modernist buildings sought to facilitate communitas through high ceilings, wide open space, bountiful lighting and windows, and a minimalist, uncluttered aesthetic…”
Natasha Dow Schüll
While casinos are designed with low ceilings, and maze-like layouts that direct your gaze, and your body, to the gambling machines; they are designed to keep you anonymous and disconnected.
“…casinos’ low, immersive interiors, blurry spatial boundaries, and mazes of alcoves accommodated ‘crowds of anonymous individuals without explicit connection with each other.’”
Schüll
They are lit in certain ways, and have no clocks, so that you will be disoriented — or rather — oriented towards the machines. There is a script for this disorientation.
“The intricate maze under the low ceiling never connects with the outside light or outside space. This disorients the occupant in space and time. One loses track of where one is and when it is.”
Schüll
She quotes Vegas heavyweight Bill Friedman’s book called Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition, which proudly describes the purpose of the maze as being to confuse and confound; to get people lost so they will give themselves to the machines:
“The term maze is appropriate… it comes from the words to confuse or to confound and defines it as ‘an intricate, usually confusing network of interconnecting pathways, as in garden; a labyrinth… If a visitor has a propensity to gamble, the maze layout will evoke it.’”
Bill Friedman, Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition
This sort of thing should make us angry. I reckon. It is also the same strategy that drives IKEA, except their maze gets you to buy Scandi furniture and homewares. But there is a new strategy in casino design competing with Friedman’s design — where rooms are open, and well lit, and beautiful… one where a guy named Roger Thomas sees himself not as an “architect” but as an “evoca-tect” — he wants to make rooms that will delight and excite; so that people will spend money.
“My job is to create excitement and delight — a task I’ve come to call evoca-tecture.”
“People tend to take on the characteristics of a room, they feel glamorous in a glamorous space and rich in a rich space. And who doesn’t want to feel rich?”
Roger Thomas
He says people take on the characteristics of a room — our habitats shape our habits, in part, by evoking our desires, and this has become a more popular design strategy — and you can bet the super-casino and lifestyle precinct built on our river will look more like this; while the pokie room at your local club will look more like Friedman’s… but what they will have in common is that the architecture is designed to take your money, and so are the machines… they are designed to disorient and addict and destroy…
Natasha Dow Schüll describes how designers adapt their machines to “fit the player” to make more money as gamblers will “play to extinction.”
“The more you manage to tweak and customize your machines to fit the player, the more they play to extinction; it translates into a dramatic increase in revenue.”
Schüll
This means playing till they run out of money; but it is a bit more sinister; talking about the use of the terminology by a speaker at a conference for pokie design, she said:
“The point of ‘extinction’ to which she referred is the point at which player funds run out. The operational logic of the machine is programmed in such a way as to keep the gambler seated until that end—the point of ‘extinction.’”
Schüll
They are designed to keep people on the machine till they absolutely have to leave, like those stories of video gamers who play so long they die at their keyboards… these machines are calibrated to needs, longings, and the pleasure receptors in our brains to pull people out of space and time — their bodies — addicts describe entering a zone where any sense of existence outside the machine disappears.
“Instead, the solitary, absorptive activity can suspend time, space, monetary value, social roles, and sometimes even one’s very sense of existence. ‘You can erase it all at the machines — you can even erase yourself.’”
Schüll
This sort of manipulation of the vulnerable should make us feel angry. Only, these same addiction mechanics are being used in our digital devices — not just by gambling apps, but by games for kids — and adults — with in-built micro-reward mechanisms that trigger exactly the same part of the brain — and Schüll says social media companies too — anyone making algorithms to keep your eyes hooked, and your hands active — people setting up the devices we carry with us to create the same scripted disorientation — the Gruen Transfer — everywhere we go — so they can make money from our addictions.
“Facebook, Twitter and other companies use methods similar to the gambling industry to keep users on their sites. In the online economy, revenue is a function of continuous consumer attention — which is measured in clicks and time spent.”
Schüll
Dr Anna Lembke wrote Dopamine Nation about how addiction works in our brain chemistry — she describes our phones as needles operating 24-7 to deliver digital dopamine.
“The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. The world now offers a full complement of digital drugs… these include online pornography, gambling, and video games.”
Dr Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation
She describes our apps — games, social media, gambling, and porn — even shopping — as drugs geared towards addicting us; hooking our brains on dopamine — the pleasure chemical — and leaving us wanting more. And more.
She talks about a dopamine economy — or what this other guy David Courtwright, who wrote The Age of Addiction, calls limbic capitalism — where a system is built and propped up by government and industry and technology — to capitalise on chemically hooking our brains — our limbic system, where dopamine works — by stimulating us in targeted ways geared towards excessive consumption, and then addiction.
“Limbic capitalism refers to a technologically advanced but socially regressive business system in which global industries, often with the help of complicit governments encourage excessive consumption and addiction.”
David Courtwright, The Age of Addiction
His book is terrifying; it suggests like the pokie-machine player, we are working towards “extinction by design.” And if this is true, how can we ever feel at home in a world; in spaces; geared towards our extinction?
Especially if these forces are at work in our homes; Aussie academic Adam Alter wrote about why we are irresistibly addicted to technology; he reckons we are wired for addiction and disposed towards consuming — some more than others — and this is also wired into the technology we build into our lives — our spaces — in ways that reinforce our wiring. Addiction is an inevitable product of the places — environments — we occupy, including the technology we use.
“In truth, addiction is produced largely by environment and circumstance… A well-designed environment encourages good habits and healthy behavior; the wrong environment brings excess and — at the extremes — behavioral addiction.”
Adam Alter
He reckons well-designed environments are the key to good habits and healthy behaviour; to avoiding addiction, which he says is not about lacking willpower in crunch moments — if we are already nudged towards the habit, or hooked on it — one of the keys is avoiding temptation in the first place through how we have built our spaces…
“This contradicts the myth that we fail to break addictive habits because we lack willpower. In truth, it’s the people who are forced to exercise willpower who fall first. Those who avoid temptation in the first place tend to do much better.”
Alter
This starts at home. Our habitats shape our habits; we are made to be at home in our bodies, and in places that form us. And it turns out the more our attention is pulled out of physical places into digital non-places, where we engage as viewers, browsers, and users — the more homeless we feel. The evidence is stacking up that digital non-places make us lonely — disconnected — exiled — and narcissistic. Online spaces like Amazon and Facebook are like pokie machines; designed to pull us in; our experience is shaped by algorithms that are scripted to adapt the machine to us, while our dopamine-hungry brains crave bigger hits. It is a brave new world.
And maybe what is worst is when church spaces become non-places rather than sanctuaries from this world — when we copy the architecture of the shopping centre, or casino — building mega-facilities people drive to like shopping centres, where people flows and signage guide us into black-box rooms, where our attention is oriented towards screens.
And notice how all these churches end up…
looking…
… the same. Even the Presbyterian ones. Like non-places built for transience, not transcendence.
Some of us met in buildings like this in West End — one was a theatre, one was the church building pictured in the first image — that was the pentecostal service meeting in the morning slot. Can you see how these habitats might subtly set us up to think about church as a product, or as entertainment; where our attention has to be grabbed and directed towards our desires, like at a casino, or we will leave unsatisfied? Where familiarity creates the illusion of belonging; rather than being places where family connection is cultivated and shaped by the story of the Gospel; places for us to inhabit with the people around us — those we commune with, whose faces we see — because the lights are not off — as God works in us through his word — that we can see without using a screen — and by his Spirit and his people?
The Bible does not set us up to live in non-places — but to live and interact as creatures in the created world; and even to make places in it as images of the God who creates place. Habitats for life, that prime us to engage in character-building habits.
God places Adam in a garden — a place — with fruit trees that are beautiful and good to eat (Genesis 2:8-9). Trees he’s to eat from — eating would be a habit that would teach him about God’s love; his provision; his hospitality (Genesis 2:16-17). The pleasure of seeing and eating that fruit was made to create something in our hearts as the pleasure chemicals kicked in. God created dopamine hits; they are meant to orient our hearts towards him, and each other, and so we could love and enjoy his world in ways that made us more human. To eat otherwise is to eat to extinction (Genesis 2:17). Our grasping, addictive, narcissistic hearts are the fruit of embracing sinful desire for self-satisfaction, and our self-declaration that things that are not good for us are good (Genesis 3:6). Chasing dopamine hits on our terms…
There is an interesting relationship between idolatry, desire, and place-making after Eden. Adam is placed in a place he is to cultivate and keep (Genesis 2:15) — these are space-making words. They are used for how priests are to maintain the tabernacle and temple as Eden-like spaces where God meets his people. The sanctuary — and altar — spaces that teach Israel about God (Numbers 3:7-8; 18:4, 6).
These spaces teach God’s people about God’s desire to be present and in relationship; his holiness; his grace; the shape of heaven and earth and the barrier represented by the curtain; his ongoing provision of life; even the smells and taste of meat and fruit and bread connected to sacrifices and feasts and festivals taught Israel its story in places; there are habitats jigged up to shape Israel’s habitual worship, stamping character — the image of God — on God’s priestly people.
Only Israel kept bringing idols and their rituals into their environment; they were a dopamine nation. Solomon is particularly instructive here, as a place-maker — while he builds the temple (1 Kings 8:12-13), he fails to cultivate and keep Israel as a place-space for life with God; by building high places and bringing in idols with their dopamine-inducing incense and sacrifices (1 Kings 11:7-8); the character-shaping habits of idolatry.
So Israel ends up in exile — in Babylon — with its hanging gardens and lush places and massive towers and idol temples — the whole environment of Babylon was scripted; designed; like our casinos, our scent-distributing buses, and our smartphones — to direct attention and habitual worship to their gods and king. But what does faithful life in Babylon look like? Place-making.
“Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease.”
Jeremiah 29:5-6
Planting their own little Edens; making spaces that are reminders of their story — of God’s hospitality, his desire for presence; that he is the source of blessing and that he calls his people to be fruitful and multiply and bless those around them — they get back in the land and rebuild their spaces, but something is missing.
And then Jesus turns up to end the exile — from Eden and Israel — as the tabernacle-in-the-flesh who brings heaven on earth — who comes to save us from homeless life in non-places — and he does not do this by restoring the temple to its former glory — as heavenly space — but his death tears the curtain, the picture of the barrier separating heaven and earth; representing our exile from Eden; from God (Matthew 27:50-51); and this does not mean that space-making is over; that suddenly we are meant to exist without habitats that shape our habits — without a temple.
Jesus makes a new temple — new tabernacles-in-the-flesh in Acts, by pouring out his Spirit on people — the church (Acts 2:33). The first church did not have cathedrals, or even church buildings. They meet in houses. Homes (Acts 2:46-47). They go to the temple, as well, in Jerusalem — but the home is the normal habitat as the church spreads into the rest of the world; and presumably there are some dopamine hits happening as they eat with glad hearts and praise God.
The home is the habitat for the Acts 2 habits — it is where they devote themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer — meeting together (Acts 2:42). The house becomes disciple-making architecture; homes become places connected to the story of the Gospel; of God making his home with his people, who are now temples of the Holy Spirit. The shared table is a setting geared towards teaching people about hospitality; to position those around the table as members of a household — it is a picture of us now being home with God; no longer exiled, but connected to him as family. Home is the ultimate place.
Look at what Peter says in 1 Peter 2; the church — people — are chosen by God and precious to him. As we come to Jesus — the living tabernacle — we are built into a spiritual house — or temple of the Spirit — we are the holy priesthood (1 Peter 2:4-5), the new Adam, the new Levites — with the job of cultivating and keeping the space where heaven and earth come together; where we learn about God and are shaped by him as we declare the praise of the God who has re-created us for this purpose through Jesus.
Our sense of homelessness in non-places is part of our longing for home; and this longing is satisfied as God makes a home with us, promising to dwell with us in a new heavens and new earth forever (Revelation 21:2-3). Our home-life — our space-making — is now an opportunity to testify to this story. Peter describes the church both as the home of God — home with God (1 Peter 2:5), and as exiles (1 Peter 2:11)… like foreigners in Babylonian spaces and other temples that wage war against our souls.
We have a weird relationship to earthly space. We are not home. It is like every space not oriented towards heaven — the transcendent — is a non-place, oriented towards earth, and transient.
“In the world of supermodernity people are always, and never, at home.”
Marc Augé
We feel homeless in a world full of people who feel homeless; but we know where home is, and our neighbours don’t. This transient never-at-home-ness and the places built to satisfy that longing with earthly stuff — casinos and shopping-centre temples, even digital spaces — are expressions of a longing to be home with God; part of being exiled.
But we are home because God is going to renew earth and make it heavenly, and we are heavenly people who can make little embassies of heaven in anticipation… pointing to the transcendent.
Our spaces are not temples — we are the temples; the church is the people not the building — but because we are place-making humans made in the image of a place-making God, and we are formed by our habits, and our habits are formed by our habitats, our place-making is an act of worship and of cultivating the world according to our story; whether that is at home, in our workplaces, or in our public spaces — like the church. It is also an act of embassy-building for us citizens and ambassadors of heaven… as we live good lives in Babylon, navigating idol temples, while making good places.
Abstaining from sinful desires raging war against our soul (1 Peter 2:11) requires resisting scripts that want us to forget our story; the story of the Gospel by cultivating habits of saying no to Babylon; acting with deliberation where the world wants us to act like automatons.
So here are some guiding principles from all this — we have to grab control of our attention — wrestle it back from limbic capitalism and its addictive extinction machines. We have to pay attention to the scripts that are disorienting us; pulling our feet from the path — whether in the physical environments we enter, or the digital spaces we occupy and devices we use. This might even look like deliberately walking the wrong way at IKEA or the supermarket — or sticking to a list — to resist impulse buying, or blocking ads on your browser, or limiting your screen time.
Maybe we could catch the vision of the attentional commons — in the spaces we control, but also in public — there have been some Christians who have campaigned for G-rated outdoor advertising; I wonder if we should go further; fighting against the privatisation of public spaces, for the good of our neighbours, especially fighting against gambling ads. We could pay more attention to the insidious and addictive gambling industry and how entwined it is in our culture — it is not a small problem.
And we should notice how the same techniques are embedded in our culture, and our lives, through desire-shaping technology, and advocate for the regulation of online spaces and technologies in ways that limit their addictive potential, rather than participating in platforms that make us lonely and narcissistic and are designed to drive people to extinction.
We are not saved by good habits; but we are saved to become disciples who are home with God; saved to devote ourselves — and we are given new hearts, by the Spirit, and new tools to do it, and a new story. Saved to break bread together; to have glad and sincere hearts, and to praise God in ways that are recognisably good in a world facing extinction. We have got to see where we are being nudged, and push back accordingly. And one way to do this is by cultivating our own spaces with jigs that make good habits feel automatic.
Whether that means creating a spot in your house where your phone is charged that keeps it away from your pocket, or your bedroom at night — or working out how to keep good things within reach; whether that is art on your wall, or photos on your fridge prompting you to pray for others, or physical copies of your Bible close to hand, or a picture on your homescreen; or your Bible app in the shortcut bar on your phone so you have to deliberately scroll past it to get to your distractions…
We have to consider the physical architecture of our houses, and our lives; one of my big regrets in the design of our house is the way we have oriented our couch towards the TV; that fuels my gaming addiction, and makes the screen our default.
There are implications here for how we create and use public space like this building — church buildings should not be non-places, or disorienting temples to consumption that are another form of limbic capitalism; it is tricky because those temples, like the hanging gardens, are often imitation Edens.
There will be wisdom and discernment involved in avoiding designs that nudge us towards extinction; and in cultivating spaces that teach us about God and evoke our sense of his goodness; just as there is in creating communal dopamine hits that are humanising because they come from encountering God through our bodies, rather than addictive.
Whatever the future looks like for this building, or a space for our communities — we should resist creating places without stories and connection to history and to people — living and dead — and should create places where community happens… places where we do not experience scripted disorientation, but Scriptured orientation — where we point our hearts towards God together; praising him through worship; through embodied life together in space and time.
This might include us appreciating the art on the walls downstairs as a picture of the faithfulness of a previous generation, but it might also involve us collaborating on new art, and beauty, and activities that bring life to this space. This might involve us resisting a tendency towards transient nomad life or being travellers, and seeking to put down roots; in space and time — but with our eyes looking towards our eternal home. This might involve us cultivating hospitality and habits and pictures of life and generosity that flow from here — like with Food Pantry and lunch together — in ways that celebrate God’s presence with us, as temples of his Spirit, and look forward to his hospitality in the new Eden.
This is an adaptation of the third talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter.And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.
Last ‘chapter’ we imagined life in an old village. This time I want you to imagine you are living in a monastery in the thirteenth century.
Here is a picture from the dedication of an altar in a monastery in France.
These seven candles on the altar were not just lights; they helped you mark time. You knew roughly — not exactly — how far a candle burned in an hour, so the daily schedule of prayers and meals was not “by the clock,” but “by the candle.”
The rhythms and rules — the daily prayers, weekly rhythms, and the Christian calendar — provided an enchanted framework for life in space and time. These candles were a technology that helped.
They are an echo of the lights in the menorah — a candlestick that held seven candles, seven bowls of oil with wicks that lit up Israel’s holy place.
Israel’s priests had to keep these lights burning from evening till morning every day as a “lasting ordinance” — a picture of space and time to teach Israel its story (Exodus 27:20–21).
The lampstand was made like a golden fruit tree, and people connect it to the tree of life (Exodus 25:31–32).
And the lights were shining in front of the curtain, which separated the holy place from the most holy place, as a picture of the barrier between heavens and earth, with shining heavenly beings — cherubim — embroidered on it (Exodus 25:3, 26:31, 35).
The word for the lamplight is used in Genesis 1, and then repeatedly in the instructions for these candlesticks. It is used for the lights that mark sacred times and days and years, in the vault between heavens and the earth. These are reproduced in Israel’s mini-heavens-and-earth space, to teach people to live in a certain rhythm that reinforces their picture of the universe, and of God (Genesis 3:14; Exodus 27:20).
The act of crafting this lampstand, and keeping these lights alight, is an act of making. This lampstand, and its lights, are a technology that shaped Israel’s physical environment, in the temple, and their understanding of the world (Exodus 25:31–32).
Making things — making technology and art and objects that teach us and shape us — is part of being human; being made in the image of God, to represent him (Genesis 1:26).
The author Dorothy Sayers wrote about this in her book The Mind of the Maker. She says all we know about God when he says we are made in his image is that he makes things:
“When we turn back to see what [the writer of Genesis] says about the original upon which the ‘image’ of God was modelled, we find only the single assertion, ‘God created.’”
Dorothy Sayers
So a characteristic we have in common with God is “the desire and ability to make things.”
To be human is to make things from the world he made, even the gold in it (Genesis 2:15) — to represent and worship him. The task of cultivating and keeping a garden, and then a temple, required tools and technology. There are even instructions in the laws about the wick trimmers; tools made of gold (Exodus 25:38).
We can make temple furnishings that teach us about God and his world. Or, like bricks in Babel and Babylon, we can make things to push beyond our limits against God. Or we can make golden calves:
“He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool.”
Exodus 32:4
That is the tension for us today. Being human means having the capacity to make technology that shapes the world, shapes how we see the world, and shapes us. That technology will either extend our function as image bearers, or deform us as we make idols. Both these truths are true and we have to hold them together.
And, just for fun, when Jesus is introduced as “the carpenter” in Mark’s Gospel (Mark 6:3), it is the word tekton — a word for craftsman — from the root for our word “technology.” The true human is a tech-maker.
So, back to our monastery, and these candles that taught people about life in the world: light and darkness; life in rhythm with God; as limited people located in space and time. Neither space nor time was split between secular and sacred; it was all God’s. This rhythm of praying the hours, marked by candlelight, provided a framework for life — one that was a little inexact. And if you were a stickler for rules, like some monks, this was a problem.
So in 1283 some monks at a monastery in England, who wanted more regulation, installed a mechanical clock, right above the pulpit in the chapel. That is when people started complaining about preaching going too long…
Historians reckon this might have been the first mechanical clock. It is likely they were invented in a monastery.
Marshall McLuhan is a bit of a hero of mine. He is the guy who said “the medium is the message.” His point was that we think we are changed by ideas — the content of a message — but those ideas are first shaped by the technologies — mediums — we use to understand things. Like with the candles: when we believe we are thinking things, changed by ideas, we neglect how our bodies interact with the world — how what we see and touch and smell and use shapes our thinking, and what we love.
Lots of his thinking about technology was actually built from two Biblical ideas. First, the idea that we become what we worship, and that we shape our tools — technology — and thereafter technology shapes us.
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”
Marshall McLuhan
And second, the idea that the incarnation of Jesus is the ultimate communication:
“In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message. It is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.”
Marshall McLuhan
He believes the clock in the monastery changed our view of time, and space, and was the start of “natural man” giving way to “mechanical man.” The monks’ need for synchronised action in communal life, with a clock regulating prayer and eating times, introduced ways of seeing time that changed what we behold. Time was seen as mechanical, and not observed in sensory and tactile ways.
He says when missionaries brought mechanical clocks to Asia they replaced not candles but burning incense sticks, so time became disconnected from our bodies and senses.
And when mechanical clocks — invented by monks — were installed in town squares they regulated the workday, and brought a new world order, and a new story about the world. Working with factories and engine-driven public transport — like trains — to get whole cities or communities running like clockwork, or like an old-fashioned wind-up robot, an automaton.
“By the nineteenth century it had provided a technology of cohesion that was inseparable from industry and transport, enabling an entire metropolis to act almost as an automaton.”
— Marshall McLuhan
McLuhan traces how this changed how we view space as well, shifting us from an enchanted cosmos to a mechanical universe. During this time, because machines were a powerful model of things working, people started talking about God as a watchmaker. The universe became clocklike.
And this would have been impossible without the clock embedding itself in our image-creating capacity — our imagination. You cannot imagine God as a clockmaker without clocks.
“The mechanical clock, in short, helps to create the image of a numerically quantified and mechanically powered universe.”
— Marshall McLuhan
Humans moved from thinking about God as a triune communion of love, whose love overflows into the world and in creation, to thinking about God as a distant engineer, because we do not just think, but we are people who live in time and space with our technology.
C. S. Lewis’s first public lecture as chair of medieval literature at Cambridge was about the difference between the world in the stories he loved, and the modern world.
He believed Pharaohs in Egypt had more in common with Jane Austen than we do. The enchanted pagan world had more in common with the enchanted Christian world than it does with the post-Christian world. And the big difference is the rise of the machine.
Especially the way with the machine we get a mythology that comes with technology: the idea that the newer and more efficient is always better.
“… a new archetypal image. It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones. For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is the clumsy…”
C. S. Lewis
And while I would not want the medical technology of any time before now, I wonder if this is where the furious tension gets broken. Where we slip into an idolatrous belief that human technology will fix the world. That all change is good, even if it breaks us by pulling us past our limits with false promises that dehumanise us.
Lewis saw this with the car. When people did not have cars they were stuck in the village we imagined last chapter. Their church was the church in the public square. Their neighbour, who they were called to love, was their actual neighbour. Where clocks regulated village life, cars fragmented it, as people could go rapidly beyond the limits of being a body in space.
C. S. Lewis wrote about the car annihilating space. He had this idea that distance is a good gift from God in a vast world, that our limits are actually a gift from God.
“The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it ‘annihilates space.’ It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given.”
C. S. Lewis
Technology will always extend or break our limits. That is both a feature and a bug. It is where we end up in Babel-like idolatry, or making tools to feed people more effectively.
But despite the idea we often believe — that technology is neutral and where it takes us is about how we use it — McLuhan has a great line about this idea, calling it the “numb stance of the technological idiot.” Technology is not neutral. It is ecological. It always brings change to our environments, and so to us. If it does not, it is not really a technology.
“Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”
Marshall McLuhan
McLuhan’s work was trying to help us think through not just the obvious enhancements brought by technology, but the unseen forces — even at the level of myths and images — that change us and the world.
The monks did not imagine that, rather than regulating time with God, the clock might change how people thought about time and space and God. And maybe, like them, we do not think about how our technology is not just regulating our lives, but changing our imaginations and providing a mythology — a story — we inhabit.
There has been a technological revolution since the mechanical age that has already altered our picture of reality — our mythology — mostly in a closed-off universe. This has been about how we think of ourselves and the universe. People once talked about our brains as machine-like. Now we talk about them as though they are computers — programmed, wired, dependent on data. And people model human relationships as networks, while picturing the universe as a giant super-computer.
Elon Musk already believes we live in a computer simulation. There are more people who think if we are not already, that is the path to immortality.
Remember Yuval Noah Harari from chapter one — the guy who ‘annihilated space and time’ by giving a TED talk as a hologram? The thought-leader who believes we are on a tech-fuelled trajectory to become gods?
“…having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus
He believes engineers — geeks in a lab — not Jesus — will lead us to overcome death:
“We do not need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the speciality of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over.”
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus
Now, most of us are not going to buy that obvious idolatry. And even if we were, Harari makes the point that most of us could not afford to, even if we wanted to.
But our lives — as individuals and in community — are shaped by digital technology, and often the devices in our pockets; these tools.
Now it is easy to think these are not just neutral, but good. Try to imagine life without one, and the apps you love, and they feel embedded and almost impossible to uproot. They are genius pieces of technology that feel like they make life easier.
It is much harder to uproot a technology you have adapted to than one you have not. But what if these are disintegrating our humanity? Could you do it? Could you walk away from your phone tomorrow?
When we talk about digital technology it is not just hardware, is it? It is software as well. But this technology is pushing us beyond our limits like never before.
It has its own disenchanting mythology, and view of the future we can buy into. Even if we do not want to digitise our consciousness, becoming one with the machine — we will look at that more next time — there is a future we are all actually living in that wants to see everything connected; a picture of the future where every surface is a touchscreen, and where all our devices — starting with the fridges — are connected to the internet, and watching us.
A smart fridge that auto-orders your groceries by anticipating your desires based on your TV viewing might seem exciting. I want one. But it is also kind of terrifying.
We do not just live in a secular age. Shoshana Zuboff describes the world we live in as The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
She says there is another tech myth out there — that we are the product. But we are not. We are the patch of ground they buy a mining license for:
“We are the objects from which raw materials are extracted and expropriated for Google’s prediction factories. Predictions about our behavior are Google’s products, and they are sold to its actual customers but not to us.”
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Here. I have made a meme for you… the medium is the message.
It is not just that tech is not neutral. It is not just “if you are not paying for it, you are the product.” We are being mined, and our thoughts and actions sold to companies who want to exploit us.
Data is being continuously collected from our phones, cars, homes, shops, smart watches, airports, loyalty cards, Amazon searches and purchases, our Netflix stream, our search history — where we tell Google our inner thoughts — and our status updates — what we project to the world.
And not just to sell us the stuff the algorithms know we want, but also to start changing what we see and interact with, so tech companies can change how we think about the world and whatever cause they like, in what she calls long-term strategies of manipulation intended to mould us.
“Personal information is increasingly used to enforce standards of behavior. Information processing is developing, therefore, into an essential element of long-term strategies of manipulation intended to mold and adjust individual conduct.”
Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism
Our brains have become the software, programmed by others so our hardware — our bodies — act accordingly. McLuhan also said “the medium is the massage” — our communication forms form us. But this is next level, especially when companies outsource this massaging of our brains to machine learning: to algorithms designed to maximise their efficiency.
You might be worried about technology because you have noticed its impact on your well-being — whether that is the way you are addicted to screens, to doom-scrolling, to games, to porn, to whatever is giving you a dopamine hit. Lots of the tech we are addicted to is designed to grab and keep your attention using the same chemical reward cycle stimulating techniques as poker machines — designed to addictively link your brain chemistry and the machine.
You might have recognised that technology promises connection, but is objectively leaving users lonelier than ever.
But that is not all. Machines can now — with human help — make stuff that leaves us constantly having to question what is true and what is real. Whether that is deepfakes, where content can be generated using audio clips and videos to make anybody do or say just about anything, or randomly generated human faces, like this person — who does not exist — just like the lady in our series graphic.
These images can be used in just about any way. You could use AI to make a person who does not exist do or say things in a video.
And, of course, there is fake news. Not just the way people within our democracy might flood social media with disinformation, but how foreign troll farms are dedicated to flooding social media with memes geared to fuel destabilising polarisation.
Technology is not neutral. It can be disenchanting — like the clock. It can deny our limits — like the car, or the hologram, or the screen. It can make us less God-dependent, and more dependent on ourselves. Not just modern medicine — which is great — but the idea we can use tech to become immortal in the clouds — which is not so great.
Idolatrous technology distorts the way we live in the world, and ultimately it is part of what is disintegrating us — our societies, and our own lives — as we are pulled beyond our limits and in thousands of directions all at once. Sometimes the pull is from algorithmic sources we cannot see or understand, and sometimes it is just our own chemical dependency fuelled by our addiction. Often it is both at once.
And this comes back to Jacques Ellul’s diagnosis of modern society as a technological society built on the myth that technology and technique — the machine — always produces progress. He published this the same year as Lewis’s lecture. This is the idea that living right is about picking the right technology and techniques to maximise efficient outcomes. Think about the way, at about this time, machines were producing maximally effective fast food. He believed this was fragmenting us then, in 1954:
“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence.”
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
Just imagine what happens when we bring this story about technology and technique into our lives as disciples of Jesus, and into our life together as the church.
We do not have to imagine that — many of us have lived it, and we are recovering from the feeling of being part of a machine; fast-food church. Some of us have followed the podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, basically the story of a church that was a technological society, fully embracing technology and technique in a digital world, to pursue limitless numerical growth, whatever the cost.
The fast-food church idea that a church should grow to 10,000 by building efficient systems, or should go global by streaming one man’s — it is always a man — one man’s preaching into auditoriums and lounge rooms around the world, where no questions get asked about that because the technology allows it… That is this technological age, and this is when tech turns idolatrous.
And so — what is the way forward? How do we be truly human — image bearers who create as people made to create? Who make tools and technology that can either connect us to God and his story, or become gods that disenchant the world? How do we resist technology that pushes us to deny our limits, distort the way we live in the world, create dependencies in our brains and bodies, and ultimately disintegrate us? All while digital Babylon — the world of surveillance capitalism — wants to use the magic of technology, and its promises, to disciple us, and exploit us while they build their towers?
Are we facing a looming disaster?
In the nineteenth century there was a collective of English textile workers who recognised the way the mechanical loom was reshaping life not just for them — taking jobs — but the way mechanisation was going to change life as they knew it. They got together and called themselves the Luddites. You might have heard of them. They tried to destroy mechanical looms wherever they got their hands on them.
I know some of you are thinking “OK boomer” when I talk about technology like this. But maybe you should be thinking “OK loomer.” Only, it is not that simple.
There are people who believe we should go back to monastic life to escape the power of technology. But that misses the fact that we are made to make — to make the world more like Eden.
I do wonder if we should be a bit more Amish. They are not anti-tech, just really slow to embrace new technology. They embrace limits, and carefully consider the changes technology will bring to their lives as individuals, and as a community, changing slowly and carefully, to resist the patterns of the outside world.
It is too late for us, though, right?
We have embraced so much of this technology and become addicts who are chemically wired into the machine.
And maybe there are some technologies we have embraced that are dehumanising us, that we need to walk away from like recovering addicts. There are new technologies we can resist, when we see forces of surveillance capitalism at play, and the risks involved in a smart toilet… or a hyper-connected world.
And yet, perhaps we Christians could also be at the cutting edge of technology if we thought about it deliberately, and built things according to our understanding of the world, and of being human. What if we made technology, or embraced techniques that reminded us of our limits, and of our place in an enchanted universe, pushing back against universal black glass and smart toilets?
And look: this would all feel abstract if a bunch of you were not super-genius tech and maths geeks at the start of your careers. Or in the middle. Or the parents and grandparents of people who might be. Or if some of you were not working out how to hack and redesign medical machinery to solve problems in the developing world.
This is the stuff of everyday life. Technology is inevitable. It is part of being human, because we are tektons made in the image of a tekton. The catch is we have the furious opposites thing going on, where tech can either make us more human, for the glory of God, or dehumanise us through idolatry. And we have to ask about the story technology teaches us — both medium and message — and how we connect ourselves to God and his creative work in creation and redemption.
Following Jesus the tekton — the creative Word who became flesh; coming as a user and maker of tools and technologies — who worked with his hands making things for thirty years, before taking part in the rebuilding project of bringing his heavenly Father’s kingdom to earth. Restoring us as images.
There is a cool thing in that bit from Ephesians we read. Paul says that we are God’s workmanship, his handiwork (Ephesians 2:10). This is a word that only turns up in one other place in the New Testament — in Romans 1:20, which talks about how we were meant to know God from what has been made — his handiwork. We — the church — we are God’s creative act, created in Jesus, to show the world what God is like as we do the good work — including the technology-making and the techniques we adopt — that reveal his nature to the world. We are saved by the work of Jesus the tekton, not our work, so God’s making is on display in our making.
We are re-created by a creator to do good, and that means creating technology and techniques — ways of being — but also living differently to the people in this world who are ruled by the prince of the air. That is the devil (Ephesians 2:1–2). Which means resisting the idolatrous mythology that surrounds technology, and the way some of that idolatry is aimed at making us like God. Just like the bricks in Babel, pushing us beyond our limits — time, space, even death — that will ultimately destroy us. Figuring out where technology is pulling us towards idolatrous self-sufficiency, and away from God’s work, will require big-brained discernment: knowing what technology can do, spotting myths and destructive patterns in our personal lives, and in our life together, and in the world. We can become like automatons united in a machine, or parts of a living body united by an animating Spirit. We have to work out together when technology is good to embrace, good to resist, and what is good to create. That will take wisdom.
What Paul says a bit later in Ephesians brings us full circle — back to the candles — the idea that God is light and life and that we should live as children of the light (Ephesians 5:8). And he does not mean backlit glass screens, but those who see the world as the workmanship of the God who said “Let there be light.” Paul says be wise and careful in how we live (Ephesians 5:15), which certainly includes thinking about technology. He says the days are evil; there is a prince of the air out there, making the most of every opportunity — or literally “redeeming the time” (Ephesians 5:15–17). Life on the clock tells one story about time. But we are called to occupy time differently; seeing our days as days lived before God, doing his work.
And maybe that means we need more candles — technology that pushes us back against the particular technological idolatry of our time. Tish Harrison Warren talks about how we are trained — discipled even — by our use of technology to spend more time on screens, a world away, focused on the trending and distant, so we miss the small and close features of embodied life:
“We are creatures made to encounter beauty and goodness in the material world. But digitisation is changing our relationship with materiality — both the world of nature and of human relationships… We are trained through technology (and technology corporations) to spend more time on screens and less time noticing and interacting with this touchable, smellable, feelable world.”
Tish Harrison Warren
She believes just as people have resisted fast food by turning to slow food, patterns of eating that are less about technology and technique, and more local and connected, we should embrace slower life in order to reconnect with our bodies, our limits, our community, and our God.
“Just as people have worked to revive slow, unprocessed and traditional food, we need to fight for the tangible world, for enduring ways of interacting with others.”
Tish Harrison Warren
Which raises the question: if some versions of church have been the equivalent of fast food — triumphs of pragmatism, technology, and technique — what does it look like to embrace slow church; church life that teaches us our limits?
We are certainly a bit minimalist, deliberately, as a church when it comes to technology. And we have tried to bring in some ancient stuff to resist modern patterns. Paul describes some mediums — techniques — that will keep us connected to God, and to each other. They are ancient techniques we still use in our life together: as we sing God’s truth to each other, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 5:18–20).
This is an adaptation of the second talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter.And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.
I want us to use our imaginations for a bit — with some help from some art.
Imagine you are a farmer in a French village. It is about 1400 AD.
You work in fields owned by the local lord, whose job was providing order. He is part of a chain of rulers — appointed by the king, who was crowned in a ceremony in church to show he is a reflection of God’s rule over the world.
When you finished work, you would head to the public square, where the skyline was dominated by the steeple of the church — a building whose art and furniture and layout, at the heart of the village, were part of teaching villagers to be human.
If you got sick, or the weather caused your crops to fail, you would wonder how the spiritual world was at play. This painting shows people being struck down by plague.
The Black Death — a pandemic — had been sweeping through the world for fifty years, killing two thirds of the population in your village. Nobody knew what to do. If you went to the big city you found the borders closed, like in this painting, and you would have to die at home, or find a monastery to care for you.
Reality was a playground for angels and demons. The heavens and earth overlapped and were involved in everyday events.
Your version of Christianity was fused with folk religion. Not only were religious relics with miraculous powers touring from town to town, but if you wanted a bumper harvest you might pocket a piece of Communion bread and plant it with your crops.
Time was marked by holy days — feasts provided by the lord and the priest — moments of embodied celebration connected to stories from the Bible, and the lives of the saints. These also worked to reinforce an enchanted view of reality where heavens and earth overlapped.
Our guide to the secular age, Charles Taylor, says the human in this world had a porous self — open and vulnerable to forces, but also living in this order. While he calls the modern self ‘buffered’ — cut off from that reality.
“A crucial condition for this was a new sense of the self and its place in the cosmos: not open and porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers, but what I want to call ‘buffered’.”
Charles Taylor
He calls the backdrop — the infrastructure, social structures, communal rhythms, and stories, the stuff that shapes our imagination and beliefs — a “social imaginary.”
“I want to speak of ‘social imaginary’ here… because I’m talking about the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings… it is carried in images, stories, legends, etc… that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society.”
Charles Taylor
Things were not great back then. Obviously. Deadly pandemics without medicine. A social order you were born into where your life was determined. Living at the whim of the weather without farming technology providing food security. Corrupt human authorities claiming to act for God.
People needed a revolution — the Renaissance — an explosion of art and culture and new ideas, a new social imaginary that included the development of humanism, and the philosophical concept of the individual.
We tend to assume this framework — that we are a self; in control of our own identity; that we belong to ourselves — but individualism is a development in the West.
The French politician Lord Montaigne wrote about the idea of self-ownership — he only wanted to lend himself to others, not belong to them, because we should only give ourselves to ourselves.
“As much as I can I employ my self wholly to my self… My opinion is, that one should lend himself to others, and not give himself but to himself.”
Lord Montaigne, 1588
An idea the English philosopher John Locke picked up one hundred years later when he said every human has a property in their person that no one else has a right to, and it is the same with the work of our hands. This idea produced liberalism, and democracy.
“Every individual man has a property in his own person; this is something that nobody else has any right to. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are strictly his.”
John Locke, 1689
Where we are our own.
There was another changing of the social imaginary in the mix here; the church was going through its own revolution — a Reformation, because it had become corrupt. The Reformation and Renaissance go hand in hand.
Tara Isabella Burton wrote Strange Rites — a book about our modern religious sensibilities that emerge out of the modern self. She charts how Protestantism, in particular, drove the move from institutional to individual, starting with Martin Luther’s emphasis on a more individualistic path to God.
“Religion itself heralded this transition from the institutional to the individual… Protestantism — particularly Martin Luther’s vision of religion — pioneered a different and far more individualistic path.”
Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites
His emphasis was on personal faith and the individual, on reading the Bible freed from corrupt religious authorities.
“Luther saw the experience of Christian faith as primarily a personal one; the relationship between the individual and the Bible was one that no outside body or cleric had the authority to encroach upon.”
Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites
Luther was a priest who was also a humanist lawyer. When he looked at the corruption of institutional power, and at the Bible, he re-articulated the way the Gospel did not say you are saved by your relationship to the institution.
This painting of him preaching has him holding the word and speaking from it to put the atoning death of Jesus in front of people, and the salvation of the individual through faith in Jesus.
Which was good. Except maybe that it led to the collapse of some other truths that had been part of the social imaginary. Luther, and Reformers after him, were so keen to go back to the text that they started a demolition of the church’s view of the sacraments — dropping the number from seven to two — and of folk religion — like magic relics, or planting Communion bread.
They also demolished festivals — things that had structured people’s experience of time and space.
There was another factor here — technology. While all this was being removed from the rhythms of life, the printing press meant more people had books. It changed who got to tell the stories. And unlike the institution, Protestants were so keen for people to be able to read the Bible for themselves that they started schools for everyone.
This education program shifted how we understand being human. We became much more focused on filling the brain with words, than on how we used our bodies. The self was a product of the mind, where we could be absolutely sure we belonged to ourselves. This inner self became the starting point for our relationship with God.
There are pretty clear lines we can draw from this changing of the social imaginary to disenchantment.
There is lots of great stuff about Protestantism that we probably love. But in these revolutions there is a reaction against one heresy — the “furious truth” that we are not our own — with the “furious truth” that we are individuals.
It is true that you — you as an individual — are made in the image of God; you have personhood and dignity as a gift from God inherent to your being (Genesis 1:27). It is true that we are equal before God, and that the Gospel has implications for you as an individual built on your relationship with the God who gives everyone life and breath, and in whom we live, and breathe, and have our being (Acts 17:25, 28) — the triune God who is a communion of love (1 John 4:8, 16).
And it is also true that we belong in a communion with others that reflects God’s nature. Part of imaging God, being human, is in the plural “them.” We are human in and through relationships. Part of our humanity is actually a product of the relationships that produce us, that give us love and attachment as we belong to our communities. At their best these communities are part of our social imaginary that teaches us about God and the universe we live in, because we are representing God.
And heretical movements, both in the church and in the world, have picked either of these truths — that we exist as humans in community, and that we exist as humans as individuals — and placed them at odds with each other. That is part of what pulls us apart.
One way to observe these heresies at play is in our own plague — the pandemic and our response to it. Think about what you might call the right and the left. In a liberal democracy both these poles are still going to be built on individualism to some extent, but the right tends to emphasise the individual self; individual responsibility, while the left tends to think about systems or societies of individuals — social responsibility.
We have had to face a disease that has brought death, in large numbers, around the world — and for most of our neighbours that has happened in a new social imaginary without God to give us comfort, and with the idea not that this could be God’s judgment, but that we humans have to fix it. We turn to technology like masks and vaccines to save us.
And the mask has become a revealer — which is ironic. It is meant to cover things. But it has revealed our fractured social imaginary. The same with lockdowns, vaccines, and vaccine mandates.
“Masks have really become politicised around the issue of personal freedom – about whether governments and health officials have the right to require individuals to wear masks… issues of personal freedom versus collective good are being negotiated.”
It is a furious opposites moment where both are true. But where political polarisation is happening because we are still heretics at heart — and these are both Christian truths unmoored from Christianity.
The thing about movements built around polarised positions like this — around our intuitions and our heresies — is that we turn to new social imaginaries, new social media story-tellers, and new festivals of belonging to have our identities recognised and reinforced.
Whether that is an anti-vax “freedom” movement, a Black Lives Matter movement, a Pride march, a football game… These are rhythms and rituals that help us with a sense of self as we bring our inner self to the world, and engage our bodies, and even dress them, so that we are recognised in a way that helps us feel human. They fill a void of something we have lost from when we lived with God as our witness in this human-centred universe where we need other people to witness us. Charles Taylor talks about this as being part of a culture of expressive individualism, or a culture of authenticity, where basically we boil things down to “finding our way” while “doing our thing.”
“There arises in Western societies a generalised culture of ‘authenticity’, or expressive individualism, in which people are encouraged to find their own way, discover their own fulfilment, ‘do their own thing.’”
Charles Taylor
While Tara Burton says we have replaced institutional religion with intuitional religions:
“Today’s new cults of and for the Remixed are what I will call ‘intuitional religions.’”
Tara Isabella Burton
We have moved from doctrine and dogma and hierarchies and any story that we are given, and replaced it with our own authority — self-authoring ourselves from our gut instinct as we navigate our experiences.
“By this, I mean that their sense of meaning is based in narratives that simultaneously reject clear-cut creedal metaphysical doctrines and institutional hierarchies and place the locus of authority on people’s experiential emotions, what you might call gut instinct.”
Tara Isabella Burton
Now we have to figure out who we are as people who have buffered ourselves; cut ourselves off from anything outside our mind, and defined ourselves from within. In the modern world this is where we talk about identity; the idea that we have to discover who we are on the inside, and express and be recognised as who we are on the outside in a way that matches.
“For the modern, buffered self, the possibility exists of taking a distance from, disengaging from everything outside the mind. My ultimate purposes are those which arise within me…”
Charles Taylor
You might have heard people say that we should “find our identity in Christ.” But I believe this can be a dangerous way to assume this modern model of the person. This idea of identity — used the way we use it — is a new thing in the English language; newer than the individual and the self.
Google has this tool called the N-Gram — it shows the frequency that words appear, as a percentage, in books published since 1500. Look at this. There is a real uptick in the 1950s that can be explained by two academic disciplines — psychology and sociology — both using the word to mean two slightly different things to answer the question “who am I” for a world rapidly breaking up with God.
In psychology, identity is about your inner self and finding ways to live consistently. In sociology, your identity is something performed and recognised by other humans, in a group.
So now we live in a world where everyone has to work out their identity question from within — belonging to themselves — and have it recognised by others. And so, in these words from Alan Noble’s great book You Are Not Your Own:
“Everyone is on their own private journey of self-discovery and self-expression, so that at times, modern life feels like billions of people in the same room shouting their own name so that everyone else knows they exist and who they are — which is a fairly accurate description of social media.”
Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own
We have to do all this in a world where complexity and speed mean we still cannot see the invisible forces that make things happen. But we are pretty sure it is not demons.
“Complex systems are often characterised by an absence of visible causal links between their elements, which makes them impossible to predict.”
Klaus Schwab, Thierry Malleret, The Great Narrative: For a Better Future, World Economic Forum
And when we face big problems it is not on God to fix things; it is on us — and often the “us” there is individual.
Think about how climate change has become an issue you have to solve by your decisions and actions — like turning off the lights, or cutting plastic out of the picture. Now this is good creation care; good stewardship. But your small changes — like not using plastic straws, or bread tags — will not make a difference if there are not also big systemic changes; changing legislation or companies changing how they work.
Even the Great Narrative says tackling overwhelming stuff starts with you. You have to get it right.
“Tackling an issue that seems overwhelming begins with practicality – with every one of us acting and focusing on the things within our remit, like being empathetic towards our fellow human beings, reaching out to those in need, making the right decisions on how we engage with others, eat, shop, travel, vote, and more.”
You have to navigate these invisible forces in a complex world and make all the right decisions.
And you cannot.
There are two risks with all this for Christians.
The first is that we treat our Christianity as though we are modern people creating an identity — seeing coming to church as just like a rally, or a preference we perform to be recognised; just one choice we make while being true to ourselves and belonging to ourselves.
Maybe you can picture people you know who tack Christianity on as something like a brand; who pose for photos with Bibles outside a church, while nothing else about their life changes.
Or maybe it is you. Maybe church is one of many identities where you perform, then jump to something else… not as an integrated person, but as a dis-integrating person; wearing different masks, performing different identities in different communities as you remix religious ideas following your intuitions.
This is not what church is; and it is not how we are created to live.
Christianity is not a preference to be performed; an exercise in self-expression. It is not an identity we have to shout at people on the internet, even if we might use the internet to point to Jesus.
There is a risk when we bring in the category of identity that we focus on being human as individual selves, and that Christianity becomes a psychological or sociological thing, where we use God as part of an answer to our question “Who am I?”, rather than changing the question to “Whose am I?” — realising that God gives us our humanity, and we become truly human not by our choice, but by receiving his gift of life and communion with him.
The second risk is that we can slip into thinking as individuals when it comes to our own complex problems. We tend towards putting responsibility for godliness on individuals — saying “fix yourself through discipline” rather than cultivating communities where individuals are encouraged and discipled in godly ways.
Think about how we talk about addictive, sinful behaviours as though they are simply a choice, when often they are products of sinful systems that benefit from addicting us to things; and from bodies that carry trauma memories, and brains addicted to dopamine hits, in a world where we have been set up to believe individual fulfilment is the best thing, and we get that by consuming more of what we want.
Our sinful individual actions are sin that we are responsible for; absolutely, that is true. It is also true they are products of social imaginaries created to reinforce these same sinful behaviours, so that the answer is not just personal change by an individual self.
We can end up with a faith that puts all the responsibility for godliness on your shoulders. And your brain. “You have an addiction? Fix it by thinking right. Read more Bible. Know more stuff about God. Choose right. Take some ownership. Belong to yourself.”
We will ask no questions about how our culture — whether in the church, or in the world — is breaking you and pushing you towards coping strategies… about what is going on in your brain… we will just tell you to self-improve… And “self-author;” “self-justify;” “save yourself” by getting your works right. This move is an anti-Gospel and it leaves us crushed by our inability to actually do it. And then the world tells us the answer to being crushed is found in the world — it is in technology, and techniques — medication, mindfulness, our coping strategies — porn, alcohol, coffee, work. And so we go back to our addictive behaviour and the cycle continues. Avoiding these risks is hard enough without living in a social imaginary that bombards us with an almost limitless number of stories about reality that reinforce our disintegration. A world built on the heresy that you are your own.
We spend all this time asking “Who am I?” and “How can I self-improve?” — but we actually need to spend more time asking “Who is God?” and “What does that mean for us?”
This is where our readings are really helpful — and where we find a phrase that became the first thing in the Heidelberg Catechism, a teaching tool from early in the Reformation:
You are not your own.
Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?
A. That I am not my own, but belong — body and soul, in life and in death — to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
Heidelberg Catechism, 1563
The right thing to do; both in creation — where, because we are made in God’s image, and in God’s story of salvation, is not to “own ourselves” or “lend ourselves out,” but give to God what is God’s. We are not our own because we have been bought, redeemed, at a price. The price paid by Jesus, the true human — who showed us what it looks like to give yourself fully to God as he did. He did not just lend a bit of himself but gave his life, his body, to bring us into communion with God.
Paul uses this truth against first-century expressive individualism. People were saying “It is my body, and I have rights to pursue my own way” — around food, and worship, and sex, but Paul offers an alternative to the crushing pressure of belonging to ourselves, and to being pulled in every direction by our desires, and those telling us they will fulfil them without God in the mix. He says our bodies are made for communion with the Lord (1 Corinthians 6:12–13). So that we find our life in God as God lives in you, and transforms you with his Spirit dwelling in you — so that you become his temple. Because you are not your own. You were bought at a price; you belong to God (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).
And there would be a tendency for us to individualise this, right — to think this is a transformative truth about me, the individual… that is who I am. I am a temple. My body. I should diet, go to the gym, and not get tattoos.
But there is a catch. Because the “you” here is not just you. We heretics read it this way…
It is youse — like two thirds of the time the word “you” is used in the New Testament; these are plural in the Greek.
“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in youse, whom youse have received from God? Youse are not youse’s own; youse were bought at a price. Therefore honour God with youse’s bodies.”
1 Corinthians 6:19–20, New Plural Version (NPV)
This is a picture of a new reality for us as individuals-in-community — and our bodies, that are temples of the Holy Spirit, and are bought at a price. United to him, and each other, by the Spirit, to play this visible role of the presence of God in the world; to teach each other about the reality of the heavens and the earth because God’s Spirit dwells in youse.
Now, what the church building and festivals were in our medieval village, the temple was in Israel. It was the centre of the social imaginary. The rituals and rhythms of Israel’s community life were centred on this place that taught them about the heavens and earth, their story, and God’s character: his holiness, his love, his judgment and forgiveness; his desire to be present in order to live in relationship and restore people to life with him.
We have a new social imaginary to shape our belief — it is our bodies. Together.
Not just my body as an individual, but the way we use our bodies in community — in communion — in ways that express our story and our hope.
Our bodies are another thing we Protestants disenchanted in our rush to the mind. But how we use them is going to teach us about God, and belonging to him as we belong to each other.
Paul is going to take this idea about the body through to how married Christians act in private, and in public, when husband and wife belong to one another (1 Corinthians 7:4), and then how the church community, a new social imaginary, operates as one body, with one Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:12–14).
A communion — of many individual parts — all working together in a dynamic, God-created way. He put us together. That teaches us about the oneness we have been bought into and brought into by the body of Jesus, as we live as the body of Jesus (1 Corinthians 12:24–25, 27), taking up the most excellent way of love (1 Corinthians 12:31, 13:4). The way of God. This is what it means to be truly human because it is what it means to be the image — the body — of Jesus in the world as people united in him.
So how do we get back to seeing the world right? To understanding ourselves this way, in an enchanted world where God rules? Without bringing back corrupt kings or priests — or being enslaved by those who would dehumanise us by trying to make us, our bodies, belong to them. How do we see the world in a way that does put the body of Christ in front of our eyes as we open God’s word, but also as we live as the body of Christ, shaped by the Gospel together?
We need rhythms for our bodies; a story to shape our view of the world and life in it, not for our individual inner self, but for our communal life as we operate as God’s temple — his image bearers — for each other and the world; as we represent the God who is love, who gives himself to us — in the Son and the Spirit — to justify and redeem us and make us truly human, truly his. Not needing to ask “Who am I?” because we know the real question is “Whose am I?”
We need a new social imaginary.
We, together, need to cultivate new art and architecture in our lives that teaches us who we are — not just how to think, but how to be human — in a community embodying this reality. And that is what the church, the body of Christ, is.
We have abandoned the church calendar — the holy days — so we march to the calendar set for us by Westfield, who co-opt Christian days — Easter and Christmas — and even saint days, like Valentine’s — to sell more stuff to us, keep us consuming. Which is one of the reasons, as a church, we have started thinking about the church calendar more — especially around Advent.
We need to tell a better story — but not just tell it — move it from a story we hear to a story we live. One we participate in with our bodies. Which is one of the reasons we Presbyterians were so quick to jump on board with weekly Communion. We could see that as an empty ritual, and it can become one, but the key is to make it meaningfully connected to truths about God. Doing this regularly is a feature, not a bug, that makes it part of our rhythms — our framework for belief.
We need to cultivate a sense that we belong to a community way beyond ourselves — a communion with other people that includes those of us in the room, but also connects us even to the villagers we imagined back at the beginning. That is one of the reasons to say the Creed; not only do we say big truths together, but we are remembering connection to others who share our beliefs — and most importantly to God.
We stand and sing together — not singing as soloists, but a choir — whose voices join together in worshipping God; praising him for his goodness in creation and redemption; recognising that we belong to him.
We eat together and celebrate that we are now a community, a family, a body.
And we need to cultivate patterns and rhythms of serving each other. None of this is only about Sunday; a social imaginary operates 24/7, and there is a powerful one out there teaching you that you belong to yourselves. We actually have a calling from God to be building an embassy; being a temple — a picture of an alternative way of life to a world full of people being torn apart by the belief they belong to themselves and that is it.
We need to spend time in communion with God — meditating on his word, not just as ideas, but seeing the life it calls us to. And in the sort of silent, contemplative prayer we practiced last week that teaches us about our limits and about God’s place in the cosmos, and that we do live and find ourselves before God, rather than before the audience of our peers.
None of these are silver bullets. They are also not just individual practices, but they might shape our imaginations and help us to practice godliness in our own lives. They are practices designed to pull us out of ourselves and connect us to the life of God that we have been connected to by Jesus; to teach us that we are not our own, but have been created and redeemed by a God who loves us and justifies us, and who does the work to save us — even from ourselves.
A few years ago (2022) I preached a topical sermon series exploring what it means to be human in an age that seems to be built to disintegrate us — I mean that in the sense of fragmenting and pulling us apart as we are moved in many directions away from our embodied reality and away from God. I’ve been meaning to turn these into posts for a while — blogging has taken a back seat for me (obviously).
I preached this series when the most ‘AI’ thing I’d played with was thispersondoesnotexist.com and very early Midjourney image generation. Over the next little while I’m going to turn the sermons into posts here. This was talk one — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter.
And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out above.
This is a different sort of sermon to normal — and a different series. I just want to warn you up front, because I am wanting to set the scene a little for us as we tackle this series. There will be a little more talking about the world, and a little less working through a passage like we did through Matthew, and then through Genesis.
We are just coming off the back of our Origin Story series where we saw how God is the author of a story — a complex and integrated story that runs through the whole Bible; and how we were made to live lives shaped by this story. But it is a story we have lost in the modern Western world; and this loss is coupled with the loss of God, as the author of life — not just life in general, but our lives.
We are living in a world more like Babylon; where our neighbours are trying to make a name, and a story, for ourselves. We are the authority over our own lives, the authors of our own stories. But there are some movers and shakers in modern Babylon who are starting to realise we have lost a grand narrative — and that maybe Babylon needs one to survive.
So the World Economic Forum is inviting us to discover The Great Narrative for a Better Future.
Now, I do not think the U.N, or the E.U, or the World Economic Forum are the only “towers of Babel” around. Any of us can try to build things where we are little gods in little kingdoms — and you are probably more likely to be impacted by an Instagram influencer, or your family and friends, than by a bunch of faceless boffins in global think tanks.
But there is something about an organisation trying to unite the world to alter the future, creating a sort of trans-national heaven on earth, without God, that is Babylon-esque.
This book is a product of political and thought leaders from around the world — looking for a new story, especially as we have been so shaken by the pandemic.
“Narratives are how we make sense of life; they provide us with a context, thanks to which we can better interpret, understand and respond to the facts we observe.”
— The Great Narrative, Klaus Schwab, Thierry Malleret
They recognise that stories are powerful — they provide us with meaning-making and a context we use to make sense of the world. They recognise that the loss of a coherent and integrating narrative has created many of our problems.
And just like Rome and Babylon and Egypt there is wisdom in the thoughts of these leaders — and there is idolatrous guff — and it is our job to figure out what is gold that is worth integrating into our own thinking, or, rather, where they are thinking true things about God’s world.
“Complex systems are often characterised by an absence of visible causal links between their elements, which makes them impossible to predict.”
— The Great Narrative, Klaus Schwab, Thierry Malleret
Their analysis of life in the modern world is that life now is complex — everything now seems multi-factorial, and all the systems out there are integrated. You change one thing in one place, and this integrated complexity flows through to all sorts of unexpected places.
We are seeing this with the price of lettuce with the floods, and the price of fuel with the Ukraine conflict, and the empty shelves at the supermarket when different global supply chains are disrupted.
Supply chains for complex products — like electronics, or a computer — look like this when you map them. And we live in these systems — like one of these dots in the supply chain for a single Dell laptop — and we are in danger of being pulled apart by this web of forces we do not see.
Life is complex.
And, as The Great Narrative puts it:
“Everything is happening much faster than it used to, because technological advances and, to a lesser extent, globalization have created a culture of immediacy… This new culture of immediacy, obsessed with speed, seems to be in all aspects of our lives… It is so pervasive that some thinkers have called this new phenomenon the ‘dictatorship of urgency’.”
— The Great Narrative, Klaus Schwab, Thierry Malleret
Now I think this is a reasonable analysis that lines up with how I am feeling about the world, and about life.
How about you?
This is not a new idea. The French philosopher Jacques Ellul wrote about our technological age — our obsession with using technique and technologies to solve our problems — back in 1954.
He argues that technology does not just change our environment; by doing that it changes us — modifying our essence. We have to adapt to this new world that is of our making; a world where the tools we have made to extend our limitations push us beyond our limits.
Here is a quote:
“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created.”
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
That is one of the key ideas in this series — that our limits, as humans, are actually a good gift to us from an unlimited God, and maybe we should embrace them more.
Ellul says we are made to walk — our bodies — at 6 kilometres an hour, but now machines fly us around at a thousand. We are made to live in a rhythm with the natural world, but we obey a clock. We use electric lights, and screens, to stay up late and sleep less.
And here is the kicker — we were created, he says, with a sort of essential unity — an integrity or coherence — but all these forces of the modern world are fragmenting us. They are disintegrating us. And that is what many of us are feeling, seventy years later.
Disintegrated.
Technology always extends us beyond our natural limits; sometimes in good ways, but always in ways that change us — it lets us push against the limits of being bodies who live in space, and time. Our technology can move us faster around space, or throw our images or voices to the other side of the world in an instant.
Making technology is part of being made in the image of a maker — but our technology — like Nimrod and Nebuchadnezzar’s bricks — can make us feel like gods.
The writer Yuval Noah Harari is one of the thought leaders the World Economic Forum loves.
He has a slogan: “History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.”
He is the first person to present a TED talk as a hologram — or digital avatar — a picture of time and space being warped by technology.
He believes we are moving into a new phase of existence — a move he writes about in his best-seller Homo Deus — Latin for “divine human” — where he says now technology has lifted us from beastliness, the next stage is going to be chasing immortality, and bending the world to our will — upgrading us humans into gods. We will become the authors of our own destiny; our own lives.
“…having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”
— Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
He is not alone.
Jeremy Rifkin is an economic advisor to the European Union. Back in the 1980s he wrote about life beyond God:
“We no longer feel ourselves to be guests in someone else’s home and therefore obliged to make our behaviour conform with a set of pre-existing cosmic rules.
It is our creation now. We make the rules. We establish the parameters of reality. We create the world, and because we do, we no longer feel beholden to outside forces.
We no longer have to justify our behaviour, for we are now the architects of the universe. We are responsible to nothing outside ourselves, for we are the kingdom, the power, and the glory for ever and ever.”
Recognise those words?
Part of what has caused the loss of a grand narrative, in the West, is this decision to position ourselves as God and to push and push God out of the picture. It is Babel, only now we are not building a tower into the heavens; we are saying the heavens do not exist.
Our model of reality used to be a cosmos, where the heavens and the earth exist and God is present in both. That shifted to a belief that there was a secular realm, where God had no interest, and a sacred realm — where we get ideas like the separation of church and state, or secular work and God’s work. To now where there is only the secular; the universe; us and our technology in a material world.
The philosopher Charles Taylor wrote a book called A Secular Age — he calls this process “disenchantment.” That is a word that is going to come up a bit in this series.
He says:
“Disenchantment dissolved the cosmos, whose levels reflected higher and lower kinds of being… which contained spirits and meaningful causal forces… In its stead was a universe ruled by causal laws.”
Lots of people have stories for how we ended up here — disenchanted, and with this secular frame as the default. He calls these subtraction stories — the idea that we have shed bad stuff and elevated ourselves by removing superstitions that held us back. The “science killed God” story. But he believes the process is more complex than just enlightenment.
“What I call subtraction stories… I mean by this stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.”
And it is also that we have added new things and ideas and practices that have made this move possible; through new technology; migration and the opening up of multiple religious stories. We are not just subtracted, but pulled in lots of directions, and this stops us having one big shared story.
Taylor again:
“Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings, and related practices.”
This is part of what is happening with the decline of Christianity in the Western world — that we have seen mirrored in the Australian census results where in every hundred people there are about this many Christians.
“…the West is not the world. Indeed in many parts of the world the turn to religion is connected with a rejection of colonialism and Western values… The West is a place beyond history. The past is another country. Tradition is seen as stifling, old fashioned. No doubt some traditions are well rid of. Which woman or person of colour would want to return to the white, male-dominated 1950s?”
This ‘subtraction’ phenomenon is only really happening in the Western world — people are actually becoming more religious in places where Western values are not part of the story, while we in the West are cutting ourselves off from history and tradition. Also, just as a disclaimer — noting Grant’s points — just as adopting some new technology into our lives is good for us as humans, some rejecting of old ideas is good, especially for people who are not white, or male.
Grant points out that while historically the West was built on a shared version of the Christian story; the modern West is shaped by a breakup with God where God is not sovereign, but people are. Where liberalism — individual freedom — our self-authorship — where we are the authority over our lives — is the chief good. And now we are free to re-imagine and re-invent ourselves, untethered from the past, from our family, and from faith — and that sort of liberation has a fundamental goodness to it so long as we are escaping a bad story, and finding ourselves in a better story.
There are people here who have come from other faith traditions, or who have escaped abusive family or church traditions, or who are enjoying the benefits of a Western world where women, and sexual minorities, and non-white people have increasing dignity… and this is good liberation; freedom from bad authorities — bad authors. We want to be able to see the goodness in liberation, while questioning the narratives we are moving to; the stories on offer in the world — whether that is the Great Narrative, or the promise offered by technology companies, or our entertainment, or advertisers, or Instagram influencers, or the stories we make for ourselves. We have to ask if authoring our own stories — being our own authorities; belonging to ourselves — is actually liberating.
Are the modern West’s God-free stories — whether we become gods, or choose God’s role in our lives as a personal choice — better than what we have rejected? We will look more at this next week in terms of what the idea that “we belong to ourselves” does. This week we are going to tackle a different starting point: asking what the God our world has liberated itself from is actually like.
See, here is the other thing that is true about the West — and you will see this in “how did we get here” stories — from Stan Grant, or Charles Taylor, or the secular historian Tom Holland who wrote a book about exactly this. Because the West was first shaped by belief in the Christian God, before rejection of the Christian God, developments in how we understand God, the world, and humanity in the West are often what you might call Christian heresies. Secularism itself is made possible by Christianity in a way it is not by Islam.
Heresies are often a failure to hold two — sometimes more — paradoxical ideas in tension.
The writer G.K. Chesterton wrote a book in the early 20th century called Orthodoxy. He is a fun writer, and he talks about this inability for us to hold tensions.
He says the way to avoid heresy in these situations where there are furious opposites is not to pick one, or to find some middle ground, but to hold both truths, and to hold them furiously:
“Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.” — G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Christianity is a belief system built on these tensions — Jesus being fully God and fully man; the Bible being God’s word, but also human; and God being three and one, and also infinite and glorious and so not “in” the universe as a creature, but also knowable through his work in the world — and paradoxically, through the Word becoming flesh, entering the world as the creator in the creation — the author writing himself into the story.
The shift from cosmos to universe — disenchantment — the modern West as we see it and experience it is built on a Christian heresy; it starts with a warped view of God.
Part of the flattening of the cosmos to the universe is a product of us wanting to live and act as though God is a creature; a being we might find through our human observation. When we could not find God with a telescope, or space travel, suddenly “science had disproved God.” But this happened through the removal of the idea that there is a transcendent overlapping spiritual reality; a heavens and an earth.
This emphasis on the natural world meant rejecting the Bible as God’s word — it became human utterances about an unknowable God, pasted together by evolving human processes. People started looking for the historical Jesus behind all the spiritual stuff in the Gospels, and rejecting the idea that Jesus is divine — that he is the Word of God come in the flesh. And in the same theological schools there was a rejection of the idea of the Trinity, because God was either fully beyond our reach, never engaging with the world, or unknowable from the incarnation or the Bible. And this all started first in the church.
We can do another thing in the church where we emphasise the opposites of all these moves — seeing Jesus as fully divine, and not really human, or seeing the Gospel just as spiritual, with no bearing on life in the world, or the Bible as only divine and not a product of human authors embedded in the community of God’s people, and in history. We even saw a thing in the last few years where Christians jumped up to support a footballer who rejected the Trinity — who saw humanity as just a skin God was wearing for a bit — but said some things about sexuality people liked. Many of us saw him as a Christian saying bold things, and the Trinity as too hard and not important. It has only been — in the West — when Christians have failed to hold tensions and hold them furiously that we have been able to conceive of ourselves as gods, and tell stories using the language of the Bible, without God in the picture, but really, truly, being human does not start with a world with no God in the picture. When we ask what it means to be human — real knowledge of ourselves — it does not actually start with us; it starts with knowing God as God is.
This is our project in this series — and really in our life as a church — not just in the sermons, but in all our time together: in our songs, when we say the Creed, when we pray, when we read the Bible, when we share communion, when we eat together over lunch, and when we go out into God’s world. We are wanting to know God more, not just know more about God, but know God as God is.
And that means knowing God as triune — knowing that God is both a community of persons, and three persons who are working in perfect harmony with one another without losing their personhood — and holding these two truths furiously. When we pick one side of this paradox we end up in bad places, but this profound idea we proclaim, maybe without really thinking about it, whenever we say the Creed together — that God the Father is God, that Jesus the Son is God, and that the Spirit is God — is at the heart of our faith and at the heart of being truly human, images of God.
“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” — Genesis 1:27
How can we bear the image of God without knowing what God is like? How can we live an integrated, coherent life without knowing the author of life — especially if God is actually the one who has authority over us, the one we actually belong to?
Which is Jesus’ point in that test with the coin, about authority — give to Caesar what has his image on it, but give to God what is God’s (Matthew 22:21).
Being human means holding the truth that we are individuals — that we should be liberated from the authority of people and systems that are harmful — with another furious truth: that we are only truly human in communion; with each other, and with God, because we are images of the God who is triune — a God who is three persons, Father, Son and Spirit — but one God. A God who is love.
This is one of the implications of the statement we find here in our reading — it comes up twice — that God is love (1 John 4:8, 16). God cannot be love — at least not eternally, and without being contingent on other beings or things — if God is simply a single person. Part of what is caught up in this statement is that God is love within the life of God, it is caught up in the dynamic of the life of the Trinity, and even in the names of the persons of the Trinity.
That God the Father is called the Father only makes sense if he has eternally been the Father — eternally the Father, and eternally loving the Son. If there was a time that the Son did not exist, then there was a time that the Father was not the Father — and that he was not loving the Son. But Jesus, in his prayer in John’s Gospel, talks about God’s love for him from before the creation of the world; from eternity past (John 17:24).
Michael Reeves has a couple of nice little devotional books if all this abstract thinking about the Western world does not resonate with you — or even if you just want to think about God and not the world. One is called Delighting in the Trinity. It is about how essential the Trinity is to how we understand God. He says:
“Here is a God who is not essentially lonely, but who has been loving for all eternity as the Father has loved the Son in the Spirit. Loving others is not a strange or novel thing for this God at all; it is at the root of who he is.”
He lands the book with this quote from an influential Russian theologian, Vladimir Lossky, who has shaped a whole heap of modern interest in the Trinity after a bunch of Germans told the world the Trinity was a waste of time:
“If we reject the Trinity as the sole ground of all reality and all thought, we are committed to a road that leads nowhere; we end in despair, in folly, in the disintegration of our being, in spiritual death.”
“The disintegration of our being” — that is the world we find ourselves in now; a world that has lost its foundation; a world decoupling itself from the author of life; the God who is love.
Jesus’ words in John’s Gospel are part of his prayer that we might be swept up into the life and love of God — that we might be one, have communion with God and each other, just as the Father and Son do (John 17:20–21). And part of what binds us together — as we come to know God — is this love; God’s love — the love that flows around within the triune God — might be in us too (John 17:26).
There is a big debate about how much we can apply the dynamic love of the Trinity into human relationships; whether there is a possible analogy we can draw between God’s eternal and divine life and our finite relationships. The idea is not to collapse the gap between God and us — creator and creatures — but for our lives, and our love, to image the life and love of God. Part of being made male and female is that God’s life and love is represented not just by individuals but by individuals and communities — those furious opposites. And that is the product of another furious opposite — we are both drawn into oneness with God — made to be like God — and not God. We are limited creatures — embodied, and mortal — living in time and space.
When John, reflecting on these words of Jesus, says God is love it is not just about the Father, it is a Trinitarian statement. He is overwhelmed by the way that we, children of God, are swept up into the life and love of the Trinity; not in a way that means we ever fully grasp what God is like; not in a way that collapses God’s life and love into something finite, but in a way that does teach us how to be human; how to reflect God’s life and love in our lives.
God’s love overflows from within the life of God — in the heavens — into the earth, as the triune God creates — Father, Word, and Breath; Father, Son, and Spirit, all caught up in the creative act together — as a community, and each playing his part as individuals. And it is the same in the incarnation — the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus as an act of love from God, and as an act of love within the communal life of God, and in God drawing us back into life with him, through the death of Jesus and the Spirit dwelling in us. These acts of God that we experience show us what love is.
In our “world without God” imagination we have turned love into a god; without really knowing what it means — without an integrated basis for how we define it. So we can also say “love is love” as though that makes sense; as though whatever you put on either side of the “is” is simply the same by virtue of our authoring things that way. John says we know what love is because we have experienced it in Jesus laying down his life for us; and that this is meant to shape our lives, and our love (1 John 3:16).
“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.”
So in his letter not only does he say that denying that Jesus — the Son of God — has come in the flesh is the spirit of the antichrist (1 John 4:2–3), he says that Jesus is the way we know what love is; in fact, he is the way we know what God is like (1 John 4:9–10). This is because of another set of furious opposites — he is both God and human.
In his other great book — Rejoicing in Christ — Reeves says:
“Here, then, is the revolution: for all our dreams, our dark and frightened imaginings of God, there is no God in heaven who is unlike Jesus.”
God shows us what love is like by sending Jesus that we might have life — the life of God. He shows us what love is like by acting first to bridge the gap between him and us — loving us first — and sending Jesus as an atoning sacrifice for sins. We know what love looks like when we look at the cross, and contemplate it, and understand it in its fullness. Because in that act we are seeing the persons of the triune God co-operating in their fullness.
We see the lengths that the Son will go to to show his love for the Father — the oneness of God. And in the resurrection we see the lengths that the Father and Spirit will go to show their love for the Son. Then in the Father and Son pouring out the Spirit on humans as a gift of love — to dwell in us — we see the lengths that God will go to to love us. Jesus even stays human; stays in the flesh. John is not just writing about people who deny the incarnation, but the resurrection and the ascension — that Jesus “coming in the flesh” is an eternal act of loving, gracious generosity to us, as an overflow of his love for the Father.
Jesus shows his love for God — and for us — in his life, in his sacrifice, in his giving of himself to God as the author of life, in order that we might be brought into the life of God. That we might not just be images of God, who bear the image of God in how we relate to each other as humans together — individuals and in communion — but that we might do this because we live in communion with God; drawn into the life and love of the Trinity.
Jesus — the God-Man — shows us what God is like, while showing us what humanity should look like — what it means to be human and to be like God. It is to love like God. Did you catch that in the reading? John says we should love each other the way God has loved us. Because God takes the initiative and loves us before we are part of his family — we should love others this way too. Generous. Prodigal. Hospitable. Sacrificial love. Given without any guarantee of reward — as we live in a story. This is not just a set of individual responsibilities — John is describing a new communal life in Jesus; as, in this world, we live and love and are like Jesus, because Jesus has brought us into this family.
You want to know what it looks like to truly be human; to bear the image of God? To be like God — in relationship with him — without acting as though you are God? Look at Jesus, and love like him.
We can be like him as we love one another, taking up the character of God’s relationships in our relationships — but holding this as a furious opposite with the truth that we are not God, and our love will have human limits.
We can run into big problems when we try to map our life onto the life of God. We are brought into the Trinitarian life and love of God — but we are not the Trinity. We are not God the Father.
We can end up trying to live without limits; trying to be infinite when we are finite; trying to be God — or to use our tools to become gods — when we are not. We can stop sleeping, and dissolve boundaries between ourselves and others. We can stop self-care. We can be pulled by technology to care for things a world away where we cannot offer the same embodied love God demonstrates in the incarnation. We can be disintegrated by thinking we are God, rather than being still and letting God be God. We have limits and these are good and God-given.
We do not need to learn to be gods from God — we need to learn to be human, from Jesus; and yet, we are not Jesus. We are not the Messiah — we are not crucified for people, nor can we save, nor are we the authors of the lives of others. We do not even have to self-justify; because Jesus’ love for the Father, and his coming in the flesh, in birth, death, and resurrection, justifies us, and liberates us.
We are not the Spirit; who conforms anybody to the life and pattern of God, or unites people under our own power. We do have the Spirit working in us to unite us to God, and to each other so that we can love one another with love that comes from God.
Our relationships are loving; like God’s, but we can get into trouble if we try to map the Trinity onto the life of the church, or into gender roles — there are stacks of books that try to do this but almost always end up crafting a God in our own image, who justifies our own social program or ideals.
We live in a world that the triune God created, that is sustained by his love, through his powerful word, and that is being reconciled by him as God authors the story. You do not have to be in control. His is the kingdom, the power and the glory. Life is found in being connected to the God who is love, and this is actually freeing — it frees us to enjoy God; to love; to be still and know that he is God, even when everything around us is complex and fast moving and threatens to disintegrate us.
We cannot solve complex issues like how to get all the raw material, or parts, for your computer, or smartphone. And it is all going to get faster and more complex as more stories are told that offer more visions for how to be human, and more choices for you to make to help you be you. And that is a storm that might tear us apart or overwhelm us if we are not standing somewhere solid.
We either need to recognise that we belong in a complex system that is going to disintegrate us by pulling us in hundreds of different directions, or find life in a complex and dynamic system that is love and gives you your personhood.
Tish Harrison Warren is a writer I love, who writes columns for the New York Times, exploring the way the pace of modern life — our need to self-author in the midst of complexity, and the way technology works — pushes us beyond our limits. She is brilliant. She will come up a bit in our series. Here is her answer for how to shape ourselves to be truly human in a world pulling us away from God, a world of complexity, fast pace, noise, and technology: rejecting the complexity and noisy pace of the world and responding by embracing our limits and drawing near to the triune God in contemplative silence and prayer.
“Contemplative silence and prayer becomes the means by which we learn the limits of words and action, and where we learn to take up the right words and actions. It’s where we learn to slow down and then to work again at the mysterious pace of the Holy Spirit.”
— Tish Harrison Warren, ‘Want to Change the World? First, Be Still,’ New York Times
This teaches us that God is God, and we are not. It is through gazing at the God we meet in Jesus, speaking to him, and meditating on his word that we live as those who come to the Father, because we have been made children by the Son, and are now shaped by the Spirit living in us, and drawing us into God’s life and love. Our prayers are how the prayer of Jesus is answered.
This is not just a practice for time together in corporate worship, but something we maybe need to build into the rhythms of each day as an act of resistance: a way of recentering ourselves in God’s story, when we feel the pressure to author our own, or be swept up in someone else’s — or the pressure to buy into one of the many heresies flying around our heads.
Part of being human is delighting in the Trinity and rejoicing in Christ — finding ourselves caught up in the life and love of God.
Things’ve been quiet in these parts. I hope to get back to writing soonish. I’ve found it trickier, in the last 12 months, to split the sort of stuff I’d normally write about here from what I’ve been preaching through at church. To be honest, writing is a fun thing that I love, but preaching and pastoring is actually my job, and this’s been a little consuming, not just of my time and attention — but of my interest and excitement.
If you’re the sort of sucker for punishment who’d like to fill the void of long blog posts with audio, then, here’s the podcast version of my sermon from week one of a ten week series on Being Human I just wrapped up this morning.
An article has been published in my denomination’s national publication (Australian Presbyterian) that I feel compelled to strongly, and publicly, disagree with. This is still, I think, my biggest platform. A dilemma I face is that by publishing here more people might feel drawn to read the original piece which is, frankly, destructive and dangerous. If this article, Jared Hood’s Step Right Up, represented anything like an official position in the denomination (and it is presented, unchallenged, without counterpoint as all op-eds are), then I would expect my wife and daughters to leave the Presbyterian Church, following, or followed by, every single man and woman in our congregation, every infertile couple, every same sex attracted person. In a church congregation of around 120 people, we’d have very few left, if everyone who cares about ministering to and with people in these categories left too our church would be empty. There would be nobody.
This article, which I will quote below, is not Presbyterian in an official sense. It’s an extreme position held by a legitimate Presbyterian academic who teaches in one of our colleges – but it is not the party line. It is, in my opinion, outrageous. Articles in this publication have become more outrageous over recent times as we ratchet up the culture wars and our rhetoric becomes simultaneously more fearful and more stridently combative in the face of the demise of Christendom (as though this is a recent thing). The strategy the magazine appears to have adopted in response, via this article, is “breed more”… because apparently that’s God’s answer. The problem is that this magazine seems to speak on behalf of the denomination I belong to. I can’t claim to offer the exclusively true Presbyterian position, but I think I can suggest that this is not a representative view, and if it is, then I’ll hand in my membership.
When we talk about ‘purpose’ which this article does, especially when we conflate ‘purpose’ with ‘ends’ we’re talking in the realm of what Aristotle and others call the ‘telos’ — this article has a problematic view of what marriage is for (kids), what life is for (marriage) and what Christians are for (ruling). It misses how Jesus is a game-changer.
This piece has a wonky view of the telos of marriage
“What is marriage about in Scripture? Chiefly two things. First it is about the physical relationship between a man and a woman. Genesis comes straight to it: “one flesh”. The main meaning is as obvious as Shakespear’s crude “beast with two backs”… Second, “one flesh” is at the core of marriage, but it is not the core… The singular fundamental purpose of marriage is this: to have children.” — Jared Hood
It’s a big jump to go from ‘marriage involves sex’ which is true, and ‘sex leads to children’ which is true but only sometimes, to the ‘singular fundamental purpose of marriage’ is to have children. Children are a good fruit of marriage. But our bodies are often so messed up by the brokenness and frustration of the world that having children itself is not guaranteed in marriage, and plenty of people get married after child bearing age (we’ll talk about how limited a view of humanity in general is on display here below). Marriage is about two different people becoming one — this is how we bear God’s image in marriage. Producing new life via giving birth is another part of us reflecting who God is, and we don’t want to understate that case, but this is a pretty utilitarian view of marriage that assess marriage’s purpose entirely on the ends it might lead to. Faithfulness through the trial of not producing offspring — for married people, or single people — is something God appears to approve of and bless throughout the Biblical story (but fruitfulness in terms of ‘seed’ or offspring’ is definitely something people desire.
But the telos of Christian marriage is not children. It’s Christlikeness. It’s the fruit of the Spirit. This character that grows in us as relate to our spouses is the same character God grows in those who are unable to get married, unmarried, or divorced in all their relationships. Transmitting this fruit — the fruit of the Spirit — to other people either in real Great Commission terms via the Gospel, or as we raise children in Christian community (with Christian community) is what fruitfulness looks like. Children brought up in the knowledge of the Gospel might be a product of Christian marriage, but they are not its ends. Christlikeness is the end goal in every relationship for every Christian. More fruit of the Spirit produced by more lives being restored to Christ is what ‘offspring’ looks like. Everything Paul says about Christian marriage in Ephesians 5 (and about all other relationships) comes through the interpretive grid of Ephesians 5:1-2 (and Paul’s picture of maturity/fruitfulness in Ephesians 4).
“Follow God’s example,therefore, as dearly loved childrenand walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” — Ephesians 5:1-2
This is at the heart of what it means to bear God’s image again as we’re transformed into the image of Christ. To imitate him. And then to make disciples. That’s the goal of the Great Commission, which includes Christian parenting as we disciple our children. Paul talks a whole lot about marriage in Ephesians 5. He says nothing about children but a lot about marriage reflecting who God is, and reflecting unity.
After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body.“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. — Ephesians 5:29-33
The end goal of marriage is unity that reflects the Gospel. Which isn’t that different to our end goal as humans. And our highest calling.
This piece has a wonky view of our ‘telos’ as humans
Hood jumps straight from fruitfulness to procreation. A legitimate step in the Old Testament when God’s people were breeding themselves into existence. Hood holds the Great Commission and what he calls Christ’s “first great commission” as separate, not as related. This piece confuses ends, means, and purpose of marriage – it takes the fruit and obscures the trees.
Hood argues that having children is the very purpose of our existence — not just of marriage — and because of this marriage is part of the purpose of our humanity. The goal of our humanity is, then, much like the goal posited by evolution; the survival of the (Christian) species. And we achieve this by giving birth to lots of ‘Godly seed’…What damaging piffle. His view of humanity rules out such luminaries as Jesus and Paul.
“Marriage exists for this. Male and female exist for this (Gen 1:27). In the next age, maleness, femaleness, and marriage, won’t matter (Mt 22:30). In this age, God says “procreate”, and therefore there is “one-flesh” marriage”… If you’re male or female today , be intentional about both marriage and children… Women of the church need to step up. If God has called you to be a wife and mother —99% of women — don’t stoop to only being a CEO. You can be celibate for the Kingdom, but not for your career. Make career decisions that fit with motherhood, not vice versa. Motherhood is the goal – “she will be saved through childbearing” (1 Tim 2:15). A Christian woman fulfils God’s plan and lives out her salvation by being a mother.” — Jared Hood
This is perhaps the most damaging argument I’ve ever read under the label Presbyterian. It is pastorally deadly. It is practically impossible. It is unloving and dangerous. It is folly dressed up as wisdom. It needs to be challenged at every turn.
Male and female exist to procreate? Male and female exist to reflect the image of God. Childbearing may or may not be part of this. Male and female exist to bear the image of God together, and as individuals. Whatever our calling. Do we really believe 1 Corinthians 7? That, according to Paul, singleness can be desirable and good? What damaging and terrible advice given in the guise of rigourous theological thought and exegesis. This isn’t just about countering a worldly idolatry of career, which infects our culture, this is poison. This is pastoral poison for every infertile man or woman who knows of their condition before marriage, it is poison for the couples working through fertility issues, it is poison for long term singles who have remained pure and faithful, pursuing chastity and thus childlessness above all other options, I have no idea where he pulled the 99% figure from, perhaps from the days when marriages were arranged in order to secure dowries and land deals. It is horrific. A car crash. And must be called out for what it is.
The goal of Christian living — male or female — is Christlikeness. Christlikeness is how we now bear God’s image, which flows through to how we understand fruitfulness and why the ‘first commission’ leads into the Great Commission rather than being separate. Fruitfulness is Christlikeness. Or as childless Paul puts it…
For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified. — Romans 8:29-30
What’s interesting is that Romans 8 is much more Presbyterian (or Presbyterianism is much more, officially, closely aligned with Romans 8). Our purpose, ultimately, is to be glorifiers, as God transforms us to reflect who he is, by his Spirit, as his children. Or as the official Presbyterian catechism — a summary of our beliefs — puts it, in question and answer form:
What is the chief end of mankind?
A. Mankind’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.
This leads to fruitfulness, and this too is us bearing God’s image.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. — Galatians 5:22-24
Hood doesn’t even offer a terribly compelling reading of Genesis apart from our telos as we see it in Jesus, he says (or sees) nothing of how fruitfulness might be tied to being a community of people who represent God. People are two whole ‘ones’, not two halves, before they become one. People must be able to bear God’s image and work towards collective human fruitfulness before marriage, Abel, a childless bloke, somehow found favour in God’s eyes in Genesis 4 via his display of sacrificial love for God.
The goal of marriage is Christlikeness. The goal of singleness is Christlikeness. The goal of personhood is Christlikeness. Fruitfulness is Christlikeness.
This piece has a wonky view of masculinity and femininity
This piece assumes some pretty damaging social norms about what men and women should be doing in order to grow up being ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers’ — it totally fails to grapple with all our norms being essentially constructed, the Biblical manhood he pines for looks nothing like the manhood of the Ancient Near East, and everything like the manhood of the pre-enlightenment west. Our assumptions about gender are almost always constructed from a particular human culture, and you’re probably in trouble if you’re trying to construct them from the Ancient Near East anyway, unless you want to somehow argue that you should force a daughter to marry her rapist, which made a little more cultural sense in a time where marriage was necessary for financial sustainability and rape essentially ruled out marriage. The Gospel, more than anything else, has shaped the way gender works for goodness and equality rather than curse and brokenness. There’s a reason we don’t let the ministers of our churches act like King David, discarding one wife, while murdering someone else to take his…
“Women spend 13 or more years in education learning to be CEOs and Senior Counsels, not learning to be mums. Men learn to remain boys into their late 20s, with Playstations, picture story books (sorry, “graphic novels”) and the juvenility of internet pornography… Education is great, but don’t use it to delay growing up. University is not compulsory, or even Years 11 and 12. Aim for marriage. To get the woman you’ve chosen to love down the aisle you’re going to need a life-plan to support her and your children… Women need mothercraft skills — there’s a conference topic or two. Mothers need playgroups. Can older women help (Titus 2:3)? Men need a church culture that says the time for onesies and superhero T-shirts is over.” — Jared Hood
I read this last bit to a young bloke at church who is delaying his education to take a gap year — serving our youth. He was wearing a Superman T-shirt. I’m sorry, but this is such a terrible view of art and gaming, and education that will leave people ill-equipped to even come close to engaging in the Great Commission with people who enjoy these pastimes. Probably the only thing I thought was agreeable in the whole piece was his labelling pornography as juvenile.
Honestly. I have two daughters and a son. I want singleness to be a plausible calling for them if that’s what following Jesus calls them to do. I don’t want them marrying deadbeats. I don’t want them marrying for the sake of marriage because someone tells them it’s God’s plan for their life. I don’t want them marrying non-Christians (because, for any non-Christian readers, the love of Jesus is the example I wish to be at the heart of her marriage, and what I hope we manage to pass on as parents). I want them to stay faithful and believe that Christlikeness is their goal, and is more rewarding and important than sex and procreation. I want them to be able to be happily single if need be, and to be trained and equipped to make a significant difference in the world. CEO or otherwise. I also want them to be able to engage with art and culture with discernment rather than fear, and to be able to use the universal human longings and desires that art — including graphic novels, games, and superhero stories — express to do that.
This piece has a wonky view of the world and how God works in it
“We don’t know what Australia will decide in the promised plebiscite. We do know this: Christendom is dead. We mourn its demise. The darkness is well advanced… In the days after the US Supreme Court decision [about Same Sex Marriage], I was heard to joke: “At least we can outbreed them.” I wasn’t really joking. Hannah, in 1 Samuel 1, sees a society fit for judgment and she does something about it. She gives her son to the Lord, to be the leader that Israel needed, to be a Nazirite like powerful Samson (1:11). On more levels than one, “children” is the response to same sex marriage. The Christian strategy is family. ” — Jared Hood
What the?
No wait.
What the?
As though we can control how our kids turn out (though Hood makes some suggestions about how to do that…
“When enrolling children in school, don’t ask the principal, “how many of your students go on to university?” Ask “how many students survive your school with their faith intact?” and “how many thrive at your school in the fear and admonition of the Lord?” — Jared Hood
It feels like, from start to finish, this is Hood’s aim, to respond to the shifting of society by positing this strategy. Outbreed ’em. As though this is how God works. As though it is his means for bringing change in the world. Procreate.
Here’s how God brings change to the world — a theme and method so sorely lacking in Hood’s graceless and destructive piece. This is also the path to the sort of righteousness Hood seems to crave… and this is what I’ll be teaching my kids is the path to real humanity, their purpose, the thing they’re to pass on in this world, in all their relationships, if they want to bring change.
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”” — Romans 1:16-17
The darkness is winning. Is it? Was Christendom which was heavy on morality light on Jesus really all its cracked up to be? Is the answer to have lots of kids, or to start living like kids. God’s kids? Imitating our big brother?
For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light(for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness,righteousness and truth)and find out what pleases the Lord.Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. — Ephesians 4:8-11
