Tag: eschatology

Revelation: Pointing the lens at the throne room of heaven

This is an amended version of a sermon I preached at City South Presbyterian Church in 2021. If you’d prefer to listen to this (Spotify link), or watch it on a video, you can do that. It runs for 42 minutes.

You can tell a lot about a king — or a kingdom — by the throne and the throne room, and who is in it.

Like the throne in “Game of Thrones” — a throne made of swords — to remind anyone who sits on it their rule is secured by the sword, and will be ended by one.

“Game of Thrones” is a hyper-violent show based on a series of books that are a deep dive into the violence at the heart of modern empires.

It is a bit like the Netflix sensation [current at the time of preaching] — “Squid Game” — the hyper-violent series aiming to expose and critique the violence at the heart of capitalism, where the haves capitalise on the have nots, in the show the super-wealthy sit on thrones watching people indebted by the system give their lives in violent games, hoping to win financial freedom.

The catch is we are so enmeshed in the system these shows critique that instead of being shocked, and exposed, we find ourselves sitting in this same chair, embracing the fruits of the system and the entertainment it uses to keep us from revolution.

Empires built on immersive violence as entertainment are not all that new. In fact, this was part and parcel of the Roman empire around the time Revelation was written.

The person occupying the throne in Rome embodied the worst of the political and economic realities “Game of Thrones” and “Squid Game” unpacked, but when you were enjoying the show it was hard to escape… The throne needs to be seen from a different angle.

And that is what this Revelation does.

John’s vision now zooms in on the throne in heaven (Revelation 4:2). There is some imagery that carries over — seven lamps are blazing — seven lamps perhaps sitting on the seven lampstands —these lamps are the spirit of God blazing; shining light on the throne. Thunder and lightning are rolling out (Revelation 4:5).

There are twenty-four elders around the throne, or, literally, twenty-four Presbyterians (Revelation 4:4), and we will see more of them later. Then we zoom out on these four living creatures who are “covered with eyes, in front and in back…” one is “like a lion”, the next “an ox,” the third has “a face like a man,” and the last “was like a flying eagle” (Revelation 4:6-8). They sound weird, but we have met them before.

They were in the heavenly throne room in Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1:5). There are some little differences, but in both scenes they are these critters that are this mix of the human and beast; the same animals (Revelation 4:6-8, Ezekiel 1:10). In Revelation these critters have six wings, but in Ezekiel, they had four. We are told the identity of these heavenly creatures in Ezekiel.

These weird lion-man-cow-eagles are cherubs. Cherubim is the Hebrew plural for cherubs.

You might picture a cherub like this.

But according to the Bible, they are beastly creatures who look more like this:

And the thing is — this picture of these heavenly beings that serve and worship Israel’s God — these did not come from a vacuum. The prophets in the Bible are making a point here.

It is not that cherubim actually look like this; they are a visual commentary, drawing on the thought world and gods of the nations to make the point that worshipping lesser spiritual beings from God’s divine court makes no sense when it is actually God who is on the throne.

Remember, these empires around Israel worshipped images of beastly gods — serpents, dragons, weird hybrid animals like this Babylonian picture.

Their stories were violent and bloody and their kings were supported by beastly supernatural beings — gods — who triumphed, tooth and claw, over other beastly gods.

And we saw how Daniel makes the connection clear, even with Nebuchadnezzar running off to the wilderness looking like the beast gods (like the cherubim) Babylon was tempted to worship in the place of the Almighty (Revelation 4:7-8, Daniel 4:33).

These cherubim are an amalgam of these beast gods, only, they are not superior beings, but servants of Israel’s God; worshippers of Israel’s God. To worship them would be a big mistake. Isaiah does the same thing with some six-winged critters; the seraphim (Isaiah 6:2).

John’s vision brings the cherubim and seraphim together.

We might picture cherubs as little angels with wings, but seraphim — the word means both burning as a verb, and snake, as a noun, and there is a good case to think that seraphim are actually flying fire serpents. The word might have its origin in cobras who spit venom. These winged snakes were a popular religious image in Egypt — where they were a cosmic symbol of divine authority.

Pharaohs even had them on their crowns. But Ezekiel and Isaiah – then Revelation – picture these beastly heavenly creatures not as objects of worship, but as worshippers of the Almighty who sing praise to him (Revelation 4:8, Isaiah 6:2).

Why would you worship other spiritual creatures who sing “holy holy holy is the Lord God Almighty”?

John’s vision pulls together these threads to show the position God occupies in the heavens; as absolute ruler over the so-called gods of the nations.

But there is more, because the cherubim had a job. They were divine gatekeepers, keeping sinful people out of God’s presence.

When humanity gets exiled from God’s presence — in Eden — cherubim guard the way (Genesis 3:24). When Israel operates as God’s priestly kingdom, carrying God’s presence with them in the tabernacle, cherubim symbolically separate people from God’s presence in the holy of holies (Exodus 26:30-31). The curtain in the tabernacle, and then the temple — the one that tore when Jesus died — was a cherubim guarded barrier between God’s holiness and the people — part of it tearing at the death of Jesus was because that barrier is now broken, but part of it was also a picture of God declaring he will not live in that temple. Statues of cherubim framed the Ark of the covenant in the Holy of Holies (1 Kings 6:27). The Ark was a physical picture of the throne of God, and the cherubim were keeping the people from God’s presence, except a priest, once a year, keeping humans away from the presence of the holy, holy, holy, God.

Here in Revelation these cherubim are not excluding people from God’s presence. They are these powerful awe-inspiring cosmic beings who draw the eye — but we are not meant to gaze at these crazy critters. Because their gaze is fixed on someone else.

We might be tempted, by all this descriptive language, to keep our eyes on the weird heavenly beings.

Especially if they represent some sort of powers or rulers of the kingdoms of the world who might impact us. Where Ezekiel’s vision ends with the camera pointed at this glorious figure “like that of a man” on the throne (Ezekiel 1:26), John opens with our gaze firmly on the throne; on this figure (Revelation 4:2), who like in Ezekiel, is surrounded by rainbows and light and glory (Ezekiel 1:27, Revelation 4:2-3).

The lens zooms out on another miracle — Presbyterians moving their bodies in worship (Revelation 4:9-10). When the cherubim and seraphim worship the one on the throne, these twenty-four elders join in. Now there is a lot of debate about who these elders represent, whether they are spiritual beings who are part of the divine council that gets mentioned in the Old Testament a bit — or glorified humans — ruling with God — but these creatures have crowns, and they lay them down in recognition of God’s rule… and say:

“You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.” (Revelation 4:11).

I think these are probably also meant to be spiritual beings; the powers and principalities the Old Testament pictures ruling over the nations, and those who Jesus now rules over as the king of kings and Lord of Lords.

I recognise how weird and otherworldly this all is, but remember this is a letter written to real churches in the first century and this sort of vision of the cosmos was bread and butter. Especially with an emperor claiming his ancestors had ascended to the heavens to rule as gods within a council of gods.

But there is an Old Testament background here too. Isaiah the prophet anticipated a day of the Lord, when judgment would be dished out on the earth; not just on people, but any powers and principalities — those beastly nations — who had stolen Israel’s hearts through false worship. Isaiah anticipates this day when God will come in judgment, laying waste on the earth (Isaiah 24:1), and punishing the cooperating rebels on earth and in heaven – the powers in the heavens, and the kings of the earth (Isaiah 24:21).

And on that day, the heavenly bodies — that is how ancient people viewed the moon and the sun, as part of the heavenly realm; the heavens will be dismayed and ashamed for this rebellion, and the Lord will reign from his throne. Remember this was in the Temple, on the ark, in Jerusalem (that’s how God is described dwelling in the temple “reigning between the Cherubim”), and in heaven. He will reign before the elders (Isaiah 24:23). This is not definitively heavenly or earthly, and in some ways it could be both — it is just that humans will come later in the piece in John’s vision. But, again, these elders are looking at the one on the throne. And that should be our focus. Not the weird beasties or the heavenly dancing Presbyterians, and not, in this next bit, the things in the hands of the people on the throne; the scrolls and seals.

The lens is pointed at the throne.

If we look at the other weird bits and worry about the scary stuff that worry can consume us and distract us, and remove our confidence in the one ruling on the throne. John’s lens wants to keep drawing our attention to him.

These heavenly characters are not just circling God’s throne, but the slain lamb standing at the center of the throne (Revelation 5:6); the one who sends God’s spirit into the earth; God’s life giving, glorious, presence.

The Lamb takes a scroll from the one on the throne — God, and when he takes it the elders fall before him in worship. They make us look at Jesus again. These heavenly elders are God’s servants, John also sees them serving God, before the throne, holding on to the prayers of God’s people; bringing the people of God into the presence of God (Revelation 5:8). And it is not the contents of the scroll they draw our focus to — but the worthiness of the lamb who was slain who by his blood purchased people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation (Revelation 5:9).

And made them one kingdom — a kingdom of priests who will reign on the Earth, the way Jesus is now reigning in the heavens (Revelation 5:10). The King of Kings who rules over the powers and principalities has brought people from all sorts of other kingdoms into his own kingdom of priests.

The heavenly host expands — 100 million angels join in song — praising the lamb (Revelation 5:11-12). The King. The one who was slain and is now worthy to be worshipped; to be honored, glorified, and praised in song. And then we get the super wide shot — each transition the lens is expanding to include more people and creatures — from the center — the throne — outwards; from the one on the throne to every creature in heaven and earth glorifying both the one who sits on the throne and the lamb (Revelation 5:13).

Whatever you want to make of the next bit — the opening of the scroll in chapters 6 and 7 — we are meant to know that God and the slain lamb are in control. They are ruling over what comes next.

So when the scroll is opened and the four horsemen of the apocalypse trot out in Revelation 6, they are not sinister figures opposed to God, but the ones who bring his judgment — the day of the Lord — anticipated by the prophets, and even earlier, in the law. All the plagues and pestilence and destruction the horsemen bring are the punishments promised by God for people who turn their backs on him and worship false gods in Leviticus.

The first rider brings the sword; turning people against each other; leaving us playing the game of thrones, dominating people to get what we want, like we are all caught up in a squid game (Leviticus 26:17).

The second horseman — the black horse — is a picture of economic destruction; inflation, the land working against people, scarcity, and no bread (Leviticus 26:26).

Then it is the pale horse — death and hades — bringing death; even through attacks from wild beasts (Leviticus 26:22). This is where beastly worship leads. He also brings the sword, wars, and plagues (Leviticus 26:25). There is a reminder of Egypt here too, and this is a picture of judgment, exile from Eden; curse; for breaking relationship with God.

This is Jesus bringing the day of the Lord promised by the prophets. This lines up with Jesus’ proclaiming judgment on Jerusalem as he approaches the cross, and his promise that the temple will be destroyed and God’s kingdom removed and given to others; a picture he, and John, both drew from Leviticus, Isaiah and Ezekiel (Ezekiel 9:2).

When Israel experiences this exile from God’s presence, when the sword is unleashed, in that moment, in Ezekiel, the cherubim, who had been gatekeepers of God’s glorious presence in the temple, they move from the Holy of Holies to the threshold, and some guys with swords turn up. God sends this bloke with a writing kit along with the sword guys (Ezekiel 9:2-3). His job is to mark out God’s people — like at the Passover — to spare them from the judgment that is about to be dished out. Those with this mark on their foreheads will be protected (Ezekiel 9:4). This is a new Passover, only it is happening in Jerusalem — and it is imagery we see in Revelation too. Once that judgment is carried out, Ezekiel pictures God and his gatekeepers, the cherubim, taking off; departing (Ezekiel 10:18-19).

Exile was the beginning of God’s judgment on religious and political Israel for not being his priestly kingdom — a judgment finally sealed for them when its leaders kill Jesus, and the curtain tears.

John is showing how exile in Babylon – for Israel — was just a shadow of the exile that comes when you kill God’s lamb, which comes on all the nations.

I know this is a lot.

So let’s just take stock.

In the Old Testament the Cherubim and Seraphim were heavenly beings — like the elders — powers and principalities. The Bible depicts them as the sort of beastly figures worshipped by the nations — and condemns Israel, in particular, for worshipping these beastly gods rather than the God they serve — the Lord of Hosts.

These divine creatures though, they were gatekeepers of God’s presence. They kept people out. Out of Eden, out of the Holy of Holies. And when the exile happened — when judgment came on Israel — they took off with God.

Now, in the New Testament, John is using all this same imagery to say the same judgment that came on Israel in the Old Testament is — like the prophets anticipated — about to come on Jerusalem and the nations.

Jesus, the slain lamb, has won a victory over the powers and principalities, which means the nations, and the spiritual realm, are now called to worship Jesus as king. He is creating a kingdom of priests from all nations, not just Israel, by inviting people to come out of those nations — to be marked by him — rather than the beast — and so to be saved from God’s judgment. Because when Jesus — the slain lamb — comes as judge, and unleashes God’s promised consequences — that bit in Isaiah is fulfilled — all the kings, the princes, their mighty armies and the powerful economies that sustain them — everyone not marked for life, they face the terrifying prospect of realizing they have stood against God and his king (Revelation 6:15).

And it is terrible. They do not want to see God’s face, or feel his wrath.

In Revelation this judgment — this Passover — does not just fall on Israel. It is coming for all people, and those who are marked by the lamb, rather than marked by the beast, will live in God’s presence (Revelation 6:16-17).

Exile from God’s presence or Exodus to be made a kingdom of priests. Beast or Beauty. Those are the choices.

This is the lens we are given — the lens is often on the horses and horsemen, and the punishments, and trying to figure out where we are in history, rather than on the one who unleashed them, and how we should respond.

Then the lens points at people.

Suddenly the cherubim are not keeping people away from God’s glory — people are now joining their song. First the 144,000 (Revelation 7:4). Now. Lots has been said about this, lots of people have guessed what is going on — but I think it is a picture of a restored Israel — Israelites who put their trust in Jesus — not a literal number that has to be filled up, but multiples of 12 as a picture of completeness.

This is not all the people who are saved ever. It is not those of us who are gentiles — also saved and marked by the lamb, because we come next.

This is the bad stuff in the Old Testament coming untrue; the exile of Israel, the destruction of a bunch of the tribes, and the exile of the nations and us all being handed over to other powers, and humanity’s exclusion from Eden; from life with God.

Now, all humans everywhere are invited to be God’s glorious people again; to become part of this great multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the Lamb (Revelation 7:9).

Calling out:

“Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.” (Revelation 7:10).

We are invited to look at the throne and join the chorus of heaven; worshipping God as one (Revelation 7:11). This great multitude is the people saved by the blood of the lamb — like in the Passover — washed, cleansed, glorified — marked as his (Revelation 7:14).

We are invited to join in; to be saved by the Lamb, to no longer be separated from God by swords and judgment, but be brought into the presence of God — back into the place sealed off by the cherubim — whether at the gateway of Eden, or the curtain temple. Our exile is over (Revelation 7:15).

We now enjoy blessing — covenant blessing — rather than those Leviticus curses for false worship (Revelation 7:16), being led by the Lamb, as our shepherd, to living water and a world beyond curse — there is a nod here to the new creation pictured at the end of the book (Revelation 7:17).

John sees things Old Testament anticipates like the choice between exile from God, or restoration through God’s anointed king in a new Passover; or between death separated from God’s presence, and life in the new Eden, a restored creation — centered on the lamb.

John invites us to share his vision of the throne room, and to choose the throne we serve.

We might not have beastly gods. We might not worship spiritual powers and principalities — heavenly beings who actually rightly serve God. We might not even have categories for cherubim and seraphim.

We might not have a tyrant on the throne — like Nero — a beastly ruler who killed his own mother to hold his throne; who commanded citizens of his empire worship him and his ascended ancestors.

But we face the same temptations that people pulled to beastly worship by the imperial cult faced.

This was a significant pressure in the world Revelation was written to. My old college principal, Bruce Winter, wrote a book Divine Honours for the Caesars, about how pressure from the Roman imperial cult was profound for early Christians, and how this pressure was not just the sword. It was cultural. The beastly empire of Rome had a beastly violence at its heart.

Emperor worship was propped up by blood. He wrote:

“Imperial veneration was also combined with other public activities, including spectacles such as gladiatorial and wild beast shows, athletics, chariot races and public feasts, such was its assimilation into the life of cities in the Roman Empire.”

Beastliness was embedded into the religion, the politics, the economy, and the entertainment and culture. It formed the imagination of the people.

So what sort of thrones shape your imagination?

Probably not Game of Thrones — but almost certainly the world it tried to unveil — a world where might makes right and violence solves problems; a world where entertainment is embedded in the same system it sometimes tries to critique, so we are never sure if we are escaping it, or escaping to it.

These systems are so compelling — just like Rome’s culture of games and feasts — that even critiques of the system become part of the system; things that feed our hearts, but also make the people making the critiques stacks of money. It is a vicious — beastly — cycle.

And the solution — the solution offered by Revelation — is not more escapism into beastly throne rooms, or onto your couch where you join in glorying in violence and cultivate desires that pull you from Jesus.

It is to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, the Lamb at the center of the throne of heaven (Revelation 7:17); to worship him as king; to find ourselves deeply embedded in his story, having our view of the world shaped by gazing upon him. The challenge is to fill our eyes — and our vision — with this throne room. This king. This kingdom. Rather than having our hearts shaped by the beastly world around us. That does not mean not watching super violent shows, or the art or entertainment from the world, but it should prime us to see critiques and push for change; rather than reveling in the violence and misery.

We should be moved to want more of God’s kingdom to come when we are confronted with the stark reality of the kingdoms of this world.

But it does mean not just watching the world through the lenses it provides.

It means not being caught up in beastly regimes through bread and circuses.

It means finding things — the Bible, art, people who live in ways led by the Spirit — that centre your life on the throne; and finding ways to feast on those things so we keep our eyes on the Lamb.

One way I do this — and we do this as a family — is with the Bible Project. Their videos are fantastic — they love the big story of the Bible — our kids love watching Bible Project with us.

But they have also got a podcast that sometimes moves me to tears as it keeps me finding new ways to see the glory of Jesus and the wonderful intricacy of the Bible’s story. They have fantastic content on Revelation. So does the Naked Bible podcast. It gives me fresh eyes as I am engaging with God’s word, and it is full of rich stuff on Revelation going at a much slower pace than we are.

We also train our hearts as we sing like they do in the throne room — singing words joining the chorus of heaven. All the songs we sing are on a Spotify playlist so you can soak in them, sing them in the shower — do whatever it takes to focus in on the Lamb.

And of course, we are about to share in the feast of the Lamb together — the picture of a new Passover — that marks us out as Jesus’ priestly kingdom [note, we share communion together every week after the sermon].

January 22, 2024 Add Comment

Revelation — The Beauty or the Beast

I have received more phone calls from strangers this year (2021) asking about the Book of Revelation and the end of the world than about anything else. Revelation is a strange book full of dragons, beasts, and chaos. Its message is coded, and we feel like we have to crack it, and we are tempted to make it about us.

Revelation chapter 13 has this famous picture of a dragon being worshiped because he has given power and authority to a beast who is also worshiped (Revelation 13:4); and we want to know who this beast is and whether it might be around now. Revelation depicts two kingdoms: the inhabitants of the earth who worship this beast and those marked by the Lamb. The Lamb has a book of life (Revelation 13:8). The beast writes a book of death. Whoever refuses to worship the beast is killed by its power (Revelation 13:15).

Whatever the code is in Revelation, whatever it means, it asks readers to consider whom we worship, what kingdom we belong to, whether we worship the dragon and its beastly minions, or the Lamb; Jesus. And the question has consequences. Deadly consequences.

Beastly kingdoms bring death to those who will not jump on board here on earth. The Lamb who was slain on earth offers life in his heavenly book.

As we delve into the Book of Revelation which reveals heavenly reality, opening the curtains between heaven and earth, we are being asked to choose between an earthly kingdom and a heavenly kingdom, a question of life and death.

And this choice has other implications in places where people rule in beastly ways; real-life implications, economic implications, political implications. Because despite what some might say, there is actually no separation between religion and politics. If you take one thing home from this series, it is not that Christianity is political, though it is, it is that all politics is religious, because all politics happens around this fundamental choice between kingdoms.

The beast, or the beauty of the slain lamb, shapes the political and economic behavior of its people. In this famous passage, one that is getting a run in the media at the moment, the beast uses a mark, an imprint—the word here is often used for images stamped on coins (Revelation 13:16-17). In this vision, if you do not have that mark, you do not participate in the economy, you do not benefit from the kingdom of the beast.

And the mark is the number or name of the beast, and we get this famous number, 666 (Revelation 13:18). Now, we will dig into this more in a few weeks’ time, but the key to understanding all this apocalyptic stuff is to read it carefully. And John, who is writing, says discerning what he is talking about requires wisdom (Revelation 13:18), and that while we might think this is going to be supernatural and demonic, it is actually natural and demonic. It is about a person, a man beast, who is on earth doing the will of the dragon.

So it is very unlikely that COVID vaccines or credit cards or all sorts of things that people have identified with this passage over the years are the fulfillment of the events depicted in Revelation.

Revelation is an apocalyptic text that stands in a tradition — an Old Testament tradition — that frames the world this way, from the perspective of heaven, to invite us to consider how we live, what kingdom we belong to, who we are and will be as people, as we choose what to worship.

It is a book that is the fitting conclusion of the story of the Bible because John’s vision is incredibly grounded in the image and story of the Bible. This choice between beauty and beast goes right back to the beginning.

Right back to the serpent — Satan — a beastly wild animal. People were meant to rule over wild animals as God’s image bearers, but the serpent slides into their direct messages (Genesis 3:1).

Adam and Eve were clothed in the glory of God, naked and unashamed, reflecting his goodness and love, and then the serpent claws them away from God. They become people ruled by a wild animal.

And we get a hint that the fall is a turn toward beastliness as Adam and Eve are clothed in animal skins. They become like the animals (Revelation 3:21).

But now, humans are caught up in a fight with the wild things. But there is hope. There will be a fruitful line, a line of seed, offspring, who will be opposed to beastliness and crush the serpent (Genesis 3:15).

There will be a battle that will determine if people are human as God created us to be, beautiful reflections of his image who rule over the wild things, or humans ruled by the animals, beastly humans.

We see this beastliness take hold in the next story, the story of Cain and Abel.

Abel has mastery over the animals. He cares for the flocks. But Cain is at risk of being mastered by the animals, becoming beastly.

God warns him, “Sin is crouching at the door,” like a beast waiting to pounce. It desires to have him. He must rule over it, not be ruled by it (Genesis 4:6-7).

But instead, Abel’s blood soaks into the ground, and Cain is exiled to live like the beast-man he has become.

In the story, his descendants go out and build cities, full of technology, tools, and instruments, but they are cities of death, where within a handful of generations, this fellow Lamech is boasting about bringing death and destruction to his enemies.

And that is the story of human empires produced outside the line of seed that will lead to the Lamb. Genesis has these stories of humans and empires who become beastly as sin takes hold. They are cities of order and technology and even art and culture. The trains would have run on time. But they are cities like Babel, Babylon, disconnected from God’s presence. Beastly kingdoms ruled with violence.

But throughout the story, there are little glimpses of both the hope and the fight against beastliness.

One example is David, the shepherd king who tends a flock, who rules over the wild animals, lions, and bears who come to kill his sheep (1 Samuel 17:36).

That is interesting, right?

But here is something even more fun, courtesy of the Bible Project.

Goliath, the giant, is presented not just as a beast but as a giant serpent.

Every time the narrative mentions his bronze armor, scaly bronze armor, it is a serpent pun. The Hebrew word for bronze uses the same letters as the word for serpent. They are related to the same root. He is bronze and scaly. He is snakey. He is beastly. He uses human power and strength, weapons, to mock God and his people. He comes with sword and javelin and snake armor (1 Samuel 17:4-6), while David comes against him in the name of the Lord.

And we know the story.

David defeats this beast-man, and his head is crushed (1 Samuel 17:41). David becomes king. He launches a “city of peace.” He uses his strength to crush beastly kingdoms, like a shepherd. The catch is that in his own temptation, his grasping, his use of the sword, especially with Bathsheba and Uriah, David grasps and kills those in his care. He is rebuked for being a predator rather than a shepherd, and he is told the sword will not leave his household. He got too close to beasts and became beastly.

The closest parallel to Revelation and the book where the beast theme really gets unpacked is the Book of Daniel. There, before the vision we read, there is a story where someone is dressed like an animal as a picture of beastliness.

The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, he has a dream, and Daniel interprets it. He says Nebuchadnezzar will go live with the wild animals until he worships God’s authority as the Most High. He becomes like a cartoon beast, an apocalyptic figure, an ox, an eagle, with hair like feathers and claws like a bird (Daniel 4:20-33). This is a picture that portrays Babylon and its power in beastly terms. If Israel in exile is tempted by the beauty of Babylon, here is a view of that beauty from a heavenly perspective revealing its ugliness.

Then Daniel has this vision of four great beasts (Daniel 7:2). And, like with Revelation, we are tempted to try to see these four great beasts as kingdoms still to come, pictures of the end of the world. We might look at ISIS or America or all sorts of modern kingdoms and try to make the hat fit.

But there is a more immediate fulfillment for this apocalyptic vision because this apocalyptic genre is a way that people can speak about present moments from a heavenly perspective.

Daniel’s vision is explained straight away. The four beasts are actually four kings who will arise from the earth (Daniel 7:17), and they might look powerful and victorious as they destroy or dominate God’s people, these beastly regimes, but actually, God is going to win, and he is going to give a kingdom to his people forever.

And these empires around Israel were overtly and deliberately beastly. Their gods were presented as animals, serpents, dragons, weird hybrid animals, like this Babylonian picture. Their stories were violent and bloody. The kings of these nations were seen as supported by beastly gods, who triumphed, tooth and claw, over other beastly gods.

Babylon’s creation story involved the Battle-God Marduk creating the world from the dead body of the serpent God Tiamat — who was also a symbol of the chaotic waters. Marduk then built Babylon as the seat of the gods on the earth; the bridge between heaven and earth. There is this idea that goodness and peace and cities of order and beauty are built out of death and destruction and violence.

Daniel’s vision — and in the narrative that goes with it in the book of Daniel — pictures a beastly empire with a beastly king. When the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, is sent into beastly exile as an animal it’s a picture of Babylon’s beastliness. When the Medes take over from Nebuchadnezzar’s son in the story of Daniel, Darius the Mede is the beastly ruler who throws Daniel to the beastly lions because he will not worship him and his gods. Then a third kingdom, the Persians take over, with Cyrus mentioned just before Daniel’s vision is described in the book; a vision is set back under Babylonian rule; back before the events of chapter five. Daniel’s vision features beast… after beast… after beast… until Daniel pictures a fourth beast; a super-power who will come in and do horrible things to God’s people (Daniel 7:21-27). And it is very likely that this superpower he pictures is Greece, and that it is pointing Israel to Antiochus Epiphanes, a Greek king who marched on Jerusalem, setting up a statue of himself on the altar in the rebuilt temple; a moment the Maccabees, a Jewish text, calls the abomination that causes desolation.

And the thing all these regimes have in common — according to Daniel — these regimes opposed to God is that they are beastly, and though they look victorious and powerful and majestic from an earthly perspective, they do not win. They swallow each other, and, ultimately, God swallows them up. These beasts represent kingdoms; earthly kingdoms that devour and trample and crush; kingdoms marked by kings who will lead mighty armies. These beastly kingdoms are violent. They wage war against each other, and they wage war against God’s holy people. These are dominion systems pounce on and devour the weak.

And these beastly kings will set themselves up in opposition to Israel’s God. They are earthly pictures of cosmic rebellion against God’s rule. And the only hope for God’s people amidst these beastly empires is for God — the Ancient of Days — the Most High — to step in and put things right in the heavens and on earth. So Daniel has this vision of the heavenly court sitting and ruling on the actions of this beastly regime, and the Most High taking the reins both in heaven and in the kingdoms under heaven, and launching an everlasting kingdom where all rulers will worship him (Daniel 7:26-27). We will see Revelation picking up lots of this language.

In Daniel, the beasts get slain at this moment when God is revealed as the rightful God of the nations (Daniel 7:11), and his king, the Son of Man is enthroned in heaven (Daniel 7:13), and in Revelation chapter one, in John’s vision of Jesus in the heavenly throne room, this has already happened. In Daniel’s vision the total victory over all other empires in the heavens and the earth is secured as the Son of Man is given an eternal kingdom covering all nations that will never be destroyed. He is worshipped in the place of the beast (Daniel 7:14).

So as we approach Revelation and its picture of beastly regimes, there is a whole lot of this symbolism that is being drawn from the story of the Bible. Beastly regimes are those empires — military and economic and political systems — religious systems — that set themselves up in opposition to God’s people as people are pulled away from glory into beastliness by the serpent.

And as we read Revelation we have to remember that while we might want to make it about us, here and now, it is first a real letter to real churches facing their own beastly regime (Revelation 1:4). One that looks like it has crushed the serpent crusher. There is a new violent and beastly kingdom serving the agenda of the dragon, Satan, but whose false beauty, the “peace of Rome,” is secured by violence, and the worldly power and beauty of Rome is tempting people to worship its gods (and emperors).

This is the regime responsible for executing Jesus who will now set about not just persecuting Christians at various times — but worse, even — it will set about asking to be worshipped; proclaiming itself and its kings as the good economy, the good empire, with the mightiest army and the best gods. Rome is not all stick, there is plenty of carrot; plenty of temptations luring people to beastliness.

It looks impressive and wealthy and powerful; it offers pleasure and peace and prosperity. That is the temptation for Christians; it is not just about martyrdom, but about the same choice that faced Israel in Babylon — do they worship God or the beast?

John is writing to people with an immediate message, presenting an important choice. And that choice will end up being life and death, because beastly empires do not tolerate opposition — they use the sword to build their kingdoms.

The Roman empire will require worship. Revelation is probably written around the time of Nero — I think probably just after his death, but it could be any time in the first century. By the end of the first century, Rome is ruled by the emperor Trajan. One of his governors, Pliny writes a letter to Trajan asking what to do with these pesky Christians springing up in his province, Bythinia — it is a region in modern day Turkey — right on the border of the province of Asia (where the letter is addressed).

Pliny says when people are accused of being Christians he interrogates them, when they confess he interrogates them again with the promise of punishment, and those who will not recant he executes. That is beastly, right? But it is just a matter of course — it is a procedure. It is like he is trying to give these Christians an easy way out too. All they have to do is worship the beast. He says:

“…in the case of those who were denounced to me as Christians, I have followed the following procedure: I interrogated them as to whether they were Christians; those who confessed I interrogated a second and a third time, threatening them with punishment; those who persisted I ordered executed.”

He says the path out of execution is conforming to the Roman gods — worshipping their gods, including the image of the beast-king:

“Those who denied that they were or had been Christians, when they invoked the gods in words dictated by me, offered prayer with incense and wine to your image, which I had ordered to be brought for this purpose together with statues of the gods…“

And Pliny writes back…

”you have observed proper procedure”…

This is the context Revelation is written to; an empire that demands worship and lures Christians away from faithfulness with bright lights, and the ‘peace of Rome’ — a peace won through violence. And so the invitation is there: Choose a kingdom; Choose a king.

Worship the image of the beast, carry his mark (Revelation 13:15); and know that you are really worshipping Satan — the dragon (Revelation 13:4) — and so will become beastly… Or worship God, and be marked by the Lamb.

The beauty or the beast…

It is interesting to think back to that moment when the Pharisees test Jesus with the coins at this point… the Pharisees, who will end up teaming up with the beast to kill the Lamb. They come asking about paying taxes to Caesar (Mark 13:16-17), bringing little metal disks marked with the beast’s image — the face of the empire — little marks that allow people to buy and sell. And they ask “should we pay tax to Caesar” — should we participate in this empire?

Jesus’ answer has often been interpreted as saying that we should participate in this empire — pay these taxes — take part in the politics of the day because Caesar has the right to tax us, and there are all sorts of reasons — like Romans 13 — to think that is true. But there is more to his answer. When you ask yourself “where is God’s image”; how do we then give our whole selves to God?

Our participation in human empires — as people who belong to God — stops when these empires ask us to worship. We see that in Daniel, we see that in Jesus, and we will see that in Revelation.

Jesus calls us to worship God, with your whole life; to give God what is God’s — and be marked by Him, not to be swept up in a beastly empire.

We live with our own beastly regimes that call us to worship — that invite us to become serpent-like.

The former US President, Dwight Eisenhower, described a “military industrial complex” at the heart of the U.S empire. It is the heart of the Western world and the peace and prosperity we enjoy — a vicious cycle where the economy and the military and the politic systems are deeply enmeshed — producing an empire built on the capacity to be mighty and violent.

Image Source.

Now. We might feel a step removed from the U.S as a ‘middle power’ here in Australia, but the news recently of an AUKUS alliance does not let us bury our heads in the sand. We are marching in lockstep with this empire, and this approach to the economy.

And we do it thinking we are the good guys, just like the Romans and the Babylonians, bringing peace because we have a bigger sword. And this is not to say that governments should not wield, or buy, swords — the Bible literally describes them as a sword. Beastly governments are the ones that call for our worship, and pull us away from life shaped by the crucified Lamb, and think that salvation and redemption and peace lies in the way of the sword, rather than the beautiful way of the cross.

There is a Pentecostal theologian named Walter Wink who describes the modern world and its military industrial complex as a domination system — another way of talking about this is to label it as it is… beastly. He says The Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth shaping the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today.

He sees this myth as essentially Babylonian — tracing our stories about heroes using violence to secure peace back to Babylon’s creation story, and to the Roman idea of peace. This myth is everywhere from Marvel movies to the stories we tell ourselves about peacekeeping as we send armies into places like Afghanistan. Wink says the Babylonian story has clear implications, that ultimately produce an ethic for kingdoms who follow the story:

“The implications are clear: “human beings are created from the blood of a murdered god. Our very origin is violence. Killing is in our genes.“

That we cannot imagine a world without armies — the sword — or solutions without domination of the will of the ‘good’ over the evil, secured through violence, demonstrates this. This myth — the idea that violence can be redemptive — that the sword wielded by government can save — is how beastly powers dupe us into complying with the system. Wink says:

“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.”

This myth takes hold of our imaginations … it shapes our politics and our relationships and gets us participating in the machine — because the benefit of being complicit is that our security and power gets us cheap stuff from those we exploit, but this is how we lose our souls and become beastly.

The thing about democracy, too, is that we kind of all end up as kings and queens of our own little empires. We all have the capacity to be beastly as we choose what to worship — especially when that choice happens in a violent system shaped by this mythology, and in a global capitalist system where greed is good and we are disconnected from the production of the things we buy and enjoy.

I read this story this week about the environmental and economic destruction brought about by our need for cobalt — did you know you need cobalt? It is a vital part of the batteries in all our smart things — and this destruction is not in your backyard, but it is literally in the backyards of people in the Congo, whose lives are being devoured by our consumer behaviour. Or Lithium; the other vital component in batteries — the ones that power smartphones and electric cars, where the rapacious mining for these commodities destroys the environment in countries like Chile.

This sort of thing is much more the mark of beastliness than a vaccination. Maybe it will get harder and harder to buy stuff or participate in the modern economy without a smartphone in your pocket. But it is easier not to think about that, and not to think about how our military might — or China’s in the case of cobalt mining — or the economic power of the first world might perpetuate this issue and guarantee the supply chains and the exploitation by preventing revolution.

Maybe we think it is better to be in the empire, worshipping its idols than opposing it and being thrown to lions. Maybe we think we can have a foot in both camps?

But here is the thing.

You have to choose.

The beast, or the beauty.

You have to choose your kingdom and your king.

Choose who to worship and serve.

And doing that has to shape your politics and your economics and your approach to the sword… to power and violence. Because actually your politics and economics show what you have really chosen…

Jesus has created a kingdom — not a beastly kingdom but a priestly kingdom… Not a kingdom of violent dominion but a kingdom of servants of God, for his glory, secured by his blood.

He is the serpent-crushing son of man — the King of Kings — who brings the beautiful heavenly kingdom Daniel saw in his vision, and that John describes here… but he does not do it through violence… he does not crush the serpent with a sword… but with his blood. His story is not one of redemptive violence but redemptive sacrifice, where even if he slays the dragon, he does this through his death, absorbing the dragon’s blows. He is not just the shepherd king, but the lamb slain; he turns the myth of redemptive violence in on itself. He does not live by the sword.

His kingdom, as we will see through Revelation, looks very different to the grasping and devouring kingdoms of this world.

John grounds his vision in the victory of Jesus that has already happened; at the cross, and in the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, the son of God and son of man, as king of heaven and earth.

The story of the Bible is the story of the victory of God over sin, and death, and Satan — and ultimately the beastly kingdoms and humans who follow the way of the serpent into beastliness… through the sacrificial love of his chosen king… the serpent crushing seed… the lamb slain before the creation of the world.

And now we have to choose. And you really only have two choices — Satan, who loses, or Jesus, who wins. The beast, or the beauty.

January 10, 2024 Add Comment

Upload: the digital good place?

Upload dropped on Amazon Prime this week. It’s like The Good Place, only there’s no twist. Really, it’s not that like The Good Place at all, except that it deals with life after death in a universe where God is mostly absent. Belief in a spiritual afterlife is a quaint hope held by some “Ludds” (from Luddites) pitted against the very real virtual hope peddled in Upload‘s universe — our universe, just in 2033.

There’s some interesting dynamics right up front with this program being on Amazon Prime; Amazon’s end game might look very much like the in show company, called Horizon. Amazon’s smile logo can be found on packaging within the show, but their push into cloud computing, digital media, and Jeff Bezos’ ‘end game’ (not to mention his exorbitant personal wealth — no seriously, click that, spend a few minutes scrolling it, and then come back) make them prime candidates for attempting to produce something like this for reals. It won’t be Elon Musk who does it; probably; he believes we’re already in this future; already characters in a computer program indistinguishable from reality. You can trust Amazon to find ways to keep making money from your consumption after you die.

In Upload, Horizon is the company responsible for the richest afterlife experience (an afterlife experience for the rich, where you have to keep paying for room service and minibar items by swiping left for your virtual pleasures. Horizon’s prime afterlife location is called Lakeview. Residents pay big bucks to have their consciousness digitised and uploaded; stored on servers, so that their lives can continue not in the clouds with harps (like some poor Ludds believe), but in ‘the cloud.’

As far as reviews go, we watched the whole first season over two nights. It’s a fascinating (but not Good Place esque) dig into some philosophical questions about what it means to be human; leaning into Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” to suggest that so long as a person’s mind is still active, no matter what happens to their body, the person still is; and later probing whether a soul exists as a thing apart from a mind. We’re in a sort of new gnostic territory most of the time, except that scientists are also working on synthetic bodies that can host a download of the individual’s upload. There’s a hint of the unnaturalness of life without a body, but even the Luddite hope of heaven is the hope of a disembodied soul in the sky when you die (where salvation, and immortality, is not secured so much by wealth, but simply by death).

The show’s main upload, Nathan Brown, is hanging out for the availability of a download because he knows, deep down in his soul, that to exist as a person, a human, is to have a body. He’s also died in a freak self-drive car accident (or was it), and lost some vital memories in the upload that also make him less than him. Uploaded beings are served by ‘angels’ — employees of the ultimate surveillance capitalism firm, who are voice activated. Unlike Siri and Alexa, these are real humans sitting at computers waiting for voice commands from now-digital beings. And so we meet Nora, Nathan’s angel.

The show also has some fun pictures of technology in the not so distant future; including consent cameras for kicking off sexual encounters largely curated via Nitely, a future version of Tinder. The show handles sex and bodies in a fascinating way; the boundaries between the digital afterlife and the real world are almost totally porous, any avatar can cross over and connect in virtual reality, which means your loved one is never truly gone — even if they stop aging (so long as you don’t pay for age up updates). Sex is excarnated, rather than incarnating — though for those on the meaty side of reality, feelings are reproduced by a frankly kinda creepy VR suit. When Charles Taylor observed that the ‘disenchanted’ world we now live in is an ‘excarnated’ world — he was describing a world that pushes us out of being enfleshed in bodies, and into ‘being’ in our heads. Where sex may once have been ‘enchanting’ — sacramental almost — as a good gift from God, in the disenchanted, excarnate, world it is simply transactional.

At one point in A Secular Age, Taylor notes that the more intimately connected we are with a person the less worried we are about cross contamination — we’ll share a spoon with those we kiss — he suggests sex is the ultimate expression of such intimacy, that “love making itself is a mixing of fluids with abandon” — it’s a bit gross; but as we become excarnate, culturally, our approach to intimacy gets a bit blurry, when our bodies don’t matter anymore, we’ll mix fluids with anybody. And yet, the VR ‘sex suit’ proves too much for Nathan’s girlfriend, stuck in embodied life, because she sees them being cleaned in the hire shop — and hears all about the fluids they have to wash out — the suits are also used for people hugging dead grandparents; so there’s a cocktail of snot, vomit, sweat, and other things. Gross. Bodies are gross. And yet, sex-as-intimacy, for two embodied people, can also be sacramental; Nathan’s girlfriend, Ingrid, is prepared to overcome the ick factor because she “misses their intimacy.” Touch matters. Bodies are essential to that, and while our approach to sex (think pornography, hookup apps, consent video cameras, VR suits etc) can ‘excarnate’ — we can push ourselves away from our bodies and into our brains, sex, like other embodied pleasures, has the capacity to re-incarnate us. To remind us of the goodness of our bodies, and even of something enchanted or transcendent; something meaningful. Taylor calls this ‘haunting’ we sometimes experience in the real world — the reminder of something beyond us a ‘frisson’ (sometimes called “skin orgasms“) — that’s the little thrill you get sometimes that makes your neck hairs stand up and your skin get goosebumps. That power of touch — even in the afterlife — gets explored too.

The fundamental question in season 1 of Upload is can a human be a human without a body; what are we? While the eschatological hope served up by ~~Amazon~~ Horizon is frictionless consumption in a digital eternity controlled by a corporation that exists to serve your every whim with a voice command (“Alexa…” I mean “Angel…”), the question Upload asks is just how satisfying such a future can be; and whether a download into an eternal body might not be a more desirable, human, outcome.

Those in the digital world have lost all the limitations of embodiment; there is no longer any mourning, nor crying, nor pain… it’s a world made new. Digitally.

Except, you can pay to be sick — because after a stack of time in the digital afterlife, your yearning for a bodily existence leaves you wanting the feeling of pain or sickness, just to feel alive. So, you can pay to have a headcold…

_______

Zach: “Having a cold is no fun”

Nathan: “Why are you paying extra for this, isn’t it like a dollar a minute”

Zach: “When you’ve been here a little longer you’ll see that having no fun can be kinda fun. My nose is actually stuffed up. Just like real life.”

_______

The conversation pauses here because a new afterlife experience pops up; it’s pay to play, remember.

Trust ~~Amazon~~ Horizon to figure out a way to monetise a sneeze.

One of the more depressing sub-plots (and there are a couple, if you push too hard), is the story of Luke. Luke is a war veteran whose body was broken in conflict; he lost his legs, and rather than suffer life in the body, with no legs, he chooses to ‘upload’ early, and spends his digital life chasing experiences from the other parts of his body he gave up (mostly sex and food). Life without a body isn’t all its cracked up to be in Lakeview. But he’s also just a bloke desperately looking for connection. The show wants love to be enough for him, and for him to find compensation for the other bits, but it also leaves open the idea that life without a body just won’t be enough.

There’s a great dialogue between Nathan, and Dave, the Luddite father of his angel (it’s complicated) about the nature of the person, the soul, the afterlife, and hope.

_______

Dave: “You see Nathan, when you died, your soul went to real heaven, so whatever simulation I’m talking to now has no soul. It’s an abomination.”

Nathan: “Ok, or, there is no soul. And there never was, and in a sense both of our consciousnesses are simulations. Mine on a silicon computer and yours on a computer made of meat. Your brain.”

_______

Dave’s hope is a tangible future where he might hold his wife in his arms again; an embodied resurrection even, but Nathan, like many good moderns, can’t conceive of heaven as anything more than disembodied consciousness; eternal life for the soul, but not for the body. Like in the finale of the Good Place, the message from episode 1, to the end of episode 10, is that heaven is other people; the chance to spend eternity (or as much time as possible) with the people you love. God isn’t in the picture — even in Dave’s heaven — heaven is other people. For Horizon/Amazon — that’s an opportunity to make some money…

There’s an open source alternative to Horizon weaving its way through the storyline of Upload; the good guys who want heaven to be ad free. That might be the truly ‘good place’ — and Nathan hopes to be able to bring some of that open source goodness to Horizon; to hack away some of the overreach of his corporate overlords. Whether or not a ‘good’ digital afterlife is possible, Upload reminds us that we really want bodies for most of the stuff we love; which fits with the Christian understanding of the person. We are not souls in a meatsack — that’s gnosticism or Platonism — we are people who have bodies. The Christian hope is a resurrected body; a body made imperishable because God’s Spirit works not just with our soul, but on our body, to make us heavenly and immortal (1 Corinthians 15).

And while the show is billed as ‘science fiction,’ there are actually people out there seriously contemplating what such a digital afterlife could or should look like. Let me remind you again, Elon Musk thinks this is it; that the digital afterlife, where we exist not as people with flesh and blood, but as 0s and 1s in someone else’s program (with Covid-19 a really weird glitch in the software; a virus even). This was also, taken in a more dystopian direction, the plot for The Matrix.

There’s a question about what a good digital afterlife might look like, if the tech was available. We humans love the idea of being in control of our own end game; being able to work towards an eschatology (a view of the ‘end times’) where we, collectively (or corporately) are gods who can select our afterlife of choice and then consume our way to bliss. That fits the secular narrative pretty neatly. Amazon is a master of that narrative; a master of frictionless consumption and seemingly limitless consumer choice; which makes its involvement with the production of this program quite bizarre to unpack. Is being sucked into Amazon’s mainframe a good death? A good afterlife?

In Greek, the letters ‘eu’ at the start of a word work as a prefix for ‘good’ — so ‘euthanasia’ is a “good death.” In 1993, tech-philosopher David Porush published a journal article titled ‘Voyage to Eudoxia.’ It was an article exploring a potential escape to cyberspace; a good cyberspace. He suggested an obsession with cyberspace emerged earlier than he was writing (almost 30 years ago), after space exploration became a little passe. The next big tech things would be computers. Games were just starting to become ‘immersive’ (though nothing like they are now). He wrote then:

“Eventually, in the far-flung future perhaps, we may all emigrate, at least part time, to this new and gleaming electronic suburb, there to revel in an excess of sensory stimulation that today’s cinema or MTV can only hint at.”

He called this future place ‘Eudoxia,’ after Eudoxos of Knidos, and an invisible city in the work of an author he liked, Italo Calvino who wrote Cybernetic fiction. Porush used the term ‘cybernetic’ to describe a future “Cybernetic Age” where technology might enable us to capture (and maybe understand) the mind and how it works. Porush described a genre of science fiction exploring this potential as “cybernetic (or even better, “anti-cybernetic”)” — Upload joins a long line of stories, like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, exploring the potential that technology might free us from our bodies. Calvino, and Porush use the word ‘Eudoxia’ to describe the ability to write and create virtual worlds, or cities, built on ‘good discourse.’

“We now have a word for a magic technology that will create a complete sensorium or virtual reality on a cybernetic platform; cyberspace, an accessible, self-referential, genre-destroying hyperspace, a soaring sensorium that will imitate, model, and link to its mirror image, the human brain.”

Porush believed such a future technology, or place, Eudoxia, would render the story — TV or fairy tale — impoverished.

Lakeview, the ‘heaven’ in Upload, is a picture of a Eudoxia. And it turns out, people still want their bodies. That the mind itself is not enough; and that the sort of ‘transcendence’ Porush dreamed of, where we push out of our bodies and into our brains, is actually disenchanting rather than magical.

In a follow up piece, Hacking the Brainstem, published in 1994, Porush argued that (even then) our “centuries-long romance with technology” where we used technology to, for example, achieve intimacy with others, “has already cyberspatialised us,” preparing the way for us to experience ‘sensuous information bodilessly’ — he breathlessly hoped that cyberspace would help us transcend our bodies. He said in the sort of science fiction that anticipated cyberspace — this cybernetic fiction — “Cyberspace already transcends the physical “meat” body by creating a simulated “meta” body in the brain and communicating with it directly via electrical implants.” He said:

“Eudoxia is presently enacted in video games and cybernetic fiction, which will find their ultimate material marriage in the computer’s cyberspace.”

Whether or not this future can, or will, happen is immaterial. It’s clearly a future that we like to imagine happening; an escape from the meat of our bodies into the meta. Life forever; freed from pain and suffering, beyond death.

That a company like Amazon is going to be best placed to deliver such a future is a scary thought Upload presents us with; but its story, like other anti-cybernetic stories, should cause us to pause and ask if this is the best good place we can imagine.

Porush describes the promise of cyberspace peddled in such stories in this reasonably long passage, it’s worth it though…

______

The imminence of the cyborg is not a matter of speculation, it is a matter of reporting the news, a matter of postmodern sociology and introspection. We are already experiencing the reflux from a time twenty seconds into the future when our own media technologies will physically transcribe themselves onto our bodies, re-creating the human in their own images, forcing our evolution into the posthuman through a combination of mechanistic and genetic manipulations… yberspace will renovate human relations; it will unite art and technology; it will represent an altogether new and radical domain for improved social, psychic, and perceptual transactions. Bypassing the infirmities of the body, cyberspace will free the cripple and liberate the paralytic. Enabling multimedia and sensory access to the entire wealth of world data, cyberspace will deliver a universal education. Through its anonymity, cyberspace will invite the construction of a more ethical code and create norms for human interaction that strip distinctions of gender, class, race, and power. Cyberspace will provide a playspace for the imagination to roam free, liberating the mind from its inevitably neurotic relationship to the body. Cyberspace therefore has untold psychotherapeutic possibilities. Yet cyberspace will incapacitate destructive urges and consequences by removing our bodies. Cyberspace will create the means for a pure and perfect democracy and universal suffrage in which everyone can vote immediately on any issue. Cyberspace will present the possibilities for “virtual communities.” Cyberspace will reconstruct the nature of the relationship between labor and time and labor and space and will reconstruct authoritarian technics as they are manifested in the workplace —although one wonders who is going to empty the garbage and build the roads after we have all emigrated to this new virtual suburb. While cyberspace will undoubtedly present new opportunities for criminality, rape and physical assault will become impossible. Cyberspace will present a new opportunity for our manifest destiny, a new frontier. Cyberspace will make war obsolete by turning it into a Desert Storm videogame. Cyberspace will create a totalized hypertextual platform that will cure what ails American higher education. We will become immortal there. It will enable us to combine work and play in a new way. Even the music will be better there. Cyberspace will be the new, clean, virtual Eden to which we will all emigrate when this physical world becomes an unlivable ecodisaster. In cyberspace we will finally perfect the academic’s dream of sex: we will be able to indulge lust without the involving of our bodies (perhaps I should have said “the dream of sex that’s academic”). The New World, World Without End, amen.”

______

Cyberspace in Porush’ vision, is the cyberspace on offer in Upload. A world built by ~~Horizon~~ Amazon.

In Hacking the Brainstem, Porush makes a pretty interesting point about ‘utopian visions’ served up in our stories; eschatologies, even. He suggests we create utopias, culturally, by ‘modelling our view of human nature rationally and then inventing a technology to control or direct that model’ — by ‘technology’ he says he means “systems that seek and project perfect control” — so when a human is placed in the system the system encourages the “best part and controls the worst part of human nature” while the human maintains the system by their participation. This is particularly interesting when one considers Upload’s utopian vision; a digital world where the technology pictures the ideal human life as one of unfettered consumption in the pursuit of goodness and pleasure, surrounded by those people you love (such that you might consume them too).

The world we live in is one where corporations want that to be our utopian vision; because it’s what keeps them profitable.

The corporate world wants to keep us disenchanted and placing our hope in a technological future — a eudoxia — because if we put our hope in some transcendent otherworld, heaven — clouds outside the cloud — then they lose us now. We no longer want to play in their system.

There’s a reason there’s no God in Upload — that the priest for hire at the funeral parlour offers up factoids about Nathan that he’s gleaned from wikipedia, and no comfort beyond his digital avatar being there on the big screen behind him. God upsets the apple cart of these apple vendors.

Like in The Good Place, the ‘eudoxia’ of Upload — Lakeview — is in need of a good eucatastrophe. A “good catastrophe” — the term coined by Tolkien for the fantastic moment in a fairy story where the failure of our attempts to build our own utopian visions; craft our own ending to the story, our own ‘afterlife’ is met by an interruption; a good catastrophe. Tolkien’s ‘best catastrophe’ — the one that means I’d be banking on fantasy novels outlasting cybernetic fiction — is the enchanting story; the story that reminds us that reality is not all there is; that the physical world points to a supernatural world; that sex in bodies is, like other experiences in our bodies, meant to throw us towards something ‘enchanted’ rather than excarnated, and to remind us that our bodies are fundamental to our personhood. Tolkien’s best version of the good catastrophe is, of course, the version where the story of Jesus is true; where the heavenly future he offers is not disembodied life in the cloud(s), but an embodied life in a re-created and renovated world; this world; not a digital world; not a world fuelled by consumption and the pursuit of pleasure through choice where you have to keep paying a corporation; but a transformed world centred on the love of God for his people, and the love of his people for God and for one another. This is our hope. The real new eden — not the digital one.

“Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!”
Revelation 21:4-5

Who needs a Lakeview when you can have a river view anyway…

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.No longer will there be any curse.
Revelation 22:1-3

May 3, 2020

The Good(er) Place

Warning: Contains Spoilerish discussion of the finale of the Good Place, and the whole series.

After we finished watching The Good Place, closing the green door on the final chapter of the story of four misfits from earth saving each other, and the entire universe in the process, I turned to my wife and asked ‘if heaven was just me for eternity, how long would it take for you to choose non-existence?’

She didn’t answer.

But that’s one of the profound questions asked in the Good Place’s exploration of the afterlife. What is worth living forever for? Is mastery of every craft imaginable enough to keep you occupied? Once you’ve read all the books, or played the perfect game of Madden — once you’ve achieved your ‘end’ — reached your telos — what can sustain you for an eternity? Is love, even love for a soul mate, enough?

The Good Place has punched above its weight when it comes to tackling philosophical questions — the Trolley Problem episode (which gets a callback in the finale) will no doubt make it into university lecture theatres for a Jeremy Bearimy or two. When we tackled the question of hell as a church about 18 months ago we showed a clip from the Good Place where arch-demon turned arch-itect, Michael, explained the scoring system that secured your place in the afterlife. We thought we were clever when we argued modern life is more complicated than the system allows, and our participation in systems built on sinfulness means we can never hope to escape the consequences of our sin on our own steam — and the Good Place writers obliged by making that season 3’s narrative arc.

Without spoiling season 4, having discovered that the system is fundamentally flawed, so that nobody can earn their way into the Good Place anymore, the team of humans; Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason, with the supernatural assistance of Michael, and super-computer Janet, have to come up with a better system.

They basically design purgatory, a process of testing and refining that will ultimately let any and every human earn their own salvation; so that people can find their way into the Good Place again. The problem here is that the system is geared against the human, so fixing the system allows humans to extract themselves from its corruption, over time. The darker part of human nature — that we might ourselves be the problem — is not part of the philosophical anthropology — an optimistic humanism — served up by the show.

This is the best and most just system humans can devise, it’s also the most hopeful. Even the demons get on board — they too have been victims of ‘the system’ — and at this point the writers might have been able to pack up having delivered a literal ‘happily ever after’ to every human.

But they don’t. There’s a moment a few episodes from the end where most shows, with happy endings, would finish. Eleanor and Chidi sitting on the couch, looking out over a glorious vista, reflecting on how paradise is having time — an eternity even — with the person you love. But the writers want to press in to just how satisfying (or not) that sort of eternity might be…

And this is where season 4 gets interesting. We get a pretty serious and imaginative attempt to depict the after life; a take on heaven that never tries to take itself too seriously, and ultimately serves as a vehicle for the show’s final philosophical message — life here on earth can be a bit heavenly if we muddle our way through towards self-improvement and more compassionate relationships. It’s life now that has meaning, especially because life and love might (will) one day end. You can have infinite Jeremy Bearimys to work this out, or four seasons of the Good Place.

The Good Place (the place, not the show, or rather, the place as depicted in the show) offers an individual the chance to continue their personal development — the process they’ve used to secure salvation — or simply to enjoy the fruits of their labour. It’s a place of rest, work, and play. There’s continuity with life on earth in a way that is profound and comforting. The old order of things has passed away. Death is dead.

Something about the picture of heaven the show offers up reminds me of C.S Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien without enchantment. It’s not that the hypercoloured reality the Good Place serves up is not imaginative, it’s that in a cosmos where everybody saves themselves and heaven revolves around one’s particular individual desires — even if only the good ones — there’s a hollowness. And it’s this hollowness the show presses into powerfully, without really resolving in a way I found satisfying.

Chidi and Eleanor meet one of Chidi’s philosophical idols, who reveals that an eternity in the Good Place with all good things on tap, a gushing, never-ending stream of goodness has left people incapable of much thought or imagination at all. Heaven has become monotonous. Even the Good Place is broken, and our band of heroes has to fix it.

Their diagnosis is that the joy offered by the Good Place will only truly be joy if it can end. Death is what gives life its purpose and pleasure its meaning. If when you’ve lived a full life you can walk through the door and push out into nothingness. The Good Place ultimately serves up the best end as euthanasia — ‘the good death’ — only not to end one’s suffering, but to finish one’s pursuit of pleasure and desire; to find satisfaction and so stop searching.

If it’s fleeting and to be enjoyed in the face of death. There’s something very much like Ecclesiastes in the mix here; Ecclesiastes without any sense that ‘life under the sun’ might point to some greater reality. A telos beyond the self. And here’s where The Good Place offers a less compelling version of heaven than Lewis, Tolkien, or the Bible.

Lewis wrote stacks on joy, on its fleeting, ephemoral, nature here in this world — though he saw our pleasures now anticipating the pleasures of the new creation, throwing us towards a more substantial reality than the one we enjoy now. He says moments of pleasure we experience now are pointers to something other-worldy, magical, heavenly even… in The Weight of Glory he describes these moments as echoes of a future time and place: “For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” But for Lewis even the fulfilment of these things — the hyper-coloured reality — is not actually what these pleasures point to.

What they point to is God.

God and his glory.

God is missing from the Good Place. And it’s that God is missing, and that the desires of the characters can be fulfilled in the goodness of pleasure as an end, or telos, that makes walking through that final door — euthanasia — seem ‘good’.

Death is not good.

God is.

And God is missing from The Good Place.

And I’d say that’s why nobody wants to stick around for eternity (and why I’d be ok with Robyn not wanting to put up with just me forever).

The Good Place is a fairy story without God. And I mean this in a pure sense; it’s a very enjoyable tale, it is mythic and beautiful, and fundamentally human in all the good ways it should be (and what a killer twist at the end of season 1). But it seeks to do what Tolkien says fairy stories should do — offer consolation — by offering a picture of a “good death” when perhaps true consolation can only be found in a truly good life.

Part of the problem is that the Good Place, with its unabashed humanism, has every character acting as the hero in their own story. Everyone who gets to the good place has pulled themselves in by the bootstraps. They’ve worked to save themselves. They’ve achieved. All they have now is the fruit of their hard work; or more work; which is satisfying for a time, but not forever. Even true love for another person can’t, in the honest appraisal of perhaps the smartest TV writers ever, sustain life for eternity.

This left me feeling sad. Not because I didn’t want to say goodbye to Chidi, Eleanor, Tahani, and Jason (oh Jason)… but because I don’t want to say goodbye to those I love at all. What euthanasia attempts to hide now doesn’t look any more compelling to me in hypercolour; death actually is a terrible thing. Existence trumps non-existence. Light offers consolation; darkness doesn’t.

Both Tolkien and Lewis depict heaven — in new, restored, creation terms — as a case of “further up, and further in” — growing deeper in a sense of glory in another, rather than in ourselves. Delighting and knowing more of God and his goodness, not simply the goodness of created stuff.

In Narnia, at the end of The Last Battle, one of the characters (the Unicorn) when discovering the ‘new creation’ — the new Narnia — sees that it is a fuller version of reality anticipated by the goodness, pleasures, and beauty, of the previous one. It’s his Weight of Glory in story form, in this new creation “every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.” and the unicorn, upon arriving, shouts:

“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that is sometimes looked a little like this… Come further up, come further in!”

Tolkien’s Leaf By Niggle is a beautiful picture of the afterlife that was, in some ways, echoed in some of the more satisfying depictions of heaven offered in The Good Place. It has Niggle, an artist, enjoying the coming to life of the beautiful works of art he created — true art, that reflected the creativity of the creator of beauty — and pressing ‘further up, and further in’ to that beauty, taking all the time in the world to come to terms with the goodness of a new, restored, reality.

“He was going to learn about sheep, and the high pasturages, and look at a wider sky, and walk ever further and further towards the Mountains, always uphill. Beyond that I cannot guess what became of him. Even little Niggle in his old home could glimpse the Mountains far away, and they got into the borders of his picture; but what they are really like, and what lies beyond them, only those can say who have climbed them.”

This little short story from Tolkien, and Lewis’ ending of Narnia, throw us towards the source of actual satisfaction — or at least show us that consolation is found not by completion, but by pushing deeper into love and goodness. They suggest such a ‘push’ works better, eternally, when you are pushing towards something, or someone, infinite.

The Good(er) Place — one that offers actual consolation — is the place where God is.

This might seem like pious waffle and a way to overthink a TV comedy — but the hollowness of the vision of the afterlife offered by The Good Place is not just because euthanasia seems like a terrible consolation; an eternity of pleasure in beautiful ‘things on tap’ rather than joy in the one who made beauty is also not consoling. Where The Good Place doesn’t achieve the emotional highs of the ending of Narnia, or The Lord of the Rings, or other fairy stories is in offering the best imaginable ‘euthanasia’ — a good death — while offering none of what Tolkien calls a ‘eucatastrophe’ — a ‘good catastrophe’ — an interruption of the natural ordering of things that thrusts us towards our telos, particularly the goodness and fullness of God.

The Good Place is ultimately a tragedy, not a comedy (or fairy tale) because death is not defeated but embraced. Comedies and fairy tales have, by not simply ‘satisfying’ endings where our desires are met, but happy endings where they are exceeded. They have a eucatastrophe that brings a sudden joy, a taste of consoling truth, to the audience.

The Good Place doesn’t console, or bring joy, in Tolkien’s terms, because its good place is not true. Tolkien says:

“The peculiar quality of the ”joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a “consolation” for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, “Is it true?”

For Tolkien the goodness of the Bible’s story — the story it tells about the afterlife — is that we are not the hero, and that the change brought by the hero is not simply time enjoying the fruits of our own victory, but that we are raised from the dead. ‘True’ consolation looks forward to the renewal of all things, secured by God’s ‘eucatastrophic’ interruption of history in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Who’d want heaven without the God who renews all things? Without Jesus?

Because The Good Place has each person in heaven there as a result of their own efforts, there is no ‘telos’ beyond the self, and one’s improvement, but also nobody to glory in or love; no experience of grace; no desire to ‘push further up, and further in’ into the knowledge of the author of beauty; the true consoler. Where the throne in heaven in the Bible’s story is occupied, and the centre of the action, in The Good Place, everyone gets a throne, everyone rules their own little kingdom, and nobody wants to stay. The Good(er) place offers something more satisfying than the green door on the good place, it offers us a throne, and one on it, and invites us to push ‘further up and further in’ to knowing and glorying in the infinitely good and loving one on the throne whose glory will take an eternity to wrap ourselves up in.

Here’s how the Bible describes the Good(er) Place… with God at the centre.

“Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!””

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

— Revelation 21:3-5, 22:1-5

In the real good place, nobody will want to leave.

February 6, 2020

ISIS, Martyrdom, Fundamentalism, and Christian hope

tertullianquote

News broke yesterday that ISIS had beheaded 21 Egyptians for being “people of the Cross.” Images from the dramatic and disturbingly choreographed and colour coordinated public statement are circulating around the internet, but I have no desire to aid the spread of ISIS propaganda, so you won’t find them here.

What you will find is some further processing of these events, consider this the latest in a series of thinking out loud, which started with the “We Are N” post, and incorporates the post responding to the siege in Sydney’s Martin Place, and the post responding to the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris.In the first, I explore the relationship between Christianity and martyrdom — something this post will unpack a bit more. In the second I suggest that one of the things we need to keep recognising in this ISIS situation is that people are motivated by religious beliefs, and that even if ISIS does not represent mainstream Islam (which, by all accounts from mainstream Islamic clerics, it does not), it does represent a form of religious belief. This is a case made in this article from The Atlantic: What ISIS Really Wants. In the third, I suggest that the Cross of Jesus is the thing that should shape Christian responses to brokenness in the world, our ‘religious motivation,’ and that this is the key to responding well to radical religious violence.

This latest horror brings all of these threads together.

I don’t know how you process events like this — it probably depends greatly on your vision of the world, of life, and death. I’m still figuring out what an appropriate response to this looks like. Part of me is just an emotional ball of anger at the world, perhaps even at God, a raging, fist shaking lament at the injustice in yesterday’s events. Part of me cries out for the sort of “justice” that the Egyptian government has promised to exact, but I’m not sure that actually solves anything (it may even make things worse). Part of me believes that this event is an incredibly clear picture of the vision of hope held out by two different religious outlooks — involving two different sorts of “fundamentalist.”

If you’re not a Christian (or a Muslim) then you may look at this event, and other executions carried out by ISIS, as just another mark chalked up on the wall in a battle between two groups fighting over whose imaginary friend has more power, if you’re a mainstream Muslim you may be horrified that, once again, you’ll be called on to explain the actions of people who have taken up the name of your faith and used it to destroy others. If you, like me, are a Christian, you might be trying to figure out how to parse out the simultaneous shock and horror at this situation, the turmoil in your own inner-monologue as you grapple with the question “what if my faith were tested like this,” and, perhaps you might worry that you have what some (even you, as you mull it over) might consider a perverse sense that these Christians are heroes, whose faith encourages you in your own suffering, or lack of suffering.

Hopefully, the universal human response — beyond the response of those carrying out the killings — is one that involves the realisation that these events are a very loud, very clear, indicator that something is very wrong with this world. It may be that you think religion, and violence like this, is at the heart of what is wrong with the world, or it may be that this brokenness we see in the world causes us to seek after God, forcing us to work through the different pictures of God we find in different religious frameworks.

This particular story — the execution of 21 “people of the Cross” is actually a picture of two religious fundamentalists acting entirely consistently with the fundamentals of their beliefs (not necessarily as fundamentalists of everyone who chooses a similar label — but actions that are consistent with the motivations of the people involved).

In any of these cases you might wonder what motivates a person to act like this — as a religious fundamentalist — either to carry out such atrocities on fellow humans, or to not renounce your faith in the face of such an horrific, violent, death? In both cases the answer is caught up with the religious notion of hope — a vision of the future, both one’s own, individual, future beyond death, and the future of the religious kingdom you belong to. This hope also determines how you understand martyrdom — giving up one’s own life (or taking the lives of others) in the name of your cause (or against the name of theirs).

It’s worth calling this out — making sure we’re sensitive to the distinction between this Islamic vision for the future, and the mainstream, because it’s in the actions of believers, on the ground, that we are able to compare the qualities of different religious visions of, and for, the world.

What we see in events like this is a clash of two religious visions for the world — a vision for hope secured by powerful conquest, the establishment of a kingdom, and martyrdom for that cause, and a vision for hope secured by God’s sacrifice for us, and his resurrection, which involves a kingdom established by the Cross, for ‘people of the Cross.’ This first vision is the motivation at the heart of the ISIS cause, and the latter is at the heart of a Christian view of martyrdom and hope. There’s also, potentially, a chance to examine a secular vision for the world — which typically involves peace, or an end to conflict (perhaps especially religiously motivated conflict).

Every world view — whether religious, or secular, grapples with this brokenness, and aims to find a path towards an unbroken world. Clashes of world views — like this one, give us opportunities to examine what world view actually provides a meaningful path towards such a transformation. Such a path is fraught, I don’t think there are many solutions that don’t perpetuate the brokenness. I’ll suggest below that it’s only really Christian fundamentalism that will achieve this, the Atlantic article articulates the problem with potential non-religious/secular solutions, especially the military option.

“And yet the risks of escalation are enormous. The biggest proponent of an American invasion is the Islamic State itself. The provocative videos, in which a black-hooded executioner addresses President Obama by name, are clearly made to draw America into the fight. An invasion would be a huge propaganda victory for jihadists worldwide: irrespective of whether they have givenbaya’a to the caliph, they all believe that the United States wants to embark on a modern-day Crusade and kill Muslims. Yet another invasion and occupation would confirm that suspicion, and bolster recruitment. Add the incompetence of our previous efforts as occupiers, and we have reason for reluctance. The rise of ISIS, after all, happened only because our previous occupation created space for Zarqawi and his followers. Who knows the consequences of another botched job?”

Christians believe we are saved, and the world is transformed, by martyrdom — but not our own

These 21 Egyptian ‘people of the Cross’ are not saved by their martyrdom.

They do not have extra hope because of the way they die.

They may have died because of their hope — hope placed in Jesus, but as Christians, our hope is not in our own lives, or our own deaths, as contributors to the cause of God’s kingdom, but rather, in God’s own life, and death, in the person of Jesus.

Jesus’ death. Not our own. Is where Christians see the path to paradise.

This produces a fundamentally different sort of kingdom. It produces a fundamentally different sort of fundamentalist. A person living out the fundamentals of Christianity is a person who is prepared to lay their life down as a testimony to God’s kingdom, out of love for others — to lay down one’s own life for the sake of our ‘enemies’ and our neighbour. Because that is what Jesus did, for us.

Here’s what Paul says is at the heart of Jesus’ martyrdom. His death. From his letter to the Romans.

“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us”

Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!

Later, in the same letter, Paul shows how this martyrdom becomes the paradigm for a Christian understanding of life, death, and following God. A very different outlook, and a very different fundamentalism, to what we see in ISIS.

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship…”

And a little later in the same part of the letter, we get an outline of a Christian response to these truly evil, and horrific, killings — and, indeed, to all the evil and brokenness we see in the world. When we live like this, we live out our hope, we become living martyrs, embodying the values of our kingdom and following our king.

“Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord.Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.

Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. On the contrary:

“If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

This is a picture of Christian fundamentalism. It’s an exploration of what it looks like to be people of the Cross.

Bizarrely — the horrific killings ISIS is carrying out, especially as they execute ‘people of the Cross’ actually serve Christians who are looking to express our own hope as we offer ourselves in this way.

We bear witness to his martyrdom in the way we lay down our lives for others — even as we live. Christian martyrdom involves bearing faithful witness to the one martyr who gains access to the Kingdom through self-sacrifice. When we get this picture we can be confident that God’s power rests in our weakness, rather than our displays of strength. This produces a fundamentally different political vision and approach to life in this world, and the comparison is never starker than it is when it is displayed in the face of a religious ideology like that of ISIS, which mirrors, in so many ways, the religious ideology of the Roman Imperial Cult, and its persecution of the earliest people of the Cross.

This is the hope one of the earlier Christians, Tertullian, articulated to the Roman Emperor, as he called on them to stop executing Christians, his argument, in part, because killing Christians was not serving the Roman Empire, but God’s empire. He wrote a thing to Rome called an Apology — a defence of the Christian faith, and the place of Christianity within the Empire. It’s where the quote in the image at the top of the post comes from. This quote (this is the extended edition).

“No one indeed suffers willingly, since suffering necessarily implies fear and danger. Yet the man who objected to the conflict, both fights with all his strength, and when victorious, he rejoices in the battle, because he reaps from it glory and spoil. It is our battle to be summoned to your tribunals that there, under fear of execution, we may battle for the truth. But the day is won when the object of the struggle is gained. This victory of ours gives us the glory of pleasing God, and the spoil of life eternal. But we are overcome. Yes, when we have obtained our wishes. Therefore we conquer in dying; we go forth victorious at the very time we are subdued…

…Nor does your cruelty, however exquisite, avail you; it is rather a temptation to us. The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed.

This is what Christian fundamentalism looks like. We need more Christian fundamentalists. More Christian martyrs. More people expressing this hope in how they live and die.

This, amongst my prayers of lament for those killed as people of the cross, and in the face of the brokenness of the world, and the horror of the Islamic State’s vision of ‘hope,’ is what I’m praying. That God will bring justice for these killings, but that he will also bring hope through them, as people catch sight of the sort of lives lived by Christian fundamentalists. People of the cross.

I want to be that sort of person — a person of the cross — to be known that way, this is one of the realisations I have come to while processing these killings.

It is only when we whose hope, whose visions of the future, are shaped by Jesus live as Christian fundamentalists, in the Romans 12 sense, that we have any hope of really, truly, presenting the Christian hope for the world — God’s hope for the world — to others.

It’s the only real hope we have of fighting other visions for the future, or breaking the cycle of brokenness.

What other response won’t just perpetuate feelings of injustice? What other responses have any form of justice that doesn’t simply create another perpetrator of injustice? Visions of justice that don’t involve this sort of Christian fundamentalism — giving up one’s ‘rights’ for vengeance simply create a perpetual system of perpetrators. This is perhaps seen clearest as we see boots on the ground (Egypt) or off the ground (The US) in secular visions of the future — military responses to ISIS, and in the actions of ISIS itself. Violence begets violence. Ignoring violence also begets violence. Something has to break that cycle — and the Cross, and the people of the cross, Christian fundamentalists, provide that circuit breaker. The message of the Cross also provides the path to paradise, the path to a restored relationship with the God who will restore the world, and the path to personal transformation both now, and in this transformed world. That’s a vision of the future I can get behind.

February 17, 2015

What if this was your last month on earth?

The Mayan Calendar reckons we’ve got a month until something really big happens. Either the world ends with some sort of cataclysmic bang or whimper, or the beginning of a new world order.

Image Credit: Sevenstreets.com: The radio cast of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy performing at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe

I think, frankly, that’s a load of bollocks. I don’t think the world is going to end in a month. I’m not planning to run out of food, or money, and I’m still thinking about the good things I want to do next year, and in the future.

But I also think, frankly, that there are no guarantees that the world won’t end next month, next week, or tomorrow. It’s pretty clear, if you listen to the Greens, some scientists, or the weird guy at the train station, that our ability to live on this planet is finite, and things are going to come to an end sooner or later – some say sooner, some say later.

It’s also pretty clear, if you are a Christian, that we should be living like the end is near. Because it might be. And because that shapes our priorities in a really helpful way. Knowing that tomorrow could be it, means you spend today on what’s important.

So what if we had a month to go? How would you spend your last 30 days on earth? How would you spend the last 30 minutes?

For some people, getting ready means fleeing to a mountain in France. Sadly, the French government is getting in the way. But how do you get ready if you know the earth is a fleeting mist?

What Jesus says

In Matthew 24 Jesus talks a bit about the end of the world as we know it… and what that means for people who think he’s the promised Messiah, from the Old Testament, God’s chosen king (that’s what messiah means), and what it means for the world – if he is the king, he’s king of the world.

He says, just to make it clear that there’s a bit of urgency in deciding who he is:

³⁶“But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

It could be tomorrow.

⁴²“Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.⁴³But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. ⁴⁴So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.

He’s speaking mostly to his followers – he says you better make sure you’re not just off partying until your master suddenly returns. Because he’ll smash you, just like he’ll smash his enemies.

A little earlier in Matthew 24, Jesus makes it pretty clear what’s involved in waiting for the end, if you believe he’s who he said he is…

¹³but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. ¹⁴And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

Interestingly, he also somewhat figuratively, talks about fleeing to the mountains as legitimate. So there you go. French government… take heed…

“¹⁶then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains”

But it’s the other two bits – the standing firm to the end, and the gospel being preached to all nations, that are the important part of the response to knowing the world could end.

This preaching, in particular, becomes the mission of his followers a couple of pages in the Bible later, in Matthew 28, after Jesus has been killed, and, to prove he is who he says he is, been raised. That’s the evidence he offers for his claim – it’s the truth that Christianity is built on. And Jesus says now that you’ve seen who I am, that I am the king… this is a little passage called the “Great Commission”…

¹⁸Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. ¹⁹Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

So, I hope the answer, if you’re a Christian, is that you’d do lots of this in those last 30 days – excited by the prospect that Jesus is king, and wanting people to know that so they avoid the pain of not being one of his people.

What Paul says (for those who don’t believe Jesus is king)

But what about if you don’t believe Jesus is king, or that aliens are going to blast off from a mountain in France? What do you do in those last days? Paul has one answer, when it comes to whether or not you think the resurrection happened – which is what Jesus’ claim to be king hangs on, he says if you don’t believe – and that’s up to you – then this is what you should do, in 1 Corinthians 15:

“Let us eat and drink,
for tomorrow we die.”

I love how Paul sums up what Christians are hoping for, at the end of the world here – the future for all people, dead and alive, who follow Jesus.

⁵¹Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— ⁵²in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. ⁵³For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. ⁵⁴When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

⁵⁵“Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”

⁵⁶The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. ⁵⁷But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

What I think is incredibly cool is that his advice for how to live in the light of this is exactly the same as Jesus’ advice – so much for the idea that “Paul invented Christianity”…

⁵⁸Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

What’s the work of the Lord – that’d be the stuff Jesus said in the “Great Commission” – the job he, the Lord, gave those who believe he was raised.

I like that we’re meant to live like the world’s going to end next month every month.

November 22, 2012

72 million reasons to be depressed the rapture didn’t happen over the weekend

If there’s one thing Harold Campling’s stupidity did manage it was to generate more global buzz around the return of Jesus than any other preacher in the last 20 years. My Facebook and Twitter feeds were filled with rapture chatter – and not just from Christians. People knew about Campling’s predictions. And if you were anything like me – you looked at your watch when the world was meant to end and thought about Campling. I felt sorry for the people he fleeced, and sorry for his future.

But his message reached tipping point. It went viral in a way most brands can only dream of. People are still tweeting #rapturefail messages as we speak.

The secret to this success was the incredible amount of money he poured into getting his message across. That’s what showed he was serious. That and the contributions he secured from other people who also bought into his message.

So now I’m thinking much the same thing I think when I see how much money people pour into building dinosaur theme parks. Wouldn’t it be great if Campling’s message (even if his eschatology is completely screwy) just focused on promoting the gospel of Jesus. Proclaiming the future return of Jesus, who came to restore our relationship with God. If you have $72 million to sink into an advertising campaign and you think the world is going to end on a particular date – just book your campaign to finish on that date and make it all about Jesus. Not about your weird interpretation of dates. Especially if your words, like Campling’s, run completely contrary to everything the Bible says on the issue.

It makes me sad that Campling’s stupidity is now being hijacked as an opportunity to mock anybody who has Christian faith.

If that’s the style of argument the atheists want to bring to this debate then we’re going to have to start judging their claims on the basis of the behaviour of their fringe. But that’s revisiting old ground.

It makes me sick to see so many people talking about the return of Jesus (not the rapture) in the trivial and derogatory way they are thanks to Mr Campling. Which is why I think the Bible takes false teachers pretty seriously.

May 23, 2011

Apocalypse Now? Or not yet

Six days later debate still rages (though slower now) on the Friendly Atheist thread (I even scored a second post about my comments that was actually quite flattering… check it out)… here’s a testimonial from the author of the original post – it probably gives a more balanced view than the quotes I mined here.

First of all, I want to thank Nathan for his continued patience and politeness in comments. Yes, we disagree with him – vehemently on some issues – but I’m impressed that the comments have stayed mostly productive and substantive.

Fellow commenter, Wayne, has raised an interesting interpretation of the mission of Jesus and the kingdom he proclaimed. His comments alone make that thread worth reading. He is singularly the most interesting commenter I’ve ever come across there. He is prepared, it seems, to not completely dismiss the Biblical accounts of Jesus’ teaching. He just interprets them in an interesting way.

He introduced his views like this:

You comment that you follow the teachings of Jesus. I assume that, like most Christians, you consider him the Son of God. I submit to you that, on the contrary, he was a human being who was an apocalypticist who was preaching that God was about to arrive in his kingdom and that the people must prepare themselves. In Mark 9:1, Jesus states “Truly I tell you, some of you standing here will not taste death before they have seen the Kingdom of God having come in power. And Mark 13:30 Truly I tell you, this generation (i.e., presumably, the one he was addressing) will not pass away before all these things take place. In Mark 14:62 Truly I tell you, You will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven. In Mathew 16:27-28 For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels: and then he shall reward every man according to his works.
…
I am a former Christian who had questions that religion could not answer, such as why Jesus would be preaching fervently for the people to prepare themselves for the coming Kingdom when it wasn’t supposed to happen for millenniums later. It simply made no sense. I’ve since realize the problem after much research from non religious sources, that it was actually supposed to happen back then, but it didn’t, which blew Christianity out of the water for me.

Then he brought up this theory on the promise to David…

Here is something to cogitate over. Yahweh made a covenant with the House of David that David’s descendants would hold the reigns of power over Israel for ever. Let me remind you that this is from a god who is all knowing. Well, the leader of a nation, I forget which, removed the ruling Davidian and replaced him with a nonDavidian. So much for an all knowing god.

Like most Christians I think Jesus was talking about his kingdom coming at the crucifixion (and resurrection). I’m a 2 Corinthians 1:20 man myself…

For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God.

One thing I hate in these arguments – and it’s similar to Ben’s disdain for experts – is when people quote “scholars” as though an issue is decided. Like this quote from Wayne (who really did have an interesting hermeneutic, and one I hadn’t really encountered before. I knew it existed, I’d just never met anybody who bought it):

“How can we look at the Old Testament and take it seriously? Scholars have determined that Abraham was simply a legend and didn’t exist. Also, the book of Joshua tells a powerful tale of conquest, supported by a God who showed no respect for most of the Holy Land’s existing inhabitants, however scholars have determined it is not history and it never was.”

Oh yeah, and anything in the Bible that contradicts his interpretations of other bits of the Bible is invalid…

Unfortunately, scholars are convinced that Paul did not write the books of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus (called the “Pastoral” epistles, because they deal with how these pastors should oversee their churches.) So this passage you quoted has no validity.

When I objected to his “scholars”, I got this response:

When it comes to religion, I will pick the majority of scholars over the majority of Christians anytime, especially when their interpretation makes more sense.

I decided that Wayne had been pretty heavily influenced by the previously featured Bart Erhman… I found, and posted, this quote from a scholar about Ehrman’s “scholarship”…

A criticism of Erhman from an NT lecturer:

It is mystifying however why he would attempt to write a book like Jesus, Interrupted which frankly reflect no in-depth interaction at all with exegetes, theologians, and even most historians of the NT period of whatever faith or no faith at all. A quick perusal of the footnotes to this book, reveal mostly cross-references to Ehrman’s earlier popular works, with a few exceptions sprinkled in—for example Raymond Brown and E.P Sanders, the former long dead, the latter long retired. What is especially telling and odd about this is Bart does not much reflect a knowledge of the exegetical or historical study of the text in the last thirty years. It’s as if he is basing his judgments on things he read whilst in Princeton Seminary. And that was a long time ago frankly.

Then another commenter took me to task for bringing Ehrman into the discussion. How dare I be so presumptuous. And Wayne linked me to this friend of his, where he’d commented with similar views (almost word for word) in the past… and credited Erhman. Priceless.

“I was originally Christian, but had too many questions like why did Jesus preach back then that you must prepare yourself for the coming Kingdom if it wasn’t going to happen until millenniums later. Or why did Jesus tell his disciples that some of them would still be standing when his Father would arrive in glory in his kingdom, if it wasn’t supposed to happen then? Ministers could never give me an answer, but Bart Erhman did.”

Perhaps this post will be enough to bring Wayne here to continue this discussion. Lets see. It’s certainly the rambliest thing I’ve posted for a while.

January 13, 2010

Theological Smackdown: The end is the beginning is the end

The last few weeks of Westminster Confession of Faith classes (WCFC) left me feeling a little bit like Hulk Hogan at a press conference…

We’ve changed the order somewhat due to the absence of our venerated leader, who for some reason decided that stuff about end times would be less controversial than stuff about the sacraments.

He was wrong. The chapters on the state of men after death and the resurrection and the one on the Last Judgment ended up being pretty heated.

The judgment study got bogged down in the question of whether Christians go through the process of judgment to be found innocent – or if we skip the process altogether.

It was a case of the one proof text verse the many proof texts – and both sides of the debate walked away thinking they’d won and the other side were idiots.

Our group features some John Macarthur fanboys (surely a breed as rabid as my posse of Mark Driscoll fanboys), who are very rigidly stuck on the idea that dispensational premillennialism is the only way to understand end times.

I’m not one of them. They told me I don’t understand Revelation. Or the Bible. I told them that Calvin was an amillenialist. It got a little ugly.

For some reason they also hold Revelation to be the most important book of the Bible. It’s like a trump card that can be played to render all perspicuous passages of Scripture relating to the same topic unclear at the sake of a fringe interpretation of a complex book.

The millennium sure is a curious little issue to think about – but at the end of the day it’s not a salvation issue. And we have freedom to disagree.

I think it matters though – because it’s the vocal fringe that brand Christianity as a bunch of crazies – and if you have a look at Christian cults – you’ll find that most of them subscribe to a premillennial eschatology. This may or may not be a strawman.

I just think they’re wrong. My thinking, like Dave’s about Christianity, comes from my parents. Check out dad’s most excellent sermon series on Revelation to see what I think about the millennium and the book of Revelation spelled out…

I think we get into trouble when we disregard the style a book is written in when we’re looking to it for meaning. That’s part of looking at context.

I got angry when I read this list of reasons Superman is better than Jesus because the guy took a verse (Luke 19:27) from a parable about a king out of context and applied it to Jesus.

Revelation 1 – “Witness Protection” – MP3

Revelation 2-3 – “To Him Who Overcomes” – MP3

Revelation 4-5 – “Who is Worthy?” – MP3

Revelation 6-7 – “When are we going to get there?” – MP3

Revelation 12 – “Defeating the Accuser” – MP3

Revelation 13-14 – “The Power – or the Passion?” – MP3

Revelation 15-16 – “Exodus Again” – MP3

Revelation 17-18 – “The End of the Scarlet Harlot” – MP3

Revelation 19 – “Onward Christian Soldiers?” – MP3

Revelation 20 – “Pit Stop” – MP3

Revelation 21-22 “Coming Home” – MP3

One of the things that Willows Pressy doesn’t do that MPC does really nicely is the sermon outline and pithy title. I like the structure a sermon outline provides for my listening – even if it’s just so I know how long the guy up the front will keep talking for – I assume listeners to my sermons feel the same way…

November 19, 2009

Arking up

These made me laugh.

From here.

And this one from the Friendly Atheist.

Almost as much as the lecture I got from a couple of premillenial dispensationalists last night. Sometimes different elements of Christianity can be funny. And I’m all for self deprecation.

I’m fairly convinced by my take on both Genesis and Revelation – but I’m much more convinced that neither actually truly matters. I don’t get people who make these bits of the Bible the big deal. Or points of division and distinction. Though I do get how your eschatology shapes your actions here and now… so I can see how it is important (but not essential).

October 28, 2009

Luther: A hippy?

Some people see eschatology as a dirty word thanks to the Left Behind mob – and I’ve always been pretty wary of people who define themselves by their views on “end times” – but here’s a second post tagged eschatology in two days. There was a comment on my post about how your eschatology shapes your actions that is worth sharing with everybody.

Joanna – who based on her email address I assume used to be a Richardson – but that’s a guess… pointed to a famous quote attributed to Luther:

“Interestingly, Martin Luther – who certainly agreed with you that preaching the gospel was an urgent task in the light of the return of Jesus – when asked what he would do today if he knew the world was ending tomorrow, answered ‘I would plant a tree.’ Was he a man with a poor eschatology, or just a strong theology of creation? Or both, do you think?”

From what I can gather – the quote, more accurately rendered is:

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

I’m not about to throw stones at Luther’s eschatology, that would be profound arrogance on my part. I am curious as to why he would answer the question that way – so I’m doing some research. At the outset I’d posit that either he really enjoyed gardening, or he thought that guessing games concerning the end of the world were pointless and that we should go on living life regardless, others speculate that Luther’s vision of the New Creation features a redeemed version of the current one, and a tree would be a part of that…

There are a few seemingly reputable sites that cast some doubt on whether or not he actually said this at all… but it turns out he did enjoy gardening.

From my initial googling, Option 2 seems to be the favoured interpretation around the online traps.

However, there are others who run with it more literally, like those planning the celebration of the 500th anniversary of Luther’s posting of the 95 theses… who plan to plant 500 trees in the Luthergarden as a visual celebration.

Then there’s the TreeLink mob who claim Luther as a tree-planting champion…

Personally, and this is probably again shaped by my “bias” – and the weight of Luther’s teachings regarding the importance of evangelism against this one quote of dubious origins – I think if he did say it he was probably emphasising the fact that “nobody knows the time and place” so we shouldn’t live as though each day should be our last – but should go on living in readiness. Which, given the weight of Luther’s teachings and the picture we have of the life he lived would involve bold proclamation of the word as a priority.

Some poor souls who run a repository of “spiritual quotes” attributed this one to Martin Luther King Jr.

Incidentally my favourite Luther quote for a long time was this:

Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.

May 4, 2009

The End is the Beginning

Ahh, the Smashing Pumpkins, what a band. Who’d have guessed that that title would stand the test of time and become the title of this post…

So, one more reflection from my sermon today and my thoughts on Matthew 9-10.

One of the other things I stressed was the urgency of the harvest – I picked up this little pointer from Tony Robowtham at Spur in Brisbane last week – but that I should have known given the family I married into – the language of the harvest is loaded with a sense of urgency.

It strikes me that your approach to evangelism is greatly influenced by your eschatology – how and when you think the world will end will profoundly effect how you live and how urgently you approach the task.

Given that I’m of the inclination that the world could end whenever God calls stumps – I’m inclined to priorities evangelism over things like caring for the planet. I can see how that’s a much greater concern if you’re a long term thinker. Probably not as profound as it seems in my head, but worth jotting down for when the idea resurfaces in my head in the future and I search for eschatology on my blog.

May 3, 2009