1st EPISTLE GENERAL OF DAN: Getting Our Needs Met

Authentic Christian . . .  spiritual practices are not just about getting in a zone or having an experience. They are about opening ourselves to God’s love flowing through us into the world. 

-- 18^thEpistle to the Nevadans

    

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

It goes without saying we live in a time of social disintegration. The Church seems pre-occupied with planning her own funeral while political extremists swirl into increasingly bizarre paranoid delusions and gun up. Democracy teeters on the brink. The left and the right both spin out increasingly fine-tuned rules to condemn each other in a Manichaean politics of mutual demonizing. That is the context in which we do – or do not do – our religion.

Looking to do my small part for civilization, I was recently at All Saints Church to be trained for a Get Out the Vote community walk. The IAF organizer built our training around a summary of Monsignor Philip Murnion’s Forming Parish Community.  https://www.amazon.com/Forming-parish-community-sociology-developments/dp/B0006WWHA8/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1533839130&sr=1-9&keywords=Philip+Murnion

Murnion’s book is like a bucket of cold water dumped on my benumbed consciousness. He says, 

Authentic parish life must enable people to enter into 

public life and must offset temptations to retreat into

a privatized, pietistic religion. 

Murnion raises basic questions about our project, starting with: what is the 21^st century religious/spiritual consumer looking for? What does the market demand?

We basically want to feel better. We want to relax and get happy. Secular life is often stressful, anxious, hostile, painful, and a whole array of feelings we’d obviously rather avoid. Alcohol, drugs, and diverting entertainment are our main ways of managing that unpleasantness. Religion is generally perceived as a competitor in the stress relief market. We are seen – and we see ourselves -- as a purveyor of spiritual opioids. Marx famously said, Religion is the opiate of the people, and we believed him. 

One may, for example, learn to meditate in ways that calm the mind and lower the blood pressure. Or one may go to a charismatic religious weekend to sing happy songs and enjoy a psycho-socially manufactured high in which one is deliriously happy about something though it is not clear what that something is. It doesn’t matter. We feel better. Calmer mind. Lower blood pressure. Feeling happy. Those are not bad things. They are indisputably good as far as they go. It is the same with pain relief. 

Many of us participate in regular church activity expecting a lower dose of the same opioid. The familiarity of ritual and music can help us escape the turmoil at work or home. But the crucial ingredient is harder to notice because it is colorless, odorless, and tasteless – church chit chat. There are unspoken, even unconscious, norms for our conversation at Church, things we routinely say, and other things we do not say. Church chit chat is crucial to the conspiracy against consciousness.Thou shalt not be aware.[i]

We are not aware of the unspeakable until someone speaks it. For example, there was recently an uproar about the government separating immigrant families at the border. It had happened under the administrations of both parties, though more aggressively under the current administration. Leaders of both political parties spoke out against it. Laura Bush condemned it. The President’s wife and daughter condemned it. The President reversed the policy. By this point, there really was no controversy. 

After the issue had been basically resolved, one of our congregations had a Vacation Bible School. The following Sunday, a priest in the course of celebrating the successful VBS said seeing families brought closer together was a stark contrast to the separation of families that had gone on at the border. One member walked out in angry protest. Did he disagree with everyone about family separation? He did not say so.[ii]The priest’s offense was mentioning something morally painful. He did not come to Church to hear about such things. Church is a place where nothing painful or difficult is to be spoken of or even remembered. This is our happy place. Pass the scotch and a tab of ethylmorphine, please. 

Let us be fair. Life is hard. The First Noble Truth really is suffering. I have my own anxiety disorder. I get it. I do not blame anyone for wanting some relief. That brings us to the second big question: Does Christianity have that to offer? 

The answer is: yes but not in the way we expect. The whole Marx quote is: Religion is the opiate of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. Their real happiness. 

Authentic Christianity is not the spiritual opioid churchianity that conspires against consciousness, artificially calms our minds, gets us happily hooked on a feeling, and makes sure no one says anything upsetting. Christianity is not escapist. If religion is as Marx described it – and churchianity is – then Christianity is ironically what Marx calls the abolition of religion. Remember what Monsignor Murnion said, Authentic parish life must . . . offset temptations to retreat into a privatized, pietistic religion. That privatized pietistic religion is what Marx called the opiate of the people. 

I don’t like Bonhoeffer’s term religionless Christianity because it sounds like spiritual but not religious individualistic piety. But that’s the very opposite of what Bonhoeffer meant. If you put it together with his classic Life Together, in which he argues that the Church is the essential meeting ground of Christianity, there is no way he was espousing private piety and spiritual individualism. His Christianity was religionless because it wasn’t a quid pro quo deal for a happy afterlife. It wasn’t an investment or fire insurance. It was not private palliative piety. It was Christian because it was a disciplined life of prayer and committed action in the world, the kind of action that led him to die for opposing fascism. Bonhoeffer explicitly rejects the spiritual anesthesia project in favor of infinite compassion. 

         

         The human being is called upon to share in God’s suffering

at the hands of a godless world. Thus we must really live in that godless world and not try to cover up or transfigure its godlessness somehow with religion.[iii]

By religion he means the whole conspiracy against consciousness, the assurance it will all be alright and is already alright deep down. 

Here’s the problem for Christianity. We are striving for union with God, striving to become Godly. But this is a God who chooses to become human, to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us. Our journey to God loops back to the real world, to messy humanity, to where we started. 

         And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started 

And to know the place for the first time.[iv]  

Paul invites us, have the same mind in you that was in Christ Jesus. That’s Christification right? How cool is that, to become like Jesus! But what is it like to have the same mind as Jesus who though he was in the form of God did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being in human likeness?[v]Jesus invites us to follow him by taking up our cross.[vi]

How does that brand of religion appeal to people who have problems enough already and just want to feel better? Feel-good religion, be it charismatic, contemplative, or whatever, is what the people demand. It sells, doesn’t it? It sells because it is what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace. Cheap grace is what Marx called the illusion of happiness. Where’s the beef? 

Human beings are built to be channels. God’s love flows through us into the world. When we allow that love to flow, it gets us into all manner of trouble, it entangles our lives with humanity in all its chaos, it leads us not away from this darkling plane[vii]but deeper into it.Now here’s the kicker. That is where true joy is to be found. It isn’t a shallow high. On the contrary, it breaks our hearts – open – to let the love in and out. 

When a channel acts like a reservoir – as when we act like spiritual consumers instead of servants – all we get is a blockage. Love isn’t love until you give it away.[viii]

The irony in the spiritual life is that we all want to get our needs met, but we can never get our needs met until we forget about getting our needs met and lose ourselves in God – not God as an abstract idea or a reassuring fantasy – God in the fat lady in Franny and Zooey,[ix]God in the refugee, God in the hospital administrator, God in the street bum, God in the blackjack dealer, God not on a throne in heaven but commingled inextricably into our broken humanity. We may not want to go there. But that’s where the treasure is buried. And, guess what, we’re already there. 

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started 

And to know the place for the first time.[x]  

---

[i]Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware

[ii]This walk out was not an isolated protest. Multiple preachers have told me that in the same time period they mentioned the separation of families at the border. Multiple laity walked out. None of them said they supported taking toddlers away from their parents. But they were quite angry the subject had been raised at all. 

[iii]Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters from Prison.

[iv]T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

[v]Philippians 2

[vi]Matthew 16: 24

[vii]Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

[viii]The Aggrolites, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiV4Ul2zaz4

[ix]https://www.shmoop.com/franny-and-zooey/fat-lady-story-symbol.html

[x]T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

WARNING: THIS SACRAMENT MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR DIVISIONS

There is One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism.

Paul said that – a lot – in different way.

His Epistles are all about the same thing:

            how to be the Church, the Body of Christ. 

The first churches were always dividing up into factions

            over this issue here; over that issue there.

In Corinth, some folk spoke in tongues and some didn’t.

Some ate meat, and some didn’t. 

In Syria, next door to Israel,

most of the Christians were ethnically Jewish

            and still practiced Judaism.
For them, Christianity was another party within Judaism,

            like the Pharisees or Sadducees.

But take things up to Western Turkey

and demographics shift.

Things were different around Ephesus.

There were Jews and some of the Jews were Christian.

But the majority of the Christians were gentiles.

So, the church division was still between Jew and gentile.

There had been a real blowout nearby in Galatia,

            over whether you could even be a Christian

            if you didn’t convert to Judaism first,

            and for men that meant getting circumcised.

That’s the kind of division Paul was writing into.

We have all seen Christians divide up over all sorts of things:

            women’s ordination, dancing, drinking, movies on Sundays – 

            whether the born-again experience is essential to salvation,

whether baptism in the spirit with tongue speaking 

                        is essential to salvation; 

            whether the promised millennium of peace and justice

                        is to come before or after the rapture;

            whether there will be a rapture;

            whether the virgin birth is literal or symbolic.

We have divided over incense, prayer book revision,

            abortion, gay marriage, background checks for gun buyers,

and whether it is too Catholic to put candles on the altar.

You name it. 

In Nevada, we divide up urban versus rural, 

            North versus South, and East versus West. 

Whenever we run out of issues to divide up over,

            we get busy inventing some new ones.

What is true in the church is especially true in the wider society.

In his landmark book, The Big Sort, Bill Bishop lays out the facts.

America is more diverse than ever.

But we have divided ourselves up as never before 

to ensure that we only interact people like ourselves

--- people who look, think, and even eat like we do.

We live in neighborhoods of people like us.

We go to churches where we all think alike.

We watch news channels carefully programed to offer only facts

            that support whatever opinions we already hold. 

Social media logarithms insure we see the posts

            that will pour gasoline on whatever fire

            we have already have going. 

The social and political impact is obvious: division and discord.

We have redrawn the congressional districts into conservative

            or liberal

so candidates do not have to campaign across ideological lines.

That’s why there are no longer any moderates to broker deals

and Congress no longer works.

Our divisions also have a personal impact.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaumsays we are losing 

            our very ability to imagine how things look to someone else.

That makes our world smaller. It shrinks our lives. 

We can divide up Black versus white,

            English speaker versus Spanish speaker, liberal versus conservative. 

The categories don’t matter.

What matters is the very act of dividing up 

            that isolates us and narrows our minds.

It was into just such a division that Ephesianswas written.

You can substitute any of our contemporary divisions       

            for the division of Jew versus gentile in this letter

            and we’ll see how the message plays. 

Paul said, Now . . .you who once were far off 

            have been brought near by the blood of Christ.        

For he is our peace. //

In his flesh he has made both groups into one

            and has broken down the dividing wall,

            that is the hostility between us.

My bishop in Georgia used to have a saying.

When people would ask him if he could work 

            with some person or group of people, he’d say,

            I haven’t met anyone yet that Jesus didn’t die for his sins.//

And that, my friends, is where it stands.

There may be somebody we don’t agree with. 

We may not even like him very much.

But you know what: Jesus went to the cross for him too.

Jesus shed his blood for him too.

We drink that blood in Holy Communion to make us one.

We lay down our grudges and animosities

            in order to take Jesus into our hearts at the rail.

There are so many standards 

by which we judge each other as right or wrong,

wise or foolish, good or bad.

Paul had a word for those standards.

He called them the law.

And we’ve got all kinds of law:

            we have liberal laws that judge conservatives

            and conservative laws that judge liberals.

We got a law lurking around every corner. 

The law is the standard of judgment we use to set ourselves apart.

But Paul says,
            (Jesus) has abolished the law with its commandments . . .,

            that he might create in himself onenew humanity;

in place of the two, thus making peace,

            and might reconcile both groups into one body through the cross.

One speaks Spanish; the other, English.

One is black descended from slaves; the other, white,

descended from slave owners.

One is straight; the other, gay. 

And we all got a law to make us right and the other guy wrong.

But the Bible says, (Jesus) has abolished the law . . .

            that he might create in himself onenew humanity.

How did he do that?

He went to the cross for both sides

            of every division we can invent.

Paul says Jesus . . . reconcile(d) both groups into one body 

through the cross.

When Jesus brings us together in the Body of Christ,

            he doesn’t abolish our differences.

He doesn’t make us all alike. 

He leaves us different.

But he gives us something in common

-- something that runs deeper than our differences.

He gives us grace. 

He gives us salvation.

He gives us the love of God. 

We may have religious differences or political differences

            or different spiritual styles. 

And that’s a good thing.

How bland it would be if we were all alike!

How dull life would be if we didn’t know people

            who saw the world through different eyes.

We get to enjoy each other’s differences

            because we have something deep in common.

We act out that something in common at the communion rail.

Here’s the thing with Communion. 

We can get the gluten out of the bread.

We can get the alcohol out of the wine. 

But we can’t strain the grace out.

When you receive the bread and wine and you receive 

            the grace that forgives your sins.

But here’s the catch: that your is plural.

The grace that forgives your sins

            forgives those other people too.

You are in the same boat – the Ark of Salvation.

Remember how Noah loaded the Ark two by two.

You enter the Ark of Salvation two by two,

            and that person beside you may not be

            anyone you would expect.

It’s The gifts of God for the people of God.

Take them in remembrance that Christ died for you (plural)

-- died to make all of us one body –

and feed on him in your hearts by faith with thanksgiving.

RANDOM THOUGHTS ON ART, ICONOCLASM, & PARADOX

Griffins Without Faces

My 3-year-old grandson, Matthew, attends a pre-school in Bury St. Edmonds, Suffolk in the lovely land of East Anglia. To get there, we walk along a few quiet residential streets till we get to a narrow driveway defined on either side by tall lush greenery. At the entrance to the driveway stand two brick pillars. Atop each pillar is a small stone griffin. The faces of the griffins have been hammered off. From the aging of the stone, I’d say the hammering took place a very long time ago. 

It is possible the griffins were defaced (literally) by random vandals, but is vandalism ever really random or does its very randomness express nihilism? Regardless, it was probably not random vandals but ideologically driven iconoclasts ridding the Emerald Isle of graven images. 

After our recent visit to Matthew’s pre-school, we went to Stratford Upon Avon. The schoolroom where William Shakespeare began his formal study of words – and we shall return to words e’er long as they play a major role in this drama – adjoins a chapel constructed by the Guild of the Holy Cross 1418-1420. Restoration of the chapel in recent years displays lovely medieval iconography on the wall behind the altar. It features Christ crucified, John and Mary at the foot of the cross, and most recently discovered, John the Baptist to the side. The images of Jesus and the saints were covered over by plaster, but before that, there had been a serious effort to eradicate them. This occurred on the orders of Elizabeth I carried out under the direction of a Stratford public official John Shakespeare, William’s Dad. John was probably Catholic in his personal piety, but Elizabeth was paying two shillings for the job and this was part of changing the purpose of the place from visual art to words, those words John’s son mastered so remarkably. 

The present restoration of the chapel is uncovering the visual expressions of Medieval piety. But pause a minute. This restoration is peeling the paint and plaster spread by John Shakespeare’s minions, right? Might we now be defacing the piety of the 16^thCentury iconoclastic reformers? 

After our time in Stratford Upon Avon, we visited the Victoria and Albert Museum. The display of Medieval art, on overwhelmingly Christian themes, was breathtaking – a profound expression of an idealized spiritual faith expressed through the genius of art. This is precisely the sort of thing that shocked the conscience of 16^thCentury iconoclasts. The Renaissance Art was equally exquisite. Renaissance Art too was rich in Christian themes, albeit an earthier more human faith.  But Renaissance Art included themes from pagan Antiquity that would have been smashed and burned by Early Christians and utterly verboten throughout the Medieval era. Both aesthetic apprehensions of what we observe and what we imagine -- Antique Pagan and Medieval Christian -- would come under attack from the iconoclastic hammer and plaster brush in a short while. 

Whence cometh this seemingly irresistible impulse of our species to make meaning through art? What is it in us that is so threatened by such art that we react against it so violently? What is it that makes words less of a threat than paintings? Now in our time, words – logocentrism – come under attack from deconstructionists. Is the challenge to words and grammar the same as, similar to, or utterly different from the iconoclastic spirit that hammers away the faces of griffins? I suspect a connection but that the connection is more complex than I can sort. 

The First Wave of Iconoclasm. There is a philosophical side to this question. But before the philosophy, let’s consider the story. My story comes down to an exegetical hypothesis on a piece of the Torah. It is somewhat interpretive, somewhat imaginative, but not an invention. It is within the realm of legitimate opinion, but it will be obviously shaped by the pastoral experience of an old cleric who has spent decades directing the sacred traffic of God’s very human people.

The history of the issue long precedes Medieval Art and the Reformation. Art was expressing religion back in the hunter gatherer and even cave dwelling days of our species. When religion grew institutional with the agrarian revolution and the rise of hierarchical states, art abounded. Language was a Johnny Come Lately to religion. We were painting divine, human, and animal stories long before someone in Sumer invented writing circa 3,000 BCE. Thereafter, words and images peacefully coexisted for nearly 2,000 years. 

Then came Moses who took a radical stand against images and words alike. Were his reasons theological or philosophical? Perhaps, but I suspect they were political – and by that, I mean no criticism. I posit Moses was trying to clear the way for collaborative moral relationships among people.

There is no archaeological evidence of a massive exodus of slaves from Egypt. There is no evidence of a massive invasion of Canaan in the era of Joshua. There is no historical evidence of such events apart from the Bible. There is evidence of class conflict in Northern Canaan, which was subjugated by the Egyptians. It would seem that Egypt as an agricultural domination system had extended its empire over the fertile valleys and plains of Northern Canaan and forced the indigenous people into field labor. Their rebellion is documented by letters from the Egyptian military to the royal court describing how the insurrection of the apiru (Hebrews – not an ethnic category but a class category – it means the rabble). 

It appears as if a future uprising may have had some success, that a significant number of the indigenous people in Northern Canaan followed Moses away from the fields, swearing to hoe no more fields for the man, and fled into the hills to take up a different life -- a pastoral life, to be ordered by egalitarian norms of freedom, justice, and equality – in marked contrast to the domination system of agrarian society. They had not previously needed to create ways to order their common life. The Egyptians had been ordering it for them. To create a free and equal society, new forms of unity were necessary. A common religion was the heart of it. 

These people were not all of the same tribe. Tradition tells us there were 12 tribes. The idea that they shared a common ancestor and a common history before Egypt is a strained tale in Genesis, which would be written centuries later. It looks very much as if some tribes claimed ancestry from Abraham and others from Isaac. Genesis makes one the son of the other and both characters had at points similar stories. A narrative of common ancestry is part and parcel of weaving 12 tribes into one people.

It was a polytheistic world, but a tribe cold have a particular tie to one god who would look out for them if they were loyal to him(religion had become patriarchal in the Bronze Age). Naturally, the tribes worshiped different Gods. Some called their deity, El (translated in the Hebrew Scriptures as God). Others worshiped a god named Yah or Yahweh (whose name will be banned early in this story, so he will be referred to more obliquely asAdonai (generally translated as the Lord). The different tribes agreed to worship the same god but in an attempt to preserve their traditions, declared:

Shema ‘srael, Adonai Elohanyu Adonai echad. 

It is vitally important to parse the Great Commandment in its context. Hear O Israel. Listen up Israel. Hear – as summons together. Then God bestows on them a single name – Judah, Benjamin, Ephraim, Manasseh, and the rest are subsumed under one name Israel. In Isaiah, it is said, you who were not a people are now my people. God through Moses forms a people by summoning them to hear and giving them a single name. Then God radically simplifies their theology: Yah (Adonai)and El (Elohanyu) are one (the same guy). Do not jump the gun. This is not monotheism. That is centuries away. The point here is to say that the different gods of these tribes are merged into a single god, Yahweh El, the Lord God, for a single people, Israel. 

But – and surely you are not surprised – disputes over the name of God persisted. Why? I do not know. Is it that the one God manifests so variously in human hearts? I do not know. Differences persisted. Troubles continued – until it was decreed no name of God should not be spoken at all. We just won’t use words. That is from the days of the Hebrew Scriptures and is a silent shibboleth of Judaism, so that many orthodox Jews will not say any word referring to God but will point upward, or when writing omit the letter “o” and print “G_d” so that without a vowel no word can be pronounced. And yet as Judaism lives on, the Kabballah gives us Nine Names of God. Judaism has two traditions, one with emphatically no name for God and another that proliferates names. 

But I am ahead of myself. Let us return to the innocent days when Yah and El were the same, so that one said Yahweh El (the Lord God) or did not say the name of God at all, how shall we represent God in our holy places –. Some tribes had worshiped a bull-god; others, a god who looked like a griffin. Who gets to paint God to look like the God their grandparents worshiped? We can easily imagine the fight over that one. And anyone who can imagine that will all the more easily imagine an exasperated Moses banning all images of God. 

It didn’t work of course. The altar of the Ark of the Covenant had bull horns. Statuettes surmised to be of The Lord God have been found from various times of the Biblical era. But, in principle, the nameless, imageless God of Israel was sufficiently nameless and sufficiently imageless that other peoples called the Jews atheists. 

We have no art from the brief period in which primitive Christianity was a Jewish sect. Quickly, the Christians became neither fish nor fowl – or part fish, part fowl – between Judaism and Hellenism. By the 2^ndCentury, paintings of Jesus as a young shepherd appear. At first there was no sacred text beyond the Hebrew Scriptures. But by the 2^ndCentury, a canon of Scriptures is forming from letters and the new literary genre of evangelion(gospel) written just decades before. It would be anybody’s guess whether the written words or the paintings came first. We can be sure, they were pretty much hand in hand. 

It may (??) be important that in this formative era of Christian art and literature, Christianity was the faith of small collaborative communities reminiscent of Moses’ pastoral communitarian society. Then Christianity became the religious arm of the Empire, Constantine’s mother Monica discovered “the one true cross” and that which had not been a Christian symbol became the central Christian symbol erected in every place of worship. Cristian literature and Christian art went public together. Did the meaning attached to the art change when it became public art, the face of the Empire and its state religion, instead of the more personal art of small, marginal communities?

In the 6^thCentury, the iconoclastic controversy arose – or not so much arose as went international. Syrian Christians had never warmed up to religious art. Iconography was all over Greece but not Syria. When Syrians surged in ecclesiastical influence, they launched a challenge to visual representations. It was a passionate fight. The more European sector of the Church regained control and decreed that icons are ok but attempted to smooth it over using words. Icons would not be worshiped but would be venerated -- meaning they are not gods but God can be encountered through them – which is not so different from how pagans had long understood the function of idols. 

What was actually going on in the iconoclast controversy? What was going on with the iconoclasm of the 16^thCentury? While it is often assumed that Henry VIII’s only purpose of a break from Rome was to secure and annulment of his marriage, he expeditiously banned votive images as such images were being destroyed in Protestant lands on the Continent. Edward VI launched an assault on all religious art, replacing it with Scriptural texts on Church walls. Yet there survived ample religious art to be destroyed by Cromwell in the 17^thCentury. What stirred their passions against paintings of the Holy Family or the saints? What thoughts motivated whoever took a hammer to the 19^thor 20^thCentury griffins outside Matthew’s pre-school?

I know of strict Congregationalists who will brook no religious objects in the Church or elsewhere – meaning no cross. Other Protestants are perfectly comfortable with the polyvalent symbol of the cross, but nothing else. Then there are those who will endure a portrait of Jesus (preferably the one modelled on Pope Alexander VI’s dissolute son) but no one else. Others will accept other paintings of all manner of saints, but no statues of anyone. Then there are those who are ok with a sta              e of Jesus only. Then some are ok with Jesus and other men, normally 4 evangelists; the quartet of Peter, Paul, Mosel, & Elijah; or the 12 apostles; and maybe more guys like Stephen or St. George. Interesting for our puzzlement about word and image, some will accept statutes of men referenced in the Bible but not saints from after 210 C.E. The foregoing are, as I say, comfortable with representations of men – but not women! No Blessed Virgin Mary for them – not in painting or statue but in the words of Matthew and Luke, she is acceptable. Then I have met a surprising to me number of people who are comfortable with Mary so long as she is white, but the Virgin of Guadalupe strikes them as idolatrous. 

Flashback to the 6thh Century. Were the icons of that day Eurocentric? Did that Hellenistic hegemony implicitly stir the iconoclasm of the Syrians who had been rather marginalized in the Church up to then? This is pure speculation on my part, but I do wonder. 

How are we to understand the stirring of art in the human spirit, a stirring that virtually compels us to express our faith in word, image, and song, but which also horrifies others? Is their horror a simplistic fidelity to “thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” – how does that get to the ban on musical instruments (but not acapella singing) in some denominations? 

I do not know. Truly, I do not know. But I wonder if it has to do with two things: the mystery of God and the continuing struggle to connect with each other. 

Iconoclasm is primarily a concern for the Abrahamic traditions – but not exclusively so. In Buddhism, images of the Buddha were forbidden in practice for several centuries, then became omnipresent objects of devotion. The iconography of Tibetan Buddhism is as rich as that of Rome. But Theravadan Buddhism is simpler and Zen Buddhism is starkly simple. Very simple drawings characterize Zen, but so does the adage, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. There is in Buddhism a concern that the sacred not be conflated with words, images, or even the person of the Buddha. I mention this because the universal ambivalence about artistic expression cannot be reduced to absolutizing a few Biblical texts. 

Being and Void/Other/Differance 

I preface all I say here with a deep thank you to Emanuel Levinas and Eberhard Jungel (and to David Ford for having struck them against each other like flint and steel). If I seem critical, it is as a gnat critiquing giants. 

Over the centuries, Christianity came to experience God not as a superbeing but as Being itself, the suchness of things, but with the empathic point that Being is not an abstraction, not a mere quality of existing; rather Being is personal and intentionally procreative of beings. God is the intimate suchness of Reality itself. The core of all that is is Love. 

That way of talking about God has been subjected to searing critique in the latter 20^thand early 21^stCenturies. It has been challenged by atheists of course but more interestingly by deconstructionist philosophy, negative theology (Marion, Cupit), and – in a category all his own – Levinas. 

The Post-Modern challenge is a kind of iconoclasm, or more aptly logoclasm, an attack on words as such and an attack on the concept of meaning that words convey, a challenge to the notion of such a thing as meaning, what Derrida calls logocentrism. Nietzsche famously said in the 19^thCentury,the reason we have so much difficulty getting rid of God is that we still believe in grammar. He meant we are beset with a sense of the order and purpose implicit in language. Post-Modernism challenges that sense of meaning and order. Marion notes that the whole scientific process rests on an implicit faith that there is an orderliness to reality. That is the implicit faith Post-Modernist philosophy smashes with the iconoclast’s hammer. 

I do not mean to paint all these philosophers with the same brush. Their concerns are different, but they have a common enemy, the notion of Being as the source, destiny, and purpose of reality. Contrary to popular assumptions, this repudiation of God as Being or the Ground of Being (as Tillich put it) isn’t science. The intellectual champion of Western atheism, Anthony Flew, was converted to theism by the Big Bang Theory because it proved the Universe has a Source beyond itself. John Polkinghorne, Wolfgang Pannenberg, and other leading theologians rely heavily on science while leading scientists debate the philosophical and theological implications of their discoveries. (I am no scientist and so cannot rightly judge but my sense is that the philosophers and theologians have a better grasp of the science than some of the scientists have of the philosophy and theology – Paul Davis being one of the exceptions). Nor does the challenge come from a boldly optimistic humanism. That naivete is under the same critique. It seems to be the horrors of world wars, the moral shock of genocide, the persistence of war often cloaked in ideology, the randomness of violence -- all in all, the moral failure of the world that has turned our minds to a logoclasm to match old fashioned iconoclasm. 

Moral protest certainly lies behind the philosophy of Levinas whose work is quite directly in response to the Shoah that so marked his life. Massive genocide led him to a radical critique of Western thought as such. As a Talmudic scholar employing the skeptical phenomenology of Husserl, he is adept at his critique. He rejects Western notions of Being, the Beautiful, the Good, the True, Aristotle’s virtues practiced in community, the whole tradition in favor of the discovery of morality when we encounter the shocking reality that we are not alone, but there are others. I am not prepared to replace the whole canon of Western intellectual history with Levinas, but his critique deserves to be taken seriously as he speaks in the tradition of Moses. 

I would like to add to the mix the thought of Levinas’s Asian contemporaries, the Kyoto School of Philosophy, most famously Keiji Nishitani, Kitaro Nishida, and Masao Abe. Form their experience of World War II in Japan, it was not only Western philosophy that was the problem. They searched Eastern thought wondering how it could have culminated in the militaristic nationalism that propelled Japan into the World War and led many Japanese to engage in such cruelty.

As Western thought had focused on Being as the core of Reality, Eastern thought had focused on the Void. WW II led the Kyoto philosophers to study Western philosophy for a corrective. They were drawn particularly to Karl Barth, a theologian whose language has some kinship with that of Levinas. They continued to believe a great Void, or Emptiness, or Spaciousness lies behind all our experience. But they discovered that the Void was procreative, freely proliferating the Cosmos. As they looked at the Cosmos spinning out of the Void, it told them something of the nature of the Void. Yes, a Void can have a nature. They discovered that the Void was personal!!! – an idea akin to a nameless, imageless God who is Love. The Kyoto philosophers too deserve our respect and attention. 

So Where Are We?Short answer: I don’t know. The impulse to find or forge meaning through art and language is so essential to human nature, we cannot stop it. But if I say, “I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name,” his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in. I am worn out by holding it in. Indeed, I cannot. Jeremiah 20: 9. This is as true for the poet, the philosopher, the theologian, the painter, the sculptor, and the dancer as it is for the prophet. Art and language are as essential to our humanity as tools – maybe more so. 

On the other hand, whatever we say, paint, sculpt, or in any way express of God is inadequate. We have such an urge to render God manageable, that we are apt to reduce the God of our imaginations to what we have expressed. We may worship our statues or our doctrines. It comes to the same thing. Stone and words alike are representations of God – essential because we cannot live without making meaning but dangerous because those stammering expressions of meaning are apt to shut down the ongoing process of feeling our way in the dark searching for God. 

Where does that leave us? Might it be that art and iconoclasm exist in a necessary tension? If so, how are we to manage it? I truly do not know. But if those who forge meaning make a discipline of paradox, there is an implicit iconoclasm in the meaning. It is when the image or idea is comprehensible rather than suggestive that it is apt to shut down the search prematurely. It is paradox that holds the mind open. that props open the door of our hearts. What do I mean by paradox? The personal Void. God who is one and three. Jesus who is fully human and fully divine. Our tradition abounds in paradox, though we often flatten it out and explain it way. That is when the hammer comes out.