[Middle English exil, from Old French, from Latin exilium,
from exul, exsul, exiled person, wanderer.]
I spent an hour at a Seattle’s Best café inside Borders watching the rain pummel disaffected hoosiers as they scurried about the plaza’s sprawling wet desert of a parking lot.
While drinking a cuppa, I read a couple chapters of McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy. I say that not to preface this thought, but to give you an idea of the waters in which I’m teabagging my mind at the moment.
“The church functions best when in exile.”
I should first say that though this statement is a product of my own mind, I don’t think I agree with it. But the nature of this disagreement is rather complex. I’ll explain this in a few articles, but for starters, here are three premises (which you’re free to disagree with).
- From the time of the ancient Israelites’ slavery under the Egyptians until the oft-suppressed rise of Jewish religion as we know it today, the Jews have largely existed under (or in opposition to) a larger host culture. That is to say, Judaism is essentially a religion of diaspora. Though this group of people has ostensibly existed and on occasion thrived, it has done so without political authority or even respect — often in disfavor and persecution.
- Christianity in its various forms, as ostensibly the default religion of modernity in the West, has enjoyed almost 1700 years in the sun beginning with the conversion of Constantine in 312 until some time in the last three decades.
- Today, we find ourselves in a culture that is less likely to accept or understand Christianity or its mythology (in any of it’s “official” 33,830 forms) as implicitly “true.” That is, individuals now must identify themselves as “Christian” and explain what that means — this identity is not simply assumed (or understood). Conscious engagement of biblical narrative (though still very much alive in the poets of our age) is very slowly but gradually fading from popular American discourse.
I often wonder what many Christians mean when they talk about “ministry in a post-modern world.” It seems that many confuse postmodernity with life in a culture that does not implicitly accept “Christianity” (as we’ve built it) as “true.”
We speak a language that has been “Christian” since its emergence as we know it today. Here, I speak of English as a “Christian language” from a diachronic perspective. In other words, English is a Christian language because it has been teabagged in biblical themes, both birthing, communicating, and transforming them.
But though our words and metaphors are steeped in centuries of Biblical myth as a framework for reality, we find ourselves approaching a time in which this myth will become less-understood by and less-accessible to our secular neighbors. As fewer and fewer recall or are subjected to years of flannelgraph indoctrination, we’re left of distillations of Noah’s Ark as “the time when God destroyed the Earth while Noah and his family floated in a boat with all of the animals.” Tales of the apocalypse are not stories of a renewed creation, but “when the earth will be destroyed like in Armageddon but Tom Hanks won’t save us.”
Perhaps the heyday is nearing its apex. For what are we without our language? And who is our God in a language that speaks of him as many speak of the NSA?
As Rob Bell said, should we turn up our noses, purse our lips, and say “People just don’t care about truth any more?” This seems like a logical response…and one that I’ve seen. But is there a better alternative? Can we productively engage it? And what might this look like?
Check back soon for more. I’m enjoying this.
Until then, what do you think?
c. scott andreas
