unfinished work

Right now I sit in the car, on my way back to Baltimore. Day 3 of the Emergent Conference ended with quite a bang—a bang big enough to carry us on for the rest of the day, really. The morning started out slow, but when we hit upon the particularity of the Christian story and the revelation in Jesus, suddenly everyone was on the edge of their seats. Tony Jones was very right in saying that this was the pregnant subject that everyone had floating in their minds, whether it be at the forefront or in the subconscious. Indeed, it seemed as if the whole room was suddenly electrified, and as Kearney articulated an example of his interpretation of the inclusiveness of Jesus by an encounter between Jesus and Buddha, he described how each would thank the other for his work without trying to "convert" the other to the other's belief.

The particularity of the Christian story, for these two philosophical theologians, is not the exclusiveness of the Christian story, but rather its radical inclusive nature. The verse "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me" becomes not exclusionary in the but through me, but rather a call to radical inclusiveness. It becomes an exclusion of exclusion. Not an exclusion of those who exclude, but rather an exclusion of the practice of exclusion.

The reason why this exclusionary, particular aspect of modern Christianity is so heavy is because, first of all, it's what most Christians are taught to believe (that Christianity is the one and only way to heaven, or even a good life, for example), but also because it is a bi-product of the penal substitution model of the Gospel—which translates into daily language as the classic "your sins need to be forgiven be believing in Christ so you can escape hell" pitch that anyone who has heard of Christianity also heard with the name Jesus of Nazareth. It's exactly what people of my postmodern generation (especially my immediete friends at MICA) can't stand and cause them to throw out the whole of Christianity for one basic interpretation of the biblical story. But, in a sense, you can't blame them for throwing it all out, since that's all they ever hear from the Evangelical side of the fence. And you can't really blame the Evangelicals for emphasizing this point so heavily, because (from their view) it's the linchpin that determines whether or not people live in eternal pain or eternal bliss after death.

Yet that doesn't remedy the conflict. And it doesn't remedy the fact that Christians who are trying to find something beyond the penal-substitutionary Gospel catch a lot of heat for doing so, and it doesn’t help those who could benefit from a different interpretation of the Gospel.

Unfortunately, all this happened in just the last minutes of the conference. It was like a battlefield or something—although everyone was on the same side. People were bursting out of their seats, waving at Tony so he could give them the mic and a chance to comment. I myself actually wanted to talk about my experience at MICA and how useful deconstruction has been to me (and thank Kearney and Caputo in the process for their work) in trying to open the minds of friends of mine to potentially vibrant spiritual issues when a kind of absolute non-absoluteness is very pervasive.

I will be brutally honest and opinionated. I find some of the relativistic mindsets to be very reactionary—and really I can’t blame it to be so. While Baltimore is a very Democratic town, many of these fellow artists of mine identify themselves as enemies of the religious right, which has been triumphant these eight years. For them, everything the religious right stands against is what they love about their lives, and they quickly recognize the hypocrisy in the politicized religion that tries to push its own wedge-like agendas.

Yet, to put it simply, Christianity isn’t all bad, just as it isn’t all good. I am not for those who say that religion is the root of all evil, despite that fundamentalism has a good stock in the religious project. In truth, one can be a fundamentalist in science as well as in religion, or in politics, or in culture. It more about a perversion of thought rather than a perversion of theology or philosophy, although all of the above can certainly be perverted.

For the sake of the conference, however, I find that the deconstructive project may be a stepping stone into a new kind of world that can dodge the fundamentalist bullet by using a strain of thought that is mirror-like: deconstruction reminds us to be humble because anything can be deconstructed, including ourselves and our religions. Except, of course, the one indeconstructible thing, which is justice—or, as one might say, the need to deconstruct. Or love. If you want to get really interesting, you can call it the Kingdom of God. But whatever it is, it is found in the inbetween zones when one breaks through old notions. In Jesus’ day, the old notion was Judaism, but the Judaism of that time was so burdened with laws, customs, rites and rituals, and an overpoliticized atmosphere (much like today with modern Christianity!) that defeated the purpose of what Judaism was originally created for—that is, the love of God.

Now, the catch is that after we deconstruct the old notions and the old structures, we cannot simply sit their on our fertile yet unplanted ground. We have work to do! It’s time to create new structures according to the new atmosphere, yet keeping the tools of humility and dialogue close to our side as we proceed, knowing forever that we are chasing the mystery of life that is not set and is not closed. For the Christian, this mystery is the revelation of Christ in all its supernatural glory. For the Buddhist, it is the defeat of the self so that one can be a true vessel of compassion. For the Islamic, it is full submission to the will of God. The containers are different, but the truth is the same.

For the Christian who has problem with the phrase “but the truth is the same,” the benefit I give them is that the “truth” said here is the Christian truth—the truth that was revealed in Christ. But the calling from Jesus is the calling to reduce one’s self to the ‘least of these,’ allowing one’s self to be nailed upon the cross of current cultural situations or evil tragedies as a living sacrifice—giving oneself up for the greater cause. It is both social and spiritual. It is eschatological and present every moment—it is continually at-hand, continually a calling, and part of that calling is in recognizing our God in the “other”—the one who does not believe like us, the one who does not talk like us, the one who does not live like us. For me this is where faith comes into play. I have faith that God truly is in other people. I have faith that I may not know everything, and that faith then calls me to “minister” to people—which translates into listening, not talking. Into hearing, so that I may know their suffering, their joy, and have it with me. But that is my calling. Not to talk, not to preach, not to convert. The disciples who argued about who would be first in the Kingdom were immediately put to rest when Jesus settled them both by saying that, if they wanted to be the greatest, they should lower themselves to be the least.

This is a continual self-destruction of my own ego. I know it’s impossible, but I strive for it anyway—to continually know that I know nothing—nothing, perhaps, but the faith to strive to know something, while continually knowing nothing.

And I find it exciting. I find it exhilerating and freeing. It’s very destabilizing, but I think that’s part of what faith should be. Some people need stability in their lives, as Scandrette so articulated beautifully yesterday, but that is a sense of balance in life. For me, balance may be more instability, since one can be as locked into stability as they can be instability.

I wish there could be more to the conference, but I came away with a lot learned, and with much more to learn after. We were all challenged and inspired. It’ll be interesting to watch how that inspiration plays out in our own different stories. Even though this conference is done, the story it started certainly isn’t.