Something I probably should've thought about more before posting

Back probably six months ago or so, I read a book by Walter Miller (not the guy that wrote The Crucible, that's Arthur) called A Canticle for Leibowitz (which I'm pretty sure is supposed to be that strange sounding of a title.) The novel was written during the 60's at the height of fears of a nuclear holocaust, which probably would concern us in the United States more today if we didn't own the majority of the nukes left (but of course we'd never use them right? I mean what we did to Japan aside, surely our government wouldn't do anything illegal or immoral, right? Seems I've wandered on to a soapbox somehow, time to step down). Anyway, the book opens some hundreds of years after a nuclear holocaust has sent the world back into the Dark Ages and follows in the first part a young novice in the fictional Order of St. Leibowitz. The Order, much like the monastic orders of the Middle Ages, has tasked itself with preserving not only Scripture and other religious writing, but also general knowledge works like scientific texts and even blueprints. The problem is that the loss of the intellectual context in which the scientific knowledge was understood has rendered much of what they are preserving unintelligible. For example, would preserving a mathematical formula like E=mc2 still mean anything if we lost what those variables stood for? Would it still constitue knowledge? If society loses the cultural and intellectual context that previously allowed the language to express truth, how is it regained?

The point, that I've have come such a long way roundabout in making, is that today's society is largely losing the context in which the key ideas of Christianity (not that Christianity is by any means a set of ideas)- sin, redemption, resurrection- make sense. The evangelist seems to be stuck in what is really preparatory work in the convicting of sin, rather than the true work of an evangelist preaching the evangelion, the Good News of the coming of the Kingdom of God through Jesus. So what do we get? We get a reduced Jesus, an abbreviated Jesus. (good I-monk post here) "You have a specific problem, sin, (I have convinced you youre a sinner, I trust) well here's the solution, Jesus! Just plug Him in and you'll be alright." We talk a lot about that "Jesus-shaped hole" and we end up with a hole-shaped Jesus; wherever I am weak and I need help, that's where Jesus gets let in, the other stuff I can handle. So we get this whole wacked-out concept of the Gospel as a specific answer to the a few distasteful habits. And if we can't convince people that they have a problem, then obviously they have no more need for Jesus; we've plugged Him into an equation and none of the terms surrounding Him make sense to them anymore, He has not come to them as Immanuel, God with us, but as a symbol without any referent.

There used to be an old hymn, "I Love to Tell the Story", and it went, "I love to tell the story of Jesus and His Mercy of Jesus and His Love..." The problem is, we aren't telling the story anymore. We are telling them something else, something more expedient. If I hear, "salvation is as simple as A(dmit), B(elieve), C(ommit)," one more time I think I'm going to scream. If Jesus' life boils down to alot of traipsing around Galilee and Judea with a group of flunkies and rednecks telling odd little stories before He went to the Cross and has no significance other than that, I feel that, first of all the Gospel writers wasted a lot of time and could have whittled it all down to a pamphlet or tract. But we don't bring them Jesus living and incarnate, we sell them our little problem-solvin' Jesus, who was you know a really cool guy and stuff and then He died so your life would be alright. Now I am not saying we can't talk about sin to people because they won't understand, but when Jesus is not shown as He is, when He is simply an answer to a sin problem we are putting seed on shallow soil. Because if Jesus is supposed to make us just stop sinning, it won't take long to realize that our equation doesn't seem to work. If Jesus is not a man, if He just is an answer, then what do we with our life when we mess up- walk an aisle again, try and believe harder? In Dostoevksy's Brothers Karamazov a story is told about Jesus coming back to Toledo during the Spanish Inquisition, He heals some people and is worshiped before being arrested and brought in for questioning by the Grand Inquisitor. When He comes in, the Inquisitor asks, "Why have You come to disturb us? What right do You have to return?" The Church had so institutionalized salvation as what it may bestow on the world, that it had no need for Jesus incarnate; our systems can't bear much reality.

I realize that this has been a pretty long, rambling post. My fault I guess for blogging late at night. But I'd like to put out two quotes before I go, the first from Thomas Merton a twentieth century Trappist monk, that comes from Confessions of a Guilty Bystander, basically a notebook of his that was published. "Faith is by no means a mere act of choice, an option for a special solution to the problems of existence. It is birth to a higher life by obedience to the Source of Life: to believe is thus to consent to hear and obey a creative command that raises us from the dead." The second is from the British novelist Graham Greene, whom I've yet to read, I've no idea where it's from, I saw it in a book of readings for Lent, Bread and Wine, "You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God." This is what is needed, the mystery of Grace and Mercy in Christ confronting us, baffling us, and inviting us in.