At the end of spring term, I had my students sit for a conversational final, during which I had the appalling realization that the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ made absolutely no difference to them in terms of the way they view humanity or ethics. That is, when asked what difference Jesus makes, they all basically invoked WWJD (who was Jack Daniels?). After tearing out large chunks of hair in front of them because it had taken me until the end of the semester to pick up on this tragedy, I pulled myself together and started asking questions tailored specifically toward trying to understand how they could’ve adopted such a superficial perspective.
The best I could gather is that even as (indeed because of his being) a historical figure, Christ bears no relationship to the WWJD Christian. His historicity places him in a group that has been sealed in a tomb of metaphysical irrelevance. Reality is dichotomized between the historical and the now, the two forever reft of the other. In fact, the only way Christ becomes relevant to us is in his moral example, which (strangely enough) is a kind of historical existence. But in terms of human nature, or salvific action, or the significance of resurrection (he does defeat death after all), many of my students could find no way to integrate Christ into their thinking about politics, ethics, the quality of life, the nature of life and death, the list goes on; they couldn’t bridge the historical gap. I wondered aloud why his humanity wasn’t a connection, or rather why the connection of human nature to Christ was limited to a moral significance. Why does Christ’s triumph over death for humankind rank below a mere moral imitation in Christian decision making? Why the lack of intimacy with Christ’s human nature and the resurrection consequences thereof?
In Why Study the Past, Rowan Williams suggests the answer to these questions might come from our intentions toward history. If studying Church History leads one to a dichotomized identity between the historic church and the present church, then of course, then we’re left primarily with making judgments, the criteria of which will come from the standards of research we have today, and not the standards by which previous Christians might have had. “Eusebius and John Foxe,” Williams states, “were not trying to write good twenty-first century history” (26). And if our standard of truthfulness, aka good history, leads us “to suppose that biblical chroniclers had no recognizable sense of truthful narrative” then, Williams argues, we’ve failed to realize that “there is a somewhat different kind of enterprise being attempted in which canons of history-writing alone will not tell us everything” (26).
For Christians, our role in reading the history of the church, our “enterprise”, is not merely to chronicle the history in our terms, but more so to engage in a community, an identity which stretches behind and beyond us. “In theological shorthand, the modern believer sees herself or himself as a member of the Body of Christ…. Who I am as a Christian is something which, in theological terms, I could only answer fully on the impossible supposition that I could see and grasp how all other Christian lives had shaped mine and, more specifically, shaped it towards the likeness of Christ” (27). On the next page Williams says, “For the historian who has theological convictions, that challenge [of understanding the church’s life] is at last something of what is truly known of Christ in the agents of the past” (28).
This concept of the body of Christ, and our participation in it, seems to me to be the fruitful way forward in jettisoning the overly simplistic aspects of “what would Jesus do” moral reasoning. Following Williams, I think the harmful aspects of WWJD thinking is in the way that it misses the ecclesiological and metaphysical ways in which we’re not connected to Christ through a flat, modern notion of imitation, but rather through the Spirit’s intimately drawing us together into one body through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Thus, it’s not a matter of only looking to Christ for an example, but living as Christ, indeed being Christ in the world.
Very nice post. I, too, am often appalled at the way Christians — both youth and adults — see Jesus as of little importance for their way of being in the world, apart from a few moral truisms. Even then, though, their moralism is rooted more in their particular cultural-historical matrix than it is in Scripture. How many WWJD Christians are willing to turn the other cheek, to give all to the poor, and pray for those who persecute them? Of course, that question holds true for Christians in general. But the point is, talking about WWJD generally has no effect whatsoever, because it is used simply to baptize whatever these Christians were already doing. Jesus didn’t smoke or dance, so neither do I.
That said, I do think there is more room for imitation in Christian living than you seem to indicate here. Paul, for example, is comfortable using mimetic language in his letters. But with you, I would ground this in our participation in Christ and not in some weak moral imitation which reduces Christ to a few particular actions.
By the way, the worst use of WWJD by far is one I heard often as a youth in a conservative evangelical church: namely, that because Jesus got angry and overturned the tables in the synagogue, we are justified in exacting violent revenge upon others as part of the American military. That kind of confused logic is reason enough to pull one’s hair out and attempt to start over.
David,
Thanks for the response. You’re right, I need to work out my thoughts on imitation more, although right now, as you intoned, the language of imitation is so badly abused, and as I mentioned, so divorced from a metaphysics of participation, that I’m not sure what to do with those like Paul. Maybe you’ll start that recovery for us.
I was once in a church that invited a group to lead a Vacation Bible School in the parish, not realising that the invited group were extreme Calvinists. They denounced bumper stickers that said “Smile, God loves you” on the grounds that “God doesn’t love you, he’s very angry with you, because you are a sinner. He was so angry that he killed His Son.”
Our teenagers argued back at many points, and it stirred up a lot of theological questioning. But in discussions with them I came to see that they really did not believe in the resurrection of Christ. They acknowledged that it took place because they believed in the plenary inspiration of Scripture, and so if the Bible said that Christ rose from the dead, then it must be true, because the Bible said so. So for them it was a fact, but not a significant fact. They seemed, in a strange inversion, to believe that the resurrection bore testimony to the Bible, rather than that the Bible bore testimony to the resurrection of Christ.
Thanks for this, Dan. I’m not sure which I appreciate more: your reflections on our motivations for reading history or the fact that you felt like tearing your hair out with your students (b/c I can certainly relate to that). Re Bp Williams statement on various motivations for writing and reading history, I’ve been trying to remind myself that amongst the things we’ve been tasked with achieving in life, omniscience is not one of them. Ba da bing.
What -is- significant to these kids?
Wii.
Very nice piece.
Actually, you’d be suprised how often I’ve heard the Jesus-overturning-the-tables = we need not scrutinize violent military action. It’s popped up so often recently in some of the most theologically interested but theologically weak people I know. Shoddy hermeneutics is the root of all evil;)
I think the problem with the youth (and I am one of them) is more broadly the great “Modern condition.” It simply limits at every turn one’s ability to conform to spiritual realities without a great deal of effort. We have inherited so many presuppositions, so many shaped horizons that implicitly make spiritual realities and faith related things appear to us as impossible, as something entirely “unreal”. Ideas like the Resurrection don’t stick because when that enters the modern ear it rings with a certain static, and certain conceptual ugliness that must be explained away as, surely, something other than what it seems to mean. We live in a “life-world” in which the very language, the word-game, of Christianity no longer has currency. The way modern experience is structured does not fill it out with any meaning.
I mean, just think of how the average student would try to process a statement like “the Spirit cries to the Father with many groans” in me, or “I live, not I, but Christ liveth in me”; or even something like “the Cross is the sign of God’s love?” We are simply predisposed to think that our horizons of meaning have advanced beyond a time when these could have been truly meaningful, coherent statements.
So, to be a pessimist, unless the student’s “life-world” is brokendown and recrafted, built up again in such a way as to embody the “language” of Christian existence; unless one is able to comprehensively change the way that things appear to them; and unless this sticks: then, well, chances are the birds will feed on the seed.
Did I mention that truly being a Christian is also really HARD?
Pax Christi,
And it always HAS been hard, so that’s a comfort.
In my teaching, I found that students from the conservative or Evangelical background often ARE ready for some way to grasp the hardness and move into it. They responded deeply to the Rule of Saint Benedict, for exammple, and I think it was because it made sense to them that the hardness of being a Christian might be lived out ascetically and fideistically, in opposition to the culture. But they didn’t really get Benedict, because the Rule is “just a bittle book for beginners” and not about the ecstatic joys and struggles of deeper union with Christ for which the rules were merely clearing a way and making time for. They didn’t get that spiritual growth is an essentially hedonistic experience that is aimed at transforming us sacramentally — as is the monastic life, a life of delighting in love through the liturgy.
Personally, I think the problem is the inability to think symbolically or mythically in our current culture. Lewis and Tolkien used to attract kids with their mythopoietic medium, which is more than a medium because it really is the message: what is real about history is what is mythic in it — its deep structures and not its mere accidents. But today we have the reduction of reality to actuality per se. But what I think about day in and day out is this kind of thing…. This is what fascinates me.
The mimesis and the poiesis that Paul speaks of are based on powerfully mediative and mythic paradigms — we don’t see anything like that about mimesis today because we reduce the being of things to their “concreteness,” and hence mimesis means making a concrete copy of an original (re[roduction). For Plato and Aristotle it meant re-enacting something in another medium, translating, carrying over what is essential instead of merely carrying over the incidental concreteness of the original’s instantiation. I don’t mean that the historicity of the original doesn’t matter: Christ’s historicity. “Myth become Fact.” But it doesn’t matter as mere fact, alone. It matters for the power with which it reveals a deeper reality, caoable of being manifested as itself in very different “concretes” elsewhere and at other times.
So, sounding like a broken record, I think what we need most fundamentally right now is an experience of a really powerful and vibrant new (old) model of knowing, a paradigm that will make manifest by contrast how the old literalism and reductionism is unfaithful. (But still, if I am right, and lots of people seem to be working on dis-covering this text, it will still remain only the intervention we need right NOW. And if it succeeds, it will hollow out into the opposite of itself in time (a parody because it will then be easy and not hard-won) — unless the next generations engage in the struggle to deconstruct and re-invent it all over again, within the state of affairs that has come to exist then (in part because of the new paradigm).
There is something out there in the students, hungering — although my son is not so sure of that as I am, and I have never taught his current generation. He says it is unrecognizably different from my world. But still, what is needful is to forge by trial and error the paradigms that will make sense to them and free them to learn and growth in Christ again. Just as the Church has always done.
I echo Davis — what is it that they DO care deeply about? Emptiness and hollowness are very good things, and so are materialism and shallowness, as teachers, because they can teach us to long for what is missing. Where do they look for what is missing? Where do they find themselves wounded and at a loss?
Dare I offer American Idol as an attraction because it is in some respects a medium of liberation, in that it offers epic exemplars of how persons strive to go deeper into the depths of a discipline and experience growth and change and fulfilment even in their limitations, and how tricky it can be to distinguish real engagement from mere show — and how HARD and ongoing real learning is. (If we could offer as gritty a paradigm for growth in the spiritual disciplines….)
Thanks for the great thoughts, Janet. I felt even more now than I already did at the time that I’ve happened upon something terribly important.
Janet, have you read Habermas’ essay in _The Anti-Aesthetic_, “Modernity, an Incomplete Project”? There’s a bit in there that made me think of this conversation and might be helpful, in a programmatic way. I think I’ll try to post a bit of it in a designated post. For now…
“…In the course of the 19th century, there emerged of of this romantic spirit that radicalized consciousness of modernity which freed itself from all specific historical ties. This most recent modernism simply makes an abstract opposition between tradition and the present; and we are, in a way, still the contemporaries of that kind of aesthetic modernity which first appeared in the midst of the 19th century. Since then, the distinguishing mark of works which count as modern is ‘the new,’ which will be overcome and made obsolete through the novelty of the next style. But, while that which is merely stylish will soon become outmoded, that which is modern preserves a secret tie to the classical… Our sense of modernity creates its own self-enclosed canons of being classioc. In this sense we speak, e.g., in view of the history of modern art, of classical modernity. The relation between ‘modern’ and ‘classical’ has definitely lost a fixed historical reference.”
from “Modernity-An Incomplete Project” by Jürgen Habermas in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster.
By the way, this is comment #666!
DWM — I’ve been pondering how this Habermas comment relates for you to your discovery about your students? Say another word or two?
I don’t think they fail to find “the mighty acts of God in Christ” detached from their lives and almost irrelevant because they are too modernist and therefore don’t value the past. (Though it would be interesting to explore that with them. I used to stir up my students by telling them that our age generally has a comparatively shallow and superficial understanding of Christian truth, compared to earlier periods, and yet that we assume we know more than previous Christians simply because we are alive NOW.)
But I think the problem is not that they aren’t historical enough, but that they are too historicist, in the sense of being inculturated to be literalistic and reductive in the way they interpret everything, whether it is in the present and in the past. It’s as though they think they can live their lives inside of one genre only, and it’s not tragedy or epic or pastoral or lyric or kerygma or satire, either. What is it? (A really dry textbook?)
The only training they get in thinking metaphorically and symbolically and largely and dynamically comes from epic clashes of good and evil in superhero films…. Not from the church, by and large, and not from their educations. (I was so disappointed in most of the reviewers of the new X-files movie, who failed to perceive that it was Paradise Lost all over again, with an added bit of cheek! If you liked the series, I highly recommend the movie, and be sure to stay and watch the background all the way til the end of the credits. I think/hope it’s the set-up for the next movie.)
By the way, about Boethius’ consolatio — I reread it, and while I still think there’s room there for you to draw attention to the irony and interplay between natural and supernatural viewpoints, I cannot see Boethius ever taking the rather stern tone that you are taking with (or about) Lady Philosophy. It’s not her fault that she is not Christ (remember Beatrice?), after all. For her to be able to draw us to God and to speak profoundly to our pain and unbelief is all the more beautiful because of her limitations — in itself a praise of the God who gives us common grace as well as special grace.
There’s a big difference between the earlier natural viewpoint (e.g. Dante’s Virgil) and the modern secular viewpoint, though I tend to be soft on the latter as well… I’m using Dante for reference but I think this love of philosophy as drawing us to theology applies to the entire pre-modern Greco-European tradition.
But I’m probably misunderstanding you on Habermas?
My big question right now (and probably forever): How can we revive or even simply live the “Dantesque philosophical love of theology life” vis a vis “modern secularism” with its silly dichotomies? What would a politics of Dante look like today?
What a great question!
Here’s one response from a source beloved by those who created this (un-despised) website, W. H. Auden:
Follow poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Dante was exiled from his city, of course. Like Socrates’ most loving son, he “returned” to make “a city in thought-words (logoi).” I think we must think the (im)possible first, before it can ever be a global politics, but how can we think it, unless we have experienced it (unless it is fore-given”)? Something at least of the communions and exchanges that always “are” the heavenly city?
In the icy deep of the City of Dis, the pilgrim Dante gives way to railing against the frozen devourings of one another he watches there. But satire and invective is the wrong key in which to respond — the pilgrim is still young in grace.
You (I mean all of you) live that politics that P.J. invokes in the arts and in every sacramental venture. The most audacious of you never responds with invective, but with tears and sighs. That’s why you are all such a blessing. (Thanks.)