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end of the world

Hipsters and Zombies: the end of civilization

Ballard says in Kingdom Come

Consumerism rules, but people are bored. They’re out on the edge, waiting for something big and strange to come along. … They want to be frightened. They want to know fear. And maybe they want to go a little mad.
– Ballard, Kingdom Come

When we live in a time when like ours, where the as-is structures are assumed and there is a certain giveness to the system, we view them as final applications. Nation States and capitalism are just two areas where this can be seen (Tripp explains this well in the interview).
In this consumerism as culture humans are defined by their external signs and symbols. These become signifiers that form more than our image, they project our identity. It is in this cul-de-sac and the end of the wide road of consuming that the monotony of round and round sameness becomes soul-numbing. You can see why things on the fringes, that lurk in the dark and just below the surface begins to titillate and become attractive.

We are bored.

Alasdair MacIntyre (who asses the situation so well in After Virtue – even though I disagree with his solution) says this about what the church becomes

nothing but a meeting place for individual wills, each with its own set of attitudes and preferences and who understand that world solely as an arena for the achievement of their own satisfaction, who interpret reality as a series of opportunities for their enjoyment and for whom the last enemy is boredom.

Our fractured and contentious societal situation is inflamed by (at least) three cultural elements: consumerism, globalization, and pluralism. The first is the disposition of individuals within a society, the second impacts the proximity of different communities, and the third affects the posture when approaching a disparate series of relationship for communities.

Consumerism is hyperbolized in an examination of Hipster ‘culture’ by Douglas Haddow entitled “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization”.* Haddow provides a vicious critique when he says:

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

It this both the dislocation of generational continuity and the isolation of consumerist aesthetics that are troubling about the brand obsessed and all too self-aware ironic sensibilities that alert one to the incredible disenchantment and disassociation of the youth culture. It is these very same consumerist influences and institutions that give rise to their embodied expression and vague angst that manifests in such irresponsible yet elaborate demonstrations of the Hipster’s intentionally senseless displays.

Ironically, we have more stuff and access to more toys, information, and treats than ever before … but we are soul-numb bored. This is the danger of thinking that what we have is everything in it’s final form. That our representative democracy, that our free-market economy, that our United Nations are the pinnacle and the end of history.

This is why that Zizek quote about living in the end times is so great – that it is easier for most Christians today to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine living in some other economy beside capitalism.

Hipsters and the suburban fascination with zombies and vampires … are trying to tell us something.

* The subtitle of this article says “We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality. “
Mark Douglas Haddow, “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters”, n.d., http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

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Savage Monkeys Won’t Save the Planet – why would they?

Two disclaimers up front:

  1. I originally posted this at HBC and it was not received so well. Which is fine, and I wrote a follow up that you can read [here] which is much more hopeful. 
  2. I do not expect anyone to like this or agree with this. I am simply put it out there for conversation.

The Summer philosophy group that I am a part of is reading The Faith of the Faithless by Simon Critchley. It is an wild, tour-de-force type of work that spans genres and categories. This past week it broached something that touched a nerve for me.

 The most extreme expression of human arrogance… is the idea that human beings can save the planet from environmental destruction. Because they are killer apes, that is, by virtue of a naturalized version of original sin that tends them towards wickedness and violence, human beings cannot redeem their environment.

Furthermore, the earth doesn’t need saving… The earth is suffering from disseminated primatemaia, a plague of people. Homo rapiens is ravaging the planet like a filthy pest that has infested a dilapidated but once beautiful mansion. In 1600 the human population was about half a billion. In the 1990’s it increased by the same amount.
This plague cannot be solved by the very species who are the efficient cause of the problem … When the earth is done with humans, it will recover and human civilization will be forgotten. Life will on on, but without us. Global warming is simply one of many fevers that the earth has suffered during its history. It will recover, but we won’t because we can’t.  – p. 110

This reminded me something that an old podcast interview with Michael Dowd first awakened me to. Dowd is the author of Thank God for Evolution and he has an incredible knack for articulating his unique perspective.

Dowd talks about the power of participating in a narrative. His assertion is that we are participating in the wrong narrative! If we think that humans are the crown achievement of a project that began about 10,000 years ago and was finished in a 6 day period … a project that humans were give dominion over – then we live one way. [often this dominion is mis-interpreted as domination and has resulted in everything from unchecked capitalism to environmental policies such as “drill baby drill” for instance] 

Dowd has this theory that humans who living under this narrative are participating in the earth as a cancer does in the body. Cancer is a biological part of the body. It is made up of the same matter that comprise the body that hosts it. But cancer is under the impression that the body that hosts it is a rival to be overcome and defeated. The cancer cells rally together to take over the body. They eventually multiply and expand to the point they endanger the very body that not only gave rise to it but that sustains it.

Ever since the Enlightenment and Descartes’ dualism, a certain set of the human population has believed that while humans are biologically mammals that they are not animals. Continuing on that while we originally were apart of the earth, we are above the earth. We are different than the rest of creation. While we came from the earth – from dust we came – we are not dependent on the earth for our very life. [I touched on this at my own blog in Nipples and Bellybuttons and the Imago dei ]

Because christian humans live by the wrong narrative, we behave as a cancer on the planet. In increasing size and exponential growth we consume at greater and greater levels, consuming the very body that gives host to our existence. At some point, the cancer ends up compromising the functions (organs) that give life to the organism in which it lives. Death ensues. We are not worried about because we think Jesus is coming back soon – it is the end times after all (a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever I saw one). *

Humans that are not willing to engage the ideas of emergence and evolution are living by a cancerous narrative that will extinguish the very host that gives it life. Humans that have a short view of history and a high view of their place in the created order behave in ways that are inherently cancerous to the ecosystems that support and sustain them.

 If we don’t wake up and acknowledge that we have been living by a false narrative we will eventually (sooner or later) overtake the host body’s capacity to renew itself and continue to survive and prosper. This 6 day – 10,000 year old narrative is resulting in a cancerous attitude that is killing the planet.

  • If Critchley is right, then we as killer apes can not save the planet – in fact we wouldn’t even care.
  • If Dowd is correct, we wouldn’t even try because we thought we didn’t need to. We would be living by a different narrative.

* The book of Revelation is a political commentary on Roman politics of the first three centuries written in the form of apocalyptic literature. 

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Reading Revelation Better (part 2)

Intro
Three things up front:

  • I love the apocalyptic elements in the Old and New Testament. I think they are both fascinating and helpful – or should I say instructive.
  • Apocalyptic literature is a very unique genre and in the modern mind, if it is unacquainted with apocalyptic, can really get mucked up fast.
  • I no longer believe that the book of Revelation or passages like Matthew 24 or 1 Thessalonians 4:16 are about the, 20th, 21st, or even 22nd century.

That last point is going to be held loosely. I am totally open to the idea of a Symbolic reading (from the last post) that sees the book of Revelation about all oppression and injustice – in every place in every time. I get the appeal of that and have listened to my friends who hold that position and why they think that it is so important. I get it and I am open to it.

The danger with the Preterist reading (all in the past) is that people immediately jump to “then it has no relevance to the modern reader” argument. I do not see that one directly leads to the other – but I will cover that in part 4.

Having said that I am not sympathetic toward the Futurist or Historicist views, I hope to clarify why in this next post and the next.

Numbers
A couple of things that pre-modern hearers (readers) would have been familiar with that late-modern (enlightenment) folks may not is the imagery embedded in numbers and symbols. While these show up in other places in the Bible (40 days of rain for Noah, the spies spent 40 scouting the promised land, 40 years in the wilderness for Israel, Jonah warned Ninevah of impending doom in 40 days, Jesus being tempted for 40 days, Jesus was seen on earth for 40 days after the resurrection, etc.)  they are really evident in apocalyptic.

Simply stated
one = unity
two = witness
three = completeness (heaven)
four = earth
five = intensity
six = man
seven = heaven (3) and earth (4) in unity
eight = newness
ten = intensity (double)

If we don’t understand the way numbers were embedded with meaning, then we are going to be confused, lost, or just wrong about what a passage means or has come to mean.

Numbers like 666 Continue reading “Reading Revelation Better (part 2)” →

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Is God a Rock?

part 2

In the last post I asked if the Bible was ‘man’ made. Now, I want to ask if God is a Rock.

If you say ‘No’, then someone will point to one of the many passages like Psalm 18:2

The LORD is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer;
my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

If you say “Yes – God is a rock”… then you have some explaining to do. Are you being poetic? Symbolic? Is it analogy? Allegory? or is it exacting and univocal?

This is why it is so important to understand what Nancey Murphy is saying in Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism. It is essential to know the difference between representative language and expressive language.

Is God literally a rock? Of course not. The author was saying that God is strong and trustworthy like a rock – the immovable foundation upon which we build. This is not representative language which works in a 1:1 ratio. It is expressive language. It was expressing something that the author believed and wanted to communicate.

There is nothing more important to get right if you want to read the Bible.

The reason is so powerfully illustrated when it comes to reading the Book of Revelation – perhaps that is why it garners so much attention and causes so much confusion.

Are there literally 7 lamp-stands over a city or a monster that comes out of the sea?  Most people will acknowledge that this is symbolic language.

Are the streets of heaven literally paved with gold? I think that is coded language for ‘it will be amazing’. Will Christ reign for 1,000 years? What if that is coded language for  a long time? Would it interest you to know that both of those illustration would have made 1st century readers think about Caesar imagery?

The so called ‘literal’* reading of the Bible ignores two important things: Continue reading “Is God a Rock?” →

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Sometimes I hate being right

Three stories caught my attention today:

1) In the newest Men’s Journal magazine, Plaxico Burress (NFL player) who was recently released from prison for weapons possession is interviewed. He was busted two years ago for weapons because he brought a gun into a NY nightclub and … shot himself in the foot.  Literally.

The eye opening part of the story is the two page spread of a tattoo across his back that reads – and I am not kidding about this – “Everything happens for a reason“.

2) I was listening to an popular podcast on Itunes. It is a theology show that tackles tough and often complex subjects. They’re most recent show was on the Religious right and the Religious left.  The team member that was charged with reporting on the Social Gospel said that he had never heard of Walter Rauschenbusch … and that he had never heard his name pronounced out loud before. He had to ask how the last name was pronounced.

3) A protester/heckler was removed from a speech by President Obama for shouting him down as “the Anti-Christ“. For real.

Here is why these three got to me:

  • I am frequently dismissed  for making too big of deal out of a bad reading of Romans 8:28 that “God causes everything to work together to for the good …”  I am told that “no one actually believes that everything happens for a reason.”  I’m telling you – they do.
  • I am continuously telling people who read theology or attend a Mainline church that “people in the Conservative-Evangelical-Charismatic camp do not know who that is – they have never heard of them”.  That’s impossible is the response. I would bet that a large majority of self-proclaimed Christians in America have no idea who Walter Raushenbusch is.  I didn’t.
  • The “Left-Behind” dispensational end-times teaching has permeated the American church. I try to point out the inherent danger here and am more often than not told that “no one actually thinks that“. They do.  People who I know by name believe it. That we are in the end times, the there is actually a mark of the beast and that there is actually one big bad guy called the Anti-Christ.

I’m telling you: people actually think that “everything happens for a reason”. People have no idea who Walter Raushenbusch was. People think that Obama might actually be the Anti-Christ.

This is not the kind of thing that I wanted to be right about.

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The Hangover: Rapture edition

Here is a newspaper report and interview with Harold Camping:Washington Post article

The thing that people seem to be feeling bad about is that some gullible individuals got duped. I am sympathetic with the mild compassion. But I think that there is something far more sinister and devastating that we should be piping mad about and are justified in mocking (or at least being cynical about).
I remember in 1988 and 1991 people dropping out of the Bible College that my dad taught at to go home and ‘save’ their family and friends…. also no sense in racking up credits for a degree you are never going to finish!
 Look – until we stop all this mumbo jumbo stuff, the newer folks are going to continue to get duped.

I was shocked last week at how many Christians said things like “well – Camping is mostly right, this stuff will all happen, its just that we don’t know the day or hour.”

SO basically (as it has been presented to me)

  • 
Thinking all this stuff will happen on May 21 = crazy.
  • Thinking all this will happen but we don’t know when = acceptable.

I was raised to read the Bible this fantastical way. But I noticed that even knowing a little bit about the 5 centuries before Christ and the 2 after quickly made reading the Bible that way nearly impossible.
Reading the Bible in this ‘dispensational’ way – or what is called the “mountain tops” view of history – is not really faithful to the text or historically accurate. It is based on linear view of time, a literal reading of the text, and sketchy view of history. Continue reading “The Hangover: Rapture edition” →

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The world is not ending

Here are some collected thoughts about the events of the week:
IF we don’t know how to read the books of the Bible within their genre, AND we were taught that time is scripted from the beginning, THEN it makes sense why people are so fascinated with the end of the world.

It’s a bad way to read the Bible inside an faulty way to understand history… of course it all comes crashing down (in our minds).

I thank God for Harold Camping. I didn’t realize how many people thought “well he is half-right. It is going to happen, it’s just that we don’t know when” until this week. This has been eye opening.

May 21 will pass without incident, but then 2012 is hanging over head.

Jesus said that all these bad things he was predicting would happen “within this generation” (Matthew 24:34).  I think it was all in reference to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ad.  Others say that he was somehow referencing that founding of Israel in 1947. But we have to be coming to the end of that ‘generation’ too.

At some point we are going to have to admit that we may have taken a wrong turn or we may be reading the ‘map’ wrong.

At least part of the wake up will be realizing that it is not a “map” at all – but an ancient style of political critique that is couched in prophetic imagination. 

It’s called Apocalyptic literature and since we don’t know how to read it – we think that Revelation is some sort of Newspaper account written ahead of time. It’s not. It is theo-poetics addressing the Roman Empire of the first century.

I would love to get your comments or hear any questions that you might have. I want this to be a safe space for honest conversation.

Here is a post after the last round of Earthquakes and Prophecy talk: LINK The Bible is not about the end of the world

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>the Bible is not about the End of the World

>I wrote this for something else but wanted to post here for discussion.

The minute the earthquake in Japan happened, I told several friends that two things were coming: 1) talk of the end of the world  2) talk of God punishing Japan

But I was not prepared for was the quality of the sample that was to come. This article details the prophetic take of Cindy Jacobs.  She is an authoritative leader in Intercession Prayer circles and someone that I am very familiar with and had even quoted during my college years (the mid- 90s).

    “In the early nineties, the Lord gave me a prophecy for Japan that it was a “sickle in the hand of the Lord” that will be used for great harvest. The physical geography of the islands look like a curved sickle with the handle being the island of Hokkaido in the north. One could also say that it looks like a curved sword. Where Japan has historically been a sword of war across Asia.”

    “On the other hand, if you look at it another way, this island, Hokkaido, looks like the head of a dragon with the body being the rest of Japan. The people of Asia have worshipped the dragon for 5,000 years. If one looks at the place where the earthquake took place, it looks like the soft underbelly of most vulnerable part of the dragon.”

Can you believe it? The reasoning is that it ‘looks like a sword’?  Are you serious?
Does that mean as seen from space… or on a map… or… wait – I’m looking at a map right now and I am not seeing a sword,  or a dragon for that matter.

Not that it matters. When you are being this imaginative and fantastical, I am not sure that the facts would be all that helpful.

I was making fun of this on Facebook and I referenced the best selling book by Harold Camping’s 1994 or Edgar C. Whisenant “88 reasons the Rapture will be in 1988”.  How corny right?

A week later I get a text message from someone listening to NPR that Harold Camping is on the radio saying that the end of the world will be next May 26th. It will happen at 6pm. It will make it’s way around the world time-zone by time-zone.

Wasn’t that how Y2K was suppose to happen?  Not that it matters…

Here is what I wish would happen: that we could make a deal as Evangelical-Conservative-Fundamentalist and Charismatic Protestants that IF this happens next May or even in 2012 at all – then those of us who doubt them will volunteer to go to hell.

BUT if it doesn’t happen then we will realize that nothing is going to happens like this – and stop doing this every time a natural disaster occurs.

Here is what I wish we would realize:

   1. human civilizations (brick and mortar) who live on fault lines and shore lines are impacted when the world does what it has always done – shift, evolve, and create.
   2. every generation can not imagine things continuing to progress beyond a point that they would find unrecognizable and thus they think ‘this must be the end’
   3. when we talk about the ‘eschatological hope’ of the resurrection we need to be careful to distinguish it from cooky dispensational “Left-Behind” mumbo-jumbo. We must distinguish because most people can’t tell the difference. In fact, sometimes I can’t tell the difference.

Background:

  • Most of what Jesus said that gets chalked up to ‘end times’ stuff – like his story about two people in a field or on a road and one is taken, or  how women will not want to be pregnant – he is talking about the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 a.d.   All that ‘flight to the hills’ and sky/moon turning red and a loaf of bread costing a bag of gold is about something that happened “within that generation” (Matthew 24:33-35).  It is not about the end of the world.
  • The book of Revelation was a political commentary on Rome of the first centuries CE. It is written in apocalyptic language because of the Roman oppression of the first century. It is not about the end of the world.

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>Tribes

>A couple of years ago I had an interesting exchange with a good friend of mine. We were looking at clothing stores and she mad some disparaging remark about ‘tribes’. It took me by surprise and so asked for clarification. She explained to me that she – and many people at her conservative bible believing church- was sick of this New Age-y push to get everybody to see themselves as part of a tribe. (We happen to be looking at a store that carried a brand of sportswear called ‘Tribal’.) I listen for a little bit about how this led away from a biblical worldview and toward New Age definitions of community and allegiances that compromised the church and getting our identify from focusing on God – instead, focusing on ourselves and what ‘tribe’ we were a part of.

I thought about it for a bit and then I said to her ‘ ya know, Tribes are not New Age-y but rather ‘Old Age-y’. They’re very ancient – from the Old Age. They are not a New Age invention. In fact, Tribes are quite biblical. The Hebrews were divided in to 12 of them and even the New Testament talks of ‘every tribe and tongue’ (Rev. 5:9). So I would think that God sees us far more in Tribes than as the Enlightenment did as Individuals.”

I am really worried about how we are conceiving of things that allows us to call ‘New’ what is ‘Old’ and ‘un-biblical’ what is clearly Biblical. Sometimes I suspect that we called good what is bad and God what is not- God.

Jared Diamond tells a fascinating story in his book “Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed”. He details the trials of the early settlers to Greenland in the 12th Century.

By using written letters, church records in Europe and archeology he draws a picture of people struggling to live in a place because of how they picture themselves and resisted a new identity for the new land and environment.

By looking at the bones in their settlements it is clear that they did not switch from beef that they ate in Europe to the seal meat that the Inuits in the area survived on. They barely ate the fish that they could catch in the waters of their shores (bones were 1:10 ratio compared to Inuit settlements nearby) and there were almost no bird bones even though Ptarmigan were plentiful. It is a tale of refusing to the adjust to the new place or adopt the practices of the indigenous population.

Writings showed that they treasured the view of themselves first as Europeans, second as Christians and third as settlers (Greenlanders). This shows up in there persistence to raise cattle on soil that was not suitable for it. They insisted on using large boats that they got from Dutch designs instead of switching to the canoes utilized by the Inuit. They also put large amounts of time, money and energy into making stone cathedrals with stain glass imported from Europe and costly & distant wine and wheat that were not Native so that the priest would have communion elements.

Their unwillingness to re-imagine their identity and adapt to the actual surroundings and circumstances allowed the experiment to creep along for two of centuries before eventually failing.

___
This is why I am interested in re-imagining ourselves as the people of God and re-inventing our conceptions and constructs of God: a global God who works for the next century.

I have been talking about God’s relationship to Haiti [link] over a month before the Earthquake.

I will be honest with you, i have no interest in Pat Robertson’s God who causes an earthquake in Haiti in order to warn the rest of the world or punish them for something that someone else did. (Or any of the famous white preachers who said similar things about the Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the Minnesota Tornadoes [link] or the 911 attacks).

That is a concept of God is leftover from when we thought that the world was flat and that heaven was just behind the clouds. That was our conception of the world and of the universe and subsequently how we conceived of God and how ‘he’ worked in the world.

I want to invest in constructs and frameworks (conversations and conceptions) of a Global perspective of God that works in the next century and for the world that we actually live in.

We need a better picture of God. I believe that. I do not think that what we need is to master concepts of God from the centuries past. That is not what we need. We need a Global God for the next century.
That is what I am hoping for here – to concieve together of an Everyday Theology.

remember – I am not advocating a new type of Christianity,
I am acknowledging that Christianity is always being made new.

The world does not work the way that people use to THINK that it did. That is what I am saying. That something fundamentally shifted in the New Covenant.

At minimum – we should agree that Jeremiah 31 says that in the New Cov. that people will not die for what their forefathers did ( v. 30) That is what Pat Robertson says this is from – a curse of the 19th Century.

Heather, we need to grow out of our elementary ways of thinking and move into the real world and stop talking about ‘deals with the Devil’ and the ‘end of the world’. We need to talk of tectonic plates and systemic poverty

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