Emmet’s blog….Jesus and the rest of us in real life

today, as we were talking about the place of secondary production within the Christian canon, I started to think about the origins of what we call the “Christian Canon”. It was essentially built and established by a bunch of Jews who were reproducing the Jewish canon to better suit their purposes. Reproducing and finding new uses for text is in our spiritual heritage, the question is, was it done perfectly the first time, our should we be constantly seeking new reproductions based on the foundational principles of the gospel and treating all the other principles as flexible and “un-sacred”?

The feedback loop is kinda crazy because it draws attention onto the already experienced and forces interpretation to take place through an established lens. This established lens is admittedly tempered to respond to the lowest common denominator with in a target society. This means that, unless the feedback loop is broken or reoriented, progressive rotations of the loop will show progressive degradation. How can we positively influence the loop, and stimulate it in such a way, to appeal to the higher desires within culture which are largely untapped?

In thinking about the four sections that we watched from “The Merchants of Cool”, I can’t get over the fact that the first three didn’t bother me yet the fourth just about crushed me. While the first three were interesting and provided food for thought they didn’t impact me nearly as much as the one on “The Mid-rifts”. The first three paint a picture of a courtship between taste, behavior, and products; a give and take between mostly willing victims. The fourth represents a domination of a group through redefining worth and identity. How can we as friends, Christians, brothers, etc. respond to the destructive myth making that the culture supports?

In talking about Bakhtin and his thoughts on carnival and how it fits in the church, I started to wonder about films like ‘Jesus Camp’ and ‘Saved’. Can the church engage them and learn from them, or will it simply ignore them? I’ve only seen clips of ’Jesus Camp’ but it reminded me of my response to ‘Saved’; I don’t want non-christian watching them, but I want all Christians, especially the ones who are offended by them, to watch them and learn at least how they are perceived by the culture that is outside the sanctuary. 

One of the challenges that we have, and should embrace, is that we represent the other. We are the y to God’s x. So often we see ourselves in relation to the world around us and we forget that we should be looking at ourselves in relation to God. The comment that the answer to WWJD about the Church being the Church is a challenge that can never be met, not that it shouldn’t be engaged. God is the ultimate undeconstructable playing out through the world in the now and the not yet of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. If we ever deem ourselves the x to the worlds y we are cosmically screwed, we will have lost touch with the need to ask the question to which the answer is “Jesus”.

Myth as logic is a helpful concept to work with. Interacting with people from different cultures it becomes clear that ‘logic’ and ‘common sense’ are not universal. Knowing that the differences exist and knowing that they are connected to cultural perspectives is useful but incomplete information. Seeing that Myths are fundamental in the formation of logic provides a starting point, both in confronting foreign and domestic concepts of logic when they distract from the logic and nature of the gospel.

The Praxis model was a bit easier to work out than I thought it was going to be. I think the challenging aspect of the model is embracing a commitment that enables the initial action yet at the same time being flexible enough with ‘your baby’ to let it be evaluated and rebuilt in an image you didn’t first intend. It seems that the underlying commitment must be to the gospel/Jesus, after that the results drive the action. This creates an odd state of holding on and letting go at the same time.

Gotta say that the first half of the class was wiped out in my joy of not having to small-gorup the Praxis model. After that, the language stuff was cool. The concept of language as a tool, and each community developing its own interpretations fell into sync with some of my experiences in other countries. Just because they speak the same language doesn’t mean they speak the same language. Communicating with someone in Africa who has grown up speaking English can be almost as difficult as trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t speak English, if only because you don’t fall into the trap of preconceived understandings.

Working with the anthropological model was a bit more difficult than I thought it would be. The initial step of looking for Jesus in a culture and working out spiritual formation principles wasn’t too difficult, but the practice of worship was. It’s difficult to step fully out of preconceived concepts and notions concerning worship, it was a constant effort to keep from trying to translate contemporary worship into other situations. It was interesting to see that the end result of the exercise was a ministry that looked almost nothing like a Sunday morning service and yet was still Christ centered and community based.

The tough question for me that came out of class to day is, “how far can you walk beside a different social/religious view that is at the heart broken and flawed?” It’s one thing to be in conversation with a Marxist talking about the correlation between Christ’s association with the little guy and Marx’s belief that the little guy would take over the world, but it’s another to be in conversation with a Nazi and try to find common ground. The strange thing is, I find communism far more repulsive and destructive than Nazism. It’s not because I condone what Hitler did, but because it wore its evil on its sleeve, It wasn’t fooling anyone (historically speaking). Communism looked good on the surface and infected a far greater portion of the population causing far greater damage in the long run. At what point do you say, “We have some common ground, but your foundation is jacked and the sooner you start working off of a new foundation the healthier you will be.”? Can you even say that?