Tame faith

Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return. - Annie Dillard, in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

I came across this quote in the Faith and Theology blog and it reminded me about JB Phillips' book Your God is too Small. It also brought resonance from critiques I've hear calling for an end to the domestication of God. I am currently reading an old book called The Search for Transcendence. Its subtitle is A Theological Analysis of Nontheological Attempts to Define Transcendence. The subtitle precisely describes the book which investigates many different figures from psychology RD Laing and Carl Jung, and two Marxist thinkers Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Bloch.

I got to reading about Ernst Bloch yesterday. He was a self-proclaimed Marxist atheist but was neither a conventional Marxist nor a normal atheist. A notable quotation of his is "Only an atheist can be a good Christian." His purpose was to tear down all human illusions and false confidences about God, emphasizing an absoluteness of God as Wholly other. In fact within his understanding it is not humans that build the kingdom but God himself and on his own terms. Furthermore it seems he claimed that "the authentic biblical witness is to revolutionary and utopian world view and that the Church is the perverter of Jesus as the original revolutionary." (99) For Bloch transcendence is to rise beyond the domestication of God to have a vision of the not-yet, of ultimate redemption. It is a rebellion against a domestication, or taming of God, a revolution founded in hope for a future.

I have heard much talk about cheap grace for years now and seen little revolution in lives. I have been stuck here for quite a few years also until I realized how little control I have over my life. But the consequences are not that bad if I give control and orientation over to God. It is not passivity but trust it is a quiet revolution of peace/shalom. The young woman playing the cello is a goth. There are many aspects of goth culture which are less than attractive, the occultic and horror strands. But I've know Christian Goths that have attracted me because they aren't tame and restricted.

A goth website describes themselves that "most goths become goths because they have been spurned by 'normal' society because the way they want to live their lives does not fit in with how most people are told to live theirs. Goths are free thinkers, ... Rather goths tend to listen to what you have to say, and make up their own mind. This kind of free thinking and rejection of dogma earns only rejection in todays society." But i think we need a lot less of the shirt and tie, the house with the white picket fence (one of my mentorees speaks of), and a lot more of wisdom calling in the market place. Less conventional and less normality. The only conformity we really ought to have is to the Christ of the market place hanging out with those on the street. (me included!)

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. Rom12:2