I guess you had to be there.

’nuff said…

Walter Brueggemann has helped me think about the church in the west (particularly in the US) as the church in exile. We don’t typically see our place in the culture as an exilic presence, but we do live within a dominant culture that may be benevolent toward us, perhaps only as long as we support the culture’s agenda.

The church’s call to witness involves, of course, the work of evangelism. Craig has helped me to think about evangelism in a new way. Rather than being a well-crafted presentation of a paradigm of salvation, it is perhaps more akin to the spirit of the term itself: It is the proclamation of the good news, that God, in Christ, is victorious and his kingdom has come.

That is a safe, martyr-proof message as long as it produces better citizens and keeps people spending money. But the good news is only good news to those who respond to a call to live in the alternative reality of the kingdom, where challenges to the dominant culture are inevitable. This is bad news to the culture that has been displaced by the kingdom of God. The threat to that dominance is what droves Jesus’ enemies to kill him.

I am coming to a place of believing that the call to come and die is not episodic–it isn’t simply associated with exiting my home in order to do the work of mission in a dangerous context. The call is to seek first the kingdom in all aspects of personal and corporate life, recognizing that such obedience is bound to fly in the face of that which dominates the larger culture.

As write this, I am aware that my friend Craig (along with my work associate Justin) is running a 27-mile marathon in San Diego. For my part, I only plan to run if someone is chasing me with a knife.

That reminds me of the procession of superlatives of good, to better, to best. How do we locate the best, in a consumer culture that swamps us with a never ending sea of the ‘good’.

And Paul talks about this:

“I can do anything I want to IF Christ has not said no, BUT some of these things aren’t good for me. Even if I am allowed to do them, I’ll refuse to if I think they might get such a grip on me that I can’t easily stop when I want to.” 1 Cor. 6:12 (LB)

And within that is a different agency, that commits, that closes down options, that is able to to say no to the permanently open ended ontological orientation of consumerism, and in which we find the cross, and true being.

If consumerism elevates choice itself as the highest good (over the actual choosing of real goods), then it assumes a rather perverse account of agency. I like Nietzsche’s account of Zarathustra praising a fallen tightrope walker in this regard: “You have made danger your vocation; there is nothing contemptible in that. Now you perish of your vocation: for that I will bury you with my own hands.” Martyrdom then resists a consumer imagination by subjecting the truth to the reality of one’s whole life, something consumerism refuses so long as it refuses finally to commit itself to any goods–this is the self-choosing and self-creation you refer to.

But then the issue isn’t somehow to extol martyrdom as an act of resistance. It is that, of course. But martyrdom is only possible for a church that has learned resistance on multiple levels. Furthermore, resistance is not a first principle; it is not what Christians set out to do. Instead, we only find ourselves “resisting” because we are so caught up doing something else, another positive option. This means Christians may not ever really need to teach or commend “resistance” but only a way of life that is so compelling that all other options are rearranged accordingly. This is important to say since the consumer stands unconditioned before all choices and freely choses. But if this is the case, Christians will be anti-consumers since the way of Christian discipleship involves submissions and formations that close off a good many choices–its goods are better than choice. Put simply, a church able to produce martyrs will (counterintuitively) be marked less by what it is against and more by what it is for. Our “for” will be a witness against and to a culture of consumerism.

Reading your post reminded me of some writings by William Cavanaugh in ‘Torture and Eucharist’.

He suggests that in countries where people are tortured, and disappeared, that martyrdom, makes the body of Christ visible. That for Christians, when the state claims ownership of the bodies of it’s people, the body of Jesus (the church) seen as a radical alternative that it seeks to destroy.

Martyrdom isn’t sort, but it is the celebration that Jesus has mastery over our souls and bodies, and not the state.

His writings have made me wonder, how consumerism, can function as a perverted liturgy, it has control over us, and fragments us into isolated individuals, we torture ourselves now.

We police ourselves, and our bodies, with the rituals of consumer culture, fearful and competitive of each other, unable to do life together in community, along with self abusing our bodies, in service of the consumer ideal. We produce endless TV shows about self creation, and being whatever people need us to be, to be famous, for being famous. And being famous means often means, escape, of being independent from others.

And liberal secularism, with it’s hegemony, that all religious beliefs should be private, that religion is a matter of personal and lifestyle choice, it totalizing too. It is the idealogical background to the market and consumption.

So if martyrdom is resistance to this authority, this emerging religion, something that makes the body of Christ visible, that challenges the rule and beliefs of secularism, and that practices of consumer culture, what form does that take?

Any ideas, please let me know Craig :-)

Practically, churches might also begin (but not really “begin” obviously) by taking better care of their members rather than only referring them to state services. We might also resist taking our cues about race from the wider culture and make a greater effort toward reconciliation across differences to bring congregational realities in line with our eucharistic performance (one body because we all share in one bread). Imagine how the American civil rights movement might have been different if the churches had taken the lead by being the only places in the country where black and white ate and drank together as equals before God and one another. Of course that is risky and radical (for white and black both, though not in exactly the same ways). And yet surely we are still witnessing the awkward and largely inauthentic attempt to try to convince the world of a better way that Christians can’t, on the whole, seem to live ourselves.