When I was a young man my father gave me a pre-paid credit
card. The card had a considerable amount of funds on it, not exactly stated, and
there was always the suggestion more funds could be added. The only thing was I
had to activate it. And yet I was not told where or how to
do this. The only instruction: I had to keep trying!
Of course, as you’ve guessed, it’s a parable.
All the places I’ve been, all the organizations and
institutions I’ve been attached to have been trial and error, trying to phone
in that card. I think there are many other people who are given the same
unsettling, perhaps terrible gift, and are engaged in finding the way to release
the funds.
So what are the funds? What is that vast sum of money?
It is the content of the gospel, its power to set us free,
unpacked in a new way for a new time. It is the dramatically new thing brought
by Jesus, finding its dramatic contemporary reading.
x x
The metaphysical content of Christianity is dead. It may perhaps be
true, in its own way, as a way of understanding our universe, and even perhaps be
intellectually unavoidable. But in terms of how it communicates to our
contemporary world it is dead. An eternal deity, first mover, eternity itself,
these are dead and dying concepts. Why?
Because both the world of information and the earth over
which it is spread have overtaken our consciousness. Modernity was always an
experience of the world for its own sake, but the coming of the Internet, of
portable devices, and the constantly evolving visual and narrative effects of
movies and TV, they have brought us face to face with ourselves in unprecedented
immediacy. At the same time, the human
living space, the earth, is under visible stress, with floods, droughts, winds,
hunger, new viruses, and continual war and economic crisis thrown in.
As a symbol producing species our spiritual framework is now
radically different. All the old symbols are still around and they have their
followers, but a new symbolic condition grips the human imagination. If symbols
act to gather meaning for us then a smart phone, a computer screen and T.V.
screen are themselves effectively symbolic: they speak to us immediately of human
immediacy. If a city experiences unprecedented heatwave or the rise of
unemployment and poverty, then that becomes a problem not only for those who
live there, but for everyone, because one way or another we feel the effect. Either the social and political repercussions seek us out, or once again our means of communication involve us humanly with what is happening.
And we understand why.
For right in the middle of this new symbolic universe there
comes a science of human relationships which forcefully underlines our
immediacy to each other. Mimetic theory and the discovery of mirror neurons
tell us that we not only empathize but empathy is the ground of meaning itself. It is the primary medium of
communication, including both violence and symbolism. There is not, therefore, a separable
“spiritual” soul carrying our meaning, but our bodies are themselves
“soullish,” generating our possibilities of meaning in and with each other, all
the time.
Symbolism even as it shows us contemporary immediacy is shown to be
rooted in immediacy. Not only is the world in our face, the world is our face!
When therefore Jesus is crucified that does not happen to
satisfy the wrath of an eternal god standing on his eternal dignity, but to teach us
at the heart of human immediacy a totally different way to be present to others,
especially to those who are enemies. Rather than starting at the top, we
start at the bottom. Rather than looking to the hereafter we look to the here
and now. Rather than starting with violence as an eternal given, we start with the gift
of love as a discovery in time.
This is the contemporary drama of the gospel within a new symbolic order of
human immediacy.
And that’s
where the money is!
Tony Bartlett
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