A Saving Face

You’d have to have been vacationing on Venus not to notice that something quite cataclysmic is happening to public Christianity. There are the doings and sayings of Pope Francis and now a rumble of unhappy murmurs about his populist style and broad-minded language, going all the way to full-blown right-wing questioning of his orthodoxy (“Francis is founding a new religion, opposed to the Catholic magisterium.")

This is a story that’s going to run and run, given the structural faults afflicting the traditional patriarchate of the West. Aside from the anomaly of two popes who seem to operate as colleagues or equals, there are the open wounds of the role of women in that organization; and then there is the way the method of mass communication, which has always been the forte of the R.C. church, is now upstaged by the universal effect of social media. The Vatican may have a Twitter account but half a billion others have one too. There can be little doubt that the R.C. church is on a crisis search for its identity, and that search can only have two opposed outcomes: on the one side a fresh opting for rigid vertical control, on the other a radically devolved, local and perhaps newly prophetic organization.

But it’s across the pond, in both the geographical and denominational senses, that perhaps the greatest drama lies. The Protestant Reformation established “the freedom of the Christian man” producing a revolutionary new basis for relationship to God. Within the sanctum of the soul a contract was forged in the blood of Christ and in consequence nothing could shake the fortress of the justified self. Allied to the ruggedness of the American landscape this “justification” produced the classic U.S. phenomenon of extreme Christian individualism. It has now reached monstrous proportions in what is known as Dominionism, a belief system underpinning the current shut-down in government and threat of debt default.

The prospect of a small group of zealots bringing the whole world to its knees is nothing new, but what’s different is that this could happen in the name of Jesus. No matter he said "blessed are the peacemakers," threatening economic collapse and, with that, the possibility of further wars channeling the resulting frustrations, all is warranted to bring about his kingdom. Nevertheless, this could well be a decisive overreach.

It is through such extreme moments in history—when the violence of a movement is fully revealed—that profound shifts take place. In this case the ferocious cancer that Christian individualism has become is now showing itself clearly, and the journey out of this false construct will become an exodus.

Many more will join the "nones," the religiously unaffiliated who are on the rise in the U.S., especially among the under thirties. But others will continue to search, and the place of promise they may well reach will be a revolutionary new sense of self not founded in individualism but deeply linked to others. Contemporary mirror theory of the self, based in mimesis and mirror neurons, has brought an entirely new intellectual ground for Christian identity, one that is much more consistent with the Sermon on the Mount. The philosopher Merleau-Ponty anticipated the phenomenology of these developments when he said "I live in the facial expression of the other, as I feel him living in mine.” We are wired directly and visually to each other, producing the possibility of jealousy and violence, but also of peace. Jesus is the one who created the possibility of genuine new humanity in imitation of his face of radical forgiveness and love. The key thing is that this is not simply a reflective or moral imitation but one that goes to the root of our being in a primary imitation.

An example would be Jesus' teaching of turning the other cheek: exactly as I adjust my face before my enemy's attack, his own face and self are brought to live within a world of nonviolence. And if my face can transform the existence of my enemy, how much more will sisters and brothers in communion do so for each other? But the very first face at the origin of all these transformations is that of Christ himself. “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.” (2 Cor. 3:18)

Empathy, therefore, is the new medium of saving grace, rather than law and the isolated self. Because of our deeply human power of immediate imitation we are enabled to live in the transformed face of the Christ. And here is the real change in contemporary Christianity: from the supreme individual to self-and-other in communion.

 

 

Tony Bartlett