Undamming The Stream Of Jesus' Semiotics!

I just got back from the 2013 Cov&r conference in Iowa (Colloquium on Violence & Religion). At one point there was a Eucharist, to celebrate James Alison's 25th anniversary of priestly ordination and to commemorate the life of a Cov&r founder, Bob Hamerton-Kelly, recently passed away. With these insistent motives I felt pushed to attend mass, a possibility I had not entertained since my reaction to the revised language of the canon experienced last summer.

I could not undergo again the sacral metaphysics represented by those changed words, those regressive signs. But the moment I entered the University of Northern Iowa campus church I felt touched by a tranquil pang of recognition. Like a scent you have not gotten for years and years, loaded with deep and rich connection.

Classically you could say "That was so weird, I really have no idea where it came from." But in fact I think I do know. Later I returned to the church, to sit in silence and sift through my feelings and thoughts. I understood that what touched me was the church's semiotic stream or flood. And by "church" I mean here both the actual building and the larger institution.

The actual building was well designed with warm red brick and abundant muted light. There were a number of large Byzantine icons scattered around, their flat two-dimensional scheme filled with circular motion, leading the eye and brain in an abyssal space of endless giving. The sacrament was to the side, an understated, materially eloquent witness. And those were just the most evident of the signs and symbols at play.

Here then is what was happening. The Roman Catholic church is a semiotic ocean or stream going back in essence to the signs performed by Jesus--both the obvious ones, the "miracles," but just as important the word-pictures he used and the dramatic performance of the meal "the night before he died," with its nonsacrificial food elements, bread and wine.  (To understand this more you could do worse than check the last two chapters of Virtually Christian!)

At any rate it is clear that Jesus left behind a transformed and transformative linguistics grounded in his own absolute reimagining and remaking of relational human life. Because of their gripping power of meaning it was all too easy, within the actually existing world, to twist these linguistics into a imperial structure. Once a crowd is gathered around these signs then certain individuals--whose roles were themselves meant only as signs--could claim legal possession and control and institute lines of power and exclusion.

But by definition a language can have no borders. Signs by nature belong to every human brain (surely the internet shows us this!) Thus part of the present crisis of the R.C. church is its inability to retain exclusive title to its semiotic universe, its weaker and weaker claims to ownership.

The present pope, Francis, is himself an extraordinary sign: he is the first "collegial pope" sharing the office with the "pope emeritus" Benedict. In Francis the vertical papacy has already become horizontal. He also likes to use striking figures of speech. Earlier this year, talking about the ointment or oil used for the sick, itself a sign, he encouraged priests to go out to the "outskirts," the margins, the places where people are suffering in order to bring an anointing in a wider sense. He said, "The ointment is not intended just to make us fragrant, much less to be kept in a jar, for then it would become rancid … and the heart bitter.”

But the whole church has become a closed-up jar, running the constant risk of making its contents rancid. If Francis is serious about his words about anointing, then the walls of the church need deliberately to be broken open and its semiotic stream released to the world, so the world may be healed. The church needs to renounce imperial ownership of its universe of signs, allowing that revolutionary wealth to run like wells fountaining up in each local situation for and in itself.

The semiotic stream I experienced sitting in that church is a transforming semiotics of human nonviolence. That is unmistakable. But by imprisoning that meaning within church walls the world is allowed to continue on its way, and that must be part of the contract the imperial church has made with the world. Yet the world is crying out now for the new language of Jesus. Come on, Francis, break down the walls, undam the stream of Jesus' semiotics!


Tony Bartlett

A New U.S. Religion

A new, nonviolent Christianity is breaking forth on the native soil of the U.S. Nonviolent both in practice and intrinsic theology. It will shine out like apple blossom in May!

Why is it possible to say this? Because there is no other place on earth so equally soaked in violence and the writings of the New Testament! The future here has nowhere to go, except more of one or the other, and probably of both. In biblical-historical terms, the Spirit of God chooses specific moments for aspects of God's work to come to clarity; and we are here in one of them. The present moment constitutes a "great emergence", as Phyllis Tickle calls it, a five-hundred year shake-up. I'm also claiming that it takes shape not simply as a style or sensibility, but specifically in terms of a theology of nonviolence. It will have its own authentic ecclesial expression, and it will renew the ancient churches.

The present near impossibility of US politics is one pointer. The extreme ideological divide around the nature of freedom, of humanity, of the U.S. constitution, results in gridlock in Washington, interspersed with wars of choice and endless extra-judicial drone-killings of those who are counted guilty simply by the fact they're killed. The resulting situation is spiritually toxic at a critical level, whether people think about it or not. Anyone who takes Christianity seriously is driven to a new searching of scripture, simply to detox.

Another indicator is the guns. The romance of the gun in the U.S. has morphed into a monster. The power of automatic weapons puts the immense sanction of the state into the hands of individuals, deciding in an instant the final rights and character of human existence. By means of the gun the trope of the individual has advanced to a twisted Augustinian god: sole, self-justifying, beyond appeal. It is now a spiritual disease which can only be cast out by seeking the more powerful nonviolence of Jesus.

A positive indicator is the stirring of the evangelical churches. The emergent and missional movement is out there looking for its soul. Theologians like Brian McClaren and Rob Bell push in the direction of nonviolence, but a conscious theology has not fully percolated to become a core evangelical theme.

What is world-changing and dangerous and essentially Christian is nonretaliation, and love and forgiveness of enemies. Nonviolence arises from Christianity's deepest self, from the deepest self of the Crucified and Risen One. And it amounts to the new humanity, which is the eschatological plan and in-breaking of God.
 

Christian faith now is nothing less than this, and it can be learned only in a face-to-face group continually rehearsing the nonviolence of the Gospel as both teaching and life. At the same time it can affect and change the established churches--but only along this route.

Real evolution only takes place at the level of the cell, the single, small cell. Organisms as such cannot evolve. New organisms arise because of the new, transformative cell. This is true at both the biological and ecclesial levels. However, it may also be true, in a framework of social evolution, that established organizations can mimic and change under the influence of new ones. This is Tickle's point: the Counter Reformation among Roman Catholics imitated the Reform of Protestantism. But first there must be the new cells!

And today these cells of a new Christian humanity are indeed emerging and once they come fully to light the ancient churches may learn this new meaning--of their traditional existence!

The apple blossom can be seen! The voice of the dove is heard in the land!

Tony Bartlett

The U.S. Crisis

I have never quite felt a sense in the U.S. like the one I experienced last week. The U.S. crisis is not fiscal, political, military, or even cultural in any usual sense. It's as profound and hard-to-name as it is evident; like some strange tropical illness with which a relative is suffering, and nobody can seem to stop it.

Founding a nation on "self-evident truths" must always be a risky business let alone when those truths claim the equality of all people. Generally speaking equality will be either a recipe for satisfaction or for constantly renewed conflict. Perhaps the real truth of the matter is that U.S. "equality" was always based, in uneasy parts, on a mutual measure of Christian individual salvation and a huge continent in which such saved individuals could lose (and find) themselves. The 2010 movie, True Grit, and the book it is based on, are convincing depictions of the cultural marriage of these two factors, with the gun as the great settler of scores against both backdrops. Now, for better or worse, both the ideology of Christian salvation and the open horizons of migration are eroded. We are left staring more and more fixedly at each other, yet more than ever armed.

The horror of Sandy Hook and the barely less horrific response of the NRA, made public a week after the shootings, brought day-to-day U.S. society almost to a spiritual halt; or at least to a kind of moment of clarity. As if the fever (our own fever) cleared just enough for a moment, for us to recognize the true character of the crisis.

A twenty-year-old man named Adam entered an elementary school and for every one of his own wretched, miscarried years he slaughtered a first-grade child with an automatic rifle, shooting each child between three and eleven times. Having previously killed his mother, he also killed six adults at the school, finally shooting himself. The cold mathematical fury of his actions combined with the extreme youth, vulnerability and innocence of his targets, plus his own rabbit-in-the-headlights-look in the photos available, managed to exceed by an order of magnitude the shock of all the previous mass shootings in the U.S.

The U.S. love-affair with guns slammed with the force literally of a bullet into its much greater love-affair with kids. There were calls at once for increased gun-controls, led by the President who declared "words need to lead to action" and directed the Vice-President to head an interagency effort, coming up with answers to the issue of mass shootings.

Such controls seem to be simple common sense--and do so to many NRA members--but the response by the NRA leadership demonstrates that there is something greater in play here than common sense. Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre called for armed guards in every U.S. school, fingered "mental health" as the culprit, and uttered the eternally classic line, "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

This kind of vision implies a complete breakdown of the idea of civil society, in a dystopian one-for-one mirroring of the violence of the lone shooter which the supposed intent is to counter. Those who carried lethal weapons in ancient city states from Canaan to Greece to Verona and Venice always belonged to the warrior class, the aristoi (from which comes aristocrats), those who were "best" in a variety of fields, above all fighting. The ordinary populace, tradespeople, and peasantry in the fields, may have had weapons stashed away but they did not carry them. (Hence the biblical "meek of the earth," as in psalm 37:11 and Job 24:4.) That way, violence was reserved to a special class, those who were, you might say, professionals in the field, and then also the soldiery which developed around them. Modern police are largely in fact a product of the time when aristocrats gave up carrying weapons and keeping beside them groups of armed retainers. What LaPierre is, therefore, talking about is a level of near-universal (re)arming never seen before in human history: armed guards at every corner and concealed-carry on the part of numerous others, together with weapons whose lethality is unparalleled. The NRA is talking about a steady state of civil war where you're never sure who or what the enemy is or whether the next moment will be your last. A Christian mutuality of individuals has been sundered apart into an original violence, and equality in violence becomes the final measure of a man (or woman).

This is the crisis we're facing. You could call it a spiritual crisis, except "spiritual" seems normally to refer to a separate realm of spirit which only secondarily has concrete consequences. You should perhaps then call it anthropological, because that indicates how we concretely structure our humanity. Most of all you could call it "Christian" because the half-born message of the gospel in the West has brought us to this decayed and dangerous form of equality, a kind of zombie Christianity filled with violent atomization and atomizing violence. This form of equality has lost all sense of solidarity with the next man or woman, completely unwilling to trust them for ordinary business of life. It has been replaced instead with a war of all against all, a long slow bleeding war which has already been engaged in many minds.

As Girard says it, "(T)he Western world is in a perpetual state of crisis, and the crisis is always spreading." (Violence and the Sacred, 238)

In these circumstances the Christian message is called to take on a powerfully renewed self-understanding. Because it was a version of Christian belief that helped put the crisis in place it is only a re-imagined and re-vitalized Christianity can help resolve it. First, then, it is urgent that Christian ministers work to transform the basic sense of how Christians think of themselves as humans. Their dominant body/soul anthropology is critically outmoded and is deeply prejudicial against organic human solidarity. Next, violence itself must be taught, not seen on one occasion as a moral aberration, and on another as a magnificent heroism. Rather it is something essentially and horribly human, a kind of spirit or essence itself which has made humanity all that it has known for hundreds of thousands of years. But now this essence has reached an elemental inner crisis because of its exposure to the gospels...being brought literally to light. Because of that light human violence is sweating and blowing up in our faces like dynamite itself. Yet, just as Jesus predicted in the gospel, at the very same time as the human crisis evolves it's also the very time for the "sign of the Son of Man" to appear. That is, the sign of a nonviolent relational humanity, surrendering to each other in love.

This sign and its teaching will be a far surer way of protecting the children than a nine millimeter in every teacher's desk.

Tony Bartlett

P.S. This post is also found on the Theology & Peace website.

First Up

Hi! I'm introducing a new blog, mostly video, that I'll be uploading here. It's not attached to any particular organization, just me, the camera and the shtick... I hope it works and provides a wider platform for some of the thought and vision I'm trying to develop. Oh, by the way,  my name is Tony Bartlett, my last book was Virtually Christian, and I currently also blog on Theology & Peace. Thanks, and peace to you!