I’m re-reading one of my favorite books, Colossians Remix, Subverting the Empire by Walsh and Keesmaat. I say favorite, not in the sense of total agreement, but in the sense that it awakens things deep inside of me that cause interesting struggles.
I am all the time thinking about Jesus and the story of the church and my life and calling and our church’s life and calling. When I do I have parts that humble and inspire me. I also have parts that get me really mad and parts that depress me. Particularly, ways that now seem so obviously clear in scripture, but which I was never taught in the evangelical subculture I walked in. So I think about the people in the congregation, my own wife and children. I ask the Lord about what I am doing that is equivalent and how to be more faithful to Him and less hoodwinked.
One of the keys is what Walsh and Keesmaat call double immersion. That is, we have to simultaneously be deeply and adeptly engaged in both the biblical story and the world we live in. This allows the text to prophetically critique the culture and grounds and focuses the mission of the church in meaningful and relevant ways. What Walsh and Keesmaat do well (in my opinion) is imaginatively bring the two together so that the text, interacting with contemporary cultural factors, deals with them “head on.” There is nothing “new” here. Every preacher and church leader is taught that this is the goal of all preaching and mission. What I find amazing is how their application of these principles produces something that really jars and impacts my life and perspective. Check out their targum-like paraphrase of Colossians 2:8-3:4:
“Make sure that one takes your imaginations captive through a vacuous vision of life rooted in oppressive regimes of truth that parade itself as something more than a mere human tradition, as if it somehow had privileged access to final and universal truth about the world apart from Christ. You see, in Christ there is a radical presence of Diety, fully instantiated and situated in the particularities of history. And you have come to partake in that presence; that fullness is yours in Christ, who is the very source of every rule and authority that purports to have sovereignty over your lives.
“In him you have your legitimacy, your entrance into the covenantal community, because in relation to him your real problem – a deeply rooted sinfulness manifest in violence and self-protective exclusion – is addressed and healed. The symbol of legitimacy is not the size of your stock portfolio or the number of hits your website gets daily, but the ancient rite of baptism in which you die with Christ to all these pretentious symbols of self-aggrandizement and are raised with him through a trusting and believing faith in the power of God, who raised Jesus from the dead.
“Don’t forget that you were once dead too – dead in the dead-end way of life that characterizes our cannibalistic and predatory culture. But now you are dead to that way of life, and God has made you alive with Christ by dealing with the real problem through radical forgiveness. You see, when the idolatrous power structures that bolster this oppressive regime of truth nailed Jesus to the cross and poured out all their fury on him, all of your debts were nailed there too. All of the ways the empire of death held you captive and robbed you of your life – the exhausting and insatiable imperative to consume, the bewildering cacophony of voices calling out to us in the postmodern carnival, the disorientation and moral paralysis of radical pluralism, the loss of self in a multiphrenic culture, the masturbatory self-indulgence of linguistic and societal games, the struggle to not become roadkill on the information highway – all of this is nailed to the cross, and you are set free. Let’s not beat around the bush here. What is at stake in this conflict at the cross is indeed power struggle. And Jesus takes precisely the principalities and powers that placed him on the cross – the idols of militarism, nationalism, racism, technicism, economism – and on that very cross disarms, dethrones, conquers, and makes public example of them. In this power struggle, sacrificial love is victorious precisely by being poured out on a cross, a symbol of imperial violence and control.
“If all of this is true, then don’t allow the front-men of these vanquished powers to tell you what to eat and drink. Don’t buy into the simulated grocery stores made to remind shoppers of an era in which shopping was more integral to community. Don’t be duped by advertising that tells you that various products are indispensible to constructing certain images and personas. This is all crap. They are still trying to captivate your imagination, to suck you into a globalistic regime of homogeneous consumption. Resist this McWorld nightmare with all the strength you have! Avoid the Disneyization of your consciousness! This stuff has no substance to it, no depth. It suffers from the unbearable lightness of being. But in Christ we find substance, something of weight and power.
“And don’t get sucked into consumerist ideology when it comes dressed up in the clothes of Christian faith. A “new manly piety” just might be more of the same old patriarchal power-grabbing, capitalist legitimating stuff that we have seen being pimped both a the mall and in the consumer-friendly church. And all the charismatic enthusiasm in the world, rolling the aisles with holy joy, amounts to little more than puffed-up humanism if it is devoid of a radical transformation of entire human lives. So much religious re-cultural imagination remains in captivity to an idolatrous worldview, and it has lost contact with the real source of life. It cannot sustain deep and radical growth that is subversive of the regimes of truth because it is not nourished from the source of all things – it does not growth with a growth that comes from God.
“If with Christ you died in your baptism to the principles of autonomous consumerism that still hold the world captive, then why do you live in a way that suggests that you are still in the iron grip of its ideological vision? Why do you submit yourself to it regulations to consume as if there were no tomorrow, to live as if community were an impediment to personal fulfillment, to live as if everything were disposable, including relationships, the unborn and the environment? Why do you allow the deceitful vision to still have a hold on you? Don’t you know that copulating with the idols of this culture is like climbing into bed with a corpse that is already decomposing?
“Let’s be clear about this: the postmodern vision of a laid-back pluralism where people hold only to their local narrative and abandon any attempt to make truth claims beyond their personal opinions or traditional communities may look like a way to end the violence, to respect otherness and stop marginalization and genocide, but it is in fact totally and irrevocably impotent to accomplish any of this. It has a mere appearance of wisdom; it has no depth of vision to discern between paths of wisdom and paths of folly. It looks like humility, and it will lay on the guilt pretty thick for the years of violence legitimated by various metanarratives (including the Christian one!), but it is not humble enough. It fails to see that the real issue of violence, exclusion, and marginalization goes much deeper – it lies in the violence, rebellion, and deceitfulness of the human heart. Self-imposed postmodern guilt trips can do nothing to heal the heart and can do nothing to stop the violence. Only the exhaustion of that violence on the cross can begin a real restoration.
“You see, my friends, the postmodern incredulity of all metanarratives is well founded. The modernist metanarrative, of civilizational progress manifest in an aggressive conquering of colonized peoples, so-called scientific objectivism, a technological will to power and a market capitalism that would commodify all of life, deplete creational resources and create an ecological nightmare, was a tall tale – a lying, self-justifying ideological narrative. Yet humans are inherently storytelling creatures. And any local narrative will necessarily and invariable function as a metanarrative in the lives of those who hold it as their story.
“So the issue isn’t whether to live out of a metanarrative or not, but which metanarrative, and whose grand story. Without a grounding and directing story, no praxis is possible. That is why the crisis of storyless postmodern people, animated by little more than media and market-produced images, is a crisis of moral and cultural paralysis.
“But that’s not the way it is with you, is it? You know which metanarrative brings life, don’t you? You now whose grand story has set you free, don’t you? Remember, in Christ you have died and were buried and have been raised to new life. His story is your story! Your identity and destiny are inextricably tied to the story of Jesus. And there is more to this story. The risen one is the ascended one, sitting at the right hand of God! If you have been raised with Christ, then, you must make your own the rest of the story. Allow your imagination, your vision, your hope to be set on and directed by the image of kingly and restorative rule.
“And this narrative of death, burial, resurrection, and ascension still isn’t the whole story. You see, Christ will return; his hidden rule in heaven will be revealed on earth – and just as his full glory will be revealed, so also will this be a revelation of your full glory as restored, renewed, and fruitful image-bearers of God. When that happens, this whole business of exchanging your true glory as God’s image-bearers for the kind of idolatry that continues to tempt and oppress you will come to a final and liberating end!
“Do you feel incomplete, not yet fully who you are called to be? Good! Because you are incomplete, and any presumptuous sentiments otherwise would land you right back into idolatry. But we do live in hope. The struggle between the restorative rule of God in Christ and false, empty , deceitful pretenders to sovereignty – this struggle we experience deep within our bodies, our communities, our culture – will reach a final resolution in the return of Christ. Yes, we are waiting, but what we are waiting for is already stored up for us in Christ’s heavenly rule and will be revealed in his coming. So live now, animated by that radically subversive hope.”
(Colossians Remix, pp.137-139)
Now there are some thing here I would love to talk with the authors about, especially definitions and meaning of “metanarrative.” I am (and so are the authors) much more favorable to postmodern sensibilities then you might get from his passage. Yet I agree with the inconsistencies and failings stated here.
What captures me about this paraphrase is how it illuminates the big, guiding issues of the modern landscape and accurately reveals and critiques them from the text. In the intersection of the text and culture the text is truly prophetic, guiding, and powerful for understanding how we live-out the life we are given. It is not as captive to the hyper-individualism and ahistorical tendencies of our culture.
What does it do in me? It makes me think about how I think. Some of my uncontested assumptions and practices suddenly have to be examined and changed. I think about what I buy and why. I think about how I live and what motivates me. I think about my fears and decisions and have to reconsider their source, validity, and effect. I am forced in light of the critique to think about what “witness” means. All of these are grounded in Christ, his calling, his way, and our lives and purpose with him.
One interesting effect is that it digs deeper into my soul and reveals a deeper source (and way of escape) for my particular temptations and moral failings. Instead of being merely an isolated, individual struggle with common human problems, I see how they are grounded in larger, more insidious forces. My struggle is no longer private, but my private struggle is part of larger confrontation with giants and enemies of the cross. This increases my sense of urgency and expands my understanding of the magnitude of what is at stake. It’s not just about me and my integrity, but it is also about a larger “battle.” It humbles me. I have a more urgent need for the Lord and his presence and power. This drives me to grace and mercy and love.
It also magnifies the importance of church and relationship. It redefines for me what types of expressions of the faith are more urgent than others. It gives me a new vision for what an adequate witness before the world must be like.
Do the scriptures; which promise these kinds of radical re-structuring of our hearts, minds, and lives; actually do that in your life? I’m not asking smugly. I’m not asking because in the glow of the moment I feel like I have a better perspective or superior understanding. I’m asking as a brother and a friend who wants to truly live and be truly alive to the audacious, mundane, beautiful vision of Christ. I’m asking because I don’t want to play church and be nice, safe, and innocuous. I’m asking because I know that I’m too much of a hypocrite and a coward to be faithful to this type of life. Unless have to be surrounded by others who will give me courage when the inevitable time to cut-and-run hits me.
If you life in the scriptures isn’t this way, would you like to get together and figure out how they can be? I’d love to do that. I don’t have a plan or a curriculum or anything. But I think that the Word of God and the Spirit of God are eagerly waiting for us to ask him.
