Meekness. Foolishness. Weakness. Humor. Fun. Stupid. These are just a few of the words I used in the previous essay to describe the way of the Christian in the midst of a world that is just taking itself all too seriously. But what about injustice? What about suffering? How can we laugh in the face of so much hurt? And, even more acutely, how can we embrace an ineffective weakness knowing as we do the depth of human suffering, and the shamelessness of the evil that perpetuates it? The Cross, after all, was not a humorous sign. The disciples did not laugh those three long days. Believing as we do, at the urging of Matthew 25, that Christ is present in all those who hunger and thirst and are trapped, how can urging the church to be a foolish institution address the real needs of those Christ draws our attention to?
These questions turn us back to the concept of effectiveness, and most importantly, force upon us the question that we have been grappling with throughout this series, albeit in the background so far: how can a church called to something as ineffective as Christian charity live into its calling to be the Good News to the poor, the hungry, the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant? This is the real rub of the Christian way: we confront a world thrown off its axis by injustice and pain, and the tools we are given by God in the life of Christ are submission and weakness and humility?
Hauerwas identifies this as “the tension created between church and world brought about by how Christians have been taught to take the form of Christ.” Because Christians are presented with such a countercultural way of existing in the world, that tension is naturally opened up, at least in the spaces where churches are not trying to be a part of this or that culture (conservative, hipster, suburban, wealthy, or whichever prevailing cultural norm is seeping into any particular church.)
This tension then opens up an expectation, among Christian and non-Christian alike, that the Church, driven as it is by moral and ethical concerns more stringent than those presented by worldly cultures, must be an example or template for the way Christians hope to make the world to be. In this view, both of these groups of people expect Christians to begin trying to reshape the world in the image of the Church, not realizing that all too often, those churches are just microcosms of the culture, and thus incapable of even contemplating real, lasting cultural change. Foolishness is not something the church practices very often, even if some churches and Christians like to pride themselves on rejection of “the world” and popular culture. No rejection is actually happening for most Christians, They are still inevitably shaped by the world, even if they can’t see it in themselves. What many view as rejection is just political or social posturing, taking on an image of “good Christian” or “compassionate follower” or “devout evangelical” over and against something else. This is not a form of kenotic emptying, as we talked about in an earlier essay. This is exercising a form of power and trying to impose something on the world.
But I’m getting sidetracked, because that’s not even the real problem being confronted here by Hauerwas. Instead, he is trying to get us to understand that the “tension is not between realized and unrealized, but between truth and illusion.” At its best, the Church is not trying to present an ideal to the world, nor is it trying to shape it. Remember Hauerwas’ maxim that the goal of the church is to make the world remember that it is the world? This is where that comes into focus in a real way. The Church is not trying to change the world. The Church is trying to make the world see itself more clearly for what it really is – namely, that it is not the Church, and cannot ever be, no matter how hard it tries.
That seems like a harsh judgment, and in some ways it is. But I have put the endpoint much earlier than expected. There is a method to work through to get to this conclusion.I want to wrestle through that reasoning here. Let’s back up. Hauerwas identified the tension created by our earlier question – how can a church called to something as ineffective as Christian charity live into its calling to be the Good News to the poor, the hungry, the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant? – as the tension between truth and illusion. The Church is “that community that trusts the power of truth and charity,” that is not built on the lie that power comes from strength, or wealth, or violence, but instead understands that power is found in the Truth and the love that testifies to that truth in every act of charity.
The world, on the other hand, is built on a need for power borne out of a rejection of truth – namely, the truth about ourselves, about our mortality, our smallness, our sin, and our pride. We cannot stand the fact that in the end, we are all human beings who will grow old and die. We cannot stand this because we look at the others around us, and we see all the things in them that bug us, and we cannot face the fact that we are no different than them. And so, the way of the world is to build structures of power and violence and domination, lies that deceive us into thinking we are immortal, we are pure, we are better than the others.
Obviously, it has been very easy for this worldview to infect Christians and the churches they build. I am reminded of this by a recent piece by Damon Linker, about the billionaire Peter Thiel, who incorporates a Christian veneer into his transhumanist, hyper-capitalist vision of the world he is trying to build through his wealth and the political and cultural power it commands. Linker writes,
In Thiel’s view, recapturing civilizational greatness through scientific and technological achievement requires fostering a revival of a kind of Christian Prometheanism (a monotheistic variation on the rebellious creativity and innovation pursued by the demigod Prometheus in ancient Greek mythology). This is the subject of a remarkable short essay Thiel published in First Things magazine in 2015. Against those who portray modern scientific and technological progress as a rebellion against medieval Christianity, Thiel insists it is Christianity that encourages a metaphysical optimism about transforming and perfecting the world, with the ultimate goal of turning it into “a place where no accidents can happen” and the achievement of “personal immortality” becomes possible. All that’s required to reach this transhuman end is that we “remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth—in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present.”
This is a terrifying bastardization of the Christian worldview, wielded in pursuit of a decidedly anti-Christian world: one where our mortality is denied, where progress and consumption has no end, where wealth solves the world’s hurts, where ideas like meekness, humility, foolishness, and humour have no place. This is a vision of God’s kingdom being achieved not through the work of God and the humility of humans, but through thoroughly human means. To quote Hauerwas again, this “world is exactly that which knows not the power of truth and thus must support its illusions with the power of the sword” – or the microchip, or the dollar, or the marketplace.
Thiel’s techo-Christianity is one that tries to deny the tension we began this essay talking about. Progress and growth requires the elimination of all tension and friction, in order to grease the rails for unlimited expansion and consumption and to maximize human potential, as potential is understood by modern capitalism. There is no room for tension, and in pursuit of this world that can be tightly controlled and shaped and predicted, all institutions that stand in opposition – or even who try to stand aside and not get on board – must be swept aside or be assimilated. The Church is too old and venerable an institution to eliminate, as well as too popular among the masses who our overlords like Thiel depend on for clicks and likes and views. Thus, it has to become part of the world they are shaping in their own image. So, as Thiel describes, the Church is no longer a place for us to confront human frailty and limitation, but as another arena for the pursuit of techno-perfectionism.
This is heresy. The Church is not a tool of Silicon Valley, or of American capitalism, or of nationalism, or of social justice, or of suburban amnesia. All these structures require a wiping away of that tension between Church and World, because that tension convicts them. The tension must be eliminated, and the Church must prove its effectiveness, its utility, its fealty to the powers that be.
But, as Hauerwas reminds us, “this is a tension that is not overcome, but rather is a characteristic of our lives.” The tension exists because, despite the best efforts of folks like Thiel and the dollars and powers they wield, humanity is flawed, and limited, and mortal, and weak, and there simply is no way to overcome that. It is a fact of reality. It is a Truth of existence. And it is a truth these powers cannot handle, for it undermines their pretensions of control and stability. “For none of us desire the truth about ourselves, and we will do almost anything to avoid it”, says Hauerwas. He goes on,
“Our social orders are built on our illusions and fantasies that are all the more subtle because they have taken the appearance of truth by becoming convention. Our only recourse, when such conventions are revealed as arbitrary, is to assert the absoluteness and protect them through the power offered by the state.”
So, people like Thiel sink innumerable wealth and influence into trying to take control of the state, in the hopes that the illusion of the people’s will can maybe protect and justify their flailing about in denial of their own impending death. Christians have no place in this farce. We cannot, and should not, give it the imprimatur of our approval by allying with these forces of evil, no matter what promises they make about protecting the Church, or our way of life, or America as a Christian nation, or racial purity, or whatever abstraction they seize on this week.
The inescapable reality of this tension between the church and world, however, does not mean Christians should all withdraw from the world and leave it to figure out its own hurts and injustices. Christ, after all, went into this world, and made clear declarations with his words and his deeds about it, and about how to live in it. What Hauerwas is doing with his ongoing critique of effectiveness is “attempting to remind us just how radical the Christian demand of charity is in terms of the Christian’s learning how to embody it in such a world.” What it means to be a Christian is so much more strange and radical than any of these worldly powers could ever conceive. They simply lack the imagination to envision a way of being that embraces brokenness and frailty and foolishness, and that turns those values into strategies for pulling up the weak and the forgotten and the disenfranchised. Again, the Church’s role in the world is to remind the world what it is by being what the Church is meant to be- namely, “the community that is shaped by the story that sustains charity in a world where it cannot be effective.” Thiel’s techno-utopianism sustains itself on maximal effectiveness. The Church rejects that strategy completely – not for the sake of ineffectiveness itself, but “because we must never delude ourselves that the justice of the state is what is required of us as people formed by God.”
I still haven’t answered that question we began this essay with: how can a church called to something as ineffective as Christian charity live into its calling to be the Good News to the poor, the hungry, the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant? And I’m not going to here in this essay. Next time, we tackle justice and charity, and in those things, maybe we start to get a roadmap towards the How of this whole ineffective Christianity thing.
Justin DaMetz 