One man's mind.: June 2010

"There was once a fiery preacher who possessed a powerful but unusual gift. He found that, from an early age, when he prayed for individuals, they would supernaturally lose all of their religious convictions. They would invariably loose all of their beliefs about the prophets, the sacred Scriptures, and even God. So he learned not to pray for people but instead limited himself to preaching inspiring sermons and doing good works.

However, one day while travelling across the country, the preacher found himself in conversation with a businessman who happened to be going in the same direction. This businessman was a very powerful and ruthless merchant banker, one who was honoured by his collegues and respected by his adversaries.

their conversation began because the businessman, possessing a deep, abiding faith, had noticed the preacher reading from the Bible. He introduced himself to the preacher and they began to talk. As they chatted together this powerful man told the preacher all about his faith in God and his love of Christ. He spoke of how his work di not really define who he was but was simply what he had to do.

"The world of business is a cold one," he confided to the preacher, "and in my line of work I find myself in situations that challenge my Christian convictions. But I try, as much as possible, to remain true to my faith. Indeed, I attend a local church every Sunday, participate in a prayer circle, engage in some youth work, and contribute to a weekly Bible study. These activities help to remind me of who I really am."

After listening carefully to the businessman's story, the preacher began to realize the purpose of his unseemly gift. So he turned to the businessman and said, "Would you allow me to pray a blessing into your life?"

The businessman readily agreed, unaware of what would happen. Sure enough, after the preacher had muttered a simple prayer the man opened his eyes in astonishment.

"What a fool I have been for all these years!" he proclaimed. "It is clear to me now that there is no God above who is looking out for me, and that there are no sacred texts to guide me, and there is no Spirit to inspire and and protect me."

As they parted company the businessman, still confused by what had taken place, returned home. But now that he no longer had any religious beliefs, he began to find it increasingly difficult to continue in his line of work. Faced with the fact that he was now just a hard-nosed businessman working in a corrupt system, rather than a man of God, he began to despise his activity. Within months he had a breakdwon, and soon afterward gave up his line of work completely. Feeling better about himself, he then wnet on to give to the poor all the riches he had accumulated and began to use his considerable managerial expertise to challenge the very system he once participated in, and to help those who had been oppressed by it.

One day, many years later, he happened upon the preacher again while walking thorugh town. He ran over, fell at the preacher's feet, and began to weep with joy. Eventually he looked up at the preacher and smiled, "Thank you, my dear friend, for helping me discover my faith."

COMMENTARY. (By Rollins).

In this story we begin to gain an insight into how religious belief can itself be a barrier to living the life of faith. It is all too easy for us to think that religious beliefs express the deep truth of our inner life while what we do on a daily basis in work is only a mask, a necessary evil that must be endured in order to get by in today's frenetic, consumerist world.

In this way we think that it is our commitment to prayer groups, church meetings, and Bible studies that reflects the essence of our inner lives. Our religious groups on the weekends and in the evenings are thought to be sites of resistance that provide us with the strength to question our work and avoid getting fully caught up in it.

However, could it be that these activities are in fact the very things that allow us to fully engage with the world? What if we need our prayer groups and Bible studies because they act as a type of safety valve that actually allows us to release the tension and stresses of our work so that, the next day, we can return again? If this is so, then the activities that we think critique the unjust world are really the very activities that this world requires in order to run smoothly. Our church activities are then nothing more than a type of air vent in the machine.

This logic is beautifully expressed in The Matrix Trilogy, directed by the Wachowski Brothers. In the first film we learn that there is a city where people are free from the AI prison where the majority of humans are held and that Neo (Keanu Reeves) is the hero who can bring freedom. However, in the later films we learn that there have been many cities before Zion (the free city) and that Neo is just the latest in a long line of messiah-like individuals who have risen up to challenge the machines.

Furthermore, we learn that the machines are actually behind what initially seems to be the very force that would threaten them: they are behind the development of Zion and they provide the necessary conditions for Neo (and the other freedom fighters) to arise. Why? Because they understand that, for the oppressive system they have constructed to work, the Matrix needs to include a site of resistance.

In daily life there are reams of activities that are publicly disavowed by the government and society at large, yet are privately permitted. Among these are turning a blind eye to prosecution in certain areas, and the fact that we can all go ten miles per hour over the speed limit without too much fear of getting fined. These acts allow people to disobey the law in ways that are actually unofficially sanctioned by the law. We who engage in such state-sanctioned transgressions are otherwise law-abiding citizens. Indeed, our ability to break the law in small ways is part of what keeps us law-abiding the rest of the time. If we were not able to engage in small acts of transgression, if the law were absolutely unbending, then we would begin to rebel against it in a fundamental way. By creating leniency within the law, the law is not experienced as oppressive and is thus more likely to be accepted with all its flaws.

In the above story I attempt to explore and critique this problem by putting into fictional form insights of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Letters and Papers from Prison. Here Bonhoeffer rejected religion because he felt that it places God on the outer edges of life as the example to our current ignorance (for example, as the name we give to the one who created the world) or as the one we turn to in private sphere (such as the church and in the home). Bonhoeffer rejected this and refused to give God a place in the world, because when God is given a place, God is confined to a specific location (and that location is usually on the edges of life). Instead he advocated an existence fully immersed in the world, utterly taken up by the concerns of the world, one that pours itself out in the joys and suffering of the world.

Such a move could of course be misunderstood as a way of actively denying God. It could be described as a humanism in which people are encouraged to take responsibility for their own lives rather than looking for some divine answer. Yet for Bonhoeffer this was not the end of the story. If religion gives God a place, and humanism denies that place, then he claimed that Christianity fully embraces this humanism, not as a way of denying God, but as the way of fully affirming God - denying God a place so that God is affirmed in every place. Here one fully lives in the world as a way of fully living before God. Hence he wrote, "Before God and with God we live without God." (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Selected Writings, ed. John de Grunchy (London: Collins, 1988), 291.)

The result of such thinking is the affirmation of a faith that permeates all our actions rather than being exhibited only when faced with something we cannot understand, or at some prayer meeting, or in some weekly service to the poor. Such an expression thus strikes against the very roots of inauthentic resistance and demands a truly radical reconfiguring of our social existence.

To put this in religious language, the above story asks if perhaps the devil, far from hating our multitude of church activities, positively loves them, for it is in these very activities that we are able to become such productive agents in carrying out his insidious desires - making changes in the world that fundamentally ensure everything in the world remains the same."

- Taken from part 1, chapter 11 in "The Orthodox Heretic and other impossible tales" by Peter Rollins (London: Canterbury Press)

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I was really struck by this story Rollins wrote and I wanted to share it with you guys. I hope it challenges you to ask questions, engages your thinking and perceptions of religion and life. I want to welcome thoughts, comments and discussions so please leave something. But you don't have to. If you don't want to. It is up to you :)

One man's mind.

Saturday 26 June 2010

"Finding Faith"- Peter Rollins.

Wednesday 16 June 2010

Friday Fellowship- The Beatitudes.