When Rockstars Deny the Foundation of Religion

September 5, 2010 By George Elerick 3 Comments

I lift my eyes up to the mountains, where does my help come from?* – King David, King of Israel

“Ancient Egyptians viewed their pharaohs as living gods they were the personification of AMUN-RA the king of gods and when they died they became true gods. Therefore these pharaohs weren’t only regarded as the kings of Egypt but as divinity.”

The king in the ancient world was the person you went to with all of your problems, the king had all the answers. In fact, on some ancient BC archaeological scrolls, something simlar to these words were found “The king is the representative of the Gods who has come down to show us how to be.” The king was God in effect. The king was a direct representative of the ontological spirit that culture looked to. People would worship the king. They would give their lives to the king. The king was the rockstar who had all the fame. The king was the one in power.

They had all the answers.

So, what happens when the king defers to someone/something else? They not only deny their power, they deny their ontological influence. They divorce themselves from being the one who has all the answers. For all intense purposes, they stop being who others think them to be. David denies his status and defers it elsewhere. This is a very self-deprecating move for a king, this is a sort of castration.

David chooses castration rather than power.

He chooses a state of non-status rather than those things that might seem to give him importance in the sight of others. What are we choosing that gives us status? Are we at least deferring them? For David, God is the ontological end. God is the true King. The ultimate monarchy doesn’t lie in what we see, but it suspends itself in the unseen. For David, it is in the unseen or in the uknown where true (post-colonial**) power resides.

We tend to look to things in our history as a church for influence on what we should do and where we should go, we tend to look to what we know rather than what we don’t? Why, because we have believed the perverse lie that somehow knowledge equals power. To David, there is power in the uknowning.

In the unraveling.
In the dismantling journey towards unbelief.
Where unbelief is true belief.

David takes it too far. By focusing outside the temple and outside of the mountain, the very foundation of the temple, David is basically condemning these things as useless.

Much like Jesus did when he spoke to the institutional representatives and told them they were dead inside. David is challenging us to see that the foundation of the institutions are the issue.

For some, I get this might be a bit outside of where you might be, and don’t want to minimize the struggle of attempting to fully divorce ourselves from the noise of structuralism into the quiet of post-structuralism. It isn’t an easy journey, I realize that, but it is one we can take together and to come to realize that the God we seek doesn’t just simply lie outside of the institution, but also resides outside of the foundations of our institution.

When David utters the words up above and looks toward the mountains, it isn’t just a declaration of nature or the natural order of things, the temple is what sat on that mountain. Centered in the ancient Eastern Levant religions was the belief that you could meet with the Divine in tents (Genesis 18), trees, and mountains to name a few spaces. They wanted to define their experience of meeting with God, so they created an institution, they created a structure.

We as people, tend to want to define or give some sort of structure to our experience, so we try to explain in it words, in language, which is itself – a structure. We have also been fed the lie that we need to instiutionalize everything that has value. David, a king, the ultimate expression of institutionalization denies the need for institution. In fact, he looks beyond it.

He looks outside of it.

He looks to what isn’t and can’t be institutionalized to express what is beyond words. David doesn’t just challenge the temple that would have been on this mountain, he challenges the mountain itself. The very foundation of the institution. David essentially says that everything of value doesn’t lie in our history, or what is laid-down before us, but is outside of what has been laid for us. It doesn’t cheapen what has been, it does encourage us to come together and dream outside of the contingencies we’ve been led to believe should be ours. The Church is in an interesting place, because for years, it has been set on a mountain, on a foundation of historical colonialism. In fact, the English language has been part of this structured ‘advance of the Kingdom’.

Structures have been the problem.

Now, we are beginning to ask important questions about the future of the de-institutionalized body of believers and what our future home will look like.

Which I think is a great question!!

I think for me, it won’t include walls, but where the walls used to be, there will be people. Where injustice used to be present in the name of God, now there will be love and renewal. Where liturgies, worship songs, and bibles used to be there will be people who are now the liturgy, the worship song and the bible. The Church has a lot of room to grow when we realize that the Church wasn’t meant for us.

* Psalm 121 is by far my favorite Psalm.

** David more like would have thought of power in a colonial sense, so I wanted to share that I am thinking of power in terms of the post-sovereign, post-colonial sense.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Burning our Scarecrows: Re-redefining History

August 9, 2010 By George Elerick 4 Comments

Strawmen

Neo is a prefix signaling a “new” form or a revival of an old one.

Scarecrows are supposed to represent the real thing. They are meant to stand immovably in each of the fields they’ve been placed and protect it from unwanted invaders. They are a fantasy of what is meant to be. They are a perversion of the real world. It has everything but the heart it requires to sustain life.

There has been a hip new influx of re-ideology. Or neo-ideologies. So for example, there used to be fascism, but now there is neo-fascism. Or how there used to be evangelical, now there is a neo-evangelical movement in some churches. Along with the neo-evangelical, there is also a neo-monastic movement that has followed closely after. We could go on, but I hope this gives you a preview of this neo-movement of old philosophies. Its much like the straw men, they look like what they represent, but they depend on what is behind them to be informed.

This isn’t simply dissecting Christian neo-ideologies, this is challenging the concept of ‘neo-ing’ anything. If we are a society that embraces change than we should be willing to allow space for the new changes to lead us rather than us attempting to slow its progress. This isn’t to say that these changes won’t take time, but there is tendency out of either fear or the addictive need to control what we don’t know, to inform the progress of change. The problem with this approach is that it isn’t change if we’re in control of it.

We sometimes look at change as this gradual thrust towards something or somewhere. But, what if change was discovered rather than controlled? Rather than constantly trying to control the direction (and yes, there are times when we need to do so) we allow change to lead us?

This is an immanent kind of change that we get to work with but not necessarily manipulate. With these neo-ideologies there is a dependancy upon what is before us rather than what is ahead of us to tell us how we should move forward. This also gives us the power to creatively/forcefully direct its paths because we manipulate what is behind us to a certain extent.

The issue with that is we will only move forward as far as the history of that subject will allow. We are then bound by history rather than informed by the future. This is why we must be careful when introducing things like neo-ideologies, because it is incredibly dependant, almost like the alcoholic is to his beer bottle.

If we continue onto the path of neo-ideologies we will have nothing more than strawmen filling the history books we left behind. I understand this approach is scary especially if we see history as something we are under, part of, or dependant upon. Or history as the Big Other. But, what if history wasn’t any of those things?

We need a new form of history. A new way to see it, address it and live it.

What if history is now? This moment. What if like the ancient eastern religions thought, time was an event, it was when things happened that time was here. What if its an ethic, something we perpetuate out of ourselves into life? If time is an event rather than something that has always been happening, than progress is the event we have been waiting for.

Think of Christ on the Road to Emmaus. Christ who was completely recognizable is now completely unrecognizable. Christ is displaced from Christ. Essentially, the Christ before the Cross no longer exists because this New Christ has been resurrected. Or as one of the early church authors once wrote, ‘the old has gone, the
new has come’.

There is a process of estrangement from our history that needs to occur. Neo-Ideology tries to hold on to a bit of the past and attempts to stretch into the future but can only reach till now because of its direct connection to the past. As long as there is a dependancy upon our past, we will only be able to progress into the now.

How does this help us practically?

I think it speaks into the heart of fear we have become victims to for centuries. It empowers us to paint with a whole new brush with literally endless possibilities. It is a post-structural approach to living life and encountering the Divine. It is a complete 180 degree turn from everything we once knew, so it will challenge us, it will change us. So, I think what it will do, is actually put feet to the idealistic notion when we say ‘I like change’. If we completely change our minds, than we can truly be changed. Like Christ was on the road to Emmaus.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Jewish Superheroes: A look at an oppressed people

June 2, 2010 By George Elerick Leave a Comment

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

(This is a deeper/scholastic look at the development of the Jewish belief system, rather than a ‘theological’ one)

Myths are stories with a deeper meaning. Myths are narratives with a culturally deep hearbeat that lives beyond its own shelf-life. Myths are important to any cultures existence and growth. Myths also tend to demonstrate something larger at work. A theme. A deity. An ethic. A truth. A love. Things that get lost in words tend to find themselves in myths, because the story itself is too powerful for everyday words.

If you look at the Jewish people (first and foremost) as a group of people committed to their myth (as defined above) than you see a people deeply in-tune with the world above them and around them. A poetic people, a people who trust their myth. As I said, their myth made sense of the world around them.

The Jewish people (in and outside of biblical record) were an oppressed people. If you put this in terms of highschool. They were the ‘nerds’ of the world. They were the essential outsider, the geeks who never got the girl. Their story (in the Torah, Gemara, Mishnah, Tanya and others) out of that oppression seems to be quite document in their literature. During their development as a people, one man stood apart in the eyes of their deity. He was chosen to be the progenitor, or the first Jewish Superhero of the race of this ‘holy nation’.

(Did Abraham live?; I am not sure that question matters as much as why he lived in the minds of his people, if he didn’t live that is).

Here we have an oppressed people who are looking outwards.

Who are trying to make sense of their oppression.

They need someone to come along and save the day. And so their history is riddled with Superheroes and heroines who represent their resolve to rise above that oppression. From Abraham we go to Joseph, who was oppressed by his own family/his own people, and Yahweh stepped in and orchestrated certain events in life so that he could rise above being oppressed. Then we a Judge named Deborah, who lives within a culture whereby if you are female you are automatically oppressed. She stands up and fights for her people even when the man wouldn’t. Than we have Samson, who in the fashion of a ‘Romeo & Juliet story’, falls in love with the enemy who ends up injuring him. At this point, he is the oppressed (a representation of Israel perhaps?); then Yawheh comes in and gives Samson (the ultimate Arnold Schwarzenegger of his day) a bit more strength to win the day for his people and smash their enemies to pieces. Then you have the uberman of superheroes, albeit flawed, King David the Giant Fighter. He came up through the ranks, not even in the army but as a helpless shepherd (it’s important to remember here, that when we first catch up with the Jews in the Torah, for the most part, they see themselves as traveling shepherds) who ends up defending an oppressed country.

As time went on, Israel popped in and out of the oppressed narrative, but for the most part they were the oppressed. Then the age of the prophets came. There was talk of a Messiah. A bruised reed. A suffering servant. Who was to come and free Israel of its oppression from others. This was the ultimate superhero, this was the political and militaristic savior come to ’save the day’. (Now, when you start diving into interpretation of who or what this Messiah was meant to be, there are interpretations across the board – one of many was that it was a person who was meant to come; some others thought it was yet another metaphor (myth?) for Israel itself).

There is also the choice of deity. There were a pantheon of gods to choose from. They happened to worship the god Yahweh who was in the council of El (Elohim-this shows up in Genesis). Yahweh was the god of war. He was a jealous god. He wanted all praise and worship for himself. He was the ultimate God who would have been a god of the oppressed. He was the warrior god they needed to be their voice for oppression. He was the god who would send them on divinely sanctioned wars to fight their oppression. This deity promised them a new land, their own. For an oppressed people who were known by their nomadic lifestyle, this would be a perfect land, a promised land. An Eden of sorts. A land ‘flowing with milk and honey.’ This god of war was going to make sure they got it and kept it.

For those who believed that the Messiah was a person, they were waiting in hope that this savior was going to rescue them from any current or future oppression. He was going to be a leader. They waited for him to come for year and years. Finally one day, a small-town Rabbi pops on the scene and starts talking about a new kind of Kingdom. He starts about how this new way of doing things would upset the natural order of things.

This is the message they were waiting for.

Hoping for.

This Rabbi did things backwards, he approached people to be his disciples (rather than the prescripted opposite); he treated others with compassion and open-arms. He was a different. He was going to upset the system, just not in the way they thought. His friends became to close to him, most of his friends were Jewish. They had heard of the thousands of years of oppression, some from their own grandparents. They begin to see this Jesus of Nazareth in a whole new light, they begin to see him as the ultimate superhero.

Even bigger than David.

Bigger than the giant-killer.

He was going to save them from the oppressive regime of Rome. He was going to usher in a new world where the Jews were going to rule the world (‘and the government will be upon his shoulders’), they were going to at least be the center of it, if not the former. Jesus was now the Jewish uberman (that Nietzche coined). He was the Messiah for the oppressed who was going to usher in the New Messianic Age they hade been waiting for for centuries.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a Comment