Doomsday is so AD 33

Enough has probably been said here and elsewhere (quite excellently, Colin) about the upcoming movie, The Road, and the extent to which it will fail to be true to the book from which it derives. It should be no surprise, given the dearth of Hollywood films portraying an apocalyptic Judgment Day in recent decades, that it will contain dramatic scenes of the global disaster that merely provides the (gratefully) un-described backdrop for the book's true focus, which is the grasping for life of a father and son in bare crisis.

Be that as it may. But what I want to think about is why? What is this fascination with the "end times"? To my dismay it seems that my evangelical church experience emerged from the suffocating fear-mongering of "end times" paranoia just in time for the culture at large to pick it up and take it (even less redemptively) from there.

Okay, I don't exactly know why. Its one of those film-trends I don't get, along with Vampire movies and the whole freakish Saw thing. But I've been thinking about all of this ever since reading NT Wright's Surprised By Hope (and before that I'm sure):

What is our fascination with doomsday? Especially in the church. Should our forward outlook not be characterized by hope? And, to take it further, is Judgment Day ultimately even a future event?

I left my copy of Wright's book at home, but what I am reading these days is Karl Barth's Doctrine of Reconciliation, and this all came flooding to mind again as I read the following words from volume IV.1:

"All sin has its being and origin in the fact that man wants to be his own judge. And in wanting to be that, and thinking and acting accordingly, he and his whole world is in conflict with God. It is an unreconciled world, and therefore a suffering world, a world given up to destruction. . . . And as a world hostile to God it is distinguished by the fact that in this way it repeats the very sin of which it acquits itself. . . . And for this reason the incarnation of the Word means the judgment, the judgment of rejection and condemnation, which is passed on all flesh. Not all men commit all sins, but all men commit this sin which is the essence and root of all other sins. There is not one who can boast that he does not commit it. And this is what is revealed and rejected and condemned as an act of wrong-doing by the coming of the Son of God. This is what makes His coming a coming to judgment, and His office as Saviour His office as our Judge" (220, emphasis mine).

Did you catch that? Is it possible, even proper, to speak of Good Friday--and not some future cataclysm however possible or likely--as the paradigmatic Judgment Day? Is that not the day where we see definitively our sin and our judgment? On the cross (condemned) and from the empty tomb (overcome)? And if so, what does it say that we are now, in the present, alive and looking back on it through Easter Sunday?!! More from Barth:

"The Christian community are those who hear the promise given to the world of people, just as they are those who hear the verdict pronounced on it and the direction given to it. . . . They are those who have the perspective that they will "live under Him in His kingdom, and serve Him." In "Jesus Christ the promise or pledge of God--which cannot be compared with anything we might promise ourselves--is already given to us. It is actually made to the world. So then (without having to create illusions about itself) the world is no longer a world without hope" (114-115, emphasis mine).

I'm not trying to deny the biblical portrayal of a day of reckoning of some sort, nor that the hope laid out in Scripture is a new heaven and earth that eclipses the old in some way. I do not wish to counter the error of earthly despair with one of naive triumphalism. But I most certainly do not believe in a pre-tribulation rapture or a tribulation of the sort envisioned by the over-productive pens of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. I have some thoughts and opinions brewing about such things as hell and heaven and the so-called "end times", but what I believe in and am oriented by is Jesus Christ, the hope of the world.

In Surprised by Hope (which I can't recommend highly enough (if for no other reason than its mixture of readability and intelligence), Wright addresses the question of Jesus' sovereignty over the messed-up world (upon which these doomsday movies seem so intent to fix our eyes), and describes the startlingly hopeful life to which only the risen Jesus can summon us:

Living in this hope is not a matter of “simply taking over and giving orders in a kind of theocracy where the church could simply tell everyone what to do. That has sometimes been tried, of course, and it’s always led to disaster. But neither is it a matter of the church backing off, letting the world go on its sweet way, and worshipping Jesus in a kind of private sphere. Somehow there is a third option, . . . [and we] can glimpse it in the book of Acts: the method of the kingdom will match the message of the kingdom. The kingdom will come as the church, energized by the Spirit, goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misunderstood, misjudged, vindicated, celebrating: always—as Paul puts it in one of his letters—bearing in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed” (112).

Meston Walk, Part Two

The family actually got out the door early this morning, and enjoyed a sunny winter's meander through campus to church. This is the second part of Meston Walk, where it leaves the library and runs down to High Street and then King's College. It was a very fine day. Thought maybe you'd like to come along.

Slavoj Zizek: Self-love, Otherness, & Art vs. Science

Out of nowhere on Friday another Slavoj Zizek book jumped off the shelf at me and stole a good hour from my day. He fascinates me, and its not just because he quotes Chesterton all the time. I've written about him before, but what got me this time was a book he co-authored with two others, called The Neighbor.

Zizek has a knack for mining pop culture, the arts, philosophy and religion and melding bold reinterpretations of them together to form a seemingly scattered yet strangely seamless argument. The following exerpt is no exception. Though I am intrigued by a lot this passage has to say regarding sociology and even theology, there's one nugget I've put in bold because it does something I've never seen before: It pits art and science against each other and suggests that art (ideally) is a more reliable gateway to understanding. Check it all out and see what you think. Zizek writes:

"Today, we seem effectively to be at the opposite point of the ideology of the 1960s: the mottos of spontaneity, creative self-expression, and so on, are taken over by the System; in other words, the old logic of the system reproducing itself through repressing and rigidly channeling the subject's spontaneous impulses is left behind.

Nonalienated spontaneity, self-expression, self-realization, they all directly serve the system [which Zizek has just argued thrives on the white noise of our 'unconstrained permissiveness'], which is why pitiless self-censorship is a sine qua non of emancipatory politics.

Especially in the domain of poetic art, this means that one should totally reject any attitude of self-expression, of displaying one's innermost turmoil, desires, and dreams. True art has nothing whatsoever to do with disgusting emotional exhibitionism . . . . If there is a thing that provokes disgust in a true poet, it is the scene of a close friend opening up his heart, spilling out all the dirt of his inner life.

Consequently, one should totally reject the standard opposition of 'objective' science focused on reality and 'subjective' art focused on emotional reaction to it and self-expression: if anything, true art is more asubjective than science. In science, I remain a person with my pathological features, I just assert objectivity outside it, while in true art, the artist has to undergo a radical self-objectivization, he has to die in and for himself, turn into a kind of living dead. . . .

In contrast to the New Age attitude which ultimately reduces my Other/Neighbor to my mirror-image or to the means in the path of my self-realization . . . , Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my Neighbor---the Neighbor remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes me. . . .

The radical conclusion to be drawn from this is that one should renounce striving for one's own (spiritual) salvation as the highest form of egotism. According to Lean Brunschvicg: 'The pre-occupation with our salvation is a remnant of self-love, a trace of natural egocentrism from which we must be torn by the religious life. As long as you think only salvation, you turn your back on God. God is God, only for the person who overcomes the temptation to degrade Him and use Him for his own ends.'"

- Excerpted from chapter 3, "Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence", p. 134-142

Karl Barth on Christ-ian Forgiveness

I have only just begun my deep foray into Barth's theology of forgiveness, but the following extracts seem to me to be fairly indicative of his direction. He can certainly be found within his Reformed tradition, but with unique emphases and critiques. What I notice first off is his a resistance to talk of forgiveness as a static religious principle to be accepted or applied and a preference toward apprehending forgiveness as the free, dynamic, life-giving act of the God-man Jesus Christ. Here is an excerpt from The Doctrine of Reconciliation:

"We can and should, therefore, rise up and rejoice thankfully in the incomprehensible comfort and forgiveness of God, in all the assistance which we are given, in all the great and little lights which shine on our way, in all the strengthenings and encouragements, in short in all the unmerited favours addressed to us by the love of God.

Yet we should also be prepared sooner or later to be recalled in some way to his limits by this love, to find ourselves forcefully redirected to the humility which we so easily forget and loses when we bask in the divine sunshine.

For it is God Himself, and not just a lucky fate, which is favourable to us.

And so, when that which we have deserved overtakes us, the same can and should bow before it, humbling ourselves to the dust, finding ourselves absolutely directed to accept the awful things which he does not like, allowing ourselves to be led where we do not want to go, yet clinging to the fact-for it is in the same love of God that these things come to us-that we will not fall into the abyss but will still be upheld.

Even in these circumstances, there are always lights in the darkness, forgiveness in guilt, new life in death, breaks in the engulfing clouds, encouragements in despair. There is always reason for thankfulness even in the anguish in which we think to perish.

For it is God Himself and not a sinister and hostile force who judges us.

In both respects we have to do with the presence and action of God in its dynamic opposition to our perversion and corruption. In both cases the aim is our purification. God utters a Nevertheless, a merciful Therefore, both when He gives what is undeserved with goodness and what is deserved with severity. It is always His fatherly hand which is active both morning and evening, by day and by night, to our purification and therefore our liberation. In both cases God really gives Himself to us and for us. In both cases He comes into our life."

- Church Dogmatics IV.2, p. 774

(altered from 3rd person singular to 1st person plural)