Simple Living Isn’t Always

If you don’t read Christianity Today online, you may not have seen this article by Ted Olsen about the Bible in recent graphic novels. He takes a look at a handful of releases, including Steve Ross’s Marked and Doug Rushkoff’s Testament. (Olsen also links to several informational sites at the end of the article.)

You can get an idea of Testament’s content and decide for yourself. Rushkoff is nothing if not inventive; he’s recast biblical stories as a post-Neuromancer epic. The writing is pretty smart, which you’d expect from the writer of Preacher. But Olsen is right about something else: Rushkoff’s books are almost gleefully blasphemous. Notice in the pic to the right the demonic appearance of the angels guarding the gate of Eden.

Remember, though, that there is no one-to-one, allegorical correlation to the biblical narratives. Rushkoff is actually reinventing/retelling the stories. Rushkoff’s site describes the series this way: “What if the Bible were happening right now? In the world of Testament, the archetypal struggle for dominion over humanity is being fought by the revolutionaries of two eras against the would-be tyrants of their ages. With art by Liam McSharp, this new series promises to challenge some basic assumptions about what the Bible is actually about.”

Now, banish any preconceived ideas you might have about comics fanboys who become writers. Rushkoff is no Slackers/Clerks dork who found a way to write comics. He is a philosopher who has taken his ideas to the masses. The winner of the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity and a Marshall McLuhan Award for his book Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say, Rushkoff’s Wikipedia entry calls him a founding member of Technorealism. That makes him pretty interesting to me.

I’ll have to study some more, and read a few of Rushkoff’s books, before I really come to some conclusions. Hopefully this will suffice for now: Rushkoff is an example of what a Christian could do, following what Tim Keller calls a third way to affect culture. On the one hand, you have Kuyperian (–>) social invention/reinvention, which says we should get into everything and be Christians: politics, art, whatever. On the other, you have (for lack of a better term) Hauerwasian (<–) counterculturalism, which says our best bet for influencing culture is to set up compelling Christian countercultures. Keller suggests a “third way” between–and including–the two. It balances full engagement and full withdrawal a la the Anabaptist tradition.

In other words, should we get our redeemed brains and fingers in everything? Or should we withdraw and invite others to withdraw with us? The answer, I think, might be yes.

For example, I think “Christian music,” music that explicitly glorifies God and celebrates Christian life, has a place in our world (Michael Card, Rich Mullins, Delirious?, etc). Likewise, I think “Christians’ music,” music that declares the glory of God in the less-explicit languages of the world, calls attention to the glory-bathed world, translates the gospel for those who have ears to hear (POD, early King’s X, Bruce Cockburn, David Wilcox, Switchfoot, Mute Math). But we have created not a compelling counterculture but a ghetto of knockoffs and marketing gimmicks and called it a counterculture. And too few are making music that’s compelling enough to break the music industry’s stranglehold. (IMO, the film industry at the moment is about the same. Books are FAR worse.) We could do both far better, by encouraging excellence on both fronts and refusing to be pigeonholed.

In addition, we need some philosophers/theologians who are willing to translate or be translated, and not just in some knockoff junk. Why, for instance, has only Left Behind made it into big-time comic book form? The easy answer is dollars. But if Christians concentrated on writing excellent books that communicated the gospel, without even looking in the direction of the soapbox, I have no doubt that more would find a market. In addition, Christians have got to pull their heads out of the sand and celebrate and encourage the work of someone who breaks out. I can’t think of an example at the moment, which makes me sad.

Rushkoff’s hypothetical “What if the Bible were happening right now?” is actually a reality. The Bible, that grand story, is happening now. We are living that story. But are we telling it? Are we (esp. Pentecostals) taking Acts 2 to heart and preaching the gospel of Christ in every language (linguistic and socially constructed) by the power of the Holy Spirit? What would the world look like if we were?

Mark Joseph is a smart fellow, and while the lawsuit he writes about may not be common knowledge, it raises (or re-raises) important questions about how to live Christianly, how to “impact” or “engage” the culture with art. In other words, I think Joseph’s ideas apply equally to fiction and movies and fine art, as well as music.

His ideas correspond to N.T. Wright’s ideas on how to live the gospel, to talk about new creation to the broken world. You can hear them via mp3, or read them in this transcription of a similar talk, or read them in the book, The Challenge of Jesus, especially the chapter entitled “Walking to Emmaus in a Postmodern World.” It’s powerful and tremendously important.

In short, if you want to change the world, to be a conduit for this resurrection life (what C.S. Lewis called ‘zoe’ as opposed to regular life, ‘bios’), then you need to (a) produce something excellent, whether it’s novels, or music, or films, or pipe cleaners, (b) let people know that you’re making something excellent, and (c) make sure they understand, when you’re given the inevitable opportunity, why what you do is excellent. You must never say, as the Christian music-and-publishing complex seems to, “Sure, you might like it, and it might even change your life, but don’t expect too much since we don’t have the big bucks that the devil’s pals do.” That’s as outlandish as it sounds.

Anyway, I commend to you Joseph’s article, and the kind of life that Wright and Lewis describe. I’m not there yet, but I think I’m on the path.

From Kendall Harmon’s TitusOneNine blog:

A Communion sermon by new Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said Christians are children of “our mother Jesus.” Some objected to such gender-bending, but she drew upon metaphors from the 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich. Underlying that, Jesus compared himself to a compassionate mother hen (Luke 13:34).

Here’s an example of what’s at stake not only in the Episcopal church, but in the church at large. We can and should recognize the genderlessness of God. He is neither male nor female in His essence. HOWEVER, he has revealed himself, by choice, first as Father and then in the human being Jesus of Nazareth.

Though the Scriptures apply mother-imagery to God along with father-imagery, IMO we sail into stormy waters when we begin to speak of ‘our mother Jesus’. Jesus used the mother hen simile (remember, comparison using like or as), but he did not say he was Jerusalem’s mother.

This is an example, I think, of doing violence to Scripture. And if things continue as they are going (including purging the liturgy of “anti-Semitism”), then we’ll move from stormy waters to the eye of a hurricane.

Jesus’ compassion is characterized by a downward pull. That is what disturbs us. We cannot even think about ourselves in terms other than those of an upward pull, an upward mobility in which we strive for better lives, higher salaries, and more prestigious positions. Thus, we are deeply disturbed by a God who embodies a downward movement. Instead of striving for a higher position, more power, and more influence, Jesus moves, as Karl Barth says, from “the heights to the depth, from victory to defeat, from riches to poverty, from triumph to suffering, from life to death.” Jesus’ whole life and mission involve accepting powerlessness and revealing in this powerlessness the limitlessness of God’s love.

(From Compassion by Henri Nouwen, et. al.)