It’s been a little while since I blogged for you - things have been crazy busy - and now you’re going to have to wait a bit longer. Both of you.
I’m off to Canada for a week starting tomorrow, visiting my girl. It should be awesome, if a little overwhelming. Wish me luck!
Most Sunday nights, recently, it’s been movie night over at Andy and Emma’s. I’m hard pressed to think of a better way to spend a quiet night.
Out of the films we’ve seen recently, the stand-out has to be King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, possibly the best documentary I’ve seen in years. On paper, it should be rubbish. Nerd holds Donkey Kong record for a few decades. Other nerd breaks record. First nerd doesn’t like his crown being taken, so pulls out all the stops to discredit the new record and maintain his status.
The thing is, it’s actually amazing. The human drama is astonishing and the characters are so cinematic and epic in their way. As I said to Andy, playing video games and watching science fiction gives people a tendency to self-mythologise. These guys take themselves very seriously.
I was delighted to read Jordan Green’s review over at Burnside Writers’ Collective, which summed up my feelings better than I can:
If this was fiction, it’d be too perfect. Billy Mitchell’s precise half-mullet and glinting, swarthy eyes would be cliche. Steve Wiebe’s baby face and soft voice would be too obvious…he resembles a pudgy Luke Skywalker, for pete’s sake. That these two remarkably cookie cutter characters would battle so passionately for a prize only one of them could hold would be an unfathomable coincidence. If this was fiction, critics would mock it mercilessly for being simple and contrived.
But it’s real.
Andy and I have already cast the fictional remake with Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell and Steve Carrell. Judd Apatow, you know where to find me.
Following on from yesterday’s post about Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change, I wanted to look at the issue of “catastrophism” in modern politics.
There’s a strong element of impending disaster that pervades the book - especially McLaren’s use of words like “crisis” and “unsustainable” as well as his overriding metaphor of the world as a “suicide machine”, a system that has set itself on course for its own destruction. His real views are probably a little more nuanced than his language sometimes suggests, but this is how he expresses himself in Everything Must Change.
Now this kind of language is present just about everywhere these days, especially in reference to global warming and terrorism. Drastic steps are justified on the basis of the worst-case scenario that is painted. But equally, opponents can discredit the entire argument where the worst-case scenario goes beyond the evidence.
I believe in man-made climate change and the need to address it through major technological and economic change. I believe that third-world poverty is a damning indictment on the West - and that resentment against Western decadence and greed is fuelling terrorism and war. These are real issues and sometimes strong language needs to be used to drive decision-makers and the public to action. But the language of catastrophe can do serious harm to your credibility and drive misinformed decisions.
By way of example, the neo-Malthusians with their concerns about the world’s population carrying capacity are damaged by the fact that their intellectual father, Thomas Malthus, was wrong 200 years ago about much the same thing.
There may be times when catastrophe is genuinely imminent but so many activists are the boys and girls who have cried wolf. We have heard of too many impending scenarios of doom to entirely believe the next one.
I think Brian McLaren and a lot of others are smart people and they understand nuance - they’re just not sure that their readers will, or they think that their readers will use subtlety as an excuse to do nothing. I think that we should assume the best in these situations and trust the recipients of our message.
On moral issues like global poverty, I don’t think we need to convince everyone that food riots will reach their suburb - because in all likelihood they won’t. The appalling injustice of it all is enough. I don’t need to believe that we will run out of oil in the next ten years to try and cut my consumption. The virtues of efficiency and simplicity are enough.
Embellishment and exaggeration are more likely to give people an “out” once they realise they’ve been had.
After hearing a lot about it, I finally read Brian McLaren’s newish book, Everything Must Change, over the weekend and I have a lot of thoughts arising from it. First of all, it was a great read and full of inspiring thoughts about the Christian response to poverty and the environment (hint: we’re for one of them and against the other). I thoroughly recommend it as a book to make you assess your own life and faith in a new light.
I do, however, have some issues that I want to discuss. These aren’t so much to do with Brian himself, and I’m wary of being one of the people who assumes they can judge his entire theology from one book, but they’re rather broader issues about how we talk about Jesus and how we talk about politics. I’ll talk about the theology (which I’m scarcely qualified to discuss) first and then the politics (which I’m much more equipped on) tomorrow.
Again, I have to say that I really appreciate Brian bringing the focus around to Jesus’ thoughts and actions to do with justice and peace. He’s at his best when he’s showing what Jesus wasn’t like and what he was concerned about. The co-option of Christianity by the forces of wealth and inequality should be a big concern and Brian is right to point out that Jesus wasn’t just here to tell us what theology to believe so we don’t get burnt.
The problem is really that there’s not much in the Jesus described in Everything Must Change to set him apart from all other wise moral teachers of history. His message is largely that we should live within limits, care for each other and respect God’s creation. These are not controversial thoughts, especially within the political left.
I was left with the feeling that the Jesus on display here was the ultimate left-wing performance artist; acting out and describing a moral and ethical system that people had come up with before and would come up with again. Kind of Mahatma Gandhi with better party tricks.
In essence, McLaren is pointing out the social justice elements within the Christian tradition, without showing any clear distinction between it and any other social tradition. There’s really nothing in this picture of Jesus to attract anyone from an agnostic or a Buddhist background. He’s really just a way for the culturally Christian to embed their social concerns into their own religious framework.
Maybe McLaren isn’t concerned about Christianity having any superior claims over other ethical or religious traditions - and considering the appalling superiority complex we Christians often demonstrate, I don’t really blame him for moving away from that kind of comparison. But I am left with the question “Why Jesus?” Do I listen to Jesus’ message because I was brought up a Christian and he’s the logical go-to man? Or is there genuinely something about the carpenter from Nazareth that was different and special? What was it about his life and death and life-after-death that makes him more worthy of my time and commitment than Gandhi or Jose Ramos-Horta or Nelson Mandela or any other prophet of love and tolerance?
I think there is. I think the fact that he was the Son of God and had a supernatural ministry and has given us his Holy Spirit to work in us and make us more like him is important. You just wouldn’t get that from reading Everything Must Change.
