What Makes a Speaker Persuasive?

18 05 2012

In his treatise on rhetoric, when Aristotle set out to express the factor that makes a public speaker most persuasive, he elected an element not many of us would choose. To Aristotle, a speaker’s most powerful weapon is not logos: it is not his unanswerable logic, argumentation, insightful content. It was not the eloquence and rhythm of his words. Nor was it pathos: someone’s passion, emotion, intensity of expression, full range of body moves.

Instead of logos and pathos, Aristotle chose instead ethos: the speaker’s character. For him, more important than what was said, or how intensely it was said, was who said it. A speaker’s character is his or her most persuasive trait. His ethos, comprised for Aristotle of wisdom, virtue, and goodness toward the audience, is what speaks loudest to the people who hear his words.[1]

I confess that I felt surprised, even disappointed, when I came upon Aristotle’s choice some years ago. True, if a speaker’s life does not match his words, the most eloquent of speeches won’t get a listening. But provided he is a decent person, I thought, and nothing could be held against him, clearly logos and pathos were much sharper arrows. Aristotle should just listen to Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream, and notice his choice of metaphors, the rhythm of language and repetition, his use of songs and scriptures to ground his argument, and the bursting, passionate delivery of his rising words – until he reaches a stirring climax with “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last” – to realize that ethos is no match for logos and pathos.

But as Aristotle’s observation remained in the back of my mind, and I came to listen to numerous speakers over the years, I grudgingly and slowly gave in to Aristotle. The master philosopher was right also on this one. And what convinced me of Aristotle’s choice for ethos was this: think of a good speaker you heard a while ago. You may remember a couple good insights; maybe a carefully constructed sentence, if he was really able and repeated the sentence at key points. You may remember a moving story or a passionate delivery.

But what stuck? What addresses you still? It is not words or emotions: it is the speaker’s soul. The questions that remain over time are: how good was that person? Did her humility lower my barriers, and did her benevolence attract my heart, so our personalities could meet? How much did she penetrate into me? Was there a communication of spirit? More than the delivery of a message, was there an encounter? Like Aristotle pointed out, it is the speaker’s spirit that communicates the most. Words may inform our minds, emotions may move our hearts, but we are permanently
 transformed only if a speaker’s character is compelling, and a piece of his soul penetrates into ours.

I’m an avid speech listener. I will pay almost whatever cost to go hear the best speakers, and to savour that multiplicity of words, emotions and spirit packed beautifully into a few moments. I search across history to find and read the most compelling rhetoric ever articulated, trying to imagine what it was like to be there and listen, feeling the speaker’s soul project forward and move through the audience. I confess I have even prayed a couple times for God to let me experience in a dream what it was like was to sit under George Whitefield, as he swept whole cities and countries with his eloquence in the eighteenth century. But nothing makes my heart beats faster than to imagine myself among the crowds that once filled the beaches and hills of Galilee, as word got around that a prophet was in town, next to people who walked for weeks to hear him speak, and to relish Jesus’ words, and feel the gravity of his personality, and be infused by his spirit, and press through the crowd, until I could get a glimpse of his eyes, and go home with a piece of that soul in mine.

René Breuel

[1] Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric (New York: Penguin, 2005), book 2.1.5-9

 


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Making Our Mark

7 05 2012

“If our life were without end and free from pain, it would possibly not occur to anyone to ask why the world exists.”  So said German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer around a century and a half ago in The World as Will and Representation, and it is a sentiment that would be echoed by many today, no doubt.  The reality and inevitability of death haunts our steps as human beings, regardless of whether we claim to be religious or not.   Every worldview must somehow come to terms with death.

One such attempt is seen in an article by Richard Handler that deals with the subject of death from an atheistic perspective.  The article is focused on atheist author and psychiatrist Irvin Yalom who, while acknowledging the fear and despair that accompany our peculiar ability as a species to foresee our own deaths, argues that the concept of “rippling” is a way of ameliorating these fears:

Rippling refers to the fact that each us creates—often without conscious intent or knowledge—concentric circles of influence that may affect others for years, even for generations…. [Y]ou can leave behind “something from your life experience, some trait; some piece of wisdom, guidance, virtue, comfort that passes onto others, known or unknown.” The key here is human connection, which touches other lives in secret and untold ways.

There is obviously a measure of truth to this. The kinds of people we are have lasting influences on those around us. We leave a mark. The problem is, that while we might prefer that those elements of who we are that “ripple” out would be positive, life-affirming things, often the marks we leave can be rather ugly ones. Even the most morally upright among us will leave, at best, a mixed legacy. The ripples that go out from our lives have the ability to affect both for good and for ill.

Handler comes close to noticing the problem:

What about those whose lives don’t noticeably ripple into a loving community? People do die without friends, alone and miserable, in prisons and cyclones. I have known people who will be missed by absolutely nobody. What rippling effect do they have?

His answer? While acknowledging that “the idea of rippling can be abstract,” in the end the best it seems we can hope for is that we “can gain comfort in thinking that one’s atoms can ripple and dissolve into the universe… All of us ripple in ways we are not even aware of.”

Far from addressing the question, this seems to simply be a restatement of the issue.  Yes, all of us do “ripple” in ways we are not even aware of.  That’s the problem! Human history is the story of both tremendous good and radical evil “rippling” down throughout history, one leaving inspiring traces of what we think we are here for, the other poisoning the lives of individuals and communities indefinitely. The problem isn’t just that some individuals and communities don’t leave much of a “ripple” or don’t “ripple” well; the problem is that some “rippling” is downright toxic.

What we need is not some vague sentiment that the best of who we are will somehow trickle down and have some marginal impact on a few people for a brief flicker of cosmic time. What we need is a vision of the future and of what it means to be a human being that can transcend and is not tied to our own inconsistent, fragile, conflicted, and transient identities and moral performances.

The beginnings of one such vision is articulated by Yale theologian Miroslav Volf who, in The End of Memory, eloquently identifies both the problem with “rippling” as a response to death and the Christian alternative:

We are neither made nor unmade by what we do or by what others do to us. The heart of our identity lies not in our hands, but in God’s hands. We are most properly ourselves because God is in us and we are in God. No doubt, what we or others have inscribed onto our souls and bodies marks us and helps shape who we are. Yet it has no power to define us. God’s love for us, indeed God’s presence in us and our being “caught up beyond” ourselves and being placed “into God” most fundamentally defines us as human beings and as individuals.

The Christian hope is that what is good, and worth preserving from human history will be validated, and rendered permanent in God’s new creation. Correspondingly, that which was false and evil, that which “rippled” down through the millennia damaging and defacing God’s good world, destroying relationships, fostering fear and enmity, and barring the way for people to experience the shalom God intended for them will be judged, healed, and forgotten. It will “ripple” no longer.

Ryan Dueck


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A Tale of Two Politicians, and of Redemption

30 04 2012

Injustice smells. There is a nauseating odor to it: toxic, enraging, sad. And when we see someone who cheated and betrayed, someone who let us down, it is hard to find satisfaction more pleasing to our guts than to beat him up, to make him pay for his sins.

Two politicians made me think of this last week. The first was John Edwards, an once-promising American presidential candidate, charming in his looks and in his words, but who betrayed his terminally ill wife and lied about. Caught right in the middle of his presidential campaign, Edwards faced last week his trial. But as Washington Post contributor Christ Cillizza pointed out, it was a trial more about feelings than legal procedures: “This trial — regardless of the outcome — amounts to one last chance for the public to express its disdain for a man who cheated on his terminally ill wife, lied about it, fathered a child out of wedlock, lied about it and is now left searching for some strands of redemption or, at least, forgiveness.” It is another chance to look at a man who fell, fell from really high up, and make him pay.

The second politician, Charles Colson, had an even more spectacular fall: the Watergate disgrace, maybe the most famous corruption scandal of modern politics, when Colson helped a team of then-president Richard Nixon’s reelection committee to break into and tap the offices of his political opponents. Colson and others were sent to prison for this, but then he underwent a conversion, narrated in his bestseller Born Again, and became a devout Christian. Colson then dedicated the second part of his life to start a ministry that reaches out to prisoners, and become a major evangelical leader.

The thing is: Colson died last week, and, curiously, his obituaries at major newspapers have varied in tone. Some narrated the whole of his life, and praised his conversion and the good he made after it. Others, however, were cynical, and implied that his life change was just smokescreen, that Colson remained the Watergate dirty trickster for all his life, that the redemption of such a treacherous man could not possibly be true. How could it?

Redemption is hard to believe in. It really is. Especially because it is such a personal matter: I am treacherous too, I’m the one deserving condemnation, and I can’t possibly believe that I could find redemption. An observer of the reactions to Colson’s death put it well: “When you read those who smirk and dismiss the Chuck Colson conversion, …  [r]ead a subtext that belongs to all of us: the fear that the criminal conspiracy we’ve all been a part of will be exposed, and just can’t be forgiven. Read the undercurrent of those who find it hard to believe that one can be not just pardoned, but “born again… That’s indeed hard to believe.”

But what if redemption is possible? What if people like Edwards or Colson can really be forgiven and start anew? What if I can be forgiven? What if I can end this life with my head raised high, with no finger pointing at me, redeemed by the grace of Christ, and have something like the following scenario for Colson’s death be true also for me?

I have to believe that when Chuck Colson opened his eyes in the moments after death that he didn’t hear anything about break-ins or dirty tricks or guilty consciences. I have to believe Mr. Colson heard a Galilean voice saying, “I was in prison and you visited me” (Matt. 25:36). I have to believe that he stood before his Creator with a new record, a new life transcript, one that belonged not to himself but to a Judean day-laborer who is now the ruler of the cosmos… That’s good news for guilty consciences, good news for recovering hatchet men and women like us.

Indeed it is good news, almost too good to be true. But true it is, and deliciously, liberatingly, scintillatingly good too. Redemption is possible, not despite the greatness of our sins, but because of the greatness of Jesus’ grace for us.

René Breuel


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Why Church Control must be Crucified

25 04 2012

The Church is about controlling people. The overbearing Pastor dominates the congregation, playing lead role and telling the others what to do. Some people avoid the Church like the plague, hoping they’ll be safer outside. Yet even there the Church interferes. One blogger commented on the decline of the Church in Australia. His solution was that the Church “stop sticking their noses into everyone else’s business: politics, child raising, court systems, sexual preference etc. etc.” With all our lobbying for political control, we’re known more for what we stand against than what we stand for. Our grab for authority and casting of judgment has obscured God’s grace and the call to life. … At least that’s how it’s perceived.[1]

Okay, is this what it should be? The Church isn’t an organisation; it’s an organism. It’s a bunch of people who when put together should look like Jesus. So how did Jesus wear his authority? Was he about control?

Well, first things first, there’s a big difference between legitimate, and illegitimate authority. I can’t walk into your workplace and start telling people what to do. Why? Well, I’m not the boss. But let’s say I was ….. So let’s try a thought experiment. If Jesus really is the Son of God, as he claimed to be, that changes everything. If it’s true, doesn’t he have legitimate authority? And can’t he extend this authority to whoever he wishes? Then the real question is, How did Jesus choose to use this authority? The bottom line is this: Jesus was no authoritarian dictator; he wielded his ultimate authority with absolute humility.

Have you ever seen that TV show “Undercover Boss”? The idea’s simple: the boss of a massive company dons the worker’s uniform and enters into their company as one of the team … scrubbing dishes, delivering mail, answering phones. The boss gets to know their staff on the ground, as an equal; and at the end of the week, everyone’s shocked as his or her true identity is revealed. Same with Jesus, the ultimate undercover boss. Take two incidents.

First, Easter. Everyone has abandoned Jesus. Peter backstabbed him three times. They feel like dirt, guilty as hell, as now that Jesus has been crucified, they’ve run in fear back to their old lives. Peter and the crew are out in the boat. But while they’re out fishing and serving themselves, who should be on the beach cooking them an awesome meal of fish over the fire, but the leader himself, Jesus. He beat death. He is the boss. Peter’s probably thinking, “I’m in deep trouble.” Now, there is stuff to talk through, and a relationship to mend. But there’s no lecture and no punishment. Just forgiveness and love. “For God didn’t send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to savethe world through Him” (John 3:17).

Second incident, John 8.[2] Know the story? A woman is caught in the act of having sex with someone else’s husband. Under the religious laws, she should be killed, stoned to death. They throw her in the dirt in front of Jesus. “Your call, Jesus.” But he turns the tables: “Whoever is without sin, you cast the first stone.” One by one they drop the rocks, and leave. But notice what Jesus says. “Woman, where are your accusers? Now, go and sin no more.” … “Sin no more.” He’s not there to judge. But nor is he saying to this lady and her male friend (who has conveniently escaped, “Guys, do what you want: keep wrecking families and doing damage.”

The Church is meant to look like Jesus. Our role is not to judge, or grasp for control.  But nor is it to ignore when stuff’s not right. If we truly love someone, we won’t watch silently on while they hurt themselves, or others. As a parent, if your four-year-old went to stick a fork into a live power socket, would you say something? To not is negligent. Worse, it’s unloving.

Jesus did call out sin, but it was out of love. And Jesus gave the Church, as his body, that same authority. It’s not to condemn. It’s so people will turn from death, from sin, and choose what leads to life and freedom.

Jesus was no control freak. When the disciples fought over who would be first, he donned a slave’s towel and washed their feet. “Whoever wants to be first must be last. Are you greater than your master? I came not to be served, but to serve, and to give my life as a ransom.” Jesus wore his authority with humility. He leveraged his power on behalf of the least. And as his body, the Church should too.

Jesus wasn’t about being the star of the show—he’s the undercover boss. And he gives equal authority to every Christian, not to one mega-leader to manipulate the rest.  It’s only when we’re all together, serving each other, that the Church looks like Jesus. The authority we have isn’t to control. Instead, our authority is to serve each other, and give up our life to help a hurting world. That’s why Church control must be crucified.

Harsh judgmentalism and control issues are often identified with the culture wars, especially in America. So before you go back to your everyday existence, to a society that prizes power, take a look at the cruciform Church’s authority expressed in an edgy city like San Francisco. Every week, dozens of followers of Jesus from different denominations gather together as one body, the Church, to serve the least of these under the Golden Gate Bridge.[3]

Dave Benson

[1] See, for instance, www.unchristian.com, the Australian Communities Report, Dan Kimball’s book They Like Jesus but Not the Church.

[2] Whilst this story’s location (John 7:53-8:11) jumps around John’s Gospel in the earliest manuscripts—it was clearly a later interpolation, though perhaps by John or another early editor—there are still solid arguments for its authenticity, and it resonates with both Jesus’ teaching and example. See here.

[3] From Dan Merchant’s DVD, “Lord, Save Us From Your Followers,” lordsaveusthemovie.com. Also, to further explore the question “Is the Church relevant,” see www.kbc.org.au/media/message-logos-is-the-church-relevant/  for a response to the perceived control, exclusivity and hypocrisy of the contemporary church.


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Housekeeping and Its Glories

20 04 2012

For me there is something satisfying about giving your house a good scrub and then sitting down in the midst of organization and cleanliness to enjoy a good book and a cup of tea on a Sunday afternoon. More than an abstract satisfaction associated with cleaning, I feel it like a satisfaction of putting your own space in order. There is something unique about home, a kind of familiarity that develops into a special sort of appreciation. In my case, I can tell where the cat is walking by the creak of particular floorboards, I know exactly which spaces get the right sort of light for reading a book, and each corner of home has potent memories associated with it. Housekeeping offers a way of defending the importance of the bundle of memories and reflexes which we associate with our home.

This can extend beyond the walls of your apartment and function on a city-level too. I’m always excited to run into someone from my hometown of Seattle as no one else understands the many things (refined appreciation of well-roasted coffee or a love of the mixed smells of rain and cedar trees) which are unique to my geographical home. There is an unavoidably intimate bond you share with a person who has drunk in the same smells and sights over a lifetime. New places that we experience get absorbed into our place-memory, but we nevertheless tend to experience an anchoring in time and place.

Contrary to what some might think, this familiarity is actually an experience that we share with God. The writer of the gospel of John surely had this in mind when he recounts, “So the Word became flesh; he made his home among us” (Jn 1:14 REB). In John’s original Greek, the word translated as “made his home” (literally “tabernacled”) refers back to the Tabernacle in Exodus, where we are also reminded that God asked the people to make space for him to be with them in a way that resonates with our own unique anchoring in place and time. But the suggestion here isn’t that God becomes a permanent guest staying in our space, but rather than he takes up residence in our home along with us, sharing our intimate emplaced experience with us.

While other religious traditions emphasise the distance of God from men and our dusty spaces, Jesus uniquely emphasised his sharing in our embeddedness. And contrary to what we might expect, this intimacy does not diminish the power of God. Instead, the familiarity that brings satisfaction to housekeeping is another form of the intimacy known by the maker of all time and space.

Jeremy Kidwell


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The Texture of Reality

9 04 2012

A touch. A fingertip feeling pulsing muscles and skin – the same fingertip that had felt the temperature of a glass of milk, that had flowed through curtains and childrens’ hair – is the fingertip Caravaggio uses for the climax of the Christian epic: Thomas finally settles his doubts and touches Jesus’ crucifixion marks. When the women and the other ten apostles told Thomas Jesus had appeared to them after his death, he could not believe it. But this touch…

The apostles did not believe it either when they first heard from the women – but then they saw him, and the unexpected became true. Still, Thomas could not believe it. And who can judge him? Even if his closest companions attested that they had seen Jesus alive after his death, Thomas could still hear the nails being driven into his hands, smell the blood flowing from his wounds, see the dust floating across the light beams as they placed Jesus’ body in a tomb. He had seen a dead body, lifeless, cold, still. And only undeniable proof could change Thomas’ mind: “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” [1]

For Thomas, the days between the news of the resurrection and his own encounter with Jesus must have been anguished. He wanted to believe, of course; he wanted to see his old friend back to life, to see death defeated before his eyes. But the texture of reality around him breathed a different spirit: cold, earthly, indifferent, often cruel. Thomas saw the world turning gray on that Friday afternoon, his friend crucified on a cross and his hope crucified within. The touch of Jesus’ cold body must have lingered on his fingers, the touch of incarnated goodness now reduced to a static corpse, violated and beaten.

But then Jesus appears to him, seemingly beyond logic, and Thomas’ finger is warmed by life and blood. Hard bone, pulsing flesh, the sound of heartbeat; a live breathing body, not the lifeless corpse he had touched before. Caravaggio amplifies the drama of this encounter with a technique called chiaroscuro, which he had learned from Leonardo da Vinci: the background is dark, and light is poured on Jesus’ body. To Thomas this scene is more concrete and physical than anything around them. In fact, this moment will illuminate his life from now on: it will be the clarity which makes sense of this dark world, the understanding that will reshape his fears and hopes and loves and desires.

Thomas’ reality is changed. The light of this moment, the warmth of this touch will stay on with him. His finger will carry this warmth as he touches faces or mud or spears, as he grabs a hard stone or as he touches his brides’ arm. He won’t even be able to eat the essential elements of the Mediterranean cuisine – bread, wine, water, oil – without remembering the resurrected Christ. Thomas’ senses are impregnated; his sight and smell and touch and taste and ears carry the ring of the resurrection. The texture of reality now breathes and pulses with life, even as he ventures later into the dark cold background.

René Breuel

[1] John 24:25


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Deeper Magic

6 04 2012

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

In 1922 T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land, a lengthy, complex poem that solidified his position at the pinnacle of the Modernist movement—a movement characterized by its sense that the traditional structures of art, culture, and religion were “like an old bitch gone in the teeth,” discredited, impotent. For Modernism, all that remained of western culture was a heap of broken images for the artist to sift through, reassembling the few usable shards into something new, something that might speak to a new generation.

Naturally, Modernists thought the Christian faith might provide some useful images but Christianity—along with the notion of an all-powerful, benevolent God—were most certainly passé. As the title suggests, The Waste Land reflects on the bleak, meaningless nature of modern life as the chorus of voices that weave in and out of the poem search for some sort of meaning, something to redeem the destructive impulses of passionless and sterile sex, rape, addiction, and suicide.

Needless to say, the literary world was somewhat puzzled when Eliot—this Modernist visionary—went on to publish The Journey of the Magi in 1927 and then Ash Wednesday in 1930. These poems—particularly Ash Wednesday— mark, in no uncertain terms, his conversion to a very traditional and highly orthodox version of the Christian faith. Eliot’s poetic and religious journey from the waste land of modern life to a redemptive vision for the individual and society culminated in The Four Quartets. Rather than filling the Modernist call to build something new out of the discredited rubble of the past, The Four Quartets are a re-presentation of the Christian narrative in the language of Modernism.

The quartets grapple with the great mysteries of the Christian faith celebrated in the Christian year: Holy Week, the Incarnation, Pentecost. Underlying these mysteries—and Eliot’s exploration of them—is the question, how can one man’s death in the first century in Palestine bring about the salvation of the world? How can his death bring about forgiveness for other people’s sins?

Like the writer of the biblical letter of Hebrews, Eliot knows this great mystery can only begin to be apprehended through rethinking linear time. Thus, he begins with cosmic history and the “intersection of the timeless with time,” which he calls the “still-point of the turning world.” The moments of the Incarnation (which Christians celebrate at Christmas) and Holy Week (in which Christians celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus) are not discrete, disconnected events but the epicenter of the great cosmic quake that occurs when God enters human history. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are the center, the axis around which the rest of history revolves, with the ripples from this “timeless moment” stretching before and after. Each previous foreshadowing act of redemption in the Christian narrative—the ram God provides in lieu of Isaac, the exodus of Israel from slavery in Egypt—and each act of redemption—individual or corporate—to come are ripples from the epicenter marked by the cross.

As this image of salvation rippling out suggests, each moment and each individual agent in history is not a discreet unit operating under its own direction. To say that people and events are influenced by what comes before is too weak and linear a way of understanding the actuality of the apparently impossible union of the timeless God with human history. It is as if the eternal, infinite energy of God piercing into the finite universe in the person of Jesus is what gives narrative motion to all of history and, as such, that divine disturbance claims for itself all those who are willing to be claimed in its temporal ripples.

How can that be? As with the Medieval champion or the ancient King, Jesus’ fate is the fate of his followers, just as each ripple in a pond is really just the visual impact of the stone that breaks the water’s surface. Jesus’ death is able to effect this ultimate resurrection and redemption because, while all that is mortal can only die, death—in claiming the immortal for itself—begins working backward, as C. S. Lewis put it. Destruction and brokenness, in overstepping their bounds by breaking and destroying the holy perfection of God-made-Man, are defeated and the holy God who formed heaven and earth shows himself victorious on behalf of all who will be claimed by his kingship.

Jessica Hughes


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The Upper Hand of Evil

4 04 2012

Is goodness feasible in an evil world? Can we maintain innocence as we seek to enter and influence the tough dynamics of the marketplace, politics and society? Can we sustain love and generosity for people who disdain and even abuse us? Or, to put it in biblical language, is it possible to follow Christ through a path that does not lead to a cross? For anyone who has really attempted it, the practicalities of goodness are no small challenge.

A painting got me thinking about these things – actually, a painting based on a novel. Erich Heckel’s Two Men at the Table uses spectral colors and pointed lines to convey a tortured scene of anguish and tension. We see two men around a table in a claustrophobic little room, a piece of paper and a knife between them, a portrait which seems to haunt the encounter and a crude picture of Jesus on the cross, surrounded by a bloodied atmosphere. The older man leans forward, apparently challenging or menacing the younger man, who does not know what to do, oppressed by faces and colors alike.

Heckel drew inspiration for this scene from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, and subtitled the painting, “To Dostoyevsky.” In this novel, the masterful Russian writer crafts the story of Prince Myshkin, a “completely beautiful human being,” as Dostoyevsky described in a letter: a generous, kind, loving, forgiving, innocent young man, who enters St. Petersburg’s corrupt society and seeks to love people, only to be dismissed and manipulated in return. Myshkin is like a figure of Christ in an un-Christian world, and he disputes the love of a stunning femme fatale with brutal Rogozhin, who attempts to kill Myshkin and who has at home a portrait of Christ taken down from the cross as a dead body without life, without hint of a possible resurrection. Beautiful Nastassya oscilates between the innocent goodness of Myshkin and the harsh character of Rogozhin, until she decides for the worse man, who kills her in the end. Heckel’s painting seems to portray this last encounter between the two men at Rogozhin’s house, where they spent a tense night veiling over Nastassya’s dead body.

Dostoyevsky’s experiment to place a good man in an evil world highlights Myshkin’s tragic fate. People don’t know what to do with him, and his purity is misunderstood and abused. A scholar described that Myshkin is a “more riddling and more tragic figure of lost absolutes. In a world where God is simply dead flesh, a good man becomes simply an idiot.”[1] We may question at several points how much Myshkin resembles Jesus’ actual example, and notice that he lacks the fiber and force of the Jesus he represents, for instance. But Myshkin reminds us still of the upper hand of evil which seemed to hover over Jesus’ last hours: Jesus facing false accusations silently, beaten and spit at, at the hands of traitors and hypocrites who take his life at the end, and who mock his final prayer, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”[2]

Yet, even as we sense the upper hand of evil seemingly everywhere, and wonder if we can emulate Jesus’ graceful endurance of mistreatment, we can also remember that the painting hanging on Rogozhin’s wall is not the end of the story. Jesus was lowered from the cross crumbled and broken, and the friends who had not fled could only weep that Friday afternoon. But Sunday was still to come, with news that would change everything; that broken body, and all the tragic human fate it sums up and represents, was gone. We may believe it or be wondering about it still, but the news of resurrection carried by the beams and airs of dawn electrified people with a cosmic kind of possibility: if that body was really gone, if Jesus had come back to life, then the matrix of reality is altered; tragedy is not the final result of goodness, nor is realism synonymous with pessimism. Evil may appear to have the upper hand, and goodness may lead to a painful cross, but there is life beyond pain, and hope beyond tragedy, and the model of one whose victory over evil changes the outcomes for us all.

René Breuel

[2] Luke 23:34


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Celebrity or Friend?

26 03 2012

Do you know any celebrities? I mean, we all “know” a lot of celebrities… otherwise, they’re not really celebrities. Of course, many celebrities have a persona that has very little to do with their ordinary selves. Fans like us live in a world of abstract concepts about celebrities: their albums, their movies, their sporting accomplishments. While we’re sometimes attracted to their “personal” lives, these usually retain the abstract element of celebrity – the big mansion, the crazy romance (and subsequent divorce). Nobody would buy a trashy-magazine with a celebrity on the cover going to the toilet – not because it’s too disgusting, but because it’s too ordinary.

Take the shock-rocker Alice Cooper, for example: his persona is one of a violent psychopath – off stage, he’s a golf-addict. I remember hearing him talk about he and Iggy Pop lamenting their poor short-game. But it had never occurred to me that people like Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop did ordinary things. I just assumed they lived in a perpetual concert.

It’d be interesting – and kinda weird – to speak to one of the ordinary friends of ordinary Alice. It might be difficult for them to explain the ordinary things they do with Alice, day by day, since they are so far removed from our expectations. We might even scoff at their discussion of him going shopping at the supermarket, to which they might say, “Well, you don’t know him like I do”. They might not even like to talk about their friendship with Alice, since it’s part of his personal life.

I think God Himself sometimes suffers from a similar sense of celebrity. In a lot of ways, He’s the Celebrity – most people have heard of Him, in some form or another, even if they have no direct relationship with Him.

One strange thing about how Christians often seek to prove the reality of God, is that we try to prove the celebrity side of Him – His abstract “stats”, like that He created the world (“… in seven days! That’s still a world record!”). This is all a rather odd thing for us to do, because we’re supposed to know God personally, as a Friend, and not merely the Celebrity. We’re supposed to have His Spirit with us as a Friend – and that’s because of God coming as Jesus Christ, Who is called in the Bible “Immanuel”, “God with us”, in relationship with us. God chose in Christ not to stay an abstract, distant Celebrity, but to become our Friend.

No wonder atheists often don’t believe in Him! Many have never met Him, personally. I struggle to conceive Alice Cooper on a golf course. They struggle to conceive of God in relationship with people like them, and us. Alice Cooper’s friend isn’t going to convince me he plays golf by talking about his stage-show. So why do we Christians consistently talk about abstract things in God?

There are two answers to that. The nastiest one is to suggest that some “Christians” are living a sham, and gave up having a personal, experienced relationship with God long ago, if they ever did. All they have left is the abstract notions about God. But I suggest that other Christians are just victims of our prevailing secular culture, that has squeezed their personal life with God into their “personal life”, that privatised secret world, and they feel they’re not allowed to discuss it. I suggest that we Christians need to get back to talking about the God we meet every day. People can argue forever about the abstract nature of an abstract celebrity, but it’s much harder to argue against the intimate relationship we have with a friend.

To my atheist friends, I can tell you that I chat with God every day (sometimes, actually, on the loo), and many times I’ve felt Him chatting back. I wouldn’t be a Christian if it was just knowing about the Celebrity God – I want to know Him, personally, relationally. And seriously, He keeps going on and on, all the time, that He wants you to know Him too. For some of us, we’ll respond that such an appeal to the experiential is too personal, too subjective. We want to talk about rational proofs for the Celebrity. That’s fine, go ahead.

But for some of you, you’re tired of just hearing about the Celebrity. Well, I’ve got Someone I’d like you to meet…

Matt Gray

 


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Categories : The Heart of Faith

Why I stopped going to Church

21 03 2012

Ah, what power there is in a word. A skilled communicator agonizes over choosing precisely the right word for the occasion—that exact nuance in a verb, a noun, or an adjective, to guide the reader’s eye and the listener’s ear to the intended message. Miscommunication is always a danger. And it’s a danger that grows with passing days, for over time language becomes loose. With use, words morph to take on reduced and alternate meanings. Awesome. Gay. Sick. Wicked. You get the picture.

So, here’s a key word from a Christian’s vocabulary: “Church.” Imagine I’m an outsider to the whole Christianity thing. Let’s see if I can define “Church” by the way most Christians speak. …

“Do you want to go to Church with me, this weekend?” “The wedding will be held at the big Church, corner of Smith and Straight Street.” “I know you’re not really into Church, but why not give it a go?” “Wasn’t worship at Church great this last Sunday?”

Okay, let’s put it together. Church is an event, a building, a hobby, and a religious club?

Now, before you accuse me of nit-picking—“It’s all semantics, Dave.  Ease up!”—realize the power of words. Christians believe it was with words that God spoke the universe into being; words are the means by which we acknowledge or deny Jesus; words convey the Gospel of life to those who haven’t heard; and words reveal the way we feel and think about our world. Maybe we need to dust off the word “Church” and get back to where it began. Until we do, our words may erect an unscalable barrier that blocks engagement with a Church-weary world.

Church: ἐκκλησία, ek-kle-siae, ecclesia. Nearly 500 years before Jesus, the ecclesia was the key assembly for ancient Athens’ democracy. Same with Rome. The ecclesia was the administrative body for the Kingdom. There were multiple Kingdom outposts, helping administer Rome’s Empire in the local regions. The ecclesia were there, like ambassadors for Rome, to make sure the everyday citizen experienced the flavour of the Kingdom. The ecclesia was not so much a place, or a program, but a people called out to represent the Kingdom in word and deed, spreading Greece’s or Rome’s influence wherever they went. The aim wasn’t to get outsiders into the ecclesia. The aim of the ecclesia was to get out and serve the citizens so they might freely align with the Kingdom.

Jesus borrowed this particular word, ekklesiai, from the political language of the day, to make sure his followers understood their call to be a new humanity, rather than forming another clique to replace the Pharisees, Sadduccees, Essenes, and Zealots. Rome was merely a cheap version of the true Kingdom, the Kingdom of God. And Christ called out and commissioned his disciples as a Kingdom outpost, to announce God’s reign and give this world a taste of how things run when God is in control (Mark 1:14-15; Luke 4:18-19). The Church isn’t a place you go. The Church is God’s pilgrim people, a body of believers selected and sent by God to administer the Kingdom and make Christ the King known by word and deed. Each region had its own ecclesia (the Church in Jerusalem, the Church in Corinth, etc.), but these various branch offices of the Kingdom were joined as one “catholic Church” as the Apostle’s Creed describes, united in Kingdom business. (Sounds ecumenical, no? Hmm.)

So, back to the present. We use “Church” with almost the exact opposite of Jesus’ intent. Instead of going to the world, we expect people to come to us. We think that getting our “lost” friends into a building to hear a religious service is the end-game for our witness. And we’ve offered the world the Church now and Heaven later, instead of the Kingdom of God which starts now and only grows in influence until the day Christ the King returns and sets everything right.

My local church knows how to celebrate when we get together on Sunday. But don’t be confused. The gathering of the ecclesia for corporate worship may attract some outsiders to align with Christ’s Kingdom. But the most powerful witness by far is when we serve up for our neighbours a taste of the Kingdom, whether by the way we love, the way we listen, or even the way we cook. 

Yes, words are powerful. The average ‘unchurched’ person has no interest in joining a religious club and tying up their sunny Sunday inside a building. But when the Church is truly the ecclesia of Christ, there is nothing more attractive and no more powerful witness. It’s our love for each other, and radical acts of loving service for those outside our community, that best points people to Jesus. And this will only happen when we stop heaping our salt in a pile, and hiding our light under a building. I mean a bushel.

So, what is the Spirit of God saying to His Church today? In short, “Get Out!” Follow Christ outside the Church building and into the midst of our post-Christendom culture. And let’s stop going to Church, and start being the Church Christ gave His life to establish—the kind of Church against which even the gates of Hell will never prevail.

Dave Benson


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Categories : On Anything and Everything, Spirituality for the Rest of Us, The Heart of Faith

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