Emerging Africa

Cross-posted from Emergent Villiage

He said to me: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.” [Revelation 1]

• Is there a parallel between our questions of origin and our questions of destiny?
  
• Does the emergent view put us in a position to understand and deal with these questions better than our forebears?
  
• Can we ask these questions in a fresh way, so as to bypass the clichéd discussions of evolution vs. creation and original sin or original blessing (on the alpha end), or hell vs. heaven (at the omega)?
  
• How are such obviously speculative ideas going to change how we behave; do they have practical relevance for mission?

With the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project we are now better poised than ever before to answer questions pertaining to life’s origins. As I understand it, this will be done by focusing in on the sub-atomic details at the first instant following the mythical “Big Bang”.

This is not the first time science has felt that it was on the verge of the Big Answer. For much of the 19th Century the feeling was that we were just crossing the t in “atom” and dotting the i in “gravitation”, and about to arrive at full disclosure. Then along came relativity and quantum theory, and it was back to the square root of 1.

I often think about how this sense of certainty rubbed off on theology and general thinking. Having been freed from the shackles of the Catholic Church, the Reformation developed a mirror approach. The pope was out, the bible in; salvation by works out, salvation by faith in. The pillars of the Reform movement, including Sola Scriptura (by scripture alone), Sola Fide (by faith alone), and Solus Christus (Christ Alone), began to peddle exclusivity in its emphasis on “sola”, creating closed sets of possibility.

Together with the dominant cosmology derived from Newton (determinism, the belief in a closed universe etc.) and the reductionist epistemology of Descartes (I doubt all things except that I think) this closed-down orthodoxy was a powerful paradigm in which creativity and cosmogenesis were effectively locked out.

One word which has come to describe this paradigm is Modernity. What is significant about these times in which we live, move and have our being, is that we have crossed the self-constructed borders of Modernism (the isms arising from Modernity). A genuinely new view awaits us, where we can deconstruct and reinvent much of what has always had more worth than what we commonly put our stock in, and whose worth extends beyond the grave, beyond matter and things. We are not just in a position to embrace a brave new world, but also reclaim that which modernism rejected—fine traditions and values at odds with the Modern myth of “eternal progress”.

I’m keenly fascinated to unearth the relationship between origins and destiny, to follow the rhizome joining our horizons of perception. It’s clear that the best we might do in the LHC is to step back a few slithers of a second, to perhaps uncover a first cause. This is by no means certain—physicist Stephen Hawking himself has a $100 bet that the elusive “God Particle” (The Higgs boson) will not be found. What he does say though, is that things will be found. It’s that spirit of adventure that really marks the human, and dare I say, the divine as well.

This is not about filling in the gaps in a given matrix. This is about getting beyond that matrix altogether. That is what marks the age of emergence, this liminal space between epochs: the adventure of living.

In my fascination with the Omega end of the question, I have been reading Four Views on Hell (Zondervan 1996, edited by William Crockett), in which the Literal Punitive, Metaphorical Punitive, Conditional Immortality (Annihilationist), and Purgatoritive views of Christian eschatology are debated. If my aim had been to find the truth of our destiny, I would be a defeated man having read it. Every view makes perfect sense within its set of assumptions. But, one bible (grudgingly including apocryphal writings, plus a very grudging hearing of a Roman Catholic doctrine based mostly on tradition), and four devout, well-trained “men of God” have produced four substantially incompatible Christian views of our destiny.

So what do I do? Anxiously choose one and hope for the best? Actually, I’m feeling rather liberated. Not because the heaven vs. hell question has “been resolved”, but rather that it seems to be “unresolvable”, at least using the approach that was used. There is a certain unknowability concerning both the alpha and the omega. Whew; I think I’ll just chill out now.

Maybe not knowing where it’s going is exactly what is needed. So that I might let go, and that in this postmodern space, I might finally come to faith. Faith on the basis of what I hold intrinsically true about Grace and Love as being central to God’s very being. Rather than the program of the future—”How do we get these saved from damnation?” or “How do we get this lot believing right?”—fuelled by a coherent set of propositions.

In his second book The Fidelity of Betrayal, Peter Rollins suggests that our Christian approach has been, in this order: 1) Belief, 2) Behavior, and 3) Belonging. Meaning firstly get your doctrines right, this will lead to a moral life, and once you are morally acceptable, you can be a church member. Rollins proposes rather that we turn that on its head: 1) Belonging, 2) Behavior, and 3) Belief.

If any sustainable change is possible at all, people need to feel accepted, unconditionally. They need to start by belonging. Genuine relationships will naturally affect how we behave. Once this transformation is underway, we can consider what it is we believe. The theory can follow the praxis.

Rollins, more radically, is claiming that Faithfulness to God’s Mission will at times mean we betray existing manifestations of that “mission”. We might need to review our view of the scriptures, how we commonly interpret them, and what our philosophies of being church entail.

This betrayal, this “losing my religion”, does not result in spiritual nihilism, but rather quite the opposite: I can now discover the adventure of the future, for it is in this that true mission—inclusive, selfless, communal, adventurous, and love-infused—might be engaged.

The Gospel of John reports, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

And if this points to a hopeful destiny, John goes on to infer a hopeful origin too, “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” Amongst the obvious evils, which are cast away by our first cause, The Light of the World, lurks a pernicious and subtle idol: rationalistic certitude as a basis for faith.