Church as Icon of the Future
 Matthew Bartlett

The previous two weeks’ seminars on Peak Oil and Global Warming suggest to me that business as usual may be an insufficient response to the ecological crises of our time. That economics (for instance) as it is practiced now does not have the resources within it to respond appropriately or effectively, and that making tweaks to a basically OK system isn’t enough. Murray Ward, speaking here last week, made a helpful distinction between the supply-side and the demand-side of the environmental crisis. He and many others are doing excellent work on the supply-side, working for just and sustainable policies at the governmental and inter-governmental level. But on the demand-side there are many things that work against a positive response to our environmental situation.

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus published their paper The Death of Environmentalism at the beginning of this year which argues that (at least in the United States) environmentalism has lost its way. It has become too narrow, one special interest among many, offering only technical policy fixes and unable to articulate a credible vision for the future to inspire the populace.

I have noticed in my own life that as over the last few years I’ve become more ‘ecologically aware’, that’s had the effect of inoculating my circle of friends against being green – it is seen as just Matthew’s hobby. I wonder if that is the way it works on the macro scale as well: inner-city smelly people with dreadlocks become the embodiment of all things green, and the wider society is inoculated against adopting ‘all that sort of thing’, and that keeps ecological concerns forever on the fringe.

So can we get past that? How can middle New Zealand be mobilized? Shellenberger and Nordhaus write:

Environmentalists need to tap into the creative worlds of myth-making, even religion, not to better sell narrow and technical policy proposals but rather to figure out who we are and who we need to be.

…and I think they’re right on the button there. But, the mythology that is I believe most prevalent in New Zealand, and perhaps in the West generally, the story which is told over and over again on billboards and magazines and TV, pictures humans as autonomous acquisitive agents; consumers. We can get anything we want. And there is a lot to want. We are especially valued in this picture if we are rich, powerful and/or sexually attractive. The world is basically under our control, more and cleverer technology will solve all our problems, including our ecological ones. This isn’t necessarily the story that ‘mainstream’ New Zealanders feel in their bones, but it is I think the most visible one, and the one that is the native land of children growing up in our culture. It is also, as Bob Lloyd reminded us a couple of weeks ago, the story that is being broadcast from the West to China 24/7 on ten cable-TV channels at once. It’s a sort of imperialism internalized, where everyone gets to be Queen Victoria.

I suggest that an alternative mythology is required, and that the Christian Church can house, nurture, maintain and embody this alternative mythology. This different story has been summed up as “… the story of how God made the world in love, identified with the world in suffering, and restores the world through his presence in those he has called to recognise the world’s destiny as a world remade.” Particularly in its cultic gathering the church reminds itself of its story and inculturates its members into it, so that they begin to see themselves in terms of it, find their past, identity and future hope in it.

It may be helpful for me to give a brief recounting of the Christian story as I see it, so that we’re on the same page:

• God makes humanity out of the dust of the earth, breathes his spirit into their nostrils (that is the same spirit that gives life to the plants and animals and “renews the face of the ground” in Psalm 104). God describes them as “made in his image” and instructs them to “work the earth and keep it”. That is, to garden and to guard the earth. That ‘keep’ is the same ‘keep’ as in the Aaronic Blessing: “The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you, the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.” So the relationship between God and humanity is analogous to the relationship between humanity and the rest of creation, humanity represent God to the earth and to each other. God and humanity walk together in peace in the garden and all is very good.
• But humankind, of course, subsequently rebels against God and is banished from the garden of Eden, from nearness to God. The earth is cursed on account of humankind. We are now in exile, and the fate of the ‘natural world’ is intertwined with ours.
• Those creation and exile stories set the scene for the beginning of God’s project of the reconciliation of humanity to himself. God appears to Abraham, and promises him that the whole the earth will be blessed in him. Abraham’s great-grandchildren, however, the children of the promise, end up as a nation of slaves in Egypt. God uses Moses to resuce that slave-nation out of their oppression. He forms them into a special people and leads them into a new homeland. He gives them the Law which is intended to create a way of life that will display the character of Abraham’s God to the surrounding nations. The idea being that when the people around Israel notice their different way of living – the weekly rest they all share, right down to the farm animals; the care they show for the weakest among them; the welcome they show to strangers – then the surrounding nations would stream to them to find out more about this great God who produced this beautiful way of life.
• Well that was the plan. But Israel regularly lost sight of the promise to Abraham and the purpose of the Law. They stopped displaying the character of Abraham’s God faithfully, they forgot their identity and became indistinguishable from the nations around. God sends them out of the promised land, they’re banished and carried away into exile.
• In the exile, prophets arise from among the people. They tell Israel to turn back to God, and remind them that the God who rescued them in the first place from Egpyt can do it again. The prophets also provide glimpses of a future beyond just the return to the homeland, as in Isaiah 11:

  The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
  and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
  and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;
  and a little child shall lead them.
  The cow and the bear shall graze;
  their young shall lie down together;
  and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
  The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra,
  and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den.
  They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain;
  for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord
  as the waters cover the sea.

  That is, a future where the non-human creation is included in the restoration of harmony between God and humanity.
• Some of the Israelites do return to their land, but is only a small portion of them, and they are once again an oppressed minority within a larger empire, this time Rome. Some of them were cozying up to their imperial overlords, others were emphasing those parts of the Law that separated them from their non-Jewish neighbours while forgetting the Law’s purpose and the promise. It is now difficult to see how the promise to Abraham can be realised in them at all. It appears that God’s project of reconciliation is at a very low ebb.
• But then God in Jesus enters the story. He is born into a poor family. In symbolic actions Jesus takes on Israel’s identity, and begins to form a new people around himself. He heals people of their sicknesses, welcomes outcasts, and announces God’s coming kingdom. He tells the people to repent, to turn from their various self-serving or nationalistic agendas and live instead in the light of the kingdom of God now breaking in. Justice is coming! He warns that there will be trouble for those who don’t heed his message. He acts out the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the Israelites’ key symbol of God’s presence with them, and declares that if it were destroyed he would rebuild it in himself in three days. Those Israelites who belived Jesus hoped that he would restore Israel’s fortunes, defeat its enemies and make it first among the nations – that is, be the Messiah. He is put to death by the ruling powers of the day. He’s crushed under the weight of human evil. All hope dies and with it God’s promise to Abraham. But then God raises Jesus from the dead, opening the door to new life. Showing victory-through-suffering as paradigmatic for all, and showing that god-like power is different to what we expected. The resurrection vindicates the claims Jesus made for himself (and his followers).
• And then as Jesus took on Israel’s identity and mission, so the Church took on Jesus’ identity and mission. The New Testament writers make huge claims for the community of people who found themselves believing that Jesus had been raised from the dead and made King over everything. St Paul describes the Church as becoming ‘the righteousness of God’, that is, the means by which God is keeping his promise to the world. St Peter sees his readers as participating in the divine nature, caught up in God’s work. Elsewhere, linking in with Jesus’ image of rebuilding the Temple in his own person, Paul describes the Christian community as God’s house, the Temple of the Holy Spirit, the new world in microscosm, the evidence of the new creation that is breaking in on the world, and that will one day be made complete.

So that’s the story as I see it, obviously very much summarized and with huge sections left out. It is not on the one hand a story of escape to a far-off realm where all the ambiguities of living in a complex world disappear, or, on the other hand, a story telling us that things will continue much as they have forever and ever. It’s a story which can create a responsible, frugal, stewardly ethos, appropriate to life here now.

So the question is, how does that alternative mythology get ‘into’ people?

When the Church gathers together in worship, it tells itself the story. It nutures and maintains an alternative mythology which gives it its identity. The past is recollected. God is praised for what he has done so far. The Church celebrates the fact that God is “making all things new”, that he will do for the whole cosmos what he did for Jesus in the resurrection. The Church learns to live in the light of that, becomes the witness of that. In offering praise to God revealed in the dying and rising Jesus as the ultimately valuable One, all the particulars of creation are relativised, and find their proper alignement. So no one element (say money, sex, power) though in themselves beautiful and well-made, gets warped by being wrenched out of its place to rule the show.

The worship service is a symbolic sacrifice, offering up all the community’s life and work to God, mirroring Jesus’ sacrifice. It’s a summing-up, not an end in itself. In the offering of the prayers of the people the Church participates in the groaning of God’s Spirit, in the painful reconciliation of heaven and earth. In tithing, the Church reminds itself that its trust is not in money. In the eucharist, Jesus’ story is literally internalized. The members of the Church feed on him, thereby gaining the strength to live beyond themselves, to live against the grain of the prevailing mythology, to continue his mission in the world. They come to see Jesus in each other.

Over time, as the story is internalised, the members of the Church come to see themselves in terms of it, they come to find their identity in it, their identity as God’s representatives, those made in God’s image. They learn to value each other not for being beautiful (and therefore without value if ugly), or rich (and therefore without value if poor) or powerful (and therefore without value if weak or sick). Instead, individuals are seen as members, in Wendell Berry’s phrase, of the holy community of creation. This gives an individual dignity which is a buttress against the temptation to find one’s meaning in constant acquisition.

Humankind seen from within this story is meant to be here - we are not a pimple on the bum of the universe. It is an enobling, inspiring and energizing story.

The title of this paper, “Church as icon of the future”, is inspired by the imagery St Paul uses in Romans 8, where he says:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.

I mean icon in the sense of an image that becomes a sacrament of God’s presence. As God’s image-bearers in particular places become self-conscious of their identity, they learn to treat the earth and each other right, to work it and keep it – the earth sees and is happy, it’s groaning is eased, and the surroundings catch a glimpse of what life is like in the kingdom, what life will be like when "all things are made new".

And I also say icon because the Church is not the thing itself, it is a pointer to something else, a pointer to the kingdom which is always ‘beyond’. The Church waits on God to complete the restoration of earth and humanity.

I intend all this as an encouragement to Christian churches to discover the total cosmos-embracing story. To find in it the resources to, in Walter Bruggeman’s phrase, fund the imagination, and move beyond the claustrophobic narratives of escape or self-help. It’s not wish-fulfilment, or a methodology for achieving our dreams, or primarily a way of meeting our felt emotional or spiritual needs. Apart from anything else, it is a new set of dreams. It is being caught up in something bigger, participating in God’s project of reconciliation.

This is all a story of hope, rather than optimism. We aren’t necessarily optimistic about the chances of say reducing emissions in time to avert catastrophic climate change, or reducing our dependency on oil so that the transition to a post-cheap-oil world will be smooth and without violence, but we do have hope that God will do for the whole world what he did for Jesus in the resurrection, that God is putting the world to rights, one way or another, and that we can be caught up in that process. Justice is coming. God is on the case. Therefore the Church worships him, and has a reason to have joy and not despair, and that joy becomes the ground of our action.

In light of all that, what should Christians do?

• Recapture the excitement of what the Church is. Those images the New Testament writers used of the Church were and still are extraordinary things to believe about one’s community.
• Rediscover our corporate and individual identities as hopeful gardeners and guarders of the earth. And therefore,
• Take responsibility. See it as our job to lead the way in displaying a new vision of what it means to be human.
• Imaginatively anticipate the future. Pay attention to the voices that suggest our current way of life is not sustainable, and encourage and support each other to take the long view, to live frugally and locally and begin to work out a redeeming pattern of life.

Back to Top