Of Dinosaurs and Jesus

I don't have much to do with the Emergent Church. I'm not against the general ethos of the Emergent movement- some of it strikes me as silly and contrived- but, whatever- I see it's value and appreciate that some people will know the Gospel through it. I am just not one of those people.

Well, to be clear, I am one of those people insofar as I understand there is no inherent value in forms and practices, and as our understanding of words change, our conception of the whole world changes as well- understanding that is an active practice and doesn't come from simply rejecting what was, but adapting and searching. So I'm "emergent" in that regard. But to make a caricature of it, simply removing given forms doesn't reveal an authentic spirituality- just like removing our body doesn't reveal who we really are.

It's perhaps a bit like teaching. Teaching isn't in having stone faces forward, books open, pens at the ready, in a rigidly uniform environment. You don't want cell phones going on in class, but if you can't adapt to the occasional phone ringing or other nonsense that occurs in real life- you're not much of a teacher. God isn't IN forms, institutions, and words. But if you can't know God through the institutions, forms, and words, you're gonna have that problem regardless.

Well, maybe to be more clear, I guess the forms and practices I embrace as "authentic" happen to be part of a "traditional" church setting. Though my "traditional" church setting is by varying definition of traditional, possibly not traditional.

Still, my pastor isn't tattooed. He actually lets people call him "pastor." We don't meet in a studio or cafe. And we actually have people over 70 in our community of faith. But perhaps the thing is the approach, and I buy the approach... or I bought the approach before I knew someone was going to turn it into an approach... or I bought the approach articulated by Friends a long time ago. Who themselves, whether cognizant or not, were discovering an expression that was already centuries old- and not, contrary to conventional wisdom- isolated to the mysterious "East." It's harder to uncover in some places than it is in others, but it's always there... waiting for us to stop feeding on pods for the swine.

What was my point...? Oh right- I was thinking of words and the illusion of their permanence- and I was actually thinking of it in relation to The Da Vinci Code. I knew about The Da Vinci Code conspiracy premise long before I knew there was a Da Vinci Code book. I used to work with a guy who was BIG into conspiracy theories. We taught at the same school- a private "Christian school." (And I was the one not allowed to teach in the Bible department). I like conspiracy theories too- in the same way I like totems, fetishes, rumors, myths, and what not. I like to explore what they say about us and who we think we are. So we would talk- me and the conspiracy-minded Bob Jones graduate.

But The Da Vinci Code, it's fiction- we understand that, right? I mean we know we can't find Dinosaurs in some South American zoo, right? We understand how fiction works? Even "historical" fiction- we know it's still fiction. Lots of somebodies rafted down the Mississippi but it doesn't mean Huck and Jim did- does it? And even if there's an agenda- we should be able to read through it shouldn't we? And the mythology behind the fiction- even in The Da Vinci Code, we know that's not new or unique, don't we?

Well you should- and I figure the high minded readers of this blog do. But on to words. Words mean something- I like to say that. But they don't mean the same something to everybody. Even the same words don't mean the same thing. We could reduce this all the way to individuals or even the self and wonder to what degree we can understand each other, but let's be serious for a moment.

I think The Da Vinci Code code is a good thing for the moment, if only because, at the very least, it requires us to actively wonder who and what Christ is and what we mean or what we claim when we say it has any meaning to us. For starters we better not be pretending Jesus is some object for us to know. For... continuers... we better realize we are in a continuing struggle for understanding.

So in the current Sojourners, Brian McLaren writes on the possible conversations we can have because of The DaVinci Code movie. While he settles on saying "it at least serves to open up the possibility that the church's conventional version of Jesus may not do him justice" and closes with the Emergent refrain of "authenticity" he at least makes the point that The DaVinci Code should be as scary to you as Velociraptors swimming to the mainland (perhaps not in those words).

I don't entirely buy his premise that readers are rejecting the dominant Christian understanding of Jesus, ergo are turning to The DaVinci Code for meaning. But I do buy that there is an avenue for understanding who we think and say we are in this phenomenon. I also like that he makes the point that the Left Behind series is perhaps more pernicious because it claims to be Christian whereas The DaVinci Code doesn't. Whatever. Can we agree that there are things scarier than hackneyed fiction and maybe turn that critical eye toward our own claims about Jesus?