The Last Western Men

CS Lewis gave an address in 1955 entitled “The Old Western Man.” He referred to himself and others as “dinosaurs." Lewis was both enough of an observer and a scholar to see that the world and worldview in which he was nurtured was passing away. 

Lewis had lived long enough to know that it wasn’t merely the old western man that was disappearing. The church of England and the particular form of evangelical Anglicanism that he represented was already in a state of almost complete collapse. His book, Mere Christianity, which had animated a generation of English Anglicans, had transported very well to the American evangelical context of the time. But it’s vision of orthodox Christianity was not sustainable in England after World War II. Evangelical orthodoxy simply could not initiate or sustain a revival of Christianity in the England of the 1950s or indeed up until today. 

Far longer lasting and far reaching are Lewis's narrative works. Like the works of J.R.R. Tolkien at the other Inklings Lewis’ narrative works do not describe a world of orthodox practices and morals. They do not even mention God or name his Son. They do not offer a theological justification for Christianity. Instead, they invite the reader, and later viewer into fictional worlds based on the fundamental principles of God’s engagement with creation and of human nature. Orthodoxy becomes what Lewis called the “deeper law” that shaped the outcomes of creaturely action in these fictional universes. And this is an orthodoxy that can speak to many times and in many cultures.

Louis could imagine a world before the Fall, and thus ask us to enter into into a moral universe not built on the assumption of sin. Lewis could imagine a world after the flood in which its purgative effects succeeded, and thus invite us to understand a moral universe without the need for further witnesses to God’s righteousness. In creating these fictional worlds of Perelandra/Venus and Mars he could see the noetic covenant and the laws of Mount Sinai not as the roots of our moral universe but as the branches from those roots in a particular world. 

The eternal love of the triune God rather than the historically conditioned needs of human societies was the creative source of his fictional worlds. 

Unfortunately contemporary acolytes of Lewis too often claim the dross of doctrine and law rather than the gold of an orthodox understanding that God’s love is ubiquitous, while human sin and the provision for it is both temporally and geographically local. Rather than addressing the contemporary context the deep law, the law of God’s providential love, they have chosen to defend the structures of Christendom in all its fading glory and fossilized bones. In doing so they, not a changing culture, have turned Lewis and his peers into dinosaurs. 

Lewis could imagine a world in which fawns and centaurs, those half-creatures of fantasy were redeemed unchanged but fulfilled by this deep law. Tolkien imagine dwarves and elves and men and halflings and wizards and orcs within God’s providential love. Some Christians can’t even imagine a world in which God’s love accepts transsexuals as they are. 

What Lewis did not recognize, or perhaps recognized by placing his bets on fantasy stories, was that the problem of the passing of Christendom is not merely the rise of secularity, or even a modern understanding of the world shaped by atheism, materialism, and evolutionary theory. It is not merely that the tide has turned and the sea of faith is receding (to the dismay of Matthew Arnold.) It is that the language through which faith recognizes and expresses itself has changed. People no more speak the faith language of Christendom than they speak the Latin of the church fathers. 

So it isn’t that sea of faith has receded. Rather faith has escaped from the inaccessible redoubts of the medieval worldview and increasingly inaccessible bulwark of modernity. 

This isn’t merely a matter of losing Christian terminology and the slow forgetting of classical theological reasoning. The grammar of faith, its internal logic, has changed. We no longer understand our relationships one another and with the transcendent in terms of beliefs locked within in a dogmatic structure created by the laws of logic. Ours is not the faith of arguments and propositions creating a coherent framework within which to locate specifically Christian belief. It no longer gazes in longing to find its place amid the cycles and epicycles of a theology systematically engineered according to its own internal logic but increasingly out of touch with narrated experience human becoming.

As importantly our grammar of moral reflection and expression is no longer shaped by rigid rules for human behavior and static definitions of sin and righteousness. Like orthodox theology, orthodox ethics finds itself in a Ptolmaic dilemma of having to create ever more complex justifications, epicycles within epicycles to prevent its unbending rules and definitions from being not merely incredible, but actually destructive. The problem isn’t isn’t just the content, or even its fundamentally flawed assumptions. The problem is that orthodox ethical reasoning is a language incomprehensible to contemporary persons.

Ours is the grammar, the logic of narrative. It is a grammar in which consistency is incoherent without authenticity. It is the grammar of characters in action rather than characteristics in static relation.

This isn’t merely true of our self-understanding. It is true of our understanding of God. The character of God revealed in Jesus Christ compels us, as it did his first followers, to worship. The characteristics of God as detailed in systematic theology neither compel us to worship nor are necessary to our faith in Christ. In this new grammar the phrase "God is love" means nothing. The phrase "God loves" means everything so long as it is seen enacted in the great drama of the unfolding world. So imitation of Christ’s actions, his story lived out moment by moment in specific situations is ethically compelling, while all attempts to reify those actions into unchanging rules universally applied are incomprehensible. 

Aristotle’s Poetics is a far better guide for the modern preacher/theologian than his Organon. 

Not that every part of our world participates in this new grammar of faith. Theological schools are notoriously conservative. Scholars with a decades long investment in classical theology and philosophy are not only reluctant to give up what they have mastered, they insist that their students be equally indoctrinated before being allowed to take up the mantle of teaching. 

Church bureaucracies are equally conservative. Their power is gained, maintained, and perpetuated by their control of doctrine and law. A United Methodist bishop, DS, or pastor knows that mastery of the Book of Discipline is far more necessary to a successful ecclesial career than dwelling in the story of God with Creation that is the beating heart of scripture. From very early in their careers young preachers learn that the masters of their fate will quiz them on dross and grow suspicious if their words glint with gold. 

And, to be fair, these schools and ecclesiocracies serve constituencies equally unchanged, or better resistant to being changed, by the outworking of God’s providence and human freedom. Just as the bishops and nobles of the Ancien Regime saw only revolt against the established order of God when the peasants claimed their power, so many contemporary American Christians resent and resist that which breaks their hereditary privilege. Who can blame them? Leaving a legacy feels a lot like dying. So we tend to insist that generation after generation of preachers conserve our sense of a privileged place in God’s unchanging order. Until those preachers enter into and are equally invested in that order. 

It is quite hard to remember that the law written on human hearts, with all of their frailties, is the only law God gives. 

So the reinforcing of the current order with laws inscribed in stone is not a sign of perseverance, but of an approaching collapse. When the old nobility gathered on their landed estates while the riotous crowds controlled the streets of Paris it wasn’t a consolidation preceding a restoration. It was the last gasp of a dying world. And the same is true in the United States as chiliastic Christian movements gather in their megachurches and anxiously await God's restoration of the established order. We have not yet learned to be still. 

Of course the entire world isn’t dancing on the bones of the last western men. There are Christians and cultures different those I dwell in. Ever since Pentecost Christians have spoken in many tongues, both within their hearts and minds and in their witness to their neighbors. If we are those who narrate our faith with our lives, for us to tell a story that includes the condemnation of other stories and constructions of faith will hardly be good news. It is hard to feel warmly toward those whose understanding of God’s providence excludes us and our friends. But Jesus says, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Thus it is good to remember that we, like they, are incapable of understanding much less emulating the wideness of God’s mercy. 

We have our task, those who live in the legacy, but not the world, of the last western men. And it is to tell our story of a world so animated and guided by that “deep law” that our neighbors, not least the fawns and centaurs, the halflings and the dwarves, and of course the humans will be drawn into that story of love. And other worlds that are not ours? 

From: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

"And of course, as it always does in a perfectly flat place without trees, it looked as if the sky came down to meet the grass in front of them. But as they went on they got the strangest impression that here at last the sky did really come down and join the earth-a blue wall, very bright, but real and solid: more like glass than anything else. And soon they were quite sure of it. It was very near now.

But between them and the foot of the sky there was something so white on the green grass that even with their eagles' eyes they could hardly look at it. They came on and saw that it was a Lamb.

"Come and have breakfast," said the Lamb in its sweet milky voice. 

Then they noticed for the first time that there was a fire lit on the grass and fish roasting on it. They sat down and ate the fish, hungry now for the first time for many days. And it was the most delicious food they had ever tasted. 

 
"Please, Lamb," said Lucy, "is this the way to Aslan's country?

"Not for you," said the Lamb. "For you the door into Aslan's country is from your own world." 

 
'What!" said Edmund. "Is there a way into Aslan's country from our world too?" 

"There is a way into my country from all the worlds," said the Lamb."

Dual(ing) Narratives

Well - quadruple or quintuple narratives.

I’m writing this in Bethlehem, where I’m helping lead a group of students in both the footsteps of Jesus and the complexities of the this land. This is my 23rd year of visits to this land, and the 14th leading groups of students.

This year our students started with a couple of days in Jerusalem being guided in what is often called a “dual narrative” approach to understanding Israel and Palestine. This isn’t my favorite approach, but then I don’t always call the shots. I prefer that our Israeli and Palestinian partners decide how to represent their experience. 

As for my own experience? In my years coming here I’ve heard far more than two narratives. I’ve heard dozens. 

For example. In Israel there are two Israeli narratives at least. One is the narrative of how people of different religions and ethnic backgrounds can build a new nation together out of the detritus of a thousand years or more of colonialism. The other is the narrative of how a Jewish state cannot exist without marginalizing a dangerous non-Jewish Arab citizenry while holding their terrorist Palestinian brethren at bay. 

But there are also different narratives in Beer Shiva and Tel Aviv and Haifa and Jerusalem. Different narratives among the Ultra Orthodox and the Secular Jews. Different narratives among the pioneering families and the just-arriving immigrants. After all, this is a country with a dozen or more political parties, none of which has ever won a majority of the vote and all of which await, again, a general election to shuffle the deck for a new deal from which the future may be drawn. 

But there are other narratives as well, such as conflicting narratives about the meaning of Israel as a Jewish nation, and in particular how you define who a “Jew” really is. So (to illustrate) on the 3rd of January the Jerusalem Post ran a long article on how more than half of the past year's immigrants met the state requirement to be regarded as a Jew (one grandparent was Jewish) but were not Jews. They were in fact  Russian Orthodox Christians or just atheists. Apart from these Christian “Jews” (not to be confused with Messianic Jews) there are huge numbers of practicing Jews whom Israel’s chief rabbinate doesn’t recognize as Jewish! 

Here in a Jewish state Jews sometimes cannot share graveyards and wedding ceremonies and even neighborhoods, while Christians divide themselves into feuding sects based on ancient ethnic and theological divides. The key to the shrine atop the burial place of Jesus is held by a Muslim family, because the ancient Christian communities don’t trust one another to hold it. 

In Palestine (aka West Bank, Palestinian Territories, Occupied Palestine) there is also more than one narrative. At the very least there is the Hamas narrative that Palestinians cannot possess their full identity without the destruction of Israel, and the Fatah narrative of a negotiated statehood that recognizes Israeli nationhood. There are also different narratives concerning the history and future of Christian Palestinians in the face of gradual Islamization. In a single day I have heard one Palestinian leader calling for a two state solution as the only way forward, and one calling for a single state with full rights for Palestinians as the only way forward. 

And there are varying narratives about national identity as what were refugee camps become third and forth generation cities and towns. And there are very different narratives in Gaza and the West Bank and in the vast Palestinian diaspora marooned in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon or adrift in Europe or the US. Listen to three taxi drivers and you will hear three different narratives - each claiming to be authentically Palestinian. 

And all of these contemporary narratives are linked to older narratives about just what happened and is happening since the beginning of significant Jewish in-migration to the old Turkish Vilayet of Damascus, the Palestine, the Mutassarifate of Jerusalem, and the Mandate. After all, what happened in what is now Israel and Palestine can’t be separated from larger narratives that include the Napoleanic wars in Europe, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of the Zionist movement, the first and second World Wars, the Holocaust, and declaration of Israel’s statehood and the formation of other middle eastern states by the colonial powers. And those are not single narratives either.

Every narrative in this land is a source of identity and self-understanding. Palestinians and Israelis tell themselves into existence as peoples distinct from their ancestors. Yet their ancestors are retrospectively drawn into the narratives in odd ways, ways they might not themselves recognize were they to come to life. 

Would the Sephardic Jew of two centuries ago, settled under the Ottoman Caliphs for hundreds of years, seamlessly integrated into Arabic speaking society of the region, imagine herself an important link in a narrative chain of continuous Jewish presence vital to the narrative of a modern Jewish State? Would an Arab farmer two centuries ago, making an existence amid olive groves and garden farms trace his lineage the “people of the land” whose continued existence for thousands of years provided a key rational for a modern Palestinian identity? 

Every narrative is a prison into which we drag the past to provide company even as we silence its varied voices to hear only that which fits the story we want to tell about ourselves today. Every narrative prevents its teller from becoming anything other than the story allows, as all the stories we tell of our lives define the limits of our imagined individuality and peoplehood. It is the same for all of us; Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, and (good to remember) United Methodists. We build prisons from the stories we tell about ourselves. 

And not surprisingly those who choose to step outside the most widespread and long-standing narratives are reviled on all sides as traitors rather than pioneers of new possibilities. The artists and teachers and common citizens who shake the bars of their narrative prison are seen as the authors of a chaos in which stories from the past and present might break free. They are seen as traitors who by offering new possibilities destroy the old, secure, identities so lovingly tended for so long in the hard ground within the prisons we call our nations. 

Even we who visit these lands don’t really want to hear these creative voices, because their freedom would shake our entrenched ideas about this “holy” land. Their shattering of the dual narrative disturbs how quickly we can set aside our narrative of inevitable conflict, or of pre-defined justice, so we can go about our personal walks among the ruins with Jesus. 

Maybe that is why dual narratives, whether in this land or back in my own United States, are ultimately embraced as a comfort. They hide the complexity from which both the destruction and creation of identity is found. 

But it is the creative people, those who draw from the deep primordial silence from which all the imprisoning voices that clamor to define us have been banished, it is they who will give us the stories of peace. I hope we hear, however faintly, those stories in the next few days. Sing to the Lord a new song - not because the Lord does new things, but because these songs open the only pathways by which the Divine can traverse the human heart and do new things.