Jon Rogers

In my last post, I mentioned the story of Redemptive Violence as one of the dominant metanarratives that the media feed to us. I am sure you will recognise it when I describe it – it is the basis for every action movie ever! Whether the story takes place in history, in space, or in some other context, there’s a set pattern to the metanarrative. There is a hero, who we are made to identify with, who loses something to an enemy – either of his own or his communities (yes, usually it is a he). After a long and dangerous quest, he and a band of valiant warriors defeat the enemy who has caused this loss in a violent and surprising fight. The story ends with some kind of depiction of the wonderful state of peace and goodness that this battle has brought about.

It is right for postmodernity to deconstruct this story, for a quick historical review can show how it is the story of Empire and oppression. Wired is far from the first to talk about the Babylonian gods’ relationship with contemporary action movies. The myths that were used to explain the origin of earth and Babylon in particular, that legitimated the rule of the King and priests were all about war between the gods. Violence solved the problem in the story, and violence was the way the empire expanded. Successive empires ruled the near east, ending with the Romans. When an ideological difference emerged, heroes stepped up to take charge and deployed as much violence as they could to take over the supreme position. The era of the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Empire (Julius Caesar and all that…) typifies the internal wars that would plague the empire for centuries.

What does the Bible say about redemptive violence? There are many Christians who struggle with the stories of violence in the Old Testament, especially books like Joshua, Judges and Samuel-Kings. Whole cities and tribes are wiped out, seemingly at the order of God. If we read the Bible as an account of how people have engaged with God, we can read these as an example of how violence is not, in fact, redemptive. The ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Canaan does not bring peace to the Israelites. The wars against Moab and Philistia do not bring peace. Even the great conquests of David do not bring lasting peace. In fact we find that the war-like nature of David makes him unfit to build the Temple of God – violence and worship of God are characterised as incompatible.

Violence was an metanarrative that the people of God had to deal with as they were conquered by Babylon and others. For me, scripture engages with it as a possibility and shows that it is flawed. The most cutting critique is in the life (and death) of Jesus himself. If there was ever a case when violent resistance of tyranny in God’s name was justified, Judea in the first century was up there. Galilee was a hot-bed of anti-Roman activity and freedom fighters – within a generation of Jesus it was devastated by war. Yet Jesus chose a different way, rejecting the dominant metanarrative of violence. He took a deliberately different approach, ‘laying down his life’ and practising forgiveness with his last breaths.

Yet there are some who believe that this approach was only temporary, that the second coming of Jesus is in violence and destruction. I am convinced that this is a mis-reading of the character of Jesus and the kind of ending and redemption that he seeks. I think that passages that speak of a conquering Jesus are supposed to point us back to the way that victory was won – in the ‘defeat’ of the Cross. If we really consider the cross to be important, we will reject any kind of power-play and empire building that seeks to conquer through power instead of weakness.

“Time is money” the old saying goes and we’ve thoroughly bought into it.
But I don’t want to be ruled by capitalism in that way. Sometimes my time can be bought and sold. But sometimes it just isn’t up for sale. Time can be treated as a commodity rather than simply as an object to be enjoyed, but the calculus we end up doing is very ugly indeed.
I wonder if the ancient teaching of Sabbath is supposed to remind us that some times cannot be traded – not simply that the most valuable thing I can give to God is time, but that somehow it’s more precious when I’m not penny-pinching with it. Sabbath time is invaluable because it is un-monetisable, not because it is spent on something of higher value.
This must then infect the rest of my life – how can I continue to treat the rest of my time as a commodity when I have learned to place one day above value? I can start to learn how to be present in a moment, rather than weighing its value in order to decide whether to extend or invest or bail on it.

Today a shiny new toy arrived in the post for me – a Samsung Galaxy S II. High on my priority list was transferring my music across to the phone. My N900 was very easy to sync – some how I’d got into using Songbird a long time ago, but I don’t use it much any more. Ubuntu has moved to Banshee from Rhythmbox as the default media player, so I decided to use that. I imported the playlist that contained the music I didn’t want synced and plugged in the phone.

First problem is that Samsung phones default to trying to connect to the Kies software suite – which of course is not running on Ubuntu. A little searching turns up that I need to change a setting to make it connect in ‘Mass Storage’ mode – in Settings -> Applications -> Development. Although it looks scary with the warning messages, ###

Next, I find that the phone does not show up in Banshee. Again, some simple searching turns up a simple solution. Create a blank text file called ‘.is_audio_player’ (without any quotes, of course, and don’t forget the leading dot) and add text to it:

audio_folders=Samsung/Music/
folder_depth=2
output_formats=audio/mpeg,audio/mp3,application/ogg

Now Banshee sees it properly and will allow me to sync. Now I just need an SDHC card, I’ve got far too much music to fit anything else on there…

I’m reading some of the people who are writing about Emerging & Missional Church for my MA Dissertation, including Alan Hirsch. He quotes a statistic that says only 4% of Southern Baptist churches will plant a daughter church – 96% will not ‘give birth’. By analogy, if 96% of women did not have children it would indicate a fertility problem, even a general health problem in our culture. Hirsch suggests that not planting churches is unhealthy and that ‘the missional-incarnational impulse is a fundamental indicator of ecclesial health’.

Now his image of new, missional churches isn’t stale image that some of us might have, so more churches to Hirsch really means more communities of Jesus followers living in their culture and sharing the good news. The idea still raises some questions in me that I’m not sure I have the answers to at the moment.

Firstly, definitions of ‘church’ seem quite hard to pin down. At what point does a new community group transition from ‘missional community’ to ‘daughter church’ – is it only with an official grant of independence? I think the contemporary trend for working in the tiny (missional groups) and the large (big, even mega- churches) means that there are groups working under the name of a much bigger church that are effectively or largely autonomous. Even semi-autonomous groups starting are an indication of new life.

Hirsch quotes the idea that if we always want new people born, it should be the same with churches. The flipside of this is that we keep wanting new people because humans get old and die. Does Hirsch think that this is the case with churches? He writes near the start of the book that the church he was leading was over 140 years old and that he and his wife were a ‘last ditch effort to turn it around’. Yes, it came back to life under their pastoring and gave life to many new churches, but the only way to keep birthing new churches is to either have (a) exponential growth in number of Christians or (b) old churches die. Or, of course, a bit of both. The trend to ‘big’ is driven in part by Christians moving to where the life is – there are churches where there is little life and death might actually be a release.

Which leads to another, perhaps more difficult question: how can churches die gracefully?

Some of my friends joke that I can get the word ‘metanarrative’ into any conversation. Probably true. Warning: this series of posts may have an overdose of the word ‘metanarrative’!

This first post in my metanarrative series will try to define what I’m talking about for those who don’t try to slot it in to every conversation! A narrative is just a story. There are two kinds of stories that we might be talking about with the word narrative – our own personal life story and the stories we tell each other about other people, real or fictional. The first order, personal stories are experienced rather than told – lived out and shared rather than dictated or written out. The second order stories are the ones we were told as children, the novels we read, the articles in the newspaper, the dramas of movies, the ‘reality shows’ of television. They hide within them hints of third order, meta stories. Meta as a prefix can mean beyond or above or about, so a metanarrative is the story of the story. Metanarratives chart the way the world is, the way things happen, how the story is supposed to go.

We absorb metanarratives mainly subconsciously – like a ‘worldview’ we forget that they’re there most of the time, even when we’ve conditioned ourselves to examine them and their effects. But they act as ‘legitimation stories’ – like a foundation, they help us to make decisions by acting according to the storyline we expect to play out. They act as a shortcut in our minds, one we cannot eliminate if we try.

Postmodernity has been famously (and frightfully reductionistically) defined as ‘suspicion towards metanarratives.’ Lyotard is responding to the collapse of faith in Communism, especially in the European academic world, which for him takes down all metanarratives, exposing them as socially constructed and fatally flawed. While there is a great deal of suspicion of metanarratives around (economic progress is inevitable? Really…?), the reality is that we still have some of these stories buried so deep in us that they are still driving our decisions and perspectives.

The media have always been the source of metanarratives, but the sheer volume of media we are able to consume in this always-on, wirelessly-connected, socially-networked, sci-fi present day has not really changed the limited variety of  metanarratives we encounter.

‘Rags-to-Riches’ stories emphasise the ‘American Dream’ of Capitalism – economic progress is inevitable if you work hard enough for it. Even people like Bill Gates are characterised as ‘a college dropout’, minimising the fact of his ultra-privileged upbringing and the unique opportunities it afforded him. Conspicuous consumption might not be quite as popular right now in ‘austerity Britain’, but we only need look at supermarkets discussing the rise in ‘premium brands’ to show it is not far away. We might be suspicious of what politicians are telling us about the future, but we harbour not-so-secret hopes that they will be right, at least for us.

One type of movie I tend not to watch has a metanarrative of Romantic Fulfillment. It’s the myth that finding the right person to be with will solve all your problems and heal all your hurts. It’s a story that says the next person you meet could be ‘the one’ and that settling for who you have now might mean missing out on the most important person. It creates holes of dissatisfaction with the present and brings unrealistic dreams of the future closer than is possible, feeding off the tension that is partly released vicariously when we see it all go right on the screen.

The metanarrative of Empire is the use of violence as a redemptive force. I’ve written before about how this story has been around for a long time, and in action movies, it’s the only story going. When our government wants to take the country to war, the presupposition that Hollywood has etched into our thought patterns is that the only way to solve this problem – be it genocide, revolution, terrorism, drugs – is to send guns and bombs to destroy it, for only once the enemy has been defeated can peace happen. My next post will dig more into the myth of redemptive violence and looking at it from a Christian perspective. I also want to discuss how the metanarratives perceived in Scripture should be seen in the postmodern world.

I also need your feedback: what are the important metanarratives fed to us by the media that we tacitly accept? Why do you think it matters that we look at the inherent violence of them?

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHglfyQOd2s

Kutiman is an Israeli musician/DJ/VJ who I first heard of when I came across Thru You, where he takes videos from youtube and remixes them to make a whole album of tracks. Thru Jerusalem, the video above was fully recorded by Kutiman in Jerusalem and then mixed to create a tour through some of the different sides of the Holy City.

When you’re writing an essay with a word count to meet, how your word processor counts the words matters. LibreOffice seems to count a lot higher than MS Word, meaning your task at meeting the word count is much harder. This is probably because of the way it treats ‘floating punctuation marks’ like a dash with spaces on either sides as a new word. It even counts a single opening quote as a whole word – which can add a lot of words to your total for no benefit to your essay.

So, if possible, save your essay as a .doc Word file and open it on a friend’s computer to do a better word count. If that ‘s not possible, do a find/replace of all the opening quotes to get a better idea of how much you’ve actually written.

Unless you understand that Jesus invites us through faith in him… to actually live in the Kingdom of God now, there will not be a basis for discipleship and transformation.

Dallas Willard, http://www.outofur.com/archives/2011/05/ur_video_dallas.html

As the conversation goes on to say, faith in Jesus is not about a new life after death, but death in our life now, and grace to live a new life now.

Ubuntu 11.04 (AKA Natty Narwhal) eliminates all kinds of Gnome Applets – most of which I didn’t use or need. One that I realised that I miss today is the proxy switcher applet. When I’m at college (LST), I need to switch to use their proxy – and back again at home. I want that to be simple and painless, not open up something from the menu and muck about with all that.

There is no ‘indicator applet’ for Natty to switch proxy location. However, Chromium can do it for me (and maybe Firefox could too, I’ve not tried.) I’ve installed Proxy Switchy from the Chrome Web Store, which sticks a little icon by the address bar in Chromium. I added a profile for LST and made the button work as a binary toggle from LST to direct connection. Since Chrome doesn’t control its own proxy settings it works for the system, I can happily switch between locations in my browser. Problem solved without needing to write a new indicator applet!

Krish Kandiah has been musing on Bin Laden’s death and how scripture has been used by Christians responding to it on Twitter.

If we are not careful Bible verses become bumper stickers – ways of  publicly labeling our beliefs. Or worse we end up not trying to seek God’s will but rather draw on the Bible’s authority to back our own positions- we turn the word of God into a mascot for our politics.

I completely agree. As Krish goes on to say, a ‘high’ view of scripture means not taking a verse out of context to back up our preconceived idea but rather engaging with the narratives on their own terms. Scripture is not a collection of proofs to tweet but a series of different and sometimes seemingly competing narratives that interweave and must be wrestled with.

Here’s Krish’s ‘working list’ of guidelines on how to avoid misusing scripture:

• We must avoid offering proof texts rather than letting the grand narrative of the Bible direct us.
• Let the original context of a passage direct its meaning for today.
• Be aware of our own cultural, political and economic biases when we come to scripture.
• Don’t avoid difficult texts that challenge your own position.
• Exploring the Bible with a posture that opens up a discussion rather than closes it down is a mark that we are seeking to humbly submit to scripture rather than use scripture to bully others.