Western-Centricity [Macro part 1]

La and I attended a talk and presentation by Laurie Anderson [a multimedia and performance artist] at the McWane Center last night in Birmingham. She said a lot of things that stuck with me, but two in particular are relevant here.

First, she mentioned that she worked for a while with the main architect who is currently attempting the rebuilding of the Parthenon in Athens [in Greece, not Alabama, no Georgia] by picking up the pieces and seeing where they fit. She was awed by the amount of philosophical thought that has been borne out of that area [she quoted it as being 14 schools of thought] and asked why the architect thought that the world wasn’t a better place for it.

His response was that years ago folks would bring statues and sacrifices to worship the Greek goddess Athena. The sacrifices didn’t seem to bring about any worry or strife within the people. The statues, however, did. Apparently [as human nature directs] people would come about to build and bring bigger and better statues. The place was filled with them. The area of the Parthenon was so filled with them that people stopped coming to this place of worship altogether. One of the worshippers was asked why he didn’t come to worship and he said, “I cannot worship in an art gallery.”

The point in what she was saying was that more often we are satisfied with merely believing rather than knowing.

The second point [which was actually made prior to the first] was bought up in a comparison between the eastern culture of the Japanese and the western culture of the United States. Out of our Greco-Roman heritage there is always a central and identifiable hero. There is always an antithesis to that hero. In our story of the hero there is a beginning, climax, and an end. In the Japanese culture there’s no definite story line of beginning, middle, and end. There’s not often a definite hero. The society and belief system function in a peculiar way [to us] wherein things exist but do not often find a solid or happy resolution [that is, if they ever find resolution at all].

When we talk about Christianity, we often equate it with Western thinking without realizing that our faith was borne out of the middle of east. Currently, when Christianity is preached it is spoken of as the creation of man as the beginning of its epoch, the first incarnation and coming of the Messiah in the flesh as our climax [and hero], and His second coming as His glorious victory. The truth, however, is much broader than this in its scope. If we look at the implications of what we know about God as per the Bible, we see that God is. He not only is, He has always been and ever will be.

Scripture, in this, communicates the characteristic of God in his infinitude.

It only seems proper to start there as it seems a good base to understanding [or understanding our lack of comprehension] God’s attributes. If God is infinite in his being [existing from eternity’s past unto eternity’s future] then his attributes must be similarly thus. Things get sticky for us, I think, when we say “God has done X because we have done Y.” In fact, we really don’t know the specifics of why God has done X. We can look through scripture and understand that God acts upon, intervenes in, and sets forth everything in creation. We can understand that all things are from, through, and to Christ. We cannot say with much certainty that God will do X if Y is performed by us, however.

Here’s the crux of the issue; in modern American Christianity we make out many antitheses to our central hero [Christ]. So then, the Muslims become our enemies because they hate Christians. Gays become our enemies because they are not living according to God’s prescription of right living. Abortionists become our enemies because they are killing all of God’s children. Anyone who is against America and American Christian values is a part of the formula of absolute and spiritual death.

What is so revolutionary about Christianity is the fact that not all enemies are enemies and not all friends are friends. Sometimes the people who seem to be closest to us can be so far from the truth, and those who are against us will be turn from an absolute hardness of heart unto life.

Some of us we’ll take portions of Scripture and end the search of knowledge with the characteristics we understand. God is holy and hates sin, therefore he condemns and punishes those more quickly who are involved in gross sin. The obvious examples of this are those who would assume that natural acts are judgments of God against the heathen scum of the Earth. What it is, in fact, is a statement of belief formed by shallow reading rather than a true knowledge formed by intimation and delving into the infinite character of God.

What the gospel tells us is that God takes those very enemies and makes them into children [that is, the gospel that is described in the old and new testaments of the Bible]. That being the case, the lines in the plot get a little more blurry as we never really understand of terrorist X, abortionist Y, or homosexual Z will be an enemy forever. The impetus for us to love the very people that hate us is that God has done the same thing for Joe American Christian. The storylines become blurred as beginnings are no longer beginnings – everything really starts off backwards compared to the optimistic hope of utopianism. We come into existence still borne, at some point we are shown what is real and what is fake, and then we progress from being less alive and less aware to more alive and more aware.

What we are called to is even more of the antithesis of how “faith” functions in most circles. “Faith” doesn’t tell me to believe that infinite characteristics lead to specific actions. Faith tells me that Christ must be the object of my affections to some degree and that what I believe about Christ has been generally quite misconstrued. Faith tells me that while I can believe in something that has happened historically, I can’t necessarily place the same mold on every subsequent event that happens.

Now, you may feel like I am babbling about this, but I have a point. The truth is that Christianity isn’t necessarily about belief. Our convictions should be changing [a better word would be “progressing,” perhaps]. There are historical points wherein we can say, “I believe that,” but to say that our faith is about mere belief is pretty foolish. What makes this idea of “faith,” so impoverished is its redundancies in belief. “Look at how wealthy America is, it is so because God has blessed us for our belief!” as it is stated. We take acts of God from the past and apply them to the present as truth, and that is a redundancy in belief as it does not take the infinitude of God’s character into account.

We take what has happened in western culture and we ask, “What is God trying to communicate to us in this.” We take these happenings and say “God is thus and must be saying etcetera.” Given the infinitude of God, how can any man necessarily know the mind of God in his current actions? What we are called to as Christians is to know God, not to believe in God’s attributes. The difference between the two is that of definition and intimacy. If we believe in his attributes, we might be able to recount various verses to define those attributes. In knowing God, we move beyond the mere definition of who He is unto a deeper intimacy than that which can be necessarily defined. There’s a lot more to be said about this, but I’ll end with the incomplete thought for now as this is almost 2 ½ pages.

What are your thoughts? We’ll camp out on this for more than tonight’s blog...

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