Recently, when I was presenting a paper to the Belfast humanist society, I was asked how I could possibly believe that my own religious tradition was true, given the fact that recent estimates put the number of religions in the world at approximately 4,200. The only answer I could give to this question was, ‘I don’t.’ While I found myself hesitant about speaking of religions that I knew nothing about, I was quite confident in asserting that my own religion was not true. This response was met by the question as to why I would affiliate myself with the Christian religion if I did not believe that it revealed God. Yet far from being a reason to reject Christianity, this is precisly one of the reasons why I embrace it, for in Jesus I see not merely an individual who acted as a catalyst for a new religious movement, but also a subversive prophet who signalled the end of all religious movements. To be part of the Christian religion is to simultaneously hold that religion lightly.
Here I was attempting to draw out how Jesus employed a deeply deconstructive approach to religion which both affirmed and critiqued the movement that began in his lifetime. Christianity, following this deconstructive and subversive element in the life of Jesus, is then a religion which critiques its own religiosity. In order to understand this, it is important to begin with a deeper understanding of the term ‘religion’. Etymologically speaking, the word itself evolved from the eleventh-century Anglo-French term religiun, a word that connotes a way of life structured by monastic vows and indicates the belief in a divine power. This word can itself be seen to spring from two possible sources. First, it can be seen to derive from the Latin root religio, meaning a respect and reverence for the gods; this word has connections with the term relegare, referring to a type of re-reading or return (from re, meaning ‘again’, and legere, meaning ‘read’). Second, there is the popular connection of the term with religare, which means to bind fast (from which we get the word ‘rely’) via an obligation that connects humans and gods. The result is a slightly ambiguous word that has the connotations of binding to the sacred and reverence for the sacred enacted by a resolute commitment to a system.
While Christianity, on this definition, would seem to definitely fit the category of being a religion, there is a sense in which Jesus’ approach was also a means of critiquing this type of system. In order to understand this affirmation and negation of religion, it will be helpful to introduce a Derridian reflection upon the relationship between law and justice. The law can be described, at its best, as an attempt to set out justice. For example, we may say that, for justice to be done, those who destroy private property ought to be punished. However, as soon as we try to write down what justice is in this way, we find that this written law can embody injustice. Hence we find people who have destroyed private property (such as military equipment about to be used to bomb cities) in the name of justice. Each time the law is presented with situations which it cannot cope with, it attempts to adapt to the new situation, and it is thus edited or added to. In this way the law is never complete but is always open to change in light of new situations. This means that the law, as a system that attempts to embody justice, always falls short of justice.
So what is this justice which the law attempts to articulate? For Derrida it is impossible to say what justice is, for as soon as we say what justice is, we are left with the law, and the law always falls short. The best way to describe justice, then, is similar to the way that we would describe the absence of one we love. If we are waiting for someone we love in a bar, then their absence is something that is actually present to us – unlike all the other people in the bar, the absence of the one we are waiting for is felt by us. In a similar way, our desire to put justice into words is inspired by the power of that which we love but which is not present. Yet the law can never make justice present. While justice is not present to us, it exerts a power over us, for it is the power of this absence which causes us to attempt to transform the law and improve democracy. So then there is a very strange relationship between the law and justice: the law testifies to justice and is inspired by justice, yet justice is not found in the law. Justice cannot be spoken, for as soon as it is put into words it is unable to do justice to all. We have arrived too late for the first coming of justice and too early for the second coming.
In a similar manner we can speak of the relation between God and the Christian religion. Our religious tradition testifies to God and is inspired by God, yet our religious traditions do not make God present. Our religion is like the clearing in a forest after a great fire. It testifies to the happening of a great event and without the clearing we would not know of that event, but the clearing does not hold that event. One of the drawbacks concerning the image of a forest fire (there will always be drawbacks when we revert to images in order to bring clarity) is that it gives the impression that the poverty of religion comes from the actual absence of God. Rather, Christianity testifies to the impossibility of grasping God because of the Hyper-presence of God. While the Christian is one who exists between two incomings, looking back to one in love and looking forward to the other with longing, the current moment is claimed to be awash with the Spirit. There is a certain uncertainty between these two ideas of God as absent and God as hyper-present, and no apologetic discourse can offer a way of resolving which is the case. The affirmation that religion is exposed as poverty-stricken in the Hyper-presence of God (rather than in the absence of God) is a belief that is open to question.
And so, while we can say that Christianity is a religion insomuch as it binds us to the sacred enacted by fidelity to a system of belief, Christianity at its origin also signals a cutting loose from such systems via an understanding of God as transcendent – not in the modern rendering that would use this term as a means of saying that God is bigger than we are, but in the more ancient meaning of God as Wholly Other. This double act of binding to God and loosing from God that is evidenced in Christianity is one of its great strengths, for not only does it acknowledge the centrality of religion, but it also acknowledges its redundancy. The Christian religion thus testifies to a relation with God that exists without relation, to religion as both im/possible and un/necessary.
The net result of this understanding of the Christian religion is a very different approach to the idea and ideal of religious fulfilment. While God is impossible to grasp, this does not mean that God has no impact in our lives, for in religion we are transformed by our desire for God. In an important sense it is the inverse of how death affects us. Death is never experienced, for death is a term that refers to the end of all experience. Regardless of what, if anything, happens after this event, death has not been directly experienced by anyone who is currently reading this book. We cannot imagine what it would be like to have no consciousness, for to think about the end of consciousness is to engage in a conscious act – death is thus utterly foreign to us and impossible to imagine.
Yet, although imagining death is impossible, this does not mean that it has no effect in the present. For the great philosopher Martin Heidegger, it is only in realizing that we are moving towards death that we can become authentic human beings, for once we realize that we are going to die, we take more responsibility over our life. For instance, people who have narrowly avoided death will often feel the wonder of life in a deeper way than ever before. In the aftermath of such an experience people will often try to fix broken relationships and perhaps even try to engage in more meaningful activities. As we can see in this example, something which we cannot grasp, like death, can still have a powerful influence over us. In religious terms, we may say that the desire for spiritual transformation is not satisfied in religious commitment but rather is itself the means of spiritual transformation. In order to understand this, let us consider the following fable:
There was once a princess who grew up in a kingdom that had been ravished by decades of famines, war and plague. One night, as the princess slept she had a dream. In this dream she was walking through the market that lay by the sea, when a young beggar caught her eye. As she turned to face him the young beggar looked up, but before their eyes could meet the dream ended and the princess awoke. As the dream faded a haunting voice arose in her mind that informed her that if she were ever to meet this young man, he would shower her with riches beyond her wildest dreams.
This dream etched itself so deeply on the princess that she carried the vision deep in her heart, until one day, years later, as she walked through the market, her gaze caught hold of the same man who had visited her in her dreams all those years ago. Without pausing she ran up to him and proceeded to relay the whole vision. Never once did he look up, but when the princess had finished her story he reached into an old sack and pulled out a package. Without saying a word, he offered it to the princess and asked her to leave.
Once the princess reached her dilapidated castle she ripped open the package and, sure enough, there was a great wealth of pure gold and precious diamonds. That night she placed the package in a safe place and went to bed. But her mind was in turmoil and the long night was spent in sleepless contemplation. Early the next morning she arose, retrieved the treasures and went down to the water’s edge. Once there she summoned up all her strength and threw the riches deep into the sea. After watching the package sink out of sight, she turned and without looking back went searching for the young beggar.
Finally she found him sitting in the shade of an old doorway. The princess approached, held out her hand and placed it under his chin. Then she drew his face towards hers and whispered, ‘Young man, speak of the wealth you possess which allows you to give away such worldly treasure without a moment’s thought.’
In this story, which charts a transformation from desire for worldly wealth into a desire for spiritual wealth, we are not told what the young man said in response to the princess’s request. However, we could perhaps imagine him informing the princess that no response is necessary, for the princess’s question, ‘Tell me of the wealth that you possess which allows you to give away such worldly treasure without a moment’s thought’, can be answered with the words, ‘Why, the same wealth that has allowed you to give away such worldly treasure without a moment’s thought.’
This story shows how the princess’s love and desire for spiritual transformation was itself spiritually transformative. The desire for transformation was itself the means of transformation: the seeking after spiritual wealth was itself the evidence of this wealth’s presence. Such a strange logic is also to be found at work when we look at religious desire.
Because God, as hypernonymous, can never be made utterly present, desire is never satisfied in God. This is very different from how desire generally operates. For instance, if we desire a new car, the desire is fulfilled in its possession: what was previously absent has been made present and thus has satisfied the void which desire had formed. However, God is never made present in this way: God’s presence is always Hyper-presence. This is analogous to the idea of a ship sunken in the depths of the ocean: while the ship contains the water and the water contains the ship, the ship only contains a fraction of the water while the water contains the whole of the ship. Our saturation by God does not merely fill us but also testifies to an ocean we cannot contain. Thus desire for God is born in God.
This is not wholly dissimilar to the desire we experience for ones whom we love, for what we know of our beloved is but a fragment that testifies to that which lies beyond us. As relationships develop the type of desire at work changes. Let us take the example of someone who is simply seeking a relationship because they are lonely. Here they do not desire a specific individual but rather desire a certain type of individual. This type of desire is self-centred insomuch as one has self-interested reasons for seeking the relationship. However, once one is in a loving relationship, this abstract desire for a faceless some-one (who fulfils certain needs) is transformed into a concrete desire for that particular individual (beyond the simple fulfilment of those needs). The abstract, self-interested desire for another that arises from a sense of lack is transcended by a concrete desire that arises from the presence of a particular person. This, however, does not mean that the original desire is by-passed: rather, it is taken up and transformed within the new desire. Instead of our desire being satisfied in the one we love, our desire is both maintained and satisfied by and in our longing. In love we desire our beloved, indeed the presence of our beloved is that which sparks the desire. This is because the presence of the one we love testifies to the fact that what we know of them is only a fragment of what is still to be discovered. This helps us understand why Augustine said, ‘For certainly nothing can be loved unless it is known.’52 Hence we see here that seeking God is not some provisional activity which precedes the goal of finding, but is itself evidence of having already found.
Rather than desire being fulfilled in the presence of God, religious desire is born there. In short, a true spiritual seeking can be understood as the ultimate sign that one already has that which one seeks, or rather, that one is already grasped by that which one seeks to grasp. Consequently a genuine seeking after God is evidence of having found. Of course, much desire that appears to seek after God is nothing of the sort. For instance, to seek God for eternal life is to seek eternal life, while to seek God for a meaningful existence is to seek a meaningful existence. A true seeking after God results from an experience of God which one falls in love with for no reason other than finding God irresistibly lovable. In this way the lovers of God are the ones who are most passionately in search of God.
Thus the emerging community celebrate the centrality of religious desire, acknowledging that it is a necessary part of faith. This approach can help us to appreciate why the psalmist writes, ‘those who desire God lack no good thing’ and why the Gospels tell us to ‘seek first the kingdom’. Here seeking and desiring are placed over and against having and possessing. Indeed, the idea of asking, seeking and knocking as steps towards receiving, finding and a door being opened is misleading and can lead to the notion that they are two separate moments. Hence we can ask what happens if someone is seeking God yet dies before finding God. However, the verse which speaks of this (Matthew 7.7-8) does not refer to two separate moments but rather to a type of present-continuous tense by which the seeking is the finding, the asking is the receiving and the knocking is the opening – in short, these are not two distinct events but rather occur at one and the same time. Just as space and time are not distinct from each other, neither are asking and receiving.
This leads to a very different understanding of the Pascalian phrase ‘God-shaped hole’. Traditionally the God-shaped hole has referred to a type of void in every human which remains unfilled until filled by God. This is caricatured in an urban myth that tells us of a children’s address in which the minister, as part of the sermon, asked the gathering of girls and boys ‘What is small, furry, climbs trees and eats nuts?’ As soon as he had finished the question, a little girl stood up and said, ‘Mister, I know the answer is Jesus, but it sure sounds like a squirrel.’
Here we see an extreme example of the idea that beneath the surface of daily life we all share a fundamental religious longing to which the only legitimate response is a relationship with Jesus. In Albert Camus’ The Outsider, we are confronted with a stark rejection of this idea. Camus presents us with a self-aware character who appears to have no sense of this void. Even upon facing the cold fact of his fastapproaching execution, this character feels no desire for God. This man, Meursault, inhabits a universe in which such speculation is existentially irrelevant and meaningless. Near the end of the book he is in prison awaiting his execution. Although he has refused to see the prison chaplain on numerous occasions, the chaplain finally pays Meursault a visit anyway, and asks why he has refused to see him on previous occasions:
I replied that I didn’t believe in God. He wanted to know whether I was quite sure about that and I said I had no reason for asking myself that question: it didn’t seem to matter… I may not have been sure what really interested me, but I was absolutely sure what didn’t interest me. And what he was talking about was one of the very things that didn’t interest me.53
In this brief exchange we are not presented with the traditional form of atheism (by which one would deny the existence of a creator). Instead Meursault has turned his back on both theism and atheism altogether, rejecting the former because it strikes him as asking a meaningless question and the latter because it takes this question too seriously. For Meursault there is no response to the spiritual question precisely because there is no question. This approach can be described as a type of quiescent anti-theism in the sense that it pays no attention to either theism or atheism.
In many ways this character can be taken to represent a contemporary response to religion, one which rejects the religious ‘answer’ as irrelevant precisely because the question is believed to be irrelevant. If the question has no relevance then an answer can have no purpose.
However, with the idea of religion as that which exists as a type of negative affirmation of God, we can say that far from having a God-shaped vacuum in our heart which remains until filled by God, the a/theology of the emerging communities allows us to turn this idea around, pointing out that far from being something that exists until being filled, the God-shaped hole can be understood as precisely that which is left in the aftermath of God.
The believer, far from once having a God-shaped hole in his or her being that is now filled, is one who has a God-shaped hole formed in the aftermath of God, a hole that compels them to seek after that which they already have. The Christian religion arises as a space that testifies to God by testifying to a God who created, but who cannot be contained, within the space. The void left by God is not unlike a type of black hole, full of something that cannot be seen and which draws our gaze into the unseen. Another analogy could be the pupil of a person’s eye. This is the very place that we look at when talking to a person, the place where we encounter the other, yet this place of encounter is a black void. This is not then some kind of preference for absence over presence, seeking over finding, questions over answers or hunger over nourishment; for in the absence there is an icon to presence, in seeking there is evidence of having found, in questioning there is a hint that the answer has been given, and in hunger there is a deep and abiding nourishment. Hence, the idea that religion provides an answer can be productively challenged with the idea that it actually evokes the ultimate question – a question that places us all into question. Faith, in this rendering, can thus be described as a wound that heals.
Pascal wrote: ‘Finally, let them recognize that there are two kinds of people one can call reasonable; those who serve God with all their heart because they know Him, and those who seek Him with all their heart because they do not know Him.’54 To this we may add one caveat: that these two kinds of people are only reasonable when they are brought together as one – they serve God with all their heart because they know him, all the while seeking him with all their heart because they do not.
By acknowledging these insights the emerging community is rediscovering the importance of desire and process as part of the unchanging face of Christianity. By existing in the void of Hyper-presence, we discover a renewed openness to genuine dialogue with others. This dialogue replaces the standard monologue of those who would wish to either clone the other, making them into a reflection of themselves, or exclude the other, making them into a scapegoat who embodies all our fears and insecurities. Both these approaches of consumption and condemnation can be seen operating in the world today and are often reflected in one and the same organization –attempting to clone that which they simultaneously exclude as evil.
The alternative is not a relativistic acceptance of every position but rather a dialogue in which we treat everyone we meet as individuals who we can learn from and perhaps teach, rather than reducing people to the same massive and clumsy categories such as ‘Christian’, ‘Islamic’ and so on. Indeed, we see this model of treating everyone in a singular way in the life of Jesus.
One can still privilege one’s own position for a whole variety of reasons. However, the difference is that those involved in the emerging conversation can engage in a genuine dialogue in which they are prepared to rethink in relation to what the other says (instead of an inauthentic dialogue in which one pretends to be open to the insights of another, but in reality one is not prepared to place one’s own thinking into question). Rather than being a sign of weakness, this powerless approach is a sign of strength, for one is committed to the idea that if we genuinely seek truth from above, we will not be given a lie, for God does not give scorpions to the one who seeks bread.
In the Ikon community we have explored this idea via a group called ‘The Evangelism Project’. This is a group made up largely of Christians who seek to be evangelized and as such take time to visit other traditions within and outside Christianity. This is not an interfaith dialogue insomuch as the group is not there to teach in any way but rather to learn. While this is a type of reverse evangelism, it has unintentionally proved to be a profoundly powerful tool for sharing Christianity with others. Generally the ‘us’ and ‘them’ approach causes both sides to solidify their thoughts and become defensive. Evangelism is usually set up as a type of debate, yet in debates we will state our views more forcibly than usual. This powerless approach breaks down the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy and provides a space in which we are all less defensive and thus more open to the work of God and the wisdom of one another. When we see our role as being not merely those who give God, but rather those who can learn from others and act as an aroma that helps others to open up (which are two sides of the same coin), then we affirm the words of Jesus when he claims that God will give God to those who are open to God.
Mission projects do not die here but, rather, are revitalized. Indeed, I have spent a lot of time with a mission group called YWAM teaching these very things. Having spoken to many of these people after their short-term mission trips, I find time and again that the idea of learning from the community that they visit enriched rather than destroyed their experience. For in this type of mission we are all transformed and have less pressure upon us to provide all the answers. In Christian mission the goal is not that some people ‘out there’ are brought closer to God by our work, but rather that we are all brought closer to God. Such an insight may actually help expand the numbers of people who want to be involved with mission organizations rather than diminishing them, for there are many who have been put off by the apparent superiority they are often required to assume in such environments.
Instead of bringing God to ‘unreached’ places and ‘unreached’ peoples, I find countless missionaries who say that, while this was how they once thought, time and again they find that these unreached places are the very sites where they must go to find God and to be reached. How many of us have learnt too late that our initial idea, that by serving the world we will help bring God to others, has eclipsed the wisdom that in serving the world we find God there.