The Jesus Heist

Recovering the Gospel from the Church

C. Andrew Doyle

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780819233523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Formation religieuse

Provocative readings of biblical stories, with thoughts on what they are saying to the church. Inside the Church, we are constantly and consistently reading the gospels through the lens of supporting our own institution and structure. This prevents us from hearing the critique Jesus offered in his own day and his emphatic and persistent call to be and do differently now (Matthew 23: 1–12). Stories include Widow's Mite, Rich Young Ruler, Destruction of the Temple, Searching for the Lost Coin, Sower of the Seeds, Transfiguration, and the Great Commission. This book flips the script of many Bible stories, allowing us to hear Jesus' call to change as one that is directed at us rather than as one we should direct toward others.

CHAPTER ONE

THE RABBIT-HOLE

The idea of churchmanship was to be wholly unattractive. I was not in the least anticlerical, but I was deeply antiecclesiastical. . . .

But though I liked clergymen as I liked bears, I had as little wish to be in the Church as in the zoo.

It was, to begin with, a kind of collective; a wearisome “get-together” affair. I couldn’t yet see how a concern of that sort should have anything to do with one’s spiritual life. To me, religion ought to have been a matter of good men praying alone and meeting by twos and threes to talk of spiritual matters.

And then the fussy, time-wasting botheration of it all! The bells, the crowds, the umbrellas, the notices, the bustle, the perpetual arranging and organizing. Hymns were (and are) extremely disagreeable to me. Of all musical instruments I liked (and like) the organ least. I have, too, a sort of spiritual gaucherie which makes me unapt to participate in any rite.

—C. S. Lewis, theologian and author¹

Are you willing to imagine a different church than the one that is even now passing away? Imagine a church renewed, alive, filled with meaning, relevant to the experience of life lived in this new millennia. If you believe in a church of the future that is more in line with Jesus’s mission, if you believe in a church at work in the world in fifty years—and thriving in service to others by giving itself away to and for the world—then this book is meant for you. We must begin, though, with our gut. We know that something isn’t quite right. We can sense that there is more to church than the institution is offering us. We aren’t sure what this “more” is because we are so enmeshed in a bureaucratic way of being church that has metastasized to encompass everything. This is true in hierarchical, catholic, congregational, denominational, and nondenominational church organizations alike.

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar and Roman Catholic priest, wrote, “We worshiped Jesus instead of following him on his same path. We made Jesus into a mere religion instead of a journey toward union with God and everything else. This shift made us into a religion of ‘belonging and believing’ instead of a religion of transformation.”² I have found in many conversations that when we ponder the reality posed in the Gospels alongside the church organization, we are all a bit befuddled. We don’t really know what to do, or how to begin to unravel the gospel from the organization itself. Meanwhile, the very nature of this predicament affects all of our mission work in the most profound ways.

My generation was shaped by a dystopian movie called The Matrix. It is about a man who wakes up to find that his life isn’t real but a symptom of forces that have enslaved him for their own purposes. Sentient machines are using the life force of human beings—their heat and electrical impulses—as an energy source. Reality as perceived by humans is called “the Matrix” and the hero of the movie, Neo, is mentored by a rebel leader, Morpheus, to understand the truth and eventually lead a rebellion against the machines and their primary weapon, Mr. Smith, a sentient computer program that sees Neo and other enlightened people as bugs in the system destined for elimination.

There is a fantastic scene where Neo is told the truth by Morpheus and has to choose to live within this dystopic reality or continue to live within the Matrix and its false world. This scene gives Morpheus occasion to hold forth on the nature of the Matrix. He begins by comparing Neo’s adventure thus far to Lewis Caroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Like the Cheshire Cat, Morpheus explains that we are taught to accept the world as it is presented. He questions Neo as to his knowledge about the Matrix. He then goes on to explain that we know the Matrix is present because every once in a while we experience a feeling that our life and everything around us is, well, not quite right. He explains that it is a gnawing truth like a “splinter in your mind.” Morpheus then reveals to Neo that the Matrix is everywhere, and that it is a super-structured computer program that artificially creates a world inside our minds. Meanwhile, the computers live off of our bio-electric energy.

Morpheus says, “It is the wool that is pulled over our eyes to blind you from the truth. That you are a slave.” Slaves to the machine that is literally consuming us. Morpheus tells him that all humanity is born into this bondage, this way of experiencing and seeing the world. Moreover, the only way to be freed from the prison is to take a pill. Morpheus then gives Neo a choice: he can take either the red pill or the blue pill. If Neo takes the blue pill, he will wake up as if nothing has changed and all of this was just a dream. However, if he takes the red pill, he will exit the Matrix and will find out exactly how far the rabbit hole goes. Morpheus is offering Neo a vision of the truth, a truth he knows is real but only sees dimly through the overlay of the Matrix.³

The point here is that reality as Neo experiences it is not real. It isn’t that the Matrix is a mere illusion of reality: it is an experience that has no underlying connection to what it represents.

What the film’s writers and directors, Lilly and Lana Wachowski, aka the Wachowski Brothers, analogize in this scene and throughout the movie is the philosophy of Frenchman Jean Baudrillard, specifically his seminal work Simulacres et Simulation.⁴ In this text, Baudrillard examines the alienating entropy of symbolic society in its perpetual reproduction. The title of the book comes from the notion that “simulacra” are copies of things, representations, and as they pile up, one atop another, each copy becomes more degenerate from the original. In essence, simulacra are endless imitations of an original that degrade with each iteration.⁵

Critical of postmodern, technographic society, Baudrillard argues that humans are symbol-making creatures. We have over time imbued our original reality with a host of symbols, signs, and metaphors. Today our world is awash in these symbols and because of the endless reproduction made possible by our digital world, they have lost their meaning. These symbols are no longer in continuity with the actual reality that spawned them. They cannot represent or mediate reality. Instead the limitations inherent in their reproduction prevents these symbols from making sense of our experiences.⁶

Mircea Eliade, a religious phenomenologist, argues that the world that came before the Information Age was awash with coherent signs and rich with symbolic meaning.⁷ By contrast, today we have more and more information and less and less meaning. Baudrillard expands on this, arguing that this state of affairs has come about because we are mired in an anemic, media-constructed symbolic copy of reality that dictates what we believe, think, do, and buy. The very marrow of our culture in the West, and quickly being exported globally, is endlessly branded but lacking in meaning. These meaningless, endlessly reproduced symbols are what Baudrillard calls “simulacra.” In Simulacres et Simulation, Baudrillard narrates the four stages of simulation that result in this symbolic degradation.

Baudrillard’s first stage is sacramental order. Here the sign is intimately connected to its originator. It is a reflection of a “profound reality.”⁸ Baudrillard writes: “Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own.”⁹ While the original copy, the original symbol, is connected well to its initiator, those that come after are not.

The second stage is a perversion of this first reality and has to hide its secondary origins. It hints at the existence of the originator but obscures the connection.

The third stage masks completely any relationship the symbol might ever have had with the first mover, the reality that originated it. In this stage, the truth of the symbol is now completely encapsulated in a hermetically sealed container, a vessel, an organization, or a system. It completely lacks any reference to the original and only references itself.

Finally, the system simply simulates and replicates itself. The symbol is now utterly self-referential and bereft of meaning. It is the simulacrum.¹⁰ Baudrillard is clear: “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal.”¹¹

The institutional church is implicated in Baudrillard’s historical process of simulation. He casts the premodern era, with a certain relationship to a definite creator, as an artificial placeholder—the symbol once removed if you will. Disconnected from the primeval relationship with the original, the premodern era replicates from the archaic a system that claims irreproducibility.¹² During this period, the church itself leaves far behind the church of the first disciples and the first apostles, accepting instead a symbolic religion connected to the state and power. From fishermen’s clothes to the vestments of emperors, symbols are invested with meaning that reshapes the original ecclesia of Jesus and his followers.

Baudrillard describes the second era of Western history as modernity. Modernity is intimately connected to the Industrial Revolution. During this era, symbols and signs are mass-produced. They become commodities and are easily purchasable and owned. This overproduction takes the symbol one more step away from reality. While it may look like the popular version of the original, its meaning and authority are now in the hands of the owner. The power in this mass production resides in the fact that the copy looks and feels just as real as the prototype. The authority now lies in the hands of the owner.

In terms of the Western Church, from the period of the Reformation to the 1970s church growth movement, we see the same mass production of community, sign, and symbol. We see the proliferation of style and type: the diversification and exhaustive experimentation of everything from building, type of church organization, and liturgy. Bitter arguments over language and liturgy are the high watermark of this period of church history. There is a complete erosion of the link between copies of church and its original, now over a thousand years in the distant past. In fact, the church of this time period looks less and less like even the second- and third-generation concepts of itself. The church idea now only references itself.

As we reach the new millennium, the end of modernity, and late capitalism, the brands—the “simulacrum” as Baudrillard calls them—collapse the connection between reality and representation.¹³ I believe that the institutional church has reached this stage. It isn’t that there is something wrong with the people of the West so much as humans who are sense-making creatures know when the symbols are no longer connected. The symbol’s original purpose is lost. The interested observer will look at the postmodern church and see precious little that reminds her of its original progenitor.

Recently, a friend took his three-year-old child to church. The little girl looked at the wall. There was a picture of me in my Episcopal bishop’s vestments. I held my wooden crozier, or shepherd’s crook. I was wearing a mitre and a chasuble, much like high priests of the first century or kings and emperors of the third and fourth century. She asked her father, “Is that the King or the Shepherd?” He shared this with me in a text. I said, “That is a good question.” And I told him the story of how one time a little boy went home after my visitation to his church and told his father that he had met the king of church that day. My friend said that he tried to explain that the man in the picture was the bishop. My friend wrote, “She simply repeated the question more loudly as though we didn’t understand what she was asking.” I then wrote back, “Exactly! Tell her the church likes to dress their shepherd servants up in princess clothes so they are less threatening to the establishment.”

This little girl was wrestling with a process of simulation that took place within a very short period of time and exemplifies Baudrillard’s process. While there was great meaning in a tradition of following Jesus passed down from shepherd-servant to shepherd-servant, it did not take long for the shepherd-servant to look and act like the king or queen of church. The symbol is removed from its originator to a degree that it must begin to build a closed system to support and justify itself.

The media (internet, television, music, film, print) are all carriers of simulacra. One author called it the “mass-ification” of society itself.¹⁴ This influx of symbols has blurred the lines between those which have resonance and meaning left to help us navigate the complexity of our lived experience and those simulacra defunct of meaning but marketed to us for the purpose of pure profit. Baudrillard would say that, in the final evaluation, all value is lost, that even the commercial value is lost in the process of endless simulation.¹⁵ The vacuous, valueless economic reality that confronts us today must be grappled with by any church seeking to reconnect with its originating singularity.

The danger of such a valueless economic reality is evident in the story of art through Western history. Art was a primary symbol bearer deeply rooted in the original symbolic worldview. It eventually became representational and then finally reached the watershed moment after the World Wars when art started to exist solely for art’s sake. In the modern era, all symbolic meaning is jettisoned so that the symbol of art could be self-referential and complete. At the end of modernity, art’s value has shifted yet again from symbolic self-sufficiency to an economic model, where art is valued in reference to markets and currency. And now that the market dictates the value of art, all symbol, meaning, and original connection to reality is lost in a multiplication and media driven expansion of value.

The institutional church finds itself within a similar economic bankruptcy. More and more bereft from its originating singularity—Jesus—the church has self-referenced itself out of any meaning or value except in the hearts and minds of a select few. The multiplication of religions and spiritual pilgrimages undertaken by one-time and would-be Christians because of their desperate search for meaning exemplifies the insolvency of the institutional church at its worst.

Charles Taylor, in his book The Sources of Self, rightly says that the only way that this impoverishment can be undone is by “connecting ourselves rightly to the significance of things.”¹⁶ This is a process that is never ending for the church. We as church institution will have to do this over and over again. Thomas Tierney argues, in his work on the nature of self and death, that Baudrillard relies upon Max Weber’s undertaking on disenchantment and is struggling to generate a system of reconnection beyond the meaninglessness of our present circumstances.¹⁷

This is what Morpheus seeks to do for Neo. Morpheus wants Neo to unplug (quite literally) from the sentient machines’ construct of false reality. Baudrillard helps us sort through the simulacra that bind us so that we can seek out the real and the meaningful. I am inviting the church to awaken from her institutional torpor to see that we are living within and promulgating a series of impoverished simulacra—self-referencing symbols that prop up an economic system sapped of meaning. We are imprisoned in a kind of Matrix, and we inadvertently serve a different master than was originally intended. We know something is not quite right, but we are unable to put our finger on what it is. It is not difficult to see the symptoms within our own organizations. And I am wondering if you are willing to see how deep the rabbit-hole goes? Or will you be content with what you have been fed?

Like a glitch in the system, I first noticed something was wrong with how I viewed the ministry of the institutional church as I traveled and spoke to people following the publication of my books, CHURCH and Generous Community. I was struck by an overwhelming sense that there was an unspoken truth about our work of ministry. The institutional church of our ministry (the building, structures, and inward-focused goals) was not the church Jesus envisioned. Whether they be Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, or any manner of denomination or nondenominational organization, countless good and faithful clergy and laity talke...