"...bruised, broken masterpieces...." (Eschatological Vision, Part I)

"Therefore justice is far from us, and righteousness does not overtake us. We hope for light, but behold darkness; for brightness, but we walk in gloom. We grope for the wall like the blind; we grope like those who have no eyes. We stumble at noon as in the twilight. Among those in full vigor, we are like dead men. We all growl like bears, and moan and moan like doves. We hope for justice, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far from us. For our transgressions are multiplied before You, and our sins testify against us. Our transgressions are with us, and we know our iniquities...." Is. 59:9-12

"We are bruised, / broken masterpieces. / We did not make ourselves." -John Foreman

The first element you find in the Christian eschatological vision is the inevitable corruption, which means it assumes the Fall, and thus assumes that every human effort, no matter how noble or well-planned, will fail. We cannot bring about the ideals that we all have or hope in. Our utopias are just that: utopia, i.e., no place, nowhere, non-existent. Now, this does not mean that humanity is worthless. On the contrary, we are made in the image of God, and on that ground we are full of worth, and in that image we create in the likeness of our Creator. Thus, all the works of our hands (whether great or small, noble or vile) point to our Creator. Even the basest act of rebellion is an act of unintended worship to the God who gave you power to rebel and a God to rebel against. In the end, everything that has breath praises the Lord. Therefore, the Fall does not mean that humanity is worthless, only that it cannot be trusted. Our efforts and works can be incredible in their terror and beauty, but in regard to our salvation they are all futile failures.

Make no mistake: all of our actions are about our salvation, whether or not we think in those exact terms. Every man who has ever drowned himself in his career, every woman who has used and abused herself to a thousand men, every murderer seeking revenge, every rapist seeking satisfaction, every philanthropist exhausting themselves and their resources in good works, every tyrant seeking conquest and control, every artist seeking beauty, every child seeking acceptance, everyone seeking peace and relaxation on any given Saturday, every action of every person is about salvation. We are seeking the place of peace, of rest, of meaning and identity, of happiness and wholeness forevermore. We seek it in every place that we can: in places and people and things, in this man or that woman, in this project or that plan, in causes and crusades, in plots and schemes, in movements and agendas, in journeys and destinations. Everything we do revolves around this one goal of salvation, and thus everything we do is simultaneously significant and futile: our actions speak to our true identity, but nothing we do can ever bring us home. That is the truth and tragedy of the Fall.

That is the balanced view, a view that neither the pure optimist nor pure pessimist can stand or understand. For the optimist, everyone is full of potential, capable of achieving their own private paradise if they would just believe in that potential. People are fundamentally good; it is outer oppression and/or stimuli that make them go bad, and if we could only construct an environment conducive to goodness, then everyone would find happiness. It is a beautifully naive position, thwarted almost daily by every newspaper on the planet. We are not fundamentally good; we are fundamentally fallen, sinners, inclined towards sin. Whatever good we have is corrupted every time, and all of our "private paradises" (which is a contradiction in terms) either fail to materialize or fail to satisfy. In the end, we are incapable of producing our own happiness. We cannot save ourselves.

For the pessimist, the Fall is (ironically) their only reality. Everyone is either basically selfish or weak or (what is most likely) both. All of our acts, even the most altruistic, are self-centered, meant to pad our egos or line our pocketbooks or else quench some psychological wound or sense of guilt. Whatever the case, we are all narcissists out for our own, and if the chips were down we would eat each other alive. Now, there is something bracing about such cynicism, but also something adolescent. It has a healthy dose of realism about our tragic condition, but it does so without any sense of mourning or (what's better) repentance. Rather, its realism is smeared with a sneer of superiority. As there is something childishly naive about the optimist's outlook, so there is something childishly arrogant about the pessimist's outlook: it holds everyone in contempt as inevitable failures and blind idiots. It is a "boys' philosophy," as Lewis would say; it is simplistic and immature. It rightly assumes man's fallen state but goes no further. At best, it sits down in its arrogant angst; at worst, it falls deeper and deeper into a darkening despair that can only give way to stoicism or suicide. They are arrested at the tragic, because they have nowhere else to go.

The Christian, however, has somewhere else to go, because it has the balanced view. It maintains the depravity of man without dismissing all humanity as a lost cause. It believes in the tragic nature of existence without despairing. It allows for the harsh realism of the pessimist, as bracing and awakening as a cold wind; but it also allows for the hopefulness and joy of the optimist. How it does is a subject for the next few posts, but for now understand this: Christianity is true because the truth is always a shock and Christianity is a shock. Anyone can be an idealist; anyone can be dreamy-eyed over what ought to be. Anyone can be a nihilist; anyone can dismiss all significance in a horror and great darkness. But to somehow find a place for both, to take all the glories of idealistic optimism and all the daggers of nihilistic pessimism and say, "Here you may dance and there you may mourn," asserting a beautifully broken, preciously corrupt world, that was to discover a strange need in human nature. It touches the very fabric of our reality, for we need hope because we know our world is mad.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

The Unnatural Sin (a cultural engagement by an orthodox rebel)

I remember a year ago I was watching the last Rambo movie because my cousin told me it was awesome (for the record, it wasn't). Right before character creation and subtlety were jettisoned out of the airlock and replaced by scene after scene of ever-increasing violence, there was a brief moment of profundity. John Rambo, living in exile somewhere outside of Burma, is asked by a group of Christian missionaries if he would take them to their mission inside of Burma, despite the country being a "war-zone" (i.e., there's crazy people with guns running everywhere). Rambo grudgingly agrees to go and ferries them up river.

Somewhere along that magical ferry ride (after Rambo uses one pistol to kill no less than five bad guys at once), Rambo gets to talking with one of the missionaries. She asks him why he has been so grumpy about what they are doing. Rambo's response is interesting. Apparently, he thinks that the missionaries are all wasting their time. "You're going against what's natural," he says, referring to their pacifistic (and somewhat pretentious) brand of Christianity. "When you're pushed, killin's as easy as breathin'." Judging by the missionary's reaction, she saw his viewpoint as highly defeatist. I saw it as closer to the truth, but not quite.

The problem with the Christian missionaries in the film is their barely implicit denial of original sin (as well as their smugness about that denial). They seem to think that if they "turn the other cheek" by refusing to defend either themselves, their friends, or even the people that are under their care, then the crazy, genocidal militiamen will just throw down their arms and sing "Kumbaya". Or perhaps God will rain down fire upon them (which He sort of did, only the fire's name was Rambo). Of course, the exact opposite happens. Just as Rambo off-handedly predicted, the mission is sacked, the men killed (or taken off to be tortured), and the women raped. Rambo is unsurprised to hear this news, because he had taken and continues to take into account an important fact: the heart of fallen man is deceitful and desperately wicked (Jer. 17:9), and expecting sudden mercy and compassion from those who have let human depravity swallow them whole is a fool's dream.

There is a problem with Rambo's near-miss assessment, however, and it is in his use of the word "natural".

Oswald Chambers once said that if a man looks seriously at life, at the whole of existence as it really is, then he will find that it is fundamentally tragic rather than logical. Something is not right with the world, something that regularly and effectively upsets all our best-laid plans, hopes, and institutions. Something called Sin. It has wrecked us and the whole of creation with death and all its damnable incarnations. Since the Fall, it has been a part of our existence, a deep and interwoven part.

As deep a part as it may be, however, it is by no means "natural". It is easy to mistake it for such, but it is still not so. It may be commonplace and widespread, but that does not make it "natural". Despite ignorance to the contrary, Sin and death have been and always will be unnatural: abnormalities, deformities, aberrations, what ought not to be. Aberrations do not cease to be such simply because they are prevalent; a disease does not magically become health because it has taken over the whole body. Likewise, just because something is abundant enough to be called "common" does not in any way suddenly make it natural, normal, or moral.

This is a very ancient yet relevant fact. The creation is what it is; but whatever it is, it was not meant to be thus. There was a time before the Fall, where creation existed as it was intended to be, an existence it may yet be again. Until such time, however, we wander through the suffering waste and grim, where the saturation of aberration has become so complete that we stop noticing it. Furthermore, many without and even within the Christian camp would say that certain aberrations are actually natural and as God intended. This is how far the disease has spread: the body no longer sees it as such and instead welcomes it as health.

Rambo had taken into account the one great fact of life: the reality of sin. The problem is that there are two great facts of life, and the second is this: the reality of redemption. Sin may be real, but it is never "natural". There are no "natural" sins; all sin is unnatural. That is what the reality of redemption teaches us; and without that reality, sin is not only real but also all that there is. What's worse, its prevalence could become so accepted that no one calls it sin anymore. They call it "natural," normal, the way things are and thus ought to be. Without the reality of redemption, we have no motivation or means to pierce the darkness; we can only succumb either to despair or blindness, to a hopeless nihilism or an ignorant optimism. Rambo was the former. The Christian missionaries were the later. The Christian Faith is neither.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011