Apocalypse/Utopia
William Stringfellows North American liberation theology/theology of the cross requires us to read the contemporary world through the apocalypse. In contrast to other popular views of the apocalypse Stringfellow does not view the text as a road map to the end of the world but instead as an imaginative telling of the possibility and future of the world captive to the principalities and powers he names as
The Utopia for Gutierrez exists less as an idealized future but instead as a great refusal of the present reality. To enter into the task of the utopia and the utopia dream with all of its implications for the human condition is to enter into an imaginative task that seeks to make an announcement and renouncement. The utopia renounces the current way things are and seeks to provide an announcement of the ways they could be.[1]
The utopia, like the apocalypse, moves forward. They project what can be into the future and invite the reader to participate in creating that world. Revelations is less about the way the world would be but more about the way it was and the way it might be with out prayerful action. To speak of utopia and apocalypse is to speak about a world that can only come into existence through the participation of human beings in their creation, through praxis.[2]
We can criticize the utopia for creating an impossible vision of reality just as we can criticize the apocalyptic for creating an unrealitistic vision of the end of time. But to do so negates our responsibility in engaging with these as storytelling devices of theopoetic and prophetic import in our contemporary world. To engage in utopic visioning is to engage with the crisis of our time. This utopic vision is built upon creativity and dynamism in relations to our work in the world.[3]
To participate in the utopic and the apocalyptic here understood, is to participate in the building and creation of a new humanity.[4] By envisioning a new way of telling Gods story as informed by our current context and reality we are also envisioning a new way for the human person to participate in Gods story and Gods world.
The theopoetic asks us to reclaim our religious imagery as a system of images, stories and symbols that overturn the basic assumptions of our culture and faith. In short it asks us to engage in the apocalyptic and utopian task of telling our faith as a living and present tense event in which we are all living participants. The apocalyptic was not a one time experience of poetic theology but is instead a theopoetic task used to critique the ways in which culture and church have become entwined to allow for the dreaming of a better tomorrow. The apocalyptic and the utopic exists as conversation pieces bent on drawing us into a dawning revelation of what could be in the present tense.
The theopoetic task is not another form of theology but is instead, in this instance at the least, a form of doing theology in the world. The apocalyptic imagination is dependent on our being able to envision and enact our creative commentary on the present as a religious and moral duty. A quick look at the contemporary and classic cinema scene provides more than enough evidence of this sort of thinking. Movies like “The Quiet Earth”, “Metropolis” and TV shows like “Jerhico” function not as a prophecy of the future but as an annunciation of and to the present.
To take on this sort of work recognizes that human work and life are shaped more by fables, myths, story and imagination and that it is here that any full engagement with life actually takes place.[5] This is not to say we rely on the apocalyptic in image and story to facilitate liberation as a replacement for Christian action but that we must recognize the role of these things in the shaping of identity for action.[6] The stories we tell of God, when we tell Gods story in other words, is more of a story that contains our desires and hopes for the present tense world and for the future that could be birthed. It’s a way of naming the contradictions in our culture. To name God as a weak force is to recognize in our world the way in which our own world holds on to power and has created ways in which mass scales of violence through war, economics and environment can effect the majority of human life. Likewise the middle-ages, suffering at the whims of disease, feudal powers and petty politics, viewed God as a powerful force in contrast to their own weakness in the light of these events.
The apocalypse then does not sit at odds with what was once called the Age of Aquarius. Instead it sits in conjunction with that age, entering into its imaginative discourses and listening to the voices their that need to be freed and to find freedom. The mythic hungers of our age work together with our apocalyptic impulses towards creating a new and ongoing articulation of our deepest spiritual hungers and longings. The imagination is the birthing ground of liberating apocalyptic impulses.
It is with this apocalyptic and utopic imagination that we are able to envision liberation in the world. Liberation theology tends to take the cross as its articulation of Gods liberating work, but to work with Stringfellow means that we are called to engage with the theopoetic task of speaking truth to power by way of fable, myth and story. This is the goal of the apocalyptic: to create a story that is a truth, that conveys an understanding of God story in our present situation. Stringfellow is dependent on this telling always recognizing that as society we will always be captive to ‘babel’ – to destructive forces that demand our allegiance and worship.
The Word as Event
To engage in this task is to become involved in a form of reading world and text that opens up the present. Stringfellow names this way of reading as seeing the Word as event. To do this does not mean to read the bible as literal, which Stringfellow names as a failure for exegesis. Instead we are to engage with the text as a living testament, to fail at this is to not encounter the dignity of our own participation in the text and the vitality of the very Word that invites and teaches us.[7] To see the word as event is to encounter the text as a force for revelation and conversation in our present realities and contexts. It is an event that is happening now and not just in the past.
This does not mean Stringfellow avoids the exegetical when it comes to reading and interpreting the Apocalypse. But instead he focuses on the Apocalypse as a polemic. On the one hand it functions as a theological conversation and equally as a political document. When we talk about the theopoetic as it relates to the apocalyptic and the utopia dream we are talking about this very function: conversation and political ideal are always pregnant and implied by our images and stories.[8] To tell an apocalypse, to critique the present, warn of the dangers of the future and to hope for Gods reigns, is always to come into conflict with the ruling ideologies and stories.
To read the apocalypse this way is to read it as a liberating text. It is to see the captivity to power and the role of
Hall says that the role of the apocalyptic is toward a visioning of God’s universal reign of justice and mercy. To not view the apocalypse in this sort of theopoetic daydreaming of the ‘kin/gdom come’ is to participate in a shallow dreaming of the world more intent on a lust for power and a perversion of religious institution into an instrument of crude self-centering fantasizing.[10] To envision God’s reign is an ongoing task in which the church is constantly asked to participate. We must learn to shape into story these mythic hunger for a better world. Dry rational is easily explained away. Myth and story can go straight to who we are as people and how we desire the world to be.
Even Luther was even skeptical of viewing the apocalyptic as a way of reading the end of the world. But his work suggests a theopoetic approach as well, that of viewing the text as a way of reading the signs of the times.[11] The danger we encounter here is that we may have a constant need to fit the social world that we live in into the text of our faith. This sort of thing can lead us to the cheap apocalypses of Hal Lindsey and the ‘Left Behind’ books. While Lindesy is focused on reading the times in the light of the apocalypse he is looking for an actual end to the world. He misses the opportunity provided by the apocalyptic impulse to call the world to repentance and to revelation.
This is the same Luther who taught on Genesis for 12 years. Luther always taught and worked as a biblical scholar in the light of the contemporary issues.[12] For Luther the ‘word as event’ had meaning as a living force in our own context. To live with the word was to live with the present tense, was to live at this time where we were alive and to speak of present tense as being a part of biblical revelation. Here the scripture, I would say, becomes alive in the way it is freed from the past for the liberation of the present. If we are able to, as the historical critical method tends to do, keep the scriptures as an event that lives solely in the past then we have declared that the Bible has no gift for a contemporary humanity.
But on the on the other hand if we believe that the scripture is not just an historical event that happened sometime in the past but instead view them as the imaginative and poetic response to their human realities then we can understand the way bible study in the present functions to open us up to the ways in which we tell Gods story for the liberation and empowerment of the present.
The Cross as Theopoetic
The task of liberation from a theopoetic point of view is not to assist in the toppling of the systems that cause oppression to happen.[13] Instead the task is to take on the underlying myths, stories and images that enable such oppression. By working from the apocalyptic we are able to take captive the prevailing images, whether they be freedom by way of war, capitalism or even democracy, and place them in a story structure that reveals their dark sides and oppressive natures. Part of the liberation sought here is to liberate those who participate in oppression so they might see the ways in which they have enabled apocalypse.
Working with Jurgen Moltman we can even see the ways in which the cross itself has a function that is theopoetic. If Moltman is correct in his assumptions that the religious life of the
In other words it functions as a theopoetic image that undercuts and damages the assumptions of power that are found in the emporeror and the states cultic religious practices. The early church was able to brandish this image in a way that was able to take the scandal of political power and find in it the revelation of God.
To participate in liberation theology from a theopoetic perspective is to engage in symbol and image making in such a manner that we find ways of telling Gods story as a present tense reality as it pertains to our local realties. As I’ve argued before its important that our poetic and liberation impulses are articulated in the ground realities of our local context. The downtown eastside exists in a network of images, symbols and interpretations that are specific to its context. To create a theopoetic of liberation there requires us to engage in the actual human lives, hungers and spiritual desires of that region.
If we are to believe that the power of the cross is the way it mocks and reverses the way our institutional religions and the powers of death are at work in our culture then it is to this that the cross, and any new images we create to convey the particulars of the cross, must engage with.
In his book on theopoetics Amos Niven Wilder names as cause for liberal, evangelical and secular mystic, the cause of reclaiming a theopoetic of the cross that is able to speak to all.[14] The task of the liberation theologian here then is to speak of a image and story of the cross that is not so indebted to doctrines, theologies and institutions that it cannot also speak of a freedom and liberation for all. The cross must convey a sense of freedom in the theopeotic sense that can have implications for those people at home in the church and for those who do not feel that they can honestly call themselves a Christian.
The cross then, as Moltman points out, is not a religious symbol but is instead a profane symbol. To align ourselves with the profane is to announce that the profane is the home of true holiness, that that which contradicts our assumptions, notions and bias’s of what the holy is more revealed in the profane than in our tightly controlled systems and structures of holiness.
Our apocalyptic and utopic visions are geared towards making and revealing symbols, images and stories that enable the profane to become a reality in our world. The profanity of the cross stands in contrast to our notions of salvation and revelation. The very profanity of the cross leads us to consider the notion of universal salvation that Guiterrez suggests.
Universal Salvation
Is this what Gutierrez means when he says that the liberation theologian must seek a universal salvation? To find in the cross a salvation does not mean to find a cross that takes away our suffering but instead reveals the reality of suffering and mocks the powers who cause suffering. What the world seeks to kill God reveals godself in. Salvation then is not to be saved from a certain experience or reality but saved to it. To seek a salvation then can mean more than just the ending of oppression but can also mean our global, corporate and intention confession of suffering and our deliberate entering into those circumstances and realities and becoming participants in them.
Guiterreze talks about this when he talks about our responsibility to be saved to the neighbor. Here we encounter the idea of the hidden God. On the cross the hidden God is revealed, that what we try to kill, torture and silence revels God to us. Likewise to be saved to the experiences of our neighbor is to be saved to the reality and ways in which they bring God to us. To confess to the realities of suffering and to enter into oppression and otherness on purpose is to live present with the hidden God and to make godself known to the world.
A universal salvation then is to be constantly turning toward the other as a way of discovering the hidden God and of being saved to that persons experience. This hidden God reveals the folly our attempts at controlling salvation and the process by which salvation needs to be saved. Garcia critiques liberation theology as being more interested in saving society than souls. To be saved to the other – to undergo a process of conversion to the realities of the other – is to encounter a type of salvation of the soul, a salvation of spiritual alignment which will enable us to save society.
A universal salvation does not negate the soul but nor does it stop there. The theopoetic seeks to help enable the various forms of salvation by asking us to tell Gods story in such a way that our souls, our personal selves in relation to God and world undergo a transformation, can then work out its revelation in the world.
This search for God in the other then asks that the theopoetic imagination take up the task of telling Gods story as it exists in the manger, among the dirty, the forgotten and the vulnerable. For us to tell Gods story as entering the world in the dirty and with a head that you can crush with the palm of your hand has implications for the church. When we tell this story we must ask of the ways in which the vulnerability of God is welcomed among us as institutions and what to whom our identity as people formed around this vulnerable God are brought to.
The Church as Theopoetic
Too often the church has told Gods story in relation to the power it seeks or has in its own possession. The cross has been used to promote the glory of earthly kingdoms instead of as a way of undermining the symbols of power and power worship that are used to dominate our world. We have tended to turn the scandal of the cross into a scandalizing event, one that imprisons and condemns instead of frees.
Part of the theopoetic task is to reimagine the church as it exists in our world today. The theopoetic seeks to tell a story to the church that reimagines the way the church can be and exist and how it serves the cross. To seek to serve the cross as a place interaction with the world is to seek to find a new story of the church. The reality of the churches confluence with cultural powers and allegiances.
By agreeing with Hall that the church is to be a suffering polis and that the world teems with those who have been oppressed and discriminated against then we are given the option of saying something new about the very nature of the church. The church, the ecclesia or called out, then can be seen as being made evident in the mangers of society. Church then is not we Christians who have responded to the call of God in Christ who constitute the church but instead the whole of humanity in their variety of situations who are a church active in the world, are a suffering polis. Church is anywhere and everywhere the incarnation of God comes to us as the other, the outcast and the foreign.
To engage in a view that encounters the entire world as an event of church then is to move beyond rigid church hierarchies and into a view more akin to Gustavo Gutierreze which asks us to view out neighbor, our surroundings and even our life situation, as a sacrament. If we are saved to the other and are seeking an universal salvation then every moment is a sacrament. Let us move beyond Gutierrezes concept of the neighbor as sacrament and into a new idea: the sacrament of the ordinary.
In this I envision the very work of world and church as being to announce that every ordinary object, event and person – like the elements of the Eucharist – are ordinary things made extraordinary. To be church in this sort of mindset is to be a church beyond institutions and is to participate in the holiness of that which we have announced as profane to the world. If we can view ordinary bread and wine to have extraordinary existence, in whatever theological model we choose to view it, then we are equally called to see average people, situations and institutions as having extraordinary lives. I take this to be the definition of the priesthood of the believer.
But to say this is not to say this and to recognize in the suffering of the other the churches true vocation is not to say that the church must suffer, or that we receive glory and validation by suffering. As Hall points out there has been serious critique of our fixation on suffering, death and violence.[15] But to enter into the sacrament of the ordinary and the suffering is to view the call of Christ as one who knew that a life of compassion, mercy and justice would result in suffering.[16] To save the world from its brokenness is to be subject to the violence of that which you are trying to save it from.
This is the ordinary that we must view as sacred. The ordinary suffering of humanity, the world that teems with the everyday reality of suffering and oppression and loss. It is here that the holy one of God is revealed to us, is incarnate. We as church seek our own destruction so we can better be on the side of those who are marginalized and left outside by our institutions. We say God is revealed here in the manner in which revelation in suffering upsets our safety nets, our security and our self identity.
Conclusion
The apocalyptic and utopic provided us with a theopoetic way of enacting liberation theology in our world and lifestyle. To do so requires us to engage with the hungers and desires that are present our age as being visions of reality that contain the seeds of a new way of being human in the world. In order for us to view this as a gateway to liberation we are asked to tell both the biblical story as having present tense import and our own story as being a form of theopoetic and spiritual insight and resistance to the powers that be.
But to do this we must avoid the pit falls of reading the world as being on a road map to hell/destruction as displayed in the apocalypse. Our apocalyptic vision draws us toward deeper and greater insights into our own way of being in the world. This sort of reading provides for, in Stringfellows words ‘a faulty exegesis’ as well as locks us into a literal mythic structure that does not allow any room for reading the world as its own text that we can explore through biblical imagery.
If we cannot read our own story as an event that takes place in conjunction and in response to the biblical narrative then the biblical event comes to predominate our world. The hungers and voices of the poor are full of their own stories and desires by which they explore the implications of the biblical event. We tell these stories together, in the apocalyptic and the utopic, as a means of becoming church in the world.
To do this, to work for liberation, means that our imaginations must be freed for, from and in our traditions and aligned with the hungers of the world. This freedom allows us to speak a new voice to the churches that calls them towards being church in the world.
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