A Conspiracy Rules Our World!

The nutty conspiracy theories filling the airwaves and cyberspace these days though wrong in so any ways about so many things are right about one thing. And it’s a thing we desperately need to hear in this country.

What is that one thing? C S. Lewis tells us better than I can: “Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going.”[1]

Christianity is the great conspiracy that runs the world! Through all the ages and in all the spaces of this world followers of the risen Jesus have been engaged, as Lewis put it, “in a great campaign of sabotage” against God’s Enemy.

And it’s not just Christianity. The Jews were God’s first agents of what John Howard Yoder called “the original revolution”:

“The Bible story really begins with Abraham, the father of those who believe. Abraham was called to get up and leave Chaldea, the cultural and religious capital of the known world in his age, to go he knew not where, to find he knew not what. He could not know when or whether or how he could again have a home, a land of his own. And yet as he rose to follow this inscrutable promise, he was told that it was through him that the nations of the world would be blessed. In response Abraham promised his God that he would lead a different kind of life: a life different from the cultured and the religious peoples, whether urban or nomadic, among whom he was to make his pilgrim way.”[2]

That’s the great conspiracy! From humanity’s fall into sin God has been working to reclaim and restore his creatures and creation from the chaos and dissolution into which they had fallen. And he’s done it through creating a new family among all the families of the world who would alone among them declare and demonstrate God’s will and way in subversive and counter-revolutionary[3] ways so they might see and be drawn back to their Creator and Lord (Dt.4:5-8).

In world resolutely turned against God, this is the way it had to be. For God to “walk with humanity in the cool of the evening” (Gen.3:8) the way he did before humanity’s rebellion and break in relation with him could only mean judgment and destruction for it. Gerhard Lohfink is right, I think:

“It can only be that God begins in a small way, at a single place in the world. There must be a place, visible, tangible, where the salvation of the world can begin: that is, where the world becomes what it is supposed to be according to God’s plan. Beginning at that place, the new thing can spread abroad, but not through persuasion, not through indoctrination, not through violence. Everyone must have the opportunity to come and see. All must have the chance to behold and test this new thing. Then, if they want to, they can allow themselves to be drawn into the history of salvation that God is creating. Only in that way can their freedom be preserved. What drives them to the new thing cannot be force, not even moral pressure, but only the fascination of a world that is changed.”[4]

Now I can hear your protests and howls of laughter or looks of incredulity or perplexity. The church you and I know is hardly a “subversive counter-revolutionary movement” in contemporary culture. And seems seldom to have been such since the 4^th century when Christianity became the official religion of the empire. And that is true!

Yet it is the nature of conspiracies to be small, intentional, focused movements within a larger group seeking its reform or change through acts that subvert the inherited attitudes, actions, patterns, and systems and a way of life that demonstrates an alternative and better way to be.

Yet in this movement it is not finally their subversive and counter-revolutionary witness that effects the desired change whenever it occurs but the life on the One at its heart to whom it witnesses and in whose power it lives. In other words, the church is more than sociology. It is a theology, a life of God, embodied in a people who didn’t seek nor earn such divine regard.

Michel de Certeau, French Jesuit social observer historian, and theologian, gives perhaps the best description I’ve seen of what this conspiracy that holds the hope of the world in its life looks like in practice in our world today.   

Certeau frames it as a simultaneous double movement.[5]

 

-the first movement is providing a place, a home with its necessary boundaries, rituals, institutions, stories, and behaviors. Place gives a point of orientation for its people to live by and live from. Jesus is that place for the church.

-the second movement is the transgression of that sense of place with its boundaries and limits the first movement creates and crossing those lines in the interest of reaching others. Jesus is at the same time this boundary-breaker for the church.

Certeau writes of “a coordination between necessary grounding points (languages, theories, institutions) and critical divergences (inventions, ‘prophetic’ actions, or displacements hidden within each Christian experience). But both these functions are equally necessary.”

Further, he says, “The Christian movement is always the recognizing of a particular situation – and the necessity of a new step forward. There is always a necessary risk in being different. It requires simultaneously a place and a ‘further,’ a ‘now’ and an ‘afterwards,’ a ‘here’ and an ‘elsewhere.’”

Finally, “Boundaries are the place of Christian work, and their displacements are the result of this work.”

And that, in its manifest unimaginability and seeming impossibility, especially in our present social condition, is precisely the kind of subversive, counter-revolutionary ministry needed in today’s world. The conspiracy at work in the nooks and crannies, and forgotten places of the world, if not, sadly, in the major centers and thoroughfares of life at present. That is what Jesus is doing among those of his people who will hear him and hazard to follow him.

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[1] Mere Christianity (HarperCollins ebooks), 46.

[2] John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism (Herald Press. Kindle Edition): 346.

[3] “Subversive and counter-revolutionary” is my term for this conspiracy. I deliberately use terms from different ends of our political spectrum to indicate the novelty of this movement and its resistance to being pigeon-holed by our categories. It is politically eclectic, socially non-conformist, and ideologically diverse. Or at least its supposed to be.  

[4] Gerhard Lohfink, Does God Need the Church, 27.

[5] “How is Christianity Thinkable Today,” http://pastorkeithanderson.net/writing/blog/item/how-is-christianity-thinkable-today-2).