Wild Gospel, Alison Morgan

Wild Gospel explores the dynamic between cultures and the irruptive power of the Gospel. Dr Morgan looks on culture as the means humanity uses to protect itself from the dread nature of our condition. We are contingent beings, constantly subject to mortality, mischance and malaise, so we construct culture around ourselves to try and feel that we have some sort of control over the chaos, that meaning and value are still available to us. It’s a protection enabling us to huddle together against the dark through a network of shared stories and attitudes.

The problems with this are many. It can become oppressive, forcing people to share our defences against fear or be excluded. It can be extremely divisive between those of one culture and another, as history has demonstrated over and over again: for some evil reason we define ourselves by who we are not, shutting out and rejecting outsiders. Cultures also let us slip into lazy thinking, where we drift along with what everyone else expects, failing to become our own distinctive selves.  

And worst of all, culture’s promise of defence against the dark is simply not true. It creates the illusion that we can get some sort of control over life and death when the 3 Ms above are all still rampant all around us and within us. We all need culture so that we can relate to one another on the basis of shared understandings: but our cultures are always compromised. In the face of the storm culture allows us to build only on sand.

This is not life to the full! All cultures, by themselves, deliver a half life of compromise and unfulfillment. But Jesus came to give life, and give it to the full (John 10:10). It follows that Jesus is always at odds with the half life that culture promises but cannot deliver on. Jesus wants to bring out the best in humanity and is therefore never going to compromise with second best. He therefore always challenges prevailing culture: Jesus is always wild, always comes from outside the expectations of encultured people. His death and resurrection mean that cultures as well as individuals need to die to sin in order to be raised to new life. But culture is so strongly connected to identity for most people that His challenge to it is met with fear and hostility.

Morgan cites Jesus’ affirmations of all those pushed to the margins of New Testament era culture – tax collectors, prostitutes, Gentiles, sinners – together with his condemnations of those who stood at the apex of that culture – Pharisees, priests and Levites – as evidence of his counter cultural drive. The Pharisees needed the challenge of Jesus’ love, not only for themselves, to shock them out of their complacency, arrogance, judgmentalism and hypocrisy, but also to counter the oppression they heaped upon their culture’s rejects.

There follows a survey of Christian counter-cultures, or more often sadly the church’s collusion with culture or even attempts to fashion an oppressive culture in its own hierarchical and institutionalist image. Morgan’s examples of new life coming and challenging withered cultures include the monastic movement, pilgrimages, the Franciscans, the Reformation, Evangelical revivalism, and the Pentecostal and charismatic movements. In spite of the refreshment they brought for a little while, each one of them in turn faded into a stale legalism. 

In general Morgan therefore sees the faith coming alive in the Spirit when new movements challenge stultifying norms, but falling back into a coma when we are fixated on the expectations of a previous generation, so that we fail to see what God is calling us to become now. One has only to look at the Crusades, the Inquisition, the burnings of books and people, the compromises with Hitler, or the Magdalen laundries to see how often the church as an institution has brought death instead of life to the people. “The thief comes only to kill and steal and destroy.” Sometimes that thief has been us…

Coming up to her time of writing (published 2004), Morgan sees the new culture as post-modernism and proclaims the death of Christendom which used to form the overarching narrative that once sustained Western culture, but whose symbols have now lost their potency for the great majority of people. Where Christendom has degraded into neo-Pharisaism this has been a good thing, a corrective to an abuse of the Gospel. 

But what is to be the way forward for our witness to this post-Christian culture? Morgan advocates personal renewal through charismatic experience as a response to the stultification of modernism and its deracination from its former Christian conceptual framework. I am very sympathetic to this, in view of my own experience of life in the Spirit, even though I have often sadly been charismatic more by aspiration than practice. Morgan has some beautiful tales to tell of people liberated by the Gospel, finding the power to change lifestyles that have served them badly through the presence of God’s love in their lives. We need Jesus! Desperately! Nonetheless I believe there are two important qualifications to add to Morgan’s prescription.

First, the emphasis on personal experience, vital as it is, far from countering post-modern culture, actually plays along with it. For very many people, there really isn’t anything else beyond myself. In a post-truth generation, what I think and how I feel is everything. Many people’s rejection of the dead world which is the still-birth of quasi-scientific materialism has led them into anti-rationalism in which evidence, analysis and cognition are devalued. Things are true because I believe them, instead of I believe things because they are true. So what if you believe something irreconcilably different, that’s true for you too. With these egregious cultural assumptions there is no reason to believe the Gospel, it’s just all made up, like everyone else’s truth. I believe that Jesus challenges this anti-rationalism just as much as any other false culture. He is the Logos, the Divine Word. God sustains the universe by His Word of power. The whole cosmos demonstrates that mind comes before matter. Mindlessness is a diminution of our humanity and an enemy of the truth.

Secondly I think we are seeing, not a new culture, the next wave in an endless cycle of ebb and flow, but a corrosion of culture itself, heading for its dissolution. There are no longer shared norms and narratives, which of course may be challenged as they decay into oppressive forms: instead there is a vacuum in which everyone has to make it up as they go along. We cannot base our identities on the traditional forms of country, artistic and literary traditions, history, religion, family, gender, work roles and so on because all these are held to be oppressive to somebody or other and form the seeds of hate crime. But if we could be confident in foregrounding our true identity as children of God, our background identities would become sources not of conflict but of celebration as each contributes their diversity to the benefit of all.

Instead of bringing freedom this absence of all boundaries has brought a tidal wave of anxiety and self-harm by corroding all concept of who we actually are. Cultures are no longer organic entities but carcases from which we pick out the bits that suit ourselves, so that we become people of everywhere and nowhere, every identity and none. Debate becomes ever more aggressive as those who disagree with us no longer live alongside us as neighbours but confront us as enemies. These are all things that culture was supposed to help us work round so we could live together, if not well, at least with some hope of community. We are therefore progressing, not towards a new culture, but to an unculture: not so much a new Dark Ages but a new kind of dark age.

The Christian project must certainly encompass the evangelical charismatic dimension of salvaging individuals from this tide of individualism and recovering our image of who we are as children of God in Christ. But the destruction of culture requires a further step – the redemption of culture. Individual Christians who are strong in their faith and speak out for it in their context are essential to this redemption. But there is a further dimension which I believe involves engagement with the arts. 

Much current Christian symbolism grew from the Victorian imagination and no longer resonates for our contemporaries. We need poets, film makers, thinkers, song writers, story tellers, musicians, painters, architects and writers who can breathe new inspiration into the great truths that bring life – justice, mercy, sin, suffering, redemption, love, compassion and sacrifice. When these cease to be abstractions, become clothed with meaning, and fire the imaginations of ordinary people, we will be able to speak to culture in a language they can understand. If Christians imaginatively convey a rich and worthwhile humanity, the poverty of our consumerism, the misery of our materialism and the shallowness of our secularism will by contrast be seen for the debased and dehumanising ways of life they are. We need to unleash our creativity to bring hope that our unculture may be redeemed and the people rehumanised in Christ.

 The Siege, John Sutherland

Dorking Book Reading Club 10aug23

This is a book I would certainly not have chosen without the Book Club. I expected shallow characters, stereotypical attitudes, very plot driven with lots of suspenseful twists and turns. I definitely got the last of these. Mr Sutherland proved to be very good at building tension and handling unpredictability – difficult to do convincingly when, behind the scenes, the author knows exactly what he wants to say and has complete control of all he creates. But I got a lot more than these…

First of all, I wasn’t expecting such a positive view of the Christian faith. I have become used to my beliefs constantly being portrayed as bigoted, out of touch, anti-rational, living in the past, humourless, hypocritical, judgemental, and so on. We seem to be fair game for every kind of resentful prejudice in a way that is not applied to other religions or world views. This is also true of crime fiction: whenever the clergy are present, it turns out to be the vicar what done it. So I am very grateful to Mr Sutherland for offering a much kinder and definitely more realistic presentation. The Church where the action takes place has invested in up to date facilities because it has a huge ambition to serve its needy local community. The vicar is open hearted and full of humanity…

But above all it’s the figure of Grace, who is at the heart of the book, who embodies a lived Christian faith. Her name is no accident, as the reference to Amazing Grace indicates. Grace is the virtue that cares, forgives and turns the other cheek, which is set forth in the story of Jesus Christ. He comes in humility, makes Himself vulnerable and endures the cross for our sake and for our redemption. This is love in action for those who can never be worthy of it – but God loves us anyway, and will do whatever it takes to bring us back, if we choose…

So Grace just keeps on giving. She is there for her friend Rosie the vicar, but also for the Syrian mother and children whom she has just met for the first time. When she has the opportunity to escape, she won’t take it, in spite of her desperation to be reunited with her son Isaiah, because she won’t leave until everyone else is able to come too. In the end she is even capable of seeing the humanity of someone who seems to have nothing but hatred and lies in his life, and to offer hope to her terrorist captor.

If this makes her seem an impossible goody-goody, she isn’t. It’s her own struggles with bereavement – her husband who died of cancer, her son who was murdered – that make her more aware of the struggles and suffering of others. Instead of hardening her, those struggles softened her. Instead of weakening her, they strengthened her, for she is strong! She is the one who transforms the entire situation because she is strong enough to care and thus to make herself vulnerable to others. Dealing with someone who is all hard edges, full of ideology and hatred, she offers a love for which he has no answers. Her vulnerability touches the vulnerability buried very deep under his angry dehumanised psyche. I did not expect to be moved by this book, but I confess, I wept.

Yes Grace finds it hard to pray in her desperate situation – who wouldn’t? Yes she is unable to return to the fatal church hall where she experienced so much trauma, just as we would be unable. Yes of course she needs counselling and support. Initially I expected her to be a cliché, big black momma, all heart and maternal instinct, but she is so much more. It’s so difficult in fiction to create “good” characters convincingly, but in Grace the author incarnates goodness in a way that humanises rather than dehumanises her. Clearly Sutherland admires and appreciates the values by which she lives.

Comparable processes are going on with Alex, the police negotiator, too. Although much is made of the professionalism of the police, shown in their deployment of resources, their detailed procedures and the rigour of their application to the task, Alex and his team’s best work comes from making genuine human contact with Lee the terrorist, trying to understand him, to get alongside him and even to offer the possibility of a more humane set of values to him: to be trustworthy, understanding and compassionate.

These attitudes make you vulnerable, so this is also a story of Alex’s redemption from the past trauma of a negotiation that went terribly wrong. Somehow he manages to overcome his hurt and reconnect with the hostile Lee. But it is also the story of Lee’s radicalisation and ultimate redemption as he discovers new possibilities through human connection. Grace even comes alongside him as he awaits trial in prison. He is offered at least the hope that life can be different, that a new start is possible.

Finally, the book is very positive about the Metropolitan Police, very timely in view of all the bad news that they have brought upon themselves lately. As portrayed by Sutherland, they are extraordinarily professional, dedicated and thorough, unequivocally a force for good. There is no racism, sexism or veniality in Sutherland’s Met. There isn’t even bickering. There are strong, effective female leaders, like Pip who leads the negotiating team. There are no officers who secretly feel that Lee may have a point, that maybe there are too many foreigners over here. If only reality were actually like this!