“Oregon Humanities”; a Journal of the Oregon Council for the Humanities; Summer/Spring 2005 – Pop Culture
By PAUL Louis METZGER
PAUL LOUIS METZGER is associate professor of Christian theology and theology of culture at Multnomah Biblical Seminary in Portland. He holds a Ph.D. from Kings College London, University of London, and is a member of the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey. He is the author of The Word of Christ and the World of Culture (Eerdmans), editor of Cultural Encounters: A Journal for the Theology of Culture, and is currently working on a new book, Eating (Jim) Crow: Confronting Race and Class Divisions in the Consumer Church.
I grew up in a conservative Christian home and now teach theology at a conservative Christian seminary but have had a love affair with the "other side" ever since high school, when I would listen to Jim Morrison and The Doors, absorbing their music into my pores. Thus, I have often felt a bit like a "pious pagan," trying to navigate between Jesus Christ and secular culture. No doubt, this dynamic tension played a part in my spearheading a journal on the theology of culture a year ago.
As editor of Cultural Encounters, I wrestle with the question of how theology can truly be Christ centered on the one hand and promote meaningful cultural engagement on the other hand. Jesus' own life and teaching provide a template for engaging culture. According to John's gospel, God's creative Word "became flesh and made his dwelling among us" as Jesus Christ.
This text speaks to me. Jesus was very world oriented; he was not afraid of getting his hands dirty, and he met people where they were, rather than waiting for them to come to him. Knowing Christ should make one more world oriented than one would otherwise be. For one, Jesus did not enter this world on that first Christmas gift wrapped in pretty paper. It was certainly not a "silent night" either. Like every other newborn babe, there was a lot of bleeding, sweating, and crying going on. Later in life, although spiritually pure, Jesus was scandalous a friend of prostitutes and other "sinners" and accused by the religious establishment of being a gluttonous drunk.
Jesus was not very religious, but he was spiritual. He claimed that righteousness must enter the heart and that spirituality is not about adhering to religious rituals and externals. Moreover, the orthodox claim that Christ created culture, which is the fabric of the created world, and entered the world that first Christmas morning, suggests that secular culture can bear witness to him. Thus, the stories of any culture, albeit frayed at points, can bear witness to him from one angle or another since culture is like a tapestry that reflects Christ's involvement in the world. Christ does not exclude secular culture and is not excluded from it.
The Christian subculture sometimes excludes Christ, though, For example, conservative Christian battles to keep nativity sets in parks strike me as odd and miss the whole point of Jesus' life and teaching. I think Jesus would have been much more concerned about helping the homeless in the park. As an artist friend once told me, we Christians often get caught up painting the flea and missing the dog.
This reminds me of Jonathan Larson's play Rent, which I saw at the Hult Center in Eugene a few years back. I remember thinking to myself during the intermission how raw and real the story was. Like the gospel, it wasn't a children’s story. In fact, it did a much better job of explaining the gospel than many Christian attempts. Here's my take on Rent. The story begins on Christmas Eve in New York City at the end of the second millennium. A group of young artists and their friends seek escape from the virtual reality of corporate America, the commercialized big city, and cyberspace. Some of the characters are suffering from homelessness (there is no room in the inn Holiday Inn on Christmas Eve, once again) and dying of AIDS and drug addictions. They are also suffering and dying from the absence of lasting meaning. Everything is for rent, even love. They do have one another, though at least for the moment. In the end, they find that they have more than the moment, for one of those who dies comes back to life, resurrecting life, hope, and meaning out of a culture of death and despair. Not only Rent but also those stories void of traces of Christian symbolism can illuminate Christ from particular angles. With this in mind, tales up and downstream in history from Christ may point to him like Greek tragedies and fertility cult legends of gods coming to earth, dying, and rising again.
Now, some may think that my attempt at engaging culture is wishful thinking, an exercise in unbounded creativity (or evidence of dementia). Others may think that the Christian story is but an illustration of the ongoing quest of the human spirit for immortality, one myth among many. But as C. S. Lewis claimed, this story is not myth alone, for "if ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this." Moreover, alternative explanations like those found in The Da Vinci Code, which denies Christ's divinity, are as problematic as the fundamentalist displacement of Christ to the strictly sacred realm both remove the divine Christ as Jesus of Nazareth from the worldly sphere. The whole point here is to get beyond the divide between the heavenly and earthly, the sacred and secular, and "break on through to the other side," to commandeer a line from Jim Morrison.
At the beginning of this piece, I drew attention to Morrison and The Doors and their impact on me while growing up. I fell upon them at a time when I was quite disillusioned with my conservative Christian subculture (not that my disillusionment has ever ceased) because it often reduces faith to religious externals and removes it from daily life. I was attracted to Morrison's passionate pursuit of his ideals and how he pushed against oppressive boundaries. Eventually though, I realized that what appealed to me in Morrison found its ideal expression in Christ, whose passionate pursuit of broken hearts and liberation of those the system oppressed led him to break on through to the other side. Those like me who dare claim to follow him will find him pushing against their own self imposed boundaries to make them more world oriented and culturally engaged than they would otherwise be.