We live in a strange moment of time and cultural winds that gets called all sorts of different names, but we can all agree its ‘modernity.’
Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, how concerned we are by it, and what features it has that we should embrace or push against are all tendentious topics. Of the writing of many essays there is no end.
It won’t surprise regular readers that I am not sanguine about modernity. I don’t think it’s been a good thing for the world or the church. Some of you may instantly want to quip that I should try living in the Middle Ages without anaesthetic, so for the sake of clarity I am not simplistically suggesting that everything was better six hundred years ago. It self-evidently wasn’t, and I’m as much a child of modernity as any of the rest of you reading this; even if it was better, it would seem confusing, strange, and worse to me.
We live in a moment that many would call ‘late modernity’ which does rather assume we know the future, but has replaced ‘postmodernity’ at least among thinkers who are not keen on the postmodern. The implication being that over five hundred years into modernity (when it starts could be argued but we’re probably talking about the Tudors, which might surprise some of you. We could also pick the Reformation, the English Civil War, or the American Revolutionary War.) we’re seeing features that feel like it’s end-stage. The promise of liberalism is falling apart. What was called postmodernism twenty years ago is now largely regarded as a natural development of what came before, it’s just being modern writ large.
Why should we care in the church? We and everyone we know for generations backward have been swimming in waters and telling stories that have been tweaked and moulded by these philosophical currents. This is true of previous eras too, but it’s more difficult to see the winds that still surround us.
The modern age gifted us wonders, like Protestantism, and terrors, like the separation of symbol from thing. We lack a sense that one thing has much meaning or connection to another thing. The world is made of atoms, right? So, each thing is just a thing and their baring on each other exists in the form of the gravitational attraction of atoms towards atoms but not beyond that. Each thing is therefore what we say it is.
But the world isn’t made of atoms, it’s made of stories.
This thinking is a feature in many of the ways that the modern world pushes against Christianity, whether we think of gender ideology or a memorialist view of the Lord’s Supper (sort of the same thing). The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman famously referred to modernity as liquid, though he was thinking more of the way that capital and technology has removed the methods that communities used to apply meaning, leaving us to find, define, and assert that meaning as individuals.
One of the roots at the base of it is this concept that each thing is whatever we call it, a fruit of a medieval theological movement called ‘nominalism.’ Without exploring that idea too deeply, a question that we should be asking is, how can we push back against it?
By insisting that things are real. If we suggest that things have substance, which participates in reality—that a tree is a tree not because it looks a bit like this other thing that we call a tree, but because it participates in treeness in the mind of God—then we define the world as solid and already endowed with deliberate purpose and meaning. Meaning is not ours to ascribe, though we may need to engage in reading the world in order to find what is inherent there. We see this thread in Genesis 1, that each thing is made ‘according to its kind.’
This means that even if I’m unsure what the meaning of being a man is, I’m aware that there is inherent meaning that I don’t get to pick. Meaning is going to be found in living along the intention of creation. This is true in societies, in cultures, in gardens, in farming, in relationships and family life, in vocation, and in just about everything else you can think of.
Which means that Theology is the Queen of the Sciences, and everything must be read in light of Christ.
It also means that participation in God, the ascriber of meaning, is the highest calling of the human life. The New Testament has a technical term for participation in the life of God: joy.
How do we push back on the strange, flat, liquid nature of life around us? By embracing joy.
I would like to, riffing on Rob Dreher’s famous Benedict Option, call this the Bombadil Option. After all, he was a merry fellow. Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.
If you’re unfamiliar, Tom Bombadil is a strange character in The Fellowship of the Ring, often left out of adaptations due to his seeming departure from the serious nature of the story. He speaks in rhyming song and capers about and dresses in bright coloured clothing, rescuing the Hobbits from a perilous moment in an old forest. He seems like he stepped straight out of a children’s story.
Except there is a hint in the book that he is much more than this. He appears to be older than the world (yes, really), and the Ring—the book’s ultimate temptation which all the wise, powerful characters don’t want to touch because it will corrupt them—would have no effect on him at all. He would forget about it and leave it lying on the ground. He is levels of power beyond the most powerful characters in the story like Gandalf, Sauron, and Saruman, who are literal angels.
Reading Tolkien strictly he seems to be incorruptible because he is a merry fellow. Much like Chesterton’s quip that angels can fly because they take themselves so lightly.
We could do with being a lot more like him: not naïve, not living on the clouds, or ignorant of the deep scarring pains of existence on the face of the earth; rather embracing joy such that temptation does not touch us. It will be harder for us to be led astray by the strange lies of the modern age if we live in reality and participate in God in Christ.
How do you do that? Buying some yellow wellies probably isn’t the way (though it won’t hurt). We do it by inches, telling true stories about the world. Remembering that dragons are real and that Christ has killed them. By taking the Lord’s Supper as a celebration of a Wedding Feast that we attend when we eat it. By laughing loudly at ourselves and absurdity. By weeping at things that are truly and cruelly awful, and then rising up to fight them where we can. By spitting in death’s eye every Sunday because the tomb is empty. By eating and drinking with friends and would-be-friends. By living.
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nuakh 