Weird is back: Get with it Christians!

Weird is back for Christianity. Let’s embrace it.

Australia’s very own vampire chanteur, Nick Cave, had this to say in an interview with the UK’s The Times, just this week, when asked whether he was Christian or not:

I don’t call myself Christian. I mean, I act like one, and I probably smell like one and I do go to church. I certainly lead a life that’s Christian adjacent, shall we say? I just find the whole thing extremely powerful and beautiful.

So let’s take him at his word. Not Christian. Well not yet at least.

But it’s what he said further that I find most interesting, especially in this era when the new atheism and its pretence of intellectual superiority (bordering on sneer) has fallen by the wayside, and when spirituality is back on the agenda.

Cave observes:

I find personally that after looking at churches for years and years, going to different churches and running out of them screaming, that you have to find a place that is unembarrassed about the whole weirdness of the Christian message.

Note that last phrase, because it’s going to be important for the thrust of this post. Unembarrassed about the whole weirdness, not of Christianity exactly, but of the Christian message.

I think Nick Cave is on to something.

We’re currently in the midst of a revival of spirituality in the modern West, and indeed a re-interest in some forms of Christianity among types who would never have touched it with a bargepole.

And Rod Dreher’s latest book, Living In Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age deals with the need for a transcendent framework with which to look at the world. People are sick of the immanent frame and its inability to hold meaning and purpose, says Dreher, so something more is needed.

Dreher’s book seems like a hard 90 degree turn on the road of his previous tomes, The Benedict Option, and Live Not By Lies. But he insists it is the natural conclusion of a trilogy.  How do I know that? Well I interviewed him yesterday in my podcast Dual Citizens. It was a great hour of dialogue and it will be published soon. Make sure you have a listen. I’ll provide a link.

The big question, of course, for conservative evangelicals, is just how weird are we supposed to get?  And that’s a hard one to answer. On the surface, the weirdness of the message is almost enough. But for everything else? Let’s put that in the too-weird basket.

Having spent years – decades – as middle class evangelicals trying to convince those within the intellectual theological academy that we were, you know, not all that weird and that our ideas deserved respect (and publication) too, we’re not adept at doing weird.

For one thing, it’s too isolating in the circles we move in. We’re too comfortable occupying the non-weird world, the immanent frame of Charles Taylor. That’s were all the good jobs, good friends and good harbour views are.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the demystifying program of the past thirty years, especially when it comes to university campus evangelistic efforts, has not been all that successful. This is not to say that we need to go down the signs and wonders blind alley of the likes of the late John Wimber.

But it is to say, that trying to dial down the so called “woo-woo” hasn’t exactly reaped a great harvest. It’s as if the only weird idea we are permitted to acknowledge is the resurrection of Jesus, and even that is predicated, and domesticated, by its historical defensibility.

But let’s face it, to say straight-faced to the average work colleague that you believe that the historical Jesus rose from the dead, in a body, and will day, in that body, return to earth to renew the creation and raise other dead bodies (and in the interim is bodily in a space called “the heavenly realm”), well isn’t that just a little too weird?

Perhaps it’s not the weirdness of that particular view that is most offensive though. I mean, we are living in an era of tarot readings, psychics, astrology, chakra, and all sorts of repaganising of ostensibly modern people.

The most offensive thing is the fact how universally applicable that message of ours is. It’s not a private opinion: “You believe in the resurrection, I believe in tarot.”  No, from the very start the weirdness of the message was its universality.

We like to think that St Paul was being completely contextual in Acts 17 at the Aeropagus in Athens, when he declared to the pagan thinkers the unknown god as Jesus.  But that neglects the scandalous universality of his claim:

Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17:29-31)

The risen Jesus will judge the world. Everybody. From all of time and space. So get on board. That’s not just weird, it’s downright offensive. And still is today.

So we have to grapple with the fact that yes,  our friends have gone all “woo-woo”. And yes they are, (after spending all day Friday trading on the stock exchange or billing themselves out at six minute increments), going to hit the town for a few drinks and a palm reading.

But here’s what they are not doing: They’re not declaring to you that you must do that also. That it’s a spiritual imperative. They don’t universalise their belief.

And we do. And that’s just plain weird.

Now lest you think I’m letting us off the hook, – and by “us” I mean my middle class, fairly well educated, evangelical readers, I’m not. It’s been an easy out for many a year to quote the re-quote in the movie The Usual Suspects. 

What does Kyser Soze say?:

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

Maybe. But maybe not. Perhaps it would be better to say “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled – IN THE MODERN WEST – was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

Cos guess what? That’s not the devil’s greatest trick throughout history or even across many parts of the world today. His greatest trick then and there is to convince people that he is all powerful. That he has ultimate authority. That he is to be feared because he is off the chain.

And none of that is true. The cross of Jesus has defeated the powers. But such lies as the devil tells, keep people just as bound and blind as the lie that he does not exist does. It just hits different.

For the time being at least. Because in the post-Christian West we are experiencing a repaganising of the culture. We are experiencing a breezy confidence among too many well-educated types that they can tangle with fire and brimstone and not get their fingers burnt or their clothes smelling of sulphur. And that is patently not true.

Read Dreher’s book. A review of it by The Gospel Coalition is a fair reading of some of the things in it that I would take umbrage with, including the risk of panentheism. But it’s a little dismissive of some of its more confronting conclusions, ending this way: