Counter Culture

I’ve only 48 pages left of Heretics and Heroes. Sigh. I hate finishing a good book. It’s just one more country I have to leave. And back eighty pages or so, he promised to talk about Anabaptists, and here we are almost done, and…nothing! Such suspense! But let me tell you what I’ve got so far. Plato. Yes.

Cahill pictures Western history as a giant tennis match between two great athletes. Plato serves first, insisting that we know so little of what is out there, and what we do know, we know “as through a glass, darkly.” The things we experience are but shadowy hints of a spiritual realm out of our reach.  Plato’s great opponent, Aristotle, counters. For him there is no world beyond what we can see. Our job is to divide our reality into categories: classify and divide, classify and divide. There is nothing else. To Aristotle we owe our scientific classification, our scientific method, even that filing system on your computer. I may owe my life to Aristotle.

But I owe my soul to Plato. Throughout the Middle Ages, Aristotle was winning the match, with all that systematizing of theology that Aquinas invented. The Middle Ages had theology down to a science. But Cahill’s book takes up where men in the Renaissance and Reformation started thinking that there was more out there. Maybe the Church didn’t have the truth sewn up after all. Maybe there was more to reality than meets the eye. Maybe there were different ways of reading Scripture, like in local languages--German, or English, even. Heaven forbid, said that Church. Such a thing has never been done, said the Church. Burn those books! Burn those heretics! The Grand Inquisitor was kept very busy trying to draw truth between the lines, and the newly invented printing press was not helping one bit. Those new, readable translations of the Bible were inciting an underground movement all over Europe. People were buying up secret copies and frantically teaching themselves to read (do you hear that, my English students? Let me repeat that just for you: “frantically teaching themselves to read!”) And they were reading the Bible and seeing for themselves Czech words and German words and English words that undermined the status quo. Welcome back, Plato.

A few months ago I opened a Pinterest account (yes, and spelled it Pininterest forever) for one reason, and one reason only. I missed my kids, both gone at college now, and wanted to stay connected, and came up with a plan to send Elai one image a day just for fun: cats, horses, ballerinas, Mexican VWs covered in beads, steampunk, a snow-frosted Bean in downtown Chicago, and…street art. Graffiti. And I stumbled across some of the most amazing art I have ever seen. Do you know who Banksy is? He’s this underground graffiti artist who wanders around painting subversive art. Not violent art, not crass art, not boring ole “let’s waste ‘em” art, but art that says, “There is more out there than meets the eye.” And I love that graffiti isn’t licensed. It’s a “here I stand” kind of thing. (To my disappointment, I wasn’t the first to introduce my counter-culture child to Banksy: she’d watched a documentary in class. Sigh. Oh, and when I tried my brilliant idea on my son, he quipped, “I’ve seen all those, Mom.” Sigh.)

But back to the point. Cahill has plate after plate in his book of Renaissance and Reformation art just like Banksy’s. My favorite is Pieter Brueghel’s The Fall of Icarus, (1558) on the cover, where life goes on, but in the water, two legs are drowning in the water and no one notices! (got a link to the story if you don’t know it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus). So what do you think? Are we sitting pretty with all the truth and all the versions of it sewn up in our churches, and as leaders, are we carefully drawing it within the lines, classifying it as a list instead of a Person? Or are we willing to let go, welcome Plato, welcome Reformation, and really SEE?

The Fall of Icarus (notice the legs on the right)

 Big Fish Eats Little Fish, (or dog eats dog; notice the ugliness of "survival of the fittest")

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, we Westerners have been living in Aristotle’s realm. We assumed we could solve world hunger with the Green Revolution and end world wars with the League of Nations. If we just classified enough, we would remake our world. Our seminaries filled with lists of theologies to master, and we graduated our leaders with “Masters of Divinity.” Masters of divinity! What a thought.  Years ago Robert walked into a classroom at church after a Youth meeting. A list on the board entitled “How to Be a Christian” read something like this:

·         Don’t drink

·         Don’t dance

·         Don’t sleep around

·         Do your devos

Today, Modernism has shown its rags, and our world, thankfully, has moved on. People all around us recognize that there is more out there than barren scientific fact. Plato is back. (For evidence, consider the missionary and mermaid in Pirates 4). Of course people come up with some pretty bizarre ideas about what is really out there, and we need to listen. But we have this going for us. The One that’s Out There has talked to us. Visited us. We know Him. Or are desperately trying to.

Here is some of Banksy's art. What is it saying? The last one made me gasp.