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Terror
and Liberalism
Grand Rapids,
Michigan Sunday, May 4, 2003
Common
Elements in Creation Myths, by Lindsey Murtagh, http://www.cs.williams.edu/~lindsey/myths/
This myth is part of the larger myth of origins from the ancient Greeks:
Soon the Earth lacked only two things: man and animals. Zeus summoned his sons
Prometheus (fore-thought) and Epimetheus (after-thought). He told them to go to
Earth and create men and animals and give them each a gift.
Prometheus set to work forming men in the image of the gods and Epimetheus
worked on the animals. As Epimetheus worked he gave each animal he created one
of the gifts. After Epimetheus had completed his work Prometheus finally
finished making men. However when he went to see what gift to give man
Epimetheus shamefacedly informed him that he had foolishly used all the gifts.
Distressed, Prometheus decided he had to give man fire, even though gods were
the only ones meant to have access to it. As the sun god rode out into the world
the next morning Prometheus took some of the fire and brought it back to man. He
taught his creation how to take care of it and then left them.
When Zeus discovered Prometheus' deed he became furious. He ordered his son to
be chained to a rocky cliff and for a vulture to peck out his liver every day
till eternity.
And every night his liver was regenerated, and every day it was again pecked
out. Thus, Prometheus suffered alone for his rebellion in bringing fire to man.
Terror and
Liberalism, Paul Berman, p46-47
I am not the first to stumble across that most powerful of modern myths or to
comment on it… And yet – how to explain this? – a full recognition of the power
and nature of that myth seems to have escaped the modern sensibility, as if,
even now, we are blind to the reigning ideas of our own time. The myth, in any
case, is the one that you find in that strangest and most thrilling of writings,
the Book of Revelation… There is a people of God, [we are told]. The people of
God are under attack. The attack comes from within. It is a subversive attack
mounted by the city dwellers of Babylon, who are wealthy and have access to
things from around the world, which they trade – gold, silver, precious stones,
pearls, linen, purpose, silk scarlet, thyme, ivory, precious wood, brass, iron,
marble, cinnamon, odors, ointments, frankincense, wine, oil, flour, wheat,
beasts, sheep, horse, chariots, not to mention slaves and the souls of men.
These city dwellers have sunk into abominations. They have been polluted… The
pollution is spreading to the people of God, such is the attack from within.
There is also an attack from without – conducted from afar by the forces of
Satan, who is worshipped at the synagogue of Satan. But these attacks, from
within and without, will be violently resisted. The war of Armageddon will take
place. The subversive and polluted city dwellers of Babylon will be
exterminated, together with all their abominations. The Satanic forces from the
mystic beyond will be fended off. The destruction will be horrifying. Yet there
is nothing to fear: the destruction will last only an hour. Afterward, when the
extermination is complete, the reign of Christ will be established and will
endure a thousand years. And the people of God will live in purity, submissive
to God.
And he who sat upon the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new… Write this,
for these words are trustworthy and true. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the
beginning and the end… He who conquers shall have this heritage, and I will be
his God and he shall be my son. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the
polluted, as for murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars,
their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the
second death.” (Revelations 21: 5-8)
Sermon
Woe to those who have eyes but do not see that we live within powerful myths and
metaphors, that there exists within human nature ancient yearnings that are
given new depictions each generation. The cover photo of the April 7th Newsweek has a suffering American soldier, clothing torn, bleeding from a
gash extending from temple to cheek, his crumpled body supported by his friend,
the positioning of bodies echoing the “pieta,” the depiction of a crucified
Christ being carried away. Another picture was of a U.S. soldier cradling a
terrified Iraqi boy who lacked shoes and pants, recalling the smiling, gentle
Jesus, the Good Shepherd, cradling his lost sheep. (“Camera Pieta,” Jeremy
Biles, Sightings, 4/24/03) Woe to those who have eyes but do not see!
There are other mythic depictions that are just as hidden to us. Terrorist acts,
for example, lie within Western religious texts, especially in the foundational
text of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All three are called “Abrahamic
faiths” because all three claim the ancient Old Testament figure of Abraham as a
spiritual ancestor. So parts of the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures are part
of the tradition of all three. In the book of Exodus, chronicling the religious
history that gave the Jews the Passover celebration, there are two instances of
terrorist acts, one state sponsored and the other attributed to God. Both depict
the killing of innocents. In the first chapter of Exodus Pharaoh, having just
ordered the enslavement of the Hebrew peoples, orders an additional abomination:
Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile...
The
God of the Hebrews responds twelve chapters later, leading Pharaoh to command
the release of the Hebrew slaves and their Passover into freedom:
At midnight
the Lord smote all the first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of
Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the first-born of the captive who was in the
dungeon, and all the first-born of the cattle. And Pharaoh rose up in the night,
he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in
Egypt, for there was not a house where one was not dead.
Whosoever thinks it
was a God in the heavens that literally dealt the deathblow must also think that
it was Almighty God Himself who drove those airplanes into the Twin Towers.
Terror and religion have a long history, almost as long as terror and humanity
itself.
We rebel at that prospect; the terror we are capable of bringing into the world.
It is in human nature to rebel against certain aspects of existence, and no one
knows this part of human nature more than a liberal religionist. For we even
rebel at the notion of religion itself! We know its oppressive potentialities.
We know how in the name of the God of love millions have been slaughtered and
enslaved. We know the distortions of a view of human nature that is too narrow,
squeezing out our capacities for good by obsessing on evil. And we rebel. Like
Prometheus rebelling against the king of the gods and delivering fire to man, we
rebel against the injustices of those who in God’s name would perpetuate
injustice and deliver the rebel’s “no” to the individual man and woman. We rebel
against a view of existence that would encircle itself around humanity’s darker
side. We rebel and yearn for life’s beauty.
“What the world needs now is love, sweet love,” croons the singer, and in our
rebellion we know her ache for a world infused with beauty. It is a romantic
ache born of the “no’s” we have grown to understand we must exercise. For who
among us doesn’t understand the rebel’s “no”? If you have teenage children you
understand the rebel’s “no.” If you remember the terrible two’s, your own or a
child’s, you understand the rebel’s “no” as integral to the development of the
individual self. The psychologist calls it differentiation. The rebel’s “no”
urges us to exclaim, “We don’t believe that. We don’t believe in the gods of
popular Judaism and Christianity.” We don’t believe in any church’s
proclamations, and we look with deep suspicion on any government’s
proclamations, because we know the evil humanity is capable of, often done in
the name of good. We rebel, and in our rebellion yearn for the beauty of a world
which needs love, sweet love, and with our rebel’s “no” and our romantic’s ache
for a better world, a fuller world, a utopia, we can be heard singing, too,
“It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.”
But hidden deep within that romantic’s ache and every rebel’s “no,” secreted
away, buried, veiled within the tears of what might be “if only,” are the seeds
of a silent unspeakable despair at the darkness that lies within the heart of
man. Like water flowing over a seemingly impenetrable boulder, the rebel’s “no”
erodes life’s affirmations. It cuts the individual off from a world that will
never live up to an existence of love and beauty. The rebel’s “no,” delivered
first against religion, and then against government, then can turn upon a life
that cannot and will not be shaped as lovely as the beautiful ache is strong.
The “no” to the world’s injustices is left unfulfilled, and itself wreaks
injustice. Unbeknownst to the rebel a “no” shouted loudly and frequently is
never transformed into a “yes.” It’s how the freedom of Woodstock and the summer
of love could have existed side by side with the bombings by militant student
groups, both rooted in the justice of ending an unjust war. In liberal
religion’s rebel “no” there are the seeds of affirming anything in the name of
freedom and love. Prometheus, aimed towards a better world than this one,
promised, he thought, when he rebelled and stole fire from Zeus and gave it to
man, suffers alone and cries out in agony, the vision of his utopia of freedom
and love chained to the impossible as securely as he is to the rock. He sees
man, using fire to warm himself and fend off animal predators, but also to torch
his fellows. It’s human nature. The “no” destroys, unless there is some
allegiance to a larger “yes” arising out of the world’s never-ending injustices.
* * * * *
It is the viewpoint of the Islamist, the fundamentalist wing of modern Islam, to
voice a different “no” to the modern world.
The myth the Islamist moves in is that of the great battle between the forces of
God and of Satan. His complaint is theological. Western, liberal, democratic
societies have relegated the realm of God to just one of many components of
modern life, instead being the supreme realm governing all of life. The
separation of Church and State is the quintessential example of the way modern
liberalism places boundaries on God’s domain, putting religion in one corner and
the state in another. “God’s existence is not denied, but His domain is
restricted to the heavens and His rule on earth is suspended.” (Qutb,
Milestones, 1964) This is the Islamist’s “no.”
“The single most influential writer in the Islamist tradition, at least among
the Sunni Arabs, is generally recognized to be Sayyid Qutb of Egypt.” (Berman,
p60) He was educated in Cairo, and then on to a masters in education at the
University of Northern Colorado at Greeley. He returned to Egypt, joined the
Muslim Brotherhood, and was jailed by Nasser for his links to the Muslim
Brotherhood’s assassination attempt on Nassar. His brother, a Muslim scholar
too, taught Osama Bin Laden in Saudi Arabia, where Sayyid had refused to escape
to. Sayyid Qubt was tortured and hanged in prison in 1966 at the age of 61. He
had lived through much of the 20th century.
Qubt claimed that the Christian and Jewish West suffers from a schizophrenia,
originating when Christianity organized itself out of Judaism after Jesus’
death. Judaism’s emphasis on the Mosaic Law, enacting God’s rule and law and
order throughout all of daily life, had lost its vigor in Jesus’ time. Jesus had
reintroduced the presence of God throughout all moments in our lives, but the
early Christians, too, lost this sense of God governing daily life by separating
human nature into a spiritual part and a sensual, material part. Paul spoke of
this duality, and the Emperor Constantine confirmed it when he converted to
Christianity, yet maintained his life of regal, kingly luxury and splendor. God
had one corner of the world, and the material world another. Christianity
adopted “a false relation to the material world [and] fled from daily life into
the spirit.” (Berman, p81) This was the beginning of nearly two millennia long
schizophrenia and the shrinking of God’s domain and influence.
But, God fared even worse with the dawn of the 18th century Western
enlightenment, our religious forbears, and the gradually formation of our
specific form of a democratic Republic. The United States took the schizophrenia
of Western religious history and institutionalized it in the public square, and
called it, of all things, freedom! The truly dangerous element in American life was not capitalism, or foreign policy, or racism, of the exploitation of women [about which our history can be condemned (BAS)]… The dangerous part was the laxity of religious standards and convictions…
-Berman, p90
God did not govern the lives of any people when the religious element of human
being, God’s domain, competed with recreation, professional success, luxury,
hedonistic desire, and a thousand and one other dimensions of daily existence.
Coming to church this morning may be only one thing on a list of things to do
today, and it may be the only specifically religious act we devote ourselves to
in the course of a week! Religious tolerance led to moral decay and decadence
and disgust, rather than beauty. The primacy of individual conscience masked a
weak religiosity that continued humanity’s schizophrenia and its life-denying
death. And especially did he leave his most stinging criticism for those Muslims
who mistakenly thought they could remain Muslims while forming democracies. To
all of this he said “no,” and to a complete submission to the will of Allah he
said, “yes.”
… in the fight to uphold god’s universal Truth, lives will have to be
sacrificed. … But the great surprise is that… they continue to live, as God
Himself clearly states… There is no real sense of loss in their death, since they continue to live.
-“Martyrdom and Jihad” a commentary on Surah 2, Sayyid Qutb
* * * * *
I’ve lived long enough now to see cries of free love from leftists and cries of
freedom through God’s eternal reign from rightists both lead to bombings and
death. I’ve lived long enough such to see mass movements from both left and
right try to initiate the final battle of good and evil. I lived through riots
and marches at home during Vietnam and riots and marches abroad in Middle
Eastern countries. I yearn to live long enough to see hope.
To the Islamist the freedom that put God here and the material world over there,
is no freedom at all, but only a perpetuation of Western man’s schizophrenic
life-denial. To the Islamist’s “no” he responds with the life-denial of suicide
murders. And the rebel’s “no,” can lead only to itself, worshipped as itself a
god, and not pointing towards some larger and deeper “yes” to existence. It,
too, can become a fulfillment of a different kind of life denial, for the death
is the slow decay of the spiritual. Liberalism that sees the primacy of
individual conscience only or primarily as the capacity and right of a person to
say “no” denies life by only being a political convenience wrapped up in the
good intent of rebellion in acknowledging human limitation. Liberalism that sees
tolerance as only or primarily a way to keep the spiritual life and material
life divided, strengthens the chains of a schizophrenia that destroys freedom
and life.
But those who have eyes to see the work of God through the primacy of individual
conscience; those who have eyes to see that we bless a creation that we did not
make when we give respect to its enormous diversities; those with eyes such as
these, willing and able to look within the fabric of life and human nature, to
them has been given the divine task of living into a new myth of human origins
and destiny. There was created a people who were called to gather and walk together as witnesses to the enormous blessings of God’s great creation. Yes. And they were given freedom, the ever-present evidence of the transcending mystery that is God. Yes. And they were given this not in the sameness of religious belief in order to build a Tower of Babel, but in assisting God’s great creation to unfold in its uniqueness and splendor, and invigorate the many spiritual languages in which God had scattered His creation across the earth. Yes. And they worked to preserve and extend God’s presence in the heart of each man and each woman by strengthening the capacity of each one to know God directly and without the distortions of a hereditary or second-hand encounter. Yes. And these people did all these things for the sake of the gift of creation, and that the Creator, too, might be free from the narrowness and idolatries of human certainty. Yes. And all of creation, yes, cried out in wonder, yes, and in thankfulness, yes, for the faithfulness of these people, yes, and even the rocks themselves could not be silenced, yes, shouting to all who had ears, yes, yes, yes! AMEN |
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