ON BEING A SKEPTIC OF THE MYTHS OF OUR DAY
H. Richard Niebuhr is right when he says: This is "the great overarching myth ...the almost unconquerable picture in the mind"--the mind that reaches into us all, that we all share with our culture to some degree: in the "past forgotten, dead generations." And there is an "image of myself" and all society "coming to that future when there is no more future." Niebuhr calls this, in all its forms, our "mythology of death."
Because we have been overwhelmed by the myth of death; because our culture holds death to be THE END, the everlasting, eternal end, we cannot, many of us, sing, tenderly and vulnerably with tears streaming down our faces about the everlasting arms; we cannot sing "leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms"; we cannot sing with Martin Luther King, Jr., "Precious Lord, take my hand"; we cannot sing with the Black churches..."This is my story, This is my song..."
And so the church must become the skeptic--we must become the skeptics-- skeptical of the powerful myths of our day which often are at the bottom of both our beer commercials and our methods of literary criticism, our politics and our very views of human well being.
Segregating life and death--and living in a culture that holds to the myth of death as the last word--we segregate joy and sorrow. And we segregate them desperately... trying to keep the vision of nothingness out of our days and ways; trying to keep sorrow out of our joy.
Coleman B. Brown
H. Richard Niebuhr is right when he says: This is "the great overarching myth ...the almost unconquerable picture in the mind"--the mind that reaches into us all, that we all share with our culture to some degree: in the "past forgotten, dead generations." And there is an "image of myself" and all society "coming to that future when there is no more future." Niebuhr calls this, in all its forms, our "mythology of death."
Because we have been overwhelmed by the myth of death; because our culture holds death to be THE END, the everlasting, eternal end, we cannot, many of us, sing, tenderly and vulnerably with tears streaming down our faces about the everlasting arms; we cannot sing "leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms"; we cannot sing with Martin Luther King, Jr., "Precious Lord, take my hand"; we cannot sing with the Black churches..."This is my story, This is my song..."
And so the church must become the skeptic--we must become the skeptics-- skeptical of the powerful myths of our day which often are at the bottom of both our beer commercials and our methods of literary criticism, our politics and our very views of human well being.
Segregating life and death--and living in a culture that holds to the myth of death as the last word--we segregate joy and sorrow. And we segregate them desperately... trying to keep the vision of nothingness out of our days and ways; trying to keep sorrow out of our joy.
Coleman B. Brown
1 comment:
In their book, Saving Paradise, Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker make the point that early Christianity lifted up paradise as a reality that existed in this world and stretched into the next, including both those here and those departed this life. The ideology of death as extinction was perpetrated by ruling empires as a way to keep social control. Christians celebrated the continued presence of martyrs and departed saints, thus countering the imperialist ideology. Resurrection intentionally blurs the line between this life and the next, undermining the power of empires to inspire fear.
Brown is really on to something important here. Our view of the next life is not as someplace totally removed and distant, the pie-in-the-sky opiate that empires project. Neither is it an annihilation. But we need to talk about the continual integration of this life and the next.
As one friend once told me when a family member was at risk: "In the economy of God, nothing is ever lost."
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