Monday, October 17, 2016

Health is Wealth

Just before the summer I went on a "theological retreat" for first-year systematic theology students and their supervisors. We were joined by a visiting scholar from Tuebingen, who presented a paper on God and medicine. One of the points he made - the one that has stuck with me - is that the things we used to do for God we now do for our health. A pilgrimage is a way of keeping fit and improving our mental health, fasting keeps us slim and cleanses the body, and so on. It is little wonder, then, that Silicon Valley is pumping millions of dollars into experimental medicine in order to discover the thing which God alone was once thought to offer: eternal life.

I live in the UK, home to the NHS, but I have private health insurance. Why? Because I am married to someone from the wrong country. For my wife to get a residence card, we needed to have something called "comprehensive sickness insurance," and the NHS didn't count. So we now pay a substantial sum of money every month for a service that we neither want nor need.

The reason I mention all of this is because I just received a call from our health insurance provider, and I have seen the future. The lovely gentleman on the phone explained to me with great gusto all of the fantastic little offers available to me as a paying customer. For example, I can get "free" cinema tickets by keeping track of my steps and earning rewards. I can also pay for the new Apple watch simply by exercising and uploading the data to their app. This, I fear, is the future. It is not a future without money. I cannot pay my health insurance provider by walking to my office, although there may come a time when that data alone will suffice. But it is a future in which the body is monetised not only for sex or for labour, but for exercise and well-being - in short, for energy (or "power" if you want to speak in a theological idiom). Energetic human beings are deemed valuable human beings. This is one reason why abortion in general - and the abortion of those with disabilities in particular - can be justified. Those without energy are deemed burdens, and they do not belong to our energy-harvesting and data-mining future.

I will continue to play my (ridiculously expensive) Tuesday evening and (free) Saturday morning football. I can't claim to feel God's pleasure as I play, and I get the impression that God derives increasingly little pleasure from watching me play. But I'll be damned before I wear a piece of technology which tells my insurance company how many (or, more likely, how worryingly few) steps I took so that I can get an Apple watch. Get me a machine that records nutmegs, however....

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Fancy a Pint of Evangel-Ice?

I grew up in a Christian environment where street evangelism was something close to a norm. My church would regularly stage events in the main square in Galway, where members of the congregation would hand out tracts (little leaflets giving you the nuts and bolts of the gospel) and share their testimony (the story of their conversion). I was too young actively to participate in these events, but I wasn't too young to feel embarrassed at having to tag along with my parents. I knew that what we were doing was odd, and that we would be making many regular people on the streets either uncomfortable or angry. There was always a certain amount of guilt attached to that embarrassment. After all, if I'm ashamed of Jesus, then Jesus will be ashamed of me. That was never said to me directly I hasten to add, but that's one of the mentalities that surrounded the whole endeavour.

My unwillingness to participate in this kind of evangelism never went away, though the gradual decline of the 80s-90s enthusiasm of evangelical Christians made the opportunities for street evangelism few and far between - at least in my small circle. More and more Christians, it turns out, are ashamed of Jesus.

Was the street evangelism wrong? Or was my embarrassment and unwillingness wrong? I am in no position to make a final judgment. What is clear to me is that the willingness of Christians to "share their faith" is not a categorical good. The reticence of Jesus to make known his true identity (the so-called 'Messianic Secret' of the Gospel of Mark) is perhaps - perhaps - as much a model of how to be faithful as are the extravagant stories recounted in the book of Acts. Furthermore, consider Jesus's words in the Sermon on the Mount: "On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you." All of this is by way of saying that unwillingness to boldly proclaim the name of Jesus in the streets of Galway is not necessarily a sign of disobedience. On the contrary, it may very well be the kind of quiet obedience that Christ commands (he said, in order to justify himself).

Why do I mention all of this? Because on my way to university this afternoon (a la my NUIG days) I saw an army truck and stall set up outside the campus library. From some distance I could see the recruitment slogan: "Be the best." All of a sudden I was the regular Joe on the streets of Galway, and the soldiers were the weird Christians handing out tracts and trying to convince me that there was something better out there for me. The whole thing felt odd, and I wondered if others felt the same way. Do those who are made uncomfortable or angry at the street evangelism of Christians also feel uncomfortable or angry at the street evangelism of soldiers?

There is much more that could be said about all of this. But what struck me is the rather simple truth that we are never not being evangelised. Speaking on the story of Elijah and Elisha, Walter Brueggemann asks his congregation the question: "Who threw the mantle over you?" What this question presupposes is contesting evangelists who preach contesting gospels, gospels to which we have committed our lives. Many of us in the West like to think that we do not wear anyone's mantle, only the mantle we made for ourselves. But that is just the mantle we have been given. The extent to which we think it is worth passing on is perhaps measured by our willingness to have and raise children. Those British soldiers are looking to throw a particular mantle over students, a mantle which brings with it some potentially horrific expectations and devastating consequences, but which is sold as the opportunity to "be the best." The Christian gospel is deeply opposed to the military evangel in ways far too numerous to be discussed here. The point is, seeing that truck and that recruitment stall made me realise that Christian evangelism - in some form or another - is more needed than ever. Or, better, the gospel is more needed than ever.

I was ashamed of going out into the streets of Galway as a very young Christian. I still am! But twenty years on from the mid-nineties evangelistic fervour I am, in my better moments, learning why Paul could proclaim that he was not ashamed of the gospel.