Palms up.

From Brueggemann’s 19 Theses:

“7. It is the task of ministry to de-script that script among us [note: see prior posts]. That is, to o (sic) enable persons to relinquish a world that no longer exists and indeed never did exist.”

Given that “naming” is such a core gift, for good and ill, it should not surprise us that the world is about “scripting”. The schizophrenia of the Modern and Postmodern ages is that there are just too many scripts in competition.

The depiction of the world as a stage and we as actors (Pascal, Shakespeare, William Law and others) who enter and then fall one by one is fairly straight-forward as are the simple ways in which inculturation takes place if not like a riot then at least often like organized chaos.

The problematic part is the illusion of real clothing our various social fabrics bring. Naming and human language used creatively in so many ways is also our greatest way of evading and co-opting God and the spiritual. In fact, when people say we have “created God in our image” this is exactly the point and why real rationale behind Nietzsche’s famous edict that “God is Dead.” Few know the next line…”and we have killed him.”

The scripting then is to create a world and gods in our own image rather than allowing that we are created in God’s image and need de-scripting and then to be immersed in the alternative script rooted in the Old and New Testament texts.

As I have “Johnny-one-noted” before, the these texts are inherently “sub-versive”. They are the true “verses” that are like the “stone levels” that William Everson says lay beneath the “blind surf of events.”

Events interpreted by a “world that no longer exists and indeed never did exist.”

For the world’s texts are an utter fiction and madness. As Ernest Becker points out, this madness is “agreed madness, shared madness…but madness all the same.”

So while living in the world we are not to become of it. In the past, this has often been interpreted in shallow fashion in a modern “Christianized” Epicurean/Stoic dialectic, both of which miss the point every bit as much as their ancient predecessors did.

In other words, not being “of the world” is not an invitation to become either a money-grubbing televangelist or Amish, In both vases “mammon” is the primary concern with God ’s self-revelation as secondary.

Sheesh.

To be “of the world” is simply to reject all other scripts as secondary at best when presented with the Living Christ and his subversive ways and words.

So, to end with an example, the word “ministry” is packed with all manner of pork-barrel add-ons, diversions and expectations. It simple means “service”. The biblical role of minster is one who equips others to do the actual work…not a professional who is hired to do it for others.

Imagine if part of our ministry was to first de-script the “ministry” as belonging largely to “a world that does not exist and never did exist”. Then what if we allow ourselves to be re-scripted by the alternative script via the Word.

It would be a nice start.