| Wet
fish, culture and shipwreck
It is possible to be swimming within an environment with assumptions about life, of which we are unaware. For example, language is an immediate environment of our relationships, sense of identity and responsibility among others that is also laden with implicit values of which we may not be aware. Within what attitudes are we swimming without recognising it? A pervasive attitude of the modern and postmodern eras is that humans are the measure of all things—the modern, with an abstract notion of the universal human; the postmodern, without a fixed view on what is human. In the modern focus on the universal human, attempts are made to negotiate universal human meaning. In the amorphous or formless view of humans in postmodernism, each of us supposedly makes our own meaning. The postmodern option is still a very modern concept—humans are the measure of all things—but as outsourced to small tribes, as small as one person or perhaps a terrorist cell. Humans are the measure of all things, whether as the universal human or as a singular fragment that has been crisscrossed by the footprints of many others. In the postmodern, every human is wholly free to leave a unique footprint of the human measure. Precisely because the sum of this measure cannot be reached, footprints are added but without any ascertainable sense of the whole. Humans as the measure of all things can be whittled down to every human as the measure of life. In one sense, this is true. Humans perceive a reality that is unique to each and ceases to exist when that site of human consciousness also ceases to exist. Yet each perceived reality within singular human consciousness is always coming up against other such worlds of perception. This is a source of interest, engagement and crisis as perceived realities are also contested. There are like worlds of perception that cohere in fear of unlike worlds of perception, so humans congregate in tribes, between the wholly autonomous person and the universal human—the tribal identity. The perennial contest of partisan perspective on the world occurs unabated—whether for the universal human or for the tribal fragment that is supposedly, a true measure of being human. Contest occurs in blame and counter-blame for why human life is not what it should be, who is at fault and how the fault should be remedied. Even in the face of fragmentation, something like a consensus of tribes is sought. Underpinning this is an assumption that if we have the right view on things and people pursue it, we could get it right! This remains a very modern concept, even if it is divvied up among numerous sites as the postmodern. The assumption that humans are the measure of all things can be couched in a common set of global perspectives and symbols consistent with modernity, or in a coordination of tribes in various concords of peace within postmodern “difference.” A little Christian garnish can be added to either, such as following the example of Jesus, as if this is transparently possible. Yet to be without any notion or articulation of the necessary transformation needed to do this, is being a fish that does not know it is wet. It is swimming in a culture that does not recognise the central question Christian faith raises concerning human life and the response it articulates. Whether as individual, tribal or global, humans—who are assumed to be the measure of all things—are radically compromised and in need of transformation. v Any culture is a necessary context for the nurture of human life but no culture can give a definitive perspective on humanity. Human cultures are contexts in which people experience the goodness of creation. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, any more than a magpie could fly without the resistance of air.* Yet in every culture, humans are also restless. The things of time, region and therefore culture are never adequate in assuaging this restlessness. Cultural particularity as a horizon of human aspiration can also provide the materials and instruments—traditional, social, economic and political—for compromising the dignity of human life and the goodness of creation. War is an extreme example. Christian testimony is concerned with both the particularity of human life and its compromise. First, Christian faith affirms human freedom, possibility, dignity and responsibility in the context of community and creation. Second, Christian faith recognises that human compromise is unrelenting, mutually destructive and radically inscribed—as the good we intend but do not do and the evil we resist but unwittingly do—in every time and region of human experience. Christian testimony speaks into every culture and unlike idealism, honours human particularity, while also disclosing in Jesus Christ what is durable beyond any culture and its compromised expressions of human life. In Christian testimony, human expressions of culture—practical or reflective—are neither elevated to unquestioned importance nor rejected as antithetical to all Christian expression. The centrality of creation and incarnation in Christian testimony prevents such dualism. Where dualism is expounded as Christian, this combination is rejected. Where human capability and knowledge are elevated to equality with grace and truth in Jesus Christ, this too is rejected. What is critical in all Christian engagement is recognition that our cultural, communal and tribal associations and expressions of human existence are not definitive but partial in their awareness of and capacity for the good, the true and the beautiful. Inasmuch as this recognition occurs, good, true and beautiful expressions of human life, thought, act and imagination contribute to the experience of creation and life as the creator’s gifts. v Shipwrecked on an unknown island, Robinson Crusoe spends much time consolidating his survival within a new and strange environment. He also imagines what his circumstances might be if he had retrieved nothing from the shipwreck—an image that is applicable to our experience of life. To be human is to be cast into a particular time, place and possibilities—being here and not there, in this time and not another. We are shipwrecked on this island and not another, from this ship and its wreckage and not another—castaway for who knows how long. We are washed up somewhere on the shore of human life—with specific gender, ethnic, historical and cultural identity. Birth and context can seem like a shipwreck in time that has left us survivors on a particular shore. Each is surrounded by the debris of a shipwreck with its specific assets for the challenge of life ahead. Our shipwreck event and island sojourn provide a composite site for evaluating what is important—an island or context as everything we have, for which we can be thankful and an infinite horizon as exposure to the reality of God, who surpasses the island of any context or culture to disclose our lack and our true source of life. Human particularity is real, treasured and establishes both limits and possibilities. Yet the horizon of God exceeds our peculiar site of wreckage and survival with its sum of things and possibilities toward which we tend to trust. The call of God in Christ is the true horizon of our lives, exceeding anything we can retrieve and value from our historical, cultural and tribal shipwrecks.
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After Kant’s dove |
