“And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief”

“As for us, we know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for our religion, and so is our religion.”

T.S. Eliot, “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry” 

The source was above everyone in the children’s literature section of the little town library when my daughter, standing upon the scorched earth of those who’ve had enough, spoke for the child’s cause to have a space free of adults:

“Lady. You give me that sticker? And I’m going to put it on my butt.”

All good things, when left to adults, become busy, and this is especially true of religion. There is a hysteria about religion in America of having to endlessly improve or else. Its talent and energies are thrown at the moral or intellectual imperative du jour whose terms are urged upon the population with great rhetorical force. Words like justice easily become biblical justice, freighted with grave theological consequence, and manufactured as an implicit positive which would see us approve without possibility of disagreement, or at least without possibility of disagreement from a position not deemed deficient at a level called spirit. Dissent is a gift where the common abuse is language. Speaking mechanically should never be confused for speaking technically.

For reasons nearest those who’ve followed the latest ACV blog activity, it would appear that when liberty for non-essentials becomes a problem, its solution is to make more essentials. The respecters of language among us would do well to observe the linguistic soil on which the discussion of the denomination’s next plot point is being built, that with the same rhetorical strategies of those who assail a culture as though its features were obstacles to reform. “Reform” too is another of those utility terms that when used can validate a course of action towards a next state. If there is substantial change ahead of the denomination, its effect should not subordinate culture to extraneous abstraction, which in our occasion would trade the Advent Christian historical inheritance for a doctrinal “unity” that has yet to establish consensus.

The conference has a right to self-direction, and I am of no mind to sway its administrative decisions. What I offer instead is the perspective of an Advent Christian who believes he belongs to the name if only for reasons of a rich culture of freedom for local communities with their own centers of influence. I also offer a perhaps unusual take that Adventism cannot take on the forms of a permanent structure or else it departs from its core confession. For whatever administrative difficulties beset the conference, such difficulties are an aside to the challenge of compelling Christians to see the church and history in their true relation. Those who carry this effect are creators who make expressions of advent out of honest perception and bring us into its religious feeling, giving us sharp impressions of the new and stirring within us our anxieties of Kingdom that is the judgment of God come down and now.

This creative activity first carries the Advent Christian presupposition that history is at its end. The Advent Christian self-understanding is not that of a teleological unit marked by some transhistorical mission, but is instead an apocalyptic symbol whose existence thrusts the present into the process of dying. Intensity of expectation is not our labor but our habit. Second more policy will not make more Advent Christians. The illusion of more doctrine and of more policy is that of superiority over local expressions in constant return to their origins for deeper affirmations of what is truly imminent. Other evangelical groups are counted among the various court religions, whose fear of being excluded from endless debate of whatever critical topic arrests the imagination towards the business of a Christianity that seeks above all the reputation of a serious religion. For Advent Christians, who again smell the smoke of apocalyptic fires, the bite of their confession is not that the current scene has an end but that it has no future. All things in time and space are now exhausted in a crisis of decision, the gravity of which is only intelligible in the language of a church who is the apocalypse of Christ at the end of the old state of things.

I have difficulty with presentations of William Miller’s disappointment as an unfortunate fact of our history and that we as his inheritors are now of a critical turn of mind. Our definition of advent carries no distinction and has no complete meaning without this event, and if there exists any loyalty among us to a tradition of maintaining the apocalyptic symbol to the extent that we would be called fringe, there comes with it the principle of aesthetic that confronts common scientific attitudes toward the Scriptures. We cannot say that Miller’s tragedy is unlike those of the first witnesses, who believed Christ would return in their lifetimes, and who ascended anxiety for this event into iconography. The apocalyptic product is art which affects the attitudes of the audience upwards towards a unique cosmology. Its body of metaphor is the tongue of angels, the language vehicle of the Kingdom come, and a tyrannizing fiction which makes us conscious of a transcendent state of affairs yet produced. Of course, a standard treatment of apocalypse is never without common cautions first against over-allegorizing the symbols and second against dispassionately historicizing the political situation of its composition. I would third caution against keeping the Gospels and Revelation at terminal points. The New Testament corpus must all be taken up with the urgency of those who believed this is it, and who in their waiting dared to interpret their own condition as the eschatological moment.

At last I return to the example of my daughter, the beautiful recusant of the adhesive. Telling the story and often, I’m reminded that how parents speak about their children and to their children are very different. We tell children in most cruel ways they are in the process of becoming, that all around them are very serious things also in the process of becoming. The full forum of existence then for a cognizing subject is to be expected upon until a crisis is reached of expecting back and seeing nothing move. For the religious among us, the expectation of change for the better is deferred to eschatology which is but a religious waiting. The Adventist is estranged from this manner of religion, because he doesn’t have to imagine its disappointment, and so it is in the life and language of Advent Christians that the worst fear of Christianity is capable of entering into proposition. That’s not that the Parousia will never come about, but that it came and went, and the alternative has entered dissolution. Our creative activity shows that even religion must be reconciled and at times transgressed to reconsider the safety of its conventions.