Nathan Crawford April 29, 2006 Conference on Christianity and Consumer Culture

I have proposed today to critique the consumeristic language that is ever present in contemporary Christian circles. I will focus specifically on my own tradition, that of evangelicalism. In doing this, I wish to do three things. The first is to locate what consumeristic language entails for me as I talk about this in the paper. I then will evaluate contemporary Christian language through the most popular selling nonfiction book of the past few years The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. I then wish to offer St. Bernard of Clairvauxs theology of love as a necessary and apt counter to the consumeristic language present in much of contemporary Christianity. First, we must locate the way that consumeristic language functions in present day society. This seems to be an easy task because we are so inundated with it. However, this inundation has made consumeristic language a natural part of our language of the language of our culture. So, we must begin by briefly piecing out what it is that makes language consumeristic. What seems to make language consumeristic is the call to consume present in language. If we think about the commercials on television or the radio or the internet, we see people trying to sell us things that we need. According to the advertiser, we must consume this or that in order to enrich our lives. The goal is to show us something that we need and to try and get us to buy or participate in some sort of activity. This seems to imply that the necessary end of consumeristic language is the call to consumption. However, I do not believe this to be true.

The end of consumeristic language is not consumption. The end is actually me or you. It is the consumer. The goal of consumeristic language is to call the consumer to enrich their lives. The person offers something in order for the person to be bettered. The consumer almost always knows that s/he does not need whatever product is being offered. However, the person feels the need to what something more, to enrich his/her life, and to have whatever end is being offered. When we think about it, consumeristic language almost never ends with the product, but ends with the feeling that the product produces. Think about the beer commercial not really offering beer, but offering a good time with friends. The diet commercial that does not offer a diet but offers being sexier. The clothes commercial that does not offer clothes but the popularity and/or coolness that comes from having such clothes. The end in all of these is the consumer and the feeling that the consumer gets from the product. If we turn our attention to the church, this is quite present. If we think about the last time heard a sermon on Jesus. Was the sermon just about Jesus and the work of Jesus? Or, was the sermon about what Jesus offers? I think about the sermons about Jesus and about calls to salvation. The offer was not God. No, the offer was a better life through the peace or justice or eternal life or whatever that God offers to the person that has salvation. The movie Dogma typifies this. In the beginning of the movie, the cardinal played by George Carlin offers us the Buddy Jesus because the Jesus who is often portrayed in the church is just not really with it and not really where the church wants to head anymore. However, what most typifies the consumeristic language present in the contemporary Christian context is the book The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. It is here that I now want to focus our attention.

Due to time constraints, I am not able to evaluate the entirety of Warrens book. So, what I will do is to focus upon a specific section of the book which I believe is a good summation of what Warren tries to do in the entire work. The section I will focus upon is pages 30-34, entitled The Benefits of Purpose-Driven Living. Quickly, though, I feel I must set the context of this section. Warren has broken the work up into a forty day reading. These forty days are broken up into six different sections. The section that we are looking at comes in the middle of the first section, entitled What on Earth Am I Here For? The chapter it comes in is the chapter What Drives Your Life? which is a chapter dedicated to helping one see that purpose should be the driving force of ones life. This is because, as Warren states, Without a purpose, life is trivial, petty, and pointless[and] The greatest tragedy is not death, but life without purpose (35). Therefore, Warren wants to offer us a purpose that is predicated upon Gods purpose(s) for ones life. The section that we are looking at is the section on the benefits of the purposedriven living. There is an initial problem however. The benefits of purpose-driven living should be predicated upon Gods purposes. However, we have not seen the purposes that God has for ones life. What Warren does is to first show that the purposedriven life is good for a person and brings certain benefits; then he looks at the purposes that should be in ones life. The problem is that Warren is selling the reader the benefits of the life without the life. The benefits are a tool meant to catch someones attention so that the reader knows that there is a good on the other side for her or him. The purposedriven life is obviously not enough.

There are five benefits that Warren believes the purpose-driven life offers. These are the end of the purpose-driven life. These five benefits are (1) knowing your purpose gives meaning to your life (2) knowing your purpose simplifies your life (3) knowing your purpose focuses your life (4) knowing your purpose motivates your life and (5) knowing your purpose prepares you for eternity. These five things are what the purposedriven life offers the reader. The five purposes lead the reader to this place, a place where ones life is given meaning, simplified, focused, motivated, and prepared for eternity. I believe that this is obviously indebted to consumeristic language/culture. What we see in these five benefits of the purpose-driven life is not Gods purpose but the good feeling that comes from Gods purposes. Warren believes that his purpose-driven life is predicated around the purposes that God has for a persons life. However, the point that Warren is making in the book is that these purposes lead to a better life. The goal of the book is not to offer one a Godly life, but to offer one a life that has meaning, simplicity, focus, motivation, and eternity through the living of a Godly life. Again, the focus is on the good that comes out of the living of this life, of having Gods purpose. God as an end in the Godself is not good enough for a person. No, a person cannot just be offered God but all of the stuff and goods that come from being a follower of God. However, Warren goes further than this. He also places the end in the reader. These goods are gotten through Gods promises. However, these goods are gotten for the readers life. They are to make my and your life better. For me to know my purpose in life gives my life meaning, focus, simplicity, etc. etc. The goal is now for me to follow God for my own sake. My life will be better if I follow God. God is the product that makes my life better. The end is not following God for God, but following God for me.

The culmination of this section is in the last benefit that is offered eternity. Here Warren says that what matters about life is not what you or I or anyone else says or thinks of our life, but what God says or thinks. This is shown in the two questions Warren believes God will ask us at our judgment: (1) What did you do with my Son, Jesus Christ? and (2) What did you do with what I gave you? However, Warren has misplaced the emphasis in both places. In both questions, the focus is on you. Consistently, Warren shows that it is what you do that matters. And, for Warren, what you do leads to the good that is eternity. For Warren, being able to answer these two questions does not mean a greater spiritual life or more Godly life or greater participation in the Triune God, but eternity. Again, the end that Warren points us to is a good outside of the ultimate Good. In analyzing Warrens The Purpose-Driven Life, I have wanted to show how contemporary American Christianity is indebted to and inundated with the language of consumerism. Christianity consistently offers a good outside of God instead of God Godself. The goal of the Christian life has become about having things instead of participation in God. What Christianity has done is to offer a religion that pursues God only so that ones life may be bettered. God becomes that product which brings about a good in our life instead of being the God that we worship and adore just because God is God. It is now that I believe we should turn our attention to the work of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. It is in his work that I believe we will be able to see someone who is trying to spur people on to loving God for the sake of God and nothing else. The best place to see this is in his treatise On Loving God.

This treatise is a letter that Bernard writes to a friend of his in Rome who is a cardinal due to the cardinals prompting for Bernard to espouse his ideas on love. What Bernard does is to come up with four degrees of love that a person has. It is in these four degrees of love that I want to focus upon. The first degree of love that a person has is the love one has for ones own self. This is the natural love that one has for oneself. It is the love that results in a person seeking what one needs and one desires. One fulfills these desires, but then begins to notice that he/she is sinful and needy. He/she notices that there is not much right with him/herself. This drives the person to humility. This driving to humility helps the person to notice that there are others with a similar nature around him or her. The person is then prompted to help others who share the nature. Thus, we begin to see love of neighbor. However, one cannot love neighbor without the prompting of God. This leads Bernard to the second love love of God for ones own sake. In loving neighbor, God prompts one to go outside of oneself to help one with a similar nature. However, this going outside of oneself causes the person anxiety over whether or not his/her needs will be met. It causes the person to need a backup plan or a safety net. In the second degree of love, God becomes this safety net. The person knows that God will help them if anything goes wrong and that God will make sure to give her/him whatever s/he needs to survive. The person continually turns to God to help him/her. What this does is to help the person develop a trust in God, where one realizes that God will always be there for the person. This trust leads one to begin to love God. This brings Bernard to the third degree of love love of God for the sake of God. What Bernard is showing is that eventually our love of God must be strictly due to love of God. Bernard

believes that eventually we learn to love God fully, knowing that God is sweet not because he meets our needs but just because we have tasted [God]. Bernard says, [The person] who trusts in the Lord not because [the Lord] is good to [the person] but simply because [the Lord] is good truly love God for Gods sake and not for [the persons] own (194). What Bernard shows is that love of God must be predicated upon who God is. For Bernard, God raises us up into the Godself through the loves that we participate within. Therefore, the more that we prayerfully contemplate God and God lifts us up, the more that we taste the sweetness of God. This tasting of Gods sweetness leads us not to expect things or goods from God, but just to love God. It leads strictly to pure love of God simply because God is God. The more that one participates in this love of God, the more one is ushered into the mysteries of God. The more one is ushered into the mysteries of God, the more that one learns how God loves. This learning and realization of how God loves causes the person to begin to love like God. In this loving like God, one begins to love oneself with a similar love to that of how God loves us. Thus, the fourth love is the love of self for Gods sake. It is only possible to love like this in contemplation of the divine mysteries. It is in this love that one is able to become like God. For Bernard, this love is almost not possible in this life. The people he sees as having definitely attained this love are the holy martyrs who, despite being tormented in the worst possible ways in their bodies, clung to loving God. This is how God loved them and how they in turn love themselves in their loving of God. It is in their participation in Gods loving of them are they able to love themselves like God loves them causing them to lose their selves in the Gods love. Again, though, this love is not often realized on this earth.

What Bernards theology of love shows is that one, even in starting with the self, must end with God. For Bernard, the end of salvation is always God. The love that Bernard so pulls us toward is only possible because of the love of God. The contemplation of God and the love of neighbor is only possible because of God. And the end of this love that God gives is always God. God gives so that the person may always experience more God. God is the end in Bernards theology, not humanity. The critique that Bernard would warrant against Rick Warren is that Warrens purpose-driven life stops at the second love. For the purpose-driven life, the fact that God gives gifts and that we get certain things, like eternity, is the goal of the Christian life. It is the goal of the life that we lead. However, for Bernard, this is to miss the point. The point of Christs cross or the love of God is not so that one may have eternal life or to get other blessings. No, the goal is for greater participation in the Triune God. It is so one may place themselves in God and live in the love of God. It is so that God may be the end. The goal of Bernards theology of love is not a love where the person is central, but a love where the person gets lost in the love of God for him/her. What we have seen so far is two offerings from two different theologians from two different time periods. We have seen that contemporary American Christianity is inundated with consumeristic language, offering a God who gives things and feelings and overall good stuff. We have also seen a medieval period typified by participation in God as the ultimate end because God is the end, not the benefits that come from God. The question I wish to now propose is how do we translate Bernard and his nonconsumeristic theology of love into contemporary American Christianity? I want to offer a very brief proposal as to how contemporary Christianity may go about doing this.

I believe that the place to begin is by starting to cleanse ourselves of some of the consumeristic language that is so prevalent in our understanding of salvation and God. The end of the Christian life must be God alone. There may be benefits that come with this, but the end must be God. Our language must begin to reflect this. We must stop offering a Jesus who brings stuff, like eternity, peace, etc., with Him and offer a Suffering Servant whose mission it is to go to the cross. Second, we must de-Americanize ourselves to a certain extent. As a caveat, we are an American people doing church in a physical place called America. This is acceptable to an extent. However, we must remember that our religion is a universal religion practiced over the entire world. Our language and the culture that we imbibe must be reminiscent of this. In constructing our Christian language, we must also realize that this language must begin to reflect the experiences not only of ourselves, but of people all over the world, rich and poor, black and white, slave and free, Jew and Gentile. Thirdly, we must de-center ourselves in theology. As has been shown through my critique of the work of Rick Warren, theology and contemporary Christianity has become centered upon humanity. The God we believe in is a God who does stuff for us or gives us stuff. This is the God we offer in our weekly worship, whether through worship songs or sermons. This cannot be though. The center of our theology and of our Christianity has consistently been ourselves. This must be changed. The center of our beliefs and our seeking must be God. God is the end of theology and the life of the Christian. The Christians goal should be God, not any benefits that God might or might not bring. Lastly, and I think most importantly, we must begin speaking of our participation in the divine life. We must offer a God who is here and active now. In the Enlightenment,

we have a bifurcation of God and world, where the two become completely separate. However, as Christians, we believe in a God who overcomes this split through creation and incarnation. We also believe that the Holy Spirit dwells among us, sent by the Incarnate Word, the Second Person of the Trinity who was in turn sent by the First Person of the Trinity. We believe that through the Words incarnation and the Spirits work as Redeemer, we are able to participate to an extent in this divine economy. We believe that God is immanent and that God has and always will be redeeming the world until its end. In this, we do participate to some extent in the life of God, as God participates in our lives. This means that God has overcome any sort of split between Godself and creation. In conclusion, what I have tried to do is to offer a critique of the consumeristic language that is so prevalent in present-day American Christianity. I have also tried to show a model in Bernard of Clairvaux who I think that counters this consumeristic language through offering God as the end, not ourselves. Finally, I have offered some thoughts on how we may begin to construct a theology and Christian language that is not inundated with consumerism.