ā..And he cautioned them, saying, āWatch out; beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.ā..ā Mk8v15
2020 is the year we all became epidemiologists.
Never again can Christians, or environmentalists or campaigners of any kind, use the language of contagiousness tritely. It should lodge in the imaginative mind of all who hope for change, that the world is a petri dish ripe for rapid and far-reaching infection. If my virus hasnāt spread, it is not for lack of carriers or because of an invulnerability of our global infrastructure, but rather it is for a lack of potency in the virus I would spread.
The narrativisation of this period as-pandemic via graphs and numbers has been its own phenomenon - detached almost entirely from the accounts of the medical condition itself and the suffering of patients. In this rash of rationalisations, the mathematics of this pandemic have confronted my presuppositions about what the world is made of, and what sort of world is possible. I consider this new popular epidemiological consciousness in three themes:
Exponential Growth
Patient Zero
Super Spreaders
[1] Viral Growth: Death is Exponential
ā..In linear interactions, we can add numbers to guess at combined impact. If the flu kills about 40,000 people annually in the U.S., and car accidents kill another 40,000 people annually, their combined impact is pretty much just that. .. But adding one more flu-like illness (as COVID-19 was presented) isnāt a linear event. Tipping points, phase transitions (water boiling or freezing), and cascades and avalanches .. are all examples of nonlinear dynamics in which the event doesnāt follow simple addition in its impacts..ā Zeynep Tufekci - What Really Doomed Americaās Coronavirus Response
ā..We started discussing what actions to take in the face of exponential growth .. But in order to accomplish that, we first need to convince people to take this outbreak seriously, which is no small task. Itās as if humans can only think linearly..ā Siobhan Roberts - The Exponential Power of Now
š Death is exponential. Sin is logarithmic. We are squares in a world of cubic threats. One of the great public health challenges of this pandemic is creating a consciousness of non-linearity. It seems the immanent frame is the only frame in most peopleās threat horizon. It seems the linear way we apprehend the speed of incoming peril will not compute acceleration. How do I think about threats to my life and to society? How do I think about trajectory, climate change, compound interest, cumulative consequences? Do I think of death as a static passive end point, or as a prowling lion, a multiplying enemy, a gathering storm? Is sinās destructive influence in my life a steady drip, or are there multipliers?
š¦ As-virus. Is there a theology of viruses? What useful extrapolation can we make from microorganisms-as-metaphors? Where sin and religione are compared to yeast, what is the symbolic carrying capacity of this analogy? Both are active, dynamic, self-interested forces, spreading memetically, colonising invisibly and corrupting utterly. However, of prescient significance, we could learn from such as Coronavirus that sin and religioneās virality consists also in a shape of exponential growth that is devastating in its curve. What forces or powers, threats or benefits, do I apprehend as non-linear?
āļø Yeastie Boys. In Mark 8, Jesus refers to the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod: different strains, same virus, different politics, same insidious permeation. Yeast's allegory is manifold: Leaven leavens 1Cor5v6, there is an active activity to the theology-as-organism: self-replicating, multiplying, consuming, colonising, distorting, entrenching. Yeast of all kinds is a corrupting infusion, souring those who imbibe it, and puffing them up. And there is a smell to this fetid festering fungal rash, a potent oxide brewing in dark damp dank lukewarmth.Ā
š³āāļø Pharisaism's yeast consisted in a vicious conservativism, distilling self-righteousness, multiplying a blooming corpus of legislative prohibition, a suffocating expansion of doughy religione and power-play.Ā So Jesusā woes to the Pharisees are self-fulfilling ~ religione kills its host.
š„³ Herodianismās yeast aligned with Sadducee sympathisers, and is the flip-side, a virus of unfettered blazĆ© liberal political expediency, entangling secular skepticism in a preoccupation with the urgencies and appetites of the imminent world. So materialismās rapacious appetite to swarm as a hedonistic parasite.
ā..As suburban children we floated at night in swimming pools the temperature of blood; pools the colour of Earth as seen from outer space. We would float and be nakedāpretending to be embryos, pretending to be fetusesāall of us silent save for the hum of the pool filter..ā Douglas Coupland - Life after God
ā..I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarmāneither hot nor coldāI am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, āI am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.ā But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked..ā Rv3v15-17
š§« Culturation. How do one grow yeast? What conditions? Get lukewarm and naked. Make a sugar solution the temperature of blood. Stir a little. Leave it in a lightless place.
š Recursion and self-reference. Both the theology of the Pharisee and the theology of Herod are ruinous. Both theologies iteratively entrench tribal self-definitions of Christ-less self-sufficiency - they are unothered, their recursion proceeds from their being incurvatus in se.Ā Just so, both left- and right-leaning social media bubbles present as the agar trays of viral reinforcement - breeding grounds fermenting and fomenting a tribeās tribal tribality.
š± Other. I have been struck before by the contrast of yeast with mustard seeds. By contrast with the asexual vegetative reproduction of religione, which is amorphous and parasitic. I'm struck today that Christ's gospel is particulate, sexuate, pollinated, day-lit, wind-carried, and it bears fruit.
[2] Patient Zero: Resurrection is Exponential
ā..He answered, āI was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.ā..ā Mt15v23-24
ā..For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek..ā Rm1v16
ā..for salvation is from the Jews..ā Jn4v22
ā..For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive..ā 1Cor15v21-22
š¦ Christianity behaves as a Virus - spreading exponentially and geographically from a node. I propose that there is a shape to the evangelistic expansion of Jesus' ministry, a distinct topology, an architecture even.
šļø š± I consider two paradigms of poiesis:
šļø 1. Grid. Picture Pruitt Igoe or Manhattan's street plan from space.Ā These paradigms construct the world as a grid, an infinitely extended and undifferentiated plane, a vast mesh populated by abstract need, to be colonised programatically by a mechanically reproducible distilled gospel formula for salvation.Ā
š± 2. Tree. Picture the silhouette of a tree sprung forth from its acorn ~ a form which is viral, fractal, rooting, organic, perpetually expanding into a pattern of responsive unfolding wholeness.Ā
š Small is beautiful? Obviously the tree is the truer, more personal, more beautiful..? But uncomfortably so. Even for all the distance we have travelled in our flight from Modernism, we would still prefer salvation to come packaged abstractly and ahistorically - we are universalists by default, and so, to us, partiality is abhorrent, the personal is an aberration. However. Christianity is Jewish. Salvation is from the Jews. Have I properly appraised this difficulty?Ā Do I really live this?
ā..The woman said to him, āSir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.ā.. ..āThe water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.ā The woman said to him, āSir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.ā.. ..So the woman left her water jar..ā Jn4v11-15, 28
ā..He answered, āI was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.ā But she came and knelt before him, saying, āLord, help me.ā And he answered, āIt is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.ā She said, āYes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table.ā..ā Mt15v24-27
š¶ Living water source. We all would love the living water of salvation bottled, a static commodity, a transactionalised convenience, an anonymised abstraction, a dislocated product procured from nowhere in particular. Its notable that although the Canaanite woman petitions for Jesusā power as mere magic effects, she has an accurate apprehension of both spiritual selectivity and of cosmic justice - crucial to the faith in her request is her understanding of the nodal nature of Godās Kingdom project and the universal scope of its trajectory. So should we understand that the effective domain of Jesus' healing does not expand through the export of bottled water but by an extension of the routing of the water mains - the downstream windfall of breadcrumbs. The Canaanite woman, recognises, as I should, that her receipt of grace is a derivative inheritance.
š° Plumbing. If there has been a lineage that came to me, then there should be a lineage that comes from me, or it was never a lineage, there was no flow, it was an accident. That is, what we have received we pass on. This gift water is to be kept in motion, if it is to be stewarded as-gift and not stagnated as embezzlement. Plumbing has to flow or it backs up
ā² Flow. In our cascading champagne tower there is one waiter pouring the bubbly, and we pass on the overflow we received Lk6v38. So the promise: Jn4v14 ābecome a spring of water welling up..ā leads to Jn4v28 āleft her water jarā ~ piped abundance supersedes bottled scarcity. Receive - Pass It On 1Co11v23. Receive - Pass It On to Pass It On 2Ti2v2.
šÆ From Wuhan to the airports. From Jerusalem to Judea to the ends of the earth. From Jesus as the patient zero - now we are all carriers. Thusly is Christianity a contagion. Thusly the universe is centred. And thusly our gratitude has an orientation - in this way salvation is from the Jews.
[3] Super spreader: Infectious praise as evangelism?
ā..And immediately he recovered his sight and followed him, glorifying God. And all the people, when they saw it, gave praise to God..ā Lk18v43
There is much hackneyed discipleship rubric and missiology which considers the difference between addition and multiplication. Hockey-stick growth is achieved by multiplication, therefore multiply. The image of an over-caffeinated youth-group leader galvanising a group for an evangelism foray.
Nevertheless, those one-to-one theories of intentional investment in intentional and replicable relationships bear revisiting. What does covidās curve provoke in you? How does it alter your sense-of-self with regards to contact with strangers? If covid can instill an awareness of an ontology of carriership and so inspire appropriate mitigating distancing to reduce the surface area for passing it on, then, that same being-as-carrier psychology should draw attention to the other social surface areas one makes available to transfer what is within you (1Pt3v15 etc).
š š Pass it on? ā..sight .. glorifying .. saw .. gave praise..ā Commentaries observe that Luke is fascinated by the phenomena of responsive doxology: Lk5v25-26 Lk7v16 Lk13v17 Lk17v15 Lk23v47 Ac3v8 Ac14:10-11 And it is fascinating, worship is peculiar. Emotional beings that we are. Affective, declarative, storied, relational, harmonic, corroborative.. Worship can happen alone, but it is exponentially a collective phenomena. There is, here, worship leading to worship, a recursive or viral mode that effects a cascade of praise. I am a link in a responsive chain. We are the ripple. Faith builds faith. Testimonies beget testimonies.Ā
šš Seeing seeing. The blind man's praise comes from seeing from Jesus.Ā The crowd's praise comes from seeing seeing and its explication in the praise attributing it from Jesus.
What is the R number of the Kingdom of God?