The Other Jesus

Graphic by Kostas Tsipos 

Last night I was on the Busted Halo radio show on Sirius/XM with Father Dave Dwyer, and he was asking me what I meant by the gospel according to U2? It’s a familiar question for someone who writes about religion and culture, and has been coming up for some forty years now, since Westminster John Knox published The Gospel according to Peanuts.

We’ve got four gospels in the Bible, right? Isn’t that all we’re supposed to need?

A lot of books purporting to be the gospel according to one thing or another have been published (and I have written a couple of them), so it’s good to know first that when we claim that something is, for example, the gospel according to U2, that doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily saying that something is the knowledge or dogma that will lead to salvation (although, with U2’s gospel, I think it very well might). “Gospel” comes to us through Old English and Latin from the Greek euangelion, which means, simply, “good news,” and it’s the root for our words “evangelist” and “evangelism” (which have not always been good news in my own life, but you can’t blame the Greeks for that).

The gospel according to U2 is simple, I discovered to my relief when Father Dave asked the question last night. U2’s songs (and the lives of its three Christian members) suggest this message of good news:
1) There is a God, a God who created and loves us, a God who wants a continuing relationship with us, a God who is worthy of praise and adoration;
2) We pursue this God in a community of others who are also on a spiritual path;
3) We serve this God best by loving each other and by doing works of peace and justice. 

If you’re a big fan of U2, and if you’ve been listening to lyrics over the years, then these three areas won’t surprise you much (although church folk might have some reservations about the second, since U2 have been notably critical of organized religion).

I think, though, that U2’s good news emphatically includes the message of communion and community, as I begin to suggest in this short excerpt from my new book, We Get to Carry Each Other: 

Perhaps it’s no wonder that U2 has been criticized by offended Christians for failing to embrace the full possibilities of Christian community. Christianity Today called Bono’s theology “light on ecclesiology” (ecclesiology is the theology of the nature and structure of the Church, from that Greek word ecclesia); more judgmental things have been said by others in print and on the Web.Some in the Church, however, are not taken aback by the band’s rejection of organized Christianity. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who gave a recent speech in which (as you’d hope) he affirmed the importance of the Church, actually responds to Bono’s oft-spoken criticisms organized religion with some sympathy:   

If we ask why exactly the religious is so unattractive in the eyes of many, including so many iconic and opinion-forming figures, the answers are not too difficult to work out. Bono’s remarks provide an obvious starting-point. Religion is a matter of the collective mentality, with all that this implies about having to take responsibility for corporately-held teaching and discipline; so religious allegiance can be seen as making over some aspect of myself to others in ways that may compromise both my liberty and my integrity. It may be seen as committing myself to practices that mean little to me, or subjecting myself to codes of conduct that don’t connect at all convincingly with my sense of who I am or what is creative and lifegiving for me. It may mean being obliged to profess belief in certain propositions that appear arbitrary and unconnected with the business of human flourishing. [1]   

  Religion, especially in community, requires the giving up of some autonomy, the acceptance of shared norms. When you have been hurt by a faith community—as U2 were, as I was, as almost everyone is, if they remain in one long enough—it can be hard to imagine ever trusting a community enough to want to return to faithful practice with one. For U2, it was an impediment that they have not yet overcome. After Shalom, The Edge went on to say that “I suppose I am a Christian, but I am not a religious person,” and Larry to say “I am a Christian and not ashamed of that. . . [But] I have more in common with somebody who doesn’t believe at all than I do with most Christians. I don’t mind saying that.” [2]

Since plenty of people cannot conceive of how they might connect (or re-connect) with the Church as they have come to understand it, the judgment that they are “light on ecclesiology” might not seem like a particularly damning phrase to apply to U2. Who, they ask, would want to be heavy on ecclesiology? But when church (as a gathering of believers, not as a building) is of paramount importance for your understanding of faith, as is true for most Christians, it turns out to be something very important.Steve Stockman, in his book on the spirituality of U2, said that one of the burning questions he would want to ask Bono if he could, would be “How have you kept the vitality of your Christian faith so vibrant in the world of rock music and in the absence of regular Christian fellowship?” [3] And Christianity Today, evangelical Christianity’s most important publication, published its editorial in 2003, when Bono was appearing in churches across the United States to talk about AIDS, debt, and trade in Africa, that asked how Bono’s commitment to Christianity could possibly be carried on outside of the Church. Christianity Today granted that “God may very well be using Bono to challenge the conscience of American evangelicals. It is well within God’s frequently evident sense of humor to use a brash rock star in the causes of justice and mercy. If that is so, we hope that God also uses this time to draw Bono into a deeper sense of what it means to be a Christian.” [4] It was a clear questioning, if not of Bono’s faith, then of its practice.

The central question for some Christians where U2 and Christianity are concerned, then, is this: How can Bono (or The Edge, or Larry Mullen, Jr.) call himself a Christian when he is not part of an established church, since ecclesia is how we have always identified other Christians and practiced our faith?From the beginning of Christian practice—even before many of the new gatherings of Jesus followers had separated from the Jewish synagogues in which many of them began—there was a very clear sense that people who believed that Jesus was the Messiah, God’s anointed one, were to join together with other believers to worship and work, were to pursue together the teachings that Jesus had left behind. And although some evangelical Christians may have an exaggerated sense of how important individual salvation might be, they still tend to gather together in small groups or large to worship and support each other in the faith.

So, on the one hand, perhaps the editors of Christianity Today were right to call into question whether Bono understands what it means to be a Christian without belonging to an ecclesia, a gathering of Jesus followers.

But on the other hand, I want to propose the idea that U2 might be thought of as a sort of ecclesia, a gathering of believers who support each other, who do good works as Jesus taught, and who, whenever they go out on tour, actually create an experience that—for many who join them—feels a great deal like worship. Brian McLaren has described the “worship” component many people have felt in relation to U2’s performances, but his description of the qualities of many emerging Christian communities might also help us recognize those qualities in the band: these new ecclesias are virile, courageous, nurturing communities that center their theology on Jesus’ revolutionary message of the kingdom and their lives on living out that radical message, and they are communities of spiritual formation whose transformed members seek social transformation. [5]

If we do envision ecclesia as a group of people rather than a building, then I think we can make a powerful case for U2 as a faithful community, and, in the process, can explore some important ideas about why and how we are saved in community with others once we have begun to come to belief in God.

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[1] Rowan Williams, “The Spiritual and the Religious: Is the Territory Changing?” Westminster Cathedral, London, 17 April 2008. Accessed at http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1759

[2] Jay Cocks, “Band on the Run,” TIME Apr. 27, 1987. Accessed at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,964182,00.html
[3] Steve Stockman, Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2, (Orlando: Relevant, 2005),  2.
[4] “Bono’s Thin Ecclesiology,” Christianity Today March 2003. Accessed at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/march/29.37.html
[5] Brian D. McLaren, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis, and a Revolution of Hope (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008), 299.    

And a non-U2 note: I’ll be leading a retreat in the New Mexico desert until June 30, then will be back with more on U2, spirituality, justice, and hope. 

I hope. 

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 11:34 am and is filed under News of the Spirit, Politics, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.