Introduction: Choosing Disneyland instead of Promised Land?

I begin by putting the question to you: is it not true that Disneyland has become not only our Euro-N. American playground but a metaphor for contemporary culture? That is, without any sense of criticising culture's need for leisure and—maybe theologians need more play and less books—nor to ignore the efforts made by Euro Disneyland to become environmentally politically respectable—but to see such glittering theme parks as one symptom of a cult of the superficial, a selling short of humanity in terms of our dreams and our hopes for the future. Harvey Cox began to hint at this so many years ago, in his book Seduction of the Spirit, when he warned us that Disneyland has no tomorrow, no future to offer: it offers only brighter, more technologically sophisticated and more luxurious versions of today. And now, when confronted with the most extravagant theme park of all, the Millennium Dome, the existence and contents of which are, to put it mildly, contentious, is it not timely to reflect on the meaning of this cultural artefact in terms of its highly ambiguous promise in the context of the end of a century and the end of a millennium?

My argument in this lecture is that the characteristics of this waning millennium offer parallels with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and the onset of the Dark Ages. (You probably remember Alasdair MacIntyre's call for a new St Benedict in this, the new Dark Ages of Europe).

Prophets and poets make difficult stable companions and they share the ability to unsettle or subvert the norms of their societies. Because of this they are often silenced or killed. They both, in different ways, offer to the individual or community a two way ‘glass’ in which the individual or community then has to face the truth about themselves. One side of this glass acts as a mirror from which is reflected the breaking of communities; the injustice, the impoverishment, the godlessness, from which our laws and systems normally shield us. The other side of the glass is the window, through which, creative and energising, the prophet/poet offers us a new and radical vision of an alternative future, a place of possibility and change. Change however is always unsettling and never easy, it is usually simpler to shut our eyes. In Cassandra, Christa Wolf turns the mirror/glass onto a society being broken down by war, and through the Scamander Caves, offers a window on an alternate way of being, visioned by women.

Walter Brueggemann discusses Israel’s turning away from being a prophetic people to being a people of worldly Kingship. He suggests that we are so enmeshed by our present reality that any other way of being is virtually unthinkable. Moreover, that this present history is one of “briefcases and limousines and press conferences and quotas and new weaponry systems.

It was Wittgenstein who said that in order to ‘combat’ a point of view, one first has to establish whether that point of view is within or without one’s own framework. That is to say, one has to establish whether the ‘combat’ is to be a dispute within a framework or between frameworks. For Wittgenstein, that was of the utmost importance if one was to avoid falling into confusion. This is because whereas disputes within a framework proceed by means of reasoned arguments which are held fast and validated by that common surrounding framework, disputes between frameworks do not proceed within a common milieu, and so the common validity of reasoned arguments subsides. Thus, a dispute between frameworks has to proceed by means of quite different methods, that is, methods of persuasion and charm.

This insight has a particular significance when one considers some of the developments that have been taking place in theology in recent years. For the last three centuries or so, theological discourse was conducted within a framework that was, at once, both ‘theological’ and ‘scientific.’ As Amos Funkenstein has argued, it was a framework ‘in which theological concerns were expressed in terms of secular knowledge, and scientific concerns were expressed in theological terms. Theology and other sciences became almost one.’ Virtually all theological disputes in those centuries were located within that framework, and consequently, they were conducted by means of reasoned arguments.