Pod People I

“It is because of views like these that I hold that the first task of the New Evangelization is to evangelize Christians. This task, as I say, is daunting and requires, among its other skills, that the orthodox be alert to what I call Pod People Talk, using here an analogy drawn from that classic sci-fi flick, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the famous cult movie about aliens who try to take over the planet by kidnapping hapless humans and forcing them to spend a night in large pods the size of body bags. Upon awakening from these awesome contraptions, the earthlings would have been zapped into alienhood: they emerged from their pods still looking and acting exactly as their past humanity would lead one to expect; but in essence they were aliens, fully intent on taking over the planet. For me the fascination of this plot derives from the way the loved ones of these newly alienized beings came to suspect something might be amiss. For although the Los Angeles English of the aliens was completely idiomatic and accent-free, there was yet something vaguely unsettling about their demeanor and sentences. A kind of subtext to their ordinary communications made their loved ones edgy and uneasy, until finally one or another of the disguised aliens would say something so utterly out of character that there could be no doubting their new identity.
In the course of forty years of adult life spent in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, it has gradually been borne in upon me that most students attending our elite divinity schools must have spent a night in the theological version of these Pods. For although they seem to talk real English, unaccented and fully idiomatic, there is yet something strange and unsettling about the lingo that comes out of their mouths. At first their sentences are merely unsettling and ooze with a slippery vagueness that sounds wrong but which can—with those patient hermeneutical transpositions that so many theologians have made their stock-in-trade—be explained away. But then along comes a Roger Haight or an ex-priest caught on tape with a reporter, and suddenly the orthodox wake up with the queasy feeling that the Body Snatchers have entered the ancient precincts of the Church.”

–Rev. Edward T. Oakes, SJ, “How to Evangelize Christians”*

I had an Invasion of the Body-Snatchers moment while reading through last Sunday’s parish bulletin(8/22/04). The parish Justfaith group placed a quotation full of pod-people talk in the bulletin, “from Fr. Richard Rohr’s wonderful book Jesus’ Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount”:

"When Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God, he was talking about an utterly different way of relating with one another than human society as we know it. Yet we have failed to understand the coming of Jesus as the dawn of a new age. For most Christians, life in the new age has been business as usual… We keep worshipping the messenger, keeping Jesus up on statues and images, so we can avoid what Jesus said. It’s the best smokescreen in the world! We just keep saying “We love Jesus.” The more we talk about Jesus, the less we’ll do with what he said. And in this case, it’s the way culture, nations, and even the churches have fooled themselves.”

This is wrong on so many levels. That line about the “utterly different way of relating” with people is misleading at best. For one thing, Our Lord came “not to abolish the law but to fulfill it.” For another, the phrase implies a radical dualism between sinful nature and supernatural grace: in the classic Christian formula, “Grace does not abolish nature, but perfects it.” The order of grace then, can’t very well be “utterly different” from the natural order—especially since there is a sort of natural grace in the world.

Rohr’s sentence “We keep worshipping the messenger” is especially troubling—as though we should stop worshipping at some point, or as though worship were a tedious, interfering burden to be lifted, rather than a foreshadowing of the saints’ worship in heaven! “Messenger” is a dubious demotion for the Son of God, who after all is more than a mere aggelos(angel). What’s more, a Catholic priest has no business belittling worship, when most Catholics don’t even attend Sunday Mass.

Rohr’s semi-iconoclastic denunciation of statues and images, standard fare in any variety of low church Protestantism, only provokes cognitive dissonance in Catholic ears. Besides that, the whole statement makes no sense as a matter of logic. “We worship Jesus so much, talk about him, and put reminders of Him everywhere, therefore we pay no attention to his words.” Psychologically speaking, perhaps familiarity breeds apathy, but (especially if the familiar is as beautiful as all Christian worship and images should be) such familiarity can just as easily lead one further into the work of God. And again, a Catholic priest like Fr. Rohr shouldn’t disparage “God-Talk” when his flock is woefully uninstructed in the Faith and when his society is so secularized that people speak of God in embarrassed, ironic tones—if they speak of Him at all. I myself am so poorly catechized that I can’t name all the spiritual and corporal works of mercy, though I do remember that two of the spiritual works of mercy are counseling the doubtful and instructing the ignorant—both of which involve talking about God.

Checking out the first few pages of Rohr’s book on Amazon only magnified my concerns. There is a lot of talk about revolution, which is so appealing to people who have never known a revolution. Having been something of a revolutionary wannabe myself, I’m prone to let this slide as rhetorical hyperbole. Of greater concern to me is Rohr’s questionable equation of Our Lord with everybody else who died under an oppressive society: “When we Christians accept that Jesus was killed for the same reasons that people have been killed in all of human history(and not because he walked around saying “I am God”), we will have turned an important corner on our Jesus quest.” (p. 3)

Talk about an alien soteriology! Our Lord Himself said “No one takes my life from me, I lay it down freely!” Our Lord died not because he was another anonymous victim of man’s inhumanity to man-—as though God can be a victim!--but rather in order to reveal God’s love to man.

What’s even more troubling, the Amazon reviewers indicate that Rohr quotes with approval several “scholars” from the Jesus seminar, which markets its “discoveries” of atheistic scholarship via major secular weeklies like Newsweek and Time. With compatriots like the Jesus Seminar apostates, and with ambiguous rhetoric that provokes dissonance even in the ears a young man like me with so little theological training, I wonder: what in the world is Rohr doing being quoted in a parish bulletin?

*Father Oakes' essay will be appearing in Crisis magazine. I have permission to distribute it samizdat, so if you want to see the whole thing e-mail me.