Sacred Images and the Picture Which Holds Us Captive

One of the reason the Matrix films were so popular is that they resonate with our real world fears of brain-washing. In the Second World War, a whole nation was swept into the moral abyss following the delusions and propaganda of a deranged and tyrannical dictator. During the Cold War, western soldiers who spent time in Communist captivity would sometimes return holding beliefs which were polar-opposite to those they had held previously. Some never recovered. Not to be outdone, western intelligence agencies experimented with their own mind-control drugs like LSD and ‘truth serums’. We occasionally read of individuals who join extreme cults, somehow taken in by the most bizarre beliefs. The fear is there: What if someone else is holding us captive by controlling our thoughts?

In fact, psychologists suggest that brain-washing is not all that different to ‘normal’ learning. Re-education occurs using the same processes as education, with the pressures, rewards, forfeits, and speed cranked up as high as possible. This strikes at the heart of our ideal of human beings as ‘free agents’. In the Matrix films, mind-control operates to such a degree that the bulk of humanity live believing that they are free when, in fact, they could not be more enslaved. Neo gaining freedom to think and act differently starts with a battle for the mind. Recognising that the entire perception of life has been restricted by imposed mental parameters which are deliberately deceptive requires struggle. Breaking free is not straight forward. The liberty which Neo obtains is the liberty to keep fighting against slavery of the mind. 

The 2010 film Inception takes the expression of this fear one step further: what if the perception of escape is just another delusion? How do we know that we are living in reality and not a dream? How do we know whether we have actually woken up, or if that waking is just another layer of deception?

Both the Matrix and Inception operate on the assumption that we can never actually take hold of ‘the world out there’; all we ever have is a certain internal mental perception some how mediated by sense receptors. Philosophically, once you make mental perception the centre of knowledge and knowing, it becomes impossible to escape the cycle of subjectivity. On the one hand it is impossible to prove that my inward perception matches external reality; on the other, it is easy to prove that my inward perception can differ from external reality - for example, through the influence of illness, drugs, failing memory, or strong emotions like anger.

This concept might be hard to grasp, especially if you work in a practical field like engineering. Engineers are generally pragmatic in their outlook. Their research proceeds on the basis that our perception represents reality, not necessarily exactly, but at least sufficiently to function and solve practical problems. If it works it’s true enough. Most people take this for granted in their day to day lives. You don’t get very far if you interrogate every thought to see if it is philosophically credible! 

But these intellectual problems will be familiar to anyone who has studied arts and humanities - fields concerned with the interpretation and communication of ideas. Because ‘epistemology’ - your theory of how you ‘know’ anything - determines the methods you choose to study, and your methods determine your interpretations and your conclusions. Pastors and theologians know that when we look at the same words in a Scripture text but come to different conclusions about their meaning and application, the differences must lie in us, not in the words. Different theological conclusions reflect different ways of thinking, and these different methods reflect different assumptions about ‘how we know’ and ‘what it means to know’.

Western philosophy has been dominated by these ‘epistemological questions’ for a few hundred years. It is widely acknowledged that this can be traced back to influential thinkers such as Rene Descartes and John Locke. When Locke stated that ideas “are produced in us... by the operation of insensible particles on the senses” he was not making a biological statement about the operation of the sense receptors and nervous system. He was making an epistemological statement about the basis on which people form ideas or come to know things. Particles in the external world operate on the mediating senses to produce internal ideas. This is different to Descartes’s rationalism, which rested on the assumption that we know some ideas (like the principles of maths) without reference to sensory experience. The common ground is that he too held to an inside-outside dualism: the innate ideas are within an internal mind not derived from external sensory stimuli.

It is no novel insight to state that this ‘internal-external dualism’ has set the agenda for western philosophy ever since. It frames the questions philosophers ask and the solutions they offer. It has a massive unconscious influence on the universal subjectivism of popular culture and the media. It underlies the widespread agnosticism and atheism of the contemporary world: if God is ‘out there’ and my mind is ‘in here’, how can God be known? It is a driving force in the liberal view of religion and ‘New Age’ spiritualities because if God cannot be known ‘out there’ through traditional ritual or dogmatic teaching, our only hope is to find God by looking ‘within’ or seeking subjective experience of ‘transcendence’ in music, art, nature.

It is also not a novel insight to state that the grip with which ‘internal-external dualism’ holds many western minds is no less dominating than the psychological grip of Neo’s fictional life in the Matrix world. Speaking of this dominant understanding of the relationship of mind to world Wittgenstein wrote:

“A picture held us captive”.

He meant that this dualism provides the unconscious background for mainstream epistemology. It represents the conceptual framework and boundaries within which all our learning and thinking takes place. It defines the horizons, the limits of what it is possible for us to think, and that puts us in a kind of mental captivity. Because although the practical implications of this view have been critiqued in a multitude of different ways those critiques nearly always come from within the picture. They suggest different ways of coping with ‘internal-external dualism’ without asking whether this dualism is the right way to view things in the first place. We look at the building and see it is crooked but few dare to challenge the blueprints.

My argument is that most of the linguistic and conceptual tools which we use to talk and think about the internet are rooted in this kind of subjectivist dualism. The terms were coined by people who think in dualistic ways and live in a dualism-saturated culture. So psychologically we ‘go’ online but our bodies don’t go anywhere. We talk of ‘web space’ and ‘web sites’ but these ‘spaces’ and ‘sites’ have no spatial location; they are ‘conceptual’ spaces, not physical ones. We can communicate with one another at a distance and call it an ‘online meeting’ - but this involves a meeting of minds, not a meeting of bodies. The very language we have unthinkingly come to use, only makes sense in a dualistic framework which allows the mind to ‘go’ whilst the body ‘stays’.

If you are in any way captive to this kind of language and this way of thinking, online communion will seem like common sense. Isn’t it obvious that an online meeting is the same as any other kind of meeting? Isn’t New Testament worship supposed to be spiritual, not bound to physical ritual and geographical location? It’s obvious. Isn’t it? It might be, but only until you try and explain why it is common sense. Because both online meeting and de-physicalised spirituality only appear to be common sense within a dualistic framework.

The insight which realist philosophy offers is that all knowledge is ‘embedded’ in contexts, culture and relationships, and ‘embodied’ in physical expression. No philosophy is perfect, but this realism is much closer to the Bible’s  ancient Hebrew mindset than Descartes and Locke were. What this means is that context is as vital to the interpretation of images as it is for the interpretation of texts, for discerning the meaning of Sacraments as well as that of Scriptures. Whether we recognise it or not, if context is essential to all interpretation and understanding, moving communion online will inevitably impact people’s perception of its meaning.

Consider this outline of the Scriptural Sacred Image which Communion presents to us and how it differs from the image presented by an online ‘communion’, where individuals in multiple homes break bread and offer it to their family members, with pastor and elders only ‘virtually present’, at best.

The original Communion takes us back to the Last Supper. Jesus had set the time and place and made all the arrangements. We see Christ take His place as ‘Host’ and ‘Head of the Table’. He breaks the bread and pours the wine and He gives it to the disciples. He explicitly puts the whole event in a Covenant context, provoking all kinds of vivid futuristic expectations for His Jewish disciples who would be anticipating some sort of heavenly banquet with an abundance of wine flowing as one of God’s richest blessings. In setting apart bread and wine as the elements He focuses attention on the tangible, physical reality of His flesh and blood; there would be no sacrament without the incarnation. His explanation points forward, not just to His death, but beyond that to His Second Coming - with the physical resurrection implicit.

So now, at a Communion service, by faith we see the Sacred Image of Christ as the Host and Head of the Heavenly Table. In His Word He calls us to His Table and, in His Providence, He sets the precise times and places. We cannot come as and when we will. He meets with us spiritually, when we “come together” (1 Cor 11:20). Not just the historical but also the covenant theological context of this statement require physical gathering.  Christ did not spiritualise worship by exalting the mental and psychological and downgrading the physical to the optional or incidental. On the contrary, the incarnation declares a fundamental compatibility between the spiritual and the physical. So to abstain until He gathers us again will do His people no long term spiritual harm; He knows the best way for us and we anticipate a rich meal when He draws us together again. On the other hand, there is no biblical reason to believe that gathering in our own way, ignoring both the detail of Scripture and the restraints of Providence, will do us any good; going through the motions accomplishes nothing; true religion means meeting Jesus on His terms, not our own. He may in fact be temporarily withholding this blessing as an act of loving discipline; pressing ahead without considering this could even do us harm.

Holy Communion is not just a regular reminder that Jesus died on a Cross. It is also a regular picture lesson that to be saved we must feed - by faith - on all the flesh and blood reality of Jesus’ saving work as the only source from which we can obtain God’s grace, the nourishment we need to sustain our spiritual life.

“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us”

And only through that physical manifestation of God in the flesh have we

“Seen his glory, glory as of the only Son of the Father, 

full of Grace and Truth”.

And only through this flesh and blood Saviour who made himself physically present with sinful people can we

“...receive from His fullness, grace upon grace”

(John 1:14-16).

Just as we must chew, swallow and drink physical food and drink to be nourished, and what we consume is incorporated into our bodies, so as we exercise true faith in observing the Lord’s Supper we grow, by the incomprehensible activity of the Holy Spirit, into an ever-increasing unity with the Son of God - the flesh and blood, Incarnate Son of God.

That is the picture of God’s grace to which I am, joyfully, held captive.

(Next post here).