DAVID BENJAMIN BLOWER, theologian, essayist, poet, podcaster, and musician, is haunted by the messianic idea — haunted in a way that has seemed to him to be unusual among his peers. This book is the result of that haunting and the resulting conversations that his friends and peers have tolerated.
He begins with a story of a potter and an emperor. The emperor collects the potter’s vases and later comes to realise that the vases are made in mosaic form from broken pieces of pottery salvaged after his extensive military campaigns and the devastation that they cause. As a result, the emperor spends long hours contemplating his vases in silence.
This book aims to have a similar impact and is formed in similar fashion to the potter’s mosaic vases. In each chapter, Blower circles his messianic themes with a series of interrelated fragments composed of stories, ideas, arguments, practices, imaginings, questions, hints and clues. In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot wrote of shoring fragments against his ruin. Blower is after a similar effect through his examination of messianism in relation to anarchy, ecology, margins, progress, openness, gatherings, life, culture, sacred spaces, work, and rule.
In another beginning, Blower cites Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Walter Benjamin as the twin lodestones for religion made strange after Modernity. While the ideas of both undeniably feature, supplemented by the likes of Theodor Adorno and Giorgio Agamben, the messianic template that surfaces most frequently is provided by the actions, stories and teachings of Jesus and his immediate disciples. The Messiah of the Gospels unmasks the world’s contradictions by perplexing them with trickery, mockery, and reversal. His aim is to dismantle existing power structures in order to invite open space for open gatherings in which all things interrelate.
What is central to this book, sewn like a thread holding the fragments together, is the relationship between zoe, life common to all beings, and bios, the differing cultures that human beings build. Bios commonly divides and rules, and, by its doing so, zoe is abused and oppressed and wordlessly groans, awaiting release. Modernity, Blower believes, has been a terrifying iteration of bios. The intent of this book is to point us towards the redemption of bios by its reconciliation to zoe.
Donald Trump is referred to once in the book as a contemporary messianic figure telling us much about the Christian groups to whom he appeals so strongly. This book, which explores ideas of a reconciliatory and open messianic vision as opposed to a divisive and hierarchical vision, is, therefore, particularly timely and prophetic, in a potentially terrifying age when nations increasingly seem to be embracing the spirit of the Antichrist rather than that of the coming Messiah.
The Revd Jonathan Evens is the Team Rector of Wickford and Runwell in the diocese of Chelmsford.
Messianic Commons: Images of the Messiah after modernity
David Benjamin Blower
SCM Press £25
(978-0-334-06638-5)
Church Times Bookshop £20