Friday, December 16, 2011


St Mathews In The City: Christmas Billboard 
What does it mean?

It seems St Matthews are continuing a new Christmas tradition started a year or two ago with very controversial billboards. This years is no different. It features a renaissance style painting of Mary holding a pregnancy test kit with a look of surprise. What's wrong with the picture? To this writer at least it says far more about the age we live in than what perhaps St Mathews intended. It speaks to me more of a problem that is really pervasive in our post modern world. And yet it also speaks to me of a problem encountered since the dawn of man. 
What do I mean?
Firstly, in the narrative that this picture represents, Mary has already been told by the angel what has happened to her. But, entirely consistent with the post modern view of reality she has to interpret this for herself, she will be the final authority as to what is real. The post modern view of language has meant that she cannot allow herself simply to take the word spoken to her for granted, she must learn what the meaning is based on her own terms.What was spoken to her is not the final and authoritative answer to her quandary, in fact she has shown with the use of the pregnancy test kit that she needs science to tell her what is really going on. The voice and opinion of autonomous man is where she will finally place her confidence. In listening to science she seeks her answer other than from God. 
But how has science helped? She should already have been assured of her pregnancy, what has the scientific test added? Will it tell her her child is divine? Will it tell her that her son will be the center-point for all of history? Will it tell her her child will be a King and his kingdom will never end? Science speaks of a certain portion of reality, but to say it speaks of the whole is to sell oneself woefully short.

As N T Wright writes-
Current accounts of knowing have placed the would-be objective scientific knowing (test-tube epistemology, if you like) in a position of privilege. Every step away from this is seen as a step into obscurity, fuzziness and subjectivism, reaching its peaks in aesthetics and metaphysics. "The Challenge of Jesus"

Secondly, we see the import of the message even though manifested in a thoroughly postmodern worldview  is merely the same problem of old dressed in a new set of clothes. Mary has done what her forbears have done. In the Garden of Eden there was another who doubted the word of God spoken to her. In fact Eve took to heart- not the word spoken to her by God- but the word of the serpent- "Yea has God said...?" To me this picture is a self indictment of St Mathews and all who go along with the revisionist view of Christianity. It says more about St Mathews than about Mary, it says more about the so-called liberal churches of today who are more content to invent their own ideas of reality than listen faithfully to the words of Him from whom all reality comes.