*

5. A Certain Puzzling Blindness.

   It is rather odd, then, to consider that in all the thousands of tons of theological literature in the world today, there are only four or five books that discuss Charles Shultz' famous 'Peanuts' comic-strip. Indeed, it seems that most theologians (as far as we can tell from their writings) are almost completely blind to the gospel when it comes at them under the aspect of humor. On the other hand, many theologians and teachers have some sort of wise or religious-type comic-strip on their office door; one that embodies some witty and amusing, but still eternal, truth. There is thus a kind of affective/symbolic break or discontinuity between the theologian's work and the theologian's life. Clearly something is amiss in the Great Land of Theology! The neglect of the comic spirit, just because it is so difficult to quantify, define, and measure, is nothing less than an ironic tragedy. Yet insofar as the comic spirit provides a direct pipeline to ultimate and cosmic concerns, this potential theological resource is immense, and remains virtually untapped!

v
Moreover, I will banish from them the voice of mirth
And the voice of gladness. The voice of the bridegroom
And the voice of the bride, the grinding of the millstones
And the light of the lamp. (Jer 25:10).

  For D.N.Powers, the central task of modern theology is the contemporary mediation of cult to culture. Such a noble project must be "more explicitly attentive to the human subject and to the functioning's of the symbolic" (Pow 13). Now language is surely the most fundamental of the universal human qualities, since without it we are reduced, and quite literally so, to the mode of being of animals. But it could easily be argued that humor and laughter are just as universal, and just as basic and necessary to authentic human being . Indeed language, in and of itself, is nothing more than a 'carrier' of meaningful symbols, a useful but empty conduit that only has value when used to express the multiplicity of human being. Now awe and laughter are equally valid responses to the glory of God and Creation. Both provide language with the meaningful content that shapes our becoming:
 
The power of [comedy, humor, and laughter] to express the transcendent, their capacity so to construe human experience as to reconstruct it, are attained through a process of demythologization and critical reflection, which opens the mind and the heart to a fresh and Iiberating hearing of the word of God. The remembrance of Jesus Christ can be received in this way as gift, and simultaneously as challenge to our inner selves and to our public conduct. (Powers 13-14 ) [In this quote I use the words 'comedy' etc in place of the author's all but useless term 'symbols' in order to better clarify and indicate what we are talking about. Normally, I do not like to change another's words in any way, shape or form; but sometimes it's necessary.]


  Despite Powers' obvious concern for the "fundamental human experiences in which religion is grounded", and which also transforms life into a meaningful reality, one would never  know (judging from the information in his book) that the human creature was even capable of such a thing as laughter, Iet alone that humor and comedy might be, in some odd way, relevant to the spiritual and religious life of humanity (Pow 30). Consequetltly, Powers, like most theologians, seems to have no awareness of the existence of comedy and humor in the service of the Sacred, and so we may certainty judge his work according to his own words: "Even though it may possess an apparent nobility, a religion [or any theology] which has nothing to say about these factors of human existence will eventually be ignored" (Pow 30). Let us then ignore Powers by all means.

  While Powers' textbook on 'culture and theology' may indeed well represent the current state of scholarship in this area of theological concern, the final judgment of it was aIready written a decade earlier. In 1981 Langdon Gilkey published his 'Society and the Sacred' wherein he defines what the so-called 'theology of culture' is not: "This reflection is not directed at the phenomena of religion or of religious Ianguage, and asking questions about the character of the former and its relation to other concerns, and about the latter's meaning, validity, and relation to the languages of other disciplines. Such an enterprise is correctly called philosophy of religion" (Gil ix). For Gilkey, theology of culture asks
 
questions of meaning or of meaninglessness, of the ambiguity even of creativity, of the freedom AND the bondage of the will, of the strange, inexorable inheritance of evil, of the career of good and evil in the passage of time, of the contradiction of even our highest values, of the tension between affirmation and tolerance, between pluralism and truth, and of the promise of new possibilities and the need for hope for the future. (Gilkey x)


  In Gilkey's book we again find no treatment of comedy and humor, but at least his conception of the theology of culture focuses attention in the right direction, such that it certainly allows for the recognition of the importance of laughter and humor in the sacred sphere. This alone puts Gilkey light-years ahead of Powers and his humorIess cohorts.

  On the other hand, some few Christian thinkers have given some attention to humor and such things, although not always to the best effect. In 'Discerning the Signs of the Times' (1946), Niebuhr has all but defined comedy and humor as 'a no-mans-Iand between faith and despair'. This highly negative definition doubtless covers some aspects of the lighter-side (eg. humor as unholy and blasphemous, or humor as vulgar profanity, or humor as malicious attack, mockery, derision, etc); BUT it does not address the better aspects of the Cosmic Comic Spirit. [However, given the times in which Niebuhr conducted his 'discernment', this oversight is certainly understandable, if not entirely forgivable.] ... Incidentally, it should also be clear that the most universal and appealing of the many shades and tones of comedy and humor are the more obviously profane and direct sorts. For example: Homer J. Simpson found the film about 'the guy catching a football with his groin' so funny that he voted it best-film, despite the fact that everybody else (including his wife, Marge) much preferred another (far less comic) film! Now Homer speaks for the masses, to be sure, and so most theologian's take the vulgar and profane aspects of humor to represent the very essence and substance of all comedy.

  In fact, the Comic Spirit is not at all confined to 'the naughty bits', but rather travels freely through the cosmos, disregarding all barriers between the sacred and the profane, between the high and the low, between pain and joy, between love and hate, between the majestic and the gross, between strength and weakness, and also between the divine and the human. It is therefore somewhat appropriate that the multi-lingual joke-sign 'King of the Jews' shines forth over the dying head of the Way; confounding the pious and the theologians alike. The placard stands, as it were, at the very center of the Way of Love, at the focal point between heaven and earth; and at the very heart of human-divine relationships. Indeed the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth could never be correctly understood if we could not even see the humor of our Laughing Lord?