"I couldn’t help but think that there just might be some good eschatology..."

I missed this at the time, but here is a 2009 post connecting some U2 lyrics from No Line with the NT Wright book Surprised by Hope.

Such a disappointment

Well, why not; let's keep the UTEOTW theme going. Here's a lengthy reflection on U2, eschatology and recent failed prophecies by Tim Neufeld. It has some useful history on the whole notion of the "rapture" for those who may wonder where that idea even came from, as well as a thorough contrast of Biblical eschatology with the end-times scenarios embraced by some segments of American popular piety.

Sounds like fun to me

Carrying on from yesterday's video theme, here's a journalist who was at the show offering an accessible though theologically literate reflection on the "Until the End of the World"-May 21 intersection by way of Gordon Fee seminary class. (HT Doug) Excerpt:

For Jesus, it boils down to the Kingdom of God. The kingdom isn't a place like heaven, but rather the authority of God over what happens on earth (and in heaven) in transforming the world. That includes what people do. It's not the government or the free market or other economic model, although they can help or hinder what God wants. And, in one of Gordon Fee's favorite phrases, it means "already, but not yet." Jesus won with his crucifixion and resurrection (the "already" part), but the other aspects of love, peace, salvation, justice, ameliorating human suffering -- goals neither politically left nor right -- are "not yet" in place. Bono had that idea cold in "Sunday Bloody Sunday" on U2's third album "War": "The real battle just begun, To claim the victory Jesus won."

U2 dedicated UTEOTW to Harold Camping last night. It's really rather poignant. Bono jokes that only Edge would be "taken up in the air," then gives a corrective ALREADY realized eschatology, and then delivers the loudest NOT YET balancing one I've ever heard. Thanks, U2, for reading the whole Bible with your whole brains and your whole bodies.

Lessons

Jonathan Blundell shares a list of 10 spiritual lessons he has learned from U2, drawing on songs as far back as "Rejoice" and as recent as "Breathe." He asks his readers for additions, and I thought I'd make a few, focusing mostly on things it seems to me are especially characteristic of the band's message (i.e. not generic spiritual truths). Here's a quick list of some prominent U2 Lessons off the cuff (more input welcome):

-- "When I was three, I thought the world revolved around me. I was wrong." Or, to quote Rick Warren, "it's not about you." The de-centering of the ego, of the presuppositions, of the self-drama, is lifelong work. One of the good, tedious and therefore useful ways to work towards this is fidelity in community. "If I want to live, I've got to die to myself one day." Another is a sense of proportion in a world in which, say, your icemaker breaking one afternoon is not on a scale with 6000 people dying the same day of malaria. (Also cf the recent interview in which Bono talks about being allergic to people who have one painful thing happen to them and walk with a limp for the rest of their lives.)

-- You could cite so many songs for this one: Surrender is exquisite. Do not be confused by this fact and conclude that surrendering in and of itself is good. Who or what you surrender to is all-important. And yet you must surrender.

-- Listen to what you want. Speak it out until you get to a true statement. When you do, God will be there. "What do you want?" from ZooTV. "I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside." "I want... I want you... I want you to be back tomorrow." "You want heaven, heaven in your heart." "Looking for to fill that God-shaped hole." And then, the mature "I want the lot of what You've got and I want nothing that You're not."

-- "I wanted to meet God and you sold me religion," "love is big... but love is not what you're thinking of," and again, a zillion other lyrics and interviews: Religion is to be distinguished from God. The former is probably about as likely to be an idol and a force for division and hatred as not. Confusing the two can be lethal.

-- "We eat and drink while tomorrow they die," (which I still think is the most brilliant Bible allusion in the entire U2 oeuvre) "with the real battle yet begun: to claim the victory Jesus won." Also related is Bono's: "If you are not committed to the poor, what is religion? It's a black hole." Being a follower of Jesus entails implementing Jesus' victory in the real world. (See next point)

-- KINGDOM NOW! Let's have a little bit of the age to come NOW! Inaugurated eschatology NOW!

-- And finally, a point of personal privilege: When agony comes to you, process it in a mode as similar to "One Tree Hill" as you can muster. Don't give up until you've seen its resolution all the way out at the outer ring. (See above point)

Born of sound

Having thrown out some general context in the past couple posts, I want to move on now to making more specific comments on No Line On The Horizon.

As has been pointed out already, it seems clear to me that "the sound" is one central metaphor. We have three "let me in the sound" requests, as well as "I found grace inside a/the sound" and "people born of sound," all of which have an essentialist, palpable ring (especially if you want to argue for a vague John 3 echo in the last one.) Along with these, there are more evocations of sound per se as granting some kind of mysterious access to the ultimate: "hear the universe," "roar on the other side of silence," and "the rhythm of my soul... that yearns to be released from control." And don't forget this album's ineffable soundscapes themselves, such as the one that begins "Unknown Caller." Because of all that, I am more inclined to understand "sound" in NLOTH as pointing to mystical communion with God now, rather than as looking forward to songs sung by others in heaven.

While we also get several specific mentions of people themselves vocalizing ("Sing your heart out," "I was born to sing for you," "listen for me, I'll be shouting") it's the sense of sound as sacred essence that intrigues me here, as if Pop's "looking for a sound that's gonna drown out the world" quest has been fulfilled in a sound-baptism by immersion on NLOTH.

So I think I'd like to at least play with a distinction. I'm certainly not positing a major disconnect, but I'm wondering if we could say that the "sound" metaphor represents something of a shift? Previously, have U2's evocations of eschatological fullness not tended more towards the apophatic? Their work has often reached, yearning, to that ecstatic limit, and then there are no words for what is coming. "I try to sing this... but." "You know I believe it, but I still haven't found..." with "what I'm looking for" left unspoken. "Mysterious Ways" (at least live): You can hear it, and see the celebration, but the lyrics are over by then. In fact, at a lot of these foretaste moments in U2 there is only inarticulate vocalization. And for the quintessential example, as glorious a moment of fulfillment as it is, the song is called "Where the Streets Have No Name," and they traditionally blind us at all its high points. (Any fans of Pseudo-Dionysius and his dazzling darkness out there?)

As a side comment: If you buy the idea, it would be interesting to discuss whether this instinct for apophaticism at the spiritual apex is part of what has made U2 so accessible to secular listeners.

In my next post, I'll share some thoughts about why this more immersive and less apophatic "sound" metaphor might have come to the fore, and either then or later I'll get to how I see it tying in with the settled Sitz-im-leben I mentioned earlier.

Grace inside a sound

I take back my statement that nothing of real theological substance has yet been written on NLOTH. Go check out this piece by Steven Harmon. Excerpt:
The basic message of No Line is that earth is not yet heaven, and therefore the album summons us to "Get On Your Boots" and work toward the day when things will fully be on earth as they are in heaven -- when heaven and earth will be indistinguishable, and there will at last be no line on the horizon. Moving in that direction requires the triumph "of vision over visibility" ("Moment of Surrender"), an echo of an earlier formulation of the same insight: that the things that last and that come at the last constitute "a place that has to be believed to be seen" ("Walk On" from 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind). It also requires an inner transformation wrought by a receptive hearing of the voice of God ("Unknown Caller") and a faithful reception of the love of God which requires that one both "stand up" for it and "sit down" to receive it ("Stand Up Comedy"). The central eschatological metaphor of No Line is the sound of the divine song, heard only by those who have the ears to hear it, yet unconsciously sought by everyone, for all people were created to hear and sing this song. Seven of the album's 11 songs invoke that metaphor in one way or another.

BTW, my answer to your "fifth point Calvinist" jab, Steve, is that the sense of the line can just as easily be "Justified, you and I will magnify the Magnificent until we die." ;-)

"Van Diemen's Land" is a U2 song I've thought very little about, although I still remember a truly awful sermon using it (and I do mean "using") that was submitted in our book's call for papers. The video that has been circulating of its recent performance in an empty O2 arena brought the piece back to mind for the first time in some years, and out of nowhere it struck me how extremely N.T. Wright-like in its eschatology this couplet is:

A day will come in this dawning age
When an honest man earns an honest wage.
(Wait, you mean in the life of the age to come we'll still have to work? We'll find meaning and reward in our labor? We won't be sitting around on clouds playing harps?)

It almost sounds like one of those "corrected versions" of hymns N.T. Wright so often proffers from the pulpit, after the congregation has sung something like "When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation/and take me home, such joy shall fill my heart." Whereupon Wright cheerfully tells them they really ought instead to be singing "When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation/and heal this world...."

When will the stars fall from the sky? When will the moon turn red?

Someone got here recently googling "One Tree Hill Sermon." I doubt they found one, since I didn't when I clicked on it. However, I did find something very close, a (months-old) exegesis of "One Tree Hill" from Café Diem | coffee philosophy. Worth a look for some nice unpacking of the Biblical background to the song.

Apocalyptic and the Beauty of God

Any of our readers with a tolerance for some fairly high-falutin' language and an interest in a theme underlying this blog, a theological analysis of the vocation of the arts (and perhaps particularly among artists with an eye to the eschatological horizon, as in the case of U2), might enjoy this sermon on "Apocalyptic and the Beauty of God" given two days ago by N.T. Wright. Excerpt:
[T]he point of art, I believe, is not least to be able to say something like that, to draw attention – not, indeed, to a shallow or trivial pietistic point, as though to lead the mind away from the world and its problems and into a merely cosy contemplation of God’s presence, but rather – to the multi-layered and many-dimensioned aspects of the present world, to the pains and the terror, yes, but also to the creative tension between the present filling of the world with YHWH’s glory and the promised future filling, as the waters cover the sea. When art tries to speak of the new world, the final world, in terms only of the present world, it collapses into sentimentality; when it speaks of the present world only in terms of its shame and horror, it collapses into brutalism. The vocation of the artist is to speak of the present as beautiful in itself but as pointing beyond itself, to enable us to see both the glory that already fills the earth and the glory that shall flood it to overflowing; to speak, within that, of the shame without ignoring the promise, and to speak of the promise without forgetting the shame. The artist is thus to be like the Israelite spies in the desert, bringing back fruit from the promised land to be tasted in advance; that story, indeed, is one of the moments when (surprisingly within the narrative) YHWH promises that not only the promised land but the whole world will be filled with his glory (Numbers 14.21; cf. 14.10).... Here is the challenge, I believe, for the Christian artist, in whatever sphere: to tell the story of the new world so that people can taste it, and want it, even while acknowledging the reality of the desert in which we presently live.

theotherblog: eschatology of U2

Drew continues his reflections on the eschatology of U2 with The Unforgettable Fire.

Rebirth, New Birth

The whole video of U2 and Green Day doing "The Saints Are Coming" (along with "Wake Me Up When September Ends" and some of "Beautiful Day") is now available on YouTube. I applaud lots of sites for trying to discourage MP3s and make very sure people support Music Rising by purchasing a copy of the audio track, but for those who couldn't see either the ESPN broadcast or the USA-only, RealMedia proprietary stream, it's nice to watch and listen to U2 and Green Day and know what all the fuss was about (at least in low-quality.)

I've seen a fair amount of discussion on the lyric changes in "Beautiful Day," which appeared to me to be typical of the way bands often add local references; but oddly no one seems interested in the changes in "The Saints Are Coming," which I found much more thoughtful. For example:

ORIGINAL:
A drowning sorrow floods the deepest grief/ How long now
Til a weather change condemns belief?/ The stone says
This paternal guide once had his day/ Once had his day.

U2/Green Day;
A drowning sorrow floods the deepest grief/ How long now
Til a weather change condemns belief?/ How long now?
The night watchman let in the thief/ What's wrong now?

In the original, the belief that's being condemned seems to be belief in "this paternal guide," the "Daddy" who's got his phone off the hook in verse one. In the new version I think, read in context, the narrator is losing faith instead in leaders whose duty was to protect citizens in the event of natural disasters but who dropped the ball -- "letting in the thief" instead of upholding the trust they were given. ("What's wrong" with that picture?) This line also strengthens the eschatological tone of the song and evokes Biblical "last day" passages like this (from Jesus) and this (from Paul, perhaps more directly related). It's also an image U2 have already used back in a day when we all thought the world was going to really end in a nuclear war any month now.

And then there was the new topical verse:
We're living like birds in the magnolia trees
Child on the rooftop, mother on her knees.
Her sign reads "Please -- I Am An American!"

While much of the media I've seen has been full of excitement about the event, some commentators were voicing criticism of the fact that whole neighborhoods are still in ruins yet there seems to be money and energy for a festive reopening of the Superdome (here's one example.) While I understand the importance of joyous public celebrations, these lyrics also make clear that you really can't claim U2/Green Day were mindlessly cheerleading about rebirth in New Orleans without asking any deeper political questions.

How long now till the clouds unroll and you come home?

Wednesday mid-morning I was talking with someone about the rumor that Green Day and U2 were covering an old song by the Skids together, for something connected with New Orleans. Could it be "The Saints Are Coming," I wondered. It's got it all: eschatology, "how long," a father, floods, "a weather change condemns belief," etc. Imagine my surprise when, Friday mid-morning, that turns out to be the song. You can read the announcement on Green Day's site (for the time being, I suppose.)

theotherblog: Musical odyssey: The eschatology of U2

Drew from theotherblog has recently begun a multipost series on the eschatology of U2. Treated so far: Boy and October.

READ THIS IF:Your favorite song about heaven is NOT "I Can Only Imagine"

The unique and ever-prolix Fresno Dave is thinking about "Where the Streets Have No Name." Kudos to him for finding that MercyMe clip, as middling as the performance is, because I have to admit its introduction made me stand up and raise my palms to the ceiling. Thanks also, Dave, for the kind words about my writing.

"United 93" -- "See you for a swim"

I was quoting another blogger's earlier post about "One Tree Hill" when I said "It takes an unusual consciousness to garner comfort from apocalyptic imagery...." Well, check out this sidebar to a United 93-related interview with a California man who lost his wife and the couple's unborn child on that flight. It ends up dipping into that kind of comfort-via-eschatology by way of answering why "One Tree Hill" turned up once (only) on the Vertigo tour, in U2's Oakland concert last November. (Hat tip to scatter o' light.)

"not only cries out against injustice, but also dares to imagine an alternative"

I'm always happy to get emails pointing out some article I may not have seen, so thanks to Steve Harmon for letting me know about his "U2: Unexpected Prophets" (PDF), found in the "Singing Our Lives" issue of Christian Reflection, a publication of the Baylor University Center for Christian Ethics. Steve's article considers U2's work under the rubrics of "Grounded Implicitly in Worship," "Steeped in the Biblical Story," "Portraying the Triune God," "Sharing Christian Hope," "Basing Salvation in Grace," and "Calling for Prophetic Social Engagement"; of course, you know I'm going to nod at the 4th section, where the observation is made that "a tension between the already and the not yet... is the key theological concept for understanding the spiritual significance of U2's music." I blogged about a previous U2 analysis by the same author here, and he helped us all out with some patristics vocabulary in a comment to this post. The article is kind enough to cite Get Up Off Your Knees (which got a little bump in sales with all the Bono National Prayer Breakfast stuff yesterday; thanks, folks) as a recommended book.

There is also an accompanying lesson plan (also PDF) including Bible conections, a cool reading from Augustine, discussion questions, and a closing hymn.

Now and Not Yet

A very brief reflection from a New Zealand blogger, which I'm linking because it's got a nice Advent theme -- and because it chimes with a conversation I was having with an email correspondent who mentioned admiring U2's "healthy understanding of inaugurated eschatology and the mission of Jesus." Whenever a theologian puts U2 and eschatology in the same sentence (an emphasis I understand Ned Gorman shared at his Covenant event in St. Louis as well) you can count on me to perk right up.

On a similar topic, Hopeful Amphibian, who has recently bid farewell to blogging, did an Advent Jukebox, which among other things featured "All Along the Watchtower."

the grenzian: Faith in the Future

Catching up... Here's some musings inspired by a live performance of "Miracle Drug": are you an eschatological pessimist, or an eschatalogical optimist?

Speaking of live performances: thanks again to those who are nicely avoiding emailing me spoilers until after the Boston concerts next week.

Bono, Blake, and biblical utopianism

Anu at u2opian wrote recently to share a post he made about the new version of "Where the Streets Have No Name." The connection with Blake is interesting, although I don't know enough about Blake to assess how unique or significant such a connection might be. However, I like the Hobson quote a lot.

One semi-tangential thing I will comment on, because I was discussing it with a friend already.... It's bothering me a bit that people these days tend to say "Streets" is about "heaven," in the popular-piety sense of an idealized afterlife. I don't remember the song being so exclusively associated with that notion before the heavily Christian reading of it, inserting "new Jerusalem" Biblical quotes and a Eucharistic introduction, that U2 gave on the Elevation tour. I think (and here I agree, I suspect, with Anu) that to say "Streets" is about "heaven" in that very limited and popular-piety sense sells a spacious song way short. But it's a very different matter to view that song as expounding Jesus' much richer, more complex, and more paradoxical proclamation of the Kingdom of God. That has room for both what people loved about the song on the Elevation tour (the manifestation/ecstatic experience of the Kingdom now), and for what concertgoers are wrestling with about the Africa version (the not-yet demand that the Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.)

BTW, while I recommend taking a look at Anu's reading of it, speaking from my personal perspective as a believer, "Streets" is the opposite of "utopian"; it's reality therapy. Which is why I cringe to see its vision relegated to pie in the sky when you die.