I have been pointing to a kind of thinking that I have found pervasive in the U.S. over the years, from Harvard Yard to Main Street. Nothing but you-name-it matters: fill in the blank or check out my preceding essay.
Here, I want to take my cue from what was many decades ago a scandalous pop song by Madonna. Her once big hit, “Material Girl,” I now want to adopt as my own statement of faith in my own way, in opposition to the whole American Way of Life: I am a material boy.
This, to begin with, is my long-announced personal credo that appears on all my emails: “Matter matters. All the creatures of God’s good Earth matter. The poor of the Earth matter even more. And the whole cosmos matters infinitely. Everything I do in my own pilgrimage of faith and my own ecojustice activism is driven by this earthly but cosmic theological vision.”
To anyone who knows anything about the history of Christianity, of course, this kind of credo is as old as the Galilean hills. It’s predicated on the ancient vision of the God who is “the maker of heaven and earth,” that is, the Creator of “all things,” who becomes flesh and dwells among us, full of grace and truth (John 1:14). In this sense, long before that twentieth-century American pop star, Madonna, identified herself as a material girl, the whole world was given a new kind of material rebirth through the infant born to the Madonna of God, circa 4 B.C. of our common era. The God confessed by classical Christian believers is thus, in Christ, profoundly, a material God.
Come along with me now on this roller coaster of classical Christian thinking, with particular reference to the Reformer of the sixteenth century, Martin Luther – who often proclaimed that this very God who is affirmed in the materiality of Jesus of Nazareth is also present in, with, and under all things. Thus the God so precariously but so zealously proclaimed by Luther was, and is, not just a material God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, but also a material God gloriously permeating as well as transcending the whole creation!
Welcome to this great scandal of Christian believing, then. Call it Christian materialism. Never mind our modern Madonna: see now, as if for the very first time, this radically different material girl now in the Mary who gave birth to Jesus of Nazareth in Bethlehem millennia ago, in whom, I believe, the love of God for the whole material world is revealed. The eternal Word of God became matter, and dwelt among us! That’s why I’m a material boy. And this is why I believe that matter really matters.
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