Report Back: Gathering Around the Unhewn Stone



Ched MyersEnergizing. Transforming. Eye-opening. Disrupting. Like most symbols, these words don’t begin to capture the experience I had at the Gathering Around the Unhewn Stone conference over the weekend. Simply put Ched Myers gives one of the most devastating critiques of civilization and he digs deep into the Christian story to do it. His presentations were a crash course in advanced Bible study but his theology and exegesis were as clear as they were challenging. Ched covered an immense amount of terrain in each presentation so there is simply no way to recount all the material in a way that would do them justice. That said, I hope highlighting a tiny portion of his ideas will give a small glimpse into his work. Below are a few of the points Ched raised:

  • Historically societies that domesticate land and nonhuman animals inevitably domesticate nearby communities and individuals to work on the land and care for the animals. Therefore, civilization begins with domestication and moves through agricultural states to cities to kingdoms/empires.
  • The dominant narrative of civilization is a drama of progress in which strong societies are eclipsed by stronger empires and “pre-historic” communities must either submit or be destroyed.
  • Civilization legitimates its dispossession and oppression of the “uncivilized” through symbols, rituals, myth-making, storytelling and images that support its totalizing narrative. For this reason, resisting civilization depends in part on being grounded in an alternative story like those in the Hebrew Bible, the gospels and the epistles.
  • Written during the late Bronze Age, the creation story in Genesis 1 represents a symbiotic, non-hierarchical, undomesticated existence before civilization in which the spiritual, natural, human and nonhuman animal realms are intertwined and holistic. In contrast, the fall represents the people of Israel’s attempt to understand and articulate the origin of the oppression and violence that brought them and other tribal peoples to the brink of extinction at the hands of Ancient Near East civilizations.
  • The tower of Babel story of Genesis 11 is a particular critique of Mesopotamian ziggurats–pyramidal dwelling places for the gods that were believed to connect heaven and earth–and can be read as one of many instances of the people of God rejecting the city structures of nearby civilizations.
  • The Bible is filled with stories of God’s people being called into the wilderness. From Abram and Sarai being called out of Mesopotamia to “go feral” to Moses and the people of Israel leaving the oppression of the city for an exodus into the wild to John the baptist being a voice that cried out in the wilderness to Jesus being driven into the wilderness after his baptism and emerging out of the wilderness to start his ministry.

This reading of the Hebrew text and life of Jesus opens up an entirely new way of interpreting the Bible, understanding Christian faith and seeing the “civilized” context in which the globe is consumed. Working with Ched through texts like Genesis 1-11; Exodus 20:24; Job 5:22; Numbers 11:32-34; Jeremiah 9:10; Mark 1:9-12 and Romans 8:19-21 to name a few was pivotal for seeing this new perspective.

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