Reality Reconsidered

Amin Aminfar

There is no phrase more semantically empty than “the real world.” And this is something of a surprise, given the way that the phrase looms in the consciousness of young people, or at least has been invoked over that consciousness as a kind of boogeyman, sent to scare students onto the path of hard-nosed pragmatism about their lives. For it is to students that the phrase is spoken, used to draw a contrast between their lives as students and their lives after being students which, because these lives at least notionally involve mortgages, taxes, and the like, have this quality of concreteness that qualifies them for membership in “the real world.”

My distrust of the phrase began when I first told my friends that I would be spending a year at Osprey Point, a time that would be devoted to discerning my calling and learning to live in Christian community. It was quite clear to my friends that such an experience was not the real world. As a result, the experience was consigned to a certain abstractedness, perhaps rewarding, but not something that would be able to extrude beyond the discrete time spent in the place itself. Once one enters the real world, apparently, the airy considerations of Christian community—or the kind of idealism that corresponds to a “protected” learning experience—must give way to harsher truths of driving to work and paying the bills.

The explanatory power of this contrast between the real world of significant responsibilities and the unreal world of responsible learning should not be doubted. The way in which the life outside of the environs of University or intentional Christian community makes totalizing demands on the time and mind of a person living in it is hardly subject to debate. But that seems to hardly justify giving those demands the credit of being uniquely “real.” To give them this credit, this kind of ontological superiority, is not to prefer realism to idealism, as is often claimed. It is instead to prefer one kind of idealism to others and to mask that choice behind false claims of necessity. The idealism chosen by advocates of the real world is, of course, the idealism of the status quo. It is the belief that what we see is what has to be.

What can be marshaled against an enemy that appears so implacable and so unavoidable? Imagination and the concrete habits of community. Both of these are admittedly fragile, capable of being overrun by the imperial demands of the world that others label real for us. But they are nevertheless the engines of possibility, the means by which hope in another world and another kind of life in that world may be realized. Imagination is the ability to see this other life and this other world, and community is the willingness for a group of people to live as if the imaginative vision were true, creating by virtue of their togetherness a genuinely alternative world. The empire of force that is the “real world” is always working against both of these—seeking to bind our imagination and the character of our lives together to only the possibilities it presents to us. But what can present other possibilities? How do we see beyond the world that presents itself to us as real?

Here we are brought back, as we always must be, to the gospel. It is first of all a matter of gospel truth that we ought to be suspicious of what the world tells us is possible. Jesus Christ came for the redemption of the world and will come again in glory to complete that redemption. This declaration requires a world in need of redemption and therefore a world that is incapable of having the courage of its convictions. For such an imperfect world can only give the provisional and temporary though it claims the authority of finality. The gospel therefore emphatically declares that what we see is not what has to be, and what’s more, is not what will be.

But the gospel does more than warn us. It gives us precisely the life imagined beyond the regnant rules of the world and the community that embodies the truth in that life. The tendrils of the real world are without strength in light of the life of Christ and the life of the church. In Jesus Christ we have the presence of genuine reality, both with us and above us. Our imagination is baptized because now Christ and Christ alone tells us what is necessary. And we are told that we are free.

The world, at the feet of Christ, is subject in all of its goods to that free imagination. And the real world is restrained from taking our imagination captive by dint of its enormity and pressure, for our freedom in Christ is a matter of habitual practice in the church, against which even the gates of hell cannot prevail. The expectations of the world can only be brought to our door—it for us to faithfully decide what comes in. This is our freedom, the freedom we only know is possible because we were visited by that which the world could not contain.

So it may be true that life in our particular Christian community is sheltered—and in a way that others find inimical, or at least unhelpful, to life in the real, outside world. But this is no critique. The University operates under an intuition that some way of distinguishing itself from the world is necessary to teaching, though the outside nevertheless exerts a greater and greater pressure to define what a University is good for. The Christian community, in contrast, operates under a mandate. Our shelteredness cannot be a matter of shame but is instead how we repudiate the authority of the world. And it is in this repudiation that “the real world” is shown to be empty. Its best hope is to exist as a shadow of the real, no more than the actor that has been given a moment and place to take on the figure of someone else. We confuse the actor for the real at our own peril.

Amin Aminfar (’03) recently graduated from the Duke Divinity School and School of Law. He is spending this year clerking on the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

0 Responses • Alumni, Tue 24 Jul 2007