An interview with David Benjamin Blower

Image credit: Jude Aytoun

We speak to David Benjamin Blower about his new book, The Messianic Commons, which publishes this month.

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Hello David. Can you describe your new book for us?

This book is an exploration of the messianic idea, which is a kind of radical religious folklore. I'm writing from the Christian tradition, but of course it's an idea that transcends religions and resonates among philosophers and radicals and such. The messianic idea asks us to imagine the world made whole, to embody that imagination into being, and to resist all that holds the world in bonds. But, crucially, it also remains somewhat obscure. There’s a humility that's necessary to sustain the messianic idea, because the Messiah is always someone else and never ourselves, and so who knows what their arrival will bring? We are obliged to compare notes with each other, toward some mystery of a liberated common life, and none of us holds the monopoly on what that is.

That sounds intriguing. What inspired you to want to write it?

I have many good and thoughtful friends doing all kinds of wonderful things: artists, theologians, novelists, business people, government honchos, chefs, foragers, activists etc. This book came out of various gatherings, moots and ongoing discussions. It's the product of dialogue and friendship and whisky round the fire. I suppose, in part, they inspired me to write it. But I’ve also been struggling to give coherent form to a kind of messianic theology that has been haunting my reading of the New Testament over the last decade. This was an attempt to give articulation to that.

In his endorsement, Jonny Baker has described your book with the phrase ‘It is a work of prophetic imagination’. Does that description resonate with you, and if so, can you unpack that a bit?

I guess Jonny's riding on Walter Brueggemann’s use of that phrase - The Prophetic Imagination - which, for him, means something like, announcing the end of royal consciousness, and energizing the imagination toward new possibilities after collapse. I suppose, to that tune, the Messianic Commons is a small funeral song for Modernity, and a sort of lucid dream toward messianic hope; to imagine the world arighted, and to faithfully embody that vision in performed anticipation of a coming Messiah.

A lot of people reading this might be somewhat familiar with the concept of a Messiah, but perhaps less so the ‘Commons’ side of it. Can you explain a little of what this means to you?

I’m an Englishman, and I think we English are always trying to remember a forgotten piece of our past. A long time ago, many here enjoyed a life lived closely on the land. We would live as communities on the commons, where we would toil and sing and dance and build homes and procreate and die together, with a measure of autonomy that came from having direct access to the land that gives life: food, shelter, fuel etc. Then about 500 years ago the commons were enclosed into private ownership. Men started working for bosses and were now paid in stacks of coins, and women who complained were burned as witches. So the commons is a distant collective memory of when we lived in the autonomy that comes of a direct relationship with land. As such, its language that calls for common life, unmanaged by rulers and systems of control. There’s more than a faint thread of political anarchy involved in this book.

How does your book relate to the concept of tradition(s)? How does this make you feel?

In the broadest sense, tradition is very precious to me. It's a thread of connection with ancestral memory, and it carries the awareness that we too, one day, will be the ancestors of future people. Religious traditions are one of the ways we story our way through the world, and even if we argue over them, this too is part of the story. In fact, many of our traditions are the products of the arguments of yesteryear. Tomorrow’s traditions will come from the arguments we’re having right now. If an argument says anything, it says that life matters and is worth getting in a fuss about.

Without giving away too much, what is one of the most intriguing thoughts, facts, concepts or other nuggets you have come across or thought about in the process of writing this book?

This book is, in part, a meander through a bric-a-brac fair of ideas and stories from the past. One discovers all kinds of things while tunnelling through books, looking for accurate references for what you thought somebody said. One discovery that rather won my heart was a Talmudic text, recorded in Abraham Cohen’s Everyman's Talmud, in which various rabbinic schools speculate about the name of the Messiah. There is an unmistakable sense of humour in the passage: each school anticipates that the Messiah’s name will be some variation on the names of their respective Rabbis. In other words, everybody expects the Messiah to arrive in the garb of their own gang.

What are your hopes for the book? Who would you like to read it?

I really do hope this book leads me to deep discussion and connection. I hope I'll make new friends in the process. I hope it'll be read by people who ask hard questions about it, because a complex ecology makes the garden grow. I hope it'll be read by artists and people who work in their communities and by people who may not have a religious disposition. To my mind, these sketches are wide open. I want to give away the religious treasures, if there are any. And I hope it'll be read by people interested in practice. I would love to connect with people who wish to do things differently.

What one thing would you love people to take away from this about your book?

What I would like to gesture towards is a theological conversation centred on common life, but without borders. Theologians have been writing book-sized letters to each other for hundreds of years and more; passing notes between members of the clique at the back of the class. This book sketches a theology that exists in open dialogue with the artist, the scientist, the community worker, the business folk, and even the tyrant who'd like to finally climb down. 

I also hope to convey a tangible sense of the autonomy of God. There's so much theological projection these days. Everybody's God sounds a lot like themselves. God becomes a collection of religious facts, an object of knowledge. People map God as though God were a land we might go and discover and populate. I don't believe in any such thing. The God who interests me has their own thoughts and I can't tell you what they are. God is an autonomous other. Who knows what God will do next? If Christianity has become a way of reassuring folks that the God situation is under control, I'll try something else. This is deep in the messianic idea. You can live toward your honestly held vision of the world made whole, but what if the Messiah arrives and surprises you with things you hadn't thought of? Frankly I'd be far more surprised to find everything pans out just as I had expected. 

Thank you very much for speaking to us, David.

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The Messianic Commons is available to pre-order now via our website.

David Benjamin Blower is a theologian, poet, podcaster and musician.