"Church and Postmodern Culture" Series author, John D. Caputo, will give the two keynote addresses to this year's Wesleyan Philosophical Society meeting at Anderson University in Anderson, IN, March 5, 2009. There will also be a panel discussing Caputo's work. And as you'll see from the schedule, there are a number of papers that will be of interest to churchandpomo readers.
January 27, 2009
January 20, 2009
Seminar on the Emerging Church at Calvin College: Thurs., Jan. 29
As part of its annual Symposium on Worship, the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship will be hosting a one-day symposium on the emerging church, featuring speakers Jason Clark, Pete Rollins, and Kevin Corcoran. Here's further info:
Exploring the Emerging Church: Theology, Culture, Ritual, and Meaning
Jason Clark, Kevin Corcoran, Peter Rollins; with respondents James K.A. Smith, Lori Wilson, Michael Wittmer; hosted by Nathan Bierma
Calvin Symposium on Worship
Grand Rapids, Mich.
January 29, 2009
Three scholars will present drafts of their work that will result in a book and DVD analyzing and documenting the emergent church movement in the US and the UK. Three respondents will raise questions of importance to the broader Christian community, especially questions of worship and evangelism. As the day progresses, we anticipate discussions of a cluster of significant themes in emerging church life—from consumerism, conversion, hermeneutics, to ecclesiology, eschatology, deconstruction, and postmodernism—that promise to challenge all participants to deepen their own framework for ministry. Participants can review the three authors' chapters ahead of time to prepare for this day of presentations, video segments, responses, and Q&A. Come to contribute to the conversation.
On the website you'll also find a detailed schedule. This seminar grows out of a book being pulled together by Kevin Corcoran. You can find drafts of the chapters (including chapters by Scot McKnight) here.
During the Worship Symposium itself (Jan. 30-Feb. 1), there are a couple of other sessions of related interest: Clark, Rollins, and Corcoran will stage a reprise of this discussion, and I'll be leading a little workshop on "Postmodernism, Worship, and Evangelism."
Almost enough to entice one to the cold of West Michigan winter!
January 19, 2009
Cornel West @ Calvin College--and CFP
Calvin College's Festival of Faith & Music will be hosting Cornel West as one of its plenary speakers, April 2-4, 2009. And this year there's also a Call for Papers for those who would like to present analyses at the intersection of faith and culture, particularly music. Here's the complete information:
Call for Papers
Festival of Faith and Music, April 2-4, 2009
Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI
Keynote Speakers: Cornel West, Makoto Fujimura, Andy Crouch
Confirmed headline artists: The Hold Steady, Lupe Fiasco, Over the Rhine
The Festival of Faith & Music is a biennial conference that brings together musicians, journalists, academics, students and lovers of music and popular culture to discuss diverse forms of popular music and issues of faith. We are interested in discovering and celebrating popular music that can be understood as rooted in conviction and/or engaged with themes of faith broadly conceived, including justice, truth, hope, epiphany, transcendence, and redemption, and in hearing or interpreting popular music from faith perspectives. Calvin College is a Christian liberal arts college which seeks to study and engage popular culture. Our festival is not primarily concerned with the Christian music industry or limited to discussing only those artists who publicly embrace a specific religion. Rather, we hope to facilitate a broader conversation about all forms of popular music and our response to it as people of faith.
Past Festivals have featured artists Emmylou Harris, Sufjan Stevens, Neko Case, and David Bazan. For this year's festival, we have invited The Hold Steady, Vic Chesnutt, Over the Rhine, and T-Bone Burtnett, and we anticipate the inclusion of many other artists. Our list of confirmed speakers includes Cornel West, Makoto Fujimura, Jessica Hopper, Terry Mattingly, Cathleen Falsani, and Andy Crouch.
We are seeking proposals for 20 minute (2,000-2,500 word) papers that address issues of faith in popular music and its various social and cultural contexts. We are particularly interested in papers related to our artists and speakers. Updates on confirmed artists and speakers can be found on the Festival website.
Please email a 300-word abstract (attached in Word format) to Drs. Benita Wolters-Fredlund and Mary McCampbell at ffmcfp[at]gmail[dot]com. Queries are also welcome.
Submission deadline: January 20, 2009
Christ, History and Apocalyptic: A Symposium, part 2
Today's engagement with Nathan Kerr's Christ, History and Apocalyptic focuses on chapter 2 entitled "Ernst Troeltsch: The Triumph of Ideology and the Eclipse of Apocalyptic." [Part 1 here.] Interacting with this chapter is David Congdon, a PhD Student in Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, and author of the blog The Fire and the Rose.
I am honored to have been asked to comment on the second chapter of Nate Kerr's book on Christ, History and Apocalyptic.
I have learned much from this book, in part because it argues for a
position that is largely my own already-and it does so in a way that is
winsome, learned, and replete with moments of brilliance. Nate's
creative work is constructed, on one level, around "the eclipse,
re-emergence, failure, and promise of Christian apocalyptic." The
second chapter on Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) examines the first
"critical moment" in this genealogy: the eclipse of apocalyptic. What
I will do here is briefly summarize Nate's argument in this chapter and
then conclude with some reflective comments and questions regarding the
work as a whole.
One of the key figures in the sociology of religion, Troeltsch is a German Protestant theologian who stands in the tradition of Schleiermacher and Ritschl. Trained within modern theological liberalism, Troeltsch takes the historical-critical method as his starting-point, which, as he says, "relativizes everything . . . in the sense that every historical structure and moment can be understood only in relation to others and ultimately to the total context, and that standards of values cannot be derived from isolated events but only from an overview of the historical totality." This is the key historicist point from which the rest follows: particular contingent events are all relativized by the historical method and find their significance not in themselves but rather in their "historical totality," in their teleological indication of universal, unconditional, and absolute reason. Troeltsch's own project is a radicalizing of this historicist foundation for the purposes of establishing a Christian social ethics.
As Nate emphasizes from the start, Troeltsch's project is nothing less than a "new metaphysics of history," by which he means "a new conception of the relation of the relative to the absolute, of the particular to the universal." Without rehearsing all the details here, I will note the key aspects of Troeltsch's vision as they set the stage for Nate's counter-proposal. First, since everything in history is contingent and relative, the realm of the universal and absolute "lies beyond history," though in a certain relationship with contingent particularity. Second, Troeltsch's radical historicism resolves this tension between the relative and the absolute by understanding the absolute as the telos of intrahistorical development. The absolute arises out of the progress of history. Third, Troeltsch's historicist metaphysics results in "an ethic of 'mastery' and 'control,'" in that human beings are now responsible for constructing the eschatological future through their sociopolitical action in the present. Fourth, on the basis of a subjective-individual "religious a priori," Troeltsch conceives of the participation of the human in the absolute in terms of a spiritual absorption into the divine life.
While Nate seeks to retain Troeltsch's emphasis on historical contingency, he rejects the nature/spirit dualism that results in an ethics of mastery for the sake of constructing an ideal historical future. According to Nate, Troeltsch's metaphysics is intrinsically "Constantinian," in the sense defined by John Howard Yoder. Christian ethics takes the form of political compromise with the established order for the purpose of mastering history. Christian mission, likewise, is a compromise with the present social structures for the purpose of establishing human unity by means of the universalization of the Christian religion within history. Since true religion falls on the "spirit" side of Troeltsch's dichotomy, the gospel is fundamentally "apolitical" in nature. And it is precisely this separation between spirit and nature which allows Troeltsch to advocate the mastery of history (nature) by means of sociopolitical compromise for the sake of realizing the absolute-eschatological unity of humanity with the divine (spirit).
It's not hard to see what the consequences of this vision are. If the gospel has no sociopolitical implications, and if compromise with current sociopolitical structures is a necessary part of Christian mission, then we find in Troeltsch a justification for the German Christian alliance with Nazism. In short, Troeltsch's vision of Christianity is "religion in the service of ideology."
Nate contrasts Troeltsch with the messianic vision of Walter Benjamin, whose "Theses on the Philosophy of History" offer an anti-historicist, and thus anti-ideological, conception of human existence. Against Troeltsch's idealistic historicism, Nate proposes an "apocalyptic historicism." With Troeltsch, Nate maintains the emphasis on historical particularities, but instead of viewing them as natural "givens" that are to be mastered and controlled, Nate's apocalyptic christology means that contingencies are "transformed by a decisive, singularly irruptive act of the transcendent God."
On all of these points, I find myself in basic agreement with Nate. The section on Benjamin is a highlight of this chapter, and I've made use of it in my own work. My differences with Nate's book come in the following chapter on Barth, where he criticizes Barth for abstracting from contingent historical reality by interpreting the historical existence of Jesus as the temporal manifestation of an ontological reality already actualized in eternity. My own interpretation of Barth-influenced by Rudolf Bultmann, Eberhard Jüngel, Bruce McCormack, and Robert Jenson-views the eternal reality of God as ontologically actualized in the historical. The history of Jesus Christ is not the temporal recapitulation of an eternal history; rather, the history of Jesus Christ is the historicization of God. A fuller response to Nate on this point will have to wait for a future engagement. For now, I think it's appropriate to close with a quote from Barth in which he refers to Troeltsch as a key moment in his rejection of liberalism:
Troeltsch was a gifted and, in his own way, a pious man. . . . But it was obvious that with him the doctrine of faith was on the point of dissolution into endless and useless talk, and that for all the high self-consciousness of its conduct Neo-Protestantism in general had been betrayed on to the rocks, or the quicksands. It was because we could no longer take part in this that about the end of the second decade of this century we left the ship. For some it was to Catholicism . . . . For others it meant a fresh beginning of serious theological study on a quite different basis. (Church Dogmatics IV/1, 386-87)
Clearly, Nate Kerr has followed in Barth's footsteps. For Nate, as with Barth, Troeltsch forms the basis for "a fresh beginning of serious theological study on a quite different basis." The result is a creative, first-rate work of theology.
David W. Congdon
PhD Student in Systematic Theology
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, NJ
January 16, 2009
Schedule for Symposium on Christ, History and Apocalyptic
Here is the full schedule of the remaining engagements with Nathan R. Kerr's Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission:
- 12 January - Chapter 1: "Introduction", response by Joshua Davis (already posted, with a fantastic discussion already under way)
- 19 January - Chapter 2: "Ernst Troeltsch: The Triumph of Ideology and the Eclipse of Apocalyptic", response by David Congdon
- 26 January - Chapter 3: "Karl Barth: Foundations for an Apocalyptic Christology", response by John McDowell
- 2 February - Chapter 4: "Stanley Hauerwas: Apocalyptic, Narrative Ecclesiology, and 'the Limits of Anti-Constantinianism' ", response by John W. Wright
- 9 February - Chapter 5: "John Howard Yoder: The Singularity of Jesus and the Apocalypticization of History", response by Douglas Harink
- 16 February - Chapter 6: "Towards an Apocalyptic Politics of Mission", response by James K. A. Smith
- 23 February - Concluding response by Nathan R. Kerr
January 12, 2009
Christ, History and Apocalyptic: A Symposium, part 1
Today begins the first post in a series of engagements around Nathan R. Kerr's Christ, History, and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission. Nate's book has recently been released simultaneously in the United States through Cascade Books in their Theolopolitical Visions series (Amazon.com link), and in the United Kingdom by SCM Press in the Centre of Theology and Philosophy's Veritas series (Amazon.co.uk link). (I should add that Cascade Books is still offering a 40% off discount if purchased through their site using the discount code "KERR40", bringing the cost of the book down significantly more.)
As is common, each post will be accompanied by an image of the book cover. However, due to the simultaneous printing of this book on two presses, there are two covers of the book, so I will be using them interchangably. The cover below is from the Cascade Books version, and the next post will be from the SCM Press version (which I actually designed with the photographic vision of Sara Cunningham-Bell, which is why I couldn't resist mentioning this!).
The first post comes from Joshua Davis who is a Ph.D. candidate at Vanderbilt University. Josh addresses the introductory chapter 1 as well as the conceptual trajectory of the work. I had the pleasure of meeting both Nate and Josh in Nashville, Tennessee last May while I was in town for a business trip for my (now) former employer, and we couldn't help but talk theology and philosophy the whole time.
Please feel free to add your own thoughts and comments below, especially if you have already read Christ, History and Apocalyptic, and if you have not done so, it's not too late to catch up.
It is an honor to have the opportunity to introduce this public discussion of Nate Kerr's fascinating study, Christ, History, and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission. It is an honor because I anticipate that the publication of this work will mark the emergence of a fresh theological perspective that is as important as it is distinct. Yet, even this is a relatively minor concern for me because, in the six years I have known him, Nate has become not only an important colleague and interlocutor, but also my friend. And, as such, I do not know this work as one more book of ideas, but as something of an angel with whom I have seen him wrestle, an encounter in whose wake I know him now to limp.
I mention this only because it seems to me his work may not be read for the kind of theological reflection it is - that is, per Evagrius' dictum, one that seeks to open out onto that true prayer that is the praise of the Father. There is a risk, it seems to me, that this work may be interpreted as one more instance of "Barthian" hyperbole and polemic, as repeating an outmoded "modernist" and "punctualist" understanding of the nature/grace relation, as propounding a "Docetic" ecclesial vision, or as a retreat into a fideistic mythological cosmology. I am not unsympathetic to such concerns; Nate's theological sensibilities are, generally speaking, the precise obverse of my own. But, such claims, I charge, obscure the real challenge Nate's argument poses. What can it mean to argue that certain critical and somewhat characteristic moves made by Barth, Hauerwas, as well as the most "community"-oriented aspects of Yoder, repeat a Hegelian gesture, inherited from Troeltsch, that is not only woefully inadequate in its rejection of mission and apocalyptic as essential aspects of the Christian witness, but is, consequently, irreducibly ideological and - what is perhaps worse for the Hauerwasian - Constantianian? I will leave this question for the readers and respondents to consider as this discussion proceeds. By raising it, I do not mean to suggest it is the only or even the most important question the book poses, but that it is one that must be put into relief at the beginning of any discussion of the work, if that discussion is not to repeat the very positions it seeks to put in the dock.
I have elected so far to speak very generally about the force of this work. Yet I believe it is also important, as a way of introducing this discussion, to underscore the simplicity of its claim. Nate names it quite clearly in the opening sentence of the introduction. What he seeks, throughout the book to investigate, is "what mode of thinking about history and the historical character of human action renders the 'truth' of the earliest and most straightforward Christian confession, that of Jesus Christ's 'lordship' - kurios Iesous - for our world today?" The subject of the book, then, is Jesus' lordship - what it means to affirm it in history, in practice, and, most importantly, in the present. This is what Nate's language of "singularity" is meant to highlight: the nature, uniqueness, and finality enshrined in the claim "Jesus is Lord."
Additionally, I should note that the most important, indeed the most illuminating and revolutionary, aspect of Nate's development of this theme occurs in his wholesale rejection of Boethius' development of Plato's understanding of time (i.e., history) as "the moving image of eternity." This is a theme too rich and complex to take up here, and is best left to Nate to develop in his response to others. I would urge the readers and respondents, though, to pay close attention to this theme, for it is of a piece with his overarching apocalyptic orientation and essential to his rejection of Hegel. In this theme, we begin to catch a glimpse of the truly original and transformative insight that animates this work. J. Louis Martyn has developed this theme in detail, though in quite different terms, throughout his body of work. It is the truth regarding Jesus that Paul insists God "apocalypsed" in him (Gal. 1:15-16), the good news that sent (apostelo) him to the Gentiles: the news that in the cross and resurrection of Jesus, God has triumphed over every power and principality, and sends us now into the world to inhabit history in such a way as to render it transparent to the Kingdom, which is our share in God's life.
Joshua Davis
Ph.D. Candidate, Theological Studies
Vanderbilt University
Nancey Murphy on "Anglo-American Postmodernity" at Calvin College
Nancey Murphy, Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Seminary, will be giving the 2009 Jellema Lecturers for the Philosophy Department at Calvin College, April 6 & 7, 2009. ChurchandPomo readers in the midwest might be interested to hear her first lecture, on April 6, "Anglo-American Postmodernity--Really?" I expect this lecture will build on her earlier, important contributions to the discussion in books such as Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda and Anglo-American Postmodernity: Philosophical Perspectives on Science, Religion, and Ethics.
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