the church and postmodern culture: conversation

Searle (Still) on Derrida (Seriously?)

Why is it that so many otherwise sober, careful philosophers seem to kiss their brains goodbye when it comes to Jacques Derrida? 

Well, I can partly understand this.  If you've cut your teeth reading Frege and Russell, then grew your hair out reading Quine, and then watched your hair fall out while reading Davidson and Tarski, then I'll concede that brief forays into the sprawling, experimental corpus of Jacques Derrida will feel like a psychadelic kaleidoscope in the lexical family of Jabberwocky.  In other words, I can see how, in a way, Derrida kind of asked for it.

But on the other hand, is it really asking so much for them to carefully read a few of Derrida's own rather "sober" texts?  (I'm not asking Alvin Plantinga to give me a charitable reading of Glas.  I'm asking philosophers of language to slow down and actually attend to Derrida's argument.)  Or, at least, could they refrain from making ridiculously mistaken claims about them--and, in particular, refrain from repeating them 25 years later!?

John Searle has made a regular habit of this.  The latest installment can be found in Searle's recent review in the New York Review of Books.  The claim comes as an aside in his critique of "social constructivism." Teaming up with the book under review, the burden of Searle's article is to preserve the objectivity of facts against the claims of social constructivists who think even the "facts" are "constructed."  Searle thinks there are bad arguments for this (from Putnam and Rorty), and then there are "truly dreadful arguments" from "authors" such as Jacques Derrida (don't miss that slight).  The latter don't even deserve refutation, Searle claims; they're a lost cause.  We'll never be able to convince such slippery ideologues that reality is "objective," that facts are "out there." 

But does anyone else find it ironic, then, when Searle can make a claim like this about Derrida's texts?

"He argues, for example, that there is no tenable distinction between writing and speech."

I'll grant that matters are complicated here (as I've tried to explain elsewhere).  Certainly the burden of Derrida's early work is to contest traditional, naive ways of distinguishing "writing" and "speech" (e.g., that speech is somehow "immediate" while writing is characterized by "mediation").  But that is not the same as trying to show that "there is no tenable distinction" between the two (as in the laughable interpretation of Derrida which thinks he's claiming that people wrote with utensils before they learned to talk!).  And nowhere in Derrida's corpus does he try to simply obliterate "any" distinction between the two.  Those are the facts of the matter.  Only a selective constructivist like Searle could tell himself otherwise.

Caputo on Milbank and Zizek

"Church and Postmodern Culture" author John Caputo has provided an extensive review of The Monstrosity of Christ for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  The long, generous review essay ultimately (and not surprisingly) ends with questions like the following:

As I do not think that matter is ultimately the matter at issue for Milbank, or that Christ is the issue for Žižek, I am also overwhelmed by a compelling sense of how uncompelling is either view. What exactly is the compelling need we are under to agree with either one of these positions or to choose between them? Why do we have to love either one of these monsters? Why do we need the notion that at the metaphysical base of things there lies either a primordial peace or a primordial violence -- or a primordial anything, at least one that we could ever get our hands on? Why do the multiple repetitions of which our lives are woven need to be cast either as a downbeat and futile search that will be always frustrated or as underwritten by an uplifting metaphysics of participation? Why inscribe either absolute contradiction or absolute peace at the heart of things instead of ambience and ambiguity? Why chaos instead of the unsteady chaosmotic process of unprogrammed becoming? Why not see life as a joyful but risky business that may turn out well or badly, a repetition forwards in which I produce what I am repeating, in which I invent what I am discovering, but in which I am divested of any assurances about what lies up ahead -- let alone deep down at the metaphysical base of things? Žižek's notion of the contingency of necessity is close to this insight, but he insists on treating the Deep Trauma like some Metaphysical Meteor that cratered downtown Ljubljana. Is this not just the search for a transcendental signifier all over again? Why do we have to believe that something deep is out there but alas it is lost and we are hopelessly searching for it? That is repetition as reproduction. Why not rather say that by searching for it, it is there, produced by the repetition? The repetition is generative, engendering, positing something not merely as a dream but by the dream, the active dreaming of the dream, the dreaming up, which gathers momentum as we dream, repeat, desire, pray and weep, over the coming of something whose coming we are engendering, or is being engendered, as the very structure of desire. Dreaming is the pharmakon, a risky supplement, a joy that flows through our veins that is liable to poison us if we are not careful. Nothing is lost from which we have been traumatically cut off. This is just desire desiring, what desire does, how it works, its happy work, and if desire is a fault, it is a happy fault.

Why not adopt the post-metaphysical idea that gives up searching for all such primordial underlying somethings or other?

I'm not convinced that metaphysics and Jesus are as antithetical as Caputo goes on to suggest, nor am I sure that theology is as marginal and distrusted as he claims in his conclusion.  (Impressions here no doubt depend on the circles in which one runs; but I think it would be hard to be a regular reader of the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, or even the New York Times and suggest that theology is some quaint backwater pursuit.  I'd think if we sampled those pages 30 years ago, that claim would have been more true.)  But in any case, despite quibbles, Caputo's review repays a read. 

And we could wish that more scholars of Caputo's stature would take the time to review the work of their peers.  As I've noted elsewhere, I think book reviews are a crucial aspect of scholarly discourse and we abandon such labor at our parallel.  Unfortunately, the culture of scholarly reviewing seems to leave this important work to graduate students and emerging scholars, for whom a published review is a kind of early, "mini-publication" for a CV.  As scholars become established, they don't "have" to do such work any more.  But a different sort of "ought" suggests they should.  I'm grateful for Jack taking the time to do such work.  May his tribe increase.

Read the rest of Caputo's review at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Speculative Grace: The Frustration of Desire

More speculating this week on how tightly a proper understanding of grace is or ought to be tied to a theistic conception of God.

1. It is commonplace to associate our need for grace with the problem of desire. This, I think, is entirely correct. We won't properly understand the one without the other.

2. However, it is also commonplace to frame our need for grace in terms of a tension between the frustration of our desires and the fulfillment of our desires. Here, the problem is understood to be the ways in which the fulfillment of our desires is perpetually frustrated. Often, we're unable to get what we want. And - even worse! - we discover that when we're lucky enough to get exactly what we want, it still didn't lead to the satisfaction of desire. Not only is not getting what we want frustrating, getting what we want is also deeply frustrating!

3. When the human problem is understood to be the frustration of desire, then grace is understood as an answer to the problem of desire because it offers us access to the one object that can in fact permanently and completely fulfill our desires: God.

4. God, as ontological Alpha and Omega, as theistic exception to the way in which everything else exists, can permanently and completely satisfy desire. God's grace solves the problem of desire by ending it. What role do the classically theistic characteristics of God (omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, etc.) play in this version of the drama? They play the crucial role of guaranteeing that something can permanently and completely satisfy desire.

5. The typical grace/works debate unfolds within this framework. To be saved, desire must be fulfilled. The only question, then, is how to acquire the fulfillment of that desire. Is satisfaction given as a free gift (i.e., as a grace) or must we work our fingers to the bone to acquire it? When framed in relation to the issue of fulfillment, the grace/works debate is a deadend.

6. I would submit that this version of the problem and solution may not be very good gospel.

7. Rather, I would propose that our need for grace is related to the problem of desire in an entirely different way. Grace has neither to do with the fulfillment of desire nor the frustration of desire. Grace has to do with our wrongly relating to desire in terms of its fulfillment/frustration.

8. Sin: wrongly relating to desire in terms of its fulfillment/frustration. 

9. In these terms, grace should be understood as working orthogonally in relation to the fulfillment/frustration of desire.

10. How does grace save us in relation to the problem of desire? Rather than giving us access to an object of uber-satisfaction, grace is what gives us desire itself. To be saved is to receive the perpetuation of desire itself as being the grace that saves us from the problem of frustration/fulfillment.

11. Rather than refusing the grace of desire, salvation unfolds when we accept the perpetuation of desire and the work that this perpetuation entails. 

12. What is the grace that saves? Receiving the gift of endless work that the perpetuation of desire bestows. Here, grace/works produce no aporia.

13. But shouldn't I try to eat, protect my family, succeed in my business, etc.? Yes, but not as a way of permanently and completely satisfying your desires! Rather, pursue those desires as a way of receiving and sanctifying them as such!

Racial Reconciliation in the Flesh of Jesus: Part I

The gospel is a partial gospel in so far as it is characterized by evangelism and personal piety alone.  In terms of Race, this half-gospel has played a role in the indifference of some Christians toward the issue of racism.  Peter Goodwin Heltzel writes,

Sin was seen primarily as an individual state of immorality, taking precedence over social disorder.  Racism was viewed as a problem of the human heart and human relationships, not an institutional social sin.  The church was seen as a community or regenerate individuals called to social witness but without a clear theology of public engagement to direct them (Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race, and American Politics, 87).

Racism is not merely a matter of personal acquaintance; it is a matter of social institutions--both their structures and practices.  Unfortunately, many religious institutions are structured around normative whiteness (even normative masculine whiteness).  A familiar example of this problem is shown in the admission policies of Bob Jones University, which denied admission to African Americans from its founding in 1926 until 1971.  BJU banned interracial dating, which continues to play out under the rublic of normative whiteness.  And what effect does this have on non-white students at the university?

While most Christians think such practices are wrong, few continue to speak out against institutional racism.  In fact, when the IRS tried to refuse BJU of its tax-exempt status, many Christians (conservative, moderate, evangelical) defended the rights of BJU against governmental interference.  What lies behind the surface issue of church/state relations is the fact that BJU operated under distrust and fear of non-whites.  It reinforced white racism and shared the support of many Christians.

The whole gospel involves both the personal and the public.  The Christian life is (or should be) one marked by a concern for social justice.  We are commanded to further the case of justice and defend the dignity of human persons.  We are not asked to defend any particular institution, even a religious one.  By defending BJU, Christians chose to defend the "rights" of an institution rather than protect the dignity of individuals--those oppressed persons who were denied access.

Heltzel suggests that the "Jewish flesh of Jesus" is the cite at which reconciliation can occur.  "[Dr. Martin Luther] King's Christology," according to Heltzel, "emphasizes Jesus as a redemptive sufferer who suffers with the oppressed and as a prophet who challenges sin both in the human heart and in social structure" (63).  Jesus' "dark" human flesh, with its brokenness, scars, and blood, suffers and, at the same time, unites the oppressor with the oppressed.  Those who are oppressed can draw on their relationship to the suffering of Jesus.  The oppressors become humbled and see themselves in his flesh, which is both condemned and redeemed.

St. Thomas Summer Seminars in Philosophy of Religion & Philosophical Theology

The 2010 St. Thomas Summer Seminar in Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 

Recent PhDs and current graduate students are invited to apply to participate in the 2010 St. Thomas Summer Seminar in Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology, a three-week long seminar organized by Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers) and Michael Rota (University of St. Thomas). The seminar will be held at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, Minnesota, from June 15th to July 2nd, 2010.  

http://www.stthomas.edu/philosophy/templeton/project.html 

Topics and speakers: 

The epistemology of religious belief: Alvin Plantinga (Notre Dame) and Richard Feldman (Rochester) 

Science and religion: Alvin Plantinga and Elliott Sober (UW-Madison) 

The cosmological argument: Alexander Pruss (Baylor) and Peter van Inwagen (Notre Dame) 

The problem of evil: Peter van Inwagen and Evan Fales (University of Iowa) 

The epistemology of disagreement: Roger White (M.I.T.) and Thomas Kelly (Princeton)  

Reductionism and the philosophy of biology: Alan Love (University of Minnesota) 

Writing for audiences outside the academy: Peter Kreeft (Boston College) 

Participants will receive a stipend of $2800, as well as room and board. The deadline for receipt of applications is December 1, 2009. 

For more information, including information on how to apply, go to 

http://www.stthomas.edu/philosophy/templeton/project.html 

This seminar program is funded by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation. 

Speculative Grace: Saint Paul

This week, some more speculating. This time about Saint Paul.

Is Paul's conception of grace amenable to a non-theistic port? Though some things will likely be lost along the way, might such a port clarify anything about Paul's own (theistic) conception of grace?

I. Grace, then Sin

For the sake of simplicity, let's focus especially on chapters 1-3 of Paul's epistle to the Romans. As I've argued in detail in the first chapter of Badiou, Marion, and St Paul: Immanent Grace (Continuum, 2008), I think that the key to reading the epistle is the following thesis:

Grace is not a response to sin; rather, sin is a response to grace.

In other words, I take Paul's position to be that grace (always already given, always already immanent) is both logically and temporally prior to sin. Sin is derivative of grace. Grace is not an ad hoc, stop-gap, supplemental band-aid for sin.

Or, again: grace is not a means to some other end (e.g., salvation), grace is salvation. Grace is both the beginning and the end of everything that matters.

For my part, I think that Romans 1-3 prompts us to think that there are good theological (and, even, theistic) reasons for resisting the traditional bifurcation of grace into natural grace (the universally available grace manifest in our having been created, our being sustained in creation, etc.) and supernatural grace (a narrowly granted supplementary grace needed to overcome the gap created by our sinfulness).

To port grace into a nontheistic context, we would have to let go of this distinction, flatten the difference between natural and supernatural grace, and view the latter not as something supplementary but as a re-manifestation of an immanent grace that has always already been given.

II. On Sin as "Suppression"

Paul's description of the essence of sin in Romans 1 is especially helpful. 

In this chapter, Paul describes sin as being a suppression of God's grace. The following verses are of particular importance:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. 

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. 

So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. 

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exhanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. 

(NRSV, Romans 1:18-24, emphasis mine)

Leaving much of interest aside, I'll only comment on a few key points. Here, Paul describes wickedness as a suppression of the truth. What truth is in question? A truth that has been manifest from the start: our createdness, our lack of ontological independence or self-sufficiency. In our visible createdness, in our obvious insufficiency, God's invisible grace is manifest. But we despised the insufficiency that this grace made plain, and so we suppressed it and this suppression degraded and disoriented us.

Finding ourselves utterly dependent on God's grace, finite, and incapable of self-satisfaction, we are ashamed (cf. 1:16-17). Out of shame we suppress the truth of our dependence on grace and refuse to acknowledge God as God. Sin is the attempt to fabricate an independence or autonomy that we lack.

In this sense, sin is a direct response to grace. Sin is fundamentally motivated by an unwillingness to accept that we need the grace that we already are. Sin is an active suppression of this need or dependence. Sin is only possible because grace is already given.

III. Displaying Grace

To be saved is to stop suppressing this truth about ourselves and receive, instead, what is actually given as the gift that it is. 

In light of this account of sin, I think that Paul's description in Romans 3 of how Christ's atonement works is very instruction. What follows is my own translation of the crucial verses. God's grace comes

through the deliverance that is in Christ Jesus, whom God publicly displayed [proetheto] as a propitiation by his blood, through faith. He did this to display [eis endeixin] his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; he did it to display [endeixin] in the present, pregnant moment [nun kairoi] his righteousness, and that he is upright [dikaion] and righteousifies [dikaiounta] the one who has faith in Jesus. (3:24-26)

In short, Paul's model of the atonement works like this: Jesus' sacrifice saves because it definitively displays the already given grace that we have (sinfully) been attempting to suppress. God's willingness to sacrifice his own Son displays the gracious unconditionality of his commitment to us (i.e., it displays his "righteousness"): there is nothing he will withhold from us. And, in doing this, God restores the present moment as the locus of givenness and grace.

For lack of a better term, I'll refer to this as a "display" theory of atonement. On this model, the atonement does not accomplish some righteousness previously lacking or supplement the world with a supernatural and salvific addendum. Rather, the atonement "displays" or reveals what we had suppressed and hidden from view: the already given (or immanent) grace that prompted us to sin in the first place. (If it weren't already immanent, sin would itself have been without motivation.) The atonement doesn't set in motion a supernatural grace, but "super"-reveals the immanent grace already and unconditionally in force.

On this model, sin is not at the theological center. Grace is not instrumentalized. And God's unconditional commitment to us is revealed as the unconditional (never withdrawn, never withheld, only willfully suppressed by us) grace that it is.

IV. Final Questions

The question, then, is about how this conception of grace might unfold within a nontheistic model. Is the grace of what is given (i.e., in particular, our createdness and insufficiency) no longer sufficient a grace if we do not, with Paul, infer from it the invisible, supernatural backing of a theistic Creator? Or, again: without a theistic supplement, is the unconditionally given grace of the present moment too poor a thing to receive or save?

The Liturgical Turn: Mr. Jones and Me

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I got together with some friends and attended a local community gathering.  After finding a parking space, we made the trek to the front door where we pasted by the greeters and were kindly shown to our seats by the ushers.  This place had everything you would expect, the lights, cameras, sound, stage.  There wasn’t a bad seat in the house.  Then the curtain opened, the band kicked in, the guy with the mic had everyone stand up. Within seconds everyone’s hands were raised and we were all enraptured by the music. 

No, we didn’t visit a megachurch (or any church for that matter).  It was my favorite of all cultural liturgies: a concert.  That which, due to the existence of children and Ticketmaster, I don’t get to enjoy as often as I used to.   This was a birthday present and I got to see one of my favorite bands, Counting Crows.  I’ve been impressed by them every time I’ve seen them in concert.  They are an incredibly tight band that knows how to play off of each other well.  Even though their lead singer and songwriter Adam Duritz has his fair-share of critics, I think he’s a great performer. That’s because he can do two things really well.  One is that he knows how to connect with the crowd really well and in a fairly short amount of time.  The other is that he knows how make his songs “work”.  By that I mean, he’s good at leading the band through them in such a way that his emotions are expressed while drawing the audience into those emotions at the same time.  If we do a little observation, then we can see that this is what makes any musician a good performer.  Bono, Sting, etc. all do this very, very well, even if in differing ways. 

However, what disturbed me a little about the show was how often I found myself taking mental notes.  Not in the way that every musician takes notes when they go to a show, but I found myself thinking of how to put some those notes to work next Sunday morning.  You see, every ‘contemporary worship leader’ out there would give just about anything for that kind response from their congregations.  Even though the best of us know that we're not performing per se and that “response” takes different forms (just like pastors should know that even if nobody complements them on the sermon that it, hopefully, was still edifying for the congregation) there is still something to be said for those times when the whole place is “lifting up holy hands” lost in worship. 

That kind of worship (along with its ‘worship leaders’) however does have its critics.  Perhaps rightly so.  Too often going to church does feel like going to concert.  In fact, my wife recently showed me a blog post of someone who extolling the greatness of their new church actually said “It’s the cleanest concert I’ve ever been too.” Maybe she’s right. If someone took a picture of a Counting Crows concert and a praise band in the middle of a ‘worship set’ more than likely there wouldn’t be much difference (except for the lack of pot and beer – hopefully!)

Believe it or not, I don’t want to be overly critical here.  Even for all the problems of over-zealous, rock-star worship leaders who employ common stage tricks to whip their audience, I mean, congregation into an emotional frenzy, I don’t think that means the church needs to stay with stuffy liturgies and out-dated hymnals.  Now, I’m all for prayer books and hymnals, but I don’t want to discount ‘contemporary worship songs’ either (for lack of a better word).  Even though, the idea of emotional response (a common argument against contemporary worship) for its own sake should raise concerns, I’m convinced more than ever that the church should be the forerunner in redeeming the “emotional response” and using excellent music to do so.  At the Counting Crows show people were singing, dancing, raising hands, clapping, etc. – all of which are gestures of praise that can be found throughout the Scriptures, especially in the Psalms.   

If these gestures can be found in secular liturgies such as concerts, how much more should be they be found in our worship? Especially among those of us who worship the God who became incarnate and redeems God’s creation.  Jeremy Begbie in “Resounding Truth” argues that if Christ became fully incarnate, then even human emotions have been redeemed.  Our praise and worship should inspire an emotional response that should manifest itself in a variety of bodily gestures – clapping, raised hands, kneeling, dancing.  Why? Because we worship the God who created us to be bodily and desires that we worship holistically – mind, heart, and strength. 

That’s one issue I have with the traditional hymns that I love so much.  I feel as if they are too embedded in modernity.  What I mean is that, even though theology and doctrine are so wonderfully portrayed through them, they are incredibly textual.  Hopefully this isn’t unfair, but I worry that the logocentrism of hymns might reinforce aspects of modernity that we’re trying so hard to move past.  Hymns are written in such a way that lyrics become the most important aspect of the song.  That’s not a bad thing.  Where I see the problem is that its tendency is to reduce the beauty of the melody and rhythm to secondary importance at best.  In a sense, we’re back to tired old dualisms – the cerebral over the material, rationality over emotional, truth over beauty. 

I don’t want to belabor that point, only to say that for all they’re worth, hymns aren’t infallible.  Particularly, because they probably stifle holistic worship more then they act as a catalyst for it.  Of course, there are exceptions to every rule.  

At the end of the day, Counting Crows, convinced me not to fear inviting an emotional response in worship.  In fact, I need to get better at creating space within my church’s liturgy for the entire range of human responses to manifest themselves if the Spirit see fit. Part of that comes in selecting songs that do include both solid lyrics and beautiful melodies and rhythms.  The other is simply encouraging freedom in worship.  Not that everyone’s response has to or can be the same, but I have found it interesting the people feel comfortable responding to music at an arena in a way they don’t feel comfortable at church - even though it’s the same song they’re singing.  

Speculative Grace: Nevertheless

A few more thoughts this week as part of my ongoing, speculative experiment of porting grace into a non-theistic context.

In a non-theistic context, rather than appearing as that which excuses us from the need to perpetually address the essential resistance that marks the real, grace appears in the work of addressing that resistance not as an obstacle to be removed but as the substance of grace itself.

Rather than being a kind of coupon for getting into an endless, frictionless, (and heavenly!) weekend spa, grace saves us instead for the only thing we have ever (or will ever) have: the nitty-gritty resistance of the here and now.

This week, I want to explore the idea that one key to addressing this resistance graciously is the ability to say "nevertheless."

1. As I've elaborated at length in previous posts (see here in particular), in a nontheistic context we might describe grace in the following way: 

Grace: whatever is given.

2. In relation to this conception of grace, I've also previously argued that we might understand sin along the following lines. 

Sin: a selective reception of what is given, a desire to decide for ourselves what is (has been or will be) given.

3. Further, we might then define salvation in the following way:

Salvation: an affirmative reception of whatever is given as being the grace that it is.

4. It is in this connection that I want to argue that one key to this affirmative reception of what is given as the grace that it is a subjective disposition characterized by the adverb "nevertheless."

5. In the KJV, the adverb "nevertheless" (here, a felicitous rendition of the simple Greek term plen) plays a pivotal role in Jesus' passion (i.e., his redemptive relation to suffering/resistance). We might even go so far as to see it being the hinge on which Jesus' transubstantiation of suffering into liberation turns. We pick up with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. While his disciples sleep,

"[Jesus] went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt." (Matt 26:39, emphasis mine)

6. What does this "nevertheless" do? What does it accomplish? What is its relation to grace? The "nevertheless" affirmatively disposes Jesus in a non-selective manner toward whatever is given without rendering him passive.

7. It's my argument that the reception of grace as something that saves (rather than damns) depends on the cultivation of this same disposition: nevertheless.

8. Let's take a look at a couple of examples of how I think this plays out. First example: something is given that I do not want (e.g., I become sick, I lose my job, etc.). 

A sinful response to this "bad" given would fail to affirmatively receive it. I could fail to affirmatively receive it either (1) by lamenting it, wallowing in self-pity, etc., or (2) by refusing to acknowledge my sickness, lack of employment, etc. In the first case, I've received what is given, but not actively. In the second case, I've been active but not receptive.

I may have a legitimate preference in a given situation for what should be given (as does Jesus in the garden), but this preference must not be decisive with respect to my relation to the given. To the degree that preference (by way of craving or aversion) is decisive, I'm sinful (i.e., miserable).

Rather, the key is this "nevertheless": if what is given is not "preferable" or "desirable" I must nevertheless receive it as what is given, see it for what it is, receive it as whatever kind of grace it is.

Fun/pleasure will always be a function of what happens to be given. The peace that passes understanding (i.e., joy) is a function of how what happens to be given is received.

The operator "nevertheless" functions as a regulator of this "how," a regulator that detaches grace from parochial preference and universalizes a space for peace and joy.

9. Fair enough, this may be a great way of handling life's disappointments. Everyone needs help with this kind of thing.

Second example: something is given that I do want (e.g., health, a better job, a banana split, etc.). 

Here, the same holds as in the first example. If I selectively affirm (rather than selectively reject as in the previous example) what is given, the result will still be misery even though I've gotten what I wanted. 

It is not the given that is problematic, but the selective mode of reception that is ruinous. This selectivity is just as ruinous when it comes to things that I want as it is when it comes to things that I don't want.

Salvation depends on our not only being able to say "this isn't what I wanted, nevertheless . . . " but also "this is what I wanted, nevertheless . . . "

10. What's wrong with our popular conceptions of grace?

In my estimation the problem is rooted in the selective asymmetry with which our "nevertheless" is applied. We want to be able to turn the "bad" things into something positive with a "nevertheless," but we aren't willing to allow that "nevertheless" to symmetrically detach grace from the selectivity of preference when "good" things come.

11. Say there is a little girl who wants a new baby doll but doesn't have one. The little girl is miserable because what is given is not a new baby doll.

Enter grace: the benevolent father says, "You don't have enough money for the baby doll, nevertheless . . . " 

What is the popular conception of grace? The popular conception of grace is associated with whatever fills in the blank at the end of the sentence: "You don't have enough money for the baby doll, nevertheless I'll buy it for you."

What's the problem? The problem comes when we identify the salvific work of grace with whatever fills in the blank rather than with the "nevertheless" itself.

We can use the baby doll example as an example of grace because it uses the correct operator (the "nevertheless") to denote the work of grace, but only if we are also willing to apply the formula in the opposite case so that it becomes clear that grace is centered in the nevertheless, not in the variable object of selective desire/aversion.

"I have a new baby doll (just like I wanted!), nevertheless . . . "

12. Salvation is freedom from the selective tyranny of our preferences (even when these preferences are legitimate), not the fulfillment of them (even - especially! - when they are fulfilled).