the church and postmodern culture: conversation

Body and Soul: the Self in Between

    In Existence and the Absolute, Jean-Yves Lacoste writes about the inseparability of soul and body. “The problem of the body is that it is an I: not some ‘thing’ that we may or may not possess, but something we are: and, more rigorously, something that defines us as man: as someone.” (p.7) Lacoste is not interested in the importance of the body per se. Rather, his point is that the experience of the self cannot be divorced from an existence of place in the world. Lacoste is speaking against the possibility of an interiority apart from an exterior orientation toward place. However, Lacoste’s comments suggest that body and soul exist as a unified whole, both being essential to our identity in the world. Many recent books and film question this premise, suggesting a growing obsession with the life  of the flesh and the fate of the soul.

     To begin with, the movie Avatar portrays a world in which a manipulating consciousness, through technical support, can switch or even swap bodies altogether. When not in-use, these bodies lie inert, although subject to biological requirements. Not only are these switches between empty bodies undetrimental to self, but seem to offer an opportunity for a more beneficial expression of the self. By finding the right body, a person can inhabit their “true” selves. Predictably, the movie portrays the main character’s disability (he is paralyzed in the course of military service) not as a condition which might inform his person, but that which represses the self and should therefore be rightfully discarded. As opposed to an integrated necessity, the body is presented as an amenity which can be upgraded or exchanged given the right resources.

     Along different lines, recent “undead” moves, books, and video games depict bodies animated beyond consciousness. Beginning with the classic zombie flick, Night of the Living Dead, zombies are depicted, not as supernatural beings, but reanimated flesh devoid of the human characteristics of intellect, will, and emotion. More importantly, in the recent undead narratives, the undead are almost always a consequence of some bioengineering project gone wrong (e.g. the book, The Passage by Justin Cronin; the film, 28 Days Later; or the series of video games, Resident Evil). Certainly, these stories express current anxieties about genetic manipulation, but more pointedly speaks to fears about the elusiveness of the soul in spite of our growing mastery of biology. When our cells can be manipulated beyond consciousness, how do we define identity? These stories typically offer an answer no less bloody than the affliction: the infected are inhuman and therefore all forms of retaliation are not only warranted, but demanded. More often than not, these movies completely relieve the living characters of the ethical quandary of “killing” undead family members and friends due to the barbarity of their attack. There is much more that can be said about the amoral forces at work in these narratives (Rowan Williams, in fact, has said much on this point in his The Truce of God). However, the point I wish to make is that these stories seem to forcefully reject that the body is an integrated part of the person.

     In contrast to these fictional accounts, I offer the conclusions of Rebecca Skloot’s book,  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (the book was also featured on fantastic episode of Radio Lab). In it, Skloot writes about the cells of cancer patient Henrietta Lacks. After these cells were taken without her knowledge, they were then reproduced for research. Henrietta’s cells became central to many advancements in medicine, including the polo vaccine. The cells were replicated millions and billions of times. When Henrietta’s youngest daughter, Deborah, learned that her mother’s cells were still in existence, she was at first confused. She worried that her mother was still alive and was being harmed in some way by the medical experiments. After a lot of emotional and spiritual anguish, she arrived at a comforting conclusion. Her answer was not to disconnect her mother’s identity from the cells, but to believe that her mother’s cells were living out a philanthropic purpose; she was a kind of an angel aiding medical research. As the title of the book suggests, as far as her daughter is concerned, Henrietta continues through her cells in a kind of immortality.

    Although I am not anxiously anticipating a zombie apocalypse, the need to readdress the relationship of body and soul has never been more important in light of the very real possibility that our bodies may indeed exist, at least in part, apart from us. When our ability to identify a person extents to an individual cell, what happens to personal identity? When the soul is unquantifiable and the body is potentially reproducible, how do we continue to make a case for the unique human condition of being, at once body and soul?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Augustinian Inversions: How would the Bishop Contend in Postmodernity?

Over the last several years of studying contemporary (continental) philosophy and theology and the theology of Augustine, I’ve noticed several recurring themes, or rather, inversion of themes between contemporary theological battles and those in which Augustine was involved.  Of course these inversion only makes sense from a broadly Augustinian point of view (which you can feel free to contest), but I think noting these inversions may demystify some common differences and misrepresentations between theologian camps.  These inversions do not function uniformly, and they really have more to do with Augustine’s opponents and how they have become inverted: the Philosophers (transcendence), Pelagius (virtue), Donatists (purity).

1) From Transcendence to Immanence:

In the classical milieu, to think the transcendence of God was natural.  But to think the incarnation, incomprehensible.  For Augustine, it was the pride of the philosophers that kept them from acknowledging that the Logos took on flesh.  And this pride could only be healed through humble submission to the truth of the immanent incarnation of God. 

But now there is a general inversion of this among contemporary (continental) philosophers/theologians.  In the wake of Hegel, it is commonplace to affirm the immanence of God and some form of the incarnation.  But it is the height of foolishness (of onto-theological speculation, of obscurantist fetishism) to affirm a truly transcendent God, a transcendence from which the incarnation was a true movement for God rather than necessary moment in God. This inversion basically sets the contemporary theological agenda such current Augustinians must argue toward transcendence rather than from it.

2) From Virtuous to Fabulous

The Pelagian controversy can be distilled to one question: from whence does virtue come?  For Pelagius, virtue (and its attendant goal of blessedness) is essentially within human reach, needing only the divine exemplar offered in Christ showing what God requires, which overcomes the ignorance of humanity .  But to the moral ignorance of Pelagius, Augustine also adds moral weakness, claiming that virtue (and blessedness) is always and everywhere out of reach for humanity outside of grace.

But now, the actual moral example of Christ in his life, death, and resurrection is not even literally believed or followed, but rather, the model of death-resurrection as a mythic vehicle for overcoming capitalist production, imperial ideology, or the symbolic order itself is all that is necessary.  From Pelagian moralism without sacrifice we have its inversion in a sacrifice (of false-consciousness) without moral exemplar (except the abstraction of death).  The concrete life of Jesus is excluded from the myth of dying-rising in Christ such that the exemplar only functions as the form itself (dying-rising) without reference to content (practices of Jesus).

3) From Purification to Separation

Lastly, I’ve noticed an inversion regarding what makes one a Donatist.  For Augustine, the Donatists where forsaking the unity of the Church for a sacramental purity.  But the Donatists ended up degradating the sacraments by subjecting them to sociological (and therefore, human) control which canceled out the divine freedom to work through the human.  Augustine, on the side of orthodoxy, refused such a reading of the sacraments and argued for the efficacy of the sacraments as the efficacy of God to work redemption through the human rather than making the divine a prisoner to human purity.  In this way Augustine argued for an ecclesiology based in the work of God against the Donatist sectarians.

But now, it seems the charge of Donatist sectarianism is laid at the feet of all those arguing for an ecclesiology which functions like Augustine's.  This comes from two sides. 

From some progressive/radical theologians, to argue for a form of orthodoxy based in a robust ecclesiology becomes inherently oppressive and sectarian.  For these, Donatist concerns for purification and Augustine's militant concern for unity join to form an oppressive theological construction (this is the reading of William Connolly).  They might say that Augustine and the Donatists were both wrong.  But I might counter that this is plausible only when the previous two inversions are in place. 

From the other side, many see the return of the language of practices and virtue to be the return of human religion and a sophisticated 'works righteousness,' which in their mind is inherently a repetition of the Donatist mistake by making worship a matter of sociology.  I believe this second reading of Donatism stems from a failure to fully grasp the nature of the incarnation (union and divine/human), and therefore is related to the first inversion above regarding transcendence and immanence.  But it also stems from a confusion of the relation of church practices to the practices of Jesus (that they are indeed related and Christ promises to culture are character through them).

I could go on and speak about forms of Platonism still play the propaedeutic role for theology, but now inverted in an education in materialism, but I will leave off for now.

I'm really just throwing this out there.  What do you think? Do you all see similar inversions from patristic theological concerns and now?  Do you see these issues differently?

Ecclesiology as a Rival "Ascetic" of Desire

(I have edited this post realising my most of the content was pre-mature, and please forgive any consternation this causes.  And apologies where the comments do not align with this truncated version)

Within my PhD work I have ben trying to understand how capitalist markets affect Christian identity formation.  Within the work of Bernd Wannenwetsch, William Cavanaugh, Reinhard Hütter, Daniel Bell, Vincent Miller, Stephen Long etc, I have come to three understandings about how late capitalist markets function:

1) The market is a form of "ascetic" practice, disciplining our bodies and inducting us with habits and practices in contrast with ecclesial practices.

2) The market then sets up patters of desire through these ascetic practices in contrast to the church in its ecclesial forms and worship and orients us around desire.

3) That comes together in embodiment and social relationship, and individually around desire, of how the market makes a false form of universal communion.

Cavanaugh, Miller, Wannenwetsch et al, have set up an inherently conflictual and rival relationship between the church and the market.  Within these accounts the problem is they present an over dichotomized account.

What ways might we respond to this?  One way I would suggest is a more nuanced reading, and Augustinian reading of the condition of modernity as a saeculum.  
 
A large question I am asking is if an Augustinian reformed account of a missional ecclesiology in relation to capitalism can be made. 

CFP: The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion (Syracuse)

Postmodernism, Culture and Religion 4
“The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion”  

Syracuse University | April 7-9, 2011

Plenary Speakers:

JOHN D. CAPUTO
Watson Professor of Religion and Philosophy
Syracuse University (http://religion.syr.edu/Caputo.html)

PHILIP GOODCHILD
Professor of Theology and Religious Studies
University of Nottingham (UK) (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/Theology/People/philip.goodchild)

CATHERINE MALABOU
Professor of Philosophy
University of Paris-X, Nanterre (http://www.u-paris10.fr/10980645/0/fiche_EE8__pagelibre/)

CALL FOR PAPERS

           Paper submissions are invited on the topic "The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion," its past and present, its history and its prospects, in the widest possible terms, addressing the whole range of its implications—politics, feminism, constructive theology, philosophy, history, literature, interfaith dialogue, and the hermeneutics of sacred texts.

            In the past, these conferences, which have provided a forum for the most influential philosophers, theologians, and cultural theorists to interact, have consisted solely of several keynote speakers.  This conference will be different.  It will feature three plenary speakers and offer multiple concurrent sessions devoted to papers submitted on a diversity of issues relating to the primary theme.  This call for papers is deliberately open, befitting the conference's animating concern with the future.  Papers are invited that address questions like (but not limited to) the following.  What now, or what comes next—specifically, after the death, if not of God, at least of the generation consisting of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Levinas, etc.?  This question concerns not only the future after those significant theorists, but also the future after-life of these eminent minds who have left such a deep impact on Continental philosophy of religion.  What is the future of Kant and German Idealism, of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in Continental philosophy of religion?  What remains for the future of phenomenology?  Of the "theological turn" in the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion and others?  Of Gadamer, Ricoeur and philosophical hermeneutics?  Of apophatic or mystical theology?  What is the future of feminism and Continental philosophy of religion?  What are the status and future of the new trinity of Agamben, Badiou and Zizek? What relevance do the political interpretations of Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and the more recent Continental philosophers such as François Laruelle and Catherine Malabou have to philosophy of religion and political theology?  What about the future of sovereignty, of money and capitalism, as in the work of Philip Goodchild?  What is the future of the movements of Radical Orthodoxy and of radical death of God theology, whether in their original or contemporary manifestations?  What about the new sciences of information and complexity in thinkers like Mark C. Taylor and Michel Serres?  What about Continental philosophy of religion and our “companion species” in Donna Haraway?  What about “Post-Humanism”?  What is the future of Continental Philosophy of religion and Judaism?  And Islam?  Or world religions generally?  What is the relationship between postmodernism, religion and postcolonialism?  What role can Continental philosophy play in the future of religion?  In the professional study of religion?  How does Continental philosophical theology relate to the ethnological and empirical-scientific study of religion?  How does Continental philosophy of religion differ from traditional philosophy of religion?  Or from analytic philosophy of religion?  What is continental philosophy of religion anyway?

            Instructions:  Submit electronic copies of completed papers (up to 3000 words).  Abstracts cannot be considered.  Papers will be subject to a double blind review by a selection committee.  Include your name, paper title and contact information on a separate page.  Include the paper title but not your name on a header or footer on each numbered page of the paper itself.  The papers must be previously unpublished in any format.  The Conference reserves the right of first refusal of the submitted paper for inclusion in a projected volume to be based upon the conference.  Paper submissions are due by December 15, 2010 and acceptances will be made by February 15, 2011.  Send your papers to: pcrconf@syr.edu.

Speculative Grace: The Four Noble Truths

I. Introduction

Continuing the business of cross-pollinating my work in contemporary Continental phenomenology (and, in particular, the phenomenology of religion) with Eastern brands phenomenology, I recently came across a striking reading of Buddhism's "four noble truths" in Stephen Batchelor's new book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist (Spiegel & Grau, 2010).

I think Batchelor's argument is worth discussing here because it succinctly frames what I take to be the fundamental theological issue: the nature of suffering (and, thus, the nature of grace). 

Is suffering (here understood in the broadest sense of a deep, root passivity) an accidental feature of this world from which the grace of God can free us?

Or is this deep, root passivity unexpungeable in a way that might lead us to associate it with the grace of God itself?

II. The Mythological Reading

Batchelor’s thesis is that the four noble truths – originally anti-mythological, pragmatic, and phenomenological – were almost immediately re-embedded by the Buddha’s followers into the more familiar and comfortable mythological framework of Hinduism in a way that conceals the straightforward but radical logic of the original formulation.

Batchelor’s argument is based in part on some textual criticism but its real strength is, I think, its pragmatic and phenomenological force.

Batchelor’s critical-textual argument boils down to this: the four noble truths as we typically receive them in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (or “Wheel Turning” discourse) have been profoundly molded by the later insertion of “explanatory” subheadings that nominalize and mythologize each of the truths while simultaneously reversing the causal direction of some key relationships.

The received, “mythological” version of the four noble truths looks like this:

The Four Noble Truths

1. There is suffering (dukkha).

2. There is a cause of suffering: craving (tanha).

3. There is a cessation of suffering (nirvana).

4. There is a path to cessation: the eightfold path.

Batchelor’s claim is that where the Buddha originally presented four noble “tasks,” this version presents four noble “truths” (i.e., claims or dogmas; hence the nominalization). Once the “tasks” have been turned into dogmas, it is only possible to make sense of them in relation to Hinduism’s mythological claims about karma and rebirth.

 

Note how their transformation into dogmas requires that we read the four noble truths out of order.  The relationship of cause and effect looks like this:

2. Cause: craving/clinging.

1. Effect: suffering.

4. Cause: eightfold path.

3. Effect: cessation of rebirth (nirvana).

Note that suffering is now understood as a contingent effect of an avoidable cause (craving).

Note that talk of cessation (nirvana) as the cessation of suffering only makes sense in light of the Hindu project to be post-mortally free from the wheel of samsara and rebirth.

On this model, suffering is a contingent effect that can be avoided and freedom from suffering is framed in relation to a post-mortal reward (nirvana as the cessation of re-birth).

II. The Phenomenological Reading

Batchelor’s argument is that this traditional reading not only does violence to the text but to the groundbreaking nature of the Buddha’s entire approach.

Let’s assume, he argues, that the subheadings that transform the list into claims or dogmas were added later. Also, let’s give full weight to the final portion of the discourse where the Buddha explicitly “operationalizes” the list into twelve actions (three actions for each of the four elements).

 

Then what does the list look like?

The list instead looks pragmatic and phenomenological like this:

The Four Noble Tasks

1. fully knowing suffering

2. letting go of craving

3. experiencing cessation (of craving)

4. cultivating the eightfold path

On this reading, the Buddha is not presenting a list of things to be believed, but a list of things to be done.

Note that in this light the logic of the list’s order is direct and requires no creative re-ordering.

1. The task is to fully know – on the basis of a penetrating, firsthand examination of one’s own experience of suffering – the nature of suffering as an unavoidable aspect of life’s being interdependent, co-conditioned, and impermanent.

2. To the degree that we know firsthand the truth about suffering, the natural effect of this will be our letting go of clinging and craving (i.e., a letting go of our demand for the world to permanently please us when and where we require it).

3. The natural effect of a letting go of craving will be that we will experience brief periods of time in which craving ceases altogether.

4. The natural effect of this experience will be our cultivation of a new way of life grounded in and appropriate to the truth of suffering. This new path of life is characterized by eight appropriate practices (i.e., the eightfold path).

Batchelor also argues (persuasively, I think) that the relationship between the four noble tasks and the eightfold path should be understood as cyclical. 

The eightfold path is clearly described as leading to the four noble tasks and the four noble tasks explicitly lead back into the eightfold path. The clarity of this cyclical relationship, however, is apparent only when the four noble tasks are not re-ordered as in the standard, mythological version. It’s also only clear when nirvana/cessation is understood as an element along the way to the eightfold path itself rather than as a final solution to a problem specific to Hindu metaphysics (karmic re-birth).

Note that in this second version nothing is organized around a post-mortal problem or question. Note that in this second version suffering is essential rather than contingent. Note that in this second version no dogmatic beliefs are required.

Where the four noble truths lay out a path to an ultimate, cosmic redemption from suffering, the four noble tasks lay out a path to the ongoing cultivation of a human redemption of suffering.

Batchelor explicitly argues that the Buddha breaks with Hindu mythology most radically in his rejection of the idea that, at root, reality is fundamentally One. For the Buddha, the noble truths are four (and, as such, irreducible), the path to be cultivated is eight, the truth of existence is co-conditioned multiplicity, etc.

This is to say: the Buddha breaks with Hinduism in that he intentionally brackets mythological claims to a transcendent, fundamental Unity and sides wholeheartedly with the immanent givenness of phenomenological multiplicity.

Is such a move possible within the context of Christianity's joyful proclamation? If so, is it desirable?

Does Christianity's joyful proclamation announce an ultimate cosmic redemption from suffering? Or does Jesus announce a way to engage in the ongoing cultivation of a human redemption of suffering?

Response to "Some Provisional These" on Kingdom-World-Church

I want to continue the conversation (really just questioning) begun by James K.A. Smith between an ecclesiocentric view of mission and the "apocalyptic theology" of Halden, Kerr, and Siggelkow.  (James commented on the Preamble). Really, I'm not offering a defense of an ecclesiocentric understanding of mission, but offering critical questions springing from "Kingdom-World-Church: Some Provisional Theses." 

I usually won't demand too much rigor from a blog entry, and I don't want to be too critical, but not withstanding the 'provisional' nature espoused throughout, the authors seems to be desiring to start a new theological agenda that may "contribute to the task of theology" and have publishes these theses "for citation purposes" at The Other Journal, so I feel free to judge it by a somewhat stricter standard.

The text reproduced, and my comments/questions are in bold.

---

    Thesis 1: The church is an event within the event of this world’s apocalyptic transfiguration. This is a midrash on Robert Jenson’s insight that “the church is neither a realization of the new age nor an item of the old age. She is precisely an event within the event of the new age’s advent” (Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:171). The church is an apocalyptic event just to the extent that she lives from the Ascension and Pentecost, and so towards the second advent of Jesus Christ. Thus the church can never fail to see itself as inhabiting this apocalyptic space. Or rather, the church’s whole mode of being is “timed” by God’s own apocalyptic act of invading the world, transforming it, and redeeming it. As such the church, in every aspect of its life, abides at the intersection of the old age and the age to come. The church lives in saecula saeculorum precisely and only at this indissoluble interstice of God’s redemptive and life-giving invasion of the world of sin, suffering, and death.

How is this “event within the event” distinguished but related?  Or rather, how is the habitation of the apocalyptic space made possible, practiced?  Is there a habituation of inhabiting?  I certainly agree with the “abiding” nature of the church between the times, and that we “abide” in Christ, Christ in us, and we in the Spirit.

    Thesis 2: The church’s primary task is apostolic. The church exists as a function of Christ’s own singular apostolicity; that is, its existence is a matter of its participation in Christ as the “sent one” (Heb 3:1). “The church has no other existence than in actu Christi, that is, in actu Apostoli” (Hoekendijk). The church thereby exists to serve the ministerium Verbi incarnati (Barth)—the church’s share in the apostolicity of Christ consists in its being sent out by the power of the Spirit to proclaim the euangelion of Jesus Christ to the world. In this sense, the church’s “priority” with regards to the world is that of a distinctively apostolic precedence.

What of priest?  What of prophet?  What of king?  Certainly evangelicals all too often get caught up in the prophetic nature of the church (which is usually a Constantinian function), and Catholics self-consciously adopt a priestly function.  And of course there is the King and Christendom?  But just to ignore these images and opt for a different one (albeit, a missionally focused one in-line with the Johannine corpus) seems short sighted.

    Thesis 3: The euangelion of Jesus Christ, as Yoder puts it, is “not a religious or a personal term at all, but a secular one: ‘good news.’” (But what is the gospel then?  And to say "apocalyptic rectification" does little help.  Rectification from what?  And Yoder isn't totally correct on this for the gospel was declared by Isaiah well before Ceasar used it).  As heralds and witnesses to this gospel the church’s visibility is thus “not a cultic or ritual separation, but rather a nonconformed quality of (“secular”) involvement in the life of the world” (Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 39). The apostolic mission of the church is secular because God’s apocalyptic act in Jesus Christ abolishes religion. The proper starting point for Christian reflection lies not with the nostalgic lament that “once there was no secular” (Milbank), but in the genuinely liberative good news that in Christ “there is no longer religion.” From the standpoint of God’s apocalyptic act in Christ religion is “unbelief” (Barth). Religion is “the attempted replacement of the divine work by a human manufacture.”[4] The apocalyptic inbreaking of God in Christ does not affirm the “world-in-itself,” but rather ruptures and suspends the religious distinction between the “sacred” and the “profane” (and between “church” and “world,” as such). The new antinomy created in the coming of Christ is not between the “secular” and the “religious” but between apocalypse and religion. It is God who apocalyptically comes to the world in the sending of his Son and his Spirit to liberate the church, and indeed, the world, from enslavement to religion. And so Paul can confidently proclaim: “It was to bring us into the realm of freedom that Christ set us free” (Gal 5:1).[5]

This seems to use “secular” in a self-serving and equivocal manner.  What the secular means for an Augustinian like Milbank is very different from Martyn (I see his language all throughout) and his use of ‘religion’.  If religion is equated with sin, then yes, the gospel frees us from it.  But if religion is the pursuit of the good and transcendence, then such an antinomy is not so clear. 

    Thesis 4: Christian worship does not lie in a realm outside of religion. To seek a direct correspondence (Who seeks a direct correspondence?  Any liturgical theology would never make such a claim.) between leitourgia (“the work of the people”) and divine action is to forget that worship itself is a “perpetual factory of idols” (Calvin). Furthermore, such easy correspondence risks fetishizing and instrumentalizing worship. The problem is structural and runs deep; in truth, the very discipline of “ecclesiology” is prone to idolatrous self-aggrandizement. Thus the critique of religio strikes at the very heart of Christian worship.[6] The occasion for sin occurs preeminently as leitourgia—the “work of the people” to self-justify, to strive to stand aright before God. Indeed, worship is the site marking our deepest estrangement from God. But this is not the final word! In Jesus Christ, God decisively wills to be God-for-us and so our idolatrous “work” becomes the site of our reconciliation with God. Reconciliation occurs not as exchange or production, but as a gratuitous event of grace. In this event the Spirit “takes up” our “work” to stand aright before God and transforms and transfigures our prideful attempts to “make a name for ourselves.” Our worship only becomes true praise, then, as our “work” loses track of itself under the great pressure of God’s own doxa. Such doxa happens as the event of God’s grace evokes gratitude “like the voice an echo.” Indeed, “Gratitude follows grace like thunder lightening” (Barth, CD IV/1, 41).

 And the criticism regarding instrumentalizing worship needs to be substantiated.  Too often we fear capitalist production that we can’t think the relation of divine/human activity.  Worship, ecclesiology, and Christology all work together as arenas of human and divine action.  How does the event of grace interact with human attempts to worship?  The answer has classically been through the sacrament which unite the physical and the spiritual?  How does this ‘event’ happen for you all?

    Thesis 5: Dispersion, or diaspora, names “the truly ecumenical reality of the church in this world” (Stringfellow). The church’s first ecumenical reality is to exist as a priest among the nations. Here mission and ecumenics are shown to be inseparable. True Christian unity is inseparable from the realization of the koinonia of the whole world with God that Jesus Christ has actualized. It is for this reason that the church cannot itself be considered a “home” or as constitutive of an alternatively “habitable world” (Hauerwas), for the Christian vocation is to be in the world, without reserve—that is, in the one whole world whose true reality is to be reconciled to God in the one whole Christ. It is as such that the church realizes the truth of its “catholicity”—the fullness of koinonia in the apocalypsis Iesou Christou.

Again, as Jamie mentioned, “world” is ill defined here.  And who of the “ecclesiocentrists” claim the church as our home?  "God is our eternal home" (Isaac Watts).

    Thesis 6: It is as Lord of all humanity that Christ is rightly to be understood as Head of his body, the church. The true body of Christ (corpus verum) is thus in reality all of humanity crucified and resurrected with Christ, and so reconciled to God in him (Aquinas; Barth). The church in via is thus “but a part of the larger Body of Christ” (Nicholas Healy).[7] So the church “is” the body of Christ as precisely and paradoxically what it “is not,” in itself. And so to make use of the image of soma Christou for the church is not ontologically to prescribe what the church is, but rather to remind the church continually that precisely as such it is not an end in itself. 

This thesis looses the emphasis of Healy, who is pulling from Aquinas, that Christ is the Head of humanity in that his power for redeeming humanity is sufficient for all, but not currently effective in all.  That all of humanity is crucified in Christ is surely more a Hegelian universalist dogma in the way state above.  Why would Paul draw such attention in Gal. 2:20 to his being crucified in Christ if all humanity already was, regardless of faith?   This does not adequately engage with scriptural and/or sacramental understandings of the body of Christ.

    Thesis 7: Jesus Christ alone is constitutive of the church’s sacramental existence. (No sacramental theologian disagrees with this.)  And Christ is so constitutive as in his priestly office he himself is sacramentally given for the whole world’s transfiguration in the singular event of his cross and resurrection. (But what does that mean?  Is the whole world transfigured in the cross/resurrection?  But does the world know this?  And if not, how does it come to know it?)  The ultimate reality (res) of which the church is a sign and for which she is given, then, is nothing other than the mystery of the world reconciled to God in Christ. “Sacrament” is thereby the language by which the church is given to communicate that for which she exists, as also the praxis whereby the church is plunged into the heart of the world (I thought the sacraments plunged the Church into the paschal mystery, but now it is into the world?) and given to live for that reality—the coming kingdom of God—which she is not in-itself (McCabe). The sacraments are neither constitutive of an alternative social program—a polis, as such—nor are they constitutive of an alternative mode of production, or the expression of an alternative “technology of desire.” Rather, the sacraments are but ways by which Christ gives the church over to a dispossessed readiness for service (disponibilité) in the world.  (I don’t understand the antithesis here.  Why can’t an alternative technology of desire prepare one for a dispossessive readiness?)  As such, the language and practice of the church are sacramental to the extent that they are utterly dependent upon the active presence, by the Spirit, of Christ’s ongoing reconciling and transfiguring presence in the world, which must continually be received afresh by the church from the world (as from without), as both judgment upon and justification of its existence. To affirm the church’s sacramental existence as such is thus to affirm that “the Church would be lost if it had no counterpart in the world” (Barth). Or, to put it another way, the language of sacrament is but the difficult work of learning “all that is involved in refusing to say that the dominion of God over his world is manifested here but not there” (MacKinnon). 

I could be wrong, but would it have been easier to say, “The sacraments help the church to know that God is at work in the world,” or something like that.  But I think the sacraments lead us into the paschal mystery (cross/resurrection) so that we can live in Christ in the world.  Or rather, in the sacraments the church learns to see that Christ is near, and in this learned perception the church begins to see Christ everywhere.

    Thesis 8: At the heart of the church’s existence is the claim that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19). This world reconciled to God in Christ is the “new humanity” (I don’t think exegetically this stands.  The world does not equal the new humanity for Paul.  The new humanity are all those who have died/risen in Christ, who are heirs of Abraham, participate in the life of the new Adam, etc.)  for which the church is sacramentally given. Our baptism is baptism into this new humanity precisely insofar as it is a baptism into the reality of this world’s transfiguration. It is this transfigured world, moreover, that provides the context for the practice of the Lord’s Supper. The eucharist, then, is not the ritual means of “inhabiting the church,” but rather the way by which the church inhabits the whole world (oikoumene) in grace, joy, and hospitality. It is the whole world reconciled to God in Christ to which we are opened in communion. And so it is the sacrament of baptism, as entrance into this world, that carries with it the imperative of open communion—without conditions! “With the gospel goes an open door” (Hoekendijk).[8]

I’m not totally sure if Herr Hoekendijk is informing your discussion at this point, but are their more recent missiologists that we could pull from instead of book written in 1967?  What of Bosch, Newbigin, or Hirsch?  And I think the ecumenical discussion of sacraments, and the discipline of missiology have far advanced beyond these claims.  It feels like you know that someone (I for one) would make a stink about the sacraments so you pre-empted by categorically redefining them.  But no liturgical, sacramental, ecumenical theologian or missiologist that I know of

    Thesis 9: If the world reconciled to God in Christ is that for which the church exists, then the church is visible precisely at the point of such reconciliation—the church is visible as an event of this world’s apocalyptic transfiguration. This is a “very special visibility” indeed (Barth). For according to such visibility what one sees is a liberation of this world from the old age of sin and destruction and a liberation for participation in the new age inaugurated in Christ. The visibility of the church then occurs precisely in the reconciling and liberating event in which “we no longer regard one another from a human point of view” (2 Cor 5:16). The church is thus made to be a visible sign of reconciliation in the world precisely in the event of being conformed, given over by the Spirit, to God’s new creation brought about in Christ. But one only sees (yes, perception, epistemology, this is essential) this transfiguration and liberation of the world by believing the church—that is, by way of faith in the gospel of the kingdom which she proclaims for the whole world.

So does one have to be “in” the church (“believing the church”) to see the liberation of the world?  How is the different from the ecclesiocentric crowd?  But it seems like so much more than ‘emphasis’ is at stake.

    Thesis 10: As such, the church is visible not by way of its ritual or cultic separation from the world, but by way of is kenotic solidarity with the world. Such solidarity with the world happens as a matter of concrete kenotic, cruciform obedience to the way of its Lord in this world. To be in such solidarity with this world is to struggle with the oppressive and sinful powers of this world by being given over to a mode of living and suffering and dying with the victims of these powers that embodies and proclaims in its very living and suffering and dying a hope and a joy and a celebration that these powers can neither produce nor control. Sent out in the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ the church stands in concrete solidarity with the oppressed peoples of this world.

 

    Thesis 11: Such kenotic, cruciform solidarity in obedience to the way of the cross leaves no room for the church to be anything other than the “church of the poor.” The church’s kenotic solidarity with the world thus occurs as solidarity with the poor. As Jon Sobrino reminds us, “The mystery of the poor is prior to the ecclesial mission, and that mission is logically prior to an established church” (Sobrino, No Salvation Outside the Poor, 21). Or as Moltmann puts it, “It is not the Church that ‘has’ a mission, but the reverse; Christ’s mission creates itself a Church. The mission should not be understood from the perspective of the Church, but the other way round.”(Moltmann, Church in the Power of the Spirit, 10). With the Catholic bishops at Medellin, the church must reaffirm and exercise the “preferential option for the poor.” This “preferential option” is not simply one of many tasks of the church—it lies at the center and heart of its mission. In fact, it is its mission, because this is Christ’s mission.

 

    Thesis 12: The “church of the poor” is in fact the one genuine “church for others” (Bonhoeffer), which lives, simply, by giving its property away. Such is the “ecclesieccentric” existence that the “Christeccentric” (R. Coles) relation of God’s kingdom to the World calls us to. It is precisely by way of such “ecclesi-eccentricity,” moreover, that the church happens as not only sign but also a foretaste of that new creation, that kingdom to come. If the way of God’s eternal life as revealed in Christ just is the way of an eternally outgoing, self-giving love, then it will have to be thus in the church. Only as the church throws its life away in love for the other, only as the church loses itself completely in the world for which God’s kingdom has come, might the church be given to happen as an event within the event of that world’s transfiguration. Only as such, in precisely this kind of solidarity with the world, might the church be given—in the event of this world’s transfiguration—to see and to taste that love by which alone she mysteriously lives, that love that shall reign forever when God will be all in all.

 

    Thesis 13: Existing as we do in the “crater” of God’s own singular action in Christ (Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 36), the church lives utterly by prayer. The incursion of God into the world of sin and death breaks open our failed history, liberating the world from its bondage to death. As such, the church, which lives as a sign of this event, awaiting its consummation in the Parousia, can only be ultimately understood as a communal event of lived prayer that is created by the Spirit who bears us in our weaknesses, “with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8: 26). God’s apocalyptic invasion of the world in the sending of Jesus and the Spirit does not create a stable, habitable place from which we as the church might grasp for ourselves a mode of intellectual or political coherence and control (Doesn’t Hauerwas always preach the gospel of “living out of control”?). Rather, this radical grace leaves us in the same place as the Son of Man who has no place to lay his head (Luke 9:58). And it is precisely in this being upended and unhanded that the church exists as prayer. “The true church is thus co-extensive with the community of true prayer” (Forsyth, Soul of Prayer, 54). As a people “timed” by the apocalypse of God in Jesus Christ, who live solely by the grace of the Spirit who conforms us to Christ, the church can embody its calling only by throwing itself in faith upon the God who raised Jesus from the dead. Thus we can finally only speak of the essence of the church in terms of lament, intercession, and doxology. To seek more than this is ultimately to seek another gospel altogether.

 

These theses are, quite clearly, only the rudiments of a beginning, the fragments of a hope that strains the bounds of theological articulation. The God with whom we have to do in Jesus is truly “exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we could ever ask or think” (Eph 3:20). These theses, such as they are, are here simply to be offered in the fullest sense of the word. Let anything in them that does not speak truly of the gospel of Christ perish and be forgotten forever. The three of us seek, in our discussion, prayer, and writing together to do nothing more than to become transparent to the liberating gospel of Christ, crucified and risen.

 

As such we hope that in the very doing of theology under the authority of the gospel that we may be given, by the Spirit to be conformed to Christ’s kenosis, his self-expending life given for us and for our salvation. We agree with the words of Donald MacKinnon: “To live as a Christian in the world today is necessarily to live an exposed life; it is to be stripped of the kind of security that tradition, whether ecclesiological or institutional, easily bestows.” It is precisely this exposed life, a life which, in prayer, desires nothing more than transparency to the way of Jesus Christ, that we seek. It is our desire to move forward in the task of theology in the service of the gospel precisely in this mode of kenosis, prayer, and weakness. With MacKinnon “we can only hope that because a false dream has yielded or begun to yield to a temper more deeply perceptive of the mystery of kenosis, we will be a little better prepared to recognize our frailty, and that it is in genuine weakness that our strength is made perfect: in genuine weakness, not the simulated powerlessness of the spiritual poseur” (MacKinnon, Stripping of the Altars, 34, 39).

 

And so we move on together, praying without ceasing that God will have his way with us in the task of theology in the service of the gospel. At the heart of our common work is the passionate conviction that, in Christ, God has truly brought about a new creation which exceeds and transcends all our attempts to control, regulate, and manage our lives through the various configurations of the power of death. We offer all of this, then, in the spirit of doxology. With Paul, we can only end in praise of the One who has set us free:

 

    O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Or who has given a gift to him, to receive a gift in return? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen. (Rom 11:33–36)

 

[1] See John Flett, “Communion as Propaganda: Reinhard Hütter and the missionary witness of the ‘Church as Public,’” Scottish Journal of Theology 62 (2009) 457–76.

 

[2] On the apocalyptic nature of reality in Bohoeffer’s work, see Philip G. Ziegler, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer—An Ethics of God’s Apocalypse?” Modern Theology 23/4 (2007) 579–94; see also Ry Owen Siggelkow, “The Lamb that Was Slain is Worthy to Receive Power: Christology, Apocalyptic, and Secularity in the Ecclesiologies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Howard Yoder” (MA Thesis, St. Paul Seminary, University of St. Thomas, 2009).

 

[3] Ziegler, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” 585–87.

 

[4] Karl Barth, CD I/2 302.

 

[5] See especially J. Louis Martyn, Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Nashville: Abingdon, 1997), Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1997), and “The Apocalyptic Gospel in Galatians,” Interpretation 54/3 (2000) 246–66.

 

[6] See Matthew Myer Boulton, God Against Religion: Rethinking Christian Theology through Worship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).

 

[7] See Nicholas Healy, “Practices and the New Ecclesiology: Misplaced Concreteness?,” International Journal of Systematic Theology, 5/3 (2003) 304.

 

[8] For more on the nature of the church’s life as being solely one of opened possibilities see Robert W. Jenson, Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel about Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 81–82.

---

I don't really have much to add from the last several theses or conclusion.  But overall, I'm not sure who advocates for what you are against, and what you are advocating for seem ill thought out.  

Micro Review: "God After Metaphysics"

God After Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetic

By John Panteleimon Manoussakis

Indiana University Press, 2007.

Manoussakis makes a solid contribution to the growing literature in continental philosophy of religion. Like most works in the field, it is really more of an essay than a scholarly monograph. While the author offers a creative and provocative riff on the conditions of possibility for an "experience" of God, the discussion is neither located within nor accountable to existing secondary literature on the problem (glaringly absent is any engagement with David Bentley Hart's 2003 book, The Beauty of the Infinite). As a result, he sometimes repeats moves that have already been made by others (the "incarnational" move has been made by Jean-Luc Marion, myself, and others), or fails to respond to challenges to his model in the existing literature (e.g., regarding the persistent binary logic he assumes). However, Manoussakis, like Marion before him, helpfully engages the substantive claims of patristic resources, particularly the Eastern fathers. But he continues to be haunted by a penchant for supposed philosophical neutrality insofar as he seeks to unhook these theological resources from "their doctrinal authority"--as if philosophy doesn't admit all kinds of other extra-philosophical "authorities." Nevertheless, the book repays careful, critical reading.

Which Kingdom? What World? Whose Church? A Response to Some Provisional Theses

Of late, several comment threads over at Inhabitatio Dei have been occasions for some ships passing in the night (shouting angrily at one another as they sense some threat in the vicinity!).  These have generally come down to differences between those of us sympathetic to what some might call an "ecclesiocentric" understanding of mission and the purveyors of an "apocalyptic" theology. 

As a way of trying to get at some of the substantive issues, Inhabitatio Dei has posted a fulsome essay, "Kingdom-World-Church: Some Provisional Theses."  As a way of trying to take this seriously, I here reproduce their essay with interjections and comments interspersed as a sort of response/commentary--something that the comment thread at Inhabitatio Dei could not absorb. 

Here I only engage the Preamble to their theses.  Perhaps in the future I'll have opportunity to do something similar with the theses themselves--or, even better, someone else might take up a similar strategy with respect to the theses.

I don't speak for any "party," in doing so, and don't represent anything like the "Hauerwas brand," as it were.  However, I obviously do have sympathies with a certain school of thought loosely represented by the Ekklesia Project and--if they're willing to slum with the likes of me--associated with folks like Hauerwas, Steve Long, Bill Cavanaugh, Dan Bell, and others.  On some points, I'm probably just mistaken, or have been working with my own idiosyncratic hybrid of a "Reformed Catholic" tradition.  In addition, I'm shooting from the hip here, in haste.  But for what it's worth....

++++++++++++

From "Kingdom-World-Church: Some Provisional Theses"

by Nathan R. Kerr, Ry O. Siggelkow, and Halden Doerge

We should like to begin these brief reflections with an oft-quoted passage from the conclusion of John Howard Yoder’s Body Politics:

The believing body is the image that the new world—which in light of the ascension and Pentecost is on the way—casts ahead of itself. The believing body of Christ is the world on the way to it’s renewal; the church is the part of the world that confesses the renewal to which all the world is called. (Yoder, Body Politics, 78)

This passage and others like it from Yoder’s oeuvre have been the impetus for a number of contemporary modes of “ecclesiocentric” construals of the kingdom of God in relation to the world.

Well, first of all, I'm not sure that any of us "ecclesiocentric" folks would ever say we're offering an ecclesiocentrical "construal of the kingdom."  God's reign is clearly larger and wider than the church precisely because it's wider than humanity.  The "kingdom," then is a shorthand for an eschatological vision of God's creation rightly ordered and flourishing.  The church is called to be a foretaste of that, and is called to be a people who are shepherding this broken creation toward that.  But an "ecclesiocentric construal of the kingdom" is never language I would use. 

The church’s missionary thinking, so the argument goes, is ecclesiocentric just to the extent that the church ontologically precedes the world and, ultimately, supercedes the world with respect to the kingdom’s eschatological fulfillment.

I've never made the claim that "the church ontologically precedes the world," but some of my friends have and I understand what they're getting at.  What I think is missing in these conversations, however, is a robust doctrine of creation, which is precisely what I think my Reformed tradition brings to the table.  The "world," then is NOT creation--it is the dis-ordering of a primordially good creation.  Therefore "the world" is secondary, derivative, parasitic.  Now, insofar as the church is that body which is a new creation, it is a restoration of creation--the creation which precedes the disfiguring of "the world."  It does seem to me that the church of this kingdom-world-church conversation needs to articulate a theology of creation in order to avoid pitfalls on both sides.  In any case, opening with this claim seems to make it more central and pivotal than it really is for those of us you're describing as "ecclesiocentric."  It seems like this claim is a favorite whipping boy for apocalpytics, whereas many of us never make the claim.  Straw man?

As the late twentieth-century theologian and missiologist J.C. Hoekendijk [uh, never heard of him--why are we letting critical secondary sources speak for the "ecclesiocentric" camp?]  has argued, however, such “church-centric missionary thinking” is itself a false start. For from within such ecclesiocentric thinking, Hoekendijk claims, the call to mission, or evangelism—that is, the call to proclaim and to embody “the gospel”—often turns out to be “little else than a call to restore ‘Christendom,’ the ‘Corpus Christianum,’ as a solid, well-integrated cultural complex, directed and dominated by the Church” (Hoekendijk, Church Inside Out, 15).

I'm sorry, but how this could be taken to be a description of what Hauerwas is after is beyond me.  (Milbank, sure; but Stanley?)  Almost no one who will identify with the so-called "ecclesiocentric" camp is going to identify with this.  Furthermore, just invoking the C-word doesn't prove something is wrong. 

That is to say, the church aligns itself with the Kingdom and against the world by way of the production of it’s own alternative, habitable culture. As John Flett has convincingly argued, mission thereby becomes tied inextricably to the extension of this “culture”; this culture, this particular way of life, just is the gospel that is proclaimed, and the church’s missionary relation to the world cannot but be a function of it’s own culture—gospel proclamation turns out to be a matter of the church’s propagation of it’s own way of life, and evangelism a mode of integrating the world into this particular habitable culture.[1]

Um....and the problem is...?  But more seriously, first: the church is called to be a foretaste of an eschatological ideal, which is to some extent a restoration of a creational norm.  And this will only be "against the world" to the extent that the world runs against the grain of the universe.  So the church is inviting "the world" to good culture-making.  Indeed, it is inviting the world to find itself vocation (what it's made for) in a graced way of life.  I must seriously be missing something because I don't see the problem here.  (If it's that this is somehow "Constantinian," then it misses that the mode by which the church does this is primarily invitation and hospitality--though we might also say that it is a blessing for covenant children to be sealed into this way of life by baptism.  If this comes down to some kind of worry about infant baptism as "Constantinian," then you've lost me.  In that case, it seems like "apocalyptic" is just a fancy cover for autonomy.)

Thus, on such an ecclesiocentric reading of the Church-world relationship, the church is most missionary precisely at that point at which the church is most intentionally “self-regarding” (Hauerwas). [Could use a little more specific reference here, with a hint of context.]  And herein lies the reason why we must insist upon resisting such an understanding of the church as ontologically “prior” to the world as such, in relation to the kingdom: viz., it presents us with not only an ecclesiologically but missiologically idealist logic—such an intentionally self-regarding conception of mission requires the construction of another (“the world”) as productive and reflective of it’s own identity.

Huh? 

The problem with such an ecclesio-concentric understanding of the church’s relation to the Kingdom and the world, says Hoekendijk, is that it misconstrues the basic Scriptural sense in which the kingdom of God is first and foremost the kingdom for the world.

I'm pretty sure I could come up with a healthy string of references to "ecclesiocentric" folks making the claim that the church is the church for the world.  What am I missing?  Do you just mean they're not universalists?  The church is the church for the world by inviting "the world" to become what is was made to be.

The kingdom is oriented from beginning to end towards the oikoumene—the whole world.

For this oikoumene the Kingdom is destined; world (kosmos/oikoumene) and Kingdom are correlated to each other; the world is conceived as a unity, the scene of God’s great acts: it is the world which has been reconciled (II Cor. 5:19), the world which God loves (John 3:16) and which he has overcome in his love (John (16:33); the world is the field in which the seeds of the Kingdom are sown (Matt. 13:38)—the world is consequently the scene for the proclamation of the Kingdom. (Hoekendijk, Church Inside Out, 41)

But surely you recognize equivocation in the New Testament regarding the meaning of "world!"  So in addition to your citations here, consider: "The whole world lies under the sway of the evil one" (1 John 5:19); "Do not love the world or the things in the world" (1 John 2:15); "Do not be conformed to the world" (Rom. 12:2).  Surely the Kingdom does not "belong together" with the world under the sway of the evil one.  So there's no identification of Kingdom and world here.  Again, it seems to me that "world" is severely under-theorized in this discussion.  (Cf. my discussion of "the world" in Desiring the Kingdom, pp. 187-190). 

In short: “Kingdom and world belong together.” The order of God’s economy is thus “God-World-Church, not God-Church-World” (71).

Still citing the Dutch guy here?  Anyway, what does "world" refer to in such a claim? 

This is the order of God’s own missionary existence in Christ. And by participation in this missionary existence of God, we must give new expression to the church’s own missionary existence: the order of this existence must be that of Kingdom-World-Church, not Kingdom-Church-World.

You're kind of losing me here, but it's probably my fault.  It just seems strange to me to talk about an "order of missionary existence."  Again, this just feels like language that we "ecclesiocentric" folks are not prone to use, so I'm trying to imagine how I'd formulate an alternative.  I'd have to think more about that because I'm just not sure what the "poles" of this debate are.  I guess I would want to say that the church is the body of Christ, Christ being the second Adam who carried out what the first Adam was created to be, then sending his Spirit to empower us to do the same.  So the church is the community empowered by the Spirit of Christ to be what we were created to be.  And insofar as we do that we constitute an invitation for all humanity to find their vocation in that way of life.  Maybe the big problem is I just don't know what "world" means in your formula. 

What we should like to propose, then, is that the quote from Yoder with which we began these reflections should be read through the perspective of this alternative Kingdom-World-Church order. Precisely as such, we might better come to understand the implications of Yoder’s insight that mission has to do with coming to “see the church in relationship to the world rather than defining ecclesial existence ‘by definition’ or ‘as such’” (Yoder, Royal Priesthood, 78). The church only exists as “living from and toward the promise of the whole world’s salvation.” (Yoder, Priestly Kingdom, 12).

As such, the church thereby exists as one dimension of a thoroughgoing apocalyptic realism. That is to say, the church exists insofar as it is constituted by the manner in which, in the apocalypse of Jesus Christ, “the reality of God has entered into the reality of this world,” proving victorious over the fallen powers of this world for the sake of this world’s salvation (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 54).

Is it fair to ask about the shape of an "apocalyptic" pneumatology? I don't hear much about the Spirit in this model. 

What really matters, then, for the church, is it’s mode of participation “in the reality of God and the world in Jesus Christ today” (55).[2] And that reality is without reserve that of the apocalyptic rectification of all things to God in Christ.

Yes, "all things" will be reconciled.  This is music to my Reformed ears. 

That event of apocalyptic rectification is constitutive of reality itself;

I'm trying to figure out why it's so hard for me to understand what this means.

and the event of the church takes place firmly within that reality of the reconciled world “that is real only through the reality of God” disclosed in Jesus Christ (54).[3] The church thus exists as an ergon Kyriou (a work of the Lord),

And you don't seriously think that "ecclesiocentric" folks think otherwise, right?!

which means to say that the church exists for the sake of the unique and special share that it is given in the cosmic meaning of the sovereignty of this world’s living Lord.

Sorry...what's that?  No one will accuse you of light prose.  Seriously, this sentence is positively Milbankian.

But precisely as such the church does exist, and it’s existence is precisely that of a special function and task. As to the nature of that special existence, function, and task, we should like to conclude these reflections. We shall do so by putting forward some provisional theses on the existence, nature, and task of the church. There could be more, of course, and these could be articulated with more depth and precision. But these are, after all, mere theses—and provisional at that.

[More to come on the Theses, I hope.]

"Badiou and Theology": a not so micro-review

Frederiek Depoortere, Badiou and Theology (Philosophy and Theology). New York: T&T Clark International, 2009.

Below is my review of Depoortere's recent book on Badiou.  For a less favorable review see Clayton Crocket's over at NDPR (he sees it as incoherent, but I think this broadly has to do with differing theological outlooks).  I would be very interested in any others interacting with Badiou on a theological level.  I would like to do more work with Badiou, but my dissertation may go a different direction for now.

While many have turned to Alain Badiou’s critique of contemporary politics and his theories of the event and the subject, few theologians have fully engaged in the task of understanding and assessing Badiou’s underlying ontological commitments.  But without this a truly theological appropriation and/or critique of Badiou has been lacking.  Frederiek Depoortere’s Badiou and Theology gladly, and impressively, steps into this gap.  Matching Badiou’s robust atheism with a clear-sighted theological orientation, Depoortere models theological engagement, even if one does not necessarily agree with his presuppositions.  The basic thesis of the book is that while Badiou understands his ontology as essentially atheistic, Depoortere argues that it in fact it does not foreclose belief in God, but actually opens toward a renewed proof for the existence of God with its own version of analogy. Depoortere accomplishes this by first examining Badiou’s understanding of the death of God and the contemporary state of the questions of the existence of God, then investigating Badiou’s ontology, and finally, by offering a theological reading of set theory.

            Depoortere begins by considering what Badiou means that God is died.  Ever since Plato’s Parmenides philosophy has labored under the impasse of the one and the many, ultimately needing to identify ‘being’ and ‘the one’.  Badiou escapes this dilemma with the axiomatic decision that ontologically ‘the one is not’ even if it is presented phenomenologically (11).  The unbinding of being from the one, accomplished via contemporary set theory, allows being itself to occupy the place of the actual infinite without recourse to a transcendent God.  Because of this set theory deposes the “living God of religion, the conceptual God of metaphysics, and the God of the poets” (18).  For Badiou, the metaphysical God is now known to have never existed, the religious God can no longer be encountered in thought, and the Romantic God of Hölderlin and Heidegger is revealed as merely nostalgic (19-20).  In outlining the contemporary understanding of arguments for the existence of God, Depoortere essentially agrees with Badiou’s typology, but against deconstructive returns to a poetic God (mentioning Caputo explicitly), he but argues for the unity of the God of religion and the God of metaphysics, siding with the First Vatican Council’s understanding of the twofold order of knowledge and the possibility of a proof for the existence of God.  Explicating this proof, and relying on Denys Turner’s recent work on Aquinas, Depoortere argues that the statement “God exists” must function such that ‘God’ is a proper noun, and ‘exist’ is a judgment of actuality rather than conceptuality (48-50).  Because of this, arguments for the existence of God must rule out a univocal use of being or existence without implying equivocity.  In other words, contemporary arguments for the existence of God must argue toward analogy, not from it (54-56).  And this, Depoortere argues, is exactly what Badiou’s ontology does.

            To show this Depoortere examines part one of Badiou’s Being and Event, and other relevant texts.  He centers around the themes of the being of the one, the void, and the infinite. Concerning being, Depoortere excellently explains how Badiou relates set theory to ontology as the presentation of being qua being.  Via the theory of the multiple, Badiou argues that “the ontological situation is that situation in which total abstraction is made of all particularity and in which no longer this or that is presented, but presentation as such” (64).  In this way, unlike contemporary constructivists, ontology is not derived from language, but the reverse (66).  This however, means that Badiou must postulate some initial place from which to infer being, since language does not accomplish this.  The ‘void’ achieves this as the multiple-of-nothing which puts set theory on its way as the pure multiple, before the one and the many.  The void is the multiple included within each presentation as nothing (69-72).  As Depoortere says, “Everything which is presented, the whole regime of presentation, characterized as it is by the dialectic of the one and the multiple, is a fabric woven out of nothing but ‘the void’ which is itself in-different to this dialectic because it is neither one nor multiple” (81).  And from this pure multiple springs the actual infinity of being, uncoupled from any transcendent grounding.  Based in the immanence of the void, transfinite numbers exist as actual infinities, even while themselves expanding into new levels of infinity (81-94).  For Badiou, the significance of set theory, then, is that it articulates an understanding of transfinite numbers that encompass and surpass the infinite succession of ordinal numbers, without recourse to a transcendent actuality.

            After outlining Badiou’s ontology, Depoortere turns to Badiou’s conception of actual infinity to offer his theological evaluation.  While Badiou rejects Cantor’s theological conclusions, who founded set theory, and announces an ontological atheism, Depoortere interrogates Cantor’s distinction between “the transfinite ‘increasable actual infinite’ accessible to mathematics and ‘the unincreasable or Absolute actual infinite’, or God, not accessible to mathematics” (110). Depoortere points out that Cantor even speaks of created and uncreated infinity suggesting a possible “up-to-date version of Aquinas’s distinction between created being as finite and uncreated being as infinite” (112).  Cantor postulated an Absolute actual infinite because increasable transfinite numbers do not make sense without it (113).  From the level of everyday mathematics, one need not account for this Absolute, and indeed can axiomatically reject it, which Badiou does.  But, Depoortere argues, once mathematics has been elevated to the level of ontology, as Badiou also does, this restriction begs the question in favor of atheism (120).  If this restriction is eliminated there is no reason to assume the atheistic nature of set theory, but rather it makes it possible to rethink a traditional distinction.  Instead of placing a divide between creature and creator as that between the finite and infinite (124), the divide is between the finite and transfinite on the one side, and absolutely infinite on the other (125).  Or rather, “Aquinas’s distinction between finite creation and infinite Creator can simply be kept on the understanding that ‘finite’ now includes both what has traditionally been understood by it and the transfinite” (125).  The upshot of this conclusion, for Depoortere, is that the Absolute is still partially comprehensible within the transfinite as limit concept.  Or rather, set theory itself suggests a principle of analogy completing the requirements of a modern proof for God’s existence (126).  Of course Depoortere notes this proof still needs to be developed, but within the set-theoretical universe, this proof does not seem excluded out of hand as Badiou had hoped.

            For as short as the book is Depoortere does a remarkably good job digesting the relevant information regarding Badiou’s ontology and offering a succinct critique and proposal (which is insufficiently reflected in the above summary).  But he does admit it is merely a first step towards a theological evaluation of Badiou.  Nevertheless, while Depoortere states his intention to only focus on Badiou’s ontology, Badiou is explicit that his ontology is in service to his theory of the event and the subject it produces, and therefore a lack of engagement in the later realms of Being and Event hinders Depoortere’s theological evaluation in two ways.  The first concerns Depoortere’s criticism of Badiou’s axiomatic decision, against Cantor, to affirm those aspects of set theory that set it against all versions of theism.  Badiou would argue that in the figure of the subject itself is revealed the halting point of set theory and is the beyond of mathematics, contra the assumption of a grounding Absolute infinite.  In this sense Badiou is eminently a modern Cartesian and/or Hegelian cum Lacanian.  Second, a more robust engagement with Badiou’s theory of the event, and its production of the subject, would problematize Depoortere understanding of the relation of faith and reason grounded in the First Vatican Council.  While Depoortere is certainly to be praised for resisting the circle of faith presupposing faith expressed in various enclave or sectarian theologies (see his long final note on 146-147), Badiou’s work precisely questions what is and is not sectarian in regard to politics and thought itself and the function of faith, which needs to be grappled with theologically.  All in all, while one might disagree with Depoortere juxtaposition of a rationalist version of Thomism and Badiou, its results are very compelling as an attempt to actualize a contemporary proof for God within the Scientific Age.

Micro Review: "God in Postliberal Perspective"

God in Postliberal Perspective: Between Realism and Non-realism 

By Robert Andrew Cathey

Ashgate, 2009

As the "between" of the subtitle indicates, Cathey (McCormick Theological Seminary) takes himself to be charting a course between the Scylla of realism and the Charybdis of anti-realism, with specific reference to the doctrine of God. Anti-realism is represented by Anglican theologian Don Cupitt (a British analogue to Mark C. Taylor). The realism pole is less defined, but seems to be associated with fundamentalism or "conservativism." Postliberalism thus represents a third way. However, Cathey's analysis complexifies this middle space. Rather than involving the usual suspects (Lindbeck, Frei, Hauerwas), Cathey's exegesis of the doctrine of God involves postliberal theologians David Burrell, William Placher, and Bruce Marshall. But ultimately Cathey's project is apologetic: whose theology is more likely to make Cupitt happy? In light of this question, postliberals like Placher end up being rejected as "internal" realists, and Cathey's "postliberal" approach feels more like Tillich or Ogden for a new generation. In this respect, Cathey's work reminds me of more interesting articulations by Philip Clayton or LeRon Shults. The result is akin to the Clintonian strategy for the Democratic Party post-Reagan: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Cathey's "postliberal" process theology is more liberal than post.