Christ, History and Apocalyptic: A Symposium, part 5

While comments from the previous engagement are still (!) trickling in, today's penultimate engagement of Nathan Kerr's Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission comes from Douglas Harink around chapter 5 entitled "John Howard Yoder: The Singularity of Jesus and the Apocalypticization of History."  Harink is Professor of Theology at the Kings University College in Edmonton, Alberta, and author of Paul Among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology Beyond Christendom and Modernity.  Again, please do not forget to chime in with your thoughts, comments, and questions by clicking on this link below.

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Benjaminian Ruminations on Yoder and Kerr

I am very grateful to be asked to contribute to this symposium on Nathan Kerr's book. The amount of critical attention Nate's book has already received is testimony to its quality and significance, as is the outstanding engagement it has already generated on this blog. I am responding to Chapter Five on "John Howard Yoder: The Singularity of Jesus and the Apocalypticization of History." Yoder is clearly the hero of Nate's story of apocalyptic theology insofar as Yoder's theology breaks free of the teleological progressivism in Troeltsch, the "obscure metaphysics" of time and eternity in Barth, and the near dissolution of Christology into ecclesiology in Hauerwas. According to Nate, for Yoder "apocalyptic" names the singular event of the incarnation, life, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in which God breaks into and opens up history to God's own reality and sends the Holy Spirit to liberate us for participation in that singular apocalyptic event through our own "unhanded" historical acts of doxology and liturgy.

I have no argument with Nate's rendering of Yoder's theology, except to say that he often makes that theology clearer, and perhaps even better than we find in Yoder himself. It would be hard to find thirty pages anywhere that do a better job of stating what Yoder has to contribute to the discussion of apocalyptic and history. We see Yoder in the best light possible here; and so it is not Nate's reading of Yoder that I will critically engage, but rather the messianic/apocalyptic theology as such that takes shape via Yoder in this chapter. I do so as one for whom Yoder informs my every theological move.

Haunting the pages of Nate's book is Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History." And rightly so: Benjamin's meditation on "the messianic" now seems to me to be as crucial as the works of Barth and Yoder for shaping an apocalyptic theology. At the end of chapter five Nate invokes Benjamin again as the one who, with his concept of "Messianic time," calls us to "make the...passage from historicist political ideology to the revolutionary transformation of history" (159). Yoder's theology is surely focused on messianic apocalyptic agency as the "revolutionary transformation of history." "History" for Yoder and Nate just names the way in which the future is fundamentally altered through the non-teleological messianic agency of Christian mission.

But just here Benjamin, it seems to me, is about something quite different. It is not the future - and certainly not mission - that is the primary concern of his "Theses." Rather, for Benjamin, the concept of the messianic is in the first place about keeping faith with the past, in fact, keeping faith with the dead. The past is "the concern of history." "The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply" (Thesis 2). For Benjamin messianic agency has a "retroactive force... by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history" (Thesis 4).

Jesus the Messiah keeps faith with the dead. He becomes one of them. In fact, the dead are dead because the Messiah dies - his death has "retroactive force": "One died for all; therefore all have died." All of the dead are dead in the dead Messiah. The Messiah's historical action is his solidarity with the dead in his crucifixion (which is the end of his revolutionary action) and in his resurrection, the redemption of the dead by the action of God. He settles the claim of the past with his own death and resurrection. I do not see this solidarity with the past and the dead in Yoder. Redemption of the past is missing. Yoder (and Nate) are (still) agent-oriented, missional, eschatological in their concept of history. They are focused on life, active participation, transformative action, new creation, the coming reign of God. But for Benjamin "redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past - which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l'ordre du jour - and that day is Judgment Day" (Thesis 3).

The apocalyptic gospel is the messianic redemption of the past, resurrection of the dead, justification of the ungodly. History is not simply "opened" to a new future (true as that is). It is retrieved, taken up, judged, purified, transfigured, given again in eternity. Christ's messianity is uncontained by historical linearity; his apocalypse is cosmic as well as historical. Some sort of metaphysics of time and eternity (perhaps even an obscure one) would be necessary to make sense of that. What is the metaphysics of the Transfiguration? When these things are placed in the background or ignored, as I think Yoder tends to do, we are tempted to turn again to another "historicism" (as indeed Nate says we must), to the history that now opens up, through apocalyptic "unhanded" human action to be sure, but through human action in history nevertheless. And so justification in Yoder's Politics is about the inauguration of a new social order. The sacraments in Body Politics are about social processes. Doxology becomes a politics of mission. But the apocalypse as the radical divine-messianic reclamation of lost time and dead stuff itself gets lost. Is there salvation for Israel "according to the flesh"? Will the whole historic, baptized, divided, ungodly church be redeemed? Will even the kings and nations of the earth bring their glory into the city of God? Will the whole groaning creation know the liberty of the children of God? Does the hope of the world rest, finally, not with a new apocalyptic politics of mission, but with Judgment Day? I fear that Yoder is in the end not apocalyptic enough.

And I worry, because, as I said, Yoder continues to inform my every theological move.

Comments

[myles]

this was the chapter that I had the most quibbles with, i think, mostly because of the construal of Yoder as apocalyptic. I have to wonder if what we find in the sacraments, for example,(as Steve Long noted in his comment in the last section)is not the ultimate extension of the reasoning begun with the dissertation and on through Politics itself, that ultimately for Yoder, social shape eclipses anything apocalyptic, i.e. extra-social that stands over against social construals.

That being said, I appreciate the 'apocalyptic' retrieval that Nate brings to the discussion of Yoder. The thing that Nate rightly notes divides Yoder from Hauerwas is Yoder's distinction between Christology and ecclesiology, that the later bears witness to the former, but does not encompass it. But Doug's question, I think, bears answering: if Yoder's project hinges on a new social order, and requires an 'unhanding' of history, where is the church in this unhanding? it would seem that for a true 'unhanding' to occur, there would have to be more than sociality in play here in 'apocalypse'.

More, but I'll stop here.

[Adam Kotsko]

Why should there be more than sociality at play? Is it impossible to think apocalyptic in the absence of transcendence?

[Halden]

I think we would do well here to interpret Yoder's notion of sociality as Kerr does, namely as a "sociality of dispossession." The new social order that is evoked by the apocalypse of God is precisely a social order of disposession, of non-grasping, non-coerciveness that is patterened after Christ's singular agape. This is apocalyptic precisely because it is the "more" of God, the excessiveness of the Spirit of Christ coninuing to break into the world and actualize life free from the principalities and powers.

In other words, I don't think that sociality and apocalyptic are in the kind of tension that you seem to imply. Not, at least if sociality is understood in the Yoderian sense as dispossessive agape.

[Hill]

I think concerns about sociality are related in some fashion to Halden's earlier questions about "what does it ultimately look like." By this I mean that the particular social and ethical contours of the church are a part of some kind of (in some sense stable) tradition. How do we account for this while at the same time "unhanding" it. Certainly this is the work of the Spirit, but I think that Nate's work in this book perhaps doesn't provide a satisfactory account of this. This is hardly a criticism, as it is a rather short book and he is at work on these questions, I'm sure. I do think (given my very limited experience with the Yoderian corpus) that the account of tradition (or the past in general) provided by him leaves something to be desired, and I think this is related to Professor Harink's concerns in the main article.

[Paul Tyson]

It is clear that Douglas Harink has a great deal of admiration for Nathan Kerr’s book, and is deeply indebted to Yoder. Yet critically, Harink – via Benjamin – is suggesting that maybe Kerr’s book is not apocalyptic enough and is too focused on what we do as church. These would be serious criticisms indeed if they were valid, because recovering a Christian apocalyptic outlook and renouncing ‘effectiveness’ in the church are central concerns of Kerr’s.

Harink wonders if Yoder and Kerr are not apocalyptic enough because they fail to keep faith with the past and the dead – because they fail to allow the redemptive power of God to redeem the past (history) itself. This question then becomes a critique of Kerr’s “agent-orientated, missional, eschatological concept of history” as a sort of blinkedly forwards striving activism through which Kerr seeks to fire the praise and work of the church here and now.

I do not think that Yoder and Kerr are inadequately apocalyptic, nor that their emphasis on the practise of Christian life betrays a lack of faith in the redemptive work of God. And I doubt that the manner in which Harink describes Benjamin’s notion of the messianic is apocalyptic, at least in the Christian messianic sense.

In what follows I will briefly seek to: (a) unpack why a Christocentric, apocalyptic, future looking vision – a vision that holds faith with Him whom Moltmann calls ‘the God of promise’ – does not fail the dead and the past; and (b) note how the emphasis on the work/practise of the church in Yoder and Kerr does not amount to faithless activism.

(a). In his “Theology of Hope” Moltmann notes that “Remembering the promise issued aforetime means asking about the future in the past.” (SCM, 1968, p154.) This comment is in the midst of Moltmann’s exposition of how Paul takes issue with the Torah Judaism of his day which held that a “genealogical connection with Abraham [was] in itself soteriological” (ibid, 154). That is, reifying historical continuity itself is rejected by Paul, and the past – and those who died in the past – have hope and meaning for Paul in relation to the radical future of God. Though, indeed, Jesus notes that “God is not the God of the dead but of the living” (Mk 12:27) so that even dead people from the past – such as Moses and Elijah (though these apparitions of the transfiguration did not, in the normal manner, die) – are in some basic way alive in the Resurrection and the Life that Jesus Himself is. So the past as weakly messianic – time itself in this aeon before the parousia – has no deep leverage on Paul, thus his strong emphasis on the radically new and yet to be fully consummated work of God, which is nevertheless believed in via the promises and actions of God in time. In sum, the forward looking nature of Pauline apocalyptic thinking cannot be ignored. To say that Yoder is insufficiently apocalyptic because he is not concerned with the past and the dead could equally be applied to Paul. Or, such a past and death orientated view of messianic redemption could simply be something foreign to a distinctly Christian apocalyptic outlook.

(b). One of the things I found most encouraging about Kerr’s book is his yearning that the work of theology have concrete expression rather than be a mere mind game. Theology that is not expressed in the living missional worship of the church is not theology but mere theory. And so the mission of the church that is apocalyptic is mission conducted in good faith to the promised Return of the Lord, as empowered by the Holy Spirit, as enlivened in our time, in the forma revealed to us – historically and singularly – in the Way of Christ. Kerr has no interest in ‘doing God’s work’ much less ‘working for God’; yet in participating in the life of Christ now through faith (good faith in Him who promises) as enabled by the power of the Holy Spirit, the sign of the redemptive inbreaking of God into the world through the passion is given life, and so we become true witnesses to His Lordship. Yes, the fulfilment of our salvation will only come via the total destruction and complete redemption that is the Lord’s work on the Day of Judgement, and the church, of course, does not bring that about. But a church that does not concretely witness to the Lordship of Christ via participating in the life of Christ now, in time, has no witness to the great hope that is the horizon before us – the Lambs consummated triumph over sin, death and the devil. We have a work of faith to do – the work of witness enabled by the life of Christ Himself – in the practical expressions of the Christ-like corporate life that walks in the Spirit. Kerr has no interest in mere effective Christian activism. None at all. But neither is he resigned to an ineffective witness, a safe and comfortable life of ‘waiting’ for the return of Christ, without any costly Spirit enabled endeavour to live in the life of Jesus now. Pneumatology is very important to Kerr’s outlook, and rightly so. The life of Christ must be expressed, here and now, by the power of the Holy Spirit, if the worship and mission and theology of the church is to be true.

To conclude. Essentially Kerr and Harink share two of the same burning concerns; that we recover an apocalyptic understanding of Christian faith, and that we renounce “all too human” efforts to master and construct the Kingdom of God in our own (modern Western historicist) terms. I think Harink is right to seek to probe Kerr’s work critically in this direction, but I don’t think he actually finds anything of any substance by his use of Benjamin to that end in this piece. So it seems to me that Harink’s criticisms miss their mark. But, to say this is no intended slight on Harink. For being of strong Yoderist sensibilities myself, I have no idea how to provide a critical engagement with Nathan Kerr’s chapter on Yoder, the singularity of Jesus and the apocalypticization of history in such a manner as to make any serious cause for concern stick.

[Doug Harink]

Thanks for the comments thus far. Given Paul Tyson’s substantial and important response, I wonder if it might be helpful for me to clarify the point of my original post. It may be that my response to chapter 5 of Nate’s book was/is already too well-informed by chapter 6, and by a good deal of the discussion that has already gone on, particularly in relation to John Wright’s response to chapter 4. In any case, I offer the following few points as clarifications:
1.The first “problem” I have is that there is virtually nothing in the chapter on Yoder with which I disagree, at least by way of interpretation of Yoder and his role in Nate’s argument. I think Nate has read Yoder well, thoroughly, accurately and profoundly, to make a crucial point about Christ’s apocalyptic “independence” from the church and its effective history.
2.My main concern, however, is precisely with the theological (apocalyptic) status of the actual history of the church, of the church as a people, even an institution, which has endured through time, ‘factually,’ in all of the baptisms in the triune name, in all of the Eucharists celebrated, in all of the ordinations, indeed, in all of the stone cathedrals, megachurches, clapboard chapels and living rooms in which two or three have gathered in name of Jesus. I.e., Christendom. It is an ungodly history, people, institution(s) in so many deeply troubling and destructive ways. Over against this historical thing, I see Yoder (and Nate?) shaping a remnant ecclesiology, via a theology of mission. Of course,not in order to establish the church or enable it to survive as a remnant, but a theology of a remnant church which exists as such precisely because those who live apocalyptically (by unhanding history) simply become the remnant – that body distinct from the whole ungodly history of the church seeking to establish an identity for itself, and a role for itself in shaping the outcomes of history. Now, I fundamentally agree with the apocalyptic politics of mission which Yoder and Nate are after. And I am convinced that the church must be about such a mission. Contra Paul Tyson, I do not propose simply waiting for Judgment Day – rather, hastening and waiting! And therefore, in some sense, a remnant comes into being.
3.My question is this: What is the relation of the remnant to the whole, and what is the relation of the whole to the remnant? I worry that for Yoder and Nate the remnant in its apocalyptic mission is “saved” apart from the whole. That the ungodly whole more or less dissipates into the “world.” That the whole is not finally represented by the remnant, which stands as surety for the salvation of the whole. And here of course I am thinking about how Paul parses out the remnant of Israel in relation to “all Israel” in Rom 9-11. For Paul, when the Deliverer comes from Zion, he removes ungodliness from Israel, rather simply than seeking out the godly. The body of “all Israel” is justified, sanctified and raised from the dead – because of the remnant. Does the same hold for “all the Church” in its manifest historical ungodliness? The Church as distinct from the world by virtue of its innumerable factual baptisms and Eucharists? What I’m looking for here is probably some account of the ex opere operato sacramentality of Israel and the Church as historical bodies, and an account of the remnant in light of that. Strangely, I think even Barth in the Commentary on Romans could give some such account of Israel and the Church, insofar as representatively they, in their “religion,” offered up all the best that the “world” has to offer, which precisely as such stood under the most radical (dissolving and establishing) judgment of God. Here is where Barth (following Paul) seems more radically apocalyptic than Yoder, and where Barth’s earlier theology might be invoked to correct Yoder. Perhaps even Luther can help!
4.If we (and here I mean Yoder, Nate, myself, Halden) do not offer some such account of the Church catholic in the historical sense, in whose ungodliness we can and must first recognize our own, then our remnant ecclesiologies may represent our own prideful attempts to establish ourselves in our disestablishment, to take ourselves in hand in our unhanding of history. I don’t think Nate intends this, but does it hover on the borders of his proposal?
5. Maybe my earlier invocation of Benjamin is not so helpful in this regard.

Doug

[Doug Harink]

A small correction. I wrote:

'The body of “all Israel” is justified, sanctified and raised from the dead – because of the remnant.'

It is not really 'because of the remnant.' The remnant is the "firstfruits." The remnant is the advance promise of the redemption of the whole.

[Dave Belcher]

Doug,

This was a brilliant response. I have found your post and this response to be a very helpful turn in this conversation. So, thank you very much for your participation in this talk -- it's been edifying for me.

I can't speak for Nate on these questions, but I would like to entertain a possible way of responding (and admittedly for somewhat selfish reasons, as much of this touches on the topic of my master's thesis -- though I promise not to get into that explicitly!).

I do in fact think Luther can help us, actually! Luther understood the "evangelical" working within the catholic church to be a "leaven" for the "bread" (John Wesley was later to adopt much the same understanding of the Methodist societies in his "connexionalism" in Britain). Likewise, Michel de Certeau, in his Mystic Fable, describes the mystics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as deploying "tactics" upon (perhaps better, from within) the wider church body (especially inasmuch as much of the mystic spirituality grew from out of spiritual and monastic "orders" from within the church body).

Now, I don't think that Nate intends to say that the "dispossessed sociality" that is the ecclesia in exile is analogous to a "monastic order"...and for the same reason you mention: we must be careful, lest our "dispossession" itself turns into yet another possession! This is vastly important. Nor do I think, however, that Certeau wants to pigeon-hole the "mystics" operations and tactics to a monastic order -- for Certeau himself notes that the wider institutional church "accounted" for the orders, opening up space for their perpetuation as a way of deadening the threat for any sort of "revolution" (which he notes is a largely ideological move: a constitutive exception). What is stunning, though, is that the mystics, for Certeau, do not abandon the body upon which their "mad" tactics are performed.

When I read Nate's final chapter (which is of course tightly wound up with the chapter on Yoder), I get a similar feeling from Nate (no doubt Nate has read Certeau carefully). That is to say, I believe that Nate understands "ecclesia" to be operating upon the historical body that is the [institutional] church, even bound to it, and never abandoning it (nor "tradition"). Perhaps I am wrong here, but that is the way I read that last chapter. But, the sort of doxological sacramentality that is this dispossessed ecclesiality seems to point to something like this: the dispossessed church is a body of people who holds before the powers, which take captive the wider, institutional church body (one that you rightly mention is "an ungodly history, people, institution(s) in so many deeply troubling and destructive ways"), their very poverty as a sign of God's grace and mercy in the "apocalyptic singularity" of Jesus Christ (besieged and emptied by an-other, they point to an-other). The church (in the sense of a "remnant body" as you have outlined) is thus a "sacrament" insofar as it points beyond itself in its very condition as emptied before the glory of the crucified resurrected Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit. This is precisely a sign for the church, then, and through the church -- but by the power of the work of the Holy Spirit -- a sign for the redemption of all creation (it is the Spirit who both joins us to Christ (deification!) and works to bring about redemption in all things).

I hope I haven't stumbled too much in what I have said here, and hopefully have addressed some of your concern. Peace.

[Nate Kerr]

Thank you, Doug, for your post, as well as for this follow-up comment and for the continued conversation. Let me say first of all that adequately to answer the very important questions that Doug and Myles raise here, I would need to develop two areas of thought that I was not especially concerned to draw out in detail in my book: (1) a more sophisticated and apocalyptically informed understanding of eternity's relationship to time, and especially of an account of time's participation in eternity (this would go some way to addressing the "continuity" issue, and of the relationship of future to past); and (2) a fuller account of sacramentality vis-a-vis the apocalyptic and missionary account of Christ and the church I am articulating. Because to outline my thoughts here would exceed the bounds of this forum, and because both of these are issues that I am at work currently to address in my forthcoming publications, I will forego an in-depth discussion of either at this point.

I do want to address, however, Doug's question as regards any "remnant" that exists vis-a-vis the unfaithful church of history. I do not want to suggest that any faithful "remnant" at all is saved apart from the redemption of all Israel, the fullness of Christ's Church, or for that matter apart from the redemption of the world itself in the apocalyptic new creation. This question goes back, too, it seems to me, to the issue raised by Steve with regards to Jiocham of Fiore. Now, I think that this criticism would perhaps have real purchase (and perhaps it does for Yoder), if I were it not for two distinct points I make in the book. The first has to do with the way in which I am at pains to insist upon the independence of Jesus from the Church even and especially in his second coming in judgment, his parousia. Because it is with this coming that we have to do with the consummation of the new creation, the fullness of the Kingdom, and the handing of the Kingdom over to the Father, then the church exists in its witness to Christ in his first advent as sign and sacrament of that parousia. In other words, the "truth" of Christ's incarnation for the church here below cannot be rendered apart from its existence as sign of that which it is not in-itself, the transformation of all things for which creation groans. And so there is nothing "holy" about the church in-itself, nor is there a Christian "remnant" at all vis-a-vis an unfaithful Church (in the way Paul would speak of a remnant vis-a-vis unfaithful Israel). Rather, as sacrament, the church is seen for what it "is" precisely in the transformation of the world to which it is bound in missionary encounter. This is why the apocalyptic relation of the parousia to the church here below is so important vis-a-vis a teleological construal of the church here and now with regard to the parousia to come (a la Hauerwas). Because Hauerwas tends to see the parousia itself as the "fullness" of the church (and Yoder can do so at points to), there is no way to avoid the problem you are pointing up. But my understanding of the missionary church could only be construed as repeating that error on the assumption that the parousia, and the eschaton itself, were the fullness of the church. Whereas I see the eschaton as the church giving way to that which it is not in-itself, to that which here below it is only the sign and sacrament, viz., the transformation of the whole world itself into the new creation in which God will be all in all. To read what I am doing as making it possible to conceive a remnant that is somehow redeemed apart, in its purity, is rather I think only possible on the basis of a non-apocalyptic privileging of the "church" defined as teleologically oriented to the eschaton, as such and in-itself.

Finally, it is unquestionable to me that the apocalyptic unhanding of history by which the church itself lives in history itself occurs ex opere operato, as this unhanding is the work done in and by Christ, who is himself the sacrament of sacraments as the sacrament of the Kingdom, and not by any means the efficacious work of the one doing the unhanding. It is precisely the unfaithful church in all its institutions of stability and control that is unhanded here; the dispossessive movement of mission occurs as this church's losing of its "property." This, of course, would require a fuller account of sacramentality than I can offer here, as I already noted above. But I would suggest that mine is a sacramental view in which it is precisely those practices which the church has instrumentalized and sought to control in establishing a stable identity -- esp. Word and sacrament -- that are the means of her apocalyptic disestablishment in mission (qua this church). And so any prophetic voice that would speak truth to such unfaithful control might do so only as bound in solidarity with the unfaithful church through precisely Word and sacrament, which binding is of a piece with the church's being bound to the world ever-anew in mission in the sacramental event of its dispossessed sociality. In the end, all of this is premised upon an apocalyptic reading of sacrament, in which whatever else we say about it, baptism and eucharist are the work of Christ himself in his singular historicity, which we are made to participate in via the excess of the Spirit. They are thus the signs of our participation -- our true "sociality" of love -- in Christ. In fact, it might be that the kind of robust catholicity whereby we are bound together in a love that transgresses even sinfulness and unfaithfulness demands precisely some notion of "sacrament as social process," however reworked that notion might be from what Yoder meant by it. Else our apocalypticism depends upon a certain kind of sacramental idealism for whatever "continuity" we might be after (and this idealist error, I fear, is precisely Barth's problem in Der Romerbrief). This is why we must articulate such solidarity which you are after as a mode of "apocalyptic historicism," for Christ's singular person just is the apocalypticization of history. We must refuse the idealization and idealist determination of apocalyptic itself.

I'm afraid that this post is too wandering and probably raises more questions than it settles. And I'm afraid I don't have time adequately to proofread it before rushing out to pick up my daughter, but I'll float it out there anyway and see if it can't help move the conversation forward a bit.

[Hill]

This is great stuff.

[Paul Tyson]

Thanks Doug for your very helpful clarifications. I’m afraid I have the opposite problem to you; my comments come a day after I read Nate’s book (I live in Australia and have found it very hard to get a copy of Nate’s book), I haven’t been engaged in the conversations of the previous chapters at all, and my response is tightly focused on chapter 5.

Your clarifications have enabled me to see what you were driving at in your original critical engagement clearly now. Your question ‘what is the relationship of the remnant to the whole?’ is a very important question, I am sure this question expresses concerns shared by Nate, and yes, any attempt to call us to radical discipleship under the Lordship of Jesus cannot but risk being seen as just another splintering of catholicity.

I was fortunate to go to an Anabaptist conference on urban monasticism in Melbourne a few months ago. The thing that I found disturbing about that conference was that whilst some fringe radical Christian communities are trying to live more authentically and ‘counter-culturally’ after the forma of Christ in our world – and this is not much of a concern for ‘mainstream’ Christianity – yet the sense in which such attempts at radicality need, in important regards, to be prophetically and compassionately FOR the ‘mainstream’ church was not a clear focus of this conference. Fealty to the Lordship of Jesus means that the witness and work of the church is as much concerned with the unity and healing of the body of Christ as it is with non-conformity to this world (see John 17 where witness and unity are directly linked). After Constantine the challenging practise of living under the Lordship of Jesus, then, often involves a remnant style distance from ‘mainstream’ Christendom (now hard to distinguish from ‘the world’) – but a distance which is FOR the catholic church as much as it is against the principalities of idolatry, privilege, power and necessity embedded in Christendom (what John calls ‘the world’).

Historically, monasticism arrises as a result of Constantinian Christendom, for prior to Christendom there was no need for a ‘remnant’ radical church within a larger politico-cultic edifice. But since Christendom, as Yoder and Nate well point out, catholicity now has some very big problems uniquely posed to us by Christendom. These problems need to be discerned and addressed. It is clear to me that this is what Nate is seeking to do. Further, whilst the extent to which such a task must be for the catholic church does not seem to gain much attention in Nate’s book (hence your initial concern Doug) there is no implication in Nate’s text that he is not making a call addressed to the whole catholic church towards radical remnant witness, which is FOR the world however much the very structures and necessities of ‘the world’ reject true life. Hence I think a universal redemptive desire is deeply embedded in Nate’s outlook, and so I think he is as radically apocalyptic as he should be.

Lesslie Newbigin’s understanding of election being redemptively FOR the sake of others – that is as a component of God’s larger eschatological redemptive purposes – is, I think, the correct understanding of how the remnant relates to the whole, be it in the context of Israel and the nations, Christians and non-Christians, or the monasteries and Christendom.

Thanks Doug for addressing my post so carefully. Your post was rich and deep. I think I get your drift clearly now, and am in full agreement with its thrust.

[Nate Kerr]

I rushed out after posting my comment and didn't realize Dave Belcher had posted at the same time. What an excellent post! And what an excellent series of exchange between Doug, and Dave, and Paul!

[Dave Belcher]

A great passage outlining what I was getting at in Certeau's Mystic Fable:

"Hence the mystics do not reject the ruins that surround them. They remain there. They go there. A symbolic gesture: Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, and many others wished to enter a 'corrupt' Order. Not that they sympathized with decadence, but these disorderly, quasi-disinherited places -- places of abjection, of trial (like the 'deserts' where monks once went to battle against evil spirits) and not places guaranteeing an identity or a salvation -- represented the actual situation of contemporary Christianity. They were the theaters of the present struggles. Like the Crypt of the Nativity in Bethelehem, like Jerusalem destroyed by centuries, they marked the very spot where a present foundation that would also be a restoration was to be awaited, where the metamorphoses and revivals of history could be 'suffered.'"

It is also worth mentioning that the "corrupt" order was deemed such because of an opposition between a "pure" inside and a "corrupt" outside -- the latter of which was often associated with the "impure" blood of the Marranos (it was a Jewish designation in other words). The mystics, according to Certeau enter into those "outsides," but in such a way as to open up the "inside" to an "outside" by their "mad tactics"...by their poverty, ecstatic experiences, identification with the riff-raff of society, and ultimately with their profoundly transgressive speech-acts. The mystics reside on the "coast" between inside and outside in order to blur such a distinction. Far from residing in a "pure" outside criticism of an unfaithful and "corrupt" inside, the mystics identify with what is deemed corrupt and place it before what is deemed pure as a sign of God's "option for the poor," as a way of pointing beyond the entire opposition of inside and outside. In my mind, then, what is happening here is very much close to J. Louis Martyn's description of the gospel of Jesus Christ as exploding open all "polarities" (as Nate has referred to, and as Josh Davis has worked out elsewhere)...it is not that the one pole overcomes the other...it is that the powers which have taken hold of this world, and which divide us into splintering oppositions (especially within "the Church"!) are destroyed by the apocalyptic interruption of Jesus Christ, in whom there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female...

To wit, far from abandoning the body, the dispossessed ecclesia holds open a space within the church -- the church which persists in history -- for the transformative work only the Spirit of Christ can work...and by so doing says that we are none of us in a position to say who is "in" and who is "out," since it is only by the power of the Holy Spirit, who joins us to the very body and blood of Christ that we "become" the sent-out-ones, gathered to proclaim a Word that remains irrevocably outside of us.

Peace.

[Dave Belcher]

All of this is to say, I think -- as Nate has indicated in response to Doug's well-stated question -- that the dispossessed ecclesia is exactly not Donatist in its exile, but the questioning and interruption of any such hedged position.

peace.

[Doug Harink]

I think we are getting somewhere (to speak teleologically for a moment). David Belcher and Paul Tyson have each made significant and critical contributions to the discussion which have enabled me better to grasp Nate’s argument, while adding depth and dimension to our understanding of what’s at stake here. David’s introduction of Certeau’s Mystic Fable (which I have not read, but probably must) illuminates the matters of “pure” and “corrupt,” “inner” and “outer” in relation to the being of the church in the world. The reference to Lou Martyn at this point is right on target. And Paul’s discussion of (new) monasticism’s relation to the wider church is also very helpful. Then there is Nate’s characteristically brilliant and intense contribution (which I’m not sure I always fully understand). Nate, I think you have convinced me, with your understanding of the church as sacrament, that you are not susceptible to the kind of remnant theology that I worried about in my previous contribution. You wrote:

“But I would suggest that mine is a sacramental view in which it is precisely those practices which the church has instrumentalized and sought to control in establishing a stable identity -- esp. Word and sacrament -- that are the means of her apocalyptic disestablishment in mission (qua this church)… And so any prophetic voice that would speak truth to such unfaithful control might do so only as bound in solidarity with the unfaithful church through precisely Word and sacrament, which binding is of a piece with the church's being bound to the world ever-anew in mission in the sacramental event of its dispossessed sociality. In the end, all of this is premised upon an apocalyptic reading of sacrament, in which whatever else we say about it, baptism and eucharist are the work of Christ himself in his singular historicity, which we are made to participate in via the excess of the Spirit. They are thus the signs of our participation -- our true "sociality" of love -- in Christ.”

What comes to mind for me at this point is the rather jarring statements of Jesus, both when he sends the disciples out into the towns of Israel (Matt 10) and in his encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman, that Israel, and not the nations, is to be the recipient of the gospel of the Kingdom – at least during his earthly mission. For the same reason, it seems to me, he is finally not content to remain in the hinterlands of Galilee and the Decapolis, but to make his messianic journey into the sacred heart of Israel – Jerusalem, the temple – where Israel’s compromise and collusion with the powers of this age is at its most extreme. He himself becomes the sacred heart of Israel, for Israel’s sake. The Messiah’s mission to the world is radically focused in the first place on a mission to Jerusalem, to his own people in that sacramental place where their identity is most intensely grounded and which simultaneously is the site of their greatest impurity. In that place he himself becomes God’s ‘real presence’ in Jerusalem, of which the temple is the broken sign. Only when he himself has sacrificially borne the sins of his own people (and of the whole world), and been raised from the dead, does he send the disciples out to the nations. In a reciprocal move, Paul, the apostle to the nations, announces the gathering of the nations in the Messiah and to Israel, not only for the nations’ own sake, but also for the sake of “all Israel’s” redemption. If these missionary moves of Jesus and Paul indicate a pattern to be imitated in some measure, “unhanded” mission will be characterized both by an ever more intensive journey into the sacred heart of the church, where we receive the living Messiah, and an ever more extensive journey into the world of the enslaved nations – and always with the conviction that these (whether the church or the nations) are my people, that their enslavements and sins are also mine, that there is no hope of redemption and transformation for us but in the unconditioned apocalyptic coming of Christ and the Spirit.

Well, I’m not sure whether this contribution is on target, or ends up leading elsewhere. But I am very grateful for the conversation thus far.

[Paul Tyson]

Yes Doug and Dave! I too think we are 'getting somewhere'. The remnant is a broken remnant, not a triumphant one (though the triumph of the Lamb is expressed in our brokennes, and in the inbreaking of the power of the Spirit upon the broken who yet hold to faith in His triumph). There is no pride in being dispossessed. And we are the core, we are born of Christendom, and the failings of the factual historical church - the great harlot, and yet our mother - are our failings and we cannot dissociate ourselves from 'them'. We are called to the fellowship of His sufferings - that is His total identification with our sinful state. It is we who kill the Christ, and He who has mercy on us. In this aspect, the diaspora seeks to worship the Lord and live as a witness, in brokenness, to His Way, and His triumph; FOR the church, FOR the World.

[Paul Tyson]

Just a little clarification. We are broken, and we as people participate in the 'harlotry' of compromise with the powers of this world in our churches and our own lives, for we cannot escape being modern Western Christians who live in the idoltrous context of the modern Western world. This is fact - but it is not good. If we claim our brokeness is in itself good, then we make a triumph out of our shame. There is a tension here that we can fall either side of. Christ is victor, and we are called to participate in His victory as a sacrament of His return - if there is no redemptive Holy Spirit enabled trasnformation in our lives then we do not witness well. And Christ is returning for a spotless bride - so any repentance, conversion, abiding in Him, and wlking in Hisa Spirit within the church is a sacrament of His work of purification. And yet we are always sinners saved by grace, we are always no different from anyone else, we are always broken and failing. So participation in the triumph of Christ does not lead to triumphalism, but neither should we see no fruit of the coming redemption in our lives, nor glorify brokenness itself.