Christ, History and Apocalyptic: Nate Kerr's Response

As this is the last contribution to this installment, I would like to take this opportunity especially to thank Eric Lee for organizing and facilitating this conversation, and to all at the Church and Postmodern Culture blog for hosting it.  Also, I would like to remind readers that the publisher is still offering a 40% discount on Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission to all readers.  To receive the discount, just go to the Wipf & Stock website, and when checking out enter the coupon code "KERR40". 

 

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Let me begin by expressing my profound gratitude to the contributors to this symposium – Josh Davis, David Congdon, John McDowell, John Wright, Doug Harink, and Jamie Smith – for being so gracious as to engage my work.  I am grateful also to the facilitators of this symposium and to all of those whom I cannot name that have participated in the conversation.  I take the conversation as a whole to have been a gesture of genuine theological friendship, of which I am grateful and to which I hope to remain faithful.  I have learned much more than I could say from the conversations that have taken place; and I eagerly look forward to the extension of those conversations as they go forward from here.  The contributors to this symposium and the conversations which have taken place have raised many criticisms and questions; many more, of course, than I could possibly hope to address in a single post.  So, rather than attempting to “answer” all of these questions and criticisms, what I should like to do in this response is to articulate what for me is at the heart of this conversation:  viz., the nature of Christ’s singular, apocalyptic historicity as constitutive of the “truth” of his lordship in history.  The reason for my focusing on this point in relation to the current symposium is that, for the most part, much of the criticisms and questions that have been put to my book have failed to engage my work at precisely this point.  And yet, it is this one point that is decisive for my book as whole, in regards both to the genealogy I tell as well as my own constructive understanding of Jesus Christ as constitutive of the irreducibly missionary existence of the church.  As a result of this lacuna, much of the criticisms that have been directed towards my own constructive proposals have failed also to account for how the very assumptions concerning the reality of Christ’s lordship in history underlying these criticisms might themselves be called into question by my own articulation of that reality.  Thus, the reason why I insist upon rehearsing my understanding of Jesus’ apocalyptic historicity as constitutive of the truth of his lordship, is because this is the one point which would be decisive for launching a serious debate over the questions that have heretofore been raised, especially as regards the recurrent question of whether or not my “ecclesiology” is adequate to the task I have set myself.  So my focus here shall not only be upon what I mean by Jesus Christ’s apocalyptic singularity (what Yoder calls Jesus’ “independence”) as constitutive of his lordship, but in what ways this singular historicity as such is constitutive of that very reality that we call “church.”

 

To begin with, I should like to recall, as my friend Josh Davis did in the very first post of this series, that the very subject of my book is that of Jesus’ “lordship.”  In fact, this is precisely what my language of “singularity” is meant to address:  viz., what it means to affirm, in history and in practice, the reality that “Jesus is Lord.”  My whole critique of Constantinian ideology and the recurrence of Hegelian and idealist residues in thinking about Christ’s relation to history turns upon the way in which these modes of thinking conceive that relation in such a manner as to render the church incapable, not just as a matter of accident but by definition, of witnessing to and embodying the truth of that lordship in its own historic life and practice. 

 

As against the backdrop of Constantinian and idealist modes of conceiving Christ’s lordship, my point about the singularity of Jesus’ apocalyptic historicity is a rather straightforward.  To insist upon the singularity of Jesus’ historicity as constitutive of his lordship in history is to insist that in the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth we are confronted with an event of such radically singular concreteness that it resists being rendered explicable in light of some other, more universal reality.  To be sure, to insist upon the apocalyptic historicity of Jesus is to insist that no account of Christ’s lordship whose axiom is the apocalyptic action of God can escape the problematic of “history.”  However, the point of focusing upon the singularly apocalyptic reality of Jesus’ historicity is to suggest that here the question of history is posed to us in such a way that the historicity of Jesus short-circuits any Hegelian or idealist mode of historical determination which requires that Jesus instantiate a universal reality, the recognition of which is then reflective and expressive of his own (and every other) particular “identity.”  The crucial point here, for me, is that where the “truth” of Jesus’ historicity is conceptualized according to this (inevitably dialectic) relation of particularity to universality, we will be led not only to an account of Christ’s lordship but also of Christian witness that prioritizes universality in such a way as to be determinative of every particular identity, including Jesus’ own.  The nature of Jesus Christ’s lordship will invariably come to be articulated in terms of his particular history as representative of a “concrete universal” (as in Barth), and Christian witness to that lordship will be reducible to Christianity’s exhibited (as practiced) commitment “to a particular way of structuring the whole” (as in Hauerwas).  This is the idealist temptation that I sought to trace throughout my genealogy:  Christ is thinkable as Lord only at the point of conceptualizing his universal significance, which conceptualization mediates the church’s “being” as the lived, historical instantiation of that universal reality.

 

By contrast, what I mean to articulate in stressing the manner in which Jesus’ singular, apocalyptic historicity is constitutive of Christ’s lordship, is the sense in which Jesus’ singular historicity is not only irruptive of this universal-particular structure, but also the sense in which the Christic logic of singularity names that truly catholic reality by which the church happens – and thus lives – in this world.  Let me explain what I mean by this. 

As the singular apocalypsis of God, Jesus just is the self-giving agape by which God is positively establishes the other as the one who is loved singularly as that one.  This is what Jesus, as “the sent one” of the Father, “makes known” of God  – his sending, his mission is that event of singular, outgoing love for the other that is God’s “eternal life.”  And it is precisely by way of this singular love that Jesus gives eternal life to all – every one – whom the Father has given him.  Jesus Christ is Lord precisely as the singular event of God’s self-giving love for the singular other – every singular other – as other; Jesus is the singular one through whom every other is constituted and loved as other by God.  The “truth” of Jesus Christ’s lordship is that it is through the singularity of Jesus that we ourselves are given to be who we are by way of participation in that singular, outgoing love for the other that is God’s eternal life.  But this means that Jesus is Lord – “glorified” – insofar as God loves us as other through Jesus only in the Holy Spirit.  Jesus is the “sent one” of God insofar as he is sent from the Father in the Spirit.  What the Spirit names is the excessive, ever-new recurrence of that love in which we are given to love each other as other, through the singular historicity that is Jesus as the “sent one.”  And thus we may say in some real sense that Jesus, precisely by way of his singular, apocalyptic historicity, is himself only ever present as Lord of history in that love by which we bound to one another as other within the contingent diversity of history itself, insofar as Jesus only ever is in his singular, contingent historicity by the excessive, sending power of the Holy Spirit itself. 

 

Now, in one sense the preceding paragraph could be read as a kind of theological interpretation of John 14-17.  But what I want to stress here is that it is at this point that I mean to speak of the “apocalypticization of history” that is effected in Jesus as the singular, outgoing agape of God, as than in which we are given not another “universal history,” but by which is established that one genuinely catholic historicity in which occurs the event of the church.  For the fullness of Christ as the “sent one” of God just is that love by which we are given singularly to love each other as other – by the power of the Spirit, who binds us to one another in love through the singular historicity of Jesus Christ.  Jesus is Lord in his singular historicity precisely insofar as he is sent from the Father by that very same power – the Spirit – which makes us in our own singular histories to participate in the singular agape of God that is the outgoing of Jesus Christ as “the sent one.”  “Church” does not thus name for me the particular historical realization or mediation of a particular universal reality or truth.  “Church” rather names the communion, the gathering, the congregation that occurs as we are made partakers of the fullness of that love (catholicity) in which we are bound to one another as other in being made participants in that singular, outgoing mission of God’s agape that is Jesus Christ (apostolicity).  (And thus, when I speak of the pneumatic excess by which Jesus is given as other to be received ever-anew in and by the witness of others, I am speaking of a logic that no postmodern account of alterity is sufficient to name, for I am speaking of the logic our participation in the trinitarian life of God that is internal to the one singular historicity of Jesus Christ himself.  I am speaking, in other words, of the catholic logic that is God’s singular agape.)

 

Thus, to conclude:  When I say that “mission makes the church,” I am not engaging in an exercise in ecclesiological conceptualization.  Rather, I am making an affirmation concerning that which occurs whenever and wherever the church is constituted as such – viz., our participation in the catholic, missionary historicity of Jesus of Nazareth.  It is by way of affirming the church as a matter of just such participation that I speak of the church as living according to the liturgical double-movement of dispossession and diaspora in this world.  My intent is not to speak theoretically about “the church” as such, but rather to discuss what is involved concretely in our movement into the glorious catholic reality that is our participation in Christ’s own non-territorial, subversive, and apocalyptic mission.  This is in no way to dispense with the “sacramental” life of the church as such:  in fact, I would be inclined to suggest that baptism and eucharist just are sacraments of dispossession and diaspora, respectively.  But they are this by way of a kind of sacramental “ricochet,” as it were; they are themselves sacramental as signs of the way in which the apocalyptic historicity of Jesus of Nazareth is itself the sacrament that “makes the church.”  To say “mission makes the church” is thus to insist upon precisely this point, viz., that it is Jesus Christ himself in his singular, apocalyptic historicity that constitutes the church.  That is the point on which the whole of the final chapter of my book turns.  To stress that the church lives in history solely by way of a dispossessive and diasporic liturgical movement will no doubt seem to be the basis for a rather haphazard “ecclesiology,” especially to those still bound to an idealist and Constantinian mindset.  And it is.  But it is so because it stresses all the more the necessity of a break with this idealist mode of thinking if we are to affirm the one genuinely catholic mode of life by which the church participates in the singular historicity of Jesus – the mode of life that is God’s own eternal, missionary life of outgoing love for the other.                                                                 

Comments

[d barber]

"To insist upon the singularity of Jesus’ historicity as constitutive of his lordship in history is to insist that in the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth we are confronted with an event of such radically singular concreteness that it resists being rendered explicable in light of some other, more universal reality."

Is this singularity of Jesus therefore its own universal reality? If so, what makes this universal reality differ from other ideological universal realities (concrete universal, etc)?

If the difference is obtained by insisting on singularity as non-universal, then what makes the singularity of Jesus's emergence differ from, say, the singularity of some singular plant's emergence?

[Nate Kerr]

Dan:

My point about singularity is a way of following Barth in refusing to abstract from the concreteness of Jesus' historicity in articulating to the way in which God relates to us in Christ. It is thus not simply a matter of thinking singularity as against universality. Jesus' is rather that of an apocalyptic singularity; it bespeaks what happens as the revelation of God in Christ. So, my response would be that for me singularity is not thinkable in abstraction from Jesus of Nazareth; there is no "singularity" as such apart from Jesus. This is to say as well that the singular "truth" of history's contingencies and particularities is not rendered according to a mere relation of a singularity that then encompasses all other singularities (which you rightly point out would make of Jesus' singularity its own universal reality); this truth is rather the positive relation that is established with each other that is the event of Jesus' self-giving, singular love of God for the other. In other words, by way of the notion of apocalyptic singularity, I am suggesting perhaps another way of thinking the pro me reality of God's revelation in Christ. Jesus' singularity bespeaks me as it bespeaks you, by way of the love that binds us in making us to be the one that we -- you and me -- are.

As to your second question, I would say that Jesus' singularity is not an "emergence." That is, as the purely irruptive event that is God's apocalypse, it does not arise from any "immanental" ground as such. The singularity of Jesus is the rupture of the logic of "emergence" -- in the manner, say, that an individual "emerges" in relation to the universal and particular in Hegel's logic. Jesus happens as the singular, transcendent event of God's action. I am constituted as the singular one that I am in this happening, as in this event God's action is an action that bespeaks my existence as "that one," as God's singular love for the other is always pro me. In the end, I'd rather think that the philosophical trope by which to articulate the catholic reatlity of this apocalyptic singularity, as I understand it, is not universality but rather repetition.

[David Fitch]

Nathan,

I come way late to this conversation. I just read your book and I have found it extremely helpful. I am sorry I missed participating in these posts. I believe your book speaks to the many conversations in the so-called missional church movement over the relationship between Christology, Ecclesiology and of course Missiology. Thanks for taking this conversation to a whole new level. Personally, I think you get Troeltsch right, Barth mostly right, Hauerwas is certainly susceptible to your critique, and your work on Yoder is immensely valuable, although from my vantage point, the distancing of Yoder from Hauerwas is overdone. In all, your book is both fair and scholarly.

I too struggle, along with some friends on this blog, over your “ontologization of the church” accusation towards Hauerwas. I can see how Hauerwas has left himself open to this charge. And you have certainly revealed this weakness well. For Hauerwas, as I read him, it takes a language and a formation of subject to encounter the living Christ as Lord. I am sure this language/subjectivity needs to be further described in terms of its relation to Christ or else we do have the subjugation of Christ by the church. For that matter, Catholics need to explain this for protestants just as protestants need to explain for the Catholics how the Bible does not become colonized in their worlds. I believe similar charges to your own have also been aimed at the post-liberal writers as well. (Yet I find it interesting that Craig Carter, in contrast to Nate Kerr, argues in several places in his The Politics of the Cross that Yoder is a post liberal). Thanks for drawing out the implications of these issues for us in all

So what I am still left wondering, and what I was hoping you’d address more directly in this last post of yours, was how is this apocalyptic event in history met apart from a social political body formed as the very extension of Christ, i.e. the Body of Christ as pictured in Ephesians? When you say (in this post) “in the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth we are confronted with an event of such radically singular concreteness that it resists being rendered explicable in light of some other, more universal reality,” where does this confrontation happen? As an isolated individual? In a language? Within a tradition? In an event that disrupts all of these? I think many see the church as the means here, but wouldn’t necessarily agree with your characterization of the church as a universal reality, especially when it is posited in such intentional post Constantinian terms by people like Hauerwas and Yoder. I hope this will not be read as a stubborn rehash of previous conversations here but as a direct question concerning your proposal of “Christ’s singular, apocalyptic historicity as constitutive of the “truth” of his lordship in history.”

It seems to me that, in the church, Christ’s Lordship over this people indeed is the reality of a political existence. It is not just an affirmation but indeed the very form of our political existence which becomes the basis of our witness. Apart from such a social “Body” how do we encounter Christ? How do we witness Christ? It seems if not the church, we are left with some sort of “protestant event,” or even worse, a positivist relation to Scripture where indeed the old problem of evangelicalism returns, the Bible is ontologized over Scripture. Because I cannot return to these old habits, I have landed much more comfortably with Hauerwas than say a position closer to yours.

Indeed the church can turn into your worst fears. Indeed I think you are right that it is this relation of the Christ to the church’s existence that is central to understanding where the church can go wrong. In a book forthcoming, I have been making the argument that evangelicalism today is a politic imploding precisely because it lost its core. In a political analysis which relies on Zizek’s conceptualization of ideology, I argue that evangelicals lost their core and therefore built their social existence “ideologically” around a empty void, an antagonism. It built its belief and practice around modern structures in autonomy from God which resulted in a starkly antagonistic, anti-missional presence in the world.

I suggest that any church without Jesus at the core of its politics, as inextricably derived from the historical living Christ (say ala de Lubac’s three fold Body) will lead exactly to the kind of arrogant, combative, coercive politic that is incapable of embodied gospel witness/ participation in God’s Mission in the the world. Indeed as the ecclesia is evacuated, I suggest that even the poor become instrumentalized. Ironically I use Yoder to help Hauerwas achieve clarity in this issue.

I think both sides in this debate on this blog (including you and I) are both shooting for an “irreducibly missional existence” for the church. I think your work here furthers all of us towards this end by provoking the intensity around the exact questions so important for the Missional existence of the church. I think you’ve done missional practicioners like myself a service in raising many of the questions that are circulating these days within missional church circles but never get carefully thought out in the ways you have done. I hope to read it more carefully in the months to come. I intend to use it in some forthcoming missional theology classes I teach. I applaud the book. Hope we can meet along the way!

[Nate Kerr]

David:

Thank you for your kind comments about the book and for your probing critical questions. I am grateful that you found the book helpful, and even more grateful for the challenge you put to me and my thinking in your reading of the book. Allow me to say a couple of things briefly, which will inevitably be inadequate.

As to your second paragraph, on Hauerwas. You are exactly right that for Hauerwas it takes the linguistic formation of the subject to encounter Jesus as Lord, and you are exactly right in that this needs to be described more directly in relation to Jesus Christ to prevent subjugation of Christology to ecclesiology. I simply do not think that Hauerwas quite gets us to where we need to go here. For me, the formation of the subject for Hauerwas appears to happen prior to and apart from the encounter. And this is bound up with Hauerwas' latent idealism, as I see it. He is still caught within the subject-object problematic, one could say. There is thus left a gap between "being" and "act," "knowledge" and "faith," and "intellect" and "will" that betrays a gap between the work of the Son and Spirit in salvation. Of course, this wasn't the argument I made in the book, and all of this would need to be substantiated in a different reading of Hauerwas than I gave. But my concern would be that Hauerwas' uniquely cultural-linguistic form of "natural theology" turns out to be its own kind of "mediating theology" (the Hauerwas of With the Grain of the Universe looks quite Schleiermacherian to me, precisely at his points of divergence from Barth).

Secondly, and more constructively, as to your point about Christ's lordship being constitutive of a certain mode of political existence. I agree with this, and yet what I am pushing towards with the final chapter of the book is that this political existence needs to be thought of in terms of the church as the sacrament of the Kingdom of God, of the Eschaton. So the church's political existence needs to be determined eschatologically and more specifically apocalyptically. As the sign of the apocalyptic inbreaking of the eschaton, the church would thus be the sign of the passing away of the old age (the world) as coinciding with the breaking in of the new age (the Kingdom of God). What is important about this is that the church is neither of these -- neither "world" nor "Kingdom" as such. The church is the sign of that inbreaking as it is happening and as it has been made real and living in the historicity of Jesus Christ. And so, what I would say is that the politics of the church is best thought of not as a "counter-politics" but rathter as an apocalyptic-eschatological politics of encounter with the world. David Bosch I think has excellently articulated the sense in which for Paul in the New Testament the church's mission is that of ongoing conversion to the living Lord Jesus Christ in the world (and Doug Harink has made this point as well in his book Paul Among the Postliberals). The point that follows upon this is that we must think of Jesus as Lord first in relation to the world, and of Jesus as head of the church (the "body") precisely insofar as he is first Lord over all creation.

In that sense, your reference to Ephesians is helpful, and it is indeed, as I pointed out at the beginning of the final chapter, that it is to Ephesians that I would really look first to ask with Yoder how Jesus Christ's historicity continues to be at work in the church. My concern in this book was to speak to the sense in which Jesus is living and so is free and independent in relation to what we know as "the church" -- his identity is that of one who is there before us; as risen he has gone ahead of us. Jesus is not the possession of the church; and the church is sacrament of precisely that reality. The church's life in history has to do with being bound and converted ever-anew to fidelity to Jesus Christ as Lord by being bound and converted ever anew to the other in the charity that is the Spirit. And so I would want to say that the "center" of the church is outside itself; and that the church lives "Christ-eccentrically" (to borrow a neologism from Rom Coles). Now, what I want to say is that Christ has indeed promised to live as the resurrected one in history as not without his church. But this does not mean that the church is some prior condition according to whose terms Christ is encountered as Lord. The sacraments do not then prescribe for us our encounter with Christ, but rather themselves bespeak the imperative of dispossession, or better, the grace of being given by the Spirit anew to the encounter with Jesus that cannot be specified in advance, the encounter with Jesus in "strangeness" (as Barth would put it), in the trust that there we will be met by the living Christ in such a way that his presence will bring to action the renewal of that love, that agape, that koinonia that is alone the sign of the Kingdom that we name "ecclesia." And so the hope of mission remains precisely this visible koinonia, this visible community, which is politically visible precisely as the sign of that heavenly polis to come, that polis which the church "is not" in-itself. In fact, speaking dogmatically, one might say that the "other side" of dispossession in mission is transfiguration.

At any rate, those are some scattered thoughts on your questions in light of my final chapter. The question still remains: how does this missionary encounter with the world shape the life and practice that we call church. That is the question I really want to leave the reader with. And that is the question I really do want us to think towards. Trust me when I say that in my ongoing work I am seeking to address precisely these questions. But I do want us to linger a bit longer with this "how" question. I really do want us to sit with the stark fact that the reality of Jesus Christ in the world and the exigence of mission does not allow us merely to rest content with continuing to go on going to church in the same old comfortable ways. I really do think that you are right when you say that we are all (in this conversation -- on the blog, even my interlocutors in the book, such as Hauerwas) seeking to think together what it means for the church to be "irreducibly missional." And I just want as humbly as possible to suggest that we have perhaps not yet thought through the radical implications of what we mean when we say that the "how" of the church's political existence is itself irreducibly missionary.

Well, I'll leave things there for now. It's late and I've probably rambled more than having actually addressed your questions. If there's something it would be helpful for me to speak more directly to in clarification, please let me know. I'll try to focus my response as such. For now, I'll just note that, in checking out your website, I see you teach at Northern Seminary in Lombard. I am from the Chicago area and my father is still the pastor at First Baptist Church in Clarendon Hills. So indeed I hope we can meet; perhaps when I am next up that way visiting family we shall have a chance to get together.

[David Fitch]

Nate,
Thanks for the careful response. I hope this conversation continues. If you're visiting nearby, please give me a call!

[Adam Kotsko]

Nate,

Thanks for the great response. I just have one question: is it not the case that you need a better ecclesiology to pull off what you're trying to do here?

[Hill]

I'd say that yes, perhaps Nate's ecclesiology is insufficient to do the work he would have it do.

[Adam Kotsko]

Plus, does Hauerwas really "ontologize" the church? That sounds like it would be bad, whereas Hauerwas is good, so.... Could you address that?

[Nate Kerr]

Hill:

It is interesting that in his recent response to my book at the Wesleyan Theological Society, John Wright described me as having a (non)ecclesiology. I think he is partly right. But I don't even think I have that. I actually don't think "ecclesiology" as such does real work, and so insofar as it does do work, I often think it is propogandistic work. I think Nicholas Healy's book Church, World, and the Christian Life is very helpful on this point. I do not think that "ecclesiology" or even "church" as such is something that we do (and I am using "do" in this sentence very deliberately, as referring to a mode of action distinct from being and reflection). I think church happens as that reality and that way of living that is opened to us in the double-movement of conversion and discipleship. And I think that way of living, that reality that we call church is an event of doxological trust that the God we praise is indeed faithful to the work that God has promised to do. Too many so-called "ecclesiologies" are a disavowal of that trust; too often they belie the fact that we know longer worship a God who is sufficient to do the work we would have that God to do. And so, as both Georges Florovsky and James Alison have each suggested in different ways, the emergence of the discipline of "ecclesiology" in the history of the church may actually be "heresiological" (the phrasing is mine). This goes back to the point that my central concern in the book is with the truth of what it means to say that "Jesus is Lord." That truth is not something that a church is constitutive of, according to which an "ecclesiology" could then be deemed sufficient or insufficent. That truth is a reality that we are given -- in the apocalyptic action of God in Christ -- to live and to embody. It is Jesus Christ (in his mission, as the sent one of God) who constitutes the church, and not vice versa. Therein lies our identity; and that identity is not dependent upon what one might call "fundamental ecclesiology" for the mediation of its truth. And, it is this distinctively "ecclesiological" mode of "natural theology" that I am concerned with critiquing in my claim that Hauerwas "ontologizes" the church. So my concern is more with what happens as the living reality that is the church, as the ecclesial, catholic, and liturgical vision opened to us in the person of Jesus Chris, and much less with discerning whether this or that "ecclesiology" is more or less sufficient to providing the "conditions of possibility" for that "happening" (which is usally, I think, what ecclesiology is about).

(All of this I hope will come a little clearer in my second book, which is essentially a set of ecclesial investigations, and the introduction to which is entitled: "Again Ecclesiological Idealism.")

[Tony]

Does Nate pay close enough attention to what Jesus Christ's intentions are in producing the Church out of himself? I am sure he is correct that there are ecclesiologies that are truly problematic from a Christological point of view, but does Nate respect enough Jesus's intentions with regard to the Church not just as his body but also as his spouse, one that Jesus loves and considers as a kind of "partner," and therefore having a kind of vis a vis existence before the Lord? Nate seems better is saying what the Church is NOT, but much more vague in saying what the Church IS... At points, it almost seems that, on a reading of Nate, Jesus would rather repudiate his Church or consign it to oblivion, as if it is something superfluous and could be done away with. Are we being true to Jesus by doing so? There is perhaps here a need for Nate to unpack his thesis about the Christological and ecclesiological link through a historical survey; I can understand how what he wants to say is truly important for the life of the churches today, but perhaps greater clarity could be had by his engagement with thinking about the Church through the centuries...

[d barber]

Nate,

I realize that my question belonged to another debate, the political theology one where you reply to me. So, I've posted a remark on your reply at

http://itself.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/for-the-record/

[Adam Kotsko]

Is the object of Christ's work the church or the world? If it's the world, then you have to talk about the church in a very different way -- perhaps the way Nate talks about it. So many of the people in these comment threads seem to feel like Nate isn't giving enough respect or reality to the church, but it's clear that the happening that Nate calls "the church" is very serious and important and an irreducible moment in the work of Christ -- it's just that it cannot be regarded as an end in itself.

Nate's criticism of the insistence on ecclesiology is that it inevitably makes the church a kind of end in itself. Yet commenters keep coming back at him with this ecclesiology question -- not claiming that his argument against ecclesiology is inadequate, but as though he hadn't even addressed it. (That's what my previous comments in this thread were trying to make fun of.) I don't think Nate's argument is difficult to understand in the least, and the fact that it is so often ignored in these discussions -- to the point that I might even argue that despite the theology blogosphere's evident love of this book, very few theology bloggers have understood it, even to the degree necessary to state the thesis -- seems to me to point toward a serious mental block among "the church"-oriented types (who seem to make up a critical mass of theology bloggers), the existence of which actually provides further evidence in favor of Nate's thesis.

I think you all need to read Dorothee Soelle's Christ the Representative. I've posted a quote on my blog.

[Hill]

For the record, my above comment was tongue in cheek, hence the egregious use of italics (did I get that part right?) and five cent theological snipe phrases about "insufficiency" and being "unable to do work." I saw Adam's comment and couldn't resist throwing a little more gas on the fire. If you continue to respond so thoughtfully to my blog comment mischief, I will continue to be mischievous. I definitely smell what you're cooking. Thanks.

[James K.A. Smith]

Unh, Professor Kotsko, could you, like, talk more slooooowwwllly, and stop using all those big words? It's hard for us to, uh, "understand" (another one of your big words).

And could you please use the word "polis" more, because we really like that? Thanks, Professor! You're awesome.

[Adam Kotsko]

Professor Smith,

That is a stupid response to a serious comment.

[James K.A. Smith]

Sorry, Kotsko, which was the "serious" comment? One of the first two where you mocked contributors to the symposium? Or the third one where, as per usual, you heave a gnostic sigh and lament the fact that only a tiny cabal of Olivet Nazarene University alumni, who've nursed at the breast of Craig Keen's secret wisdom, really "understand" anything in theology today?

[Adam Kotsko]

No, that was not what my last comment was about. I explicitly said that Nate's argument is not difficult to understand! His argument may well be wrong, and all you guys might be right to hammer away at the ecclesiology point. I have no way of knowing that based on the symposium, however, because none of you have actually addressed his arguments directly -- you just keep trying to figure out whether his "ecclesiology" is good enough, whereas he's trying to argue against having an ecclesiology. You're not confronting his point head-on at all! And it's not like I'm making this up: Nate himself feels the same way, or at least that's how I read his response here. (I don't pretend to speak for him, despite the fact that we do have a telepathic link as members of the Craig Keen Borg Collective.)

The second comment I made about Hauerwas was admittedly petty, but I do sincerely think that's the level that the debate was working at -- Nate provides what seems to me to be unequivocal textual evidence for his claim that Hauerwas "ontologizes" the church, and everyone acts uncomfortable with the claim, but doesn't offer any counter-evidence. (The actual response to the Hauerwas chapter was even worse on all fronts -- I'm talking about remarks from other symposium respondents and commenters.)

This mismatch was all over the event as a whole, with the exception of Josh Davis's response (and I'll note that Josh never studied with Craig Keen and has probably never even set foot at Olivet -- yet somehow miraculously managed to understand a clearly written and organized book! Will wonders never cease?!). And now the mismatch continues as you respond to my good-faith, if brashly-worded, assessment with petty sarcasm -- as though an argument is a personal attack! You did the exact same thing when Nate pushed back against what he took to be your misreading in your own response -- all of a sudden it's personal, Nate should be grateful you're participating at all, you're a busy man and shouldn't be expected to catch every nuance of course, you're just trying to catch snatches here and there while shuffling your kids to their various activities.... Have a little humility, man! You admit you're not perfect, that you miss things -- yet you act like it's a personal attack when specific things you missed are pointed out. Should we moderate our tone? Okay, probably. But you should definitely respond in good faith to good faith arguments, rather than treating everything like a personal attack.

If you'll go back and read my long comment, I said that the attachment of this crowd to a certain way of talking about "the church" is producing a mental block. Nate's book isn't being met with total incomprehension -- it's being systematically misunderstood by very smart people. There are recurring patterns of misunderstanding, in other words. Yes, I did say that no one seems to be getting the main thesis -- but that's because that thesis directly cuts against the fetishization of "the church" that characterizes this crowd. He is saying something that you don't want to hear, and so to the extent that you do hear it, you dismiss it. Mostly, I'd assume that you try to be "charitable" by setting aside that obviously wrong view of "the church" -- similar to how everyone is so "charitable" to Hauerwas as to systematically ignore Nate's exhaustive evidence of his ontologization of the church.

My complaints, in short, are grounded in the specific circumstances of this symposium and of trends I've noticed in theological blog conversations in general -- not in your stupidity or anyone else's stupidity here (if I thought you all were stupid, why would I be frustrated at your lack of understanding? It would be totally expected!), nor in my access to some kind of occult knowledge that I gained by communing with Craig Keen (with whom I personally took a grand total of four courses, and from whose thought I have become significantly distanced in the six years of graduate study I have undertaken since leaving Olivet). It may well be the case that since we've never met before and never, to my knowledge, even exchanged blog comments except in this very symposium, that you don't know me or my motivations very well and that maybe you should respond to the actual ideas expressed in my post rather than the rather pathetic route of sarcastic defensiveness you have in fact chosen.

[Adam Kotsko]

Man, that remark about Craig Keen is really galling -- as is the claim that I somehow display a pattern of sighing over everyone's Keen-deprived ignorance. When did I so much as mention Craig Keen? Does Craig Keen-like thought have any distinguishing traits other than arrogance in your mind? (As he could tell you if he were taking part in this conversation at all, I responded rather harshly to what he had to say about "the church" in a work of his he shared with me.) What is gained by slandering an innocent bystander in this way?

And where would you have ever picked up on patterns in my behavior anyway? Have you been lurking at my blogs for years, or what? I'm really mystified.

[James K.A. Smith]

Um, I think you're missing the joke here.

Beyond that, I have to confess that I couldn't suppress a chuckle when I realized that I was being lectured on blog "tone" by Adam Kotsko. Rich.

More substantively, do you honestly not see the irony when you respond by saying: "I explicitly said that Nate's argument is not difficult to understand!"? Yes, I saw that. It seemed to me your critique went like this:

(1) The questions Harinck, Smith, Wright and Fitch are asking show they don't understand the book.
(2) The book's argument is "easy to understand."
(3) Ergo?

Did I miss something in the logic of your criticism?

I'm wasn't taking your comments as a personal, ad hominem attack (unlike some of the comments in an earlier thread). I was reacting in kind to your smarmy mock questions and ensuing comment. (If you can't see the implied gnosticism in that longer comment, then there are lots of "mental blocks" to go around.) I was implicitly criticizing _how_ you thought such a debate/dialogue could be conducted.

Now, in this respect, I do think the engagement with Nate's book has been interesting at a "meta-theological" level insofar as it has made me appreciate how difficult it is to have a theological conversation even within significantly shared paradigms. So I recognize that we've been talking past one another to a certain extent. You say as much. And I agree that Nate expresses the same in his helpful final post. But the difference is that you seem to think the burden of responsibility for this talking-past-one-another falls entirely on the "eccelesial" crowd.

For my part, I don't think I disagreed with Nate just because his argument was critical of Hauerwas. Or, to put it otherwise, I don't think I had questions about Nate's book just insofar as it didn't provide an "adequate ecclesiology." Instead, as I noted, the book got me thinking about things I just hadn't considered before, such as just how we think about time/history in terms of teleology vs. apocalpytic. And for that, I praised it.

But it's also on these matters where we locate disagreements that are hard to mediate. For example, on the "ontologization of the church" issue. Perhaps I should say that I grant that Hauerwas (et. al.) "ontologizes" the church (though this language is foreign to him); then I guess the question is whether that's a bad thing. Perhaps that's where we disagree.

For me, the lingering issues have to do with how to think about history, time, eschaton and apocalyptic. Nate makes a strong case for a radical apocalyptic. I continue to have questions and concerns about the viability of the ontology that seems to be assumed here.

For example, Nate lucidly says in this post: "my point about the singularity of Jesus’ apocalyptic historicity is a rather straightforward. To insist upon the singularity of Jesus’ historicity as constitutive of his lordship in history is to insist that in the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth we are confronted with an event of such radically singular concreteness that it resists being rendered explicable in light of some other, more universal reality." OK. I get that. But if the "event" of Jesus of Nazareth is to be "revelatory"--which I would think is central to apocalyptic "unveiling"--then I think we disagree about whether such a "revelation" could be 'received,' as it were, if it's so radically singular (I criticize J-L Marion on a similar point in chapter 5 of my _Speech and Theology_).

Or, again, while Nate said that he wanted to stick to a very specific definition of "teleology," I continue to think about how we can think about the event of Jesus of Nazareth in light of the "event" that unfolds with creation. I think the creational narrative, and ensuing story of God's elective, people-gathering activity from Adam through Israel constitutes a sort of "hermeneutic horizon" for the "event" of Jesus of Nazareth. So I find myself less allergic to teleology as such. But I suspect that Nate and I might not be very far from one another.

Finally, there's no question that Nate has a rich vision for the church "on the ground" so to speak. That's partly why--perhaps mistakenly--I said I didn't feel such a radical difference between Hauerwas' ecclesia and Nate's "church." That's NOT to say that there aren't significant differences 'in the background,' so to say. But consider Nate's winsome description of the church in this final post: "“Church” rather names the communion, the gathering, the congregation that occurs as we are made partakers of the fullness of that love (catholicity) in which we are bound to one another as other in being made participants in that singular, outgoing mission of God’s agape that is Jesus Christ (apostolicity)." Does Nate think that the Hauerwas', Wrights, and Fitchs of the world would disagree with that description?

[Adam Kotsko]

Perhaps all the people listed wouldn't disagree with the quoted statement. I assume from your tone that you think they wouldn't, so I'll go along with that. But would they agree with the argumentative path Nate takes to get there? Would they agree with the consequences he draws from it? Everything in this debate seems to me to indicate that they wouldn't -- yet as I say, I can't know for sure because no one is really taking those arguments head-on. We're stuck at the level of saying yes or no to a conclusion, without really getting into the guts of the argument that supports it and builds off of it.

Maybe you disagree with my assessment of how this symposium has proceeded -- and in fact, maybe there are who tranches of rich, argumentative-gut-penetrating discussion that I've managed to miss. Maybe my own maniacal focus on "church fetishism" is blinding me! I would note that those are arguments you could've advanced but didn't (i.e., you easily could've highlighted a few of the better comments, or shown from my blog that I have a one-sided polemic against "the church" -- since you are apparently deeply familiar with me). But okay, let's assume that at least on this question of ecclesiology, I'm right: that by and large, this symposium has been concerned to accept or (mostly) reject Nate's conclusions about ecclesiology in relative isolation from his argument and the consequences he draws from his conclusion. We could agree that that would be a bad thing, right? That one could object to that on an intellectual level, perhaps even forcefully object? That is, that one might be raising that objection out of a sincere spirit of intellectual inquiry, and not primarily out of a sense of intellecual superiority, or out of a petty Keen-based tribalism, or out of sheer nihilistic assholery? And that maybe you should therefore respond on an intellectual level rather than with the aforementioned pathetic sarcastic defensiveness?

Now you have, at least in the second half of your comment. Hopefully we can all put this "niceness police" crap behind us and actually talk about the issue at hand, which is all I've ever wanted to do throughout this whole exchange.

[Adam Kotsko]

(I'll also assume, for the sake of charity, that your remarks about Craig Keen and his supposed Gnostic cult were part of the broader "joke" that I had missed.)

[James K.A. Smith]

Just a few more things in reply, Adam:

1. For the record, I don't think I started the sarcasm in this thread. Please see your first two comments. I thought your comments deserved only a response in kind. What's at issue is not "niceness" or niceties; the issue are the terms on which we can have such a discussion. As I said, I think there are real--and interesting--meta-theological issues at stake here. I'm not hurt or angry; I don't take this personally (indeed, you weren't talking about me); I just find your first three comments in this thread smarmy and tiresome.

2. Do you honestly think you're an "innocent bystander?" Puh-lease. Somebody responds to you in kind and all of a sudden you're an "innocent bystander" who doesn't deserve such treatment. I've not been "lurking" on your blogs (you make me sound like Larry Craig in a Minneapolis airport). But obviously you regularly comment here, at Faith & Theology, and elsewhere. We also clearly have some similar interests and passions. So I have followed the links to The Weblog and/or An und fur Sich. And clearly there's a pattern. Obviously, if you didn't have some interesting things to say, I'd ignore it altogether. But the formula is noticeable, and a tad predictable (so yes, perhaps you have your own anti-church fetish, but I'm not given to psychoanalytic terms).

3. Let me be clear that I have nothing against Craig Keen whatsoever. I'm a bit sorry to have mentioned his name in this regard--except that I find it very interesting that there is clearly a circle of bloggers (you know who you are) who emanated from Olivet Nazarene around a certain time, who are very sharp, who read continental stuff, and who exhibit a similar stridency which sometimes feels like a bit of ressentiment. But alas, I psychoanalyze...

At the end of the day, I think there was more substantive engagement with Nate's book that you claim--but not as much as Nate would have hoped for. I think the latter is regrettable, but I think his argument needs to be digested much longer than this little symposium. I know Nate's argument will be rumbling in my head for the next couple of years.

[Adam Kotsko]

The innocent bystander was Craig Keen, not me. Obviously it would be ridiculous for me to claim to be an innocent bystander in this conversation.

We seem to be almost at a breakthrough point where this whole tempest in a teacup could lead to people more deeply addressing what Nate's actually saying about ecclesiology. Dare we hope?

If it's not going to happen, here's an alternative topic: I wonder if this symposium could've gone better if the participants had been assigned the task of mostly just summarizing Nate's argument, along with occasional comments or criticisms as they went, and then leading discussion in comments? After all, even though the book seems to be selling well, there are probably a lot of people who haven't read it yet -- and sometimes just having a good summary (perhaps even an opinionated one) can be clarifying for people who have read it but are having trouble putting the pieces together.

That format would have the benefit of automatically keeping the discussion closer to the text, which has been a kind of meta-complaint of mine. It might also be less contentious or less full of vague criticisms that can't really be discussed in a blog format -- I do really think the blog setting is responsible for some of the disconnect that I've seen here and elsewhere.

On this last point, I'm not meaning to pick on this symposium in specific -- just throwing the idea out there for future events of this kind.

[Anthony Paul Smith]

"Let me be clear that I have nothing against Craig Keen whatsoever. I'm a bit sorry to have mentioned his name in this regard--except that I find it very interesting that there is clearly a circle of bloggers (you know who you are) who emanated from Olivet Nazarene around a certain time, who are very sharp, who read continental stuff, and who exhibit a similar stridency which sometimes feels like a bit of ressentiment."

No, I don't think "they" know who they are. Who are you talking about? From what I can tell Adam, Dave Belcher, and Thomas Bridges are the only bloggers to have "emanated" from ONU. One can hardly say that Dave and Thomas hold the same positions. As to this charge of ressentiment, what is with this certain circle of American RO authors who all emanated from somewhat Continental philosophy and religion departments, love the Roman Catholic church in all its hierarchical glory but aren't Catholic, and have a similar distaste for criticism? I mean, really, what are you trying to do with these kinds of comments?

[Adam Kotsko]

I do think that the stridency you detect is, if anything, a desire to work past the passive aggression that evangelical settings tend to inculcate. Doubtless we go overboard sometimes! We are only human. In my own case, I tend to overreact when people personalize my stridency (implying I'm an asshole, taking my disagreement as a personal attack), because I think it should be okay to have strong disagreements and forceful arguments, especially among friends.

It's really a moral principle for me! Conversations where niceness is the first and last concern often wind up going nowhere, if only because no one's really sure where anybody stands or where disagreements actually lie. Again, do I go overboard? Arguably yes. My two mocking comments were probably ill-advised, an expression of frustration more than good-faith argument. But I'm going to stand behind the third one, because I've become convinced over the years that the "niceness police" problem is much more toxic and conversation-killing than my brashness could ever be -- and I've often noticed a pattern that the very people who are demanding "niceness" from me are at the same time being meaner than I'd ever imagine being.

[Nate Kerr]

Man, Adam, you sure don't make things easy for me do you?! Despite the stinging rhetoric (which, I will admit, it may be ontologically impossible for you personally to do anything about), I do appreciate the point you are trying to make with regards to the argument of my book. I would only make one qualification: I'm not sure that I would say that my book is being systematically misunderstood, so much as important dimensions of my argument as a whole are being systematically misread (or ignored). I have tried to indicate those points as much as possible in my post here. But to reiterate where I think that misreading is happening, I would make two points. (1) First of all, there seems to be a tendency deliberately to be misread my book as a work of ecclesiology. Whereas my primary concern is with the nature and truth of Christ's lordship in relation to the world and history. (2) The second point at which I am being misread is in what I take to be the ecclesial implications of Christ's lordship as I understand it. The nature of Christ's lordship, as I have articulated it, is christologically missionary -- it is Jesus Christ who is Lord as the "sent one." And so when I say that "mission makes the church," I am simply articulating what I understand to be the concreteness of the reality of our participation in and embodiment of the truth of that lordship, that mission, in history. The point that is being missed here, I think, is that the real point of departure for critique of my understanding of the church would not then first be an ecclesiological one, so much as it would need to be a Christological one. That is to say, if it is to be argued that the church is wrongly understood as a non-territorial disaporic liturgy of dispossession whose peoplehood is rendered visible at the point of missionary encounter with the world, then what will need to be contested first is my articulation of the nature of the truth of Jesus Christ's lordship, and not my lack of an "ecclesiology" as such. I do think that my argument represents unique challenges to certain deeply held ecclesiological assumptions, not the least of which challenges is my insistence that a certain ecclesiocentric approach to the questions I am addressing is reductive both of what we take to be truth of Christ's lordship, as well as of the missionary life of the church. One of the major implications of my post, I think, is that differences over what I take to be the implications of the claim that "mission makes the church" may not so much be a matter of differences between two distinct "ecclesiologies," as a matter of disconnect between what we mean when we confess that "Jesus is Lord." And that, furthermore, the failure of catholicity, of true communion and koinonia, today is can only be called an "ecclesiological" failure inasmuch as it is our "ecclesiologies" that have rendered us incapable, constitutionally and definitionally, of speaking and embodying that truth with one voice, in one Spirit, and as participants in one singular agape. I'm not sure this core element of my argument has really yet to be engaged. And insofar as the "spirit" of your comments here (if not the "letter" or the "tone"), Adam, is to lament that fact, I am thankful for them.

At the same time, this is not to dismiss as unimportant the other questions that have been raised by Jamie and others regarding my book and the implications of what I am articulating therein. These are all valid questions and criticisms that I have done my best to take in good faith, and in good faith to respond to as at great a length and with as much care and precision as possible. However, what I would hope is that perhaps now this particular dimension of my argument can be engaged in conversation. As I said, I take your comments as lamenting this lack of engagement (a lament I share, even if I don't think this lack of engagement is to be mocked). My only plea to Jamie and to others would be to take your comments in the spirit that they were meant, as an opportunity to engage the points that have been raised. While I don't necessarily share Adam's conviction that my argument has been misunderstood, I will say that I do not know how to read the ongoing ad hominem comments regarding Craig Keen, his students, and the charge of ressentiment as other than an evasion of the issues I have tried to raise in my post. I extend to Jamie the good faith that his comments are not such an evasion, but rather that he was roused to such comments by Adam's (admittedly ill-advised) snarkiness and sarcasm in his first two comments. I cannot blame Jamie for this, though I am discouraged by some of the comments and by the tone that has been set in the back-and-forth which has ensued. My only appeal to Jamie and my other friends here would now be that we go forward in addressing the real challenge that my friend Adam has put to my critics with his comments.

Jamie is right in pointing out that there is much to digest in my book, and that there are many issues to think through on many levels, and I do indeed hope for the sake of conversation and theological faithfulness that we will continue to think through these issues together in the days ahead. And it may indeed be the case that the level of nuance and of give and take that is really needed for this debate cannot occur in this limited format. I take Jamie at his word when he says that my argument needs to be more thoroughly digested beyond this symposium, and that my argument will be "rumbling" in his head "for the next couple of years." I take that as a word of support for my book, as well as an indication of the seriousness with which he takes it, for which I am grateful. I could say the same thing about the questions and criticisms that have been put to my work in this symposium -- they will no doubt haunt me as I continue to think and write about these issues. And for those questions and criticisms, as well as for the ongoing engagement and conversation, I am indeed grateful. Nevertheless, my only request is that, whether it be in this forum or elsewhere -- private correspondence, future public conversations and publications, etc. -- that the conditions I have set forth in my book (and have clarified in this post and in these comments) as necessary to be accounted for if the criticisms put to my work are to hold, be acknowledged and engaged as we go forward in conversation from here.

[James K.A. Smith]

OK, having slept on it, I'll say this: having finally read and appreciated Nate's final post, then scrolling through the comments, I then, instead of engaging the issues, let myself get sucked in by Adam's first two questions (that were mocking friends and colleagues) and his third comment (which I still contend exhibits the syllogistic logic I outlined later). I responded in kind, and well, it went down hill from there. I'm sorry that this happened on your dime, Nate.

I agree with Adam that in dialogues of this sort, where we don't have the immediate checks-and-balances of face-to-face, it would be helpful and instructive to offer summaries of what we take the argument of the book to be, and then work from there.

Finally, I appreciate, Nate, that the book was not a book on ecclesiology (though clearly it's very near to that). And I also appreciate that alot of the questions we asked you were about the _implications_ of your account--which is, admittedly, a topic for another book (your next one, i take it). I think this partially stemmed from the fact that your book is asking a sort of question that is very unique and doesn't fit well within our given theological loci. So I found myself struggling to find my bearings in the argument, not because of any failure on your part necessarily, but because you were tracking a line of questioning that was quite foreign to me. Whether or not this is central to the argument, I took the book to be fundamentally challenging various theologies OF history. Because I hadn't thought much about my "theology OF history" (your book has changed that!), it was hard for me to articulate my concerns, questions, and qualms.

Thanks for the spirit in which you've engaged us.

[Nate Kerr]

Jamie:

Thank you for your response. I do want to say that part of my discouragement stems from the fact that my own friends and colleagues were mocked by you in this exchange. Whereas Adam's mocking comments aroused you do defense of your friends and colleagues, I want it equally to be registered that your comments about Craig Keen and the spirit of ressentiment in his students were mocking of friends and colleagues of mine. That has not been acknowledged; and I feel it needs to be. Adam's sarcasm was not only responded to in kind, but directed at very specific persons and in ways that appeared to be intentionally hurtful of persons, in a way that I think Adam's was not, actually. And while I am not inclined to respond in kind, I do want it to be said that I stand in solidarity with Adam on this point, as one of those fellow students, but more importantly as his friend. I don't want there to be any mistake about that.

I don't mean by this comment to re-open the tit-for-tat, and to engage in more mud-slinging. I simply think it was something I needed to say in this case. I hope that will be understood by all.

[James K.A. Smith]

Fair enough. I was slinging at a "circle" like Adam regularly swings as "church"-oriented/RO folks. I expressed regret at naming Craig (I'm not even sure why his name came to mind, except he's the only theologian I've known from Olivet Nazarene). So mea culpa.

By the way, am I even in the ballpark to situate your book as articulating a theology of history? Or is that still missing the argument? Just curious, since that's how I've been framing when I have late night conversations with myself.

[Adam Kotsko]

Prof. Smith, I'm still a little weirded out that you think it's implausible that a circle of people who are very concerned with questions of ecclesiology would have a kind of mental block when it comes to addressing an argument that strikes at the very foundations of the enterprise of ecclesiology.

Like let's say that someone was critiquing Zizek (whom I often find myself defending on the internet) and the core of the critique was that psychoanalysis is fundamentally flawed as a theory -- I can see myself potentially missing the point and arguing that that person was misconstruing Lacan or something, or else just claiming that they're not engaging thoroughly enough with psychoanalysis in general. I may even claim that they need psychoanalysis to make their argument work!

All of these types of evasions have been present in the present discussion, and it doesn't mean that anyone's stupid, etc. It's a natural thing that anyone could fall into. There's nothing mysterious or insulting about it -- you guys just think of course it's important to have a well-developed ecclesiology, because ecclesiology is one of your main concerns. And it's hard to know how to get at an argument that moves in a very different direction. Yes, I made fun of it, and that was rude -- but there does seem to me to be a clear difference between making fun of a specific argumentative tendency and hurling out massive insults. I say you guys are overly fixated on ecclesiology; you say my "circle" is filled with a bunch of assholes who think they have access to secret knowledge. Both are "swings," but they're really different kinds of "swings," don't you think? (Just saying "you're joking" isn't a get out of jail free card, by the way.)

Responding in kind is great and totally warranted -- but respond in kind, with some degree of proportion! I get the feeling from you that because "I started it," whatever you did in response is somehow my fault. Fine, "I started it." But at least one commenter managed to respond to my joke in the spirit in which it was offered (Hill).

[Hill]

If I may offer something toward clearing up this impasse:

I think the problem here is in how the phrase "I have a problem with ecclesiology per se" is being proffered and then understood. If, to switch to Adam's analogy one were to say "Zizek has issues because psychoanalysis, meaning a very particular mode of thought and study that emerged in history at a particular time and is conditioned by various things, is fundamentally flawed" I think we could accept the force of that critique if not necessarily agree with it. Now if another person were to say "Zizek has issues because psychoanalysis, meaning broadly: analyzing someone's "psyche," understood in the broadest and most general terms, is fundamentally flawed," that would be a much more difficult critique to even understand, much less to accept.

This is how I understand what may be equivocation, in the context of this conversation generally, about the meaning of "ecclesiology." Out of a hermeneutic of charity, I'm assuming that Nate is not suggesting that one cannot undertake theological descriptions of what the church looks like. I take him to be doing ecclesiology in even saying that the Church is mission. I think the "ecclesiology" being criticized is something broadly related to "the ontologization of the church," which is a particular way of "doing" ecclesiology, but likely not the only one.

This is all to say that because of the equivocity operating in what is meant by ecclesiology, it can become tempting to deploy rhetoric along the lines of "but you're doing ecclesiology (i.e. wanting to talk about the church) and Nate says you can't do ecclesiology!" but as I've hopefully explained, it's unclear what this even means.

[Adam Kotsko]

I think we need to give Hill some kind of prize here for being the first to actually take on the challenge of addressing the question substantively!

In response, I would raise the possibility that the equivocation is actually operating among Nate's critics rather than in Nate's own argument.

[Hill]

I don't think Nate is intentionally equivocating, but I don't think his interlocutors are either. I think it is simply that in the space of this conversation, the meaning of ecclesiology hasn't been appropriately determined, or it might be better to say the polysemy of the word is not being sufficiently acknowledged and accounted for.

I think this is related to a more general phenomenon of assuming that Nate's critique is more far reaching that it actually is. I don't mean to say it isn't far reaching, but one gets the sense (and I have experienced this personally, at times) that Nate is trying to deliver a coup de grace to the entirety of "orthodox" Christianity as a historical phenomenon after the apostolic era. I don't actually think this is what he is doing, but he tends to be interpreted along these lines (for whatever reason). The "assault on ecclesiology" (my caricature) is a specific instantiation of this general phenomenon. Unfortunately, the response of the Nate Kerr fan club (I'd like to offend a few people with this remark, but I'm probationary adjunct member) is often along the lines of "this is an unconscionable misreading; I am dumbfounded." While I'm not suggesting that this is always a baseless sentiment, it is usually unhelpful. So I don't think it would make sense to accuse anyone of willful equivocation for the purpose of advancing their position, but I think there is a tolerance for inter-locutionary definitional sloppiness because it eases the burden of making one's case, especially when one feels as if he has the upper hand already.

[Adam Kotsko]

I guess what I'm thinking about is what John Holbo used to constantly point out about "Theory" in the context of literature departments -- it was a pretty well-defined body of texts, but if someone would attack "Theory" (in the sense of the specific articulation "Theory" had historically come to have), there was always a temptation to say, "But surely you can't reject 'theory' (in the sense of abstract/philosophical thought, etc.)." Whether Holbo's attack was fair to Theory advocates, it does seem to be a pretty familiar form of argument -- a particular species of equivocation, let's say.

So how that would work is that let's say there's a general agreement among this crowd that a particular kind of ecclesiology is needed -- at the very least, a really strong ecclesiology. I'm not saying you're all in lock-step, but there's a pretty clear family resemblance in the ways people tend to talk about ecclesiology. Nate's argument seems to me to be directed against that kind of ecclesiology in specific.

The "two-step" approach would be to say, "But surely you don't intend to prohibit talking about the church at all!" And of course he isn't doing that. That would be dumb. In fact, if "ecclesiology" is just having some kind of account of the church, it seems clear that Nate does have an "ecclesiology." But the fact that so many people are saying his ecclesiology is inadequate, etc., seems to indicate that for them, the strong ecclesiology that this crowd favors is the standard against which ecclesiologies are measured -- it's not just one possible ecclesiology among many, but in an important sense the ecclesiology worthy of the name. Nate's argument seems to recognize the hegemony of strong ecclesiologies (or whatever you want to call them) among people who talk about ecclesiology. He's arguing against the specific form "ecclesiology" has taken in contemporary debates. Acting like he's outlawing talking about the church at all is an evasion.

It's really hard for me to see how a similar two-step would work from Nate's side. Sure, he seems to be functionally identifying "ecclesiology" with the hegemonic strong ecclesiology we all know and love, but he's being consistent -- the slippage doesn't seem to be operating, and it's unclear to me how he could gain any rhetorical benefit from that kind of slippage.

Ergo: the equivocation is not on Nate's side, but on his opponents'.

[Hill]

I am in general agreement with you on this. I just think, perhaps like you, that it has taken an inordinate amount of discussion to arrive at a relatively clear description of what is really going on here. I marvel at that.

[Nate Kerr]

Hill:

I think there are several reasons for why this is so, but I think the biggest reason may really just be the medium. I do think we have been able to get at some of the key issues of my text; while I think other key issues have for whatever reason been misread, overlooked, or evaded. That, at the end of the day, is okay with me, insofar as this medium and this symposium is not the end-all (so I hope) for how my book will be read and discussed. These issues will be discussed elsewhere and perhaps things will become clearer later in ways that are not possible in a blog-comment format. The important thing is that we continue to respond to one another in good faith, and trust that even in our disagreements and misreadings and frustrations that we might come to think and to live a little more faithfully than we would have otherwise. The questions and criticisms that have been raised here, and the conversations which have occurred, have in fact done that for me, and I've learned much from them. And that is why I will continue with these conversations. Because at the end of the day what is important to me is not so much that we reach a certain kind of intellectual "agreement" on things, but that we find ourselves committed to the kind of solidarity that emerges out of the shared faith in search of theological understanding.

[Hill]

Amen.

[Andy Rowell]

Nate, you write above in comment number 9.

(All of this I hope will come a little clearer in my second book, which is essentially a set of ecclesial investigations, and the introduction to which is entitled: "Again Ecclesiological Idealism.")

Did you mean to say "Against Ecclesiological Idealism?"

I could see it either way.

That's a sincere question.

All the best,
andy

[Nate Kerr]

Andy:

Yes, I did indeed mean "Against Ecclesiological Idealism." But you are right: It could be read either way, and part of what could be argued (as I have learned from my colleague Josh Davis) is that much of contemporary ecclesiology is structurally Donatist and repeats what turns out to be the proto-Idealist logic of Donatism itself. Part of what I mean by ecclesiological idealism is the way in which much of what passes as "ecclesiology" is meant conceptually to mediate and to restore a presumably fractured and now otherwise unavailable (because "lost") "identity." But that, of course, is an argument that will have to be made.

Nate

[Barry R]

Dr. Kerr,
Just a brief and simple question. Regarding this issue of ecclesiology, I wonder if you might offer briefly your thoughts on the long-running discussion of the visibility/invisibility of the church. Obviously Hauerwas, but also others such as Smith, Cavanaugh and so forth, speak of and celebrate the rediscovery of a 'visible' church after Christendom, which in their sense means the church appearing as a kind of social entity in its own right within society (I'm tentative to use the word 'polis', but I suppose this is what they're getting at). This is in contrast to the 'invisible' church, which I suppose would fit with a more Troeltschian view, or any liberal theology which makes itself subject to 'things' (philosophy, politics, social theory etc,) external to itself. How would your 'mission-as-church' notion fit into this, if it does at all.

Having read the book I'm expecting you to want to subvert both these options, and change the terms of the debate - though I wouldn't want to pre-empt that.
Thanks
Barry

[Nate Kerr]

Barry:

Thank you for your question. I am sorry to be delayed in responding. We have just finished finals week here, and I have been working to dig myself out of a pile of ungraded papers all week. Even now, I'm afraid I will have to be much too brief in response to your question, and I am also afraid that my response will not be properly coherent, as I'm writing after a good 12 hour day of grading with a couple of more 12 hour days of grading to follow this week! Anyway, your question strikes me as incredibly important, and is a question I am constantly trying to work through, so perhaps I can at least give you some hints as to how I am thinking this through. I'd like to say a couple of things:

1.) The first is that the question of the relationship of the "visible" to the "invisible," if it is to be rightly construed, is to be returned to its properly sacramental and eschatological context, classically understood. I'm thinking here of Augustine and Aquinas, especially. And of Rowan Williams' very pregnant idea of the church as sacrament precisely as the "sign" of that which it "is not" in-itself. It seems to me that when Hauerwas and Yoder are calling for a renewed emphasis upon the visibility of the the church after Christendom, they are doing so in a way very much consonant with Augustinianism (who often gets saddled with the "blame" for this division between visible and invisible church). Hauerwas' student Charlie Collier has just completed and defended a very fine dissertation on Yoder and Augustine that brings out the complexities of some of these issues well. At any rate, my point is that Hauerwas and Yoder are both responding to what is essentially an modern idealist filtering of the visible/invisible distinction, which makes of the visible/invisible distinction not a matter of two dimensions of the church's sacramental concreteness in via, and in eschatological relation to the Kingdom (which it was for Augustine and Thomas), but rather a matter of discerning the church's invisible "essence," which the visible church is then said to mediate. The problem with this, is that "church" thus itself comes to play a conceptually mediatory role in relation to a universal "essence." And in this way the church is merely representative of an "idea" which the appartuses of history are then given to realize, machine-like. So this is what Hauerwas and Yoder are responding to and rejecting, with their emphasis upon the visible church, as a matter of re-focusing upon the political reality that the church is as this visible "polity." Now, as I think I state in the book, I think this critical emphasis upon visibility is more or less right, but I am not convinced that Hauerwas especially really escapes the modern idealist logic that is at work in the disjunction between visibility and invisibility for Troeltsch, etc. I'd have to say more here to flesh this out, but essentially my concern is that Hauerwas (and at times Yoder) thinks "church" concentrically, and his reason for doing so is still bound up with the question of "what" the church is, of its "essence" and of its "identity," so that the very reality of the church's visibility is actually representative of "church" as a mediatory concept for that identity, and that this has to do with a certain self-reflexive "ontologization" of the church. An idealist logic is still at work in all of this, just inverted. And so I wonder if Hauerwas does not adequately retrieve the sacramental heart of Augustine, with the focus upon the action of God -- of the Word and the Spirit -- in locating the mystery at the heart of the church's visibilty.

2.) Now, as to how my understanding of church-as-mission fits into this debate, I'd have to say that what is needed is a truly missionary understanding of sacramentality, and of church-as-sacrament. And a truly missionary understanding of God's action, of God as a missionary God. All of this is to be worked out in forthcoming writings. But I will say that Hauerwas has really pushed me on this question recently, in light of my book. I recently wrote an essay for a forthcoming volume to be published by Cascade Books entitled The New Yoder (eds. Peter Dula and Chris Huebner), in which I was asked to expand upon the reading of Yoder and Certeau that I offer in the last chapter of Christ, History and Apocalyptic. The chapter is entitled "Communio Missionis:
Certeau, Yoder, and the Missionary Space of the Church." In that essay I address precisely this question of how the visible political community Yoder calls church might best be thought of as a visible "community of mission." I'll excerpt a critical paragraph from that essay (a paragraph composed largely as the result of Hauerwas' suggestion that I need to address just the question you have asked). It is not sufficient to all your question involves, and it is taken out of context, but hopefully it will give you some idea of how I'm thinking through this material. It will be these ideas of sacramental visibility that I will be working out in full in three "dogmatic" essays on preaching, baptism, and eucharist in my next book on the church. So here's the paragraph:

'Finally, then, we are in a position to state clearly that which we have so far only been alluding to in the previous paragraphs. It is precisely as the embodied sign and sacrament of God’s coming Kingdom, as the sacrament of this world’s conversion – indeed, of the conversion of place itself – to this coming Kingdom, that the utopic and diasporic Christian community is rendered concretely visible as the missionary space of encounter that it is. Here I should like to suggest that Yoder’s account of “sacrament as social process” gives us to think the political visibility of the church positively in a manner that Certeau’s logic of perpetual withdrawal does not, while still allowing us to avoid the kind of fetishization of ecclesiastical sacramentality that insists upon conceiving the Christian community in itself as “the center of the world and the place of the true,” which would be to reinscribe the concentric logic of place with respect to the Church’s sacramental structure. If the “social process” which the church “is,” is irreducibly and perpetually a diasporically eccentric movement of mission, then the Christian community is sacramentally visible precisely by way of those concrete practices – paradigmatically baptism and eucharist – by which God acts perpetually to give it to work for the “salvation of the culture” – the conversion of the “place,” the “city” – to which it has been sent. To say this is to say that the church is visible as a missionary space that is a non-place, precisely insofar as the church’s sacramental life is the sign of the truth of the fact that it need not exist by way of the logic of place, with its own sovereign center, but rather exists only by way of that eccentric “social process” by which it is given ever anew to receive and to love the other – the “outsider” – in her own singular conversion to the coming Kingdom of God. And yet, for the church to be given sacramentally to receive and to love the other as other in this way, is for the church to be visible as a social process of being bound to the other as other by way of the other’s own sacramental participation in the missionary life of Christ-as-other, whose self-giving way of love makes of Christ himself “the transformer of culture.” To say this is to say that the church’s sacramental practices are themselves only sacramental as practices of mission, as visible practices of that very love by which members of the Christian community are bound to one another and to every other qua other in Christ. That is to say, the church’s sacramental practice – its “social process” – is its very participation in the sending of Jesus Christ that is God’s own self-giving way of love. To speak of the church’s sacramental visibility as “social process,” then, is just another way of saying that “mission makes the church.”'

In short, what I mean is: The church is visible as precisely the sign of the world's conversion to the Kingdom, that Kingdom which the church, in-itself, "is not."

I know that what I have given you here are mostly scattered thoughts coming from a presently too-scattered mind. But at any rate, I hope that these thoughts give you some indication of how I'm at work to address the question you ask more directly. Hopefully, at least, they are enough to help begin a conversation. I'd be genuinely interested in what you make of the continuing importance of this visible/invisible distinction in light of these thinkers' works.

[Paul Bischoff]

Nate, If you haven't already done so, may I recommend Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison as another conversation partner for your thesis of "participation" in Jesus Christ where DB would resonate with "participation in the sufferings of Christ" with your "participation in the historicity" of Christ. I'm currently developing similar thinking on a book "The Secular Church" which affirms a similar departure from Constantinian ecclesial fossilization.
Rev. Dr. Paul O. Bischoff