the church and postmodern culture: conversation

Hunger and Love - The Logic of "Late Capitalism" Unwinds into the Postmodern Apocalypse

By Carl Raschke

It’s another gray and misty morning here in the second district of Vienna.  The church bells toll to invite the sleepy-eyed revelers from the night before to churches that, except for Christmas tourists, will probably remain mostly empty. 

The second district is historically the Jewish district of Vienna, where Freud lived and hung out.  For some unfathomable reason Freud is in the air, virtually “everywhere”  these days.   His books are on sale, his named invoked regularly (even in newspaper ads), and he often serves as a self-identifier, as in the case of a student I know who met a girl at a Vienna dance club who in response to the standard, get-to-know-each-other  question “what do you do?” replied, “I’m a Freudian analyst, so what do you think now?” 

Perhaps the answer was simply intended as a well-practiced feint against any presumed,  male, predatory Anmarsch, as they say here.   But the “Freudian thing,” as his “Ur-postmodernist” French psychoanalyst descendant Jacques Lacan put it, may be more the temper of the times than we care to admit.   

In Civilization and its Discontents – a text that figures such as Derrida and Deleuze, for example, tend to cite – Freud sums up what might be called the “secular eschatological” implications of his lifelong work with the following quote from the German poet Schiller: “hunger and love serve as the gearworks of the world.” 

Freud was an infamous pessimist, and he certainly had nothing to "say" directly to Christian theology these days.  You can’t “take Freud to church” – really!   But Freud was definitely someone theologians should listen to, especially if you go prowling the streets of Vienna, or any European city, or any city at all for that matter, this late autumn.  You observe the growing numbers of beggars and prostitutes and every morning.  You see a new, more disturbing headline about the slow-motion economic meltdown of the EU, not to mention the ever louder warnings from economists about its apocalyptic implications for the world economy.   

Hunger and love!  Until 2008 the “gearworks” worked magnificently to generate an ever expanding global  consumer society that was supposed  to gradually alleviate all hungers by fulfilling every symbolizable and estimable desire.   Yes, we were worried about things like climate change, prompted by our using too much energy to produce too much “stuff”.   But that could be handled by both a new consensual system of intergovernmental policies and regulations and the adoption of new lifestyles that were “post-materialist,” even if they remained highly consumerist.   “Information” and “knowledge” leave no carbon footprint – allegedly.  Our increasing consumption and production of “significations” rather than material commodities -  i.e., Baudrillard’s distinction between the “hyperreal” and the real – would solve that problem, so we were told.    

It is the hyperreal that has done us in, however, I fear.   Although Baudrillard’s term converges with many familiar,  key philosophical terms used in postmodernist discourse, such as Lacan’s “symbolic order”  or Deleuze’s “difference machine,”  the force of its meaning remains symptomatic  of why the world order today appears to be inexorably and ever more painfully unwinding.    Baudrillard a generation ago playfully characterized the hyperreal as the order of “processing simulacra”, of self-generating significations in the form of commodity images, fantasies, political and social ideas, collective idealizations,  and so forth.  He argued that these idealizations take on a life of their own, and that we become increasingly unaware that they do not somehow rest on any tangible base stratum of things, a theme popularized in such movies as The Truman Show and The Matrix.   

But, more importantly, we do not recognize their generative and addictive power to guarantee what our senses assume is “really” real.  Hence, the expression “hyperreal”, which according to Baudrillard is “more real than real.”    The triumph of hyperreality in our time can thus be considered a reversal of the old order of repressed desires, which Freud diagnosed, in the sense that their purely virtual character now function as a whole new form of “repression” or unconsciously displaced meaning (the real force of Freud’s term Verdrängnis)  .   Just as our Victorian ancestors could not confront the fact that we are intimately bound up in material reality, we cannot confront our immateriality.   

Consider derivatives.   These so-called “special investment vehicles” (SIVs) proved to be the Achilles heel of the ever exploding global economy before 2008.   Although it was the collapse of the American real estate market that technically triggered the crisis, it was the so-called  derivatives that sent the worldwide jerry-rigged system into a downward spiral, which is still continuing.   As in mathematics, a “derivative” in finance is nothing more than a set of signifying linkages, the notational equivalent  of  “difference” in the relations between two or more functions. The word “spreads”, which one hears constantly right now with regard to the European debt  crisis, has a similar set of characteristics.  Without going into the technical details of what these words mean in investment parlance, we can say that the long-standing growth of “casino capitalism” was driven by a constant leveraging of the spreads, or differentials, in the mathematical algorithms that defined the new computerized global marketplace.  Much of what people actually invested in had nothing to do with commodities, real estate, the net worth of companies, and so on.  Investment increasingly was targeted toward “speculative” interrelationships between abstract calculative processes. 

This tendency to pursue an economy of pure sign functions is not some perverse immoral imperative foisted on us by the “one percent,” the “greedy multinational corporations,” or the faceless “speculators”, as garden variety anti-capitalist rhetoric routinely intones.    It follows the “logic of late capitalism” itself, as  Jameson referred to postmodernism as a whole in his book by the same title that appeared in 1991 (See Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: The Logic of Late Capitalism, Verson, 1991) .  Jameson was in many ways prescient, although his work was considered largely  cranky and obscurantist at the time. 

Like Žižek, who rose to notoriety during the decade immediately after the book’s publication, Jameson did not see “postmodernism” as some new, emancipatory phase in the development of politics and culture.  He saw it as a form of worn-out modernism, at least in the cultural sphere.  In the economic  realm he regarded it as the final stage of the world-historical process Marx had analyzed in Capital.   The “crisis” Marx predicted, which actually did not come ironically until the early twenty-first century after communism itself had crashed and burned, would be a result, Jameson implied, not so much of the complete “immiseration” of the working class through capitalist expropriation of the value of their labor, but the transmogrification of labor itself into aesthetic trivialities and human consciousness itself into a whirl of  frivolous enjoyments (think mall shopping or cable television), the endless production of new commodified intensities propelled by insatiable sexual appetites (think contemporary art and internet porn),  the raising of compulsive triviality and narcissistic emptiness to the level of the pseudo-sublime (think Facebook).

Jameson wrote in 1991:  “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods.”  The “occupy” movement that has gained so much attention lately, like the Wall Street bankers themselves, therefore is  simply one more node in the vast global net of signifying differentia, as Ferdinand de Saussure, who along with Nietzsche birthed postmodern thinking, would have put it.  Saussure in many ways sketched out the theory of the hyperreal in his Course in General Linguistics given at the University of Geneva on the eve of World War I.   Jacques Lacan, who influenced a whole generation of French postmodern philosophers, put it into practice with his analysis of how what he called the “symbolic order” – the order of linguistic and conceptual sign interactions – not only dominates, but absorbs all our desires and imaginings.   

In postmodern culture the endless thirst for the “latest and newest” French thinker  - the proverbial haut couture splashy intellectual “fashion model” with the trendiest, most recent, most outrageous position, or proposition,  to come down the publishers’ runway – is but one manifestation of such developments.    In pop Christianity it is the rage for an ever sexier way of making Jesus seem cool and relevant.  Jesus, the historical singularity that fused the infinite Lord of time with the finite depravity of humanity, is now just an inexhaustibly mobile Lacanian “sliding signifier” in the global marketplace of commodified Christianities.

But let us return to Freud.   As the slow motion apocalypse of the global system of empty significations (i.e., “late capitalism”) gathers momentum, hunger returns.    Not only the hunger for food, but the hunger for significations that are not hyperrealities, that are not pure differentia.  A hunger for a meaningfulness that is truly transformative and “sustainable”.  Aha, say the salivating cyberevangelists, now let’s give them Jesus.  But Jesus himself condemned the Pharisees for offering hungry men snakes and stones.  We can no longer give hungry men and women Saussurian signs.   

Just as we all suffer from so many environmental disorders because of the pollution of our bodies with additives, industrial chemicals, and waste products that we can no longer even define, so we pollute our spirits with the subtle hyperrealities we have no idea are no longer real at all.  The love of God satisfies the hunger and environmental hysteria of the postmodern soul, but it is a love that does not come through the endless natterings of the “symbolic order,” let alone the political as well as the religious preachers of completely virtualized fantasies of a new heaven and earth, of a redemption that can be carried out through out through social media theater, through nothing but private and collective gestures, posturing,  or signifying inanities. 

The apocalypse that is at hand is the apocalypse of a real God who really loves us and really loves through the real love that we show in deeds rather than our gestures, our placing of our hearts along with our bodies in the space of those who desire love, who desire intimacy, closeness, and relationship.  The love of God is inseparable from the love of neighbor (and even more so the love of child, spouse, significant other). 

The second commandment is no Baudrillardian simulacrum.  The true parousia of Christ (“Behold, I am coming soon”) is not “deferred” Derridean avenir.   

Hunger and love.  The real is relational and the relational is real.   It is NOW!

Carl Raschke is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver.  He writes regularly on religion, Christianity, culture, and postmodernism.  He is the author of The Next Reformation (Baker Academic, 2004`) and GloboChrist (Baker Academic, 2008).  His latest book Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory: Toward a Semiotics of the Event will be published by University of Virginia Press in 2012.

Review of 'Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty'

 

Paul Kahn’s new work Political Theology: Four new chapters on the concept of sovereignty is not an immediate choice for a Brit like me to pay attention to.  For its immediate focus and concern is an examination of how the imagination for American political life is funded by ideas of revolution before notions of social contract (constitution). So for all non Americans turning away now, stay with me to the end of the review, for Kahn may prove vital to your non US context.

Kahn argues that to understand American life, and in particular the nature of law within that life, we must apprehend that it is the will and decision of a sovereign people, acting together, that creates and sustains the American idea of nationhood.  

Kahn frames his thesis and method around the work of Carl Schmitt’s classic 1922 text, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.  Schmitt made this very claim, that American legal order ultimately rests upon the decision of the sovereign and not ideas of social contract.  Kahn’s methodological aim is not so much a replaying or updating of Scmitt’s text, but a hope that Kahn in exploring Schmitt, can ‘think with him, rather than think about him’.¹

In one regard, Kahn’s work is an exploration of American exceptionalism.²  In that exploration Kahn reveals how current liberal political theory is unable to understand American exceptionalism, forced to view it merely as an unjust claim of privilege.  What is at stake for Kahn is that American exceptionalism is about identity, existence, and decision, something current liberal political theory cannot discern, whereas political theology can.  For it is a political theology that gave rise to this exceptionalism in the first place and Kahn constructs a political theology from Schmitt that reveals some of the identity, existence and decision of American exceptionalism.

Kahn’s work is at this level, a detailed philosophical exploration of the contours of American political and legal life. Again a territory largely alien to my British context.  However recent events with the assassination of Osama Bin Laden have caused Bishop N T Wright, to cite American exceptionalism in our UK national news today.³  

But there are some other riches in this work that correlate to the broader dimensions of political theology, and warrant attention by non Americans.  For political theory has become a dwindling field, in which the European imports of post-Marxist theory have found little traction and revitalization of American political thought and imagination (or so my American friends tell me, whilst this line of post-Marxist thinking is holding much sway and resourcement for people like me in Europe, but that is another story).  

What is revealed in that paucity of resourcing, is the failure to take seriously the concrete practices and beliefs of American life, and the need for an examination of the embedded political theologies that gave birth to current ways of American life.  In this regard one way to read Kahn is as a ‘reparative’ account of American life (a la Peter Ochs political theology aspirations).  And for those of us seeking similar ‘reparatives’ for our own contexts, Kahn’s work provides a narrative to fund our methodological processes and imaginations.  

For Kahn’s work is at heart an exploration of human freedom as it has been realized in the distinctive set of practices and beliefs of ‘sovereignty’.  Such practices and beliefs may differ in the United Kingdom, but the need for similar explorations of the realization of human freedoms is as pressing, as is the reality of how current political theory is similarly blind to the concrete practices and beliefs that gave rise to current ways of life.

It would be all to easy to pigeon hole Kahn’s book as a technical exploration of the nature of freedom within the American legal system, and American exceptionalism.  It is certainly a recondite account of this, but it is simultaneously a deep enquiry into the social imaginary of American life.  Therein Kahn provides a resource to stimulate an exploration of the impact of theology on non US contemporary political commitments, that suggests we focus attention on the theological underpinnings of european secular legal systems.  But most importantly if we read Kahn, we might find that his work beckons and entices us into an even larger endeavour.  The exploration of the social imaginaries of other nations through political theology.

_{1. Paul Khan, Political Theology, p28.}

2.  That the United States is qualitatively different from other nations with that exceptionalism emerging from revolution as ‘the first new nation’.

_{3. http://ruthgledhill.blogspot.com/2011/05/archbishop-of-canterbury-condemns.html.  Wrights polemical letter makes use of some narratives and mythologies adjacent to Kahn's understanding of American identity in it's approach to the Law and the social imaginary of sovereignty.}

 

Specters of Rage in an Age of Change - Sloterdijk and the "End" of the Postmodern

Multiple Specters

Perhaps we can adapt just one more time Marx's well-known and overadapted opening to The Communist Manifesto that a "specter is stalking" us. It was this same "specter" that Derrida back in the mid-1980s adapted in Specters of Marx to rejuvenate what by then was his already aging project of deconstruction to produce first the "political", then the "religious" turn.  It is from this particular "turn" that so much theological pomo derives.      

Another specter, however, today is haunting postmodern religious thought itself.  It is the specter of irrelevance. Or better yet - the specter of an irrelevance nurtured, especially in America by faddism, mindless Francophilia, and academic navel-gazing.  As recently as two decades ago Christian thinkers shied away from postmodern philosophy because of the silly and groundless canard that it was "nihilistic", or that it was noxiously inhospitable to "faith" (if you were conservative) or "social action" (if you were liberal).  

Today most educated Christian scholars have probably read the entire postmodern "canon" from Derrida's Writing and Difference to Zizek and Milbank's Monstrosity of Christ.  That you can take courses with the same basic reading list in contemporary theology at Fuller Theological Seminary and Harvard Divinity School tells you how times have changed, does it not?  

But Nietzsche's underlying point in most of his late career tirades that when things have ripened over time they become essentially wormy at the core does not should not be overlooked when it comes to postmodernism itself.  Nietzsche understood that even his own future legacy, which so much of postmodernism happens to be, would not be immune from the same kind of jeremiads he hurled at his own generation.  I myself, as someone who for more than thirty years has crawled along like some tiny, clueless gnat on the vast spherical surface of this gigantic and now multi-generational, slowly ripening, pomo passion fruit, acknowledge this fact with a certain nostalgia of loss, if not a very un-Derridean Angst about what is avenir.  Christian academics, evangelical and mainstream alike, were slow to jump on the postmodernist bandwagon, and they will be probably be just as reluctant to climb off.     

It is not simply a matter of philosophy - and theology for that matter - "painting its gray on gray," as Hegel famously described the end of a theoretical epoch.  Nor is it merely an effect of the scholastic haute monde wearily deciding that "time's up," and summoning the taste-setters and market makers to define the next great thing. Intellectual fashions, unlike whatever is worn by runway models, don't come about that way.  Furthermore, the legacy of the "high postmodern" will not fade away.  It will most likely be aufgehoben in the same way as structuralism, phenomenology, Freudianism, ordinary language philosophy, and existentialism were all folded into and "taken up" into the "post-structuralist" revolution of the 1970s that came somewhat later to be named postmodernism.  

Major shifts and sea changes are more a matter of a widespread changing focus that recognizes how patterns and networks of ideas tended to be embedded in an underlying social and cultural reality, and that this reality is now somehow missing.  They arise from the dim, but unavoidable, awareness that these ideas have now been gradually hollowed out through both overuse and an altered context.  They are in their "twilight," as Nietzsche put it, and it is in such crepuscular times that the thinker begins to test the idols, to tap them to see if they are solid, and force into the open certain questions that one's contemporaries remain uncomfortable asking.  That is what Nietzsche really meant by philosophizing "with a hammer."  It is similar also to what Heidegger meant when he wrote during the 1930s that the philosopher announces how "all the gods have fled" and one must wait for der letzte Gott ("the last God") to "pass", as he said in his Beiträge ("Contributions").

The Times They Are A'Changing

Yet a shift is on, and in many ways it is eerily similar to the 1930s.  I am not referring merely to what we now call the "Great Recession" that is slowly, like a toxic chemical spill, seeping out of the US where it first happened and spreading slowly, sometimes with indecipherable long-term effects, across the planet.    I am referring to a gathering "great recession" in mood and outlook that has changed the culture of the West and starkly affected the politics of the world's own recent historical pace-setter - the United States. 

If postmodernism , in hindsight, looks more like the happy, playful, effervescent, and disseminative "superstructure" (in classic Marxist terminology) of the rising economic and social order of post-70s that came to be termed "neo-liberalism" with its innovative and entrepreneurial energies, hyperindivindualistic ethics, and "post-secular" spiritual and religious proclivities, the era after postmodernism may mirror the pre-1940s preoccupation with issues of social justice, aggregate action and responsibility, and an intellectual confrontation with human complacency, self-deception, and the diverse and competing threats of collective violence against both groups and persons. Reinhold Niebuhr's famous attacks on liberal optimism may have to be brushed off as well.  The familiar political romance of the "just cause" against injustice, shared by "progressives" and neo-conservatives alike that often disguises itself as righteous religious and theological critique, will have to give way to (perhaps even an updated Niebuhrian) to a neo-realism that profoundly recognizes the bankruptcy of both facile certainties and the avante-garde cult of indeterminacy, while at the same time affirming the necessity of conscience, action, and resistance - and the appropriate context for their application and deployment - nurtured by a mature intellectual caution and skepticism of the latest enthusiasm.   .

Which brings us to another specter that is stalking the postmodern - the specter of rage.  The specter of rage historically has always stalked ages that follow upon a sudden and unanticipated collapse of every "proud tower" of collective illusions that were once thought to be the great ideas that animated an age. This particular specter has already hovered routinely around the celebrity status of Slavoy Žižek in the past year or so.  Žižek's own "rock star" image, fostered earlier on through his rhetorical panache with dissecting commonplace issues of pop culture within the framework of Lacanian theory, has more recently tapped into the congenital rage of the American intelligentsia at the outsize global ghoul called "capitalism", especially after the financial crisis of 2008 and the unravelling of economic systems, mainly in America and Europe. Žižek's recent routine summons to reclaim the banner of hard-core revolutionary Marxism a la Lenin, even if such a clamor no longer has any resonance outside of Latin America and perhaps political nostalgia buffs in Russia, in the face of his predicted "end times" collapse of the world economy, is consistent not only with the intellectual Zeitgeist in the West but also with his accompanying fulminations against the post-structuralists and their legacy.  In bad times the self-styled philosophical "bad boy" is all but assured of having an attentive audience.

Rage and History

But there is another, perhaps more telling current of rage, brilliantly diagnosed by another contemporary European "bad boy", the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in his recently translated Rage and Time (Columbia University Press, 2010).  Rage and Time is far more thana a somewhat sophisticated commentary on the temper of our own time, even though Sloterdijk himself has gained fame in Germany over the past decade as a controversial television commentator and talk show host. Reaching back all the way to the Greeks, Rage and Time seeks to lay bare the "deep structure" of the modern as well as the postmodern.  

Perhaps a better phrase would be the "deep economy" of things.  "Rage" (Greek=thymos) is the "force" from the heroic age of the Greeks onward, according to Sloterdijk, that "holds the world together."  Rage "preserves in its essence the unity of substance in the multitude of its eruptions.  It exists before all the manifestations and survives unchangingly its most intensive expenditures." (p. 7).  If Christianity with its crucified and unconditionally self-giving deity "removed rage from God" and handed it over to the work of the Devil, the growth of capitalism brought it back in spades.  The "creative destruction" of capitalism, as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called it, bears a certain resemblance to the wrathful Yahweh of the Bible. It was not accidental that Medieval Christianity denounced competition and acquisitive behavior in the name of a higher morality and divine justice.  

Capitalism was only made possible, according to Sloterdijk, by the "thymotization" of social economies that had previously been made the exclusive prerogative of divine providence.  The supposedly God-ordained, non-competitive order decreed by the Medieval church as both divine and natural law was revealed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a total sham, and became instead a cynical rationale for nobility and clerics to preserve their own special status in an egregiously corrupt order of things.  Even Plato's ideal republic required the thymos of the guardians to keep the state functioning.  The thymos of the ascendant capitalist classes engineered the unravelling of the Medieval fabric, and Weber's newly minted Protestant ethic" ensured what Deleuze would later describes as the "chaosmotic" dynamism of the modern eon, propelled by the violence of history itself and Hegel's celebrated "power of the negative." 

At the same time, capitalism engendered its own thymotic reaction, the revolutionary pushback of the socialist internationale and the dream of a classless society.  It has been the strange dampening of this grand historical rhythm of rage in the late twentieth century, culminating with the "fall" of communism in 1989, that a thymotic economy has been seen as a thing of the past.  The golden age of postmodernism has coincided with this historical solar minimum.  Perhaps in only such an interregnum has been it possible to imagine a "religion without religion" (i.e., a "rageless" religion) or a "messianism without a messiah."  Do not messiahs normally rage and smite against injustice, even if it is deferred rage, the rage of Armageddon?  

We are rapidly coming out of this solar minimum, according to Sloterdijk.  The theological minimalists cry peace, peace, when there is no peace; as Nietzsche might have said; the festival of peace is just a masked ball where in the back drawing rooms rage and resentment primp for their own grand entrance toward the end of the evening. Or, as Sloterdijk writes, "a wrathful God is the great impossible variable of our age.  But what if, beneath the surface, he is working on becoming our contemporary once again?"  (p. 43) Nietzsche could not have said it more efficaciously.   

Sloterdijk as Derrida's Own "Derrida"

Sloterdijk has been around in Germany as long, if not longer, than most of today's well-known postmodern thinkers.  But it is only in the twilight of the postmodern that his star has been suddenly rising.  American academic publishers with the help of the German government are getting ready to crank out a stream of translations of his writings just as the French ministry of culture did for Derrida and Deleuze a generation back.  Ironically, what can be considered Sloterdijk's first mark-making on academic thought outside Germany was his publication of a short book in 2006 (the first edition was actually in French) entitled Derrida: An Egyptian (English edition by Polity Press, 2009).  

That is not to say Sloterdijk offers us a "turn" beyond the postmodern.  Our era is not so much a turn as an "end" in the same sense that both Hegel and Heidegger used the word in talking about the "end of philosophy," and which I myself adapted in publishing the inaugural text of American postmodern religious thought entitled The End of Theology in 1979. An "end" in this connection constitutes a fruition rather than a termination, a fulfillment and maturation of thought trajectories that can now be redirected through new and equally productive strategies.  Early "deconstruction" was thus the "end" of phenomenology and the philosophy of language in this sense. Speech and Phenomena, Derrida's fascinating prolegomenon to deconstruction that is unfortunately seldom read any more, harbors all the indices. Sloterdijk does something totally un-Derridean with Derrida - he takes him to a new level.  In that respect Sloterdijk can be seen as Derrida's own "Derrida," mimicking in many ways Derrida's relationship to Heidegger.  

As a tribute to Derrida upon his death - especially the Derrida that has never really been known or acknowledged in the U.S.  - Sloterdijik's Derrida: An Egyptian is most telling, because it goes back to the latter's "pre-theological" sources in the essays of the 1960s and argues pithily that something was going on there that "immortalizes" what deconstruction was all about in the first place.  On the death of a great thinker this moment of immortalization both preserves, but also sets in motion the next great trend or wave. Sloterdijk ingeniously compares Derrida to Moses, so far as Freud was concerned in Moses and Monotheism.  

If Mosaic Judaism ultimately "historicized" as well as democratized Pharonic immortality in making the "pyramid" nomadic and mobile in the form of the ark of the covenant containing the stone tablets of Torah, Derridean deconstruction perhaps has served to pyramidize the Torah-like reading and re-reading of texts as a way of archiving the history of philosophy.  Derrida's "aporia", therefore, is not really "Jew-Greek", but "Egyptian-Jew," according to Sloterdijk.  There is no more Graeco-form "essential" meaning of the text.  There is only the strange immortality that comes from its endless de-construction and de-positioning with trace-like "deposits" of its signs.  Deconstruction was the new postmodern way back into philosophy, as Heidegger himself had sought to accomplish, if only on his own terms.  

Spectral Excess

Deconstruction created at the same time its own tensive cultural and intellectual "economy" that brought about an ever-broadening and hyperkinetic play of previously pyramidized, "traditional" significations which, if we follow this analysis beyond Sloterdijk's own somewhat technical philosophical reading, were mirrored in the post-1989 expansion of the global consumer economy.    This play of cultural signs was largely new media-driven. It was truly Jean Baudrillard's "hyperreality," fostering a seemingly limitless and purely semiotic economy of consumption and excess, guaranteed with a kind of romantic moral mandate pressed by the already comfortable, but hypercritical Western intelligentsia to disseminate the infinite, generative, substanceless surplus to every corner of the globe.  

That intoxicating sense of a burgeoning, real-life, global economy of excess, of course, was what Georges Bataille had lionized at the height of 1930s austerity and what neo-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri had described in their book Empire as the "ripe" set of condition for a new and final "proleterian" revolution of the wage-liberated, culturally enfranchised at the turn of the millennium.  Hardt and Negri were simply the left-wing Tweedle Dums of the neo-liberals and neo-cons, prophesying an equally wrong version of Francis Fukayama's "end of history."  

It was this infatuation with excess, however (not so much the policies of either the Clinton or George Bush administrations), that led to the Götterdämmerung of the global economy in 2008, according to economist Raghuram Rajan in his recently published book Fault Lines (Princeton University Press, 2010).  Rajan, by the way, was one of the few economists to predict the 2008 collapse.  At the conclusion he writes that "progressives in the United States blame the bankers, while conservatives blame the government and the Federal Reserve.  The worrying reality is that both are to blame." (p. 228)  

Both are to blame because hyperidealized models of predicted economic performance that came from both free-market conservatives (so-called "supply siders") and the apostles of government intervention, regulation, and stimulus (the current Obama administration team) have led equally to disaster.  Both, if we follow Rajan's logic, can be attributed to what he calls the myth of "arm's length" relationships between economic players, where Deleuze's "desiring machines" are more than a kind of Weberian "ideal type" (as they actually seemed to be for the philosopher himself), but the signifying processes born of the very generative grammar of theory itself that seem to take on the curious semblance of sentient embodiment.  

It was this Golem-like transformation of theory into both politics and policy, which could only happen during a profligate planetary regime of conceptual errancy and excess - a true Bataillean economy gone mainstream.  In the economic sphere both monetarists and Keysians turn out to be fellow-travelers on the same ship of fools. As Rajan points out, the true "moral hazard" was never really the bank bailouts, mainly because the same systemic hazard can be traced to the total sublimation of investment, risk, and the seemingly boundless expansion of the capacity for consumption summed up in Alan Greenspan's memorable phrase of the 1990s - "irrational exuberance."  

As Rajan points out, however, there was nothing "irrational" about the economic expansion.  It went "unregulated" because the underlying econometric metaphysics of excess demanded it.  There was also a deep, moral, "categorical imperative" behind the expansion.  Thou shalt consume, and thou shalt be oblivious to the consequences, because justice demands it.  There shall be no more any such thing as privilege and marginality, as gain and loss, as winners and losers, so to speak.  We have now entered a truly win-win world. The "revolutionary" economy of each according to his abilities and each according to his needs is founded overthrows the "economy" of scarcity, which is what economics is all about in the first place.  The economy of excess was in vitro designed to abolish "economics" as we know it.  No more "dismal science," only liberty and justice for all! 

Such a hyperconsumptive "meta-economy" followed its own self-propelled trajectory of a new "exuberant" rationality based on the postmodern productivity of the sign process.  Technically speaking, this hyperreal economy was postulated on what a philosopher such as Alain Badiou identifies as the confusion between the virtual and the potential.  The virtual is infinitely productive of significations, and hence is - as I have lately argued - the "event horizon" of the religious.  But virtuality is not the same as potentiality. Potentiality inhabits matter, as Aristotle underscored, not form.  It was this underlying confusion of the formal and the material, the virtual and the potential, the signification and the signified (a confusion first found in DeSaussure) that has enabled both the end and the "material" crisis of the postmodern.

Is Rage the New "Rage"?

It is that peculiar sense of material crisis that animates Sloterdijk's most recent work. Rage economies, in accordance with Sloterdijk's philosophical modus operandi so to speak, are woven from the threads of disjunctions in the sign-process rather than the processes themselves.  They are fashioned from the    lesions that make up Žižek's "barred" subject, incised from the episodic events of the Real.   But unlike these events, which remain in Žižek's neo-Lacanian analysis mere fractures in an otherwise continuous "dialectical" economy, the inscriptions of trauma are stored in an underlying "rage bank" that invests in the various economies of resentment and revolt.  

Unlike Žižek, Sloterdijk is not at all impressed with Marxism, and therefore fails also to be entranced with the enduring academic fantasy of a raging worldwide proletariat, which he understands has sunk beneath the waves of history. Today's rage bankers are investing far more productively in the vengeful mobilization of traumatized collectivities who still bear memories of having been an erstwhile "universal class", whose seemingly seamless imagination, perhaps even in their lifetimes.  The new jihadist Muslim internationale is one illustration he profiles.  Another one, not yet perhaps on his radar, is the current "Tea Party"ism of the new, disenfranchised, American middle class.  But these are not really postmodern phenomena at all. Sloterdijk, in contrast with Derrida, does not view Muslim jihadism as a "return of religion,"  but as the "thymotization" - and hence the historicization - of what was previously simply the play of signs.  They are significations not in their own right, but symptoms of profound trauma.  They are indicators of the end of the postmodern.  

In his 2009 interview with the German national magazine Der Spiegel, Sloterdijk characterizes what the publication's editors call the Eingeweide ("viscera", "embowelment") of today's Zeitgeist.  The editors did not intentionally perhaps suggest through the title that Sloterdijk's philosophy of rage is the "dirty" essence of today's disenchanted politics - the term is employed more in the sense of the "guts" of the issue.  But Sloterdijk, who uses the platform to criticize the European welfare state from the standpoint of a "lifelong social democrat," makes the broad point that the dysfunctionality of the system can only be addressed by an appeal to the implicit "generous" virtues of our thoroughly thymotic culture.  In other words, "forced" taxation and redistribution only leads to evasion, criminality, and narcissistic self-seeking, which hides behind the grand illusions of state-supported architectures of "social justice".  In true Nietzschean (whom Sloterdijk routinely quotes) he calls attention to the current global crisis as a kind of apocalypse of ressentiment brought about the toxic involution of the will to power of inherently self-seeking consumerist individuals masquerading as champions of compassion.  

Sloterdijk's analysis is neither comforting nor encouraging.  It is not one more recipe for the appropriation of contemporary philosophy by the Christian conscience.  But neither was Nietzsche's.  It just happens to be philosophically provocative enough to ask questions in this Indian summer of avant-garde enthusiasms that we have never asked before.     

              

      

The Gift of Difference - Part II - Review of the Parts

(x-posted at the de-scribe)

In Part I I addressed some of the shortfalls of the overall project while affirming what was perhaps the inevitable 'shortfall' of the two dialogue camps. Putting aside any larger intentions of this collection the chapters themselves maintained a steady offering of what it means to "to be differently ethical and differently political" (5) without falling into prescribed and caricatured notions of 'purist' or 'compromised' faith. I will touch on a number of the chapters but offer more sustained engagement with the chapters by Tripp York and Peter Dula.

The first two chapters highlight the movements, tensions and unresolved thinking represented within the book. In chapter one Peter Blum draws out a Derridean account of a metaphysics of violence as actually offering a greater possibility of peaceful practice as opposed to Milbank's ontology of peace which, with Derrida, also assumes the inevitability of violence in the present and so its discerning use on the part of the Church for the purpose of peace (for more on the Blum chapter see here). Then in chapter two the positions are flipped as Kevin Derksen accepts Milbank's critique of Derrida and illustrates it in showing that even in offering our death (Derrida's Gift of Death) this act "paradoxically reinscribes itself as the moment of purest ownership" (31). In light of the resurrection even the sacrifice of life must discerned and not given in its ethical value. This critique is then leveled against certain Mennonite accounts which seem to make peace a stable category from which other theological claims can be made. These chapters set the tone for the book. This will not be for or against the two traditions but simply difference, engaged and explored.

Tripp York's "The Ballad of John and Anneken" was the most clear and straightforward account posing the simple question, "Does [Milbank] deliver an account of witness that is capable of producing witnesses" (53)? York questions Milbank's discriminate use of violence as simply re-framing the often used 'myth of redemptive violence.' York calls for a rise in 'witnesses' if Milbank's work is to gain any lasting traction. Where even is the witness of the life of Jesus in his account? Where are the stories that flow from and reflect his ontology? York introduces the witness of Anneken Heyndricks from the Martyrs' Mirror. Anneken was to be burned at the stake for heresy. At her questioning she did not recant though neither did she curse those around her but blessed and gave thanks. York says, "such a story represents the faithful who, rather than accepting tragedy by conceding its viability, absorb tragedy as Christ-absorbed evil" (64). It does not pass through her life onto others but ends with her though she does not end, as the resurrection promises. York then asks how Milbank might respond with such an account and then adds with some bite, "Were [the civil and ecclesial authorities] not practicing dominium, and, therefore, both extending and preserving the social harmony for the good of the commonwealth" (64-65)? And further with, well, a little more than bite, "Though Milbank is not here talking about ecumenical disagreements, as charitable as I would like to be, I fear Milbank's theology would have easily been placed in the service of ecclesiastical forces that would have resulted in a number of writers in this volume, had they lived centuries ago, being burned at the stake" (65). Snap.

New for me was Peter Dula's account of "Fugitive Ecclesia" that develops Sheldon Wolin's Fugitive Democracy. It is worth citing Dula's initial quote of Wolin in full,

I shall take the political to be an expression of the idea that a free society composed of diversities can nonetheless enjoy moments of commonality when, through public deliberations, collective power is used to promote or protect the well being of the collectivity. Politics refers to the legitimized public contestation, primarily by organized and unequal social powers, over access to the resources available to the public authorities of the collectivity. Politics is continuous, ceaseless, and endless. In contrast, the political is episodic, rare (104).

I take the political expressed here to be those 'moments' when motivated, intentional figures also have the stars align allowing for something to happen. "[T]heir power sprang from grassroots . . . they were not political actors coming together but individuals formed into political actors through their common deliberation" (105). The question Dula asks is whether the church as it is conceived in theologians such as Milbank, Hauerwas, Bell, Cavanaugh, and Yoder is actually best described as a type of 'fugitive ecclesial,' that is a church that for the most part does not actually exist as it is called but for moments does exist as such. If this is the case why are they not more up front about it and what then does this mean for the church in the mean time if in fact the church remains episodic, rare? It seems necessary for these theologians to travel back to some pure conception and expression of the church while remaining at the point of despair with regards to the contemporary western church. This leads to the further question of whether or not there is some external some actual alternative to the structure of late-modern capitalism (or whatever else our state might be characterized as). Is there any longer space for the political in the midst of our current ongoing politics? The prospects, as Dula sees them, are not particularly hopeful. He offers six.

• We can accept a fugitive ecclesial and "celebrate the moments of fugitivity rather than mourn that that is all there is" (124).
• We can turn to being more 'realistic' acknowledging that our condition robs 'us of some possibilities of faithfulness" (124).
• We can, with Barth, relieve the church of so much responsibility and place it on Christ making ecclesial defenselessness possible.
• We can, with Hauerwas, acknowledge that we lack necessary skills and remain blinded to what we are called to, but hopeful that we can perhaps learn.
• We can become more open to what is going on outside of the church. "If it is true that we need to try harder, then outsiders may be able to teach us how" (126).

The sixth option appears to be Dula's own offering,

[F]ugitive ecclesia could also create the space for a renewed attention to friendship. If the church is as rare as these theologians think, then all their reflections on the church, while important, also make room for greater attention to pairs instead of communities. We may even want to revive the long discredited epithet 'organized religion.' It may suggest all we can hope for is the occasional intimacy of two or three (127).

This is an intriguing offering. It at once calls up the criticism of those fighting to change the structure but the question becomes whether this offering is from those who have been worked through the structure and understand it as perhaps one of the only alternatives left, and a theologically faithful one at that.

I will not continue reviewing each chapter at such length. The former chapters (York and Dula) strike me as the most suggestive and also, potentially, the most constructive. That being said many of the other articles offer helpful nuance to long established debates. Such is the case with Long's article "Desire and Theological Politics." Long argues that violence is as much about the desire for non-violence as it is about greed or power. In addition to suppressing violent acts pacifism has also tended to suppress the desire that may have motivated the act, a desire that may indeed have been godly. And I will leave it up to someone more qualified to engage with Pauls' chapter "Harmony in Exile: Rest in its Embers" which uses Berio's sequenza IV (for piano, 1996) as a mode of understanding Radical Orthodoxy's theological and liturgical aesthetic. The language in this chapter was highly evocative but slightly too technical in musical theory for me to fully grasp the force and implications of her work.

As I stated in part I of my review this book is not constructing some theological or ecclesial project. It is however engaging in a hopeful practice. It is a practice that does not believe one's tradition has the corner on a given expression, or even fully understands said expression. It is a practice that believes that learning may in fact be possible across traditions even if the learning means that you maintain or strengthen your opposition to another tradition. It is also a practice that has no interest in overcoming another tradition through rhetorical force but allows expressions to have their own say and persuasion. I would conclude that these are good practices for our time and place.

The Gift of Difference - Part I - A Review of the Whole

(x-posted at the de-scribe)

Jaime's previously posted blurb gave me a shot in the arm to offer my first post here at church & pomo.

The Gift of Difference is perhaps best understood in its ambiguous subtitle, “Radical Orthodoxy, Radical Reformation.” Just what is the relationship between these two expressions? Any number of conjunctives or disjunctives could have been used; on, against, and, etc. But this volume neither set out to define the relationship nor did some definitive view emerge. In many ways the comma, noting a pause and space, a fragile jot, in the end may be all that is holding these traditions in sort of relationship. While this volume at times offered an invigorating maybe even synergistic exchange where a “\” could have been the best syntactical divide, however, for the most part I was not convinced anyone came out of the exchange changed. In trying to clarify my view of this work I realized that my criticisms are with the whole while my great appreciation comes in the parts. I will begin with the whole.

There are several criticisms that can be leveled against this work as a whole. First and foremost is the almost complete absence of contributions from anyone directly associated with Radical Orthodoxy (RO). John Milbank offers the foreward and D. Stephen Long, a contributor, could perhaps be called a friend of RO (though I can’t claim to know who is in and who is out). It is then in many ways Radical Reformation (RR) on Radical Orthodoxy. Even within this initial limitation there is further narrowing of the conversation. Most articles focus on an exchange between Yoder and Milbank. This is to the exclusion not only of other modern RR thinkers (though the contributors themselves constitute this in some ways) but also a complete absence of historical RR figures (though a martyr does show up). What is more is that there tended to be a focus on Milbank’s contentious understanding of pacifism. Milbank rejects pacifism because of its posture of gazing. If you look at violence you are being even more violent. If you look away from violence you betray the victim. Numerous articles within the collection address this exact point and accept some value in critiquing a ‘secular pacifism’ but reject it as a model for understanding Jesus’ incarnational peace. Milbank appears unmoved by these various critiques and in his foreword he makes a point of re-emphasizing “the uncomfortable historical fact for contemporary Christians [which] is the debt that they owe to kings” (xvi).

Milbank’s foreword and Chris Huebner’s concluding chapter form a dissonant inclusio to this precarious relationship. Milbank asserts the role of the kings (and therefore the sword) in the preservation of Christianity. “For the survival of Christianity was enabled by acts of military defiance and its survival otherwise would have been marginal or non-existent” (xvi). This provides a type of historical justification that says because we still exist and in the past we used the sword to survive therefore the sword was necessary to exist. Contrast this to Huebner’s closing paragraph, “[Mennonite theology] more appropriately embodies the essential riskiness of a theological vision. Its appreciation of theological riskiness can be seen in its refusal of the temptation to make Christianity necessary, and its corresponding embodiment of an ethos of dialogical vulnerability that cultivates a readiness for the Radical Reformation” (216) [emphasis mine]. The logic here is almost inverted. Christianity exists as a gift from God. To the extent that we seek to secure it by violence it already ceases to exist. Therefore Christianity only exists as a gift from God.

Perhaps these initial comments indicate that I did not enjoy or appreciate the book. That would be entirely misleading. While there were some definite limitations I did find the content, the parts, of this work invigorating. And perhaps I am too harsh on it as a whole. What should I have expected from encounters with some of the ‘highest’ and ‘lowest’ church expressions? Would I have been happy with a tepid ‘middle’ church? Perhaps the whole accomplished exactly what it should have namely a respect for difference and openness to any gifts involved even if the gifts were meager or even non-existent. I imagine this is necessary to except and even celebrate when we hope that the theological agenda is set outside of our own agenda. I am not saying that the contributors did not receive from their encounters only that ‘middle ground’ was never presupposed or aimed at. Hmmmm, I recant. I now endorse this work as a whole.

In the next post I will move to direct engagement with particular chapters of interest.

Do we really get Romans? A little Badiou and Žižek can help.

It's been said that reformations and revolutions in Christianity begin with a re-reading of Romans.

That is certainly true of the Protestant Reformation with Luther's epoch-shaking insight into the meaning of the phrase "the righteousness of God."   

It is true as well of Barth's commentary The Epistle to the Romans, which in the words of a Catholic commentator "burst like a bombshell on the playground of the European theologians."  Barth's leveraging of Paul's argument in Romans served, in the shocking aftermath and disillusionment of the First World War, to turn the scholarly, cozy, and complex arguments of 19th century Protestant thinkers on their head and usher in the relatively long era that we today know as Neo-Orthodoxy.

The long-tenured regime of Neo-Orthodoxy collapsed - quite quickly really - in the mid-to-late 1960s with the cultural revolution of that period, which coincided with the rise of both religious studies as an "alternative", at least in America, to the intellectual cartel of Barthianism and the Barth-based mainline Protestant establishment and the emergence of so-called "secular theology," which gradually morphed into a new establishment with its own signature and features.  Much of today's Christian postmodernism has this latter development as both its source and heritage, although it is also fair to say that its initial impulse in the form of applied Derrideanism was derived from the sense of a thoroughgoing "gappiness" in conventional liberal constructions of God along with the realization that there was room for postulating a "holiness" that could be glimpsed in all the holes of the not-so-monolithic text.  That is the genealogy of all "religion without religion."

Secular theologies, whether they be grounded in the grand narratives of 19th century bourgeois progressivism or the "apocalypse now" and "destruction of metaphysics" themes of the post-Sixties decades, are always the products of good economic times and social stability.  The varieties of "crisis" theology" - the original terminology for Neo-Orthodoxy - find fertile soil in political or economic anxiety and social upheaval.   All the current discussion of what may be coming "after postmodernism" may be setting the stage for the emergence of a 21st century crisis theology, though one completely and obviously unlike what reigned from the 1930 up to the 1960s.   

Besides Romans, crisis theologies - if that's really the word we want to use - always turn out to carry the genetics of a previous and hitherto marginalized philosophical movement.  Luther relied indirectly on nominalism for his critique of Thomism, indulgences, and Catholic sacramental theology.  Barth "discovered" Kierkegaard.  If a new crisis theology is in the making - most likely with its own re-appropriation of Romans - what might that be?  

The word "postmodern," as we have known for years, carries way too much freight if it is to be intelligible in a serious philosophical or theological setting.  The term itself was deployed by Jean-Francois Lyotard in his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge during the mid-1980s to provide a label for the Zeitgeist of the time, although it has been applied a bit retroactively to the thought of the early Derrida and proleptically to much in the history of philosophy since then.  The feeling that "postmodernism" is now slowly fading from the picture may have more to do with a general weariness in the face of our recent past, not to mention a growing recognition that things have significantly changed in the past few years. One needs, however, to put aside the strife over labels and ask what is happening on the broader intellectual, philosophical, and theological levels.  

There has been a larger major trend since the late 1990s in Continental philosophy, especially on the French side, that has not yet gained traction in the American theological world which may be the key to the beginnings of a new "crisis theology."  The trend is closely associated with the prevalence of two special words nowadays in our postmodernist discourse - "singularity" and "event."  The nomenclature on the main can be traced back to the writings of Gilles Deleuze (though ultimately as far back as the middle and late Heidegger) But these words have become staples in the work of Alain Badiou and Slavoy Žižek. 

Without delving extensively into the technical usage of these words in postmodern philosophy, we can make the general observation that they focus our attention on the productive power of certain nameable "phenomena" in our struggle to signify the unsignifiable. Events are "singular" incidences within our narratives and articulations of what we experience that have both broad-ranging origins and consequences, though we cannot "say exactly" what the event is "all about."   The singularity of the event both derives, and derives from,  chains, complexes, and assemblages of potentially meaningful, yet inherently indiscernible, moments of signification that run invisibly back into the past and forward into the future.  The event itself, however, is unnameable.  

Deleuze talked about the singularity of the event in terms of what he called the "virtual."  This kind of talk has deep affinities with the stock, but non-mathematical, language of theoretical physics - e.g., virtual particles, virtual states.  The event, however, is unnameable.  The visible phenomenon, which from Husserl through Heidegger to contemporary "phenomenological" theologians such as Nancy and Marion, can be named by philosophy.  But the event itself surpasses the horizon of everything that is even potentially nameable.   Just as "black holes" in physics are "singularities" with their own "event horizons" that point, without signifying, beyond the laws of nature, so events in the philosophical sense indicate, without naming, beyond the horizon of our syntax and linguistic iterability.

For Žižek the event can be associated with the irruption of the "real" in the endless, but futile, formation of the psychological subject.  For Badiou the event is always identifiable and locatable, yet not "explicable," within history.  It is a "singular truth" that cannot be achieved by philosophical discussion and controversy, yet arises as a surprising and fruitful breakage within the perceived "flow of events" to be seized by thought, which then makes it meaningful through the rigorous application of "truth procedures."

For most post-Sixties French intellectuals the genuine event - l'eventement as Badiou and others call it - was the sudden and fateful inbreaking of the student protests, worker strikes, and the crisis of the Gaullist state in 1968.  For America - at least in recent memory - it might be considered 9/11.  In one's own life, if we go with Žižek's take, the event can be a breakdown of all the cognitive and the "symbolic" routines of processing our experience in accordance with our own personal imago  that we suddenly name as a collapse or "failure" in the generation of a sense of selfhood.  From the Christian point of view the latter is close to the unexpected profound awareness of brokenness and the need of grace.  "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, to save a wretch like me."  And so forth.  The event is the moment of "crisis" and redemption that has ramifications far beyond its own horizon of nameability. 

But what does all the foregoing have to do with theology? Much of the appeal of the earlier version of crisis theology rested on its unabashed Biblicism as well as the implicit cry of "back to the Reformation," where shibboleths like sole fide and sola scriptura resonated strongly with the fast-growing, implicit critique of secular authority.  If we are living in a time of religion's return, we are also witnessing a rapid collapse of confidence, not just in America but throughout much of the Western world, in political and secular authority.  Some kind of "Biblicism" - because of the intrinsically iconoclastic register of the Biblical canon itself, which elevates the singularity of the ancient Judaic faith experience over the would-be universality of the Greek sophrosyne or the Latin ratio, the principle of measured and "enlightened" thought in keeping with harmonious living that supposedly is a mandate for all human beings.

The Pauline indictment of such "measured thought" is most concentrated in his dialectic of "wisdom" and "foolishness", or "vanity", that are found in Romans.  The same dialectic, of course, appears in l Corinthians.   "For though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking...Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles." (Rom. 1:21-23).  

This kind of dialectic is very familiar to theologians, but what remains unspoken is the implications of Paul's repeated use of variants on the Greek term mataioites (those things that are "futile" or "vain").  The Greek word commonly suggests idolatry, but it has the primary meaning of "lacking force" or "unproductive of sense".  In other words, Paul is contrasting the emptiness or fecklessness of Greek dianoia, or discursivity, which from Plato onward was supposed to lead under the direction of sophia (i.e., "wisdom") to the pure eidetic, or ideal, vision of universal truth.  The dianoia of philosophy, which yields a specious wisdom, results in what Nietzsche termed nihilism, the "twilight of the idols." "What does nihilism mean?  That the highest values devaluate themselves.  The aim is lacking; 'why' finds no answer." (Will to Power, 2).      

In contrast, Paul goes on throughout the rest of Romans to explicate the mystery of the Cross, the importance of what he calls the "obedience of faith" in the gospel that is "the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith (Rom. 1:16)," and the subtle and rather complicated of the relationship between the Jews, "entrusted with the oracles of God", and the role of Christ followers.  What makes Christians special?  It is not that they have a "knowledge"  of God (gnosis), which is reserved for the "Greeks", or a special relationship to God through the Torah, which is reserved for the Jews.  The "obedience of faith" specific to Christians consists in a complete re-orientation of our lives and the formation of our hopes around a once-and-for all event, the event for which the horizon is Christ death and resurrection.  This event can be discerned neither through sophrosyne, which leads to futility, nor as part of the (Jewish) awareness of one's own distinctive election in the economy of God's Heilsgeschichte, which leads to "boasting" and arrogance.  It can only be discerned through the "weakness" (astheneia) of both our philosophical and religious understanding that finds the Cross intelligible only as a pure singularity that remains otherwise impervious to the inferential capacity of our computative minds (dianoia).  "But we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles." (1 Cor. 1:23)

For the event Paul, of course, employs the term kairos to indicate this singular and infinitely productive event, which can never be named per se.  "For while we were still weak, at the right time (kata kairon) Christ died for the ungodly." (Romans 5:6).   The kairotic character of the event is only perceptible to the "weak", who experience overwhelming "power" while right-minded Greeks sense futility and conscientious Jews a total humiliation, which was the Roman aim in crucifying their victims.  A crucified messiah?  How absolutely insulting to the divine majesty!  Indeed, the Cross signifies not just abject failure, but absolute nihilism so far as Western "ontology" is concerned.  "God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not (ta me onta), to reduce to nothing things that are."  On the face of it, what Paul is saying is the most shocking thing that the "onto-theological" version of Christianity can beard - God himself is the author of a strategic historical nihilism that is totally necessary to reveal the "power of the Gospel" in all its fullness and immensity.  

The fascination of today's would-be "atheistic" French philosophers like Žižek and Badiou with the singularity of the crucified Christ is not accidental.  So much of postmodern thought is not merely an "overcoming of metaphysics" and ontology, but a quest to penetrate to the singularity that is neither logical, ethical, nor ontological, but (as Heidegger would put it) the "origin" of the intelligibly determinative. Beginning with Heidegger himself, whom Derrida never really understood and who inaugurated the quest itself, we find a struggling to find some kind of "name" for this origin.  Heidegger calls it the "Being" that can "be" only by crossing it out.  Derrida names it khora, Deleuze the virtual, Badiou the event.  It is a quest for the name of the origin of the "universal."  As Badiou the  tells us, however, the event can be discerned, though not named, in the very "name" of Jesus - not the historical Jesus, not the Jesus of Christology qua onto-theology, but the event to which we give that name, and from which all names emanate.  "He is the name for what happens to us universally" (Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 60).  

A "crisis theology" would be concurrent with a new explication of the original sense of the Christ event. But postmodern thinking has already brought us to that crisis.

Hence, we need to re-read Romans. 

Carl Raschke

          

 

 

 

        

Frederick Douglass on the Economics of Human Stock and “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

The following post comes from Cynthia Nielsen who is a PhD candidate at the University of Dallas and blogs at percaritatem.com.

By the shedding of whose blood have we become one of the wealthiest nations in the world?  To begin an answer, why not turn to one whose back bore many a bloody lash for the sake of the so-called “American dream.”  In his 1852 oration, “The Internal Slave Trade,” Frederick Douglass offers his own analysis and stringent condemnation of America’s participation in the trafficking of human beings for economic gain.

Behold the practical operation of this internal slave trade—the American slave trade sustained by American politics and American religion!  Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market.  You know what is a swine-drover?  I will show you a man-drover.  They inhabit all our southern states.  They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation with droves of human stock.  You will see one of these human-flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans.  These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers.  They are food for the cotton-field and the deadly sugar-mill.  Mark the sad procession as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them.  Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives.  There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray.  Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms.  See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes, weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn.  The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength.  Suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul.  The crack you heard was the sound of the slave whip; the scream you heard was from the woman you saw with the babe.  Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains; that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on.  Follow this drove to New Orleans.  Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers.  See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude.[1]

This is simply one among many scenes depicting the hardships African American slaves endured on a daily basis as a result of the institution of chattel slavery.  Enslaved by the love of money, the master’s vision becomes distorted.  Not only does he see human beings as things, but the sounds of suffering fall silent to his ears.  Deafened to the wailing of mothers’ torn from their children, he transposes the dissonance of clanking chains into gold-en keys, which like the dual cut of a double-edged sword open the door to his future and secure the bonds of his brother. 

To add to their humiliation and degraded status as mere property of the white man, slaves were subjected to public auctions where they were ordered to stand, often naked or nearly so, and allow the potential buyers to examine their bodies to ensure their suitability for long-term servitude.  If a slave’s body showed signs of illness, disease, or possible weaknesses, they were passed over as bad investments, unprofitable for the master’s business.  Scar tissue on a slave’s back—the number of scars, whether the scar was old or relatively fresh—became the subject of a mythology employed to determine a slave’s character.   Too many scars indicated a rebellious spirit, whereas having few scars meant that the slave possessed a docile, obedient spirit.  “As they worked their way from inflicted scars to essential character, buyers fixed slaves in a typology of character according to the frequency, intensity, and chronology of the whipping apparent on their backs.”[2] While the slaves stood humiliated, exposed and wondering what kind of master might purchase them on that particular day, the slave buyers paraded themselves before the crowds as augurs who “could read slaves’ backs as encodings of their histories.”[3] 

 

Undeniably, the United States has come a long way from the days of chattel slavery, and we can be encouraged by the positive strides made in racial relations and equality; yet, it is important to remember whence we came in order to avoid repeating past mistakes and so that we might become critically alert to new manifestations of racism. Here we would do well to heed the words of Frederick Douglass’s 1852 oration, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Having accepted an invitation to speak to a largely white audience in celebration of Independence Day, Douglass, as master orator and rhetorician, turns to a Psalm of lamentation—a passage with which his audience was thoroughly familiar—and interprets it as analogous to the situation of American slaves.

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.  If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth” [Psalm 137]. Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are to-day rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. […] To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.[4]

Although chattel slavery and slave auctions are no longer part of America’s daily routine, in what ways do we continue to act as augurs de-coding and constructing the Other?  What kinds of actions can we, as Christians, take to change, subvert, or expose such practices?

---

[1] Douglass, “The Internal Slave Trade,” 436–7. 

[2] Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul, 145. 

[3] Ibid., 145. 

[4] Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” 431-2.  

Ecclesiology as a Rival "Ascetic" of Desire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

---

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

Symposium: The Politics of Discipleship - Part 1

Today we begin our three-part symposium on Graham Ward's new book, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens.  Because our contributions for this symposium are longer than some of our other chapter-by-chapter symposiums, I'm making the papers available as pdfs, with a little teaser below. 

Our first contribution is from Ronald Kuipers, Senior Member in Philosophy of Religion at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, Ontario.  He is the author and editor of several books, including Critical Faith: Toward a Renewed Understanding of Religious Life and its Public Accountability and Solidarity and the Stranger: Themes in the Social Philosophy of Richard Rorty.  Churchandpomo readers will also be familiar with him as the interviewer of Charles Taylor and Jeffrey Stout over at The Other Journal.

Here's a snippet:

Both Taylor and Ward consider this Christian interpretation of the good (as beyond ordinary human flourishing) as both different and better than contemporary secular-humanist alternatives.  For example, there is an interesting bit in A Secular Age where Taylor compares the virtues of a secular-humanist motivation for pursuing social justice and solidarity with the virtues found in a Christian motivation for pursuing the same things.  While he deeply admires the self-giving service of a secular humanist such as Albert Camus, he nonetheless resists the temptation to view Camus’ “heroic individualism” as the ultimate in selflessness; for, according to Taylor, it misses something important about love that Christianity does not:  “This is a bond where each is a gift to the other, where each gives and receives, and where the line between giving and receiving is blurred.  We are quite outside the range of ‘altruistic’ unilateralism.”  Taylor continues:  “Could it be that, in a very different way, something analogous lies behind the sense of solidarity between equals that pushes us to help people, even on the other side of the globe?  The sense here would be that we are somehow given to each other, and that ideally, at the limit, this points us towards a relationship where giving and receiving merge. Taylor thinks that the Christian understanding of agape, because it takes into account the sense that “we are somehow given to each other,” and “points us towards a relationship where giving and receiving merge,” provides a better account of the good than at least this particular secular-humanist alternative.

Taylor contrasts the motivations of secular humanism and Christianity with respect to efforts to attain justice and universal solidarity because he is trying to name an ethos that can bear universal human respect, but for which he thinks certain versions of Christianity provide a better account.  He goes on to say that he thinks this understanding of universal human solidarity can be real for us, “but only to the extent that we open ourselves to God, which means in fact, overstepping the limits set in theory by exclusive humanisms.  If one does believe that, then one has something very important to say to modern times, something that addresses the fragility of what all of us, believer and unbeliever alike, most value in these times.”  The idea here is that Christians have a better way of accounting for something (universal solidarity) that most people, religious or otherwise, already profess to cherish.  Christianity gets something right here that other positions do not.  The cultural importance of this epistemic status lies in Taylor’s claim that “getting it right will help to strengthen it.”

I think that in this book Ward shares Taylor’s sense of the importance of “getting it right,” and by “getting it right” I think both authors mean something more or less akin to a theoretical account, one that is better able to explain or justify the pursuit of and longing for universal solidarity than other accounts currently on offer.  And this is precisely where I want to insert my question in this closing section.  How important is it to ‘get it right’ here, to have all of our theological and metaphysical ducks lined up in a row?  I ask this because, in spite of his affirmation of the importance of this effort, Taylor still warns against a temptation that arises when we take ourselves to have so gotten it right.  Throughout history, he notices, “[t]he goodness which inhabits our goal, or our vision of order, is somehow undone when it comes to struggling to realize it.”  He continues:

The paradox is, that the very goodness of the goal defines us, its builders and defenders as good, and hence opens the way to our grounding our self-integrity on a contrast case who must be evil as we are virtuous….  There is no general remedy against this self-righteous reconstitution of the categorizations of violence, the lines drawn between the good and evil ones which permit the most terrible atrocities.  But there can be moves, always within a given context, whereby someone renounces the right conferred by suffering, the right of the innocent to punish the guilty, of the victim to purge the victimizer.  The move is the very opposite of the instinctive defense of our righteousness.  It is a move which can be called forgiveness, but at a deeper level, it is based on a recognition of common, flawed humanity.”

Now I am confident that Ward would affirm most everything Taylor says in this passage, and his book is full of warnings against precisely such self-righteous presumption.  So I do not want to take this reflection in the direction of such an accusation.  What I do want to say, in closing, is that perhaps the pitfalls associated with ‘getting it right’ are a sign that, in insisting on its importance, we have not taken Christian renunciation far enough.

I say this because I think we ought not to confuse the task of being salt and light to a world desperately in need of such things with attempts at theoretical self-justification.  When we slide from the former into the latter, we are all too easily tempted to assume a ‘no flies on me’ posture that bars the way to achieving the very effective solidarity our cherished version of the good envisions.  That is why I read Luke 18:19 as such a liberating passage:  “There is not one good person on earth. No one is good but God.”  I do not read this passage as saying that everyone but God is bad, nor do I use it as a whip with which to flagellate myself according to some misguided form of Christian asceticism (or populist Calvinism).  Instead, I read it as a passage that frees me from having to make myself good, from the task of justifying myself, and, perforce, from the need to construct theoretical self-justifications of the hope that is in me.

To continue reading, download Kuipers' article, "No one is Immune: Reflections on Ward's Politics of Discipleship," and be sure to contribute your questions, comments, and criticisms as part of the conversation.