Author: david cl driedger

On My Arc Away From Liturgy

I left an annoying comment on Tony’s recent post about liturgy.  His post briefly explores the possibility of the Church Year as offering the foundation for an ‘irregular dogmatics’.  My comment was simply stating that I wish I could comment because at present the notion and validity of the Church Year and its structural liturgy is, at present, in upheaval.  I thought I might try and trace my thought trajectory so that I can see where it might be heading.

As I alluded to my last post I have been preaching Romans for Advent.  Paul, having little to say about the historical Jesus at the best of times, has no Christmas story.  There appears to be no value in recounting Jesus’s birth for the sake of churches he worked with.  This led to a sort of paradigm shift which began to view liturgical practices not so much as rhythms of resistance but as abstractions displacing what should be existentially integrated (did that make sense?).  So we set baby Jesus outside of us as opposed to attending to the blood, shit and pain that comes with childbirth.

This thinking was further crystallized by a comment Chris Rodkey made on a somewhat unrelated post at AUFS.  He states,

One thing I have been thinking about as I am constructing an outline for a collaborative project a colleague and I are gearing up to write together is Jacob Taubes’ critique of Christianity in his book Occidental Eschatology. Essentially my appropriation is this: The liturgical calendar and liturgical time prevents any sense of Parousia. [emphasis mine]

Perhaps I could be convinced that present liturgies are simply parodies but it hardly makes a difference.  The point is the manner in which our lives are presently and existentially engaged.  As it turns out Dan seemed to push my thinking even further with his recent post.  He writes,

This is the season of Advent and some of my friends are writing pretty words about this time of waiting, hope, anticipation and proleptic action.  They are saying the sort of thing I used to say not too long ago.  As for me, I am tired of waiting and tired of being a good little fellow and “waiting well.”  With all due respect to my friends, I say fuck that noise.  If there is a God out there, and that God is lingering, deciding to postpone an intervention, then I think the only way to wait is to act as if God is not coming or to try and force the coming of God.  Instead of finding ways to make our peace with our godforsakenness we should absolutely refuse to accept it.  Anything is better than that acceptance.  Better to risk everything on the wager that God cares enough to intervene (although that usually doesn’t work out well) than to sit back and make peace with this.  Better to spit at the back of God if that is what will bring God to act.  Besides, it is actions like these, and only actions like these, that actually take God seriously.  Anything else in the context of abandonment is either a pale imitation of worship or idolatry.

I am not quite sure how to take this.  At present I read it as a Psalm which is fully truthful if not entirely complete (is that an insult Dan?).  This leads me to my present reading in Philip Goodchild’s Capitalism and Religion.  Goodchild looks at Henri Bergson’s work on time and freedom.  Bergson critiques ‘measured’ or ‘counted’ time.  Goodchild writes,

For synchronization to occur, real time must be replaced by an abstraction which has eliminated the essential quality of time – change.  Measurable, homogeneous time is an abstraction where nothing takes place.  In countable time, the living is measured in so far as it conforms to the behaviour of inanimate clocks. (105)

In brief, the representation of reality in both science and metaphysics is a commodification, replacing the thing with a quantifiable symbol fashioned for the purpose of exchange.

Bergson’s alternative is to place reason within the temporal process itself. . . . The experience of thinking replaces the object of thought.  Freedom must be encountered in the experience of thinking before it can become the object of thought. (107)

The question this raises is the extent to which liturgical practices actually undermine, overthrow or replace dominant social modes (empire, capitalism, etc.).  Or do they simply fall prey the near omnipotent work of commodification?  Does a flash mob singing the hallelujah chorus in a food court do anything more than make people feel good about their shopping experience?  Even the cultural liturgist Jaime Smith thinks not (I have not read his Desiring the Kingdom). (I also can’t help but cringe at Winnipeg’s attempt to piggy-back on this . . . apparently the press was there waiting for it ‘to happen’)

So that is a bit of the arch.  I still retain theological convictions of doxology as a sort of foundation for practice but as for present form of church liturgy I am becoming increasingly dissatisfied.  The issue remains the extent to which the acts and the structures produce abstractions or commodities that keep one from encountering and entering into the Gospel.  What is my alternative?  At present it is little more than an increasingly social form of (or socially aware) existentialism.  Or to be more naive . . . a biblical faith.  Hopefully, more to come.

A Pauline Christmas

Preaching Advent has been a highly rewarding experience (well for myself in any event . . . I won’t speak for the congregation).  I preached three of four Advent Sundays.  I decided to follow the Romans texts.  I was able to integrate the first two texts within the broader and more traditional context of Advent with relative ease.  First Advent was a re-evaluation of time (entering Messianic time); Rom 13.  Awake the time is at hand.  Second Advent was the need for local, particular traditions to be challenged so that Christ might enter into them; Rom 15.  Fourth Sunday in Advent, however, takes us right back to the beginning of Romans.  It was in preparation for this sermon that Paul’s non-Christmas imagery was catching up with me.  What the hell I am supposed to do with Paul’s call to be a servant, set apart for the Gospel?  I could focus on his note that this was promised beforehand through the prophets but that felt like a cop-out.  I decided to go canonical on this one and embrace a Pauline Christmas.  Romans 1 is the first chapter of Paul’s first book in the New Testament so I took it as programmatic and read this as Paul’s Advent.  Here are a few excerpts;

Continue reading “A Pauline Christmas” →

Have You Seen This Dead God?

Lately it seems I cannot turn around without coming across the dead God.  I have been reading Zizek again and instead of simply being playfully amused by his counter-intuitive insights I have begun to see more clearly his hegelian reading of the Trinity.  God empties himself into Jesus and is split, de-centered from himself.  And dies.  The God of ‘beyond’ which can and does ground every ideology is emptied and the space of struggle, the Holy Spirit, is opened in this death.  Traditional theology will tend to keep God the Father above and beyond pulling the strings and maintaining order.  It is precisely that God that must be emptied into Jesus die for the purpose of salvation.

Man is eccentric with regard to God, but God himself is eccentric with regard to his own ground, the abyss of Godhead. . . . Christ’s death on the Cross thus means that we should immediately ditch the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology – Christ’s death on the Cross is the death of this God, it repeats Job’s stance, it refuses any ‘deeper meaning’ that obfuscates the brutal reality of historical catastrophes. – The Monstrosity of Christ

I also recently finished reading Ronald Osborn’s Anarchy and Apocalypse.  This is a relatively conservative appeal to the biblical resources of non-violence set within particular contemporary settings.  However, here the dead God surfaces in the form of post-holocaust Jewish thought, namely that of Elie Wiesel.  Wiesel sees God as the young child hung from his neck, dying and almost dead.  This becomes the straightforward,

ethical as well as a religious imperative: if we are to remain human we must refuse passivity, ease, complacency, and fight for the justice which God, in His captivity, in the time of His banishment, cannot bestow. – Anarchy and Apocalypse

And all the reminded me of an old post I wrote reflecting on Kierkegaard’s test for true love which is to love someone dead.  The dead is the absolute relationship.  If the relationship of love changes it must be because of you, the variable element (no blaming the dead for not understanding you).  To love one dead is love a non-being.

In order properly to test whether or not love is faithful, one eliminates everything whereby the object could in some way aid him in being faithful.  But all this is absent in the relationship to one who is dead, one who is not an actual object.  If love still abides, it is most faithful. – Works of Love

What is going on here?  Will a decade, more or less, pass after which we will look back at these silly caricatures of theology?  Or are these accounts already reflections and indictments of an already over-caricatured and debased theology and ecclesiology?  I would like to call this theme humanist in its apparent rejection of God but that does quite do it justice.  Death is something other than human or perhaps fully human; something that modern humanism (as I have encountered it) does quite seem to grasp.  Also these accounts remain in many ways thoroughly theological.  They are dealing with the dead God not with God as an illusion.  It is this possible realism in theology that I find intriguing and potentially attractive.

And for your listening pleasure he is Gash’s 1986 God is Dead


O Blogger Where Art Thou?

A great silence it seems has fallen across the theo-blogosphere.

Ben Myers has become sporadic and relatively uninteresting.

Halden Doerge has been reduced to throwing up quotes and meta-observations on blogging.

David Congdon flared up for a moment but I doubt that will be sustained.

D W Horstkoetter is ABD but that has not affected his output.

Church and PoMo Culture is simply flat.

Dan and memoria dei post less often but are usually worth the wait.

Where shall I go from here?  I rely on the kindness of strangers for my theological engagement.

It seems AUFS remains the primary and most high level theology (related) blog (and it would cringe to be so named!).

Perhaps WIT and Jesus Radicals can also fill some of the void.

Who is emerging to take the place of these  stewards of virtual discourse?  Am I missing something? O blogger where art thou?

I Object!

From a recent Globe and Mail article,

What attracts native-born Canadians to church these days, says religion sociologist David Seljak of St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ont., is the availability of parking, quality of preaching and children’s programs, in that order.

I object!  I know from direct anecdotal evidence that children’s programs ranks higher in drawing attendance than quality of preaching.  As a minister of the Gospel I am deeply offended by this accusation.

Digging Into the End

I remember when my little brain first gained the conceptual ability to ponder (outer) space.  I let my mind wander as far as it would go into space.  It traveled deeper and deeper where the star lights began to grow dim.  Then light became absent.  Things slowed down but my mind continued.  Eventually my mind reached a wall, or more accurately a corner, a point where my mind was funneled.  This is the end, there is no further.  But the thought came to me, What if I began to dig into the end?

This thinking always comes back to me when the question of immanence and transcendence surfaces.  It always supported, in my mind, a position of transcendence.  I no longer see this as the case.  I see the question now more as a Hebrew one; that is a question of boundary.  In any  event I have been trying to think through various expressions of immanence lately.  Most of them are loosely or directly connected with Gilles Deleuze (and seems to characterize much of the contributions at AUFS).  Currently I am reading Philip Goodchild’s Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire.  As I am working through many things I do not understand I came across a very helpful and short statement on understanding immanence.

A truly critical philosophy can only be judged by the immanence of its criteria: it must do what it says, and say what it does.  It becomes a being-thought: a thought of being and a being of thought.  The second limit of critical philosophy is therefore a pure plane of immanence; this is the only possible meaning of the ‘end of philosophy’.  Immanence does not mean the absence of determination; rather, it implies that all that one is should be put into how one thinks, so that one’s entire mode of existence may be changed by encounters and idea within thought. [emphasis added]

This is far and away the most helpful thinking I have encountered in this discussion.  I have always approached the question as a jockeying for position over transcendence.  Who is policing the boundaries?  Who is claiming access or insight into the other side?  Who has dug through the end?  Goodchild’s (or Delueze’s) posture orients the question much more existentially and in many ways reminds me of statements found in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground in which the Underground Man attempts to face himself.

There are certain things in a man’s past which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends.  Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as a secret.  But, finally, there are things which he is afraid to divulge even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things in his mind.

. . .

I particularly want to put the whole thing to the test to see whether I can be absolutely frank with myself and not be afraid of the whole truth.

This thinking has no interest in the perception from outside as an abstracted and inaccessible site of conversation.  This thinking desires to put all into play; a venture of risk and trust.  I cannot rely on a secure deposit outside the relations of this world.  What else is kenosis?  As such this becomes a venture that may offer traction to the Christian notion of faith.  And perhaps more importantly this thinking may actually put flesh on the possibility of conversion.

Book Review – Anarchy and Apocalypse

Ronald E. Osborn. Anarchy and Apocalypse: Essays on Faith Violence, and Theodicy (Cascade Books, 2010).

Osborn’s short collection of essays is one of the more eclectic publications I have read in some time.  Faith and violence are indeed the mingled themes that bind this work together; having said that, however, the collection is somewhat nomadic moving from shorter almost op-ed pieces to longer more technical engagements.  Osborn’s introduction claims that a possible underlying ‘project’ here is an attempt to relate anarchist and Christian approaches to nonviolence.

Continue reading “Book Review – Anarchy and Apocalypse” →

I Saw the Future

In the past two weeks I have visited a number of seniors in my congregation.  I have to say that the experience has been a little unnerving.  In these visits I encountered paranoia, gibberish and sexual frustration.  All the while I walk the halls to find a particular room and a particular person and in the process pass by men and women sitting with their heads tilting back and to the side staring at the ceiling or staring at nothing at all.  Some moan.  Shouting can be heard coming from some rooms.  This, I imagine, is the fate of the majority of westerners; that is if they are lucky enough to be able to afford one of these places and can get in.  There is nothing absolutely nothing in nature to preserve our mind and body.  It is the natural order to become decrepit and crazy.  One woman was fondling my hands continually repeating it would be wonderful if my hand could be outside . . . could my hand be outside . . . do you think my hand could be outside.  This is the culmination of life.  There is no dignity ahead.  Know that now.  Let that inform you now.  These people are not becoming less human they are becoming more human.  They are returning to our original essence which is formless and void.  Hold on and reinforce all you want.

Really, though, these people are crazy . . . and we accept it.  It is more human to be crazy than to be not crazy.  I remember one piece of graffiti I saw which read all of god is insane.  It was the ‘all’ that got me.  But they are not crazy and god is not insane.  We build out of ineternal materials and so we slow down the flow of divinity thinking it will cease, reside, rest but the Tent must always move.  And when a middle aged person acts like any single person I am referring to above then we fear.  And at times for good reason for they are still strong enough to enact this strange divinity.  They are in step with the speed and we cannot keep up.  No I am still wrong.  We are all crazy.  It is simply a numbers game.  How many people are convinced of which truth.  Love is what differentiates.  Love is what cuts along the the arbitrary horizon of sanity.

Operation Tell it Like it Is

I have for years and years struggled in my encounters with panhandlers.  And I have continued to live and work in areas that have forced me to struggle with this.  During the years I have shifted from gratuitous giving to simple refusal.  I have never been happy with any response (as if my happiness was the goal).

I would like to bracket for just a minute the larger structural and societal questions around panhandling and focus on the reality that each encounter is an encounter between two human beings in the midst of life.  While I am still not fully satisfied with my approach I am beginning something new.  I am beginning to shift my posture towards panhandlers to something more selfish.  I am now interested in their stories.  I value the unknown (to me) story latent within each of these encounters and I am willing to pay fairly for it.  Working in a church located centrally in Winnipeg we come across a fair number of people looking for some sort of aid.  I never really believe their ‘story’ as if any story is truly believable by someone in power.  So I am trying to evoke another kind of story.  A man came in to my office for the second time in about as many weeks.  The presenting story is always well scripted and pointed in a way that is all or nothing with respect to what they are asking for.  You will either have to accept me or refuse me . . . on my terms.  I was sitting and thinking with this man on my couch and did not feel really comfortable enacting my new plan with him.  But reluctantly I put forward the proposition that I would like to buy a story from him if he would write one.  At first he started telling it to me but I stopped and told him that I would like him to write it down.  He actually responded with more than a little enthusiasm.  Now the story he completed still reads a little more like a ‘justification’ for why he is asking for money.  I tried to be clear that was not what I was looking for.  As I went with him to take out some cash to pay him he started talking about how his girlfriend has been telling him to start writing again (he used to write in prison).  I told him I was not always sure I can pay the same rate but I would be happy to look at other stories.

While this approach does not offer a solution it does make me hopeful and I think it made him more hopeful.  Not a bad thing during this season.

Here is an excerpt from my first story acquisition;

Lately I have been taking good care of Linda and love her very much.  Sometimes she thinks that she’s a burden because she’s sick and I need to reassure her that she needs my help and I’m okay with it.