Category: church

The garments are better than those who have put them on

A few years ago I would have found it convenient to dismiss any expressions that smacked as ‘gnostic’, a term I would have held to be basically synonymous with dualist (body = bad / spirit = good).  After all the church has had centuries of developing coherent defenses against any claims too far out of creedal orthodoxy. Over the past couple of years and have been able to allow myself to actually read non-orthodox expressions and allow their logic and orientation to develop their own merit.

In any event I have finally got around to chipping through the standard English translation of the Nag Hammadi library. Some of the texts clearly demand some sort of secondary explanation to orient the reader to what, at least on the surface, is a foreign concept (or expression) of reality. However, others provide surprisingly contemporary readings of theology. The question of course is what we would make them being ‘contemporary’ (i.e. non-orthodox). Are we doomed as they were? What does it mean to be doomed? Is doomed a theologically negative category?

In the Gospel of Philip (which I have just started) we have an account that unravels the easy criticism of a strict dualist outlook of the world.

Light and darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable. Because of this neither are the good good, nor the evil evil, nor is life life, nor death death. For this reason each on will dissolve into its earliest origin. But those who are exalted about the world are indissoluble, eternal.

The virgin birth is also denied. The logic for this is also interesting. The Holy Spirit is female and so cannot conceive with another female. This of course raises some interesting possibilities for orthodoxy as Jesus being the conception of a lesbian union.

What I have been most curious about is a passage regarding the role of the ‘flesh’. I wanted to write it out here so that I could read it through more slowly.

Some are afraid let they rise naked. Because of this they wish to rise in the flesh, and they do not know that it those who wear flesh who are naked. It is those who [ . . . ] to unclothe themselves who are not naked. ‘Flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God’ (1 Cor 15:50). What is this which will not inherit? This which is on us. But what is this, too, which will inherit? It is that which belongs to Jesus and his blood. Because of this he said, ‘He who shall not eat my flesh and drink my blood has not life in him’ (Jn 6:35). What is it? His flesh is the word, and his blood is the holy spirit. He who has received these has food and he has drink and clothing. I find fault with the others who say that it will not rise. Then both of them are at fault. You say, that the flesh will not rise. But tell me what will rise, that we may honour you. You say the spirit in the flesh, and it is also this light in the flesh. But this too is a matter which is in flesh, for whatever you shall, say, you say nothing outside the flesh. It is necessary to rise in this flesh, since everything exists in it. In this world those who out on garments are better than the garments. In the kingdom of heaven the garments are better than those who have put them on.

I am not quite sure how to orient my thinking on this passage but I find the last few lines very suggestive and much more ‘earthy’ but not predictably so. Thoughts.

An Ill Fit

“Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last.  And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.  Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’” (Mark 15:37-38)

“Creation was subjected to futility. . . . We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves . . . groan inwardly while we wait for the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:20-23)

This second quote is not our reading for the morning, but it is what came to mind as I reflected on our text and reflected on Lent as we draw closer to Easter.  Paul is coming a little late to the story.  He was not a disciple during the life of Jesus and does not seem to have been present during the events surrounding Easter.  And perhaps for that reason Paul seems to be hit all at once with the futility of creation and how humanity exists within it.

There is a certain type of futility that must be faced as we approach Easter.  At Palm Sunday crowds are ecstatic, celebrating their potential Messiah, their king, but Jesus does not mount a war horse rather he ambles in on a donkey.  Pilate, the one in charge, examines Jesus and seems to be more interested in the crowd’s response then in executing justice.  The soldiers let off some steam adding insult to injury with their mocking punishment of Jesus.  The whole story seems to be a practice in futility.  No one really gets what they want.  The people do not get what they want and they do not give Pilate what he wants.  And Jesus seems to be deliberately instigating a denial of these desires.  Jesus evades the religious, social, and political expectations imposed on him that keep us from feeling the futility around us.  To recognize Jesus then, it seems would simultaneously be to recognize a certain futility, the futility of trying to build a kingdom that does not fit creation.

In light of this context what sort of recognition did the centurion offer staring at the cross and the dead Jesus?  The words out of his mouth were simple, This person really was a son of God.  Some scholars read the statement as an extension of the soldier’s mocking of Jesus.  Jesus dies, the whole trial and ordeal is over and here, this man who couldn’t even last on the cross as long as other convicts, have a look everybody this man is truly a son of God.  The irony and the mocking continue.  The centurion remains hardened, he has probably seen it all before and at some point it always ends up this way.  Hopes are ignited, expectations are frustrated, and the powers re-assert themselves.  Another reading of the text interprets this statement as the very first conversion after at the death of Jesus.  At Jesus’s death this Gentile centurion sees the light of salvation, makes his confession of faith, and becomes a member of the kingdom of the God of Israel.

I think these two interpretations reflect our tendencies in how we encounter the seeming futility in life at times.  Sometimes we simply buckle under it. We resign ourselves to the fact that nothing changes and nothing will change and so we find our expressions tainted with cynicism, sarcasm, and despair.  The other tendency is to respond to possible futility by creating beautiful and symbolic visions that can help transport us out of some of our more difficult material realities.  We have hope in what is possible through faith expressing itself in work, prayer, and imagination. This position does not buckle under the futility but it can also lead us into illusions and denials about some of the realities in the world.

So which was it?  Was the centurion’s statement a hardened cynicism or an enlightened confession?  There are grounds for both interpretations.  On the one hand it is truly hard to imagine a centurion uttering these words affirmatively because it equals treason as Caesar the ruler of the Roman empire is called the son of God.  And second, there seems to be no implications to his statement.  The centurion goes about his work following Pontius Pilate’s orders in the following verses.  On the other hand it is also clear that early interpretations of this passage viewed the centurion as offering a faithful confession of Jesus as divine.  While still open for interpretation both Matthew and Luke offer slightly different accounts that seem to view the centurion as being much more affirming as a confession of faith.

This morning I want to consider the centurion as someone stuck between the possibility and futility of the world.  In the Roman army a centurion is essentially one step up from a regular soldier.  A centurion commands a group of one hundred soldiers.  Centurions were often soldiers promoted from within the ranks.  As a soldier there was a chance for advancement.  A centurion would have known and experienced that change and improvement was possible.  It was possible to imagine and work for something within the larger faith of the Roman Empire.

But there seems to have been catch with becoming a centurion.  The pay and standard of living would have improved somewhat, but with that advancement you became the most accessible target of a soldier’s frustration and unrest.  The first century Latin historian Tacitus offers several accounts of how soldiers direct their discontent against their centurion leaders.  At one point Tacitus refers to centurions as “the customary targets of the army’s ill-will, and the first victims of any outbreak.”  But in reality the centurion seemed to hold little authority beyond his small group of soldiers.  In fact the blame could also be passed down onto the centurion from higher ranking figures.  After Caesar Augustus died under unknown circumstances Tiberius become the new Caesar and leader of Rome.  After Tiberius became emperor it so happened that one of his rivals also died.  When the death was investigated the centurion who killed the man was called to testify.  The centurion said that he was following the orders of Tiberius.  And as you might guess we find out that Tiberius said that he never gave the orders.

So with the centurion we seem to have someone who can experience very real change and yet, in the end, may still find it hard to believe that anything really changes.  At the cross he saw the soldiers under his charge mock and abuse Jesus and he saw Pontius Pilate above placating to the crowds and he was in the middle of it, striving for advancement but forever the target from below and at the whim of those privileged above.  The soldier in doing his job well becomes a centurion and this promotion makes him the scorn of former comrades and the scape-goat of his superiors.  And so maybe there was something about this event and encounter with Jesus that simply proved too much to take and something changed.

Thinking about the story in this light the centurion reminded me a little of the characters in some of Franz Kafka’s novels.  Kafka was a German novelist who wrote in the early twentieth century.  What I have noticed in Kafka’s novels is that they often start with some dramatic change but the implications and awareness of that change are not fully evident.  In his novels The Trial and Amerika the protagonists both find themselves in completely new situations, in The Trial Joseph K. is placed under arrest without being told his crime and in Amerika Karl Rossmann leaves his native Germany in disgrace and arrives alone in the United States.  In both these stories the protagonists believe, in good faith, that the place and the system they find themselves in will yield positive results so long as they learn and abide by the proper rules.  But in each case the rules themselves are always able to steer and bend things away from their favour.  Kafka is devastatingly relentless in how far he will depict people willing to work with the system only to find themselves further under the system’s power.  And, in turn, how a system (like the legal system or like a country’s culture) is able forcibly, even if subtly, to bend your will and change your beliefs, like the centurion who believed in the work and possibility of Rome.

So if for the centurion his encounter with Jesus is a confession and a conversion experience then it is a strange one, one that we don’t know how to talk about anymore.  It is not yet the promise of Jesus lifting the burden but may be a conversion to the full and crushing awareness of the burden that the world exerts.  It is to be with Paul who hears and utters the true groaning of creation under a system and power that is able to reach and apply its pressure on all people.  This is what Paul calls sin, and it is pervasive.

Towards the end of Kafka’s The Trial we find Joseph K. who experienced just how deep and smothering the legal system is and how it thwarted any good work and intention he might throw at it.  Joseph is talking with a priest, who is also a prison chaplain, someone inside the system of the law.  The priest tries to explain some aspects of this system telling him that it is not truth but the belief that it is necessary that is important.  Joseph responds to the priest saying, “Depressing thought.  It makes the lie fundamental to world order.”  This might be one way of interpreting the centurion’s confession.  In seeing Jesus’s death the centurion also sees clearly the system that surrounded and imposed itself on him.  And perhaps like some Kafkaesque character the centurion has changed but does not fully know it himself.

In perhaps his most well-known novel The Metamorphosis Kafka depicts a character waking up one morning only to find out that he is now a giant bug, a monstrous vermin in some translations.  The change is stark, extreme, and definitive but the character does not yet know what to make of it.  He tries to go about his day as usual but he cannot, his body does not work the same, he does not fit as he once did, despite his continued attempts to fit under the old conditions.

So the centurion continues his duties after his confession not understanding what happened.  But maybe he begins to notice that his helmet does not fit properly anymore.  Maybe his spear that was once an extension of his arm now looks foreign and strange.  The commander’s voice that directed his every action was now emptied of its authority.  The gods that watched over Rome become impoverished images and meaningless rhetoric.  He begins to see that in this situation he will always be despised from below and rejected from above.

For the centurion and for anyone who encounters the way this cross, this death, this person who brings into focus the order of the world, the question becomes how you will live out of the change.  How much and or in what way will we continue to invest in trying to fit into in a system that seems to be based on a lie.

As we encounter the death of Jesus and the opening of the Temple curtain how do we continue to try and fit within the world?  I used to think I knew some of those answers.  I used to think I had to change myself but what if, like in Kafka, the change has already happened and we are trying to figure out how to live into it?  And here we need to take Kafka seriously.  In his stories some characters will go to any length believing they will find redemption in the order and system established around them.  Many of these stories do not end well.

So do not stifle the groaning you feel at the parts of this world that do fit the form God has given you.  Do not stifle the groaning that others feel at the forces that push down on them to try and conform or distort them into something they are not.  You are not alone if at times you feel like some monstrous vermin in the light of the powers and the pressures of this world.  It is, after all, a false light.  So continue this Lent as we approach the darkness, lose your orientation to the light of the world’s powers, and wait.

Amen.

Abandoning the oppositional territory

Jacob Taubes’s doctoral thesis-turned-manuscript Occidental Eschatology is immense in scope, trying to account for the presence and expression of eschatology in the West.  In this account it seem that the notion of the ‘end’ and history has not been able to rid itself of the forms of apocalyptic that continue to emerge.  According to Taubes it appears that apocalyptic emerges when a generation or segment of society is no longer able to abide by the current forms of totality, whether it is a totality of empire or thought (Rome or Hegel).  His work culminates in Hegel’s grand system of spirit and how to think something’s opposition within its whole (a thesis always functions with and somehow exists with the necessary presence of its antithesis).

So Hegel himself is rather unremarkable in his context or to put it positively, Hegel is adaptable for his time causing few waves.  But not so for those who cannot abide by his whole or those who further extend its implications.  Neither Marx nor Kierkegaard can abide by Hegel as it is (and of course in this way it could be argued that Marx and Kierkegaard are more Hegelian than the later Hegelians).

Both Marx and Kierkegaard want a return to accounting for actually as opposed to remaining in an abstracted ideal system.  But there is a massive difference between the two approaches.

“The difference between Marx and Kierkegaard lies in the positions of inside and outside.  Marx pins his hopes for a proletarian revolution on the economic situation of the masses, while for Kierkegaard it is the individual that underpins the religious revolution of the bourgeois Christianity.  This contrast corresponds to the difference in their interpretation of self-alienation.  Marx sees bourgeois society to be a society of isolated individuals in which man is alienated from his species; Kierkegaard sees in bourgeois Christendom a Christianity of the masses in which man is alienated from his individuality.  . . . Both critiques are grounded in the disintegration of God and the world, which is the original pre-condition for self-alienation, as has been shown in the studies of apocalyptic and Gnosis. . . . When Marx builds a society without God, and Kierkegaard places the individual alone before God, their common assumption is the disintegration of God and the world, the division of the divine and the secular.” (176, 184)

In this way Taubes positions Marx and Kierkegaard in a sort of ‘face-off’.

“Inwardness and outwardness are divided between Marx and Kierkegaard into worldly revolution and religious repentance.  Kierkegaard has made it absolutely clear that Christian life is inward and therefore must be acosmic and antiworldly.  Marx has replaces the truth of the world beyond with the truth of this world, and has shown that the atheistic roots of communism are constitutive.  The fusion of inside and outside can only be attained if one is prepared to abandon the territory which holds Marx and Kierkegaard, even in their opposition, captive.” (191)

What I was not prepared for was Taubes’s Epilogue following this statement, his account of abandoning the shared oppositional territory.  It is probably why I was attracted to his style in The Political Theology of Paul precisely because he did not rest or reside in that territory but in doing so he also did not abandon what was important to both Marx and Kierkegaard.  And he does this, I think, then without also trying to return to Hegel, but that is not a statement I am certain I could back up.

I will post some quotes from and thoughts on his Epilogue shortly.

A sign of contradiction

I am beginning to wonder about a fairly fundamental orientation of the church.  The church has largely understood and accepted the role of being or bringing Christ to the world.  I do not want to rehearse the misguided ways that the church has understood this mission, namely through colonial disbursement.  It is not hard to understand how people can come to the conclusion that contemporary global capitalism is an extension of an earlier theology.  In both practices there is a message of hope that is articulated by the saved/wealthy and in both cases the message never seems to play out as being truly good news for the pagan/poor.

I came across a sort of ominous foreshadowing of this orientation to the church’s message in The Epistle to Diognetus (2nd century).  In upholding love of neighbour the author of this text states,

[H]e who takes upon himself the burden of his neighbour; he who, in whatsoever respect he may be superior, is ready to benefit another who is deficient; he who, whatsoever things he has received from God, by distributing these to the needy, becomes a god to those who receive [his benefits]: he is an imitator of God.

Now to be sure the early church was not in the same position as it was to rise to in the 4th century but the logic of disbursement is already elevated to a strong paternalistic even divine tone.  While we are uncomfortable with saying that we ‘become a god’ in this imitation, that is essentially what we are saying theologically when we talk about imitating Christ, isn’t it?

In any event, this Sunday I preached on the presentation of Jesus in the Temple in Luke 2.  This is a story of reception, of receiving the Messiah.  And how does Simeon the priest receive Jesus?

Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying,
29     “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,
according to your word;
30     for my eyes have seen your salvation,
31     which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
32     a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and for glory to your people Israel.”
A beautiful image hope and peace but then Simeon turns to Mary and says,
This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed (sign of contradiction) so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.
Here are a few excerpts from the tail end of my sermon.
So what does it mean to receive Jesus as a sign of contradiction?  I did a bit of research on this phrase and found that the Catholic Church has an entire doctrine based around it.  This doctrine holds that the church is to be a sign of contradiction; that the church in its holiness it will be rejected or opposed.  There is an element of this doctrine that I can appreciate.  I believe that to live out the vision of the Gospel will lead to contradiction and opposition in the world.  But as I understand it there is a destructive assumption at work in this expression.  The assumption is that it is the church the has the privileged knowledge of how Jesus becomes present in the world.  This doctrine assumes that it is no longer the church that needs to receive the sign of contradiction.  In trying to hold this doctrine the church itself can actually become immune to the presence of Christ.  . . . When you believe that your way of life has a privileged or even exclusive access to ultimate human truth then it will be near impossible to receive a sign of contradiction; you control the rules of the games and determine the value of those around you.
. . .

The church, and particularly the Mennonite church, has elevated the call to discipleship, the call of being like Jesus in the world.  Mennonites have fought theological wars over this matter.  When other churches focused simply on the death and resurrection of Jesus, or the centrality of Communion the Mennonites demanded that we also give attention to Jesus life, how he taught, what he did, how he treated people.  But where is the theology that asks how we might receive the presence of God precisely from outside our theology and our expression?  How does our theology and our practice prepare us to receive something that contradicts our theology and our practice?

. . .

Our tradition affirms that the church is the body of Christ and yet Christ must remain fugitive.  Already as a child in the Gospels Jesus flees to Egypt after Joseph received a vision of Herod’s plot to kill Jesus.  The French activist and philosopher Simone Weil is quoted as saying, “We must always be ready to change sides, like justice, the eternal fugitive from the camp of the victors.”  We cannot secure the place of Christ, but we can hope to receive Christ.  Our vision remains universal because there is no place we will not seek this Christ.  Our theology and practice remains fragmented because we are never so Christ-like that we cannot receive again this child, this man, this saviour, this God.  Our theology and our faith is only as healthy as it is able to receive from outside of its expression.  I am wondering if we have made a fundamental error in our basic understanding of the church’s mission.  We go out not to bring the message of Christ.  We go out to receive it, to encounter the fugitive.

I am not exactly breaking new theological ground and I am not claiming to overturn any notion of having content or a message of some sort.  I do however sense that there is still a horrendous imbalance in how churches continue to view themselves as fortresses of divine truth.  And this line of thinking has helped me to challenge a basic Mennonite goal of discipleship.  While discipleship has always been problematic I have not heard it addressed from the basic shift from giving to receiving Christ.
Thoughts?

Let us contemplate, beloved, the resurrection which is at all times taking place

Since I am on a bit of ‘ancient lit’ kick I thought I would start picking at the first volume of the Ante-Nicene Fathers.  The first work is Clement of Rome’s Epistle to the Corinthians.  In one chapter Clement exhorts his readers to consider the resurrection.

Let us consider, beloved, how the Lord continually proves to us that there shall be a future resurrection, of which He has rendered the Lord Jesus Christ the first-fruits by raising Him from the dead. Let us contemplate, beloved, the resurrection which is at all times taking place. Day and night declare to us a resurrection.

A nice little bit of rhetoric except what follows is a simple analogical extension of how nature has cycles.  This strikes me as completely non-apocalyptic and at best (and I mean that) waters down the resurrection message into something easily accessible and compatible to other systems of belief and thought.  Indeed the major example that followed was a little unexpected (though doing a basic google search found that this was a common image for many early Christian writers).

Let us consider that wonderful sign [of the resurrection] which takes place in Eastern lands, that is, in Arabia and the countries round about. There is a certain bird which is called a phœnix. This is the only one of its kind, and lives five hundred years. And when the time of its dissolution draws near that it must die, it builds itself a nest of frankincense, and myrrh, and other spices, into which, when the time is fulfilled, it enters and dies. But as the flesh decays a certain kind of worm is produced, which, being nourished by the juices of the dead bird, brings forth feathers. Then, when it has acquired strength, it takes up that nest in which are the bones of its parent, and bearing these it passes from the land of Arabia into Egypt, to the city called Heliopolis. And, in open day, flying in the sight of all men, it places them on the altar of the sun, and having done this, hastens back to its former abode. The priests then inspect the registers of the dates, and find that it has returned exactly as the five hundredth year was completed.

I don’t think its possible to escape analogy when we are talking about anything but what does it mean for the early church’s theology to find its image and confirmation of the resurrection in thoroughly natural and mythological images?

A note on economic idols in the OT

It is a well worn observation to think of the way money functions alongside the biblical prohibition of idolatry.  What I have been curious about for some time is the manner in which the actual (clay?) gods of the Ancient Near East functioned in relation to wealth and economy.  I grew up assuming that these gods were viewed as having some inherent value, that they were at least viewed as objects that mediated a supernatural reality; that they were primarily objects of pious devotion.

I began to wonder, however, if these gods had an actual currency.  What was their value and were their value held in common, what effect could these objects produce?  I have been reading through James Pritchard’s anthology of Ancient Near Eastern texts.  In a relatively obscure section dealing with Akkadian practices of adoption (which allowed land to be sold that had to be kept in the family) there is a comment that if someone is adopted but later the father is able to conceive his own son then the [biological] son shall take the gods of the father.  I had sort of been skimming at this point but did notice a footnote at this which read,

Possession of household gods marked a person as the legitimate heir, which explains Laban’s anxiety to recover his household gods from Jacob (Gen 31).

While we have moved some way from an overly spiritualized view of the Gospel I think we are still prone to project this back into the biblical text, perhaps especially the OT.  These figures were not detached from the broader economic structure.  They were no less integrated then our money and legal documents.  This, of course, makes the demand to smash them all the more difficult.

Why should I hope in the LORD any longer?

Jeremy over at AUFS has written an important post on abuse and theodicy.  I found the piece moving on a number of levels.  First, it is rare to find such a short post packed with equal parts confession and critique.  It is both moving and forceful.  Second, it picks up an weaves a number of threads that I find myself currently tangled in.

The post is in part a reflection of Jeremy’s clinical internship in psychology.  More specifically, it is an engagement with the tragedy, pervasiveness, and damage of childhood sexual abuse.  The post then moves towards to an engagement of how theologians could possibly respond to such a reality.

For this Jeremy sets two broad poles.  There is either the ‘psychotic’ response of somehow saying this is all part of God’s plan.  Or there is a broadly ‘process-oriented’ view that conceives God as a non-coercive reality and places the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of humanity.  The first view is a clearly horrific and almost always (or ultimately) damaging articulation on a number of levels.  The second view helps avoid some of the former’s inadequacies (to put it mildly) but is pushed and viewed itself as being too ‘convenient’ and a ‘cheap way’ of avoiding the question of such a God and such a reality.

As if Jeremy’s concise post was not insightful enough the comment thread bore out a range of responses to further thicken the engagement (with some developing and some falling into the initial account).  As I mentioned above, I am writing this now because this is both a practical and intellectual question for me that is indeed pressing.  So what follows is simply an attempt at articulating what I am already doing and thinking so it might further challenged or developed.

First I will begin with my ‘practical theology’.  In the last two years I have been increasingly influenced by aspects of death-of-god theology and more recently process theology.  Academically I consider myself an expert in neither areas.  However, the result of this formation has, perhaps surprisingly, made one its greatest impacts in how I offer pastoral care.  I have become keenly sensitive in how any forms of theodicy enter my own expressions of care.  This has been helpful, and I have posted briefly about it before.  The greatest difficulty in this has been trying to respond well when people are looking to me to console them with a particular notion of God (a God that might feel good in the moment but will come back with vengeance if followed too far), or when a well-meaning visitor is also there and invokes such theologies.  I try and return the conversation to the strengths and support that I see manifest and while I am naturally a rabid ‘meaning-maker’ I refrain from doing so in that context.

But then I pray for them.  I pray.  I don’t know.  I guess I pray like I lead the congregation in prayer on Sunday.  I don’t really know what I am doing.  The intentional part is one of naming, using language to vocalize and externalize particular realities; to put them out there before us, to have to sit with them.  And then it is asking and seeking.  I don’t know, I just do this.  I hope.  But this implies a theology of course.  Just maybe there is a God who can intervene but then what does that tell me . . .  And so theology runs aground and perhaps prayer is obscene.  It definitely feels that way at times.  It can be therapeutic but would it loose its magic if I named it as such?

I think prayer can remain viable but I am hesitant to let it slip into what I consider a vacuous liberalizing of it, but why would I be hesitant?  If prayer is powerful, but perhaps not for the reasons I once thought it was, then should I not embrace and explore that differing power?  But again lingering, what if God is listening . . . but then immediately after . . . so goddammit God has been listening?!  I am hesitant and fearful about talking about God to my three year old, about praying with him.  We do give thanks (but again there is lingering here).  And I do try and invoke blessings.  To prayers that are involuntarily on my lips are God dammit and God bless ’em.

The second half of my engagement with this post was regarding the related point of my intellectual development.  I have been recently influenced by the process theology of Catherine Keller and some of the related orientation of Dan Barber (also a contributor at AUFS).  The major shift here is thinking about what it means to try and keep nothing out of play, nothing unaffected.  In this way I cannot hide an ideological/idolatrous ‘core’ that will determine in advance how I define and position people, groups, and situations around me.  So, because of my profession and confession does this model, if followed through on, end in becoming a convenient or cheap way of avoiding the question of God and suffering?  I think it depends.  It does in some ways avoid the question.  Or for me, at present, it rejects the question in most of the terms.  But this orientation has given me a renewed understanding of bearing with the chaos (as Keller, and Barber, put it).  But there is certainly no immediate payoff.  It has not made me more effective.  It does not make me more hopeful (but maybe not less hopeful either).  At present it simply helps orient me to a tradition that has power, and could be more constructively powerful.  But things are still at play with me.  I hope it does not lead me away from the church.  There is much strength in the tradition I work within.  I also support me family with it.  But I do hope I follow through on seeing and proclaiming a good news of life.

Around the time of reading Jeremy’s post I came across a little referenced passage in 2 Kings 6.  Famine was severe.  Pigeon shit had a monetary trade value.  The king of Israel hears a story of a women who was convinced by another woman to cook and eat her son and that the next day the other woman would cook her own son.  The first woman agrees and they eat her son but the next day the other woman (who suggested the plan) does not offer her son as a meal.  The king tears his clothes and runs murderously out towards the Elisha the prophet.  After all, the prophets at this time in the Bible are the ‘rain-makers’.  The king says succinctly, “This trouble is from the Lord! Why should I hope in the Lord any longer?”

Elisha here is the only theologian who can respond in this situation.  And he gives no refutation for this scenario.  He seeks to save his own life when the king approaches him.  He gives a ‘miraculous’ bounty the next day (to refute that such a miracle is not possible) but he apparently cannot resurrect the already consumed child (he did resurrect a child in 2 Kgs 4) nor does he mention him.  This strikes me as the sort of bind any theology is going to find itself in with respect to suffering.  Turning to Job he does not escape it either, but at least he does provide a resource and hope for engagement in our bondage (though the text of course includes its own problematics in all this).

I would like to have a better conclusion to all this, but it seems that is part of the problem so I will leave it at that for now.

More than meaning

Rene Girard’s basic thesis is well known; human culture arose out of the resolution of mimetic desire. By nature we desire what is desired by others, this leads to conflict and ultimately murder. Institutions and rituals arise out of this act. Girard sees the Gospel texts of the New Testament as a revolutionary exposing of this basic mechanism. However, the church has continued to offer a sacrificial reading of the Gospel which undermines its revelatory potential.

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is an excellent and accessible overview of his thought. What I found interesting was his conclusion. At the end of the book Girard suggests we suffer most basically from a lack of meaning. I find this to be a bit dissonant from much of his work. Perhaps he is was still too heavily influenced by the existential angst that seemed to exist in the middle of the twentieth century but I expected him to move in a much more ‘material’ direction in his conclusion. Here are some of his parting lines,

“What is important above all is to realize that there are no recipes; there is no pharmakon anymore, not even a Marxist or a psychoanalytic one. Recipes are not what we need, nor do we need to be reassured – our need is to escape from meaninglessness.
. . .
I hold that truth is not an empty word, or a mere ‘effect’ as people say nowadays. I hold that everything capable of diverting us from madness and death, from now on, is inextricably linked with this truth. But I do not know how to speak about these matters. I can only approach texts and institutions, and relating them to one another seems to me to throw light in every direction.
. . .
Present-day thought is leading us in the direction of the valley of death, and it is cataloguing the bones one by one. All of us are in this valley but it is up to us to resuscitate meaning by relating all the [Judeo-Christian] texts to one another without exception, rather than stopping at just a few of them. All the issues of ‘psychological health’ seem to me to take second place to a much greater issue – that of meaning which is being lost or threatened on all sides but simply awaits the breath of the Spirit to be reborn.”

At which point Girard concludes by quoting Ezekiel 37’s vision of the valley of dry bones.

To be clear, I find this conclusion hugely attractive.  I am sucker meaning, as in meaning of life meaning, but when hearing something so well developed as with Girard I can’t help that the truth which fends off ‘madness and death’ is something other than ‘meaning’.  And here I have to default to a confessional position and introduce some notion of worship.  For all his religious language and even examination of idolatry Girard does not really address the a non-sacrificial sense of worship.  In this way I take him to be broadly in line with the death-of-God thinkers who believe we must go far enough to situate the presence and Spirit of God in and only in and only as the life-giving community.  Here again, I am deeply attracted.  But for the life of me I just don’t know who these people are that believe ‘in the power of humanity’.  I don’t see it in myself or much around me.  I don’t mean this in a self-deprecating sense but more in a I-have-been-banging-my-head-against-a-wall-for-over-a-decade-trying-to-understand-life-giving-personal-and-social-change way.  I just don’t see it to be honest.  So we offer works of worship that at our end must be purged of idolatries (here Girard, and Zizek for that matter, are right) but beyond that, hell if I know.

If you want to go the route of ‘meaning’ don’t look to Girard, the Coen brothers do it much better.

Keep it to yourself

A number of blogs that I follow push back (most recently here) pretty hard against a type of personal activism that ends up creating a structure a moral evaluation with no sense that effective change is produced or even possible.  What do I mean by this?  I mean simply that personal activism can be a therapeutic response to the guilty conscious of privilege.  There is nothing new in that statement and many of the blogs that I follow outline and develop this a more thorough manner.  However, I though it might be helpful to outline a few simple guidelines for how to discern this reality.

  1. If you believe your action has direct connection to effective change, then outline the network of relationships that demonstrates this, so as to help enable others to participate.  So the personal practices of reducing and recycling are good but I personally do not know of the statistics that relate the basic difference between the personal recycling of material goods and the inherent production of corporate waste in producing our goods and services.  Therefore, in our current structure I do not actually know if increased recycling will actually make a dent in the realities of environmental damage.  So reduce, reuse, and recycle but unless you can articulate a well-informed understanding of how that effects change in the environment in relationship to all the other variables then just do as a base-line practice and nothing more.  The same is true for alternative or ‘guerrilla’ gardening.  These practices can be fun and meaningful but can they address global issues of starvation?  Should they function as anything more than a ‘good habit’?
  2. Be honest that ‘fair-trade’ products represent a sort of premium or ‘luxury’ brand.  They are not bad.  They are simply out of reach for many people to consistently have access to.  The result of creating a morally elevated status for such products is that those who are the most vulnerable in our society will actually have guilt heaped on them (in addition to the prevalent social stigma of being poor).
  3. ‘Symbolic’ gestures are only powerful if they register or gain traction in the face of those in power.  In my Mennonite culture there is an emphasis on ‘simple’ or humble lifestyles.  This basically means that people are not supposed to be ‘flashy’ with their money.  So a family can have a cabin, an RV, snowmobiles, a boat, etc. but if another family occasionally goes out to a fancy restaurant or purchases a piece of ‘abstract’ art they are deemed frivolous or ‘materialistic’.  Simple living is fine, not having flashy things is fine, but there should be no moral scale here.  The only time a particular way of living has symbolic power is if it is actually taken note of by those in power and disrupts the flow of power.  Otherwise, go ahead and do it but drop the implicit or explicit pretense of righteousness.

The result of not following some of these guidelines is, I believe, the very real possibility of insulating ourselves from the possibility of actual change because we are already the change we want to see in the world.  So, again, to repeat there are all manner of good and relatively equivalent (I did not say neutral) ways of living (because in many instances we do not actually know the good or harm we do).  This is not a critique of particular practices as such, rather I am concerned about the moral structure that gets developed around these practices that serve to sanctify and pacify our privileged guilt while condemning those in our midst outside the privileged ability to attain this sort of personal social-piety.  Sure we will condescend to acquit the poor from such guilt but it will be done not from solidarity but from ‘on high’.  And to be clear it is not only those without material means who struggle to attain this sort of personal social-piety but the reality is that it is a lot of work to be consistent in this area.  Many people with mental illness or with children with disabilities or with other significant stress in their life will find it hard attain this piety and will only have more guilt/shame added to their lives as they already have difficulty achieving the other salvation narrative of the ‘American dream’.

So is this another expression that functions to insulate my own position?  I am sure there are elements of self-protection here.  But I do want to offer this as a sort of confession.  For most of my adult life I have lived in the ‘less-desirable’ areas of Canada.  I have, for the most part, quite enjoyed this experience.  I have, however, also held it up as a sort of implicit model of ‘faithfulness’.  And for the most part the practice has been selfish as it has kept me in touch with certain social realities that we tend to ignore.  But functionally there has been no more method in this approach than the baseline hope of being a ‘good neighbour’.  Being a good neighbour will look differently in my neighbourhood than it will in other neighbourhoods but it is also no more righteous (and I am not convinced I have lived up to this in my context in any event).  While I need to take down my lifestyle as a model of personal piety this is different than articulating the manner in which neighbourhoods are formed and maintained (which I have articulated here and here).  This articulation can be a framework in which possibilities for effective or symbolic action can be developed.  This becomes a participatory and collaborative expression rather than a personal posture of living in the ‘hood is more righteous than living in the ‘burbs.  My point in all this is simple.  There are many good things to do in the world but for the most part keep it to yourself.  If it is an effective or truly symbolic act then it will speak for itself.

So what am I missing in my thinking or on my list?