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 relationship whatsoever. 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.
Jason posted an excerpt from Hauerwas’ commencement address at Eastern Mennonite University. Just wanted to link to MQR that has it posted for free access on their site.
The Gift of Difference hit the ground running with Peter C. Blum’s chapter, “Two Cheers for an Ontology of Violence: Reflections on Im/possibility.” The chapter reflects on the strange possibility that Derrida’s ontology of violence and the impossibility of nonviolence may actually offer more resources for peace than Milbank’s ontology of peace which (as almost all contributors to this work identify) actually justifies and ultimately requires violence. Derrida reduces the impossibility of nonviolence to an assertion that existence in the form of expression will always be an expression of reducing “the Other to the same” (11). Blum quotes Derrida, “nonviolent language would be a language which would do without the verb to be, that is, with predication. Predication is the first violence” (12). Impossibility for Derrida though is not the end but it is where “things get interesting” (15). Blum raises a case of the Nickle Mines shooting as a case of the madness and impossibility of forgiveness. Blum is not concerned with whether or not the Amish response escapes violence but the manner in which it forces us to face the impossibility of nonviolence, its madness.
I don’t think I will offer substantive responses to each chapter (though many deserve further reflection). What this chapter raised was a sort of tangential offshoot in relation to the Kingdom-Church-World Theses over at Halden’s blog. What I found confusing there was Thesis #11. The language was muddled especially the church’s syntactical relationship to ‘the poor’. In this short thesis there are three prepositions used to relate the church to the poor.
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.
To me this clearly indicates the ongoing struggle of the western/affluent church to integrate something it still does not quite understand. Are we the poor? Are we with the poor? Are we for the poor? Given Blum’s reflection on impossibility I would like to suggest that the church is called to announce and embody the impossibility of wealth. This was the revelation to the church of Laodicea. You say, “I am rich.” But you do not realize that you are poor (Rev 3:17). There is no such thing as human wealth. This is our great illusion. This is found throughout the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament. The wealth streams to the Temple of God. It is only there that is has any worth. We must not be for or with the poor or even attempt to become the poor. We must rather unveil our poverty in thought, word, deed. The impossibility of wealth then can be taken up in the gift of God (Come buy food without cost . . . ). This most certainly does not leave material poverty off the agenda as the unveiling of poverty releases us from the mechanics that the illusion of wealth demand from us. For me this also helps release the church from a bind that previous theologies tend to place on practice namely what we hope for the poor. Do we want the poor to be wealthy? Why would we assume that they would turn out to be anything other than what the wealthy already are? We must not eradicate poverty as such but eradicate the illusion of wealth that creates security systems that alienate one from another. It is this alienation more than material poverty itself that must be overcome. This erases the need to join syntactically with the poor and creates only the conditions for God’s gift.
Alas, many think that the eternal is a construction of the imagination, money the reality – in the understanding of the eternal and of truth it is precisely money which is a construction of the imagination! – Soren Kierkegaard in Works of Love.
This post continues an exploratory question that ended up asking about the extent to which the Old Testament development of priesthood can be used as a contemporary theological resource.
My basic orientation for reading the priestly literature of the Pentateuch comes from the work of Samuel Balentine. His book The Torah’s Vision of Worship explores the priestly theme of worship from sociological, anthropological, and rhetorical perspectives which are ultimately in the service of theology (I may address the methodological issues in this approach later). This is a departure from the standard historical-critical approach that dominated the subject until the last few decades. Balentine is not interested in re-constructing what the possible priestly cult looked like but rather uses his method to understand how the literary corpus we received was developed within its historical context. His work then is “a study of worship in the Hebrew Bible not of Israelite religion” (33). This is a study of the final form of the text, as it was developed in its social context, with an eye on “the larger reality that is encoded in the Torah’s vision” (35).
The question of alternative is becoming more and more pressing for me theologically. With the return or unveiling of universalism manifest in our global economic structure I have begun to wonder whether it is still possible to speak of alternatives with any integrity. To what extent are socially, economically, and environmentally responsible alternatives simply a practice of personal therapy or self-soothing?
One of the reasons I have stayed in the Mennonite church is because I believe it carries a history of alternatives. It has often been called a ‘third way,’ a mode of ecclesial life that does not conform to the binary pressures of Protestant and Catholic (apologies to the Orthodox). It also has a strong tradition of social, economic and environmental responsibility long before it became a trendy or urgent cause. I could offer anecdotal evidence out the yin-yang of average folk in congregations I have been in that practised the most beautiful expressions of care and service that flowed with ease from their basic approach to and understanding of faith. I won’t even start with the Amish and Old Order expressions. But are these any longer true alternatives? Is there any way of living in western/affluent societies in which we actually give more than we take; heal more than we destroy? Framing the question in this way raises a sort of fatalism within me; suicide as our most ethically responsible choice. This is the sort of all or nothing that the notion of alternative drives home in me. It creates the assumption that we are complete and definable, able to transfer ourselves neatly from one paradigm to another. I am thinking this is a dead end (pun partially intended).
For some time I have been exploring the expression of holiness and priesthood as it develops within the Pentateuch. Holiness in this context is entirely divorced from any modern concept of piety. Holiness reflects a complex web of relations that is navigated by appropriate boundaries. Holiness breaks out and what is unclean can transgress and defile what is holy. What attracts me to Torah’s concept of holiness is first that it is still a largely un-mined resource for contemporary theology, ecclesiology and ethics. Samuel Balentine notes that the rise of Protestant historical-criticism disdained priestly liturgy and writings as a low-point in hebraic thought which verged at times on being anti-Jewish. The larger theological thrust of Protestant anti-ritualism also led to the neglect of further study and reflection on these texts. But I am not interested in these texts simply as a historically neglected curiosity rather I find the paradigm of holiness an embrace of all of life; personal/ethical/religious (maintaining right relationship with neighbour and God; the golden rule is found in Leviticus), biological (the breaching of semen and blood are to be accounted for), social/relational (the stranger within your land is to be treated appropriately), geographical/political (borders and their maintenance are tremendously important), structural (needless to say the Tabernacle functions significantly as an overall paradigm) animate and inanimate objects (mold breaking out on a house needs to be addressed). It is a complete, a universal model that does not seek a utopia (as the Conquest can be greatly misunderstood) but navigates the daily threat towards and blessing of holiness. It does not create an alternative but creates instead a sense or a posture of how to engage a world full of objects and relations that can be otherwise than they are (that are otherwise than they are . . . if that makes sense). This is a model of creating, maintaining, restoring, and experiencing boundaries that do not violate and do not insulate but rather facilitate right relationships between people and God.
After recently reviewing The Gift of Difference (CMU Press) I found my thinking resonating with Peter Dula’s article “Fugitive Ecclesia.” Dula’s article explored the extent to which many contemporary theologians appear to have despaired over the possibility of the contemporary western church as constituting any alternative or challenge to the larger economic forces. To what extent can the church exist ‘outside’ the spaces structured by economic forces? While Dula offers many possible ways of addressing this situation what I want to take from his articulation is the possibility that the church can still exist as the church even when it is not the church.
[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).
With respect to the priesthood this reminds me of the significance of the cloud of presence and the maintenance of the fire lit by God that is to continue burning. The sacred can become profane but that does not negate the priesthood. That in fact is what the priesthood is called to which is an exploration of what it means to consecrate. We do not create or establish a complete alternative, again questioning the possibility of clear and distinct paradigms, but instead we remain at work in the world possible which is the world of objects and relations which can be holy and clean but they can also be profane and unclean.
Over the coming months I hope to return and review earlier work that I have done in this area and review and revise it for contemporary expression. In this way I hope to develop new resources for a contemporary expression of the priesthood of all believers.
States of Exile is the third book in the Polyglossia series which engages the radical reformation tradition with contemporary issues and authors. In this book Epp Weaver explores exile as a theological mode (from a broadly Yoderian perspective) as well as the social reality of exile as it exists in Israel-Palestine.
This Sunday I will be preaching from the book of Jonah. I am framing Jonah as a parable (nothing new I know) and I thought I would spend some time on the work of parables. They perform upon us irritating, rubbing, smoothing, caressing. Jonah eventually reveals the line that was at work upon him, “I know you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.” This line worked on Jonah to the point where he fled from God due to its implications.
The parabolic line at work in me is often “let those with ears hear.” This line can almost drive me mad. I went to fit it into a conceptual epistemology. What is this line telling me about knowledge? But it is not concerned with knowledge it is concerned with the ear, with sound, vibrations. I recently purchased Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans. The first track is All the trees of the field will clap their hands.
If I am alive this time next year
Will I have arrived in time to share?
Mine is about as good this far
I’m still applied to what you are
And I am joining all my thoughts to you
And I’m preparing every part for you
I heard from the trees a great parade
And I heard from the hills a band was made
Will I be invited to the sound?
Will I be a part of what you’ve made?
And I am throwing all my thoughts away
And I’m destroying every bet I’ve made
And I am joining all my thoughts to you
And I’m preparing every part for you
There is an engagement here, a wrestling with the possibility that despite all effort he might not be ‘invited to the sound.’ While I believe there are important expressions of knowledge that are equally available in accessible models of discourse I am troubled that there remains something, perhaps I should not even call this knowledge, that I may well not have access to at this time despite any efforts.
There is a recent trend in certain strands of contemporary theology to explore an out-of-control mode of theology. This is rooted broadly in the traditions of Yoder and Hauerwas. In as much as I resonate with these expressions a suspicion lingers that securing and controlling the discourse is rarely escaped.
And I am throwing all my thoughts away
And I’m destroying every bet I’ve made
And I am joining all my thoughts to you
There is at once a discarding and a returning to thought. A throwing and a joining.
As I said this parabolic language haunts me. I hope in turn it forms me. There is something more than knowledge. Knowledge is the product of structural process. Knowledge is not bad. But there is a sound. Sound is not knowledge. Sound is action, motion, presence, touch. I think we have (well I have) yet to learn (or to learn again) what it means to receive. I think there needs to be maintained not an absolute but a working and living distinction between knowledge on one hand and insight and imagination on the other. They are of course not exclusive but neither are they identical.
I hope I am in good company with other bloggers in being a little obsessive and sensitive when it comes to my blog. I just made a major shift from a longstanding blog that I had run for a number of years. There I tried to engage academically with theology. This mode met with greater and lesser success at times. The shift here was to represent an intentional attempt to shift my manner of discourse to become more particular with respect to my vocation as a pastor.
This past week I was reflecting on this recent shift and as I looked at my blog I suddenly had the temptation to change my tag line, descriptive pastoral theology. The reason for this was both internal and external. Externally I felt that it might project too limited a scope on what I am trying to do here causing people to judge this blog by its (sub)title. The second and more significant motivation is my own internal relationship to the thing called pastoral theology. I hated my pastoral theology course in seminary and I have never encountered pastoral theology text that I have appreciated nor have I come across many pastors blogging who have kept my attention. These are supposed to be the practical applications of theology for the church but they always strike me as impoverished theoretically or simply uninteresting practically. For this reason my academic pursuits have always been a little escapist when it comes to the day-to-day realities of pastoring. At least when I was focusing on biblical studies I was gaining invaluable tools for directly related study. Theology always presented itself as the un-winnable dichotomy between irrelevant systematic theology and weak pastoral theology. I have come to terms with this experience as being a symptom of my choice in educational institutions. However it influenced a trajectory that has been hard to alter.
I decided to keep my tag line because I see the value, potential and role of pastoring. Given my congregations I have experienced a greater freedom in my intellectual formation. I am no longer on a track of greater and greater specialization making sure I can account for all secondary literature on a given person or subject. I now read broadly with a sense of imagination in how various themes can engage with each other. The problem remains that this process has still largely confined itself to the pulpit. It is my hope that this space will eventually lead to the exploration of other areas of pastoral work (pastoral care, baptism, Lord’s Supper, ‘mission’, etc.). In this way I hope to engage and also challenge the intellectual trends that have been formative in spaces marginal or outside the church. And of course that those trends would also challenge the practices within the church.
For this reason I also want to maintain the title descriptive pastoral theology. Again, this is no claim to objective understanding of task or concept. This points rather to a practice or discipline which is meant to slow things down and takes for granted that things are already in motion and so shifts in perspective and articulation will already announce and enact shifts of practice and understanding as this is worked in particular.
For the past number of summers I have helped to organize some Friday night events for my church. We have abandoned the traditional model of ‘summer bible school’ were kids come during the day and learn verses, sing and do crafts. Instead we have hoped to create a more inter-generational experience gathering around a campfire for a less more formal time while still trying to be engaging across the ages.
In any event there is usually a small group time where people get together and share or work on a project. Last night people gathered to talk about an early and formative experience of God. After the small group sharing I asked if anyone wanted to share their responses with the whole group. There tends not to be a flood to the microphone. Three people did share (including myself) and I found the cross-section quite illuminating. One man shared about a road trip he took with his parents to Alberta. It was there that he saw the Rocky Mountains and Lake Louise. He said the experience almost moved him to tears as he wondered how something so beautiful existed and what that told him about the world and God. A woman shared about her experience at a youth conference. This was a bi-national event and so for worship there thousands gathered together. This experience also deeply moved her to reflect on things greater than herself. Finally I shared. My experience was from early grade school. It was the year they handed out those little red Gideon Bibles that contained the New Testament and the Psalms (I heard they still do this in some public schools). I remember being alone in my room and at the back of my Bible it talked about the commitment that God calls people to in the Bible. There was a place you could sign your name if you wanted to make that commitment. I can’t actually remember if I signed my name or not but I remember being alone and experiencing a sense of commitment. I have tried to neither under- or over-emphasize this event but the reality is that it remains fixed in my memory.
What I found interesting about the sharing is that one was focused on an experience in relationship to nature. The second was in response to a gathering of people. And the third was alone removed from nature and people. This was helpful for me because I tend to downplay and even be suspicious of people who talk highly of encountering God in nature. I have also found it intriguing that in the Mennonite churches in this area that I am in contact with I find that when I ask people about their faith they most often talk about the church (that is the people around them) as opposed to a relationship with God. Both of these expressions strike me as secondary as flowing from something more primary. It is easy to see now why Kierkegaard resonates so strongly with me. For him our very nature or selfhood is established in the God-self relationship. There is nothing prior to that and everything else flows from it. I suspect what I need to explore or be more open to is the manner in which this primary relationship is formed. Or is it even helpful to talk about a primary relationship. Is life too complex and layered to think that I can reduce or strip away other factors and influences so that I can be alone before God? Or is this God-self relationship a discipline in which I delineate the role of nature and neighbour to be secondary and therefore these influences are neither a cause of anxiety or fear when they appear threatening or uncertain and neither are they a false sense of security when they appear stable and generous.
I have tendency to relax at times when I am reading Kierkegaard. In some ways (or at least in some of his works) he is an ‘easier’ read than other philosophers. This can appear especially true of his upbuilding discourses (which he himself claims to moving towards the ‘simple’). In Works of Love SK spends a brief section on ‘The Work of Love in Remembering One Dead’. This section unsettled my ease.
Loving a dead person is characterized as the most free an expression of love can become because the dead person will not leverage love. The dead, though, are also the most rigorous. If at any time the loving relationship changes then it must be related to a change in the living person. In this relationship there can be no excuse. The living can’t complain of how the dead have changed. ‘She’s not the woman I fell in love with’ can find no justification for abandoning the love of a dead person.
As I read along. I thought this was a fairly clever expression until I took it seriously and how it was both absolutely literal and absolutely analogous. What a strange spiritual discipline and yet what a powerful analogy for loving the living. Then there was one line that took this a step further. SK relates loving the dead to the parent’s love for a child. It can be said that the parent loves the child before the child is even born (or even conceived). In this way the parent loves one who does not exist. Then SK adds, But one dead is also a non-being. This sent my thought careening into Marion’s God Without Being. In this work Marion shows the problematic model of conceiving of God first as Being. This is to place the concept prior to the reality of God. And so ‘faithful’ philosophies of the God of Being are actually no better (and likely worse) than the critical proclamations of the death of (the) God (of Being). Getting back to SK I wondered if loving the dead God is a necessary move of faith exemplified by none other than Christ himself on the cross and also of the death of Christ. In Matthew Jesus announces the forsaking God (the Father) and the forsaken God (the Son) and note also in Matthew that Jesus ‘gave up his spirit’ and with that the Trinity is dead. Who will love this dead God?
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 relationship whatsoever. 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.
States of Exile is the third book in the Polyglossia series which engages the radical reformation tradition with contemporary issues and authors. In this book Epp Weaver explores exile as a theological mode (from a broadly Yoderian perspective) as well as the social reality of exile as it exists in Israel-Palestine.
David CL Driedger 