Category: church

The mockery of careful planning

I have always been a little uneasy with Jesus’ parable of ‘planning’ (Luke 14:28-31).  Jesus asks whether the people would not plan ahead of time to make sure they had sufficient materials to complete a tower and sufficient soldiers for victory.  The ‘moral of story’ as I have received it is that of the wise stewardship of resources.  I could not quite put my finger on why this bugged me other than the fact that it seemed to propagate good, bland suburbanites.  I’m not sure why I didn’t see it but the two images obviously have strong connections to the Old Testament in the Tower of Babel and David’s census taking.  Both of these acts reflect careful planning.  They are also both sins.  Who has the materials to finish building a tower? The answer is no one,  because a tower is never finished.  Who has the man-power to win a war? The answer is no one, because a war is never over.

The parable drives this home in a way that should have made it clear.  The parable  is book-ended first by the command that one cannot follow if they do not first hate their family. And at the end of the parable Jesus offers a re-articulation that states that you cannot become a disciple if you do not give up all your possessions (i.e. ending the production of tower-building and war-making).  The internal space of these commands is the mockery of ‘careful planning’.

Getting what you ask for – Egypt Update

I am developing a basic framework for a ‘visitation team’ at my church.  This team will help connect with those in the congregation who are physically unable to regularly participate in church.  This morning I was looking through a few resources that I could use to help equip this team with some basic approaches to care and visiting.  A while back I bought a cheap copy of Carl Rogers’ classic On Becoming a Person in which he outlines his client-centered model which is based on the belief that each person has the inherent ability to change and that particular relationships can help facilitate that change.

I have strongly mixed feelings about this approach.  It is very easy to critique this book on its optimism about the possibility of becoming an ‘autonomous individual’.  However, I am respectful of the sort of posture Rogers wishes to nurture.  I am constantly bewildered expressions from those who reject an individualist approach to contemporary issues and those who want to address systemic issues.  It almost invariably seems as though the people wanting to address systemic issues must, must, heap scorn upon actual individuals (particularly if they do not agree with a particular view of systems).  In any event, as I was working through a few his very readable chapters what troubled me more than the dichotomy between systems and individuals is the notion of what positive change could look like.

Rogers cites a study which explores the implication of various parenting styles.  The best model in his estimation is the ‘acceptant-democratic’.  Here is his description the children,

Children of these parents with their warm and equalitarian attitudes showed an accelerated intellectual development (an increasing I.Q.), more originality, more emotional security and control, less excitability than children from other types of homes.  Though somewhat slow initially in social development, they were, by the time they reached school age, popular, friendly, non-aggressive leaders (41-42).

I tried to imagine what these kids looked like and it was not hard.  These are the children of upper-middle class families who excel in school and have enough restraint and insight so as to manipulate passive-aggressive acts for the purpose and maintenance of social dominance.  I also expect that these are the families that nod assent to the value of church and social responsibility but don’t give a shit about making any significant change for those values because they have already arrived.  And they are also afraid of those who ‘unstable’, that is, not like them.

This is just a guess.  But if it is correct then Carl Rogers has unfortunately succeeded because there seems to be a whole glut of these families.

** Update – Perhaps it is with a Rogerian sort of unconditional acceptance that Senator Clinton has approached the Mubarak family.

Christ, Who Fills Everything in Every Way

This past Sunday I preached on Ephesians 4:4-16.  I wanted to draw attention to two themes in the book.  First is the abundance of language about abundance.  Believers are filled with riches, power and wealth.  Second, this is set within the context of the body of Christ which (who) fills all things.  A broad theme in my recent reading is on the notion of capitalism as that body which currently (and rapidly) seeks to fill everything.  From last Sunday’s sermon,

The basis of economic growth is of course to make more money.  This requires more resources to make products and more markets in which to sell them, and ideally cheaper labour by which to make the products.  Consider how coorporations scour the entire globe in search of resources and labour.  Consider the manner in which resources that arguably should be public are increasingly coming under the umbrella of private coorporations.  The issue of access to water comes readily to mind; the patenting of seeds for agriculture is another.  Think of ever expanding marketing we face.  Children are marketed, lifestyles are marketed, environmentalism is marketed, health and beauty, relationships, status; the list could go on forever.  The public space for gathering is now the food court surrounded by the constant refrain of the mall to consume.  High-interest money-lenders are popping up everywhere taking more money (and security) than they will ever give.  The market of money knows no limit to its desire to bring everything under its control.

Borrowing heavily from Philip Goodchild I then went on talk about how the financial crisis exposes both the power and the fragility of contemporary capitalism.  Even governments submit to its whims.  Though the ‘limits’ of contemporary capitalism are also becoming more apparent (increase in material costs).  In this way capitalism forms a mocking portrayal of an expanding and universal body which we participate in.

Also, borrowing heavily on Goodchild, I turned to the role of attention as a primary indicator of piety (whether ‘secular’ piety of religious).  To what then does the body of Christ call our attention to?  Here I returned to the Ephesians text and drew attention to what had seemed like a strange insertion for me.

[E]ach of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it is said, “When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.”  (When it says, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions of the earth? He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.) Eph 4:7-10

Here I drew attention to Christ’s descent.  The primary movement for the body of Christ is one of descent.  It is after this movement that ascension occurs, captivity is held captive and gifts are released.  Therefore our attention is turned to the descent.  I described this as attention to suffering and vulnerability.

This is the paradox of the body of Christ.  That in turning our attention to the vulnerability and suffering within and around us we enter in the joy of God’s grace; in feeling bound and helpless by the scope of suffering Christ binds bondage and frees us with his gifts of grace.  We are called to draw near to that strange place where we face each other, where crying and laughing become almost indistinguishable. [I thought of the description of the Cairo protests as by one participant as a ‘wedding feast’]

I had a relatively strong reaction to this sermon both positive and negative.  I ran into one group after the service vigorously discussing the implications of the sermon.  I also ran into other individuals who felt that the message was too ambiguous and loosely connected.  This sermon was part of a small series on ‘lay’ leadership.  In this way I suppose I could (or should) have been a little more ‘practical’.  However, I could not shake the notion that practicality in the church has typically meant ‘plugging into’ existing programs that are often ‘unplugged’ from pressing issues.  While the Mennonite church may have a slightly better track-record in this regard my hope is that ‘abstract’ sermons like this one can eventually build a new framework for church expression.

Introduction to Louis Riel and His Philosophical Theology

[Update: For those who may be interested in following this I have included a link to these posts in the ‘Translation Projects’ tab.]

Louis Riel was a Metis Canadian born in 1884 near Winnipeg Manitoba, Canada.  He was the leader of two resistance movements that attempted to preserve Metis rights in the face of the expanding Canadian government in the East.  I do not pretend to be a Riel expert nor do I consider myself particularly knowledgeable of the political context for the expansion of Canada.  However, I do know the following;

Louis Riel is a controversial figure.  He has been described as a hero, revolutionary, lunatic, self-proclaimed messiah and traitor.  Louis Riel was a deeply religious man.  Louis Riel attempted to promote an alternative politics in the face of the monopolizing government and Hudson’s Bay Trading Company.  In the process he established a provisional government in Manitoba in opposition to the Canadian government in the East.  Riel continued this pursuit in the face of extreme resistance.  Riel received capital punishment for his actions.  Riel is part of my local history.

This scant information has provided enough motivation to seek out his writings to find if there are any explicitly theological tracts.  In his Collected Works I have come across a short section that includes fragments he called a ‘philosophical theology’ in French.  So far as I know these are untranslated.

While there is a book on Riel as a religious man, Louis ‘David’ Riel: Prophet of the New World, there is no substantial study of his theology in relation to his politics in English.  There is one work in French that I hope to eventually give some attention.  This is Gilles Martel’s, Le messianisme de Louis Riel.

My intention is to slowly offer his Système philosophico-théologique in translation (it is only 12 pages of fragments).  I have no idea what this pursuit might offer but it seems helpful to at least render more of Riel’s French writing into English.  It also seems helpful to look over these writings (in addition to his occasional writing relevant to his theology) with a more thoroughgoing theological attention than has been given.

Controlled Irony

I finished Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony yesterday.  While the majority of the text worked through Socrates thoroughgoing negativity the final section looked at “Irony After Fichte.”  This was essentially a commentary on Romanticism.  I think I missed something in this section.  While Kierkegaard was not entirely critical of this expression he also did not view this movement as either reflecting or going beyond Socrates.  In browsing over what I underlined I saw what might be a paradigmatic statement at the start of the section;

It was in Kant, to call to mind only what is generally known, that modern speculative thought, feeling itself mature and come of age, became tired of the guardianship in which it had lived hitherto under dogmatism and, like the prodigal son, went to its father and demanded that he divide and share the inheritance with it.  The outcome of this division of the inheritance is well known, and also that speculation did not have to go abroad in order to squander its resources, because there was no wealth to be found.  The more the I in criticism became absorbed in contemplation of the I, the leaner and leaner the I became, until it ended with becoming a ghost. (272)

Turning then to Fichte he talks about how he “infinitized the I in I-I. . . . But this infinity of thought in Fichte is, like all Fichte’s infinity, negative infinity, an infinity in there is no finitude, an infinity without any content” (273).  I don’t entirely understand why K. becomes more critical of this ongoing need of irony to ‘free itself’ (he was hardly critical of Socrates in this regard).  The criticism comes, it seems, on the shift towards making everything myth as a disingenuous mode of irony (contra Socrates); a sort of unfair play by irony to keep its thinking free.  This [Romantic] ironist ‘poetically composes’ but is not ‘poetically composed’.  This would require a limiting within actuality.  There is no content for the Romantic and transitions are nothing.  “At times he is a god, at times a grain of sand” (284).  So while Romanticism offered a cool breeze its tragedy is that “what it seizes upon is not actuality” (304).

So at the end of his 35o page dissertation he offers a brief 5 page conclusion, “Irony as a Controlled Element, the Truth of Irony.”  Here he treads carefully along the contentious line relating the life of the poet to the poetic work.  K. agrees that the poet’s life is no concern of ours.  “But in the present undertaking it should not be out of place to point out the misrelation that can often exist in this respect” (325).  I am still not quite sure what that sentence means.  As an example he points to Goethe.  “The reason Goethe’s poet-existence was so great was that he was able to make his poet-life congruous with actuality.  But that in turn takes irony, but, please note, controlled irony” (325).  K. accuses the Romantic of being incongruous with his work.  The point here seems to be that poetry is nothing if it does affect lives . . . and should it not affect the poet above all!  K. continues making the intriguing statement “what doubt is to science, irony is to personal life” (326).

As I am re-reading this short conclusion I am realizing that it is much more suggestive than I first realized.  I think I will end it here for now and spend a little more time working directly through his conclusion.

I am also almost finished the 100 pages of notes Kierkegaard took on the lecture series he attended by Schelling.  It is a supplement added to the Princeton series . . . I kinda of wish it wasn’t.  I doubt I will post anything on it.

Irony and Change; Or, Why Porn is F**king Boring (Or is that Other Way Around?)

Kierkegaard begins the second part of The Concept of Irony exploring the place of irony in shifting or changing of historical eras.

Catholicism was the given actuality for the generation living at the time of the Reformation, and yet it was also the actuality that no longer had validity as such.  Consequently, one actuality collides here with another actuality. (260)

Kierkegaard goes on to explore the difference between the ironist on one hand and the prophet and hero on the other.  The prophet articulates presentiments and the hero battles for the new over the old but the ironist perceives the old “in all its imperfection” (261).

For the ironic subject, the given actuality has lost its validity entirely; it has become for him an imperfect form that is a hindrance everywhere.  But on the other hand, he does not possess the new. . . . He is the one who must pass judgment.  In one sense the ironist is certainly prophetic, because he is continually pointing to something impending, but what it is he does not know.  He is prophetic, but his position and situation are the reverse of the prophet’s. The prophet walks arm in arm with his age, and from this position he glimpses what is coming. . . . The ironist, however, has stepped out of line with his age, has turned around and faced it.  That which is hidden from him, lies behind his back, but the actuality he so antagonistically confronts is what he must destroy; upon this he focuses his burning gaze (261).

The negative work of irony here is not of particular phenomena but of the whole, infinite absolute negativity.  Here Kierkegaard begins to drawn heavily on Hegel noting that the ‘negative’ in Hegel’s system is ‘irony’ in actual history.  He then moves on to articulate a position that sounds very much like the Hegel/Kierkegaard synthesis that Zizek promotes.

[S]ince the ironist does not have the new in his power, we might ask how, then, does he destroy the old, and the answer to that must be: he destroys the given actuality by the given actuality itself; but it should be remembered nevertheless that the new principle is present within him [potentially], as possibility.  But by destroying actuality by means of actuality itself, he enlists in the service of world irony.  In his Geschichte der Philosophie, Hegel says: “All dialectic allows as valid that which is to be valid as if it were valid, allows inner destruction to develop in it – the universal irony of the world” (262). [emphasis mine]

The means of destruction are provided by what is to be destroyed.  Let me take an example that may be more or less controversial depending on my reader.  I grew up with pornography being a dark, shrouded and heinous sin.  In my evangelical youth I remember various works emerging to deal with this problem.  Pornography was treated like acid.  To even inadvertently cast a less-than-pure glance over a cheerleader as you (religiously) watched football was to risk being splashed with its scarring spew.  Eye poison.

Now I can appreciate the need to address pornography on a number of levels but I began to see this approach heaping supernatural power on nearly every form of possible sexual expression.  Now for any of you wander off the straight and narrow path of internet browsing (perhaps finding less-than-legal sites for sampling music or whatever) it does not take much to come across some pretty hardcore stuff.  First glances raise all that historical baggage but then I actually looked at what was being promoted.  How incredibly unattractive and downright boring this stuff is.  I can see why the industry has to be the fastest evolving in terms of technology and expression because it plays out so quickly.  In other words the seeds of its destruction are within.  I am not looking to downplay the reality of addictions.  I mean getting drunk becomes pretty boring as well.  The question may be to help people into a space where they can see clearly what is at play and name it for themselves as opposed to having someone else name it for them.  Or at least to understand where these names come from and who is invested in them.

Now perhaps we can move on to economics . . .

Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony – Mid-Point Reflections

I have to say that The Concept of Irony has been a pleasant surprise.  It has provided a sorely needed introduction to Socrates.  Kierkegaard’s continual engagement with Hegel has also been helpful.  Surprisingly this engagement is primarily positive.  Hegel is an authoritative source to which Kierkegaard consistently appeals.

The method of Socrates is a thorough-going negativity.  All is clearing away, nothing is planted or established.  Kierkegaard reflects on the role of Socrates’ daimon as enabling a shift away from both state and religious control.  The daimon is not to be equated with consciousness but is a sort of necessary shift for the possibility of individuality.  Instead of state law or religious oracle there is now an internal / external authority.

Instead of the oracle, Socrates now has his daimon.  The daimonian in this case now lies in the transition from the oracle’s external relation to the individual to the complete inwardness of freedom and, as still being in this transition, is a subject for representation.  [citing Hegel] . . . “The daimon is not Socrates himself, nor his opinion, nor his conviction, but it is something unconscious; Socrates is impelled.” (163-164)

What is important for Kierkegaard is that the daimon only warns.  It, again, offers no positive content.  It remains negative.  Socrates brings nothing but silence and space, the vanishing point.  This is irony.

[Socrates’] whole position, therefore, rounds itself off in the infinite negativity that turns out to be negative in relations to both a previous and a subsequent development, although in another sense it is positive in both relations – that is, infinitely ambiguous.  Against the established order of things, substantial life of the state, his whole life was a protest. (218)

With regard to morality the good then becomes the process of becoming and not arriving.

There are clear and strong seeds and outlines here of what Kierkegaard will take up in later writings.  What interests me will be how and if he explicitly addresses his move away from Hegel and beyond Socrates (in Christ).  He seems to maintain the role of negativity.  There is high view of clearing away and creating space and yet joined to that is the possibility of the ‘leap’ which seems to allow for positivity that is not trapped in a Platonic or Hegelian idealism.  This text is far more invigorating than I expected.

I have an unusually high amount of free time this weekend so hopefully I can finish off this volume shortly.

A Faithful Life?

I notice a tension between a substantive conception or articulation of a faithful life on the one hand and its entirely contextual and unexpressable nature on the other.  The notion of the substantial reality of faith is most often employed as a negative presence.  This is why my life is not faithful.  The most common refrain being that I live in the midst of and am embedded in powers and principalities that benefit the few at the cost of the many.  In Yoderian language I cannot say that I live independently of these powers.  Therefore my life is not faithful. But I can look to the ungraspable notion of grace and hope in apocalyptic action (of which I seek and participate).  So maybe my life is not faithful but God is faithful.  I am internally in contradiction.  I live in tension.  I would argue, though, that this tension is not a creative dialectic but a binding and entangling cord.  It is only a negativity.  Perhaps a negativity that will serve a purpose or has a place but it is a negativity nonetheless.

I think of a family I know.  She works and receives an increasingly rare middle-class salary.  They have bought a modest house in a ‘bad’ but developing neighbourhood.  He suffers from mental illness and requires stability but is still unable to work.  They have a young girl who he cares for.  This is not a dramatic home (well I cannot attest for everything that goes on there) but also not an easy life.  They discuss and strive for faithful choices in daily life.  I would characterize this house as faithful in the sense that Jean Vanier speaks of when he refers to enough stability for healing and growth and enough chaos and uncertainty to keep life open.

My life is not much different.  But I struggle some days even to conceive of their life as faithful never mind my own.  Negativity can always appeal to a lower (or higher) denominator.  This is binding, indebting and imprisoning.  It is not Gospel.  But I don’t know another way forward.  Is this process I am in necessary . . . is it helpful?  What would freedom mean?  Can I enact that freedom (who will rescue me from this body of death . . . )

Am I stuck in morality?  Do I need to move beyond good and evil as they say?  There is not enough nuance in the world to account for its complexity, at least in terms of possibility.  Who then is the righteous fool?  Who is the faithful one?

The Potency of Life

What, then, is the potency of life?  A life, a singular life, a life that dies in the event, a fragile life that does not live in time and cannot be evaluated in terms of money – a life that necessarily dies in its incarnations. . . . Throughout the history of philosophy, philosophers have elevated bizarre idols to obscure this transcendental field. . . . the situation is hardly improved when one throws out the transcendent, allowing capital and time to become impersonal grounds of evaluation and thought.  Life is controlled by that which does not live.  All manner of tyrants and idols have been worshipped as supreme values, as dogmatic images of thought, or as transcendentals – philosophy is superstitious, all too superstitious.

All it requires is for thought to consider a transcendental persona, to show a little care for a dying rogue, to try resuscitation once more, to breathe a little life into ‘this dank carcass,’ ‘this flabby lump of mortality’, for thought to lend ‘a hand, a heart, and a soul’.  For, in modern life, this dying rogue is no one but ourselves, and the transcendental persona of thought is our doctor.  Life is immanence, ‘the most intimate within thought’, yet it is also transcendence, ‘an outside more distant than any external world because it is an inside deeper than any internal world.’ So often the concepts of immanence and transcendence are opposed to each other, as if one could be thought without the other.  Nevertheless, the criteria for absolute immanence and absolute transcendence are the same: they consist in removing all pretenders from the role of the absolute.  Transcendence only has a relation to this world in immanence; immanence only constitutes this world in transcendence. [emphasis mine]

– Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion, 166.

Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony – Some Quick Thoughts on Method

The Concept of Irony is not recognized by Kierkegaard in his later work The Point of View on My Work as an Author.  Noteworthy, I think, is the fact that The Concept of Irony represents his first and last direct engagement with the academia.  Subsequent works were all published independently or jounralistically.  His writings had no backing or initiative from the academic institution.

While Kierkegaard received unanimous approval for his thesis it was not without qualification.  Nearly all critical comments were directed towards style and method. Kierkegaard himself notes this at several points and explicitly states in the conclusion of the first section how the whole treatise “departs somewhat from the now widespread and in so many ways meritorious scholarly method” (156).  What I take K to be referring to here is the subjective dialectic (or ironic method?) being employed.  K is trying to outline the Socratic as ironic but to do that he must wade through the mediated sources of Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes.  This is no ‘Quest for the Historical Socrates’ (those scholars would have done well to read this).  Rather, Socrates is in some sense intuited by the misunderstandings of these three writers.  In a footnote K clarifies this mode,

Wherever, it is a matter of reconstructing a phenomenon by means of what could be a view in the stricter sense of the word, there is a double task: one must indeed explain the phenomenon and in so doing explain the misunderstanding, and through the misunderstanding one must attain the phenomenon and through the phenomenon break the spell of the misunderstanding (155).

This seems to me to be a healthy pre-Gadamer understanding of the situatedness of both the reader and the text.  And K presses forward pushing all scholarly boundaries by conceding that in all this he already had an ‘end’ in mind.

During this investigation, I have continually had something in mente [in mind], namely, the final view, without thereby laying myself open to the charge of a kind of intellectual Jesuitism or of having hidden, sought, and then found what I myself had found long ago.  The final view has hovered over each exploration simply as a possibility.  Every conclusion has been the unity of a reciprocity: it has felt itself drawn to what was supposed to explain and what it is supposed to explain drawn to it.  In a certain sense it has come into existence by means of reflecting, although in another sense it existed prior to it.  But this can scarcely be otherwise, since the whole is prior to its parts. . . . If I had posed the final view first of all and in each particular portion had assigned each of these three considerations its place, then I would easily have lost the element of contemplation, which is always important but here doubly so, because by no other way, not be immediate observation, can I gain the phenomenon (156). [emphasis mine]

This is not a simple admission that K found what he was looking for . . . eisegesis as the biblical scholars like to accuse.  Rather this seems at first to be a negative dialectic.  Perhaps it is already K’s attempt at Socratic irony.  However in the next part K says that he will shift methodology now incorporating ‘historical facts’ which he will treat in their ‘inviolate innocence.’  We’ll see where that goes . . .