A few weeks ago in the first Sunday of Lent I challenged our congregation to fast from the fruits of privilege. One minor act on my part has been to ride the bus as often as possible. As a country-boy the bus has always been a source of fascination for me and this spiritual exercise paid dividends this last week as my experience ended comprising about half the sermon.
Category: theology
The violent religious man of faith . . . and Abraham
Kierkegaard’s religious self, that is his conception of the self in a religious stage, has a few qualifications. By nature it can bar no one entry on the basis of external achievement. There is no aesthetic mood, ethical act or intellectual understanding that can stand as a gatekeeper to faith. The movement of faith is qualified internally. This continues to be a troubling prospect. I still maintain that most criticisms of Kierkegaard as some demon of individualism are misguided and lack a substantial understanding of his work. However, I am struggling with repeated refrain of Fear and Trembling which is that “the single individual is higher than the universal.” This is the story of Abraham as told by Kierkegaard. The ethical is the universal and must be intelligible and communicable to all or else it is not universal. If there is faith then it must be in absolute duty to God and as such related to the individual and as such is then elevated above the universal. But because it is now above the universal it also now rendered unintelligible by others. Kierkegaard asks whether it was ethical for Abraham to withhold his plans from his family. Kierkegaard ends by asserting that for the expression to remain in the realm of faith Abraham could not express his plans to anyone. To render them intelligible would be to make them universal and therefore return them to the domain of ethics and foreclose the movement of faith. Faith becomes paradox and Isaac restored by virtue of the absurd. Abraham’s act is faithful but as such it demonstrates ‘the teleological suspension of the ethical.’
Dorothy Soelle in Suffering has criticized this reading of Genesis 22. She characterizes K’s readings as advocating that,
There are situations in which the ethical orientation breaks down, situations in which people carry out a religiously based suspension of the ethical.
She notes acts of protest which were essentially ‘ineffective’ as belonging to this category (Edith Stein’s choice to go to the gas chamber when she could have escaped). Though she says these do not point to the ‘absurd’ will of God. She then goes on to say,
God is not the one who desires or commands such sacrifices, even if we admit that in certain situations such sacrifices exhibit clearly the truth of God beyond the sphere of the ethical. This explanation of the story contains a masochistic understanding of humanity, or perhaps more accurately, an understanding of devotion that can go all the way to the sacrifice of one’s own life. A theory about suffering derived from this explanation will seek in all suffering conscious and obedient sacrifice.
While I just happened to be reading this work by Soelle alongside Fear and Trembling (and have benefited from it) this seems to be a clear misreading of Kierkegaard (though perhaps not of his interpreters). First of all Soelle assumes that description of the ethical and the religious are both equally possible. Kierkegaard denies this. Second, Kierkegaard is not interested in determining situations in which it is appropriate to go beyond the ethical (to do so is to remain in the ethical). Third, Kierkegaard paints no picture of the ‘knight of faith’ as some masochist suffering. Kierkegaard is quite clear that a person of faith may well look like some ‘bourgeois philistine’ (hardly the prototype for self-inflicted sufferer).
Going beyond Soelle it is possible to add further clarification that would keep zealots from reading F&T and then go off and shoot people. Kierkegaard’s next work is Repetition. Repetition occurs not in recollection or replication but in perpetual restoration. The common example is the married couple trying to ‘re-ignite’ the passion by re-creating their first date. To the extent that they replicate this event to the tee it will likely not end in repetition. To re-ignite the passion there would have to occur a situation in which the same resulted from a difference. In any event, we now have the cultural understanding and prototype of the crazy religious nut who does things because God told him to. Its been done. To do it again is recollection and not repetition. A faithful act will always be that which rises above the universal and therefore can only be considered in retrospect (a theology of scripture?). To even attempt to ‘send a message’ by such an act is to disqualify it.
This leads me to another line of thinking as I am working through Kierkegaard. To what extent is he just extremely gifted in ass-covering (using faith as the foil)? It seems like there would always be a way out when someone would claim to have properly critiqued him (ie his claims to the intellectual inaccessibility of faith). And that I suppose it part of the point in that his aim is not convince but to create movement where movement is possible.
Did you wish . . . could you wish
Either / Or concludes with Judge William offering the transcript of sermon he received from a friend who is a minister. William is convinced that this sermon reflects what he had been straining towards in his letter (which is what all of vol 2 is considered). The minister has yet to preach this sermon but believes in time that he will be able to have his entire congregation understand it “for the beauty of the universal consists precisely in the fact that all can understand it.”
Jesus was sinful
Can we not interpret the baptism of Jesus as a necessary act of repentance from the power inherent to his share in positions of structural authority (male, healthy, intelligent, etc.). It is by those powers individuals are able to move and shift along with culture as it continues to position itself in safety and security (by the exclusion and exploitation of others). Was this not a sin that needed repenting of so that he would live only as a child of God, grounded in an identity of love and acceptance so that he could live as such with his neighbour? Isn’t true repentance (of sin) the greatest testimony of his sinlessness? Just asking.
The self as choice . . . the choice to impregnate yourself that is
This weekend I finished Kierkegaard’s Either / Or. A major theme in the ethical ‘Or’ of Either / Or is the role of choice.
But what is it I choose? Is it this thing or that? No, for I choose absolutely, and the absoluteness of my choice is expressed precisely by the fact that I have not chosen to choose this or that. I choose the absolute. And what is the absolute? It is I myself in my eternal validity. Anything else but myself I never can choose as the absolute, for if I choose something else, I choose it as a finite thing and so do not choose it absolutely. Even the Jew who chose God did not choose it absolutely, for he chose, indeed, the absolute, but did not choose it absolutely, and thereby it ceased to be the absolute and became a finite thing.
. . .
This self which he then chooses is infinitely concrete, for it is in fact himself, and yet it is absolutely distinct form his former self, for he has chosen it absolutely. This self did not exist previously, for it came into existence by means of the choice, and yet it did exist, for it was in fact ‘himself.’
In this case choice performs at one and the same time the two dialectical movements: that which is chosen does not exist and comes into existence with the choice; that which is chosen exists , otherwise there would not be a choice.
This strikes me as a tremendously pivotal move in Kierkegaard’s work. The notion of ‘self’ will be picked up again with greater rigour in The Sickness Unto Death but here we must also remember that Kierkegaard is still trying to awaken, to disturb, to move. These are not his ‘direct’ religious writings. It is easy to see that as Kierkegaard’s work was slowly translated into German and English that these sort of passages were developed into the type of ‘individualism’ that existentialism became known for. However, even in this section Kierkegaard has no interest in the unique individual instead Kierkegaard demands the dialectic of the individual which is both absolutely singular and universal. In following page he writes,
Therefore it requires courage for a man to choose himself; for at the very time when it seems that isolates himself most thoroughly he is most thoroughly absorbed in the root by which he is connected with the whole.
This then culminates not in the maxim of ‘knowing yourself’ but in the admonishment to ‘choose yourself’. Though he admits if he wanted to be clever he would say that we must ‘know’ ourselves as Adam knew Eve.
By the individual’s intercourse with himself he impregnates himself and brings himself to birth.
I’ll let my distinguished readers unpack that one.
Organic theology . . . no, wait, don’t click to another site!
The term ‘organic’ seems to be moving quickly into disfavor among many philosophers and theologians. The impression I get is that the term is most often evoked with a sense of nostalgia and naivete with respect to how we can best understand and respond to situations (and the co-option of the term for less than desirable purposes cannot help). Whether this reaction comes from the pushback against ‘localism’ over at AUFS or the apocalyptic theology of Doerge, Kerr, Siggelkow et. al. it seems that ‘organic’ is not the right mode of engagement. This is a reductionistic preface but a preface that should indicate our ongoing desire to find the next and better mode of inquiry. That is fine and I am not looking to go back. I am just setting this up for one simple observation.
I was given a plant. It is in my office. This plant seems at once to be both dying and regenerating itself. At times it has beamed with robust health and at other times it teetered and I have not known what will come of it (though I know what should come of a plant). More often than not I do not know what to do. At one point branches were snapping. The giant leaves seemed too heavy or was it that the branch was too weak or was it that they had simply grown to completion. I would grow anxious. Too much or not enough of any number of things can spell the end. I rushed to the Sunday School supply room and came back with pipe cleaners and popsicle sticks trying to create splints to see if they could heal. But I had to let them go. Out of the three only one sprouted a new leaf.
This all reminded me of my childhood on the farm. I could not farm. In my bones I despised farming because I would work an already too wet field and see dark clouds roll in from the West miles away on the prairies bringing more rain. It made me ill. So I left the farm unconsciously thinking there were places where I could have more control.
And I found these places in regular paychecks and relatively clear job expectations. But now several times a day I look over at that plant and I do not know its fate. Again, I am trying to be very conscious of nostalgia or paternalistic tendencies in my thinking. I suppose the only point I am trying to make is that if someone wishes to move beyond the organic metaphor they should have made sure they sat long enough with it in all its precariousness and anxiety . . . and beauty.
Between slavery and control
Perhaps this imagery goes without saying but I think there is still significant contemporary theo-political content to be developed from the Pentateuch. Here are some excerpts from last Sunday’s sermon on Leviticus 19,
I think one of the most misunderstood aspects of Leviticus as well as the first five books of the Old Testament in general is the notion that the commandments given represent some sort of static or fixed law. The center of Old Testament faith is not the following of particular laws. This may flow out from the center but the center of Old Testament faith is the presence of God. Everything in Leviticus as well as Exodus and Numbers finds its orientation in relationship with the Holy of Holies, the center of the Tabernacle, which was the Tent of Meeting, around which the Israelites camped as they travelled in the wilderness and when they first settled in Canaan. And what is at the center of the Holy of Holies? Inside that space is the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark is a box covered with a lid sometimes called the Mercy Seat that had two angels, called cherubim, mounted on either side on top. I view the Ark as a sort of frame.
At the center of other religions at that time there would tend to be a physical idol that would represent who or what was being worshipped. However, in the Tabernacle there was an empty space between the wings of the cherubim on top of the Ark. In the book of Exodus God says to Moses, “There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the covenant, I will deliver to you all my commands for the Israelites.” What is the significance of this image? God comes to meet with Moses from the place that humanity cannot control and confine, in the space that is left open and empty. God cannot be directly equated with our conceptions, with our tradition or with our expectations. So while we have the framework, so to speak, of ethics and tradition that provide some continuity and stability we must always be open to the newness or aliveness that the love of God will speak into situations.
. . .
The Tabernacle by its nature is movable. The Tabernacle as well as Mt. Sinai exist in a special place in the Old Testament story. These sites exist between the experience of slavery in Egypt on one side and the experience of slowing taking power and control in Canaan on the other side. The Tabernacle exists in the freedom of reliance and dependence on God between and therefore beyond being enslaved or being in control. And as the author of the Gospel of John put it so well of Jesus saying literally that “the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.” We are to learn to be a tabernacling people. . . . We remain a people with history and tradition but can these things be dismantled, stakes pulled up, to set up the site again in a new place?
. . .
And so like the nomadic Hebrew people of the wilderness we must nourish the ability to migrate, gather and frame the possibility of God’s holiness over the spaces between slavery and control. We gather and walk with one another and with our neighbours seeing how our objects, our actions and our minds relate to one another. This is the body of Christ that walked the earth 2000 years ago. He never grasped for political and social control and even when his body was ultimately grasped by these forms of control he never became enslaved to them. He always held open that space for the love of God which enters the world as the love of our neighbour as our self. This is to be the body of Christ today, that is the church, it is to spread and wander with eyes attentive to power and bondage and then to stand between them.
Debating whether or not I care
I recently crossed paths with someone heavily involved in an atheists group at the local university. This person was not of the ‘sort’ I expected. In any event the encounter spurred me to do a little snooping around on the internet for local atheist blogs and see what was happening. In the process I ran into The Winnipeg Skeptics. One of the contributors has his own blog Startled Disbelief. I started reading various posts and before long I chimed in with a few comments. Now I have to say I appreciate Gem Newman’s tone at Startled Disbelief and so was quite open to hearing his positions. After my initial comment Gem directed me to an earlier post which outlined in broader terms his position as a skeptic. We had a decent little exchange going before I realized that the arc of the conversation was quickly moving into territory I simply had no interest in pursuing.
If you are interested in the full conversation see the last link (I did quite appreciate his overall presentation). In any event there was one aspect to the conversation that continued to trouble me. Gem constantly pushed the notion that skepticism was somehow non-political. Skepticism is simply a method of critically examining claims (as he puts it). I didn’t think anyone believed in a neutral mode of scientific inquiry anymore. Gem went on to say that skepticism does not “provide a personal moral framework” and also that “atheism says nothing about politics, economics, or even belief in the supernatural.” He claimed I was confusing the politics of particular atheists with the politics of atheism (I had earlier proposed that atheism was actually a much more robust approach than skepticism . . . for him atheism is a one-off subject). Gem claims that he is “a skeptical, liberal, humanistic atheist.” I suppose it is this combination that clarifies his politics. However, he continues to maintain a broader skeptical orientation in saying, “I think that everything should be open to question. All conclusions are provisional.” How is this not political? How will that not continue to deny participation to decisive and potentially life-threatening postures that need to be taken in response to abusive powers?
Now so far as theology goes I would agree that a skeptical atheism comes much closer to biblical faith than many other contemporary theologies do in its rigor for idol-smashing. However, biblical faith is a decidedly declared position. That is, biblical faith will always ultimately undermine earthly authorities which abuse power. This is Christology (as well as good Old Testament theology). So I put it to Gem saying that I am much more interested in the proposition ‘love everything’ as opposed to his tagline ‘question everything’. Love maintains a critical posture (because of its love for others) but always orientates the person towards a constructive and engaged posture. This is where things started coming off the rails in my mind. Here Gem began ‘applying’ his method. His defense of and basis for skepticism was simply the apparently self-evident role of the Enlightenment as “proven to have held up.” This is exactly my criticism he does not address. The Enlightenment does not hold up because it offered nothing socially or politically substantive to engage the West. I am then accused of a ‘false dichotomy’ in my opposition of love-or-question everything. Though, I should add that love under Gem’s definition is some sort of fond cuddling. When I advanced my view of love (as something restorative) I was accused of having a definition that “seems vague, misleading, needlessly complex, and in some cases probably guilty of equivocation.” Oh man, I guess Gem has the definition down for love.
It is at this point at the end of the conversation that Gem offers the strange example of giving lectures to teachers on how to teach mathematics. In this example it would not interest him to consider how to integrate the possibility that some children are unable to learn due to unstable life circumstances. That sort of clinched it. I suspect he would say that indeed would care about it but he also says that he has “neither the skills nor the inclination to be a counsellor, and the fact that some of them may need counselling does not make teaching mathematics any less important.” Who the hell would argue from that example that mathematics are not important? Yes, fine we are all able and limited in various capacities but to consider one aspect of education as ‘pedagogically pure’ regardless of circumstance seems unhelpful.
Why am I recounting this? I guess I wanted to process it for myself. Christian and skeptical/atheistic apologetics are pretty big these days. I thought it might be a good exercise to understand why I don’t care. What this has clarified for me is the reality that by and large these expressions (on both sides of the fences, as I have encountered them) have a drastically insufficient or at least dis-integrated view of politics as though they can go about their business because they are a-political. Its not my responsibility for what others do with the sacred truth I discover. In any event it seems more like bullshit than before.
Original boredom and solving our financial crisis
While I have not posted on Either / Or the experience of volume 1 for a second go round is better than I expected. The problem is that it is a ‘popular’ work and so also a dated work. Can you imagine reading Zizek’s works over 100 years from now trying to piece together the pop-culture illusions? Either / Or is not that extreme though I am certainly feeling its distance. One of the pieces is volume 1 begins with a reflection on boredom as the root of evil. And because of this seeks to eliminate its evil presence. He takes finance as an example. Imagine trying to improve the economy by practicing economics!? How utterly boring and therefore sinful.
The history of this [evil] can be traced from the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored togethre; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand. The nations were scattered over the earth, just as people now travel abroad, but they continued to be bored. Consider the consequences of this boredom. Humanity fell from its lofty height, first because of Eve, and then from the Tower of Babel. What was it, on the other hand, that delayed the fall of Rome, was it not bread and circuses? And is anything to be done now? Is anyone concerned about planning some means of diversion? Quite the contrary, the impending ruin is being accelerated. It is proposed to improve the financial condition of the state by practicing economy. What could be more tiresome? Instead of increasing the national debt, it is proposed to pay it off. As I understand the political situation, it would be an easy matter for Denmark to negotiate a loan of fifteen million dollars. Why not consider this plan? Every once in a while we hear of a man who is a genius, and therefore neglects to pay his debts – why should not a nation do the same, if we were all agreed? Let us then borrow fifteen millions, and let us the proceeds, not to pay debts, but for public entertainment. Let us celebrate the millennium in a riot of merriment. Let us place boxes everywhere, not, as at present, for the deposit of money, but for the free distribution of money. Everything would become gratis; theaters gratis, women of easy virtue gratis, one would drive to the park gratis, be buried gratis, one’s eulogy would be gratis; I say gratis, for when one always has money at hand, everything is in a certain sense free. No one should be permitted to own any property. Only in my own case would there be an exception. I reserve to myself securities in the Bank of London to the value of one hundred dollars a day, partly because I cannot do with less, partly because the idea is mine, and finally because I may not be able to hit upon a new idea when the fifteen millions are gone.
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’.
David CL Driedger 