Category: theology

Peter Blum on Im/possibility and the Church’s Syntactical Relationship with the Poor

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.

Yielding or Navigating Empire in the Pentateuch; Or Church as Secondary State

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).

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An Alternative Question

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 – Review

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.

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Religious Experience

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.

Who Will Love This Dead God?

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?

Naaman and the Parable of Academic Theology

In a couple of weeks I will be preaching on 2 Kings 5:1-19.  This is the story of Naaman a great commander of the army of Aram.  Naaman, however, is a leper.  In one of his conquests Naaman captures a ‘small girl’ who ends up as a servant for Naaman’s wife.  As the small girl sees Naaman’s affliction she says that Naaman should send word to the prophet in Samaria and he would heal him.  This is Naaman’s initial posture.  By almost all accounts he is a man of status and power and yet he is afflicted in such a way that everything is tainted.  In that position he is able to hear from the ‘small girl’ who in every way is his contrast.

Once Naaman hears of this possibility he does not send word to the prophet but immediately reverts to the ‘appropriate’ channels.  He sends word to the king.  He brings a large sum of money.  He travels with horses and chariots.  And the king of Israel upon hearing word tears his clothes.  What can he do for this powerful man?  Surely Naaman is trying gain some advantage through this encounter.  Naaman must a shrewd and clever dialogue partner looking for advantage in this relationship.  But Elisha the prophet simply asks that Naaman come and see him.  So Naaman arrives at the entrance of the prophet’s home with all his pomp and procession.  But Elisha does not even greet Naaman.  Instead he sends his messenger to tell Naaman to wash in the Jordan River seven times and he would be healed.  Naaman is infuriated by this action.  He goes on to describe what he imagined should have happened.  Elisha should have come out to greet him and standing their he would call on the name of his God and wave his hand and heal him.  The scene again is one in which the grandness of the result should be accomplished by a grand action.  There should be a proportional relationship.

This story reminded me of my academic development.  I began post-secondary education as though listening to a ‘small girl’.  I had a felt need and desire that this process could be a work of healing or restoration (it was all of course more convoluted than that but for the sake of contrast it is not entirely inaccurate).  Perhaps it did not happen as quickly as with Naaman but I began veering off course away from the prophet and towards the king.  This path called for a demonstration, a pageantry displaying the validity of my presence and purposes.  I saw around me that small and simple acts were inadequate.  One needed to call on the name of rigorous thinkers and wave the hand dense and nuanced argumentation.

Of course this parable falls apart on any number of levels.  Any Naaman could come across this post and demonstrate its inadequacies.  But it is only an attempt to begin writing in the spirit of a ‘small girl’.    There are many important things going on among important people who are able to sustain important discourses.  And these things are important as they affect many people.  I, however, suspect I have plugged the ears that once heard small things. I no longer know where the Jordan River is and I may not even have the patience to wash seven times in it.  And to what end would that accomplish in any event?  Naaman was convinced and he washed himself.  What happened?  His flesh became like that of a ‘small boy’.  This is no cult of beauty.  This is a reversion or a return to a way discounted by our culture.  It is a path not noticed.  A path not seen.