Category: theologians theorists and the like

Following the Kick-Ass Jesus; Or, Caged Faith

I was recently made aware of what should be an unsurprising website Jesus Didn’t Tap.

Jesus Didn’t Tap was one of the first Christian based MMA clothing companies to hit the scene. In the sport of Mixed Martial Arts, to “tap” is to quit or give up. The message of the Jesus Didn’t Tap line is that Jesus didn’t quit after going through unimaginable suffering and pain when he was crucified on the cross. The company aims to represent both the competitiveness of MMA and honoring God in all of their designs and hopes it will help spread the Christian message of salvation to a whole new audience. (from the website)

This is unsurprising and, for me, now a surprisingly clear example of heretical faith.  It is not heretical because it is ridiculous.  It is heretical because it believes that faith can be expressed analogically.  I will briefly qualify that statement by saying that I am unqualified to speak about ‘analogy’ as it is used in systematic theology and so these comments may or may not relate to a larger discussion.  My observation is simple.  Faith cannot be analogical because faith cannot be reduced from entirety into examples of totality.  This website reflects a belief that the ‘kernel’ of faith can be translated into the medium of fighting.  As a sport I actually have a relatively high regard for certain forms of MMA but this is viewed from a larger complex of social, ethical and personal perspectives.  What is at issue is the belief that you can ‘close’ the door of cage and function faithfully and independently within a confined space.  This is not a new insight but it is claiming more ground in how I view faithfulness.  This is how I would understand the word ‘piety’ as it used by folks at AUFS and also Hauerwas’s criticism of American as too ‘spiritual’.  Piety or spiritualism reflect those actions and postures which assume some effectiveness despite the realities of a larger context.  As it is Thanksgiving in Canada ‘piety’ might mean thanking God for a prosperity that comes at the direct cost of others without the means to object.  It is an act isolated from its relations.

I do not have the book on hand but Kierkegaard in his preface to The Sickness Unto Death speaks of faith as that which fearlessly encounters all of life.  In this way I have become much more receptive to ‘secular’ and ‘materialist’ expressions that attempt to thoroughly examine the functions at play in religion and culture (a critique of ideology it is often called).  To the extent that an expression distracts or insulates from an identifiable aspect of life it must be deemed unfaithful because it rejects the basic theological premise that the whole earth is full of God’s glory.  The basic posture of the Christian must remain to see, to hear, to feel, to taste, to smell.  This connects to the reason I began a new blog.  The hope was to learn the discipline of description.  I am not sure how I feel about the idea of accuracy in description (and I certainly reject any notion of neutrality) only that we tend to go through our days bypassing the basic acknowledgment and engagement with our senses.  Our mind already has enough patterns to live by assumption and guesswork and not take the time to recognize the utter uniqueness of everything (a bit grand of a statement I suppose).  So when I see examples like the one above I am reminded not of how ridiculous they are but of how tempting it is to cage faith in containable expressions allowing other forces free play in the ‘real world’ the one in which people live, breath and die; the one fallen and full of the glory of God.

I came across this quote from the website as though it was looking to enhance my point.

When Jesus stepped inside the cage of life to take on the cross, human legs did not kicked his out from under him. It was not human hands that broke his arm during the arm bar of adversity. It was not a human fist that knocked him to the mat for our sins. It was not a human that kept him inside the triangle choke of suffering. It was not the fighter’s sent by Satan to tap him out that beat him.

God gave him strength while on his back being pounded in the face by the elbows of sin. Those same hands that formed the universe. Those same hands that held you and me before the foundation of the world.

Take a jog out to the mountain of the skull. Out to the cross where, with holy blood, the hand that placed you on the planet wrote the promise, “God would give up his only Son before he’d Tap Out on you.

Truly, Jesus Didn’t Tap! – Are you tapping out on him?

Spiritual Mastery

Economic activity constantly seeks to transcend itself, not only by extending its domain into the artistic realm, but also in exertion within its own proper sphere, in its own inner dynamic.  It is striving to become not only one sphere of life, but the only on, or the ultimately definitive one, recognising no extra-economic or supra-economic court of appeal.  The result is economism as a fundamental perception of the world, a world-view.  Its class expression is ‘economic materialism’, a many-faced and many-faceted phenomenon, although it has come to be associated with the name of one its boldest exponents, Karl Marx.  Man is aware of his being in the world only as an economic subject (economic man, homo economicus), for whom economic activity is pure commercialism: economic instinct or egoism is laid down as the foundation of life itself.  This egoism is simply the pure manifestation of the universal, metaphysical egoism of creation as a whole.  Economic activity founded upon egoism in inevitably afflicted by disharmony and strife, personal and communal (‘class war’), and there is no possibility of any ultimate harmonising of this economic egoism which would lead it towards the ‘solidarity’ of which socialist thinking makes so much.  Economic egoism is an elemental force which is in need of regulation, both external and internal (spiritual and ascetical); left to itself, liberated from all restraint, it becomes a destructive power.  Where economics is concerned, it is just as wrong to turn away from it in disgust as to be enslaved by its concerns. Economic labour is imposed upon us as a penalty for sin, and we are bound to see it as a duty [obedience] laid upon all mankind.  There is nothing common between fastidious aristocratic distaste for economic activity and that freedom from economic concern which the gospel enjoins: this freedom aims not at neglect or contempt but at spiritual mastery.

– The Unfading Light; Sergii Bulgakov (1917)

I have not ventured far into Bulgakov but I am intrigued and hopeful in his earthy and fleshly spirituality and how it engages the world; the practice of spiritual mastery (as if I needed incentive to read more turn of the century Russian authors).

There is No Oedipal Triangle

I am slowly and awkwardly making my way through Anti-Oedipus.  The process reminds me a little of my first venture through The Brothers Karamazov.  At many points I had the Russian names all jumbled, I had put it down for weeks at a time and then picked up wherever it was that I left off not entirely sure of just what I was entering back into.  It was through that process I came to realize that some books simply needed to be read once so that a basic orientation could be laid for a second reading.  Perhaps this is a lousy and ineffective reading strategy but it has helped sustain my spirit while plodding through books I did not understand (only later to be greatly enlightened by them).  In any event Delueze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is of a similar but also entirely different order.  I rarely know just what the hell is going on.  There have been, however, enough intersections of clarity that offer themselves as tiny beacons to start charting rough waters.  I recently read one such section.

There is no Oedipal Triangle:  Oedipus is always open in an open social field.  Oedipus opens to the four winds, to the four corners of the social field (not even 3+1, but 4+n).  A poorly closed triangle, a porous or seeping triangle, an exploded triangle from which the flows of desire escape in the direction of other territories.  It is strange that we had to wait for the dreams of colonized peoples in order to see that, on the vertices of the pseudo triangle, mommy was dancing with missionary, daddy was being fucked by the tax collector, while the self was being beaten by the white man.  It is precisely this pairing of the parental figures with agents of another nature, their locking embrace similar to that of wrestlers, that keeps the triangle from closing up again, from being valid in itself, and from claiming to express or represent this different nature of the agents that are in question in the unconscious itself. . . . It could always be said that these extreme situations of war trauma, of colonization, of dire poverty, and so on, are unfavorable to the construction of the Oedipal apparatus – and that it is precisely because of this that these situations favor a psychotic development or explosion – but we have a strong feeling that the problem lies elsewhere.  Apart from the fact that a certain degree of comfort found in the bourgeois family is admittedly necessary to turn out oedipalized subjects, the question of knowing what is actually invested in the comfortable conditions of a supposedly normal or normative Oedipus is pushed still further into the background.

The revolutionary is the first to have the right to say: “Oedipus? Never heard of it.”

Anti-Oedipus, 96.

Introduction to After the Postsecular and Postmodern – Excerpts and Comments

For anyone interested, the editor’s Introduction for After the Postsecular and Postmodern is available at Scibd.  One of the editors and several of the contributors in this volume are regulars at AUFS.  As I started reading through it I thought I would past chunks that stood out or reflected the direction or intent of the volume (I have not yet seen a copy).  I have inserted a few comments, some of which are critical but of course they are then very provisional as I am working from something that points to a whole that I have not seen.  I have tried to keep the comments then on how this piece structures the project.

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The Gift of Difference – Part II – Review of the Parts

In Part I I addressed some of the shortfalls of the overall project while affirming what was perhaps the inevitable ‘shortfall’ of  the two dialogue camps.  Putting aside any larger intentions of this collection the chapters themselves maintained a steady offering of what it means to “to be differently ethical and differently political” (5) without falling into prescribed and caricatured notions of ‘purist’ or ‘compromised’ faith. I will touch on a number of the chapters but offer more sustained engagement with the chapters by York and Dula.

The first two chapters highlight the movements, tensions and unresolved thinking represented within the book.  In chapter one Peter Blum draws out a Derridean account of a metaphysics of violence as actually offering a greater possibility of peaceful practice as opposed to Milbank’s ontology of peace which, with Derrida, also assumes the inevitability of violence in the present and so its discerning use on the part of the Church for the purpose of peace (for more on Blum see here).  Then in chapter two the positions are flipped as Kevin Derksen accepts Milbank’s critique of Derrida and illustrates it in showing that even in offering our death (Derrida’s Gift of Death) this act “paradoxically reinscribes itself as the moment of purest ownership” (31).  In light of the resurrection even the sacrifice of life must discerned and not given in its ethical value.  This critique is then leveled against certain Mennonite accounts which seem to make peace a stable category from which other theological claims can be made.  These chapters set the tone for the book.  This will not be for or against the two traditions but simply difference, engaged and explored.

Tripp York’s “The Ballad of John and Anneken” was the most clear and straightforward account posing the simple question, “Does [Milbank] deliver an account of witness that is capable of producing witnesses” (53)?  York questions Milbank’s discriminate use of violence as simply re-framing the often used ‘myth of redemptive violence.’  York calls for a rise in ‘witnesses’ if Milbank’s work is to gain any lasting traction.  Where even is the witness of the life of Jesus in his account?  Where are the stories that flow from and reflect his ontology?  York introduces the witness of Anneken Heyndricks from the Martyrs’ Mirror.  Anneken was to be burned at the stake for heresy.  At her questioning she did not recant though neither did she curse those around her but blessed and gave thanks.  York says, “such a story represents the faithful who, rather than accepting tragedy by conceding its viability, absorb tragedy as Christ-absorbed evil” (64).  It does not pass through her life onto others but ends with her though she does not end, as the resurrection promises.  York then asks how Milbank might respond with such an account and then adds with some bite, “Were [the civil and ecclesial authorities] not practicing dominium, and, therefore, both extending and preserving the social harmony for the good of the commonwealth” (64-65)?  And further with, well, a little more than bite, “Though Milbank is not here talking about ecumenical disagreements, as charitable as I would like to be, I fear Milbank’s theology would have easily been placed in the service of ecclesiastical forces that would have resulted in a number of writers in this volume, had they lived centuries ago, being burned at the stake” (65).  Snap.

New for me was Peter Dula’s account of “Fugitive Ecclesia” that develops Sheldon Wolin’s Fugitive Democracy.  It is worth citing Dula’s initial quote of Wolin in full,

I shall take the political to be an expression of the idea that a free society composed of diversities can nonetheless enjoy moments of commonality when, through public deliberations, collective power is used to promote or protect the well being of the collectivity.  Politics refers to the legitimized public contestation, primarily by organized and unequal social powers, over access to the resources available to the public authorities of the collectivity.  Politics is continuous, ceaseless, and endless.  In contrast, the political is episodic, rare (104).

I take the political expressed here to be those ‘moments’ when motivated, intentional figures also have the stars align allowing for something to happen.  “[T]heir power sprang from grassroots . . . they were not political actors coming together but individuals formed into political actors through their common deliberation” (105).  The question Dula asks is whether the church as it is conceived in theologians such as Milbank, Hauerwas, Bell, Cavanaugh, and Yoder is actually best described as a type of ‘fugitive ecclesial,’  that is a church that for the most part does not actually exist as it is called but for moments does exist as such.  If this is the case why are they not more up front about it and what then does this mean for the church in the mean time if in fact the church remains episodic, rare?  It seems necessary for these theologians to travel back to some pure conception and expression of the church while remaining at the point of despair with regards to the contemporary western church.  This leads to the further question of whether or not there is some external some actual alternative to the structure of late-modern capitalism (or whatever else our state might be characterized as).  Is there any longer space for the political in the midst of our current ongoing politics?  The prospects, as Dula sees them, are not particularly hopeful.  He offers six.

  • We can accept a fugitive ecclesial and “celebrate the moments of fugitivity rather than mourn that that is all there is” (124).
  • We can turn to being more ‘realistic’ acknowledging that our condition robs ‘us of some possibilities of faithfulness” (124).
  • We can, with Barth, relieve the church of so much responsibility and place it on Christ making ecclesial defenselessness possible.
  • We can, with Hauerwas, acknowledge that we lack necessary skills and remain blinded to what we are called to, but hopeful that we can perhaps learn.
  • We can become more open to what is going on outside of the church.  “If it is true that we need to try harder, then outsiders may be able to teach us how” (126).

The sixth option appears to be Dula’s own offering,

[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).

This is an intriguing offering.  It at once calls up the criticism of those fighting to change the structure but the question becomes whether this offering is from those who have been worked through the structure and understand it as perhaps one of the only alternatives left, and a theologically faithful one at that.

I will not continue reviewing each chapter at such length.  The former chapters (especially York and Dula) strike me as the most suggestive and also, potentially, the most constructive.  That being said many of the other articles offer helpful nuance to long established debates.  Such is the case with Long’s article “Desire and Theological Politics.”  Long argues that violence is as much about the desire for non-violence as it is about greed or power.  In addition to suppressing violent acts pacifism has also tended to suppress the desire that may have motivated the act, a desire that may indeed have been godly.  And I will leave it up to someone more qualified to engage with Pauls’ chapter “Harmony in Exile: Rest in its Embers” which uses Berio’s sequenza IV (for piano, 1996) as a mode of understanding Radical Orthodoxy’s theological and liturgical aesthetic.  The language in this chapter was highly evocative but slightly too technical in musical theory for me to fully grasp the force and implications of her work.

As I stated in part I this book is not constructing some theological or ecclesial project.  It is however engaging in a hopeful practice.  It is a practice that does not believe one’s tradition has the corner on a given expression, or even fully understands said expression.  It is a practice that believes that learning may in fact be possible across traditions even if that learning means that you maintain or strengthen your opposition to another tradition.  It is also a practice that has no interest in overcoming another tradition through rhetorical force but allows expressions to have their own say and persuasion.  I would conclude that these are good practices for our time and place.

The Gift of Difference – Part I – A Review of the Whole

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.

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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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The Gift of Difference – Teaser

I just received my review copy of The Gift of Difference: Radical Orthodoxy, Radical Reformation.

John Milbank from the Foreward:

Without any question, the essayists below have done Radical Orthodoxy and me the immense service of taking seriously our concerns.  All the readings of Radical Orthodoxy writings are careful and never caricatured.  This is rare.

Yikes.

Opening quote is from Yoder in the first chapter:

The Niebuhrian or the Sartrian has no corner on clean hands.  The question is not whether one can have clean hands but which kind of complicity in which kind of inevitable evil is preferable.

I am gathering the general tone of this work will aim at transcending any simplistic dialectic between purity and comprise in the social and political realm.  While most (did I say most?) Mennonites recognize they are not ‘perfect’ I hope this work will go a long way towards dismantling the stain of perfectionism that still contaminates much of our personal and social activity (or inactivity).

Look forward to a more sustained engagement with book!

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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