Category: world

On My Arc Away From Liturgy

I left an annoying comment on Tony’s recent post about liturgy.  His post briefly explores the possibility of the Church Year as offering the foundation for an ‘irregular dogmatics’.  My comment was simply stating that I wish I could comment because at present the notion and validity of the Church Year and its structural liturgy is, at present, in upheaval.  I thought I might try and trace my thought trajectory so that I can see where it might be heading.

As I alluded to my last post I have been preaching Romans for Advent.  Paul, having little to say about the historical Jesus at the best of times, has no Christmas story.  There appears to be no value in recounting Jesus’s birth for the sake of churches he worked with.  This led to a sort of paradigm shift which began to view liturgical practices not so much as rhythms of resistance but as abstractions displacing what should be existentially integrated (did that make sense?).  So we set baby Jesus outside of us as opposed to attending to the blood, shit and pain that comes with childbirth.

This thinking was further crystallized by a comment Chris Rodkey made on a somewhat unrelated post at AUFS.  He states,

One thing I have been thinking about as I am constructing an outline for a collaborative project a colleague and I are gearing up to write together is Jacob Taubes’ critique of Christianity in his book Occidental Eschatology. Essentially my appropriation is this: The liturgical calendar and liturgical time prevents any sense of Parousia. [emphasis mine]

Perhaps I could be convinced that present liturgies are simply parodies but it hardly makes a difference.  The point is the manner in which our lives are presently and existentially engaged.  As it turns out Dan seemed to push my thinking even further with his recent post.  He writes,

This is the season of Advent and some of my friends are writing pretty words about this time of waiting, hope, anticipation and proleptic action.  They are saying the sort of thing I used to say not too long ago.  As for me, I am tired of waiting and tired of being a good little fellow and “waiting well.”  With all due respect to my friends, I say fuck that noise.  If there is a God out there, and that God is lingering, deciding to postpone an intervention, then I think the only way to wait is to act as if God is not coming or to try and force the coming of God.  Instead of finding ways to make our peace with our godforsakenness we should absolutely refuse to accept it.  Anything is better than that acceptance.  Better to risk everything on the wager that God cares enough to intervene (although that usually doesn’t work out well) than to sit back and make peace with this.  Better to spit at the back of God if that is what will bring God to act.  Besides, it is actions like these, and only actions like these, that actually take God seriously.  Anything else in the context of abandonment is either a pale imitation of worship or idolatry.

I am not quite sure how to take this.  At present I read it as a Psalm which is fully truthful if not entirely complete (is that an insult Dan?).  This leads me to my present reading in Philip Goodchild’s Capitalism and Religion.  Goodchild looks at Henri Bergson’s work on time and freedom.  Bergson critiques ‘measured’ or ‘counted’ time.  Goodchild writes,

For synchronization to occur, real time must be replaced by an abstraction which has eliminated the essential quality of time – change.  Measurable, homogeneous time is an abstraction where nothing takes place.  In countable time, the living is measured in so far as it conforms to the behaviour of inanimate clocks. (105)

In brief, the representation of reality in both science and metaphysics is a commodification, replacing the thing with a quantifiable symbol fashioned for the purpose of exchange.

Bergson’s alternative is to place reason within the temporal process itself. . . . The experience of thinking replaces the object of thought.  Freedom must be encountered in the experience of thinking before it can become the object of thought. (107)

The question this raises is the extent to which liturgical practices actually undermine, overthrow or replace dominant social modes (empire, capitalism, etc.).  Or do they simply fall prey the near omnipotent work of commodification?  Does a flash mob singing the hallelujah chorus in a food court do anything more than make people feel good about their shopping experience?  Even the cultural liturgist Jaime Smith thinks not (I have not read his Desiring the Kingdom). (I also can’t help but cringe at Winnipeg’s attempt to piggy-back on this . . . apparently the press was there waiting for it ‘to happen’)

So that is a bit of the arch.  I still retain theological convictions of doxology as a sort of foundation for practice but as for present form of church liturgy I am becoming increasingly dissatisfied.  The issue remains the extent to which the acts and the structures produce abstractions or commodities that keep one from encountering and entering into the Gospel.  What is my alternative?  At present it is little more than an increasingly social form of (or socially aware) existentialism.  Or to be more naive . . . a biblical faith.  Hopefully, more to come.

Have You Seen This Dead God?

Lately it seems I cannot turn around without coming across the dead God.  I have been reading Zizek again and instead of simply being playfully amused by his counter-intuitive insights I have begun to see more clearly his hegelian reading of the Trinity.  God empties himself into Jesus and is split, de-centered from himself.  And dies.  The God of ‘beyond’ which can and does ground every ideology is emptied and the space of struggle, the Holy Spirit, is opened in this death.  Traditional theology will tend to keep God the Father above and beyond pulling the strings and maintaining order.  It is precisely that God that must be emptied into Jesus die for the purpose of salvation.

Man is eccentric with regard to God, but God himself is eccentric with regard to his own ground, the abyss of Godhead. . . . Christ’s death on the Cross thus means that we should immediately ditch the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology – Christ’s death on the Cross is the death of this God, it repeats Job’s stance, it refuses any ‘deeper meaning’ that obfuscates the brutal reality of historical catastrophes. – The Monstrosity of Christ

I also recently finished reading Ronald Osborn’s Anarchy and Apocalypse.  This is a relatively conservative appeal to the biblical resources of non-violence set within particular contemporary settings.  However, here the dead God surfaces in the form of post-holocaust Jewish thought, namely that of Elie Wiesel.  Wiesel sees God as the young child hung from his neck, dying and almost dead.  This becomes the straightforward,

ethical as well as a religious imperative: if we are to remain human we must refuse passivity, ease, complacency, and fight for the justice which God, in His captivity, in the time of His banishment, cannot bestow. – Anarchy and Apocalypse

And all the reminded me of an old post I wrote reflecting on Kierkegaard’s test for true love which is to love someone dead.  The dead is the absolute relationship.  If the relationship of love changes it must be because of you, the variable element (no blaming the dead for not understanding you).  To love one dead is love a non-being.

In order properly to test whether or not love is faithful, one eliminates everything whereby the object could in some way aid him in being faithful.  But all this is absent in the relationship to one who is dead, one who is not an actual object.  If love still abides, it is most faithful. – Works of Love

What is going on here?  Will a decade, more or less, pass after which we will look back at these silly caricatures of theology?  Or are these accounts already reflections and indictments of an already over-caricatured and debased theology and ecclesiology?  I would like to call this theme humanist in its apparent rejection of God but that does quite do it justice.  Death is something other than human or perhaps fully human; something that modern humanism (as I have encountered it) does quite seem to grasp.  Also these accounts remain in many ways thoroughly theological.  They are dealing with the dead God not with God as an illusion.  It is this possible realism in theology that I find intriguing and potentially attractive.

And for your listening pleasure he is Gash’s 1986 God is Dead


I Object!

From a recent Globe and Mail article,

What attracts native-born Canadians to church these days, says religion sociologist David Seljak of St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ont., is the availability of parking, quality of preaching and children’s programs, in that order.

I object!  I know from direct anecdotal evidence that children’s programs ranks higher in drawing attendance than quality of preaching.  As a minister of the Gospel I am deeply offended by this accusation.

Digging Into the End

I remember when my little brain first gained the conceptual ability to ponder (outer) space.  I let my mind wander as far as it would go into space.  It traveled deeper and deeper where the star lights began to grow dim.  Then light became absent.  Things slowed down but my mind continued.  Eventually my mind reached a wall, or more accurately a corner, a point where my mind was funneled.  This is the end, there is no further.  But the thought came to me, What if I began to dig into the end?

This thinking always comes back to me when the question of immanence and transcendence surfaces.  It always supported, in my mind, a position of transcendence.  I no longer see this as the case.  I see the question now more as a Hebrew one; that is a question of boundary.  In any  event I have been trying to think through various expressions of immanence lately.  Most of them are loosely or directly connected with Gilles Deleuze (and seems to characterize much of the contributions at AUFS).  Currently I am reading Philip Goodchild’s Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire.  As I am working through many things I do not understand I came across a very helpful and short statement on understanding immanence.

A truly critical philosophy can only be judged by the immanence of its criteria: it must do what it says, and say what it does.  It becomes a being-thought: a thought of being and a being of thought.  The second limit of critical philosophy is therefore a pure plane of immanence; this is the only possible meaning of the ‘end of philosophy’.  Immanence does not mean the absence of determination; rather, it implies that all that one is should be put into how one thinks, so that one’s entire mode of existence may be changed by encounters and idea within thought. [emphasis added]

This is far and away the most helpful thinking I have encountered in this discussion.  I have always approached the question as a jockeying for position over transcendence.  Who is policing the boundaries?  Who is claiming access or insight into the other side?  Who has dug through the end?  Goodchild’s (or Delueze’s) posture orients the question much more existentially and in many ways reminds me of statements found in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground in which the Underground Man attempts to face himself.

There are certain things in a man’s past which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends.  Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as a secret.  But, finally, there are things which he is afraid to divulge even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things in his mind.

. . .

I particularly want to put the whole thing to the test to see whether I can be absolutely frank with myself and not be afraid of the whole truth.

This thinking has no interest in the perception from outside as an abstracted and inaccessible site of conversation.  This thinking desires to put all into play; a venture of risk and trust.  I cannot rely on a secure deposit outside the relations of this world.  What else is kenosis?  As such this becomes a venture that may offer traction to the Christian notion of faith.  And perhaps more importantly this thinking may actually put flesh on the possibility of conversion.

Book Review – Anarchy and Apocalypse

Ronald E. Osborn. Anarchy and Apocalypse: Essays on Faith Violence, and Theodicy (Cascade Books, 2010).

Osborn’s short collection of essays is one of the more eclectic publications I have read in some time.  Faith and violence are indeed the mingled themes that bind this work together; having said that, however, the collection is somewhat nomadic moving from shorter almost op-ed pieces to longer more technical engagements.  Osborn’s introduction claims that a possible underlying ‘project’ here is an attempt to relate anarchist and Christian approaches to nonviolence.

Continue reading “Book Review – Anarchy and Apocalypse” →

This Just In . . .

Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair (really?) debated the role of religion in society in Toronto last night . . . this morning’s headlines,

Hitchens apparent winner in religion debate

Preliminary poll results show Hitchens winner of religion debate with Tony Blair
I have to say this blew a few gaskets over my morning coffee.  Yes let’s set the question of whether religion is divisive and destructive in the context of simplistic oppositions requiring the perception of a single winner . . . perfect.

Romans 13 – An Agambenian Reading

Romans 13 has long been a thorn in my Anabaptist side.  Yoder of course went a long way in clarifying the distinction between being subject to those in authority and actually obeying those in authority.  That reading however still left me with many unanswered questions as to what Paul is calling the church towards.  In preparation for the Romans readings of this season of Advent I reread Giorgio Agamben’s The Time that Remains.  In this reading the notion of messianic time functioning as “the time of bringing time to an end” became more clear and relevant as I was reading through Romans alongside his work.  I interpret the structure of the world’s authority as functioning as a sort of limit to the mode in which humanity lives apart from the Spirit.  As such the kingdom of the world is and will be coming to an end.  This becomes significant for reading Romans 13.  What struck me was the simple Greek structure of verse 7
ἀπόδοτε πᾶσιν τὰς ὀφειλάς,
τῷ τὸν φόρον τὸν φόρον,
τῷ τὸ τέλος τὸ τέλος,
τῷ τὸν φόβον τὸν φόβον,
τῷ τὴν τιμὴν τὴν τιμήν.
Pay back every debt
for tax, tax
for revenue, revenue
for fear, fear
for respect, respect
Then Paul adds significantly in verse 8,
Μηδενὶ μηδὲν ὀφείλετε
Be in indebted to no one for anything (I can’t comment on the double-negative in Greek here; I suspect it is common)
The process of relating to earthly authorities is that of closing down their economy, of divesting yourself of its structure (which is different than escaping it).  The work then is not of revolt (necessarily) which is why this passage can be confused for quietism but rather that of rendering it inoperative an important Pauline term that Agamben stresses.  I read this in light of Kierkegaard’s commentary on Paul’s And having overcome all, to stand.  Much of our effort exists directly in relationship to opposition.  Opposition in many cases is absolutely necessary for the existence of our work.  I need the machine to rage against it.  This is a reductionist characterization to be sure but I can’t help think of how many movements will simply fall down when the powers are removed from their pushing.  In any even I take Paul to be doing something different than direct revolt.  This does not necessarily clarify what we should then do with this reading but it demands that we not acquiesce to earthly authority but that we are continually in the active process of liberating ourselves and others from indebtedness.
To the extent that you are invested in this world whether tax, debt, fear or honour pay it back in kind so that all that remains in practice is the opening of love and not the foreclosure of debt.  The work of this ‘flesh’ will continually be present in a humanly inescapable manner (who will rescue me from this body of death).  We become though tools of light which cut through and create a division within the divisions of this world that constantly undermine and deactivate them.  This is all exegetical rhetoric at this point.  I have no idea what sort of tool I will function as what it demands though is that no position within world renders spiritual impossible.  No system is dominant that it can, by its force, reclaim the new creation of the Messiah.  This problematizes the typical leftist project as I would see it which continually stresses system as that which binds and liberates (though it does that at a certain level).  I read this text and larger Pauline theology (in light of Agamben) as one which always supposes the freedom of the individual so that she might work within the place of her calling (and in communion with the saints) dividing the divisions and use this time for bringing time to an end.

Memorial Friday; Or, Black Friday of Death

In remembrance of the young man trampled to death opening the doors to a Wal-Mart during Black Friday 2008.

Listen to the crazy rhetoric of this piece.  There are a tonne of soundbites worth dissecting.  Look at the repetitious shots of the ‘gang’ of young black men standing around outside by the police cruiser.

Police were knocked over trying to give CPR to the man

The store reopened for shopping by noon

The cause of death was apparently ‘unclear’ at that point