the church and postmodern culture: conversation

From the Archives: A Roundtable on Radical Orthodoxy and the Church

2008-07-11T09:53:33-05:00

In September 2003 we hosted a conference at Calvin College on “Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition” which brought together representatives from both streams of thought (and some with feet in both). A number of the papers were later collected and published as Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition: Creation, Covenant, and Participation, eds. James K.A. Smith and James H. Olthuis (Baker Academic, 2005). However, one piece of the conference that wasn’t reproduced in the book was a roundtable discussion about how (or whether!) RO had anything to say to the lived worship and discipleship of the church. I recently bumped into a transcript of the conversation in my files and thought it might be of interest to post it here at www.churchandpomo.org. This was not a collection of “emergent” folks, but rather some participants and local folks who were pastors, former pastors, or trained pastors for ministries in churches mainly connected to the “magisterial” Reformation. As such, it might feel a bit insider-ish to those not familiar with the Reformed tradition; but then again, that was the ecclesial focus of the conference. (One disappointment of the conference was that Robert Webber was unable to attend because of illness. Webber had interesting things to say about both Radical Orthodoxy and the emerging church in his book The Younger Evangelicals. Michael Horton very kindly and capably pinch-hit in Webber’s place.)
In the conversation you’ll hear critical reflections on what Radical Orthodoxy could (or should) have to say about the church. You’ll also hear Graham Ward’s demythologizing of the label “Radical Orthodoxy” and his articulation of a “big tent” sensibility in league with others. And more. All in all, an interesting snippet that perhaps makes some contribution to bringing these matters back to earth, as it were.
My thanks to Jerry Stutzman for transcribing the conversation, and Ryan Weberling for doing a final editorial clean-up.

Download the transcript as a pdf file.

GloboChrist has arrived!

2008-07-10T14:21:02-05:00

Baker Academic has delivered the third book in the Church and Postmodern Culture series entitled GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn, by Carl Raschke. As you can see above, my copy just arrived in the mail yesterday. You should be able to order your copy now from Baker Academic at a discount. Even though Baker's page says that it is available in August, they have assured me that this can be ordered right now from their website. To whet your appetite, an excerpt may be read here.

Beginning on August 18th, engagements with this book will begin on this blog. The following is the schedule of engagements:

August 18th: Introduction
August 25th: Ch. 1 & 2 - Andrew Jones
September 1st: Ch. 3 & 4 - Amos Yong
September 8th: Ch. 5 & 6 - Jamie Gates
September 15th: Ch. 7 - Deirdre Brower-Latz

We would love for you to read along with us.

Ecclesia as res publica

2008-07-07T00:16:00-05:00

My previous posting was on 'The loss of church as public', and I want to continue some thoughts in that vein in this post, of the ontological priority of ecclesiology.

For the autopoietic self, there does seem to be nothing that is prior to that ‘self’. No organisation or institution provides giveness to human identity except that which the self determines and orders within that organisation. In other words, with regard to the Church as an organisation and institution, there is no possessive plural pronoun and adjective. The ‘our’ of institution and the plural ‘ours’ of identity and being are missing. With popular modern missiologists increasingly asserting that ecclesiology is the most flexible of doctrines [1], there is nothing given to ecclesiology except that which we create for it.

And within that I fear that Christianity has not only accommodated itself to the privatisation of religion (within secularism and consumerism) but in doing so has also lost something inherent to its very nature and purpose. Any ecclesiology that does not seek to address this is destined to remain unable to establish and form Christian identity.

On my recent reading of Hütter[2] and O’Donovan[3], I am beginning to wonder whether there is in fact some giveness to ecclesiology, whether the flexible ecclesiologies of emerging culture have more to do with the historicism and voluntarism that reduces organisations to cultural artefacts – not just in terms of some existential ontological priority, but also in terms of performative actions and practices.

Perhaps the most audacious claim of Christianity in the modern world might be to suggest that human nature and the purpose of that life are not self-creating and self-authenticating but find their rule, organisation and fulfilment in the theological anthropology of Jesus Christ. Subsequent to this, the most controversial claim to place amidst current missiologies might then be the suggestion that ecclesiology is not a free-for-all, that, in order to counter the endless self-creation of the modern agent, we must rediscover the giveness of ecclesiology from a theological and traditioned reading of Church history with regard to ecclesiology. And that to do so is inherent in the very nature of Christianity itself.

Yet in trying to get at and to that ‘giveness’, I want to assert that no ‘single institutional form or set of relations can claim finality of truthful expression of God’s order’[4], but there is a distinctiveness beyond how the Church appears and what it does that ‘lies in how God is present to and within the Church’.

(I am hoping to discover this 'giveness', via some the main discourses of the Christian tradition of Catholic (social teaching), Anglican (Radical Orthodoxy) and the Anabaptists (Hauerwas et al)).

Bretherton in a critique of O’Donovan’s ecclesiology suggests that there is something to be made of the space between resurrection and ascension (this gap in events is something O’Donovan references in Resurrection and Moral Order). Bretherton posits this space as the eschatological tension central to the establishment of the Church and the nature of its specifity.

To paraphrase Bretherton, we might ask whether there are practices that structure the relationship between Christians and others in public in such a way as to recapitulate the ascension and Pentecost moments of the Christ event.

This would co-inhere with my previous suggestions of how space forms the initial experience of humanity in Christ’s redemption before further experience in the eschaton. This Christ-event space might give rise to an eschatological understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit in the creation of concrete missional spaces, the ‘space–time nexus’ that forms the locus of the public of the Holy Spirit, as Hütter describes.

I think this possibility offers some exciting avenues for ecclesiological exploration.

Jason Clark

----------------
[1] For example see, Frost, Michael, and Alan Hirsch. The Shaping of Things to Come : Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003.

[2] Hütter, Reinhard. Suffering Divine Things : Theology as Church Practice. Grand Rapids, Mich. ; Cambridge: W.B. Eerdmans, 2000.

[3] O'Donovan, Oliver. Resurrection and Moral Order : An Outline for Evangelical Ethics. 2nd ed. ed. Leicester: Apollas, 1994.

[4] Bretherton, Luke. "A Proposal for How Christians and Non-Christians Should Relate to Each Other with Regards to Ethical Disputes in Light of Alasdair Macintyre, Germain Grisez and Oliver O'donovan's Work." Kings College London, 2001.

St. Paul, Philosophy, and Politics

2008-06-30T11:04:40-05:00

Outside of the little fact that I lost my conference folder containing all my notes, Saint Paul's Journeys into Philosophy (Vancouver, British Colombia: June 4-6) was a wonderful gathering of people and ideas. It had a perfect balance between philosophical theologians and biblical scholars (reflected both in the plenaries and conference attendees), each interacting with recent philosophical appropriations of Pauline thought.

Of the four plenaries session, two were by theologians (Paul Griffiths and Travis Kroeker) and two by biblical scholarsh (J. Louis Martyn and Steven Fowl). Martyn's began the conference by arguing that Paul was asserting the way of Christ in salvation against the "2-ways" of ancient moral theory (the way of Live and the way of Death). Of all the papers, Lou Martyn's most sought to polarize theology against philosophy. Travis Kroeker explored 'messianic becoming' in light of the thought of Jacob Taube. Steven Fowl discussed Alain Badiou's 'indifference to difference' and a truly Pauline universalism. Finally, Paul Griffiths discussed Giorgio Agamben and the politics of messianic quietism. Outside of Martyn's paper, the conference on the whole was devoid of a polemic between theology and philosophy, and even more refreshingly it didn't get bogged down in methodological discussions of how one might relation theology and philosophy. All the papers (not just the plenaries) assumed a relation and noted it consequences.

Three persistent questions arose through the discussion during and after the presentations:

1) How does metaphysics and theology relate? Or, more to the point, how does eschatology and ontology relate? Often through the conference, especially in regard to Agamben, the 'messianic of becoming' would be situated against the 'world of being' pitting eschatology against ontology. But Paul Griffiths kept alerting us to the dangers of inscribing theology within the discourse of meontology in an attempt to overcome onto-theology. Griffiths kept asking if theology really should be opposed to ontology. Or, in other words, must we agree with Badiou that Paul is an anti-philosopher?

2) Relatedly, what is the priority of relation between theology and philosophy? Does one give the coordinates for understanding the other? Are they mutually interdependent? Some argued for the absolute priority of theology over philosophy, while others asserted that often atheist philosophers are the best Christian theologians. Often this question is answered according the how one answers the previous question.

3) Lastly, it became quite apparent that while interesting and illuminating, most often the exegesis Badiou/Zizek/Agamben/Taubes in relation to Paul is extremely incomplete, tending toward eisegesis. But just as, say, Badiou's interpretation of Paul is incomplete in his St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, so too is an interpretation of Badiou incomplete when it is only through this one book. And in fact, answering the challenges to Christian theology as posed in this book would miss the much more important critiques stemming from the corpus of his work.

Be that as it may, the piecemeal engagements like those at the conference, are still fruitful and productive because understanding and critique are always provisional affairs anyway, continually pressing in deeper and farther. Therefore it is my hope that such engagements will continue along these fronts.

Lastly...
to conclude, I would like to make one final reflection (switching from the academy to the church): One week after this conference, a young congregant of ours overdosed on meth (who was also my next door neighbor). In light of such a tragedy I found myself wondering if all this going to conferences, writing papers, hoping to be published isn't all just vanity. And in light of a looming global food crisis, it feels like all this really is just "academic". Isn't his all just a waste of time? (and I think I can hear my dad with a hardy 'Amen')

But it's not. These questions deal with how we as a church live and respond to death and suffering, both personally, corporately, politically. The tensions between philosophy and theology are the sames tensions between lived reality and the life of faith. It concerns how we affirm the salvation in Christ even amid a fatal relapse into meth addiction. It concerns how do we proclaim "Come Lord Jesus" in all its apocalyptic urgency while also affirming that "This is my Father's world" . It concerns how we praise the God who created the fields which gives us bountiful harvest year after year, even while that same food is horded and wasted while so many hunger and die? These are not merely spiritual questions, but also political questions, philosophical questions, and theological questions.

At the end of it, Paul might not be a philosopher, but he was certainly involved with politics. And if Agamben, Badiou, and Zizek (along with others) can help us remember and see that Paul and politics belong together, then pastorally we ought engage their thought.

Why being against metaphysics is so cool-a schoolyard explanation-

2008-06-25T23:36:00-05:00

It seems these days that all the cool kids are against metaphysics and onto-otheology, and all that boring stuff. Today it is hip to talk about the betrayal of faith, heretical orthodoxy, and the me-ontology of the Cross.

Why is this?

Well, perhaps we could look to Heidegger or Freud and all those other folks who prepared the way for the p_stmodern. But I suggest that it began earlier than our first reading of Being and Time (or what is Being and Nothingness, or Being and Event). It begins before our first introduction to teenage angst and grunge music (oh how I loved the '90s!).

Yes, our aversion to metaphysics coincides with our first glimmers of social pressure, our first awkward steps of independence, our first riotous disputes over games that didn't exist until we made them up (yes we are all social constructivists). I'm talking nothing else but the schoolyard education into overcoming metaphysics.

Here are my top five reasons for why metaphysics is not cool:
5) Because the cool kids always talked back to the teachers , and are always very witty (showing that we all desire to betray the master discourse).

4) Because all the cool stuff is outside the classroom, i.e. the playground (showing that the play of the signifier escapes the ground of the signified).

3) Because raising your hand to answer a question is a phallic will-to-power encouraged by teachers (showing that 'answering' is always coercion while questioning is freedom).

2) Because all the little boys chase the little girls around the playground, but don't know why they do it (showing that flows of desire shape reality).

1) Lastly, because it is always more fun to say "Is not!" right after "Is too!" during a schoolyard argument (showing that we all intuitively know that khora, the 'is not' of reality, precedes all existences).

Perhaps I'm still dealing with pre-pubescent insecurities...?

(what are other schoolyard reasons?)

"If I go there will be trouble / An' if I stay it will be double"

2008-06-23T18:47:43-05:00

Admittedly, this is an odd platform for this question (perhaps not?), but with some trepidation I ask: should I go to my parents' church on July 6th?

Three years ago when I was visiting my hometown with my girlfriend (we're now married), the weekend closest to the 4th of July was extremely traumatic for me. I usually attend my parents' church when I am in town. During most of my teenage years, this is the non-denominational church I called 'home'. I never thought we were out of sorts when I was there at the time, but after attending 4 years of college, after the events of 9/11, after a war in Iraq had begun (again), and after being recently steeped in the church-as-politics vision as informed by my pastor via Hauerwas, MacIntyre, Lohfink, et. al. -- my parents' church's activities on "4th of July weekend" suddenly became jarringly pagan to me. I could go on and on in detail about the church 'service' that unfolded, but suffice it to say, I had never seen a bigger display of civil religion in my entire life, and with every next scene in the 'production', I became more and more horrified as the American flag and conservative republican politics were touted as the savior of not only the world, but were clearly heralded above the Triune God at every turn.

Then, after the 'service', the pastor--who had taken part in the production and who was clearly pumped on nationalistic adrenaline--walked up to me and my family to greet me and asked me what I thought about the display. All I could muster was, "uhh... that was interesting...", to which he replied, "It sure was!" The conversation didn't go beyond this, nor did the conversation really go anywhere with my parents in my attempts to persuade them that the service was an affront to the Gospel. They were offended that I did not rise during the national anthem nor pledge allegiance to the American flag, intimating that I was disgracing the memory of my recently deceased grandfather who flew bombers in World War II.

For about three months after this weekend, I constantly mulled over writing the pastor a letter informing him of what I really thought about the patriotic service. To this day, I have never spoken any further with this pastor nor my parents about this weekend. Thankfully, my parents and I get along wonderfully in most other areas of life. However, every 4th of July I become apprehensive even though I do not always visit my hometown during that time of year. I also become apprehensive because I know just how much the spirit of my parents' church is shared across many other congregations in the U.S. This phenomenon is clearly not unique.

Two weekends from now marks the Sunday upon which my parents' church will have their annual 4th of July service, and as it turns out, I will be in town again (for other reasons) on that Sunday. I seriously have no idea what I should do. If I opt out of going, I will offend them, but if I attend, I will offend them by not participating whatsoever in the service; either way, my actions will come as an offense to them.

For obvious reasons, this is an extremely touchy subject. I am open to any suggestions in love, and would prefer it if the comments did not turn into a venting session for all the different things witnessed in patriotic churches across America, as if our own brothers and sisters in Christ were somehow a circus act and actually any different than us (speck, meet plank, so to speak). Please, no dismissiveness. Perhaps you have similar experiences where these events have turned into constructive opportunities for conversation and understanding? If so, please share. I just am still a bit too traumatized from that experience that I really don't know where to begin and what to do.

Charles Taylor, Pluralism, and the Postmodern Condition

2008-06-16T15:46:14-05:00

One of the "canonical" books connected with postmodernism was Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. The "report" was funded by the forward-thinking government of the province of Quebec in the late 1970s. Thirty years later, the PQ government has once again funded the sort of sophisticated, philosophical study that it's hard to imagine any state government ever doing. Co-chaired by Charles Taylor and Gerard Bouchard, the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences has now issued its report, with easy access to an abridged pdf version of the report. It makes for interesting reading as a new analysis of our "postmodern condition," particularly the challenges of cultural pluralism and how a "secular" society can absorb cultural difference, particularly religious difference (as usual, it's hard not to recognize that Islam is a significant impetus for the commission's mandate).

I've not yet had a chance to properly digest even the abridged version of their report, but on a first skim I was struck that the proposals advocated a kind of "secularity" that felt more like France's policy of laïcité. Given Taylor's nuanced account of the secular in A Secular Age, I would have expected some less, well, "Enlightenment-esque." But I need to give it more careful attention. I think the report would make for interesting small group discussion.

On a related note, Church and Postmodern Culture readers will want to check out Ron Kuipers' series of interviews with Charles Taylor, appearing in The Other Journal.

A Gadamarian Critique of Hirsch’s Meaning/Significance Distinction, by Cynthia R. Nielsen

2008-06-09T17:02:10-05:00

Part I:

Is interpretation primarily about a relation between the reader and the subjective intentions of the author? Doesn’t the whole hermeneutical method that E.D. Hirsch espouses in his book, Validity in Interpretation, land us right back into the egocentric predicament, as the sole purpose becomes re-producing the original subjective meaning of the author? According to Hans-George Gadamer, Hirsch’s method misses the essential dialogical character of interpretation. (The very fact that he proffers a “method” seems to harmonize more with modern rather than premodern or postmodern hermeneutical practices). The text for Hirsch becomes an object of scientific investigation rather than an occasion for the interpreter to be changed by the subject matter of the text through locating its question and then being himself/herself questioned by the subject matter of the text. As Gadamer says, “the real event of understanding…goes continually beyond what can be brought to the understanding of the other person’s words by methodological effort and critical self-control. It is true of every conversation that through it something different has come to be” (“Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem,” p. 58).

In addition to his focus on the dialogical character of a text (emphasizing the text’s flexibility or dynamism, yet still affirming the text’s identity), Gadamer develops what he calls a “phenomenology of the game” to highlight the inadequacy of a theory of understanding that focuses solely and exclusively on the subjectivity of the author or the interpreter.[1] In his editorial introduction to Gadamer’s Philosophical Heremeneutics, David Linge describes how, in the phenomenon of play, the player, so to speak, “loses himself” in the game—he or she is “absorbed into the back-and-forth movement of the game, that is, into the definable procedure and rules of the game.”[2] The game is not understood as an “action of subjectivity,” but rather as a “release from subjectivity.” As Linge explains, “what is essential to the phenomenon of play is not so much the particular goal it involves but the dynamic back-and-forth movement in which the players are caught up—the movement that itself specifies how the goal will be reached. Thus the game has its own place or space (its Spielraum), and its movement and aims are cut off from the direct involvement in the world stretching beyond it.”[3]

The structures that Gadamer finds in the phenomenology of play are then put in service of Gadamer’s attempt to develop an alternative theory of understanding—one that neither confines the meaning of the text solely to the subjective intention of the author, nor construes the project of understanding as merely an attempt to re-produce the original intention of the author. As Linge points out, the customary authorial intention hermeneutical approach is fashioned in the image of the methodology of modern science. “Just as scientific experiments can be repeated exactly any number of times under the same conditions and mathematical problems have but one answer, so the author’s intention constitutes a kind of fact, a ‘meaning-in-itself,’ which is repeated by the correct interpretation.”[4]

Part II:

As we highlighted in the previous post, E.D. Hirsch of course was the great proponent of authorial intention, as well as the meaning/significance distinction. According to Hirsch, a given text has one and only one meaning, yet the significance of the text pro nobis may and indeed does vary. Highlighting the problem with Hirsch’s theory, Linge states,

The basic difficulty with this theory is that it subjectifies both meaning and understanding, thus rendering unintelligible the development of tradition that transmits the text or art work to us and influence our reception of it in the present.[5]

To restrict the meaning of the text to the mens auctoris is to view understanding as a “transaction between the creative consciousness of the author and the purely reproductive consciousness of the interpreter.”[6] According to Hirsch’s theory the fact that we have competing interpretations over time of the meaning very same text—not the significance of the text for us—simply means that either all the interpretations are wrong or one interpreter has it right and all others have missed the mark. This approach does not seem to do justice to the phenomenon of interpretation, and it likewise “involves a hubris regarding our own reality: it denies the role of our own hermeneutical situation and thus exhibits a neglect of the reflexive dimension of understanding that Gadamer has show to be operative in understanding.”[7]

Rather than restrict the meaning of a text to the intention of the author, Gadamer speaks of the text as having an “excess of meaning” that surpasses authorial intention and upon which tradition builds. Understanding for Gadamer involves a fusion of horizons—the horizons of the interpreter (and his/her tradition) and the text. Thus, understanding is never merely re-productive but is always productive. In Gadamer’s approach to hermeneutics, the meaning of the text is understood as “both eliciting and including itself in the varying interpretations through which it is transmitted.”[8] Here Gadamer’s phenomenology of the game informs his hermeneutics. Linge again provides a helpful explanation,

The idea of a self-presenting reality overcomes the isolation of the text as an object over against its interpretations. Neither the historically transmitted text nor the work of art can be regarded as solely dependent on its creator or on its present performer or interpreter, so that by reference to one of these we might get a definitive perception of it “in itself.” Like the game, the text or art work lives in its presentations. They are not alien or secondary to it but are its very being, as possibilities that flow from it and are included in it as facets of its own disclosure. The variety of performances or interpretations are not simply subjective variations of a meaning locked in subjectivity, but belong instead to the ontological possibility of the work.[9]

Gadamer, in stark contrast with Hirsch, does not offer a single methodological procedure of hermeneutics. Rather, for Gadamer, hermeneutics and understanding involve a dialogical engagement which gives rise to the possibility of a diverse manifold of meanings (without destroying identity), as the present is brought into conversation with the past.

[1] David E. Linge (ed.), Hans-George Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977) p. xxii.

[2] Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. xxiii.

[3] Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. xxiii

[4] Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. xxiv.

[5] Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. xxiv.

[6] Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. xxiv.

[7] Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. xxv.

[8] Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. xxv.

[9] Philosophical Hermeneutics, pp. xxv-xxvi.

Geuss on Rorty: Pragmatism and (as?) Americanism

2008-05-14T05:59:09-05:00

I'm a sucker for academic memoirs and scholarly recollections that give peeks into the lives and friendships of scholars, particularly when they inhabit rather places like Princeton (an idyllic little island that might as well be a million miles from Trenton). But even those without a soft spot for this genre will find Raymond Geuss's personal recollections of Rorty at Princeton a delightful read: a witty, entertaining, and critically respectful take on Rorty, both the man and his pragmatism. It includes some spirited disagreement about Gadamer, the history of philosophy, and the prospects of pragmatism.

I have long thought that pragmatism is under-appreciated in philosophical circles, as well as in circles concerned with "postmodernism" and theology. Indeed, I've been trying to get a leading voice to write a book for the Church and Postmodern Culture series that would articulate a 'postmodern pragmatist' take on the church's mission (Jeff Stout turned me down!). However, though I have a deep appreciation for pragmatism, and a sense that it has something important to contribute to the conversation, I've always had a nagging worry that it is not only a distinctly American product, it might be a distinctly Americanist project. (I've hinted, for instance, about such concerns with respect to the closing section of Stout's Democracy and Tradition--though I need to take the time to articulate this in a more scholarly context.)

So I was doubly intrigued when, in the middle of his recollections, Geuss makes this incisive observation:

Achieving Our Country, though, represented a step too far for me. The very idea that the United States was “special” has always seemed to me patently absurd, and the idea that in its present, any of its past, or any of its likely future configurations it was in any way exemplary, a form of gross narcissistic self-deception which was not transformed into something laudable by virtue of being embedded in a highly sophisticated theory which purported to show that ethnocentrism was in a philosophically deep sense unavoidable. I remain very grateful to my Catholic upbringing and education for giving me relative immunity to nationalism. In the 1950s, the nuns who taught me from age five to twelve were virtually all Irish or Irish-American with sentimental attachment to certain elements of Celtic folklore, but they made sure to inculcate into us that the only serious human society was the Church which was an explicitly international organization. The mass, in the international language, Latin, was the same everywhere; the religious orders were international. This absence of national limitation was something very much to be cherished. “Catholica” in the phrase “[credo in] unam, sanctam, catholicam, et apostolicam ecclesiam” should, we were told, be written with a lower-case, not an upper-case, initial because it was not in the first instance part of the proper name of the church, but an adjective meaning “universal,” and this universality was one of the most important “marks of the true Church.” The Head of the Church, to be sure, and Vicar of Christ on earth, was in fact (at that time) always an Italian, but that was for contingent and insignificant reasons. The reason most commonly cited by these nuns was that, as Bishop of Rome, the Pope had to live in the “Eternal City,” but only an Italian could stand to live in Rome: it was hot, noisy, and overcrowded, and the people there ate spaghetti for dinner everyday rather than proper food, i.e., potatoes, so it would be too great a sacrifice to expect someone who had not grown up in Italy to tolerate life there. I clearly remember being unconvinced by this argument, thinking it set inappropriately low standards of self-sacrifice for the higher clergy; a genuinely saintly character should be able to put up even with pasta for lunch and dinner every day.

For Geuss, this Catholic universality was just a sort of antidote to nationalism; that is, it inoculated him to nationalism without commiting him to a distinctly Catholic transnationalism. But it still raises a tension that those who do confess "one holy, catholic, apostolic church" need to take seriously.

Zizek, and the danger of Obama for the American church

2008-05-12T09:51:38-05:00

by David Fitch

One piece of Slavoj Zizek’s political theory in his foundational book The Sublime Object is his notion of “ideological cynicism.” Subjects of the first world, Zizek says, are too smart to become duped by the political ideologies of Western states. We know it’s all just more political spin. Instead, ideology for Zizek, takes on a different form in the so-called “first world.” Here, we are offered ideologies to appease us, to make us feel better about ourselves, so that those in privilege can keep on conserving what it is they really desire. So now, we look at the political ideologies spinning across the political process, and instead of politically observing “they do not know it, but they are doing it,” we observe “they know it, but they are doing it anyway.” In essence, we listen to all the new political speeches and new political options given the electorate and we know nothing will really change. Yet we participate in it anyway, because in essence subconsciously this is what we really want: we wish to protect our own specific pieces of the economic social pie yet feel good about doing it (there’s the classic Freudian split in the subjective consciousness). Zizek suggests that political ideology serves a cynical function now, giving us a Big Other to believe in, making us feel better about ourselves (morally), all the while we hope for keeping the status quo in place protecting our own personal pieces of the pie.

When it comes to Christians of my evangelical tradition, I would suggest Zizek’s “ideological cynicism” could work another way. We participate in National politics, its political ideologies of a more just/moral society, even though we deeply suspect the corporate national machine insures nothing will change. We do this because it is much harder to think of the church itself as a legitimate social political force for God’s justice in the world. Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority did this for the evangelicals in the 80’s. He allowed us to think we were working for a better society thereby granting us a reprieve from examining our own churches’ life for moral vigor. Today, perhaps it is the same, as many of us jump onto the Obama bandwagon. It is simply a lot less work to support Barak Obama for president than it is to lead our churches into being living communities of righteousness, justice and God’s Mission in the world.

I know Zizek might appear too skeptical for most of us. And there is always the cry “why can we not do both - vote for Obama and be missional communities for justice in our neighborhoods.” Yet I think the question is worth considering: “Are we supporting Obama because it’s easier than being God’s justice in the world ourselves?”

Senator Obama is putting out a pleasing message of “Change.” “I’m asking you to believe in Change,” “the Audacity of Hope,” and “A Unified America.” Yet Zizek would call these ideas “signifiers without the signified.” Words that in the end no one knows what they mean or refer to. Zizek would say it is these “words” which allow us to consent to what we know is a lie so that we can avoid the Real: that true justice of God demands fundamentally the way we live in relation to each other and the world. I fear these “words” take the place of pres. Bush’s words “Freedom” and “No child left behind,” words that few knew what they actually meant but morphed into a politics of multinational corporate politics the horror of which is hard to believe 8 years later. In a Zizekian way, I have often asked, did we consent to all this (vote for George Bush) as evangelical Christians 8 years ago (who by and large elected him) in order to assuage ourselves that we (through our country’s national politics) are contributing to a better world all the while staying comfortable within our protected enclaves.

Obama has shown signs of not caving in to the ideological production machine. He has dared come close to making particularist commitments. He did not shrink back from his infamous “they cling to guns or religion” guffaw. He did not pander to the production of ideology (concerning gas prices) by proposing an end to the gas tax as Hillary did. Yet when it came time most recently to defend his pastor, Rev Jeremiah Wright, Obama backed off (after defending him other times). Wright’s particularist ethnic claims evidently came too close to puncturing the dominant ideology of race relations that allows us all to keep things going as they already are. Let me explain. In Detroit, on Apr 27, Wright made statements about differences among ethnic groupings in America. He detailed how the black culture is “different” but not “deficient.” He was continuing along his previous line of thought describing how American culture, politics and justice is really a white man’s system. It is was the kind of accusation which exposed the power structures of the existing system of which Barak seeks to become president of. In so doing, Wright came too close to upsetting the ideology which enables us all to be comfortable with the status quo concerning race relations in America. I know Wright has been extreme. I know he has been incendiary. He has been inopportune and self aggrandizing. Nonetheless, isn’t his line of reasoning the very stuff of which the ideology of American democracy cannot handle for the reasons Zizek cites above? So Obama has to publicly disavow Wright. It is an irruption of the Real for those of us who think justice can somehow emerge from the current structures and signification systems of the American State. It’s a wake up call to the fact that Obama must cover over the realities of exclusion that occur within America’s system towards black culture in order to persist in the illusion of “Change” and “Belief” that Obama is selling. Wright is too dangerous because he reveals that anyone who wishes to be insistent on his or her particular commitments culturally and religiously (after all Wright says he is “running for Jesus”) cannot fit in to the American system of justice.

I must confess my own proclivity is to vote for Obama this fall. Yet Zizek helps us see that if we seek a revolution of justice, we need counter movements that can reveal the lack in the System. To me this points to the church. And so I continue to want to press for the church to be the primary instrument of true justice in the world. The church must be FIRST as the initiator for social justice, from which we can then push for governmental cooperation. I am concerned that the new energy for justice on the local level by emerging and missional church movements might be dissipated by the Obama hope. I have always been concerned about the marginal status given the church as the foundational center for justice in society by my various spokesmen/women/friends of the Emerging Church. I know many fear fundamentalist sectarianism. I fear the democratic capitalist Symbolic Order shall subsume us all.. More and more however, people like Jim Wallis are seeing the insights of a tempered vision of what is possible in national politics (see The Great Awakening). More and more, people understand a new possibility for a Hauerwasian radical politics (see Shane Claiborne and his Jesus For President campaign). SO GO AHEAD AND BY ALL MEANS VOTE FOR OBAMA, but do not allow false ideology to sap our energy or distract us from the task of being God’s people, his embodied Kingdom in submission to His Lordship, birthing forth His justice made possible in His death and resurrection until He comes.

What do you think? Is there a work of “ideological cynicism” at work in Christians supporting Obama? Is the Obama bandwagon a positive or a negative (or neutral) for the church’s role in bringing justice to the nations? Is energy by Christians spent on Obama politics misguided, too hopeful, and misdirected? Is it too easy to just say “you should be doing both, voting for Obama and working for social justice in your local church”?

Conference: St. Paul's Journeys Into Philosophy

2008-05-11T17:44:54-05:00

An International Conference

June 4-6, 2008

Vancouver School of Theology and Carey Theological College
at the University of British Columbia
Vancouver, British Columbia

Join us for a conference which explores the critical appropriations of Saint Paul by modern and contemporary Continental philosophers, including Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Jacob Taubes, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek, and others. An international group of philosophers, theologians, biblical scholars and literary theorists will present papers on a wide range of themes arising from this recent philosophical appropriation of Saint Paul. Plenary speakers include Stephen Fowl, Paul Griffiths, Travis Kroeker and J. Louis Martyn. There will also be presentations by Creston Davis, Neil Elliott, Paul Gooch, Douglas Harink, Chris Huebner, Mark Reasoner, Jeffrey Robbins, Gordon Zerbe, Jens Zimmerman and others (like our own Geoff Holsclaw!).

For conference, travel and accommodations information, including speakers, abstracts,
schedules, and registration forms visit our webpage at:

http://www.kingsu.ca/saintpaul/

Theological Networks

2008-05-05T10:09:42-05:00

Global society has shown us that it is not connected through hierarchical relations. Instead, it is connected through networks and associations that have fluidity. We can see this in financial trading as the value of the US dollar changes depending on its valuation relative to other currencies. There is no external standard by which their values are set. The system of trade is supported and maintained by its infinite regress of reference and the production of desire for it. To give a specific example, the value of the US dollar is maintained because it is infinitely self-referential (a sign is always a sign of a sign) and desire for its continued existence is produced by intersecting networks (such as the nationalist identity of the US). How does this situation translate into theology and the church?

Theology is always a network; more precisely it is a network of many theological concepts. In this manner, a particular theology is seen as a name given to a particular configuration of these concepts. However, this network is in motion; the network always changes. Even the most systematic theology changes over time. This phenomenon is common in computer networks: Systems dislocate and reorganize: link. This is the same effect in the theological network where concepts move to have the optimal connection. For instance, Luther's reformation reconfigured theology so that the concept of salvation was detached from any kind of deed—sola fide!

The theologians of the future will interact with this model of networks and interact within networks. This change has been seen decades ago in the abstract writings of thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari (e.g. rhizomic structures vs. arboreal structures), Baudrillard (“The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control”, Simulacra, 2), and others. The other response to networks is that of fundamentalism: those that absolutize difference so that their particular brands of theology can remain constant over time. The future of Christianity lies in its ability to engage networks and let the transcendent God interact with humanity immanent. This is the radical (re)turn to the Gospel.

ICS Summer School with Caputo and Olthuis: "The Weakness of God"

2008-04-29T17:45:03-05:00

ICS Summer School, 2008

The Weakness of God: John D. Caputo

Dr. James Olthuis and Dr. J.D. Caputo
Dates: July 7 - 18

This seminar will examine the emerging deconstructive theologizing of John D. Caputo, a leading American Catholic postmodern philosopher. Beginning with his effort to construct a radical hermeneutics, moving through his treatment of the prayers and tears of Jacques Derrida, the seminar will conclude by focusing on Caputo's radical theology of the weakness of God, forgiveness and faith.
Video: Dr. Olthuis discusses this course. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeYrXcwu7C4

Dr. John D. Caputo, PhD (Bryn Mawr) is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Humanities at Syracuse University. He is also David R. Cook Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Villanova University where he taught from 1968 until 2004. Dr. Caputo’s newest books are What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (Baker, 2007); The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, (Indiana University Press, 2006), winner of the 2007 AAR Book Award, “Constructive-Reflective Studies,” and Philosophy and Theology (Abingdon, 2006). He has recently edited Transcendence and Beyond (Indiana, 2007), Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession, co-edited with Michael Scanlon (Indiana U. P., 2005). Other recent publications include On Religion (Routledge, 2001), More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are (Indiana, 2000), The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Indiana U.P., 1997), Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Fordham U.P., 1997).

Dr. James H. Olthuis, PhD (Vrije Universiteit) is professor emeritus of philosophical theology at the Institute for Christian Studies where he has taught since 1968.Among his publications are The Beautiful Risk (Zondervan, 2001; Wipf and Stock, 2006), Keeping Our Troth (Harper & Row, 1986), and I Pledge You My Troth (1976). Dr. Olthuis has also edited Religion With/Out Religion (Routledge, 2002), Towards an Ethics of Community (Wilfrid Laurier, 2000), and Knowing Other-wise (Fordham U.P., 1997). He is a psychotherapist in private practice and a grandfather who rollerblades to the office.

Full details available at: http://www.icscanada.edu/students/summer_school.shtml

Incarnational "Ecclesiology" - From Third Space to Smooth Space

2008-04-29T13:51:18-05:00

Much of the conversation in this location concerns theology and ecclesiology. By the latter I have in mind not the doctrine, but the theory of the church. Increasingly the theory of the church has outstripped the ensemble of faith-articulations that we know as the "theological" enterprise. A recent post by Jason Clark on this blog called for a revival of ecclesiology and offered the prospect of a "third space" as an alternative to the familiar private and public spaces that serve as the axis of tension in the postmodern world. Clark also makes the telling point (in a general manner of speaking) that so much of today’s “conversation” about the church, including what is “emerging” or “emergent”, or old-style “modern” versus revolutionary “postmodern”, has grown threadbare because it amounts to little more than an entropic process of making ever more rarefied distinctions within this specific axis of tension and articulation.

The design of this axis, which generates endless cultural and intellectual styles of signification, arises from the clash between Medieval corporatism and Lutheran cum Cartesian subjectivism at the time of the Reformation and the dawn of the modern era. “Public” and “private” represent interlocking and reciprocal protestations – hence the term Protestant - against the epistemic (in Foucault’s sense) configurations of the other. The collectivisms of the modern era from French republicanism to fascism to Marxism to Maoism culminating in Hardt and Negri’s “multitudinism” are but forms of ongoing “counterreformationism”, or effort s to reinscribe the sovereignty of the corporate - that is, in terms of a totalized symbology of the dynamic power of the collective - in increasingly this-worldly or immanent terms.

Both reformationism and counterreformationism (terminology I myself have minted here), which express themselves in the ever more sophisticated ideologies of what Foucault named the “biopolitical”, define a never-ending metaphysical struggle within the realm of Western thought. Borrowing from Heidegger, we might term it the true “gigantomachy”, or titanic battle, within the metapolitics of the West. Mark C. Taylor in his most recent book After God (University of Chicago Press, 2007) characterizes such a struggle as the engine of secularization, the trajectory through the “death of God” to an ill-characterized age that comes “after God.” It is no accident that so-called “postmodern” theology has swung back and forth in an increasingly volatile manner between the radical reformationism of the early emergent church thinkers to the “left”-leaning counterreformationism (socialism with a sacramentalist heart and soul) of radical orthodoxy.

Źiźek’s observation that postmodernism amounts to little more than “late modernism” may be apt in this instance. It was Nietzsche’s implicit rhetorical point in his later writings – and it is the most telling ramification of the poignant parable of the madman - that a Christianity that needs to justify God really has lost God. In its effort to justify God what it is really seeking to legitimate is its own priestly, or “ecclesiastical”, Wille zur Macht. So is a “third space” simply the dialectical resolution of the conflict between assertions of these two congenitally modern spatialities? Or is it a space like no space we have yet envisioned? Theologies and ecclesiologies are nothing more, and nothing less, than elaborations or articulations of certain epochal “topologies,” the semiotic version of the Foucaultian episteme. These topologies can be characterized as “epochal” because they belong not to an era but to a vast range of time in which art, architecture, language, and modes of social and cultural organization are developed and go through their own life cycles in ways that express certain underlying, or indigenous, tendencies. Let us refer to such a topology as an inherent typology or “logic” of historical space. The space of Christendom and its secularized counterpart is both differential and dialectical.

The great “theologian” of secular Christendom, as Taylor observes, is Hegel. Hegelian dialectics are anchored in Chalcedonian metaphysics or ontology, where the paradox of two “natures” (physes) is held permanently in tension but ultimately “taken up” into a third space that reconciled rationality with reality. This third space Hegel calls the state. The Hegelian state is the secularized version of God on the cross. Hence Protestant reformationism comes to be manifested as the “spirit of capitalism”, embodied in Western liberal democracy and in the phase of late capitalism as Hardt and Negri’s “empire.” Corporatist counterreformationism undertakes a systematic critique of capitalism (the Hegelian “rational”) under the sign of a theory of fully productive labor and autonomous human desire (the Hegelian “real”) in quest of a new universal solidarity that expresses what is supposed to be truly human. But the secret of Chalcedonism is the “church visible”, while the secret of Hegelianism is the state, whether capitalist or collectivist.

Thus the third space of much contemporary ecclesiology, derived from dialectical theology, turns out to be either the imperial or territorial church where authority resides in its own magisterium which in turn has drawn its legitimacy ever since Constantine from the sovereignty of state, or it is the “voluntary association” of the Christian faithful – Luther’s priesthood of all believers – who act according to their own “sovereign” consciences, which is the basis of Madison’s “right” to the free exercise of religion. Both “spaces” in their own way sacralize the secular. The first sacralizes the earthly regime, or the communitarian political regime of social engineers and “experts”; the second sacralizes the Lockean “natural man” who pursues his or her own happiness. The Chalcedonian-Hegelian dialectic, which ultimately becomes a secular dialectic, finds its moment of incarnation in the state collective, which masquerades as “liberation” from previous regimes, but establishes its own regime and institutes a new form of the state apparatus.

But on a global scale we are witnessing the beginnings of a new kind of “incarnationalism” that is neither Chalcedonian nor Hegelian , but Antiochene. By “Antiochene” I refer not only to those arcane disputes of the fifth century in which the question of how the divine and the human were conjoined in Christ (the Antiochenes against what later became the “orthodox” position stressed the human as the “complete” expression of the divine), but also the post-Pentacost and “missional” dynamism of the early church, as idealized in Acts. Antiochene space was not a tertiary space, but a proto-space of incarnational and relational reality. To turn Hegel on his “ear,” the real is not rational but relational, and the relational is real. The living Spirit of the fast-growing body of Christians was the animating force of Pentacost.

The space of the church is not yet “Roman” or ecclesiastical with its hierarchies, sacramental solemnities, enclosed basilicas, and doctrinal dicta, but “ecclesial” in the original sense of ekklesia, the “calling” together of those who empowered by the Spirit and responsive to Jesus’ “sending” (the Great Commission) of the spirit-led and spirit-driven to the ends of the earth It is the space of what Hugh Halter, with whom I have had the wonderful opportunity to meet and partner with in the past few weeks, calls “the tangible kingdom” (cf. Hugh Halter, The Tangible Kingdom, Leadership Network Publications, 2008). The tangible kingdom is the incarnational kingdom of those who are involved in mission, whose “being” is both being-sent and being-in-relation. Halter is not a theologian. Nor is he an “ecclesiologian.” He is a true Antiochene church theorist who see “churches” not as places or communities, but as relational networks.

The tangible kingdom is the ongoing and global incarnation of God in the mundus, the world. It does not represent the secularization of the church, but the Christification – not to be confused with the Christianization or “churchification”of the saeculum. He calls the congealing of these relational networks into effective nerve centers of outreach and benevolence as “communities of blessing.” They are not a “third space”, which is still an institutional space, but the spatialization and semiotic articulation on its myriad planes of the soma Christou. As Deleuze would say, such a soma is not codified into the mutual Platonic reflectivity of eternity and time, or of heaven and earth, but emerges as the “rhizomic” spreading and sending forth of intensities that radiate in all directions, what I in my new book call the GloboChrist.

The rhizomic community of blessing therefore constitutes the radicalization of the incarnate Christ in the relational and immanent reality of de-territorialized humanity we know as “globalization.” It is not a third space, but (again citing Deleuze) the “smooth space” of the new global and local (“glocal”) Christianity. Theology must not become anthropology, as Feuerbach sketching the secularist project once proclaimed. Theology must become a Deleuzian Christian nomadology, the nomadology that the Letter to the Hebrews foreshadows. It is the postmodern turn that the Great Commission is now taking.

James K.A. Smith in the Netherlands

2008-04-24T11:26:56-05:00

Just FYI, for those who might be interested, I'll be enjoying a very brief speaking tour in the Netherlands at the beginning of June. Thanks to the hard work of Nico-Dirk van Loo, and the hospitality of the Christelijke Hogeschool Ede, the Centre of Reformed and Evangelical Theology at the Free University of Amsterdam, and the Theologische Universiteit Kampen, I'll be giving lectures on:

June 2: "The Politics of Worship: Augustine, Radical Orthodoxy, and the Critique of Liberalism"
June 3: "Secular Liturgies: Discipleship at the Moulin Rouge", and
June 4: "Recovering and Re-locating 'Antithesis': Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition"

See emergingchurch.nl for more information and updates.