Despite my tone — which is a little harsh in places and rightfully so I think — I am not suggesting that what some are calling “positive belief” simple be abandoned or dismissed. I am, after all, dealing with the Christian tradition in which I have been inculcated. I am a theologian and I use the symbolic framework and the social imaginary of this tradition. Better, I interpret these things as best I can and try to read and reread them in creative ways, hopefully in ways that have been for whatever reason silenced or glossed over by the dominant power discourse. All of this involves positive belief, argumentation, and responsibility for my thought ideas. On this point Derrida agrees with me. Though he is situated in a different tradition, I believe his body of work stands as a testament to detractors who would suggest otherwise.

For me, the problem is not with “positive belief” per se, but rather how said belief is used and wielded. The language and tone I hear around “reconstruction” suggests to me that belief may be given a new label but it is still built around a metaphysics of presence and given substantial recourse to some sort of big Other, what Derrida calls a transcendental signified, that ultimately secures things. For me this is untenable and representative of the attitude that deconstruction is merely a stage rather than an ongoing discursive strategy. As I said before it should alway infect theology, leaving the tension between religious desire and the belief structures that necessarily facilitate that desire forever open and haunted by that which that can never fully contain. If anything it is an argument for the proliferation of “positive belief” and a multiplicity of understandings within a tradition on the condition that these things are provisional, susceptible to reinterpretation, and open to fall under the judgment and analysis of rigorous scrutiny.

I am as much a critic as I am a theologian — the two are always closely intertwined for me — so when it comes to belief I tend to err on the side of deconstruction, hoping to bear witness to an event that even the most beautiful and persuasive positive belief structure can never fully contain (this is also why I have a deep love for the mystics and the apophatic tradition). I am alway unsaying what I have previously said so I can hopefully, maybe, say it a little better. That doesn’t mean I’m not interesting in saying anything. It just means I want to precise and open to being shown my blindspots, which is maybe another possible definition of deconstruction. I aim to be about the business of reframing and reinterpreting while at the same time taking responsibility for the Christian tradition by inhabiting its language, turning around in it, and showing that there is always some excess that never quite fits into the puzzle perfectly.

A theology infected by deconstruction is always looking over its shoulder, always oscillating between the known and the unknown, leaving the tension, the wound of divine desire, open and festering in order to say something, however feeble or inadequate, about the event by which it is animated. So in a sense, there is no reconstruction that needs to be done. It is all already there, the tradition is before us and ahead of us. We already have the constructions. Good theology is about negotiating how they function in discourse and life, asking whether they foster a posture of unmitigated hospitality toward heterogeneity and alterity, toward the divine itself, or whether they squelch it through misguided quests for ultimate grounds, bedrock foundations, and sedimented structures.

And that’s why I am not interested in leaving deconstruction behind for mere surface reconstruction — because for me deconstruction is, as friend of mine put it, a sustained spiritual practice, fostering a deep sense of awe and wonder at the world and incessantly reminding me that the divine always lies ahead of even my best theological ideas.

Related articles

• Misusing deconstruction: on belief and the emergent church (blakehuggins.com)
• Derrida and theology [video] (blakehuggins.com)

First, blame shouldn’t fall solely on emergent church folk. Philosophers and cultural theorists (who should know better!) have  also misused the word since it gained popularity in discourse. The fact that Jacques Derrida‘s (in)famous hermeneutic (if i can call it that) translates to a very common word in the English language doesn’t help much either. The word is already operative in our common vocabulary and it carries with it certain connotations that run completely counter to its theoretical function. So the inertia is against us before we get to the emergent church. I think Jack Caputo’s Deconstruction in Nutshell should be mandatory reading for anyone who uses or hopes to use the word deconstruction as a key concept (in the emergent church or otherwise).

Popular use notwithstanding, I do think that emergent church folk are particularly and especially culpable for their use and misuse of the word theoretically and theologically in large part because of their affinity toward postmodern philosophy and their use of key thinkers like Derrida. This makes things complicated and, if dissected closely, I think it shows that the emergent church — or at least some subgroup(s) within it — aren’t all that different from mainstream Christianity and certainly not as subversive as some had initially hoped.

My frustration stems from the tweets, Facebook statuses, and blog posts (and books) that I see from time to time where someone will in effect suggest that having a “deconstructive stage” was important for a while but now its time to “get serious” and start reconstructing things (faith, theology, etc.) toward some sort of “new” end. In essence, deconstruction is given a negative and overly critical connotation and is understood to be the initial step in a larger process. Doubt was good and cool for a time, criticizing and rejecting conventional religiosity was fun while it lasted, but the real work starts when you decided to start affirming and arguing core theological tenets anchored by a foundation. When I read and hear things like this I realize how unfortunate it is that the mystics and the via negativa don’t get more play in emergent church circles.

While Paul Ricoeur‘s language of a hermeneutics of suspicion and affirmation may seem more appropriate here, it too is inadequate. Ricoeur, in a manner similar to Derrida, referred to suspicion and affirmation not as two steps in a linear process but as two modes or tonalities that are in constant tension with one another. In discourse and life one is alway oscillating between the two, never completely settling on one and certainly never moving from one to another toward finality. When construed as the initial counterpart to “reconstruction” (the ultimate aim) deconstruction is deprived of its theoretical traction as a type of interpretive tool that helps one read against the grain or read between the lines in order to allow alterity to speak and the heterogenous to come.

When laid out like this, the problem becomes painfully obvious. Once deconstruction is set aside as some sort of stage or adolescent phase and “reconstruction” pursued in its place one begins to fall back into the comfortable arms of a perceived orthodoxy often with tacit epistemological ossifications that underpin the entire edifice.  This impulse is so strong in Christianity that it is almost unavoidable when deconstruction is circumscribed and caricatured as rejection or  negative criticism. You end up returning to essentially the same belief structure (not necessarily the content)  you where leaving or subverting when you set out to be hip and “deconstructive.” The window-dressing may change but the structural foundation remains happily intact. What looked like pushing the envelope at first turns out to be a search for a new and improved envelope. What looked like “maturation” beyond something juvenile turns out to involve leaving the security blanket in place except now it is hidden or concealed while assumed to be absent. The need or to desire to have bedrock belief is simply transfered to something else.

So deconstruction becomes a type of easy shorthand for systematic dismantling the components of one’s faith or theology, throwing out those pieces that don’t make sense and then putting it all make together again. This is the trajectory I see some in the emergent church taking and its one that seems to be gaining popularity. As far as I know, Peter Rollins is the only person who has caught on to this, suggesting during his Insurrection tour that this would be like “having a dark night of the soul with the lights on” where one convinces oneself that s/he has “deconstructed” everything and has moved only to leave the metaphysics of belief firmly in place. He says something very similar here regarding transferring everything onto the belief structure itself rather than changing the structure.

I read a short piece by Clayton Crockett the other day in the latest issue of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. Though he is writing in a different context and using a different theoretical register (that of Lacanian psychoanalysis) I found Crockett’s analysis quite apropos to the danger of misunderstanding deconstruction.

If the fundamental conception of atheism is “God is dead,” then everything rests on the intentional, conscious and prepositional belief, whether it be belief in God, Nation, Love, or whatever. But if the formula for atheism becomes “God is unconscious,” then the real issue is less one’s intentional beliefs, but how one’s beliefs are structured, which is indirectly by relation to the big Other who believes for me. If there is no big Other, then God is not the Other, but God is strictly speaking unconscious.

The problem with moving away from deconstruction and toward reconstruction is that the belief structure, i.e., the (ontological) edifice that anchors one’s “reconstructed faith” is still left in place as what Lacan calls the big Other, a transcendent foundation that secures everything. Derridean deconstruction resists being bent toward some exterior end and is instead focused on pushing back against our desire for a big Other in the first place, it is the constant examination of the belief structure and its function in discourse. Rather than amounting to a vulgar abdication of responsibility toward this structure deconstruction is the incessant rereading of texts and traditions to 1) reveal their inconsistencies and contradictions and 2) to create discursive space for the other, one might say the divine, to be experienced. Later in his life Derrida himself stated that “the experience of the impossible” was the “least bad” definition of deconstruction. Is this not also a description of the theological task? Not to settle into another sedimented version of reconstructed orthodoxy, but to creatively and inventively (re)read the tradition and thereby open oneself up to new possibilities that were previously unimaginable?

It is in this way that I would say a “reconstructed Christianity” is (hyper)theological in the worst possible sense. That is to say the core of this “reconstruction,” regardless of its content, functions as the big Other, as the transcendental guarantor of meaning and that which secures or grounds all that emanates from it (Neoplatonic pun very much intended). This edifice is, in essence, God — God the big Other who believes on my behalf as the belief structure itself.

A Christianity constantly and perpetually infected by deconstruction is, on the other hand, theological in a much better sense. Maybe not the best sense (if there even is one) but certainly better. Borrowing from the legacy of mysticism and negative theology — but with a healthy degree of suspicion as well — a deconstructive theology aims to speak of that which always elides its grasp, that which creates an open wound of divine desire, an Augustinian restlessness that tears at the fabric of one’s being like an itch that cannot be scratched. This demands constant exploration and re-imagination, not calcified reconstruction. The pursuit of such a desire demands that one sacrifice full satisfaction and contentment. It demands that one come to grips with the reality that the big Other does not exist and instead eventuate, through deconstructive gestures, the coming of God as divine desire always just beyond the horizon, present in its very absence. This, to me, is why deconstruction cannot be abandoned — because this abyss, this wound of divine desire is not something to be overcome and subsequently reconstructed but something the aftermath of which we are constantly wrestling.

One of the more recent additions includes a video overview of Derrida and his impact on theology. The presenter is Steven Shakespeare of Liverpool Hope University. Shakespeare has written one the best introductory texts on Derrida and theology I’ve read in Continuum’s Philosophy and Theology series. The video is a bit long but it provides an excellent sketch of Derrida’s intellectual biography and context, drawing particular attention to some main themes and concepts that have significant theological import. Not exactly an easy task! Check out the video below.

While I can understand and certainly resonate with the sentiments that might lead one to denounce Breivik’s behavior as completely incompatible with Christianity (I am a theologian after all!) I am more than a little uncomfortable when persons try to downplay the fact Breivik’s actions might be religiously motivated or completely ignore his Christian affiliation at all (cultural or otherwise). Of course Christians should be outraged. Of course we should publicly denounce such terrorism as completely incongruent with the best exceptionalism of the Christian legacy. Of course we should. But passion for the best of what we have to offer should not — should never — lead us to simply ignore monstrosities perpetrated in our name nor should it give us license to turn a blind eye to the dark parts of our history. We hold those things within us. We have to own them.

Issues of religious identity and Christian definition aside (those are certainly at play here, though I think one should be suspicious of the intent behind the move to write off someone like Breivik as something other than Christian) the real problem here is that there is an insipid double-standard at play when it comes to identifying and condemning religiously motivated terrorism, one that leaves a long but unacknowledged tradition of Christian exceptionalism and racism perfectly enact.

To but it bluntly, when “a cultural Christian” is to blame, acts of terrorism have nothing to do with religion. When a Muslim is involved, however, it is quite the opposite. This is the framework operative in our collective imaginary (despite the fact that many Muslim terrorists appear to be motivated by anti-imperialist sentiments rather than religion alone). Muslims are terrorists, Christians are not. These categories have become so deeply engrained in our psyche that the knee-jerk reaction to any terrorist attack is to place blame upon Islam.

Immediately following the violence in Oslo the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal both jumped to xenophobic conclusions. Even a newspaper as “progressive” as the New York Times wasn’t immune to the sociological inertia. The same thing happened after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. In times of crisis and in response to heinous acts of violence our most foundational — and, by and large, dualistic, even Manichean — stereotypes come in to play. And it would seem that in the American imaginary, liberal, conservative or otherwise, the category of the Muslim is conflated with that of the terrorist. There is a deeply essentialist if not racist double-standard at play when it comes terrorist and religion. The common perception, even the default position, is that Christianity is the exception, while Islam is the rule.

Mark Juergensmeyer, who has written extensively on religion and terrorism, has a piece in Religious Dispatches today that get to the heart of the problem.

Is this a religious vision, and am I right in calling Breivik a Christian terrorist? It is true that Breivik—and McVeigh, for that matter—were much more concerned about politics, race and history than about scripture and religious belief, with Breivik even going so far as to write that “It is enough that you are a Christian-agnostic or a Christian atheist (an atheist who wants to preserve at least the basics of the European Christian cultural legacy (Christian holidays, Christmas and Easter)).”

But much the same can be said about Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and many other Islamist activists. Bin Laden was a businessman and engineer, and Zawahiri was a medical doctor; neither were theologians or clergy. Their writings show that they were much more interested in Islamic history than theology or scripture, and imagined themselves as recreating glorious moments in Islamic history in their own imagined wars. Tellingly, Breivik writes of al Qaeda with admiration, as if he would love to create a Christian version of their religious cadre.

If bin Laden is a Muslim terrorist, Breivik and McVeigh are surely Christian ones. Breivik was fascinated with the Crusades and imagined himself to be a member of the Knights Templar, the crusader army of a thousand years ago. But in an imagined cosmic warfare time is suspended, and history is transcended as the activists imagine themselves to be acting out timeless roles in a sacred drama. The tragedy is that these religious fantasies are played out in real time, with real and cruel consequences.

The bottom line is we need to be more consistent. Either we create religious identities that are so pious and so pure that they apply to virtually to no one (which would likely cause more problems than solutions) or we own up to the fact the religion is always constituted within particular contexts and is always the result of some cross-pollination. This leads to some really beautiful things. It also leads to terrorists like bin Laden and Breivik both of whom may not have been motivated by religious convictions alone but were without a doubt influenced by them. Fundamentalism is fundamentalism, be it Muslim, Christian or something else. Until the legacy of Christian exceptionalism and xenophobia is properly dismantled and an equal standard applied to all religious traditions in the wake of acts of terrorism we will only create more create more Breiviks and bin Ladens.

“Guide us…to the end of time.”

I ran across this quote from the final paragraph of Italo Cavino’s Invisible Cities the other day.

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form be being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. the second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

If the title hasn’t already given it away, this is another post about The Tree of Life. After viewing the film a second time I am convinced that the field of theological aesthetics could stand to learn quite a bit from Terrence Malick.

In my first post I drew attention to Roger Ebert’s wonderful mediation on the film. There Ebert states that he believes the film ”stands free from conventional theologies, although at its end it has images that will evoke them for some people.” I think this is true although I would go a bit further and say that there are images, symbols and even names that evoke conventional theologies throughout the film. And, as far as a more generalized audience is concerned, I think the line between tacit conventional theologies and the sort of impressionist pastiche Malick has created is so fine it practically doesn’t exist. The ending is a perfect example, as Ebert points out. Given the breadth and scope of the film Malick all but sets himself up for failure. Virtually any ending seems inadequate for a film of this magnitude, but the one chosen does seem to fall into the comfortable arms of convention and familiarity.

Despite this, though, it still works. Just like the ostensibly conventional religious images and theological symbols work — and work wonderfully. This is because Malick is a master at couching the familiar differently, of subtlety wielding the conventional otherwise. More than any of his previous films The Tree of Life relies less on dialogue and more on pensive narration and, especially, breathtaking images of life and nature (The Thin Red Line is a close, close second). This is why the ending, while certainly flawed, still works within the context of the film — because by the time the ending comes the overall aesthetic and the symbolic frame have created an environment in which such an ending is wielded differently than it would otherwise, albeit in a very subtle and delicate manner.

After two hours when we finally see Sean Penn fall to his knees on the beach and the scenes that follow it is quite clear — at least it was to me — that the film is hardly against materialism (i.e., somehow disparaging of the physical world in favor of an otherworldly reality), which is how the ending might be interpreted in a vacuum by itself. Such a view is without a doubt compatible with the conventional theologies that Ebert has in mind. As an impressionist piece I cannot think of a film that is more firmly materialist. The images of nature (often through refracted sunlight), the emphasis on life and living, and the heightened sense of the beauty  and grandeur revealed in the world through Emmanuel Lubezki‘s stunning cinematography and Alexandre Desplat‘s gorgeous score all point toward the luminous and sublime glory of the things themselves. This is a common theme in all of Malick’s films but I believe he is at his aesthetic best in The Tree of Life. The poetry of the natural world and the mystique of humanity practically ooze out of the production design. The dialogue may be purposefully elliptical but watching the film I never felt that I was missing something. Even when the characteristic voice-overs were lacking the visuals carried themselves. And, as I said before, the aesthetic reveals grace in nature rather than reinforcing a familiar binary.

The touch of grace in nature that persists throughout The Tree of Life — both in the story and the aesthetic — is another instantiation of its materialism and one of the central motifs in Malick’s entire oeuvre: the awe and beauty of existence itself. All things shining. As far as I can tell this first becomes explicit in The Thin Red Line. It could not, however, be more explicit in The Tree of Life. Whatever else it may be, this is a film first and foremost about the glory shining through all things. It is not primarily a coming of age story complete with cosmogonic sequences that brilliantly juxtapose the magnitude of the universe with infinitesimally mundane lives of single individuals or families. No, these things only contribute to the larger bricolage, of impressionist snapshots, portrayed almost as if they are archetypal vignettes of our collective memory that point to both the beauty and majesty of nature as well as its contingency and ambivalence. All things shining. Chaos and serenity. Grace and nature. Together. Two sides of the same coin.

As one reviewer put it, The Tree of Life, more than any of his other films, expresses Malick’s “belief in the power of cinematic images to express the sublime.” Scenes and shots bleed over into one another in transitions that are more dreamlike than they are seamless. Dialogue shifts effortlessly into whispered voice-over as images of family life in 1950s Texas are juxtaposed with the origins and evolution of life itself making the former seem so small and so inconsequential, yet so beautiful and weighty at the same time.

Such a film places important demands upon it viewers, demands that place much more stock in the luminous aesthetic to convey the films cinematic greatness than they do straightforward story-telling and linear plot lines. Because the inertia of American cinema is such as it is, viewing something like The Tree of Life may seem more like a chore than pure entertainment. If it is, then so be it. I would submit than the experience is well-worth it, especially upon a second viewing (the first sort of washes over you, I wasn’t able to really take it all in). It demands that you become a better viewer of the art before you.

Films like The Tree of Life and filmmakers like Terrence Malick push me as a viewer to see all things shining. They ask me — in the same way a numinous religious experience does — to take note of the luminous glory and beauty revealed in all things around me, even in deep ambivalence and contingency. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I had what most would call a religious experience both times I saw the film.

This turn toward the aesthetic leads me back to the Cavino quote from Invisible Cities above.”[S]eek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” I cannot think of a film in a recent memory that has done a more effective job of visually capturing this sentiment, of giving those things space that clearly do not belong in the hell we have created for ourselves, of lifting them up and making them endure as the best of what we have to offer. Grace in nature, again. Beauty amidst the trite and the grotesque. Awe-inspiring grandeur in the shit that Cavino says has become such a part of us that we no longer see it for what it is. All things shining through the dismal and the gloomy, indeed even in the dismal and the gloomy.

The Tree of Life opens with an epigraph from Job 38. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” The film begins and ends with images traditionally associated with conventional theologies. Yet, Malick wields them otherwise, holding them delicately in a decidedly different manner. By the time the credits roll it is clear, I think, that the question recorded in Job does not come from some omnipotent super-being exterior to the present world in some sort of metaphysical vacuum. This question echoes down through the ages and into eternity from what we call God, yes, but God as the numinous that inheres in all things. The grace found in nature and the nature found in grace, the antinomies and aporias of which are, for Malick, constitutive of material reality. The ecstatic sublime in the epiphanies of the everyday.

All things shining.

Related articles

• Video: Tree of Life Visualizes the Cosmos Without CGI (wired.com)
• Terrence Malick Prepping a Six-Hour Version of ‘The Tree of Life’? (slashfilm.com)
• Video: Christopher Nolan and David Fincher Praise Terrence Malick in New ‘The Tree of Life’ Promo Featurette (slashfilm.com)

In my previous post I alluded to the possibility that one of the film’s major leitmotifs is not so much the opposition between nature and grace but rather the implication of the one within the other, of their inherent and seemingly ambivalent contingency. The film certainly does this. It may not be as overt as some of the narration in The Thin Red Line but it practically oozes out of the production design. As one review puts it, it is not at all the idea of nature versus grace it is nature and grace, often positioned in a type of contradiction that is, for Malick, subject of awe and transcendence, revealing all things shining.

One of the most talked about parts of the film is the origins and evolution of life sequence. Reading this post and the comments that followed it struck me that Malick’s version of pre-history offers an interesting counterweight to that of Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Kubrick’s sequence it is clear that Darwinian predation and violence are the common denominator of life. Predation is present for Malick, but not without contestation and ambivalence.

The Tree of Life’s most radical detour (the film is itself, a radical, unthinkable collection of detours) is a drop-in on the Mesozoic era after a sequence of shots tracks the birth of life on Earth. A raptor-like creature emerges from the forest and wades into a stream. At the opposite bank lies a wounded herbivore. The predator scampers over cautiously and apprehends his prey’s immobility. And just as we expect carnage (thanks to conditioning from Jurassic Park and its sequels), Malick provides instead, grace. The raptor, who has pinned the injured creature with one clawed food, shares a moment of silent communion with the wounded dinosaur, releases his grip and then leaves. This may seem an unlikely moment in the animal kingdom, even less so in the kingdom we can only know through the fossil record. But does Malick exhibit hubris here by applying a naive anthropomorphism to the scene, or do those who criticize do so by suggesting he’s necessarily incorrect in his vision, tacitly implying grace to be the sole provenance of humanity? A frighteningly elegant shot of a comet devastating the planet, and the dinosaurs with it, reminds that we’ll likely never know for sure. (link)

Is Malick suggesting that this is perhaps the first act of compassion in history? An instance of incipient grace? Of a type of grace found within nature, not reserved as the crowning achievement of humanity alone?

When read within the context of the larger trajectory of the film (if it can even be said to have such a thing) and within the even larger context of Malick’s entire oeuvre, I think the charges of anthropocentrism miss the point. In fact, if we go with the notion that the film reveals how unfounded the distinction between nature and grace really is — that the two are, in fact, more porous than conventional theology allows — then criticisms of anthropocentrism are actually more insipid instantiations of the very thing they denounce.

Why must it be the case that grace inheres in humanity alone? Whatever else it may do, The Tree of Life not only suggests that grace inheres in all things, but that grace and nature are, in some sense, in separable as constitutive of life and its processes the vicissitudes of which are at the same time both beautiful and dangerous. It is precisely this sort of ambivalence that is cause for the deep sense of awe and wonder that is characteristic of Malick’s films. One could even say it is transcendence without the metaphysical baggage of most theologies.

Malick’s films have always exuded a sort of poetic, quasi-philosophical, one might even say crypto-theological, quality. They explored the deep contingency and ambivalence of human nature, indeed of nature itself. A type of mystery that always leads back to the awe of existence, the wonder, the grace the inheres in all things and is, I think, the starting point of all theology. The opening narration in The Thin Red Line describes it well.

What’s this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power, but two?

And later as the film closes.

The brother. The friend. Darkness from light. Strife from love. Are they the workings of one mind? The features of the same face? Oh, my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining.

The cinematic ground Malick treads is ripe for theological rumination. It shouldn’t be too surprising. Though Malick has made a career out of scrupulously keeping to himself it is no secret that he studied philosophy at Harvard under Stanley Cavell and later at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He eventually left Oxford without a degree after a disagreement with his advisor over his dissertation on Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein. So Malick turned to film. And he has created some real masterpieces.

But it looks like The Tree of Life — and the IMAX documentary companion piece The Voyage of Time that Malick hopes to make — may be more explicitly his than any other project. We’ll see. I can only hope.

For now what interests me is an interview with Brad Pitt, one of the stars of the film, conducted by Time Magazine. Near the end of the interview Pitt comments on the religious and theological themes of the film.

Terry has an embrace for Christianity, for all religions, but not in the textbook definition of Christianity. You’re looking at a man who loves science, and has an interpretation and a feeling for God. In America those two things usually don’t coincide. And yet he sees the two as one: he sees God in science and science in God. [...] I’d say that Tree of Life is not a Christian so much as a spiritual film. I was surprised, watching it last night, how powerfully it struck me. What the film was saying to me is that there is an unexplained power; there is this force. And maybe peace can be found, but not by trying to explain it with the religion. Maybe there’s peace to be found just in that acceptance of the unknown.

Aside from the fact that Pitt’s somewhat predictable remarks reinforce and are based upon the tired, “spiritual but not religious” cliché, they proffer an unimaginative, flat-footed reading of religion, specifically of Christianity. By dismissing what he calls ‘religion’ as something that impedes rather than facilitates a sense of mystery in the unknown Pitt ignores a robust theological legacy that does just that.

It’s probably because I am preparing a sermon based on Paul’s famous sermon at the Areopagus and I’m just coming off writing a thesis and making a short film of my own dealing with precisely these theme. Contingency, ambivalence, and unknown mystery are central to theology. They may not be the most noticeable motifs in the public sphere, but they are there. This is exactly what Roger Ebert picks up on in his reflections on Malick’s latest film.

Terrence Malick’s new film is a form of prayer. It created within me a spiritual awareness, and made me more alert to the awe of existence. I believe it stands free from conventional theologies, although at its end it has images that will evoke them for some people. It functions to pull us back from the distractions of the moment, and focus us on mystery and gratitude.

These conventional theologies are certainly operative but they are not representative of the entire discourse nor should they be taken as such. Theology is about “seeing through a glass darkly,” into the unknown enigma that is our ultimate concern. It seems to me that this is precisely what Malick’s film is about, indeed the narration in the trailer is almost a word for word reference to 1 Corinthians 13:12 (one of the few passages I prefer in the King James). I’m sure I will have more to say after viewing but it seems a safe bet to say that The Tree of Life may be the best type of theological film, the type of theological film we desperately need. It is an exploration of the mystery that we can never fully know but can never stop seeking.

Related articles

• Terrence Malick’s Mystical Tree of Life (pajamasmedia.com)
• Pick of the week: Malick’s gorgeous, crazy “Tree of Life” (salon.com)
• Watch 7 minutes of Terrence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE (geektyrant.com)

Do you believe in ghosts? I remember being asked this question often as a kid. My and my friends used to go on camping trips during the summer and we would stay up all night telling each other spooky stories. And when we finished we would sit for a while in silence around the campfire and inevitably someone would always ask, “So, do you believe in ghosts?” Then we would proceed to have this detailed, in depth metaphysical discussion — okay, so maybe we didn’t know it was metaphysical at the time — about whether or not ghosts existed, until someone would pop out of the woods and scare us half to death. It didn’t much matter if we actually believed in ghosts. What mattered was that we were able to be scared by something, to be disturbed by something even if it was just one of our friends with a bed-sheet over his head.

In this passage from Ezekiel we are confronted with a ghastly and disturbing scene. Ezekiel enters a valley that is littered with dry, brittle and bleached bones, the remains of bodies that were slaughtered in the Babylonian exile. As surprising as it may seem, scenes like this weren’t out of the ordinary for Ezekiel. Israel had been conquered by what was at the time the world’s largest superpower.[1] The Babylonians took them captive, sacked their cities and led them away from their homeland as slaves with chains around their necks. Jerusalem was destroyed, the temple razed, and the Davidic kingship lost. To say that this was period of oppression and tyranny is almost an understatement. Under this exile people were living at the extremity with no hope and no sense of the future. It seemed as if history had come to an end. Image the most vivid and graphic cataclysmic movie or novel you can think of and you may have a sense of Ezekiel’s context. This is as post-apocalyptic as it gets. For all intents and purposes the world had come to an end. It is within this context that Ezekiel was a prophet — a prophet to a people without hope, to a people experiencing a deep collective trauma in the loss and fragmentation of each other and their communal identity.[2]

God Questions Ezekiel

Our text for today is one of the more popular passages from Ezekiel, and it is precisely because of this popularity that it is important to keep the setting in mind. Ezekiel does not enter the valley of the dry bones in a vacuum. He knows exactly why those bones are there, he knows who put them there, and he knows there are bodies missing in the exilic community, bodies whose remains were carelessly tossed into the valley. The question of whose bones these actually are is never addressed in the text because it is obvious — these bones belong to the countless number of bodies that were unjustly broken, crushed, murdered, and mutilated in the exile. It is very easy to miss this question altogether and jump to the end of the text, to the prophecy that God will resurrect the bones, rattling them together, laying sinews and flesh upon them as sign of hope to the exilic community. But make no mistake, when Ezekiel enters the valley of dry bones, with unidentifiable skeletons and nameless corpses littering the earth as far as the eye can see; when Ezekiel enters this valley and is greeted with the vile stench of death and decay he is remembering the bodies that were slain, the bodies that were murdered, violated and vanquished in the exile. He recognizes the ghosts that are visiting him, haunting him at this site of dereliction.

Image via Wikipedia

When we gloss over this scene we ignore the grotesque monstrosity that is laid before Ezekiel’s eyes. This is, in effect, a mass, unmarked and open grave, a dumpsite where disposable bodies were left and heaped upon one another after they were executed and slaughtered. These bones are the remnants of murdered bodies, bodies that were not properly buried or properly mourned. Yet the promise is that these dry bones will, somehow, live again.[3] But before the promise there is a question, a heavy question, posed to Ezekiel by God: “Mortal, can these dry bones live?” This question is posed to Ezekiel by God, not the other way around! It would make sense that Ezekiel might ask this question of God, out of despair or even anger on behalf of the exiled community. But instead God asks this question of Ezekiel who is a representative of the exiled community. Can these dry bones live again?

Resurrection is Contingent Upon Memory and Mourning

This question is, in essence, the question of resurrection, and it depends upon the community’s ability to remember those bodies that were unjustly murdered, those bodies that are missing. Can these dry bones live? It is contingent upon the community’s response, upon the ability to be visited by ghosts, to be haunted by this seething spectral presence that weighs in and upon the force of history. If these bones do indeed live again, if resurrection is in fact possible, it won’t be because God intervenes in a unilateral and wholly omnipotent manner, it will be because the community to which these bones and these corpses belong remember and properly mourn them. It will be because that community retains its ability to be visited by ghosts and haunted by the specters of past injustices.

Here I am reminded of Toni Morrison’s somber and beautifully written novel Beloved. As some of you may know, the book follows the story of a Mother and Daughter as they attempt to rebuild their lives after escaping the chains of slavery. At one point in the final third of the novel, one of the characters says to another, “You know as well as I do that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground.”[4] You know as well as I do that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground. The ghosts and the specters of bodies that have “died bad” haunt us and their seething, churning presence weighs in on the present, demanding that the future be different, that we remember them, that we mourn them.

Toni Morrison and Ezekiel both call for us to be visited by ghosts, to be haunted by specters of past bodies that have been broken and crushed, bodies that are no longer present. The valley of the dry bones should disturb our neat and tidy understandings of resurrection, indeed this text suggests that if resurrection is to occur at all it will be because we mourn the absence of these bodies and because we remember such that these bodies, these dry bones, can be re-membered, portending a type of spectral clairvoyance that creates the possibility for something different, something new, something otherwise than our penchant to ignore or repress death. If we allow this seething, spectral presence of past suffering to weigh in upon the present, if we allow ourselves to be visited by the ghosts of the unjust dead they can become what German theologian Johann Baptist Metz calls “dangerous memories,”[5] dangerous memories that threaten the status quo and demand a hearing.

This is a difficult task. Even now, as we are in the middle Lent, we look forward toward the assurance of Easter. And as Holy Week approaches we are preparing, like always, to leap-frog Good Friday and Holy Saturday, definitively asserting resurrection and redemption over death, over dry bones. Worship committees at churches everywhere are no doubt preparing for Holy Week, the entire thrust of which leads to the climax of Easter, almost totally eclipsing the deep sense of loss and abjection that Good Friday and Holy Saturday signify. Holy Week demonstrates to us that we have to wrestle with the valley of the dry bones, we have to let it percolate within us, unsettling and disturbing us by suggesting that if Easter is to come it will be because we mourn and we remember.[6]

A Church that Does Body Counts

But how do we do this? How do we allow this haunting to take place? We need practices that create space for this spectral presence to weigh on us, to weigh against the concentrated weight of the world, to weigh against the tendency to repress monstrous and grotesque scenes like the valley of the dry bones. I read a blog post earlier this week that describes one way this could be done. The title of the post is “A Church that Does Body Counts,” and it makes reference to a NATO airstrike that took place last month in Afghanistan. Taliban fighters were the intended targets of this particular strike, but the strike missed completely and ended up killing a small number of civilians, including several children. Of course, all the news articles on this downplayed the fact that bodies were killed, bodies with faces, bodies with names, bodies with friends and family. Instead there were disembodied and labeled “collateral damage.” The blog post lamented this and suggested that perhaps the church has a responsibility to mourn deaths like these, allowing the specters of these bodies to haunt to us. Katie Grimes, the author of the post, who is also a Ph.D. student at Boston College writes, “I don’t have any concrete prescriptions to offer, but it seems to me as though Christians should not only remember the ‘victims of history,’ who are often those whom history forgets, but also that we should mourn them. The church should do body counts. When we do, we will be a church in which all bodies count.”[7]

In a time when we can drop Tomahawk missiles on persons at high altitudes, distancing ourselves from the bodies being slaughtered below as in some perverse video game, we need a community that does body counts. When we can create our own valley of dry bones much easier, much quicker and with a clearer conscience than we can attend to the suffering victims of erased history, we need a community that does body counts. And when we can happily jump to the triumphalism of Easter, forgetting the monstrosity of Good Friday and the present absence of Holy Saturday, we need a community that does body counts.

We need a community that does the work of public mourning, allowing the silenced voices of the past to be heard, allowing them to become dangerous memories that threaten the negation and suppression of silenced bodies. Cornel West often says that “the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak.”[8] This includes past suffering, suffering that is easy to miss or ignore or simply erase. The valley of the dry bones stands as an enduring witness against this tendency, demanding that suffering continue to irrupt the present and rupture our ways of thinking and being in the world.

Can These Dry Bones Live?

The epigraph of Toni Morrison’s novel reads “Sixty million or more,” referring to the number of bodies lost in the slave trade. Ezekiel enters the valley of the dry bones knowing full well that the ground he walks upon is littered with the countless dismembered remains of bodies lost, bodies broken, bodies crushed, violated, mutilated, and murdered in the exile. Can these dry bones live? The prophecy is that they can, that God will lay sinews upon them, stitching them together, rattling them together, laying skin and flesh upon them such that they haunt future history. But this resurrection, this haunting, is contingent upon the ability of the community to mourn the loss of those bodies, to remember such that they are re-membered as a dangerous memory that lays claim to the present. “You know as well as I do that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground.” Can these dry bones live? Can these bodies be given a voice? Is resurrection possible? These are central claims of our faith. But they all depend upon a larger, deeper, more ominous question: are we willing to be visited by ghosts? Can we be haunted by the specters of the past, allowing them to lay claim to us? These bones, these dry bones, if they are to live, must live through our acts of mourning and memory. We must enact this promise or there is no promise at all. And when we do, let us remember the words of the poet Victor Serge:

I see, growing on the ripples of the water,

The revivifying specter,

Of a barbarous freedom, drunk on its tears.[9]

Amen.

onto a ram’s silicified forehead
I brand this image, between
the horns, in which,
in the song of the whorls, the
marrow of melted
heart-oceans swells.

In-
to what
does he not charge?

The world is gone, I must carry you.

-Paul Celan

Perhaps patient mediation and painstaking investigation on and around what is still provisionally called writing, far from falling short of a science of writing or of hastily dismissing it by some obsurcantist reaction, letting it rather develop its positivity as far as possible, are the wanderings of a way of thinking that is faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world of the future which proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure of knowledge. The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For the future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that guides our future anterior, there is as yet not exergue (4-5).

So I think I am to the point where I am ready to argue that, whatever else it may be, deconstruction is a certain type of eschatology, i.e., it harbors a certain eschatology or maintains a crypto-eschatological tone even though Derrida himself was reticent to use that language. It is certainly there and it is interesting to me that theologians have yet to tease it out in a sustained manner. Even John Caputo’s theology of the event, which comes close to doing what I am imagining, fails to acknowledge itself as a type of eschatology. My inclination is that people like Caputo just aren’t interested in dealing with all the baggage of conventional theology and classical theism that comes with working on eschatology. Yet, one of the stated aims of The Weakness of God is to reveal the deconstruction at work in those traditional themes. It seems to me that the critique of ontotheology enables one to (re)think eschatology otherwise just as much as it allows the rehabilitation of theology in general.