the church and postmodern culture: conversation

Zizek, and the danger of Obama for the American church

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

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

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"

 

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

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

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.

The Humor of God

...a [blog] about math concepts, no matter how simple, has the potential to be dull.  A [blog] about theological themes also has the potential to be dull, so a [blog] about math and theology has the potential to be supernaturally dull.  (from here).

Many folks when talking about the humor of God argue logically over whether God has as sense of it.  That's not very funny in and of itself, but those who say he does cite things like Elijah's mocking of the Baal prophets or Jesus' somewhat regular mocking sessions of the Pharisees.  I myself think of Elijah's calling lightening on 50 of the king's men - twice - who then of course, rather than having delivered Elijah to the king, are all suddenly dead.  Or even the story in 1 Samuel, Ch. 6 about Isreal's making a mockery out of the Phillistines with five golden rats and tumors.  Yes, golden rats...

'What shall we do with the ark of the Lord?  Tell us with what we shall send it to its place'  They [Israelites] said, 'If you send away [from the land of the Phillistines]the ark of the God of Isreal, do not send it empty, but by all means return him a guilt offering.  Then you will be healed, and it will be known to you why his hand does not turn away from you.'  And they [the Phillistines] said, 'What is the guilt offering that we shall return to him?'  They [the Israelites] answered, 'Five golden tumors and five golden mice, according to the number of the lords of the Philistines, for the same plague was on all of you and on your lords.  So you must make images of your tumors and images of your mice that ravage the land, and give glory to the God of Israel.  Perhaps he will lighten his hand from off your gods and your land.'

Then there are those who like to make light of the hot button topics of evolution and the relation between God and nature.  They are the constructivist lovers of modern science who can't take a good joke, so instead take the easy route and cite things like the Platypus.  If I were to engage in an argument along such lines for the humor of God, I, however, would prefer the Bananna Proof of God's Existence, by Monty Python.

In this case, though, it should of course be noted that in technically correct theological terms God doesn't have a body.  "Humours" are bodily fluids, so God doesn't "really" "have sense of humor."  So tell me, then, who was the one actaully laughing when there was no one around in the O.T. story but a dead (and uneaten) prophet, a living prophet, a donkey and a lion (who had killed the dead prophet, but not the donkey) - all standing around with each other, hanging out by the side of the road?  I guarantee you the living prophet wasn't the one laughing at that point.  Nor was it the donkey, although there is that one instance in the scriptures of a talking donkey.

Amongst all this talk of the humor of God - which I find to be mostly marginal to the closeness of the actual bosom of God, which is the part of God that really gets to giggling heavily - what I find interesting fodder for questions or ponderings on His humor is the story of the Tower of Babel.  I think it might just be possible to engage in a very serious argument that the whole reason why God "separated the languages" was because of his sense of humor.  He could forsee all the funny scenarious it would bring.  The argument is well demonstrated by Monty Pyton in The Argument Clinic, which is rather appropriate for this site of academic "conversation."

I mean shoot Pentacost was the reconciliation of what was broken at Babel, right?  But does no one else besides me find it funny that a lot of folks thought us Christians were drunk at Pentacost?  That seems like the ultimate "laughing at the wrong moment" kind of joke, I suppose, huh?  I guess the question is whether or not God finds it funny.

Well, I do know that God made ears and butts, of which I was reminded when I saw a particular Easter cartoon.  It was a depiction of a chocalate Easter bunny - after someone had taken a tasty bite out of it, thus causing the absent buttox - saying: "My butt hurts."  In response the chocolate Easter Bunny with missing ears says, "What?"  "Eyes That Do Not See" is the chapter title in a famous architectural treatise.

The reality, however, is that the Babylonian humor of God, humor of miscommunication we might say, isn't really so different from the humor of Elijah's mocking of the Baal prophets.  In Michel Serres' book called Genesis, on the multitude (a popular topic here recently) and in which there is much talk of Babylon, he says the following:

"The Tower of Theodicity plunges down and takes root in a confused virtuality.  One probably need not go down very far to be steeped in senselessness, mounting clamor, and raging hate.  The pyramid emerges from the noisome, nauseating flood, it emerges from the deafening noise and its peake alone is at peace...Could the Tower of Thales the geometer be only the last apartment of the pyramid of possible noises?  Could the tower of Babel, uncrowned above by the haze of languages, be the very pyramid of the Theodicity, upside down?"  Notice how in the picture of Tower of Babel, it disappears into formless clouds.

In other words, (also from here): "I think it was Bertrand Russell who said - and this is probably a very mangled quote - the problem with this world is that thoughtful, intelligent people are generally racked with doubt and uncertainty, while fools tend to be cocksure of themselves."  By the way, I happen to find it to be another stroke of ingenious irony from God that it was Bertrand Russell who said that (I mean one of Marshall McLuhan's one-liners in derision of the "conceptualists" is, "I might be wrong, but I am never in doubt."), but the point is that Michel Serres, in the quote above on the tower of Babel, was speaking about a humbling.  And speaking of irony, it is funny that King Saul had the real king living in his house - without even knowing it - and loved him to death.  King Saul, the fools of Bertrand Russel and the king's men who came to retrieve Elijah all have the same problem.  They are full of themselves.

To return to Serres: "The monster is, in animal manner, a variety of Babel...The frog (in La Fontaine) explodes with a loud noise from having wanted to be the size of an ox.  That was only a slight error.  Anybody can build a pyramid, a tower, much higher, broader, taller than the little pyramid of the Mykerinos.  Just look at the pyramid of Cheops, it almost succeeds.  But the frog the size of an ox is an ox.  Some adjustment is needed, then, in the course of growth.  Swelling, inflation, homothety ultimately, are not enough.  The frog, quite clearly, doesn't know this...The world is full of people who are no wiser is a frog the size of an ox, plus the noise of the bursting, plus the envious fury of the frog's sister.  A monster is inconceivable, but it is faithful to the real 666, is repetitive, cancerous, like the frog and its metastases."

Now for the sake of isolating the point about being full of one's self, I left out part of the above quote, which was as follows: "Again, we must understand what we need to understand without using concepts."  After the bit on the frog and its metastases, it continues: "Yes, the constructivist model is promising, but it provides only bricks and mortar whose final product is unattainable.  Yes, the biological model holds promise, but it begets only monsters, it opens up a teratology of unclassed animals.  It remains for us to meditate on the unfinished."

This is why I referred to the Platypus-as-evidence-of-God's-humor-argument as "marginal" to the bosom of God.  It relies on the constructivist model, and I think, misses the point.  When presented with the significance of the myth of Prometheus in actual life, a constructivist gives you the same look as when they say "I don't know, it's all Greek to me."  Then sometimes they might follow that up with a frog-the-size-of-an-ox pretending to be an ox-the-size-of-a-frog kind of statement like: "Well, yeah, I guess ultimately we don't know everything like God does." 

So although Serres seems to be heading toward the target, I don't think he is a believer in the Cross of Jesus, so you find him saying: "The incompletion is common, and we shall inhabit the great pyramid only when we are dead.  Perhaps we only know how to build tombs."  The truth of the matter, however, is that, "It is finished."  At least Serras is heading in the right direction.  Perhaps this direction, the direction of laughter over the golden rats of the Phillistines or the talking donkey, is a clue as to why some humans, at the moment of their salvation, break out into uncontrollable and overwhelming bouts of laughter.  The third time the king's men asked for mercy rather than having fire called down upon them by Elijah.

As a kind of final anecdote to my musing on Babel, the constructivist model and its humor, I would like to mention a ministry that I am involved with at my local church.  There is a group of Latinos who come to our area every summer to work at a local botanical nursery, so our church has a program in which we teach them "survival English" and befriend them.

What I am noticing is that the most successful teaching that occurs is the least informational and involves the most friendship and laughter.  Tonight I obseved a class taught by a man who has had many very successful classes in the past, and he probably only taught them about eight vocabulary words in the entire forty-five mintue class (the tower of Babel is also about boundaries and/or limits, which Serres also gets into in his book Genesis).  I found it interesting that he regularly referred to the students as "amigos."  And he did not have to "prove" it either, a la the constructivist model, but he simply had to, like on a stage set, make it believable in the way he looked in their eyes, in the humble way he carried himself, in the peace that pervaded his being.  Interestingly he also used "props," along with his immediate environment, in connection with the vocabulary words he was teaching.  And the class throughout was full of a sense of human intimacy, a certain comfort, which also of course beget a few good laughs along the way.

Joy and Peace - not to be found at the head of a pyrmaid or tower, but at the foot of the Cross!

Jason

The Loss of Church as Public

My first location for this post is as a church planter, trying to grow a church in the post Christian, secular materialist, and post church context of Europe. What does it mean within this context to try to establish a vibrant church community that enables Christian’s formation and grow in faith, and for people in our local community to convert to that form of life, as Christians, in and through our church plant?

Alasdair MacIntyre has demonstrated how practices are prior to institutions, and yet good practices are only sustained over time by institutions. However those very institutions over time corrupt and undermine the good practices they were set in place for.

In referencing MacIntyre, I betray my second locations for this post, of being within ‘emerging church’ discussions and conversations (whether others consider me legitimately located within this context is another question).

Within my context the protestant church has seemingly retreated into the subjective private gnosis of ‘relevance’ with it’s myriad progressions of worship aesthetics, be that charismatic revivalism, purpose driveness, or alternative worship, whilst on the other hand it has turned to a reified and objectified faith around some form of biblical fundamentalism.

There are many types of shading to both of these streams, but they do seem to me to have something deeply in common, the shared feature of a loss of ‘genuine public’.  There has been either an unwillingness to question current ecclesiologies and the inherent corruptions and distortions of the institutions of church that debilitate it from a genuinely ‘public life’, whilst on the other hand there has been the naïve and often-bourgeois indulgent fantasy of being ‘post institutional’ with regards to ecclesiology, that often goes as far as an ontological ‘post-church’ articulation.

Where the church in modernity has been reduced to an association of religiously interested individuals, and most ongoing critiques of that association seem to continue to spawn even more religiously associated individuals, is there any hope or need to establish churches that reflect more than a dissolution into private clubs that reflect the tastes of their members? And with that assertion I betray my other location, that of my PhD research.

In order to address that problem, to seek to diagnose its condition and extrusion within consumer culture, and to find and offer an alternative public ecclesiology, I have been orienting myself within the discourses of Catholic Social Teaching, Radical Orthodoxy, and Anabaptist theology.  Unsurprisingly given the nature of my problem area, and thesis, my method has increasingly located itself within ‘political theology’, with the hope of finding an ‘embodied’ and ‘public’ form of church. 

I have been recently been drinking deeply from the wells of William Cavanaugh, Bernd Wannenwetsch, and Reinhard Hütter.  They have given me theological descriptions to my intuitive anxieties from working in the field as a church planter (I must plug the upcoming conference at Calvin in May with some of these writers, that I am more than a little excited about attending).

With regards to this loss of ‘genuine public life’, Hütter delineates five current ecclesial responses that he does not see as exhaustive:

1.) A return to the State
2.) A return to Rome (and I would add for many the turn towards Canterbury)
3.) A continued splintering around protest (I would find the children of the protestant reformation birthing the post-church movement here)
4.) A continued confessional church a la Bonhoeffer, that seeks to remain grounded in word and dogmatic confession
5.) A new charismatic principle of the hermeneutical horizon of discussions about confession

All of them are fascinating areas for discussion, but it is the last one, given my locations as a church planter, and my emerging church context, that I find for the purposes of this post the most interesting.

(And without any detailed analysis of these responses, I will lay my cards on the table, in that I think we can find ecclesial hope in the embrace of all of them, as well as the anticipated sixth alternative that Hütter offers)

Much of the emerging church has been self consciously located around the notion of ‘conversations’, and whilst I have found it’s largely irenic dialectic immensely helpful, I think Hütter exposes one of the ecclesial limitations of this emerging church moment. 

When doctrine is no longer something we orient ourselves around, i.e. there is no ‘giveness’ and instead dogmatics becomes a dialogue partner that ‘discloses it’s content within the nexus and horizon of communication’, no wonder there is no ‘giveness’ and public to church life.

In other words ecclesiology collapses into the conversations about church, the flux and idealizations of talking about what church might be (and often the pathology of what it isn’t), such that ecclesiology remains a hermeneutical horizon of discussions about church, rather than a concrete reality of growing and new communities with new Christians.  No reference is needed to practices and habits of concrete church locations and communities.

Or to put it another way, if there is no ‘church’, no concrete third space and alternative to ‘us’ and the public, if we too easily resent the notion of any third and institutional entity between the consumer quest for ‘community/fellowship’, and us as autopoietic agents, surely the church will continue to be forced into producing ‘private religious associations’?

Hütter suggests that there is no third space between the content of Christian traditions and individuals appropriation of that content for their own private spiritual formation due to this inherent and continued aporia of protestant thinking. 

William Cavanaugh offers us a Eucharistic theo-politically imagined public for ecclesiology,  Bernd Wannewetsch a similarly grammatically embodied public worship, and Reinhard Hütter himself an explicitly pneumatological ecclesiological that overcomes the modern alternatives of ‘autonomy’ and ‘heteronomy’ with a doctrinally embodied practice.

With all this I am seeking for a new ecclesiological method, an ‘institutional hermeneutic’ if you will, that enables the release and development of good practice, whilst remaining suspicious of itself, without falling into the naivety of post-intuitional thinking.  An ecclesiology that enhypostatically epitomises the institutional realism of Alasdair MacIntyre.

I am increasingly convinced that what we need is a real ‘public’ church that counters the modern state church, and the private god space associations of much that is emerging.  And until we do, we will see little in the way of vibrant communities filled with new and growing Christians, at least in Western Europe.

So I turn to you, gentle reader.  Do you see a similar location for the problems of ecclesiology, have you interacted with my discourse partners, and what alternatives do you see available?

Jason Clark – London

(Please excuse any typos given my typing this on the fly, and with far too much haste whilst on holiday)

www.jasonclark.ws
www.deepchurch.org.uk
www.vineyardchurch.org

(Bibliography:  Reinhard Hütter, “Suffering Divine Things”, Bernd Wannenwetsch, “Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens”, and William T. Cavanaugh, “Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ” and “Theopolitical Imagination”)

The Flesh of the Multitude and the Global Civil War

Because it seems that Hardt and Negri have come up several times recently, below is a portion of a larger piece I've been working on in relation to the Multitude and the Eucharistic Community.  This is more a presentation of the multitude. 

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Living in a time of global civil war, generated by and generating ethnic conflicts and militant fundamentalism; an age of ruthlessly expanding markets coupled with the attending need for competitive labor; an era faced with the collusion of state sovereignties and the regimes of global capitalism, where might one find peace and unity?  How might one live beyond exploitation?  Where might one find resistance?  In short, how might one find true democracy amid perpetual war?

Responding to these questions, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri propose the theoretical concept and political project of the multitude (1).  Their objective is to propose and produce an alternative to the currently emerging global social body.  Their story goes as follows:  The beginning of the modern age is marked by the rise of the nation-state with attending theories of the ‘people’ and the ‘social body.’  The ‘people’ serve as the middle term between the consent given by the population and the command exerted by the sovereign power, retroactively giving rise to a conception of a single, unified social identity.  This sovereign power, be it democratic or despotic, imagines itself as a social body, transfiguring the diverse, individual bodies of the ruled into the one cohesive body of society, embodied in the one who rules (2).  All this occurs to end and protect against the internal threat of civil war, opening the path toward international politics. However, according to Hardt and Negri, our situation has emerged into a new state of civil war.  We live not in a state of civil war within a sovereign nation, nor of constant wars between sovereignties, but of a new civil war across a global terrain, a territory created by capital’s Empire (3).  In light of these circumstances, their question can be formulated: As the social body of the modern nation-state formed out of the caldron of internal civil wars, what new social body might arise from our global civil war, a war between the regime of global capitalism and its resisters?

Their answer: multitude. Hardt and Negri offer this summary. The multitude

“is not unified but remains plural and multiple…The multitude is composed of a set of singularities—and by singularity here we mean a social subject whose difference cannot be reduced to sameness, a difference that remains different.  The component parts of the people are indifferent in their unity; they become an identity by negating or setting aside their differences.  The plural singularities of the multitude thus stands in contrast to the undifferentiated unity of the people.” (4)

Unlike the social bodies of the modern era, the multitude is an alternative social body of difference proposed to quell the global civil war.  But even the term ‘body’ becomes problematic for Hardt and Negri because it signifies an organically unified, cohesive social totality.  “A democratic multitude cannot be a political body, at least not in the modern form.  The multitude is something like singular flesh that refuses the organic unity of the body” (5).  The multitude is a living and monstrous flesh (6),  escaping the logic of bodily hierarchy between the ruling head and subjected members.  Because of this the multitude is able to resist capital’s violent integration of all socialities into the one global social body.  The multitude being numerous and diverse, resists the concept of the people as ‘one’, and as such can never be assimilated into the social, political, economic body of global capitalism.   For Hardt and Negri, only the multitude will lead us productively beyond our global civil war into a time of peace and true democracy.  For them, “the multitude is the only social subject capable of realizing democracy, that is, the rule of everyone by everyone.  The stakes, in other words, are extremely high” (7).

But is this so?  Are there no other options?  And even if there are no other options, under what conditions might the multitude emerge?  For even Hardt and Negri know better than to offer too much, and only suggest the multitude as a concept rather than a political directive.  However, they certainly hope that the ontological concept of the multitude might produce

“a political project to bring it into being on the basis of these emerging conditions…If the multitude were not already latent and implicit in our social being, we could not even imagine it as a political project; and similarly, we can only hope to realize it today because it already exists as a real potential.  The multitude, then, when we put these two together, has a strange, double temporality: always-already and not-yet.” (8)

This constitutes Hardt and Negri’s ironic appropriation of eschatology.  This temporality of the multitude is marked not by “the linear accumulations of Chronos…but the sudden expression of Kairos,” (9) such that “we can already recognize that today time is split between a present that is already dead and a future that is already living—and the yawning abyss between them is becoming enormous.  In time, an event will thrust us like an arrow into that living future.  This will be the real political act of love.” (10) This “real political act of love” constitutes the beginning of the multitude even while being literally the last words of the book.  But this moment, this event, this act of love, still awaits a future.  A future,

“after this long season of violence and contradictions, global civil war, corruption of imperial biopower, and infinite toil of the biopolitical multitudes, the extraordinary accumulations of grievances and reform proposals must at some point be transformed by a strong event, a radical insurrectional demand.” (11)

But what this ‘strong event’ might be is never discussed, at least not in this text (12).  So, again, is the multitude offered in contrast to the ‘people,’ the last word concerning our global civil war?

I suggest that Augustine’s picture of the Eucharistic community as that which stands against, beyond, and between the ‘people’ and multitude  Into the gap between Hardt and Negri’s political concept and project of the multitude the Church ought to insert the sacramental practice of the Eucharist, for the Eucharist starts from the other end of time, or rather, from the middle.  The Eucharist begins not from a theory, but a practice.  It sets out not from a project needing initiation, but one requesting our participation. And most importantly, the Eucharist is not merely concerned with ‘how’ to cross the concept/project gap, but rather with ‘who’ is crossing.  It is concerned with what subject enters into the practice of the Eucharist and what subjectivity exits the traversal of concept and project?  Toward this end I would like to suggest a sustained reading of Augustine’s Eucharistic theology, tracing how the Eucharist might produce a revolutionary subjectivity beyond the types required and produced by the emerging global empire; a subject based instead on the one who said, “This is my body, given for you.” (13)

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(1) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004).
(2) Ibid., pp.160-162.
(3) See Part One of Multitude is titled ‘War’; see also Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (NY: Verso, 2002).  For a similar yet theological account of the emergence of modern nation-states see William Cavanaungh, Theopolitical Imagination (NY: T&T Clark, 2002), ch. 1.
(4) Hardt and Negri, p. 99.
(5) Ibid., p. 162.
(6) Ibid., p. 100, pp. 190-194.
(7) Ibid., p.100.
(8) Ibid., p. 221.  Interestingly, much of this section draws on a disavowed Pauline “already/but not yet” eschatology and a Johannine “in, but not of” ecclesiology.  See especially pp. 219-227.  A fuller exploration of Negri’s ontology/eschatology would have to take into account his “Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo” (2000) in Time for Revolution (New York: NY, Continuum, 2003).
(9) Ibid., 357.
(10) Ibid., p. 357, 358.
(11) Ibid., p. 358 (emphasis added).
(12)  Jared Woodard draws out the point that this turn to the event at the end of Multitude does not cohere with the Spinozist ontology that undergirds their work.  We will return to this below.  See Jared Woodard, “Waiting for the Multitude,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory vol. 6 no. 1 (December 2004): pp. 122-132.  PURL: http://www.jcrt.org/archives/06.1/woodard.pdf.
(13)  Luke 22:19.

Globalization and the Great Commission in the "Postmodern Cosmopolis"

The following musing for this blog is intended to stimulate interest in both the sweep and argument of the author's new book GloboChrist (to be published by Baker Academic Books this coming summer) without going into detail.  The posting pertains primarily to chapters 1 and 5 of the book.  The pre-publication URL for the book can be found at http://www.bakeracademic.com/ME2/Audiences/dirmod.asp?sid=0477683E4046471488BD7BAC8DCFB004&nm=&type=PubCom&mod=PubComProductCatalog&mid=BF1316AF9E334B7BA1C33CB61CF48A4E&tier=3&id=D06B03B52E474DC1BD0C47845F9ECC7A

Globalization, as Jan Art Scholte in his Globalization: A Critical Introduction (Palgrave MacMillan 2005) emphasizes, in the final summation is not about the free circulation of capital around the planet and the marketization of what were previously command economies.  Nor is it some vague, internationalist notion of a “convergence” of planetary cultures and governance mechanisms.  It is not for the most part about political economy at all, although questions of human rights, wage exploitation, and the struggle for new institutions that further democracy as well as what in the West we term “civil society” are not irrelevant – obviously.  Globalization in the final analysis amounts to a “planetary moment” – and its aftermath – along the historical continuum when space comes to be conceptualized and signified in epochally different terms that it had been in the past, when the guarantors of personal location and identity are suddenly ripped from their conventional moorings. 

Globalization is about living, engaging, and behaving “responsibly” when the boundaries within which we define and orient ourselves suddenly become permeable and fluid.  Gilles Deleuze denotes this process “de-territorialization”, which applies not just to geographical determinants but to the very conceptual and symbolical matrices wherein we are accustomed to operating and navigating.     Scholte describes it as a “re-spatialization”.  In a day-to-day context globalization means we no longer view ourselves and those who are not-ourselves (the “other”) in terms of radiating circles of proximity and therefore relevance – our family, our workplace, our community, our country, humanity in general, etc.  Globalization means that increasingly the notions of the “stranger”, or the “foreigner”, become strange and foreign in their own right.   Whatever, or whoever, in the past seemed remote is now immediately present through webs of instantaneous communications.  The same communications systems assure us that all human and economic transactions now acquire their own kind of immediacy, and oftentimes a  curious sort of intimacy.

Scholte argues that globalization reshapes at every level our sense of human immediacy and intimacy.  Jesus posed the same challenge to the “expert in the law” in the parable of the good Samaritan.  The “expert in the law” had offered to Jesus the Great Commandment of loving God and loving one’s neighbor with all one’s heart as the customary answer to the question of what one must do to have eternal life.  But as a Pharisee or “lawyer” he had sought to split hairs by raising a further question concerning whom a proper Jew should consider his “neighbor.” 

With the parable Jesus deconstructed both the query and the anticipated response.  He told the hypothetical story of a Samaritan, the despised “other” from a Judean perspective in the first century.  Post-Exilic Judaism, which developed a detailed division of the holy into those who adhere strictly to the Torah and those who do not, had based its notion of religious integrity on a what anthropologist Mary Douglas would describe as a complex grid of  distinctions between the ritually “clean” and those who pose a threat.  The sense of ritual purity also had a profound spatial dimension.   Holiness was implicitly commensurate with distance from the temple at Jerusalem.  It was focused on locality rather than globality.  Hence diaspora Jews were burdened with a second-class status as a result of their lack of propinquity.  Samaritans, whom Judeans considered false Jews because from before the time of David and Solomon they had worshipped God at a shrine site other than Jerusalem, were even more outré.   They were regarded spiritually and ceremonially alien for that very reason despite their geographic proximity.  In one swift parabolic gesture Jesus sent toppling the all-too-familiar spatio-ritual touchstone of divine power and presence by reframing the concept of righteousness, as the prophets themselves had done, in terms of the ethics of mercy or what Emmanuel Levinas has formalized philosophically as “responsibility to the other.”  In the same gesture gave us a still inchoate insight into what globalization is all about.

As I stress in my upcoming book GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn (Baker Academic, 2008), the question of postmodern Christianity is not ultimately about the deconstruction of texts, or the critical unmasking and realignment of the signifying systems of authority and motivation.  Methodological iconoclasm, regardless of how many trendy European luminaries it can cite, is an honored “Protestant” habit of intellectual attention to both our theological legacy and the political and social issues of the day.   But it fails to comprehend the terrain of forces that are radically reshaping the very milieu in which pose our own pressing sorts of questions.  Globalization is much more than a Schumpeterian swath of “creative destruction” across the planet as the circulation of capital is rendered both borderless and stateless, while the value of labor in classical Marxian fashion deliquesces into an precedented and “hyperreal” (Baudrillard’s term) form of surplus value that can no longer even be managed or quantified, as the current crisis of international finance discloses.   As Paul Virilio in one of his more enigmatic, but highly insightful, quips tell us: “The speed of light does not merely transform the world.  It becomes the world.  Globalization is the speed of light.”

At we approach the speed of light time condenses and space contorts.  Globalization yields an instantaneity of both communications and relationships, a transcendence of the simply cultural and the merely social.  We do not live in strictly a postmodern world, but a “globopomo” world.  We live in the postmodern cosmopolis (comparable to the Romanitas of Paul’s epoch) where the civitas Dei and the civitas terrene are diffused together.   In the postmodern cosmopolis relationships are radically “deterritorialized” (Deleuze).  Postmodern Christianity is the “radical relationality” that the postmodern cosmopolis makes possible. 

As I stated in my last book on this subject (playing on Hegel), the “relational is real and the real is relational.”  This radical relationality is the immanent – perhaps we might even say “eschatological” – derivation of the Christian revelation itself, which at the ultimate level is neither a book (the Bible) nor a doctrinal proposition (“Jesus is truly God and truly human”) nor an ecstatic experience of the kind both esotericists and charismatics frequently reference.  The theological anchor for the “archae-ological” reality of the relational in the postmodern cosmopolis is the Johannine prologue itself, on which the doctrine of the incarnation (“the logos made flesh”) rests.  “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν, καὶ ἐθεασάμεθα τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, δόξαν ὡς μονογενοῦς παρὰ πατρός, πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ἀληθείας. John 1:14).  

The “dwelling” or “tabernacling” of (Greek=σκήνεω) the divine among or with us is what makes the Christian revelation both radical and distinctive at the same time.  It distinguishes the Christian revelation from all other revelations.  The Being of the Christian God is inherently “with us” (Emmanuel) and “for us.”  As Luther put it, God is always für uns (“for us”).  Or in the language of Jean Luc Nancy, the Sein, the concrete reality of, God is not so much Dasein as a Mitsein that is at once Fürsein. 

In the global postmodern cosmopolis the “Great Commission” for Christians constitutes the enactment of Levinas’ “responsibility to the other,” insofar as the “paradoxical” signification contained in the concept of the Christian God necessitates that the “face” (Hebrew=pani) of the infinite present in the gaze of the finite other be regarded at the same time as a dynamic ethical relationship, the radical relationship to the “neighbor.”  The statement of a dynamic and radical relationality that also undergirds the “categorical imperative” of the Great Commission can be found in Luther’s famous statement from The Freedom of a Christian, the 1521 tract that encapsulates both the historical and the “new” postmodern Reformation: “as our heavenly Father has in Christ freely come to our aid, we also ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be Christs to one another and Christ may be the same in all, that is, that we may be truly Christians.”   

A "political theology" of the postmodern cosmopolis would adduce the question of a global social ethics (an "ethics of responsibility") from the incarnational "truth" of the Christian revelation. I argue that the nebula-like explosion and rhizomic spread of the new "indigenized" Christianity of the global South, documented and analyzed in the well-known work of historian Philip Jenkins and Yale theologian Lamin Sanneh, is because of this "globopomo" incarnational dimension of the faith that goes back to Jesus' own final words to his disciples.   I do not analyze the political forms of the new "globally emergent" Christianity (that is a subject for my next work of this sort) as I show the inadequacy and subtly "Eurocentric" myopia of the more familiar forms which are endlessly debated, sometimes even on this blog.   The choice is not between the old confessional Protestantism of the modern era (which in the decades following the Sixties became a kind of privatized, evangelical Gnosticism" tailored to the developing global consumer society) or the new Protean, "everything must change" sort of neo-Protestant (but equally consumeristic and Eurocentric) Christian eclecticism of  more familiar "postmodernist" discourse.   The dilemma is whether one goes on "shopping", intellectually as well as spiritually, among the many varieties of the stylishly configured (Western) "Christ of culture" or one responds in radical and reverent obedience to the one who summons us to "make disciples of all nations" - in other words, the GloboChrist who "draws us to him," the One whose kingdom is both in our midst ("God with us") and (soon) "to come" (avenir).  

Upcoming Conference: The Grandeur of Reason

Click here for the Conference description Call For Papers, info on location, booking details, and paper abstract submission.

Art and Religion at Biola; by Daniel A. Siedell

I just returned from a weekend symposium at Biola on art and religion.  (For the symposium overview and participants, see <www.Biola.edu/academics/undergrad/art/>.  I like Biola University a lot.  I like the campus; I like its proximity to Los Angeles; I like its spiritual direction; and I like the faculty and students.  It also embodies the strengths and weaknesses, the irreconcilable tensions, of a certain kind of conservative evangelicalism within which I lived my most formative years.  Eight years ago the Art Department invited me to give a series of lectures to their students.  It was instrumental in my development as a Christian and as a scholar. 

The symposium was shaped around art historian James Elkins’s little book, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (Routledge, 2004).  One of the most well-known and prolific art historians writing in English, Elkins, who professes no religious belief, offers an informative examination of the relationship of art and religion.  He concludes his study by observing:

I have tried to show why committed, engaged, ambitious, informed art does not mix with dedicated, serious, thoughtful, heartfelt religion.  Wherever the two meet, one wrecks the other…That is not to imply the two sides should maintain their mutual mistrust, but that the talk needs to be very slow and careful (115).

But despite this conclusion, Elkins, however, does not think that art and religion should go their separate ways.  He suggests that it is, on the contrary, “irresponsible not to keep trying” to develop a closer relationship (116).

Elkins seems dissatisfied with his own conclusions.  I find this one of the book’s chief virtues.  Art and religion do not mix.  However, we must continue to reflect on art and religion, together.  Elkins’ irenic approach offers a stiff challenge to those who claim to have it all figured out, who tie up too quickly and neatly the loose ends of both “art” and “religion.” Elkins simply cannot dismiss or disengage “art” from “religion” despite the fact that he cannot resolve their relationship in a way that he finds satisfying.  The two cultural practices, “art” and “religion,” are thus perpetually separated yet inextricably linked by that tiny conjunction, “and.”  Heeding Elkins’ warning, my remarks will be slow and careful and perhaps a bit too tentative for those who are anxious to formulate a definitive “Christian perspective” on Elkins or contemporary art.  But the stakes are too high.  My work as a critic, curator, and art historian is in large part predicated upon the meaning and significance of this tiny conjunction.

What cultural practices has Elkins connected with this tiny conjunction?  He defines religion as a “named, non-cultic, major system of belief” such as Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, or Buddhism.  Elkins’ definition of religion is significant for two reasons.  First, it offers no value judgment.  It is clear that Elkins deeply respects religious belief and practice.  And in this he stands out in the contemporary art world, where most critics and art historians consider religious belief, consciously or not, to be merely a symptom of a lack of education, deficient thinking, or the result of unfortunate geographical location.  Moreover, Elkins also includes in his definition of religion what he calls their “trappings,” such as “rituals, liturgies, catechisms, calendars, holy days, and what have you.”  This is an important observation, for religion is not merely the sum total of beliefs or dogmas to which one must give mental assent.

Elkins’ definition of art is also important.  “Art is whatever is exhibited in galleries in major cities, bought by museums of contemporary art, shown in biennales and the Documenta, and written about in periodicals such as Artforum, October, Flash Art, Parkett, or Tema Celeste.”  Elkins’ frank assertion of high or museum art and its continued life through the narratives of modernism and postmodernism in artistic practice poses an immediate challenge to the evangelical community, which often dismisses modernist high art and the contemporary art world as elitist and anti-Christian.  In its place, it has tended to redefine “art” in one of three ways.  First, it identifies “authentic” art with the figurative style of the Renaissance and Baroque and transmitted through the academic tradition.  Second, it defines high art as liturgical art or art produced for the Church as patron.  These first two approaches result in an exaggerated and distorted attachment to a Golden Age, when high art and Christianity allegedly operated hand in glove and communicated seamlessly to their “audience.”  Third, it eschews fine art altogether and engages contemporary visual culture through film, music, and design.  The result is that discussions about “art and religion” from these perspectives redefine “art” in order to work more closely with what is already understood to be “religion.”  In other words, art is shaped to accommodate religion.  But Elkins’ approach, which emerges from the contemporary art world, not from a pre-determined religious commitment, bends neither “art” nor “religion,” and thus offers to the Christian community a different way to conceive of these practices.  Evangelicals simply cannot dismiss the history and development of modern art as irrelevant.  This approach keeps the contemporary embodiment of high art at arm’s length, to say the least.  The problem, particularly for art departments like Biola, is that contemporary artistic practice, as Elkins defines it, is not at arm’s length.  It is next door.  It is in the graduate programs, commercial galleries, and world-class museums only a few miles away. 

An important reason why art and religion, as Elkins defines them, do not mix is that each side has calcified a view of the other that ultimately insulates their most committed practitioners from recognizing deeper connections between them.  Each side regards the other to be important in theory but has, through corrupted contemporary practice, denigrated its true nature.  So, from the perspective of artistic practice, the cranky Christian Right and soppy televangelists have obscured the teachings of Jesus; and from the Christian perspective, the work of Jeff Koons, Damien Hurst, and the Chapman Brothers have made a mockery of the achievements of Raphael, Rembrandt, and Giotto.  Despite the significant grain of truth in each criticism, such perspectives tend to weaken the virtue of self-criticism, ignoring the log in one’s eye as one obsesses about the splinter of wood in the eye of the Other.  Elkins’ book is refreshingly free of such distortions. 

Elkins’ great strength as a scholar lies in his ability to develop taxonomies and other categories as a means to sort out, divide, and analyze complex problems.  This yields important and significant results when he explores art and religion.  However, I would like to push further, complicate things a bit by finessing Elkins’ definitions of religion and art, by looking at that tiny conjunction, “and,” that strange space between religion and art, which can seem as vast as Lessing’s ugly broad ditch.  My approach takes his two clean, tidy rooms, one labeled “art” and the other “religion,” and mess them up just a little bit.  Rather than see this tiny conjunction that keeps art and religion together yet perpetually apart, I consider it to be porous, to be a hallway that connects them.  It is a hallway that not only connects them, that enables movement from one to the other and back, but is also messy, where stuff from each of the rooms spills out.  Although I do considerable work in each of these rooms, most my time, however, seems to be spent in the cluttered hallway as I shuttle back and forth.

The porosity of this hallway is risky, however, as I have learned through my experience with artist Enrique Martínez Celaya.  As I approached his work from a distinctive Christian theological, philosophical, and aesthetic perspective, his work pushed back, not necessarily in resistance, but to exert pressure on my preconceived patterns of thought.  In important ways, looking at his pictures and reflecting on them over the last five years has played a role in my own religious development every bit as important as my reading of the Scriptures, study of the Fathers and church history, and involvement in spiritual practices.  This is all the more surprising because Martínez Celaya is not a religious believer despite the religiosity of his artistic practice.  His work embodies Wittgenstein’s enigmatic admission, “I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing everything from a religious point of view.”  Rather than take as rigid and static a certain Christian worldview which one merely applies to contemporary art in order to decode the worldview of the artist, the integrity and aesthetic complexity of the work of art should at the very least be allowed to shape a more self-reflective and richly textured position.  But this also applies to artists, critics, and art historians who reveal a shocking lack of knowledge about religion in general and Christianity in particular even while their own practices are in perilously close proximity.  But both religion and art have their constituencies, their board members, patrons, colleagues, and the like that conspire against such messiness.  Both have their confessional watchdogs.  That is why my experience of this cluttered hallway, although exhilarating and productive, is also terrifying and sometimes lonely.  There are very few people in this hallway.  But, there are some.  I meet Martínez Celaya there.  And I also meet New York-based independent curator, philosopher, critic Klaus Ottmann, curator of the Site Santa Fe Biennial in 2006.  An avowed atheist who has told me unapologetically that art is his religion, Ottmann, Martinez Celaya, and I have had provocative discussions of our shared interest in Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling,” Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, The Passion of Andrei Rublev, Pascal’s Pensées, and St. Augustine’s Confessions.  That the greatest icon painter in the history of the Church, an existentialist Lutheran philosopher’s text on Abraham and Isaac, private thoughts by a Catholic mathematician, and the conversion story of one of the greatest saints of the Latin Church could be the common ground for discussion with an agnostic Cuban-born artist, atheistic German-born critic, and a rather conservative Christian art historian from Nebraska has to speak to something significant.

Let me suggest that this tiny conjunction between art and religion, this cluttered and narrow hallway between their tidy rooms, is liturgical practice.  It is the liturgy that is the porosity between art and religion.  Both religion and art are embodied.  And the heart and soul of any religion is its liturgy.  Religion is not merely or simply “believed,” as if it is the sum total of our intellectual thoughts about it; it is practiced.  It is, literally, religion’s work.  It is art’s work as well. 

Sensitivity to the liturgical and sacramental dimension of contemporary artistic practice requires, however, that Christians practice a Christianity that is liturgical and sacramental.  Evangelicalism, however, is anti-liturgical and anti-sacramental and so it is largely insensitive to those aspects in contemporary artistic practice that might resonate most strongly with religious practice in general and Christian practice more specifically.  Contemporary art deserves a richer, fuller, deeper and more expansive Christianity, one that is nourished by a liturgical and sacramental worldview, which can experience, interpret, and find meaningful even something as strange as contemporary artistic practice.

St. Paul had a choice on Mars Hill.  He could easily have condemned as blasphemous those altars erected by the Greeks to the unknown god.  That seems to be the strategy in much reflection on contemporary art from a Christian perspective.  But St. Paul did not do that.  As he walked around those monuments and altars he creatively interpreted them to be, in fact, altars to the one true God, whom the Greeks honored without full knowledge.  St. Paul’s apologetic was to complete their knowledge, to fulfill it, not to destroy it.  That is the model for Christian work in the contemporary art world.  It is to show how and in what way contemporary artistic practice participates in, embodies, and points to religious truth, whether or not the artists themselves intend as much. 

The Russian Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann once said, echoing the Church Fathers, that to be a Christian means to see Christ everywhere. But we, as Christians, become comfortable seeing Christ where we expect to see him, where we want to see him.  But Christ is everywhere, even in the contemporary art world.  Do we have the courage and imagination to find Christ there, even if it risks messing up our own tidy artistic and religious rooms?

Christ is Risen!  Christos Anesti!

He Rests in Rising

by wendell berry

What hard travail God does in death!
He strives in sleep, in our despair,
And all flesh shudders underneath
The nightmare of His sepulcher.

The earth shakes, grinding its deep stone;
All night the cold wind heaves and pries;
Creation strains sinew and bone
Against the dark door where He lies.

The stem bent, pent in seed, grows straight
And stands.  Pain break in song. Surprising
The merely dead, graves fill with light
Like opened eyes.  He rests in rising.

(from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, p. 25)

at a distance to the state: radical democracy and religion

I've been working on a paper on radical democracy and radical ecclesiology for two different conferences, and I was hoping to get some feedback from you all.  It begins by comparing Thomas Hobbes and Alain Badiou concerning the State, and then looks at the recent collaboration by Romand Coles and Stanley Hauerwas called Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations Between a Radical Democrat and a Christian.

It is some what of a survey paper, and still in draft condition.  I don't feel that I have pulled it all together.  Anyway, I'm fine with heavy criticism, so shoot off some comments or email me (holsclaws@netzero.net) if you have the time to read it. 

Download: at a distance to the state draft.doc

Abstract: Contemporary globalization puts both religion and the State on notice.  Giving rise to a backlash of religious fundamentalism, cultural and economic globalization also puts the State into a reactionary stance.  In light of this, questioning the political relationship between religion and the State must again offer an account of the State as well as religion.  This paper will therefore investigate the relationship between the State, religion, and radical democracy.  An interrogation of the State will proceed through a juxtaposition of the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and 21st century French philosopher Alain Badiou.  The former understands politics as principally concerned with forming the State, while the latter understands politics as operating ‘at a distance to the State.’  Within these conceptions of the State, we will then examine the recent account by Romand Coles and Stanely Hauerwas of radical democracy and radical ecclesiology in Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations Between a Radical Democrat and a Christian.  In relation to Hobbes and Badiou, we will examine the feasibility of the church as an alternative ‘polis’ in relation to the project of radical democracy.  With Badiou, it will be argued that the best understanding of politics is not as ‘against the State’ in a religious o