Daily Archives: June 20, 2007

Cornell West: Democracy is not my Faith

Posted by on June 20, 2007 Comments Off

I speak as a Christian- one whose commitment to democracy is very deep but whose Christian convictions are deeper. Democracy is not my faith. And American democracy is not my idol. To see the gospel of Jesus Christ bastardized by imperial Christians and pulverized by Constantinian believers and then exploited by nihilistic elites of the American empire makes my blood boil. To be a Christian- a follower of Jesus Christ- is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom. This is the radical love in Christian freedom and the radical freedom in Christian love that embraces socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope.If Christians do not exemplify this love and freedom, then we side with the nihilists of the Roman empire (cowardly elite romans and subjugated jews) who put Jesus to a humiliating death. Instead of receiving his love in freedom as a life-enhancing gift of grace, we end up believing in the idols of the empire that nailed him to the cross. I do not want to be numbered among those who sold their souls for a mess of pottage- who surrendered their democratic Christian identity for a comfortable place at the table of the American empire while, like Lazarus, the least of these cried out and I was too intoxicated with worldly power and might to hear, beckon, and heed their cries.

To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely- to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away. This is the kind of vision and courage required to enable the renewal of prophetic, democratic Christian identity in the age of the American empire.

H/T: Eliacin

Tragedy for The Simple Way

Posted by on June 20, 2007 Comments Off

As some of you might have heard, there was recently a 7 alarm fire in Philadelphia which decimated the Kensington neighborhood where the intentional Christian community, The Simple Way is located.  Many familes have been displaced and many other have lost all of their belongings.  Please be in prayer for this community.

Here is the most recent letter from The Simple Way:

This morning, a 7-alarm fire consumed an abandoned warehouse in our Kensington neighborhood in Philadelphia. The Simple Way Community Center at 3200 Potter Street was destroyed as well as at least eight of our neighbors’ homes. Over 100 people were evacuated from their homes, and 400 families are currently without power. Despite this developing tragedy, we are incredibly thankful to share that all of our community members and every one of our neighbors is safely out of harm’s way.

This fire will forever change the fabric of our community. Eight families are currently homeless, and in many cases have lost their vehicles as well as their homes. One of our neighbors, the Mahaias Family, lost their three cars as well as the equipment one family member uses for her massage therapy business. Teenager Brian Mahaias is devastated not because he has lost his belongings, but because he fears that this fire will force him to move away from this neighborhood that is his family as well as his home.

The Simple Way has lost a community center that was home to our Yes! And… afterschool program, community arts center, and Cottage Printworks t-shirt micro-business as well as to two of our community members. Community members Shane Claiborne and Jesce Walz have lost all of their belongings, Yes! And…’s after school studio and library were ruined, and community member Justin Donner’s Cottage Printworks equipment and t-shirts were destroyed.

We are thankful that we are able to help each other during this time of need, and we will continue to keep your informed about today’s events.

We have established funds to support the families who have lost their homes, the Yes! And… afterschool program, and the Simple Way community.

A fund to support the families has been established through a partner organization, EAPE. Tax-deductible donations can be made at https://www.tonycampolo.org/online_donation.php . Please make sure to put “Kensington Families Fund ” in the memo section.

Donations to the Rebuilding Fund can be made via PayPal to contribute@awip.us.

-The Simple Way Community

Radical Trinitarianism: Index of Posts

Posted by on June 20, 2007 2 comments

This series of posts takes its impetus from the introductory and supplemental theses I posted previously on Radical Trinitarianism.  In the next few posts to come, I will attempt to offer an incohate theological exploration of dogmatics from a radically Trinitarian orientation.  I had not originally intended to turn this into a series on dogmatics, but after thinking further through the idea of Radical Trinitarianism, I found that this line of reasoning was quite fruitful, at least insofar as my own theological instincts go.

What follows will be a series of brief explorations in Christian dogmatics that seeks to be radically Trinitarian in all dimensions, and yet to avoid a certain faddishness or mere Trinitarian glossiness to what is being said.  I hope for this exploration to yield two things.  First, I hope it shows the importance and fruit of allowing Trinitarian theology to radically shift our mode of thinking in all areas of dogmatic theology.  Second, I hope that it shows how Christian dogmatics, when properly Trinitarian in form and content, are more oriented toward doxology, liturgy, and celebration which is the telos of all theological reflection.

This, then is an outline of the posts to come in my Radical Trinitarianism series.

Radical Trinitarianism

§1: Introductory Theses

§2: Supplemental Theses

§3: Christology & Theological Method

  • §3.1: The Gospel & the Promise

  • §3.2: Christ, Church, & Scripture

§4: Trinity, Analogy, & Participation in God

  • §4.1: Who’s Afraid of the Social Trinity?

  • §4.2: Theodramatic Analogy & Personhood

§5: God, History, & Drama: The Trinitarian History of the World

  • §5.1: Transcendence & Divine Noncompetitiveness

  • §5.2: From Melodrama to Drama

  • §5.3: Immutability, Covenant, & the Pasio Dei

§6: Ekklesia & Pentecost: Salvation, the Spirit, & the Church

  • §6.1: The Pentecostalization of the World

  • §6.2: The Ekklesialization of Humanity

  • §6.3: Mysterium Sacramentis: The Church as the Telos of the Cosmos

§7: Transposition & Consummation: Towards a Trinitarian Eschatology of the Cross

  • §7.1: Suffering: Horrors, Hope, & Good Friday

  • §7.2: Death: Non-Being, & Holy Saturday

  • §7.3: Resurrection: Kenosis, Plerosis, & Easter

  • §7.4: Life: Communio, Shalom, & Pentecost

§8: De Forma Trinitate: Liturgy, Life, & Joy

  • §8.1: The Great Dance: Doxological Ontology & Liturgical Identities

  • §8.2: Blood of Love, Bread of Life: Eucharist & Ethics

  • §8.3: The Great Banquet: Baptism & Feasting

  • §8.4: Triune Rhetoric: Hearing & Speaking in Communio

 §9: Inhabiting Jerusalem: Shalom, Polyphony, & the Omnipotence of Grace

Radical Trinitarianism §2: Supplemental Theses

Posted by on June 20, 2007 Comments Off

The following theses are meant to supplement and complete my introductory theses on radical trinitarianism that I posted a few days ago.  Together, these two sets of theses will form the skeleton from which I shall attempt to unpack a brief trinitarian dogmatics.

  1. A truly Trinitarian theology is thoroughly pneumatological.  It is in and through the Spirit of Pentecost that the life of the Trinity as revealed in the cross of Christ is communicated to humankind throughout all nations.  The mission of the Spirit in the economy of salvation is the pentecostalization of the world, that is the bringing together of all persons into one Christic body of communion.  The Spirit is the communal “language” of God (the Logos) transposed into human tongues.  It is from within the outpouring of the Spirit of Triune love that all created persons find their true personhood and destiny.  The Logos of the Triune life does not compete with, but fulfills the logoi of creation, suffusing them with grace and transforming them into occasions of Christic and pneumatic communion.  This is fundamentally what the church is as the community of the Spirit.

  2. What the Spirit brings about in the world through the creation of the church is the fulfillment of God’s covenant with humankind.  The telos of God’s work in the world is the being-together of himself with his created people (see Rev. 21:3-4).  The shape of this being-together of God and humanity is life in covenant.  Covenant is God’s determination to be God for us and God with us.  It is his determination for us to be for one another and with one another.  And this self-determination of God as the God of covenant is coterminous with God’s Triune being, and specifically with the history of Jesus Christ in Israel, the Church, and all creation.

  3. The history of Jesus Christ narrates the Triune God’s establishment of a new covenant economy.   What this entails is the disruption, and indeed the dissolution of all other humanly crafted modes of social life which determine the identities of human persons in terms of the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic.  The de novo social order that is brought about in the ekklesia of Christ is one in which reconciliation first appears as a reality in the world.  The inauguration of the new covenant economy dismantles the logic of cultural ethnocentrisms, racial hegemonies,  and political nationalisms.  This is the message of Pentecost.  Namely, that in the work of Christ and the Spirit a new covenant has been established which brings about the flourishing of human relationship with God and one another.  To live in God’s new covenant economy is to have our identities radically reshaped by the resurrection and Pentecost.  It is to live within the realm of Christ’s healing compassion and the Spirit’s flame of infinite love which brings about the being-together of all humanity in Christ.

  4. In the passion and resurrection of Christ, and the giving of the Spirit, the Triune God deconstructs humankind’s faulty performance of community and thus, of personal identity as ruled by the powers.  What happens in Christ is recapitulation.  Christ submits himself to the machinations of history as ruled by the logic of the powers, and in so doing, unmasks and destroys it.  Thus, Christ re-performs history through the Triune movement of his life, death, and resurrection, and thus draws creation into the new, recapitulated world of the Spirit.  Pentecost, then is the climax of the recapitulating work of Christ to remake the very fabric of human history within his own person, and thus to establish humanity as his own body, in communion with the Father through himself in the Spirit.  To live within the fabric of the new history which Christ recapitulates in his life and breathes out in the Spirit is to live within the realm of God’s own Triune life.

  5. The history that is rewoven in Christ’s person through the Spirit is the history of God’s love outstripping, absorbing, and transfiguring the logic of human violence and exclusion.  In Christ and the Spirit, the violence and the will towards death that marks the life of sin is transposed into the life of the Trinity, overcome and extinguished in the enflamed, eternal love of the Triune persons.  This is what death and resurrection means.  In Christ, the infinite peace and serenity of the Trinity is found to be unfathomably deeper than the furthest depths of human godlessness and hell.  Thus, when the depths of Satan are invaded by the luminescence of the Trinity, all darkness is cast away and in this new light, humankind is freed from the fear of death to dwell in the world of Triune shalom.  Triune redemption, both proleptically and consummately is a life of shalom.  The end which we are promised and called to in the Triune economy is a life of infinite peace, where melodrama is transfigured into drama, where discord is transposed into symphonic glory.  In the realm of Triune shalom fasting breaks forth into feasting, thirst is forever quenched by streams of living water and wine.  In short, the realm of Triune shalom is the realm of infinite joy.

  6. And this speaks also to the “point” of Trinitarian theology, if there is such a thing.  No theology is Trinitarian if it does anything less than leading the theological community into joy.  For in the end, joy is the perhaps the best description of the life in God which all theologizing about the Trinity seeks to shed light on.  To be a radical Trinitarian theologian is to live in joy.  

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