Monthly Archives: September 2008 - Page 2

Against Ambiguity–In Praise of Binary Oppositions

Posted by on September 25, 2008 1 comment

The Johannine writings are distinctive among the writings of the New Testament in that they are so radically polarized in how the present the conflict between the church and the world. John’s whole thought world is one of binaries: life and death, love and hate, truth and lies, above and below, heaven and earth. This has been one of the reasons that the Johannine corpus has been subject to quite a bit of disdain. Clearly, it seems, John’s pure world of clear opposition between good and evil, church and world, must be an oversimplification, reflecting a sort of paleofundamentalism that must be qualified by other, more nuanced segments of the New Testament.

I would question this way of evaluating the Johannine writings. By contrast, I suggest that the very disambiguity of the Johnannine thought world is precisely what it has to offer the church. The problem with the church is generally not that it is too stark in how it views its life vis a vis the world, but that it is too nuanced. We are far more apt to strive for ambiguity, pluriformity, measure, and moderation in how we understand ourselves in relation to the pressing issues of our world. We crave ironic, tragic, and ambiguous ways of reading our world because it allows us to moderate any sort of ethical rigor that we might detect the gospel imposing on us. All too often our declarations about the ambiguities of being a disciple in a “complex” world are ways of simply making disobedience palatable and normal.

Bonhoeffer saw this perfectly in his book, Discipleship, which argued in no uncertain terms that we strive for ambiguity precisely to avoid questions of obedience. This is a message that continues to need to be heard. The Johannine word is always and ever relevant to a church that strives to have the demands of the Word against it eased into a sort of ambiguous tension–which is simply an elaborate way of dissolving any such tensions. We need to be told, not that there are countless “options” for our lives in Christ which may have their pros and cons, but that more often than not, our choices are between truth and lies, life and death. Our cravings for the comforts of ambiguity and complexity mask a perverse dodge that seeks to avoid asking the hard questions, presented so vividly in John’s gospel. What would it mean for us if we were willing to view the decisions we make about where to live, how to live, and who to live with as decisions either for life or for death? What if we permitted ourselves to embrace that kind of Johannine seriousness in attempting to morally navigate our Christian lives?

The Impossibility and Necessity of Love

Posted by on September 25, 2008 1 comment

The Johannine literature arguably has he most developed and sophisticated theological understanding of love in the entire Bible. For John, love and love alone is the test of all Christian reality. All of this is grounded in John’s theology proper–God is love, and as such love is the divine reality par excellence. Love is a divine, rather than a human possibility. Within “the world” love is simply impossible. For John our ability to love one another is solely grounded in the intrusion of God’s love into the world. “We love because he first loved us.”

For John, living in a community defined by mutual love is every bit as impossible as the dead being raised to life. However, if the God who is love, the God who raises the dead has indeed irrupted into the world, love is not only possible, it is the only true and real evidence of the gospel’s truth. For John, love is intimately tied up with the reality of the resurrection. Love is the the reality which raises the dead, and is the reality of the gospel in the world. Thus, “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death.”

But what is the definition of Johannine love? It is precisely what we see in Christ–the willingness to expend oneself fully for the sake of others. There is nothing sentimental about Johannine love. Johannine love is the love that subjects itself to death for others and in doing so flourishes and lives in a way that defies any rational calculation. The reality of this love being embodied in the world is the only apologia for the Christian faith in Johannine perspective.

Violence and Nonviolence: Human and Divine

Posted by on September 24, 2008 23 comments

In his incredible book, Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf makes a very subversive and contentious argument. He claims that the Christian call to nonviolence in the face of persecution, violence, and terror requires a belief in divine vengeance. Volf argues that Christians are called to a posture of nonviolence in the face of suffering, patiently bearing the cross and offering forgiveness to those who would abuse them.

However, this posture of patient suffering is sustained through a belief in the coming retribution of God who will right all wrongs, judge the guilty, and bring about equity for the oppressed. For Volf, we are called to nonviolence, not because God is a God who refuses to judge, but rather because judgment ultimately belongs to God alone. God is the source of all human life, as such God alone has authority over human life (cf. Deut 32:39). The taking of the lives of others thus becomes a way of usurping the sovereignty of God over human life, that is why it is wrong, not simply because it is “violent.”

Here is Volf’s zinger of a quote:

“My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologian in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this chapter was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind. (p. 304)

Now, whatever one may think of this statement, one cannot deny that it has some measure of authority and integrity behind it. Anyone who doesn’t take a challenge like this seriously is almost certainly among those enjoying the “pleasant captivities of the liberal mind” indeed!

What I appreciate about Volf’s view is that it is difficult. It accepts no easy answers. It is easy to offer the enlightened liberal platitudes about God being perfect nonviolent love, and therefore we are called to absolute nonviolence (which, after all will really solve all the world’s problems). It is likewise easy to claim that we are victims, that our offenders are opposed to God and therefore the cause of justice in on our side and we are free to violently eliminate those who stand against us (and therefore against God). Volf takes the hard path of insisting that evil must be punished, and yet demanding that we refuse to take upon ourselves the mantle of divine perogative, suffering at the hands of evil rather than playing God ourselves.

However, that being said, the question remains, is Volf right?

A New Otherworldliness

Posted by on September 24, 2008 3 comments

Robert Kysar, a noted Johannine scholar makes an interesting observation in his essay, “The Coming Hermeneutical Earthquake in Johannine Interpretation.” He predicts that twenty-first Christians, having lost their dominance over the mainstream culture in the West, will draw heavily on the Gospel of John, particularly as a resource “to understand themselves over against the world.” He predicts the coming of a “new other-worldliness” that is grounded in a sort of Johannine sectarianism.

While Kysar worries that this will be dangerous in some key ways, I find myself sitting right in the center of the faultline of this coming earthquake and loving it. As I’ve said before, I think the church needs to become more sectarian, not less. Only by doing so will we discover the forms of communal life which make for authentic culture and human flourishing.

At least in evangelical and mainline protestant cricles, there is far too much ink spilt today on how the church must become more “authentically worldly.” The church, we are told must move beyond simple preoccupation with “eternal” life and focus on the matters of real importance in the world, social justice, poverty, war, world hunger, etc.

However, this call to discover an authentic Christian worldliness comes, more often than not, at too great a price. For the sake of being timely and relevant, the church equivocates on the radicality of its message and its calling. The church cannot seek to “get involved” in the world, or become “wordly” in any way other than being precisely otherworldly. The reason for this is because the church itself is an “other world.”

The church’s true calling is in fact to be as otherworldly as possible because the message of the gospel is precisely that there is a whole new world into which our broken lives can be translated and transfigured. This does not mean that Christians seek to cut off contact with non-Christians, rather it means that the only real thing, the only truly radical thing that Christians have to offer those outside is the offer of a new world of reconciliation, actualized in Christ and made present to us by the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit.

Thus, the question the church should be asking is not, “How can we best enter into the struggles of the world?” Rather the church’s question must always by “What does it mean for us to live as the true world, the world of the gospel in the midst of this passing age of darkness?”

Apocalyptic Eschatology and the Ethics of Love: Some Johannine Observations

Posted by on September 23, 2008 4 comments

One of the most striking aspects of the Johannine writings is the way in which they view the world through the lens of apocalyptic. The Gospel and Epistles of John see the world as utterly rent by cosmic conflict. The church in the Johannine writings is an island of the order of God that has broken down into the cosmic anti-God system which is the “world.” Thus the church is the site of conflict between the forces of God and the forces of the Devil.

The Johannine writings understand the eschatological tension of the church in the world quite differently than the “already/not yet” of Paul and the Synoptics. In Paul especially the line between the old age and the age to come runs through the church and through each Christian (see esp. Rom. 7-8). For John by contrast, the church is the divine reality of God that has descended down to earth, invading, and interrupting the evil system of the world. Thus, the eschatological tension the church lives in is not within the church but between the church and the world. Thus the holiness of the church is vital in the Johannine writings. The church is the presence of the heavenly kingdom of God which is dynamically invading the world, translating people out of the world of death into the new world of life. (cf. 1 John 3:14)

Deriving from its apocalyptic orientation, the Johannine literature centers on calling Christians into a life of total love for one another. Love is the ultimate definition of who and what God is (1 John 4:7ff). Therefore, we are called to participate in, imitate, and abide in the form of love manifest in Christ, eschewing any other way of being in the world. Thus for John holiness is defined as an exclusive orientation towards mutual love as the Christian mode of action.

Moreover, this ethic of absolute love derives from John’s apocalyptic worldview. Loving one another is how we participate in God’s invasion of the world that began in Christ’s death and resurrection. Loving one another brings us into God’s own being, unites us with Christ, and grants us eternal life, which, for John simply is union with God in the perichoretic relations of the Godhead (John 17:21-23). Thus, the ecclesial reality of mutual love is the reality of life displacing death, it is the eschaton embodied in the world. The Johannine ethic of mutual love is ultimately an ethic which demands and implies a theological understanding of history. It calls us to incorporate any and all interruptions into our life through a thoroughgoing practice of love, believing this act to be the only mode of being that is in step with God’s eschatological action, which is bringing creation to its transfiguration and consumation.

John Milbank: The Future of Love

Posted by on September 22, 2008 16 comments

I realize the blog has been silent for a few days. This is the fault of John Milbank. I’ve spend the last couple weeks rigorously editing his forthcoming volume with Cascade Books, The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology. Whatever disagreements I and anyone else might have with Milbank, the man is an incredible genius, having a grasp of western philosophy and theology, the likes of which is rarely seen in a theologian.

The forthcoming book promises to be a very good one, containing a lot of superb essays from Milbank that really get at the inner-workings of his theopolitical vision and his theology as a whole. Here is the contents of the book:

I Theology and English Culture

1    Coleridge: Divine Logos and Human Communication
2    Religion, Culture, and Anarchy: The Attack on the Arnoldian Vision
3    What is Living and What is Dead in Newman’s Grammar of Assent

II Theology and British Politics

4    Were the “Christian Socialists” Socialist?
5    The Body by Love Possessed: Christianity and Late Capitalism in Britain
6    On Baseless Suspicion: Christianity and the Crisis of Socialism

III Theology and Social Theory: Responses

7    Enclaves: or Where is the Church?
8    On Theological Transgression
9    The Invocation of Clio

IV Political Theology Today

10    Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror
11    Liberality versus Liberalism
12    Stale Expressions: The Management-Shaped Church

V Theology and Pluralism

13    The End of Dialogue
14    The Conflict of the Faculties: Theology and the Economy of the Sciences
15    Faith, Reason, and Imagination: The Study of Theology and Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century

VI Theological Agendas

16    Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: A Short Summa in Forty-Two Responses to Unasked Questions
17    The Transcendality of the Gift: A Summary in Answer to 12 Questions
18    The Future of Love: A Reading of Benedict XVI’s encyclical Deus Caritas Est

Personally, I found the essays in the sections on Theology and Social Theory and “Theological Agendas” to be the most engaging and interesting. In particular, I think Milbank’s article, “Enclaves, or Where is the Church?” is one of his best pieces. In it we get an utterly rich reading of Paul’s ecclesiology in the Corinthian epistles. Milbank’s engagement with Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclial, Deus Caritas Est is also a superb piece. All in all, I think anyone interested in contemporary theology in general, and Milbank’s work in particular will find this book very helpful. I look forward to it going into production soon.

Children of Abraham

Posted by on September 18, 2008 16 comments

There is one thing and one thing alone that distinguishes Christianity, Judaism, and Islam from all other world religions: they all trace themselves back to the same person, Abraham. For all three of these religions, the connection to the patriarch, Abraham is a central part of their identity. These three religions, unique among all others, consider themselves in some sense deriving from Abraham.

The Jewish theologian Peter Ochs has often highlighted the importance of the common Abrahamic heritage of these three faiths in his dialogues with John Howard Yoder and in his response to 9/11. If there is any theologian who takes the issue of “Abrahamicity” seriously in terms of inter-religious dialogue, it is him.

Here is my question: what theological significance, if any, does the common Abrahamic heritage of Judaism and Islam have from a Christian theological perspective? Clearly we cannot think about Judaism and Islam the same way we think about, say, Hinduism. At some level our stories are connected. What theological difference does this connection make?

The Church’s Claim

Posted by on September 18, 2008 Comments Off

“The Church claims to show the human world as such what is possible for it in relation to God–not through the adding of ecclesiastical activities to others, and not through the sacralizing of existing communal forms, but by witnessing to the possibility of a common life sustained by God’s creative breaking of existing frontiers and showing that creative authority in the pattern of relation already described, the building up of Christ-like persons. The Church’s good news is that human community is possible; the Church’s challenge is its insistence that this possibility is realized only in that giving away of power in order to nurture authority in others that is learned in the giving away of God in Jesus, and its further insistence that the relations constituting Christ’s Body neither compete with nor vindicate others, but simply stand on their own right as the context which relativizes all others.”

– Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 233.

Being Converted in a World of False Communality

Posted by on September 17, 2008 2 comments

“The transfiguring of the world in Christ can seem partial or marginal if we have not learned, by speaking and hearing parables, a willingness to lose the identities and perceptions we make for ourselves: all good stories change us if we hear them attentively; the most serious stories change us radically. that is why tragedy is important, especially in a culture of false communality. And if we can accept  a very general definition of parable as narrative both dealing with and requiring ‘conversion’, radical loss and radical novelty, it may not be too far-fetched to say that the task of theology is the explication of parable, and so of conversion.”

– Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 42.

My Philosophy of Blogging

Posted by on September 17, 2008 14 comments

When I look through the few hundred posts I’ve written since I started blogging, three basic categories stick out to me. The first consists of posts that are quotes, reviews, reflections, and thoughts stimulated by books I’m reading, things I’m watching, or events that are currently happening. These posts are primarily a way for me to process various things that I’m taking in in an effort to understand them better and think more intelligently and accurately about them. The second category consists of works of constructive theology, attempts at synthesizing my own perspectives on theological issues for the purpose of ongoing discussion. Personally, I think I have less posts in this category than in any other, but these are the blog posts I like best to write and tend to think are the most important, at least to me personally. Third, I post polemics, knee-jerk responses to contemporary happenings, perspectives, and people. These are often the most fun and precarious posts to write. They generate the most discussion and traffic, but also tend to become a black hole.

My basic philosophy about blogging is something that I only came to be aware of after doing it for some time. The key thing that I think readers and commenter’s should understand about (what I take to be) all good blogging is its inherently fragmentary, exploratory, and unfinished nature. Blogging, including theology blogging is all about pressing issues, responding to recent discoveries, and engaging thoughts that one is only cursorily familiar with. Blogging is not like writing books and articles on theology. It is much less certain and more playful that those genres. All good theology bloggers will be eager to bend on most (but definitely not all) of the things they post on. Theology blogging, at least as far as I’m concerned, should not be a sounding board for one’s own certainties, but a space within which to rigorously explore one’s uncertainties. A good blog post is one which understands itself as merely the opening of a door to different vistas and discoveries in regard to the subject matter discussed. A good blog reader is one who understands this fundamentally tentative and exploratory nature of blogging.

Much like keeping a journal, theology blogging is something that is actually quite embarrassing half of the time. Try reading posts you wrote two years or more ago and you’ll see. That is what I love about this mode of theological conversation. It is inherently unfinished, exploratory, and playful. I always write with the knowledge that much of what I post I will eventually come to express and understand very differently as a result of the conversations that follow. This is what, to my mind, makes theology blogging such a potentially good form of theological conversation. It lacks the strictures and confines that attend the other venues of writing and discussion in academic circles. It is in some sense, a safe realm in which genuine change of mind can safely occur. This is, I think one of the most rewarding things about theology blogging, the chance to have one’s own mind changed and to witness the change of mind of others as we all seek to journey on in our pursuit of the gospel.

The Cross-Confessional Persistence of Honor Killings

Posted by on September 16, 2008 2 comments

One of the things that editing and proofreading books forces on you is the reading of books on topics you ordinarily wouldn’t choose to read. I just finished a manuscript arguing that the dilemma Joseph faced in the biblical account of the virgin birth involved potentially bringing about Mary’s death through an honor killing, similar to those that we hear about every so often in the news.

One of the other interesting points the book makes is that honor killings are equally common across religious lines. Among middle easterners (and other ethnic groups and regions, including China), religious affiliation is statistically irrelevant to the likelihood of one’s participating in an honor killing. This I found incredibly frightening. The book included an account of a Palestinian Christian who murdered his daughter that was particularly harrowing.

What the book shows very well is the way in which the quest for patriarchal power, not religious convictions as such, lies at the heart of honor killings. Most honor killings depicted in the book involve the murderers explicitly violating crucial tenets of the faith that they explicitly profess. The  logic of these honor murders revolves around an utterly patriarchal worldview in which the virginity of women is conceived of as the “property” of their fathers and husbands. Familial honor is breached when a daughter’s virginity is defaced outside of marriage and that dishonor is rectified by murdering the woman who brings this shame to the family. Truly disturbing realities to contemplate.

The stories and poems from women who have witnessed and escaped these horrible murders are quite jarring. The fact that Jesus was conceived in a situation vulnerable to this sort of patriarchal barbarism is a very powerful notion. The unborn Jesus dwelt within the vulnerable body of a powerless woman mired in an utterly dehumanizing culture in which her very life hung in the balance on account of her willingness to be used by God for our redemption. As such could we say that Jesus indwells all women who are victims of this sort of patriarchal violence in a particularly intimate way? Yes, I think we had better be able to.

Moral Equivalence, War, and Abortion

Posted by on September 15, 2008 45 comments

It has been recently suggested in a number of places that abortion, as practice in our culture in particular, is not simply one issue among others, but is in some sense the issue of issues. It is the quintessential horror of our time and it cannot be properly equated, in moral terms, with other pressing issues such as war. Now, I think there is a good case to be made for seeing abortion as  the most insidious form of violence active in the world today. It is part of what Slavoj Žižek refers to as “systemic violence,” the “catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.” Unlike the “subjective violence” that is quantifiable, visible, and plain in war, abortion is invisible in everyday life. “Violence” is thought of as a “perturbation of the ‘normal’ state of things.” But it is precisely this sort of systemic violence that is “inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things.” Abortion is one of the most insidious forms of this sort of systemic violence. Whether in the service of state totalitarianism as in China or what Sheldon Wolin calls the “inverted totalitarianism” of Western culture, consumed by the pernicious force of choice and commodity fetishism, abortion occupies an insidious place of systemic violence which sustains social and political systems and ways of life which, tragically, we all participate in to one degree or another.

However, I want to probe the question of whether or not abortion is somehow more morally clear, plain, or serious than other issues of violence in our time. What arguments could be marshaled to support such a claim? The first and most strong is simply numbers. The number of persons killed through abortion clearly trumps the numbers dying currently in wars. So if body count determines moral severity, then clearly we have a winner. However, a mode of calculation that relies solely on body counts is not likely to bear much theological weight. The more common argument involves the fact that in abortion, innocent life is deliberately eliminated without mercy while in war and other forms of violence, the taking of innocent life is, ostensibly, a form of tragic collateral damage.

Here is the crux of the issue: what makes the taking of innocent life more morally serious than the taking of non-innocent life? What sort of ethical claims do we need to establish in order to meaningfully press this distinction? How does innocence establish one’s life as more sacred? What sort of actions does another person have to perform in order for them to be rightly judged non-innocent and therefore not entitled to life? What is it about innocence that makes it more morally serious to intentionally target the innocent for elimination than to target the non-innocent?

It seems that, according to this sort of reasoning, one’s status as a life-deserving persons is determined my one’s moral performance. Those who are innocent are entitled to live, while those who are non-innocent are not. This sort of binary opposition between innocent and non-innocent may sound noble, but is really only typified in movies where the line between good and bad guy is drawn clearly in ways that are really just insipid and false. But the question is really a theological one: what does it say about God if our entitlement to being alive is contingent upon our moral performance? How can that square with the fact that God gave the life of Godself for the guilty rather than deprive them of it?

I am utterly against the liberal platitudes that would seek to minimize the importance of abortion within our public discourse. But likewise I am utterly against the sort of ethic of innocence that is utilized to establish abortion as an utterly unique instance of horrific violence that trumps all others. What makes forms of violence morally serious cannot depend on the innocence or non-innocence of those who suffer them. What makes violence morally serious is not that it falls on people who are innocent, but that it falls on persons who are human.

As such I get uncomfortable at the way many conservatives seek to elevate the issue of abortion to a pedestal above all other issues of violence and coercion in our culture. To use the seriousness of abortion as a shield against having to think about the moral severity of militarization, torture, and genocide is just as reprehensible as those who use such issues to downplay the seriousness of abortion. John Paul II was correct to include all of these horrors within his indictment of the “culture of death.” Seeking to do some sort of moral algebra within the culture of death to determine which is the “worst” seems like an utterly wrong question. To make one issue loom horrifically large before inevitably hides other things from our field of vision, making us myopic, curmudgeonly, and perfect subjects for the discipline of capitalism which is happy to absorb special interest groups and partisan hacks into the fabric of the global order.

We need to be willing and ready to condemn all facets of the kingdom of this age as equally perverse, lost, and horrifying. Trying to disentangle the biggest of the evils in the world is already to play the Devil’s game and remain caught in the polarities of late capitalism’s theater. To refuse to engage in that sort of diabolical calculus will almost certainly put us out of step with the standard partisans of our age, including both Republicans and Democrats. And that is exactly why we need to do it–to testify to the presence of a new order which subverts all the modulations and sub-variations of the kingdom of this age. To do any less is to fail before we begin.

If we Speak for God, then Everything is Permitted

Posted by on September 15, 2008 2 comments

Žižek takes Dostoyevsky’s dictum “If God doessn’t exist, then everything is permitted” to task, claming, in true Žižek fashion, that the opposite is in fact true: if God does exist everything is permitted to those who speak for God:

“[Dostoyevsky] couldn’t have been more wrong: the lesson of today’s terrorism is that if there is a God, then everything, even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders, is permitted to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of his will, since clearly a direct link to God justifies our violation of any ‘merely human’ constraints and considerations. The ‘godless’ Stalinist communists are the ultimate proof of it: everything was permitted to them since the perceived themselves as direct instruments of their divinity, the Historical Necessity of Progress towards Communism.” (Violence, 136)

Žižek makes a very good point, but one that needs two responses. The first response comes (at least to me) through Herbert McCabe. The only god we could ever “act directly on behalf of” is precisely that, “a god,” an inhabitant of the universe, a “top person” who legitimated our activities. The God of the Christian confession is not a top-person, a mere existent whom we could claim to represent directly. Rather God is the reason there is anything at all, the source of all being, and as such lies beyond our ability to directly mediate or claim. McCabe notes that most atheists think of the question of God as though religious people “claim to have discovered what the answer is, that there is some grand architect of the universe who designed it, just like Basil Spence only bigger and less visible, that there is a Top Person in the universe who issues arbitrary decrees for the rest of the persons and enforces them because he is the most powerful being around. Now if denying this claim makes you an atheist, then I and Thomas Aquinas and a whole Christian tradition are atheist too” (God Matters, 7). Only if God is some sort of existent, a “top person” who issues arbitrary decrees could we conceptualize God as the justification for acts of violence. And this is not the God of the Christian faith.

Secondly, a response via Rowan Williams, whose new book on Dostoevsky sheds quite a bit of light on the fragment the Žižek seeks to invert. Williams notes that

“[Dostoevsky] is not really interested in arguing the question–in general terms–of whether God exists. This does not mean that the reality of God is a matter of indifference to him or that he can be claimed from some for of contemporary nonrealism. But the different between the self-aware believer, the self-aware sinner and the conscious and deliberate atheist is not a disagreement over whether or not to add on item to the total sum of really existing things. It is a conflict about policies and possibilities for a human life: between someone who accepts the dependence of everything on divine gratuity and attempts to respond with some image of that gratuity, someone who accepts this dependence but fails to act appropriately in response, and someone who denies the dependence and is consequently faced with the unanswerable question of why any one policy for living is preferable to another.” (Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, 227)

Further to this point, Rowan Williams’ theology offers a helpful response to Žižek’s critique in that for Williams it is completely impossible for the church to ever make a strict identification between their work and the will of God. The only possible “direct link” we have to the Christian God is the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ which forbids us from gingerly locating ourselves on the side of God and God’s cause. Rather, according to the Christian gospel we are addressed by God precisely as those whose agenda is at cross-purposes with God. Any attempt on the part of the people called by God to equate their will and action with that of God is always to exchange the true God for some miserable godlet, an idol. Moreover, the God whose power is manifest precisely as cross and resurrection does not allow those who would follow God recourse to any other mode of power:

“God’s power ‘tells us who we are’ only in the risk and reciprocity of God’s life with us in Christ, as God displays his identity in the terms of human freedom and human vulnerability. That is the power by which the whole world is given newness of life, humanity itself is given new definition. And because it is that kind of power, refusing to functionalize and enslave what it works with, the process of preaching a transfiguring gospel must take place in a community that resists the idea that one human group can ever have license to define another in terms of its own needs or goals or fantasies. All must be free to find that ultimate self-definition in the encounter with a God who does not use us as tools for his gratification but shares a world of risk and contingency with us to bring us to our fullest liberty in relation with him and each other.” (On Christian Theology, 288-89)

Precisely because our only “direct link” to God is that of the cross and resurrection, Christians can never assume any posture of power than that displayed by God with us. As such, just as God enters into our lives on the path of cruciform vulnerability, so Christians are forbidden to deal with others, including religious others from any standpoint that would instrumentalize them in terms of our own needs, agendas, or fantasies. The cross forbids us any optic that would allow us to see other persons as obstacles to be overcome or destroyed for the sake of our own ends. Rather we are called to kenotically allow the other to be the other, trusting their transformation to the God of the resurrection. Christians, far from having their ambitions legitimated, are called to rest in the contingency and risk of not securing what they perceive the proper place of the other. For the acts of violence and domination that Žižek analyzes are ultimately reducible to a perverse attempt to narrate the other in a particular way, to circumscribe the other as a particular sort of other whose place must be determined by my ideology.

As such, I submit that only the Word of God in Christ, which calls us to this life of kenotic defferal-in-trust is able to actualize events of true peace in this world. For it establishes that we do not speak for God, God speaks for God in Christ. The proper mode of Christian action is always first silence before that speech which calls us out of our delusions and fantasies and into a life of vulnerability and contingency. Only such a mode of living, participating in the kenosis of Christ can be a true event of peace in a world of violences.

Žižek and the Logic of Religious Violence

Posted by on September 14, 2008 6 comments

In his book, Violence, Slavoj Žižek contests the standard story that religious adherents use in response to the claim that religion causes violence. Generally it is claimed that perpetrators of religious violence are “only abusing and perverting the noble spiritual message of their creed.” Žižek argues instead that we should wise up and admit that religions simply are violent and thus “restore the dignity of atheism, perhaps our only chance for peace.” In other words, Žižek calls religions to the mat, insisting that any easy answer of “they aren’t true representatives of my faith…” is necessarily a dodge.

However, what is ironic is that Žižek utilizes the exact same logic in his defense of the moral superiority of atheism to religion. He claims that we should “renounce religion, including its secular reverberations such as Stalinist communism” and that while “there are cases of pathological atheists who are able to commit mass murder just for pleasure,” these events are “rare exceptions.” Here Žižek is simply marshaling the same argument flippantly used by religious adherents to explain away the violent behavior of their fellow-believers. He claims that events of atheist-perpetrated violence are simply exceptions that abuse and pervert the noble morality of true atheism. Why should the exact same argument be more believable as a defense of atheism than of religion?

An Anarchic Mercy

Posted by on September 13, 2008 2 comments

To believe in Jesus’ God, the God of unconditional accessibility and even-handed compassion, to believe in an anarchic mercy that ignores order, rank and merit, is to accept that our projects and patterns are the mark of failure, of illusion, of the infantile belief that we can dictate truth and reality. Because it is menacing and painful to be confronted with the knowledge that our constructions of controlled sense are liable to be empty self-serving, we readily turn to violence against the bearers of such knowledge: in Johannine terms, we have decided that we want to stay blind when the light is there before us, claiming we can see perfectly well.”

– Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1990), 17.

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