Monthly Archives: January 2010

Barth on Ideology

Posted by on January 31, 2010 7 comments

[Ideology] comes about as [one] thinks he can and should ascribe to the presuppositions and sketches he has achieved by his remarkable ability, not just a provisional and transitory but a permanent normativity, not just one that is relative but one that is absolute, not just one that is human but one that is quasi-divine.  His hypotheses become for him theses behind which he no longer ventures to go back with seeking, questioning, and researching.  He thinks that they can be thought and formulated definitively as thoughts that are not merely useful but instrinsically true and therefore binding.  His ideal becomes an idol.  He thinks that he knows only unshakable principles and among them a basic principle in relation to which he must coordinate and develop them as a whole, combining them all, and with them his perceptions and concepts, into a system, making of his ideas an ideology.  Here again the reins slip out of his hands.  This creature of his, the ideology, seems to be so wonderfully glorious and exerts on him such a fascination that he thinks he should move and think and act more and more within its framework and under its direction, since salvation can be achieved only through the works of its law.  This ideology becomes the object of his reflection, the backbone and norm of his disposition, the guiding star of his action.  All his calculations, exertions, and efforts are now predestined by it.  They roll towards its further confirmation and triumph like balls on a steep slope.  Man’s whole loyalty is loyalty to the line demanded by it.  He thinks that he possesses it, but in truth it already possesses him.  In relation to it he is no longer the free man who thought he had found it in its glory and should help to put it on the throne.  He now ventures to ask and answer only within its schema.  He must now orient himself to it.  He must represent it as its more or less authentic witness and go to work as its great or small priest and prophet. At root he no longer has anything of his own to say.  He can only mouth the piece dictated to him as intelligibly as he can, and perhaps like a mere parrot.  His own face threatens already to disappear behind the mask that he must wear as its representative.  He already measures and evaluates others only from the standpoint of whether they are supporters of this ideology, or whether they might become such, or whether they might at least be useful to it even without their consent, or whether they must be fought as its enemies. Its glory has already become for him the solution not only to the personal problem of his own life but to each and all of the problems of the world.

~ Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV/4, Lecture Fragments, 225.

Sacraments, Mission, and Divine Action, ctd.

Posted by on January 30, 2010 18 comments

This is actually a repost of something I wrote over a year ago. In light of recent conversations we’ve been having here, I thought it might be useful. I’ve modified it a bit from the original version to express things better.

By virtue of the church’s union with Christ (the totus Christus), the base-practices of the church—Baptism, Eucharist, the preached Word—which were instituted by Christ in his incarnation bear witness to and proleptically share in the apocalyptic promise of the final communio of the Triune God and the created world. The sacramental practices of the church participate in the christic and pneumatic dynamism of the immanent triune life which is the promised transfiguration of the world in Christ. The sacramental base-practices of the church, rightly understood, bear witness to, and by God’s grace manifest the form and splendor of the inter-trinitarian love translated into the life of humanity through the missional action of the Son and Spirit. In baptism a person is drawn into the circle of triune love, which embraces, heals, and captivates the brokenness of sinful humanity. Through baptism the Spirit unites the believer with Christ, drawing her into the communion of the Trinity, of which the church is a sign and sacrament. Likewise, through the Eucharist, the members of the body of Christ are gathered together by the Spirit in the peace that has been wrought by word of the cross which makes all things one. In the Eucharist the one loaf is consumed by the one body thereby assuming the members together into a truly united, truly catholic ekklesia.

The Word and sacraments are at once a witness to the divine verbum externum (vera visibli) and the sign of the gratuitous unio mystica. They testify to and participate in the sovereign work of God extra nos and simultaneously the divine condescension en nobis. Thus, the church bears witness to and corresponds to Christ because as his body she is united with him by the Spirit, thus being given to participate in the triune life of God. The church and Christ exist as one body in the communion of the Spirit, intimately connected, yet utterly distinct. Therefore, through the sacramental base-practices of the church, the Spirit continually actualizes the reality of divine-human communion in the church which is constantly being transfigured–indeed revolutionized–through the depths of the triune love poured out therein. The sacramental mediation of the church is in a sense an extension of the soteriological mediation of the Son, but the church is only that extension in the mode of pathos, of receptivity, humility, and poverty before the sheer gratuity of God’s action pro nobis in the cross and resurrection of Chist. Thus, the expansive and ubiquitous outpouring of the pneumatic love of God draws the entire creation into the communio, of which the church is a sign, such that in the eschaton all things are found within the infinite agape that is the Trinity.

The church then, in its practice of the Word and sacraments, participates in and recieves the movement of the Trinity into the world. Not in any way because of what she is in herself, for in herself she is nothing. Rather the church’s particiaption in the trinitarian work is wholly due to the gracious outpouring of the love of God by the Holy Spirit which enflames, enlivens, dissolves, and makes new, thus drawing the church into the apocalyptic movement of God into the world. God’s saving action in the world is not static, but gratuitous and infinitely expansive, intruding upon, interrupting, and transfiguring the world of sin and alienation. Thus, through Christ and the Spirit the triune Lord “makes room” for the church within God’s action for the salvation of the world, precisely as humble recipients who praise and witness to Jesus. God’s outpouring of love allows us at once participation in God’s trinitarian mission (which is God’s own eternal life) to drawn all persons into sacramental, spousal communion with God. The ecclesial communion is a sign, anticipation, and sacrament of this divine  promise and base-practices of the church are our fundamental modes of giving ourselves over to God in prayerful anticipation and joy.

Waxing Hauerwasian

Posted by on January 29, 2010 26 comments

In light of the recent mega-conversation on Hauerwas and the truth of the gospel, perhaps folks will indulge me if I wax Hauerwasian for a moment:

“If you need a church to worship Jesus, then worship your fucking church!”

Of course, you may know that the actual quote that Hauerwas has stated many times is “If you need a theory to worship Jesus, then worship your fucking theory!”

Just saying.

Since we’re talking about “the church”

Posted by on January 28, 2010 17 comments

Time to bring in yet another serving of Will Campbell:

Hell, I don’t know what the church is. Jesus said something about the fact that He was going to build the church. He did say that nothing would prevail over it . . . even the gates of Hell, but He didn’t ask me to build it. And He certainly didn’t ask me to define it. I believe the church is at work in the world only because of my faith in this Jesus person. Trouble is, I don’t know what Jesus is up to or where His church is. That’s good because if I found the church then I’d give it a name and start running it.

Will Campbell, “Interview with The Wittenburg Door,” in Writings on Reconciliation and Resistance, 71-72.

McCarraher at TOJ, ctd.

Posted by on January 27, 2010 20 comments

The final, and in my opinion the best, part of The Other Journal’s interview with Gene McCarraher is live now. Definitely check it out. The stuff on Herbert McCabe is really worth your time. Especially if you have committed the grave sin of not reading Herbert McCabe.

This section of the interview also includes Gene’s evisceration of the Manhattan Declaration. Here’s just one quote from him on the folks behind this rather lazy and windbaggy document:

If they want to be the intellectual shock troops of a counterrevolution, they’re going to have to amass a better arsenal than what’s on display in the Manhattan Declaration. David Fitzpatrick’s hagiography in the New York Times Magazine made it appear that Robert George is a real intellectual juggernaut, but this document is really lame. (Having met George once, I can attest that he is indeed a learned and gracious man.) The preamble, for instance, is a farrago of half-truth, untruth, and middlebrow history. We’re told in the very first sentence that Christianity has a two-millennium “tradition” of “resisting tyranny” and “reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed, and suffering.” Not a mention of the two-millennium tradition of sanctifying tyranny—imperial conquest from the Romans to the Americans, monarchical rule from the Dark Ages to the twentieth century, dictatorships from Francisco Franco to Ríos Montt. Not a mention of the many blessings showered on feudal and industrial squalor, the oppression of slaves with the authority of the Bible, the infliction of suffering on Indians and other non-Christians. Later, we’re regaled that Christians “challenged the divine claims of kings,” but nothing about how Christians also, and more forcefully, sustained those claims. We’re reminded that Christians liberated “child laborers chained to machines,” but we’re left unenlightened about Rev. Thomas Malthus, Rev. Thomas Chalmers, and later evangelical apologists for laissez-faire and wage labor, often the very same evangelicals who fought for the abolition of slavery. And that’s not to mention the impact evangelical thinking had on exacerbating the Great Famine in Ireland. (Those interested in early 19th-century evangelical social thought must read Boyd Hilton’s The Age of Atonement.) We’re informed that Christian women “marched in the vanguard of the suffrage movement,” but not that Christians of both sexes also barred the door to the franchise for women, bolstered, I might add, by centuries of tradition. The authors think they’ve covered their backsides by writing that they “fully acknowledge the imperfections and shortcomings of Christian institutions and communities in all ages,” but the survey they offer betrays no sign of humility or contrition.

Yeah. Humility and contrition never seem to go with conservative Christian sloganeering, does it?

JPII and Self-Flagellation

Posted by on January 27, 2010 12 comments

Interesting stuff about the late pope’s ascetical practices from a forthcoming book by the Monsignor who’s promoting his candidacy for sainthood:

Pope John Paul II whipped himself with a belt, even on vacation, and slept on the floor as acts of penitence and to bring him closer to Christian perfection, according to a new book by the Polish prelate spearheading his sainthood case. . . .

At a news conference Tuesday, [Monsignor] Oder defended John Paul’s practice of self-mortification, which some faithful use to remind them of the suffering of Jesus on the cross.

“It’s an instrument of Christian perfection,” Oder said, responding to questions about how such a practice could be condoned considering Catholic teaching holds that the human body is a gift from God.

In the book, Oder wrote that John Paul frequently denied himself food — especially during the holy season of Lent — and “frequently spent the night on the bare floor,” messing up his bed in the morning so he wouldn’t draw attention to his act of penitence.

“But it wasn’t limited to this. As some members of his close entourage in Poland and in the Vatican were able to hear with their own ears, John Paul flagellated himself. In his armoire, amid all the vestments and hanging on a hanger, was a belt which he used as a whip and which he always brought to Castel Gandolfo,” the papal retreat where John Paul vacationed each summer.

For a fellow so deeply known for his book Theology of the Body, I can’t help but find this at least a bit odd/interesting. I certainly think there is plenty of good and fitting modes of ascetical practice (like fasting, vigils, etc.), but I find something deeply incongruous between the act of self-flagellation and the affirmation of the body’s goodness and dignity.

When does bodily discipline simply degenerate into bodily denigration?

H/T: Sully

Why can’t Hauerwas just be a witness?

Posted by on January 27, 2010 105 comments

In the final chapter of of With the Grain of the Universe, Hauerwas reaches something of an apogee in stating his view of the importance of the church’s witness in relation to the truthfulness of the Christian message:

Does the truth of Christian convictions depend on the faithfulness of the church and, if so, how do we determine what would constitute faithfulness? Am I suggesting that the ability of the church to be or not to be nonviolent is constitutive for understanding what it might meant [sic] to claim that that Christian convictions are true? Do I think the truthfulness of Christian witness is compromised when Christians accept the practices of the “culture of death” — abortion, suicide, capital punishment, and war?

Yes! On every count the answer is “Yes.” (p. 231)

Meditate long and hard on what’s being said here. As far as I can tell Hauerwas is saying outright that the truth of Christianity, the truth of the gospel depends on the church’s own faithfulness. This, to me seems like a crazy statement. Its one thing to say that we have no way to talk about the gospel’s truth apart from listening to witnesses (whether they be apostolic witnesses, historical witness, or ecclesial witnesses). But it is quite another to say that the truth of the gospel depends on us being nonviolent.

Or, simply put, if Hauerwas is right then the gospel simply cannot be true because “the church” no matter what sort of content we try to fill that term with is manifestly violent and unfaithful.

Even when I was at my most sympathetic towards Hauerwas, I still couldn’t get behind what was being said in this book. Because what’s going on here is a fundamental redefinition of the very meaning of “witness.” Hauerwas’s attempt to get beyond Barth’s allegedly faulty ecclesiology (see p. 193) actually runs completely contrary to Barth’s whole understanding of witness. For Barth a witness is, well, a witness, someone who reports what they have seen.  Witnesses point outside of themselves to a reality fundamentally other than they. Thus, the truth of the reality witnessed to is in no way dependent on the witness. The credibility of the witnessing account may well be dependent on the life and word of the witness, but the object witnessed to is not.

For some reason (and really, I’m not sure what), Hauerwas will not content himself with saying that the credibility of the church’s message depends on its faithfulness (which is obviously true and right). He is bound and determined to go further and say that the truth of that message itself is at stake in our own moral performance. If we perform badly, somehow the gospel isn’t true anymore. The very truth of the gospel has found itself inextricably internal to our own moral effort and achievement (though of course Hauerwas uses the language of gift for the church’s nonviolent witness).

So why? Why does Hauerwas want not merely the gospel’s credibility, but its very truth to depend upon our faithfulness? What does making that move accomplish? Why is this better than simply making the far more plausible and intelligible argument that the gospel’s credibility rather than its truth is at stake in our faithfulness or lack thereof? Why is it so important that, at the most fundamental level everything must depend on us?

“Blog!” says the pope . . .

Posted by on January 26, 2010 4 comments

The supreme pontiff seems to think that priests ought to be blogging more:

Responding adequately to this challenge amid today’s cultural shifts, to which young people are especially sensitive, necessarily involves using new communications technologies. The world of digital communication, with its almost limitless expressive capacity, makes us appreciate all the more Saint Paul’s exclamation: “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel” (1 Cor 9:16) The increased availability of the new technologies demands greater responsibility on the part of those called to proclaim the Word, but it also requires them to become become more focused, efficient and compelling in their efforts. Priests stand at the threshold of a new era: as new technologies create deeper forms of relationship across greater distances, they are called to respond pastorally by putting the media ever more effectively at the service of the Word.

The spread of multimedia communications and its rich “menu of options” might make us think it sufficient simply to be present on the Web, or to see it only as a space to be filled. Yet priests can rightly be expected to be present in the world of digital communications as faithful witnesses to the Gospel, exercising their proper role as leaders of communities which increasingly express themselves with the different “voices” provided by the digital marketplace. Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis.

Best Theological Book of The Decade

Posted by on January 26, 2010 58 comments

The other day on Facebook, a discussion arose on the basis of a claim about what the best theological book of the last decade was. As I thought on the question I found it exceedingly difficult to answer, so I thought I’d pose the question here. What do you think the best theological book of the last decade was, and why?

UPDATE: By “theological” I’m thinking not of biblical studies, religious studies, or  philosophy, but books that are setting out to solve or differently frame central theological issues (God, Christ, church, world, salvation, mission, etc.) from a distinctively Christian perspective (so yeah, we’re just talking Christian theology here). Hopefully that narrows it down somewhat.

Oh please little world! He’s kicking your head in

Posted by on January 26, 2010 4 comments

Ready, steady, go:

Or you could just make cookies. With bacon.

But they’ll never take . . .

Posted by on January 21, 2010 10 comments

I think we all need this.

Against patriotism

Posted by on January 21, 2010 19 comments

I’ve got to get that 9 Marks crap out of my system. And there’s only one way I know to do that: Will Campbell:

I believe God made the St. Lawrence River, and the Rio Grande River, and the China Sea and the English Channel, but I don’t believe God made America, or Canada, or Mexico, or England, or China. Man did that. . . . It is doubtful that there has ever been a nation established for bad reasons. Nations are always established to escape tyranny, to combat evil, to find freedom, to reach heaven. Man has always been able to desire to build a heaven. But it seems he has never been able to admit that he didn’t pull it off. So he keeps insisting that he did pull it off. And that is really what patriotism is all about. It is the insistence that what we have done is sacred. It is that transference of allegiance from what God did in creating the whole wide world to what we have done with (or to) a little sliver of it. Patriotism is immoral. Flying a national flag—any national flag—in a church house is a symbol of idolatry. Singing ‘God Bless America’ in a Christian service is blasphemy. Patriotism is immoral because it is a violation of the First Commandment.

Will D. Campbell, “I Love My Country: Christ Have Mercy,” Motive (December, 1969)

H/T: Chris Spinks (via Facebook)

Dressy fundies

Posted by on January 21, 2010 31 comments

Have you people been checking out this new 9 Marks thing? Wow. That’s really all I can say. I mean, I know that regular displays of fundamentalist-evangelical craziness are constant in the United States. But this little self-styled bunch of prophets really seem to take the cake. Its like they’re fighting the battles of nineteenth-century liberalism in the twenty-first century on purpose.

Now of course the essays reflect a complete lack of scholarly acumen or even biblical literacy in most cases, but what’s amazing is the kind of smarminess that oozes off of every page. I mean, what do you make of quotes like this:

For most of my adult life, I have been a pastor among the highly educated, the materially successful, and the politically powerful. It’s not that I sought these people out as more strategic than others. It’s simply where God’s providence placed me.

Wow, that sure is great for you, isn’t it? Gee wasn’t it nice of God’s providence drop you miraculously among the super rich and the politically powerful? Thanks God!

Yeah, its no accident that the majority of this little movement’s contributors are ruling elites of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, which sits but a couple blocks from the U.S. Capitol building.

And then there’s the “9 marks” themselves which consist of expository preaching and then, well, 8 things that start with the word “biblical” (well I guess one of them is actually “promotion of Christian discipleship and growth”).

Couldn’t they just narrow down the list by just having one mark called “biblicalness in all things” or something? Why try to make up a movement just to display your church’s sense of superiority?

Anyways, if you’re looking for some woefully bad reasoning, odd martyr complexes, and general theological dyslexia, check out the 9 Marks. Its a treasure trove of fundamentalist dumbshittery.

Edited to add: I deeply apologize if my language in the last paragraph offended any people with dyslexia. I by no means meant to compare you to orangutans that run the 9 Marks. Please accept my apologies.

In place of purity (more on wine & Jesus)

Posted by on January 20, 2010 47 comments

In John 2, the story of turning of the water into wine, there’s an interesting detail that I’ve never seen commented on at length before. John 2:6 describes the vats of water that Jesus turned into wine: “Now standing there were six stone water-jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons.”

These aren’t just random water-jars, they are holy water. Water for the rites of purification given in the Torah. Jesus however turns out to be the enemy of purity. Instead of water for ceremonial purification, he leaves us with wine—120-180 gallons of it!

There’s a deeply transgressive quality to Jesus’s actions. In the place of a system of boundaries and morals, clean and unclean, Jesus gives people enough wine to get all of Dublin hammered. Jesus’s actions are, in a sense, shockingly amoral. Or rather, they transgress and overcome the binary structures that define “religious” morality.

Jesus doesn’t come to offer a new way for the unclean to be made clean, the profane made sacred. He comes to obviate the whole notion and throw a party instead. And this is his glory (2:11).

More from TOJ and how you can help keep it coming

Posted by on January 20, 2010 2 comments

Part two of Gene McCarraher’s interview with The Other Journal has been published. Check it out, it’s well worth the read. In part two of the interview, McCarraher talks about the “Obama Doctrine,” Niebuhrian realism, and the usefulness of maps.Here’s just one quote:

If there is such a thing as the Obama Doctrine, it’s different in tone, not in objective, from the doxology of American global hegemony that first appeared in benevolently racist form during the annexation debates after the Spanish-American War; that achieved its haughtiest homiletic apogee in Wilsonian internationalism; and that morphed into neoliberal realpolitik in the “National Security Strategy of the United States,” published by the Bush Administration in late 2002. (It’s often considered a neoconservative document, but I don’t see much difference between neoconservatism and neoliberalism.) As far as I can see, Obama’s foreign policy hasn’t departed significantly, save in its cosmetic features, from the larger American imperial trajectory of the last century.

Obama’s Nobel speech was the one example of audacity he’s actually provided over the last year. It’s indisputably audacious for the Chief Executive of the only contemporary empire, not to accept the peace prize with bloodied hands—that’s been done by previous recipients, from Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Kissinger—but to turn the occasion into a defense of U. S. imperial policy. It’s absolutely breathtaking. And what’s more, the assembled dignitaries and celebrities just sat there, starstruck, and let him get away with it. That tells you, not only that Europeans can be just as infatuated with warmongers as Americans are—imagine what the reaction to the speech would have been if George W. Bush had delivered it—but that European governments really are still quite deferential to the geopolitical interests of the American Empire.

In point of sentiment and argument, Obama’s Nobel oration was very similar to the West Point speech he’d given a week earlier; in fact, he lifted some passages from the West Point talk and inserted them, almost verbatim, into the Oslo address. They’re both chock full of the Niebuhrian platitudes we’ve come to expect as camouflage for imperial ambition. If there’s anything new about this Obama Doctrine, it’s that the United States will now feel a bit worse when it imposes its will on the powerless of the earth. When we have to bomb a village or support a tyrant, we’ll shed a tear about the Tragedy of It All. Unlike the Romans or the Spanish or the British, we’re the imperialists who feel your pain.

Also, since we’re talking about all the awesome content that TOJ provides, allow me to put out a call for donations. As far as I’m concerned, The Other Journal is putting out some of the absolute best material in theology and culture today, and doing so is not cheap. There’s actually some pretty significant financial needs at TOJ right now that I’ve been made aware of, and I hope some of you will find it in your hearts and pocket books to donate whatever you may be able. I realize that people who read theology blogs tend to be on the poor side of well-educated comfortable Westerners, but please, if you can. Show TOJ the love they deserve.

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