Monthly Archives: June 2010

Religious righteousness

Posted by on June 30, 2010 4 comments

If for some reason you have never read through Karl Barth’s The Word of God and the Word of Man, you have one task before you. And don’t just read “The Strange New World Within the Bible,” as awesome as that essay is, and neglect all the others. They are all as deeply moving and relevant today as they ever were. Perhaps more so.

Religious righteousness! There seem[s] to be no surer means of rescuing us from the alarm cry of conscience than religion and Christianity. Religion gives us the chance, beside and above the vexations of business, politics, and private and social life, to celebrate solemn hours of devotion—to take flight to Christianity as to an eternally green island in the gray sea of the everyday. There comes over us a wonderful sense of safety and security from the unrighteousness whose might we everywhere feel. It is a wonderful illusion, if we can comfort ourselves with it, that in our Europe—in the midst of capitalism, prostitution, the housing problem, alcoholism, tax evasion, and militarism—the church’s preaching, the church’s morality, and the “religious life” go on their uninterrupted way. . . . A wonderful illusion, but an illusion, a self-deception! We should above all be honest and ask ourselves far more frankly what we really gain from religion. Cui bono? What is the use of all the preaching, baptizing, confirming, bell-ringing, and organ-playing, of all the religious moods and modes, . . . the efforts enliven church singing, the unspeakably tame and stupid monthly church papers, and whatever else may belong to the equipment of modern ecclesiasticism? Will something different eventuate from all this in our relation to the righteousness of God? Are we even expecting something different from it? Are not we hoping by our very activity to conceal in the most subtle way  the fact that the critical event that ought to happen has not yet done so and probably never will? Are we not, with our religious righteousness, acting “as if”—in order not to have to deal with reality? Is not our religious righteousness a product of our pride and our despair, a tower of Babel, at which the devil laughs more loudly than at all the others?

~ Karl Barth, “The Righteousness of God,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man, 19-20.

Best. Review. Ever.

Posted by on June 29, 2010 13 comments

Its been a while since I’ve indulged in something linking to a movie review, but this is just too damn good to pass up. Drew McWeeny’s review of the latest Twilight schlock is just utterly fantastic:

Here’s where I have a problem.  I don’t care if they get married or not, because in this film, “get married” is just code for “now we can do it.”  Their marriage isn’t about building something together or creating a family.  Their marriage isn’t about time they’ve spent together and time they want to spend together.  It’s all hormonal.  It’s all impulse.  Bella Swan is defined as a character purely by who she wants to sleep with, and I don’t care if she actually consummates the act or not.  This movie is driven from start to finish by the real estate between her legs, and if that sounds blunt or harsh, good.  I want it to sound ugly, because I think it is ugly.  Deeply ugly.  She’s the weakest, most dependent lead in a film that I can imagine.  There is nothing interesting about Bella aside from her desire for these two boys.  It is a narcissistic teenage fantasy taken to a disturbing depth.  Nothing in the world of these movies matters beyond the resolution of whether or not Bella is going to bone Edward.  And when.  And how.  And whether she’s going to bone Jacob as well.

There is talk of love, but there is nothing like love in these movies.  These are not stories about love.  They are stories about infatuation, temporary teenage madness.  And, hey, man… I may be ancient at this point, but I remember what it’s like when you’re a teenager and everything feels so important, and I’ve seen films that get that frenzy just right and they still manage to feature real character work and stories that are interesting and actual events.  You can make a great movie about the rush of teenage love.  You can use it as a backdrop for all sorts of stories.  But for that to be the thing that holds us as an audience, we have to believe that there’s something behind it.  I have yet to see anything in any of these movies that would connect these characters beyond narrative convenience.

Bella doesn’t love these men because of things they have done together.  Instead, everything they do together is because they “love” Bella.  It’s a pissing contest.  And both of the guys are just as poorly defined and as grotesque as Bella in what they represent.  Edward is her “dream man,” and as depicted in the films, he’s basically a control freak who treats her like an object to possess.  He lies to her.  He manipulates her.  He is unable to tolerate her interacting with anyone else.  Ladies… if you have a chance to marry a man who acts like Edward while you’re dating, do it.  And then you can look forward to broken bones and mysterious bruises and a slow and methodical separation from friends and family until you exist only for him.  Which is obviously what you’re looking for, right?  Ooooh, romantic.

Or if Edward’s love isn’t the right kind for you, then maybe you can get lucky and earn yourself a Jacob.  A guy who is hot enough that he knows you will love him, and if you don’t, then it’s just a matter of time.  After all, look at his abs.  He doesn’t offer anything more substantial than Edward in terms of emotion or support, but he does have those abs.  He’s also got body heat, so obviously he is a better choice for Bella.  He has one scene where he actually tells her that he has not imprinted on her as a mate, as is the way with his kind, but that doesn’t matter.  We’re still supposed to believe that this is important, that this struggle over this pathetic, empty dishrag means something.

I love women.  I love all sorts of women.  And because I love real women, actual flesh and blood human being that happen to have a slightly different arrangement of chromosomes than I do, I despise these movies.  I hate them for what they offer up as a value system.  I hate them because there are girls who mistake their own chemical response to the male leads in the movie as an actual affection for the story that’s being told.  They invest on the surface level, and in the meantime, there is this poisonous cancer, this vile insidious message that’s being sold to them underneath.  I hate these movies because they tell girls that this is their value in the world.  Who you bang defines you.  You are worth your vagina and nothing more.  You are who your man is.  That is all.

I just want to point out that this is the first time that the categories of “awesomeness” and “Things that make you want to gouge your eyes out with your pinky, shove scalding hot pokers in your ears, and repeatedly slam the door of a 1950s-vintage, American-made sedan on your head” have become unified in one post.

H/T: Brad E.

Prayer and action

Posted by on June 28, 2010 5 comments

Our church has been fighting during these years only for its own self-preservation, as if that were an end in itself. It has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and to the world. So the words we used before must lose their power, be silenced, and we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings. All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew, out of that prayer and action. . . . It is not for us to predict the day—but the day will come—when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed. It will be in a new language, perhaps quite nonreligious language. but liberating and redeeming like Jesus’s language, so that people will be alarmed and yet overcome by its power—the language of a new righteousness and truth, a language proclaiming that God makes peace with humankind and that God’s kingdom is drawing near. “They shall fear and tremble because of all the good and all the prosperity I provide for them” (Jer. 33:9). Until then, the Christian cause will be a quiet and hidden one, but there will be people who pray and do justice and wait for God’s own time.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Thoughts on the Day of Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge,” in Letters and Papers from Prison, 145:389-90.

Freedom toward humanity

Posted by on June 25, 2010 1 comment

If the prose is any gauge, it would have been quite enjoyable to listen to Ernst Käsemann preach:

Entering upon discipleship, who knows what lies ahead? Each day keeps us in suspense, so that boredom does not emerge. Discipleship does not merely involve our own salvation. This too must be learned, since Christians, no less than others, incline to circle everlastingly about themselves, to incessantly feel their pulse and that of their friends, to regard their own navel as the center of the world, and to forget that our God is not only concerned with the salvation of pious people. He creates his kingdom on earth, and it does not grow where religious and brave citizens stay by themselves. Advent breaks into a demonized world in which humanity continually retreats before barbarism, in which so-called factual constraints drive us into the war of all against all—for example, in the capitalist economy, where thousands of children die daily of hunger because the haves rake in power and money and harness all of us with our desires and duties to their wagons. God’s salvation embraces the godless as well as the pious, counts the poor, abandoned, oppressed, despised, and dying dearer than the strong, satisfied, and self-secure. God’s Advent stands as sign that humans must become more humane instead of competing with their Creator and outdoing one another.

In following Jesus, not only apostles fish for people but all the disciples whom the Christ forms after his image and calls to his mission, where over the wastes and the graves he wakens the community of those who become joyful companions of the needy, bearers of salvation. Only the one who is active in the service of freedom is free, a messenger and witness to the glorious freedom of the children of God. Freedom in and toward humanity is God’s will for his people and the meaning of every Christian life. God became man in order to capture humans for his glorious freedom. His servants are not to become divine. Through his Spirit they must become more human to bring freedom to a world racked by tyrants. Their service is not needed for heaven, but for the earth, which for the majority of its inhabitants has become a hell from which there is no escape. (On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene, 323-24.)

Yoder’s Warsaw Lectures

Posted by on June 25, 2010 36 comments

In the last year, several books by John Howard Yoder have been posthumously published, all concerned in various ways with the issue of nonviolence. The biggest of these is, of course, Yoder’s Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution. The most anticipated, however, may well have been The War of the Lamb. Less heralded is the most recently published of the three, Nonviolence: A Brief History. However, I would perhaps recommend Nonviolence even more highly than The War of the Lamb.

There are several reasons for this. First of all, Nonviolence and The War of the Lamb have significant overlap—in terms of subject matter, actual content, and size/approachability. They both contain the same chapters—“From the Wars of Joshua to Jewish Pacifism” and “The Science of Conflict”—which to my mind is indicative of how closely tied the books are, yet also how different they are, editorially speaking. It’s the editorial difference that leads me to commend Nonviolence over The War of the Lamb.

My concern is that the editors of The War of the Lamb seem to have taken too many liberties in their work of crafting the book form of these essays. Comparing the shared chapters between the two volumes is quite revealing. In Nonviolence, for example, there are a total of 6 footnotes in “From the Wars of Joshua to Jewish Pacifism,” all of which the editors make clear in their introduction are their own addition to the text. In The War of the Lamb, by contrast, “From the Wars of Joshua to Jewish Pacifism” contains 16 footnotes, many of which speak in the first person, as though they are in fact from Yoder himself, though they appear to be editorial additions (The War of the Lamb also contains some footnotes that the editors claim as their own).

These differences between the books makes me worry that the editors of The War of The Lamb took some liberties that served to blur Yoder’s voice with their own. In particular, it seems that Glen Stassen’s “just peacemaking” project lurks in the background of certain editorial decisions. For example, the back cover summary, Stassen’s introductory essay, the unspecified editorial additions to the footnotes and subtitles of the chapters—these all work to give the impression that the argument of Yoder’s book supports Stassen’s own project, which is centered around a rapprochement of the just war tradition and pacifism. Indeed, the back cover “summarizes” the book as arguing that the “Christian just war and Christian pacifist traditions are basically compatible.” As I have argued on this blog, this reading of Yoder’s work is patently false. Most distressingly, the text of The War of the Lamb actually refutes the back cover’s summary of it. Yoder is straightforward that his dialogical approach to the just war tradition is not because he thought it complementary to pacifism in any sense:

I know from having tested it for thirty years from inside that the just war tradition is not credible. I don’t dialogue with it because I think it is credible, but because it is the language that people, who I believe bear the image of God, abuse to authorize themselves to destroy other bearers of that image. (p. 116)

Fortunately, as the above quote demonstrates, Yoder’s voice rings through, and thus the book still has very real and indispensable value. However, those of us interested in Yoder’s work being disseminated simply for its own sake and in its original form have reason to be disappointed by the way in which this book was packaged and slanted towards bolstering a project that was not, in any explicit sense, Yoder’s own.

Nonviolence is a different matter altogether. Many of the same themes are covered in similar depth, but the editorial judiciousness is deeply refreshing. The editors of Nonviolence, no less than Stassen, are invested in advancing arguments about how Yoder ought to be read and the direction of his thought. However, none of this agenda is brought to bear on the text of the lectures in the way that Stassen’s just peacemaking seems to appear in The War of the Lamb. For this kind of editorial judiciousness, I am very grateful.

Both of the books are indispensable and very helpful. I highly recommend both. My preference for Nonviolence reflects my judgment that scholars ought to separate clearly the tasks of presenting Yoder’s own thought from offering their own reflections upon it.

Genuine love

Posted by on June 24, 2010 1 comment

Somehow I just today came across Ernst Käsemann’s recently-collected book of essays, On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene. It’s packed with provocative and profound reflections on the Gospel in the New Testament. Here’s a taste:

Christian love as bodily surrender and daily worship confesses what it believes when it regards the earth as the field of its Lord, thus in its ideas and in its arms embraces those most distant, as well as the brother, the sister, or neighbor at the door. Only a love that extends worldwide, that does not merely give alms, corresponds to an ecumenically open faith. This assumes, first, that middle-class morality and tradition no longer serve as criteria for Christian behavior and, second, that risk, whether personal or in the church, is not to be avoided in service to God’s creation. Genuine love does not remain within itself. Faith points beyond itself and to all who have fallen among robbers and murderers. Genuine love ties the imagination of the Good Samaritan to the reason of those who recognize in the other God’s gift and their own task. Religious schizophrenia threatens us more and more. It separates Sunday from the everyday life of a meritocracy in which the whole creation groans and the Christ still dies among revolutionaries. In the school of Jesus we reflect on the fact that he preferred self-denying surrender to remaining in heaven and went as cross-bearer into the embattled no-man’s-land between interest groups and ideologies. Whoever cannot get free of all the entrenchments as he did will deny faith and love. Love is an export, and the cross is its distinguishing sign. Christian faith is unfruitful where it does not bear this sign. (pp. 164-65)

The church as the presence of the humiliated Christ

Posted by on June 23, 2010 10 comments

More Bonhoeffer, this time from the new translation of his Lectures on Christology (popularly published as Christ the Center) in the Berlin: 1932-1933 volume:

With the humiliated Christ, his church must also be humiliated. It cannot seek any visible authentication of its nature, as long as Christ has renounced doing so for himself. Nor may it, as a humiliated church, look upon itself with vain self-satisfaction, as though being humiliated were the visible proof  that Christ is with it. There is no law here, and the humiliation of Christ is not a principle for the church to follow but rather a fact. Even the church can be high, and it can be lowly, if only both conditions occur for the sake of Christ. It is not good for the church to hasten to proclaim its lowliness. But it is not good either for the church to to hasten to proclaim its greatness and power; it is only good for the church to seek forgiveness for its sins.

Even the church, as the presence of Jesus Christ — God who became human, was humiliated, resurrected, and exalted — must receive the will of God every day anew from Christ. For the church, too, Christ becomes, every day anew, an offense to its own desires and hopes. The church must stumble every day anew over the sentence “You will all become deserters because of me,”[Matt 26:31] and it must hold on to the promise, “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” [Matt 11:6] (p. 360)

The kingdom of resurrection

Posted by on June 23, 2010 Comments Off

Yet more from Bonhoeffer’s “Thy Kingdom Come! The Prayer of the Church-Community for God’s Kingdom on Earth” (in the Berlin: 1932-33 volume of the DBW series):

“Thy kingdom come” — this is not the prayer of the pious soul of the individual who wants to flee the world, nor is it the prayer of the utopian and fanatic, the stubborn world reformer. Rather it is the prayer only of the church-community of the children of the Earth, who do not set themselves apart, who have no special proposals for reforming the world to offer, who are no better than the world, but who persevere together in the midst of the world, in its depths, in the daily life and subjection of the world. They persevere because they are, in their own curious way, true to this existence, and they steadily fix their gaze on that most unique place in the world where they witness, in amazement, the overcoming of the curse, the most profound yes of God to the world. Here, in the midst of the dying, torn, and thirsting world, something becomes evident to those who can believe, believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Here the absolute miracle has occurred. Here the law of death is shattered; there the kingdom of God itself comes to us, in our world; here is God’s declaration to the world, God’s blessing, which annuls the curse. This is the event that alone kindles the prayer for the kingdom. It is in this very event that the old Earth is affirmed and God is hailed as lord of the Earth; and it is again this event that overcomes, breaks through, and destroys the cursed Earth and promises the new Earth. God’s kingdom is the kingdom of resurrection on Earth. (p. 290-91)

Praying for the kingdom

Posted by on June 23, 2010 Comments Off

Bonhoeffer’s 1932 essay, “Thy Kingdom Come! The Prayer of the Church-Community for God’s Kingdom on Earth” (in the Berlin: 1932-33 volume of the DBW series) is nothing if not stirring:

If we are to pray for the coming of the kingdom, we can pray for it only as those wholly on the Earth. Praying for the kingdom cannot be done by the one who tears himself away from his own misery and the misery of others, who lives unattached and solely in the pious hours of his “own salvation.” The church may have hours in which it can sustain even that, but we cannot. The hour in which the church prays for the kingdom forces the church, for better or for worse, to identify completely with the fellowship of the children of the Earth and world. It bind the church by oaths of fealty to the Earth, to misery, to hunger, to death. It renders the church completely in solidarity with that which is evil and with the guilt of their brothers. The hour in which we pray for God’s kingdom is the hour of the most profound solidarity with the world, an hour of clenched teeth and trembling fists. It is not a time for solitary whispering, “Oh, that I might be saved.” Rather, it is a time for mutual silence and screaming, that this world which has forced us into distress together might pass away and Your kingdom come to us. (p. 289)

Barth, the church, and the world

Posted by on June 21, 2010 9 comments

As many of you all know, the Karl Barth Conference is currently going on and it sounds like a great time. WTM has some comments posted about it and hopefully more are to come. In the meantime, for those of us unable to make it out to Princeton, here is an excerpt from the conclusion of Nate Kerr’s paper which was presented yesterday at the conference, entitled “Das Ereignis der Sendung: The Word of God, Apocalyptic Transfiguration, and the ‘Special Visibility’ of the Church”:

Thus, the way properly to consider “the church” and “the world” is not in terms of “inside” and “outside,” of “inclusive” and “exclusive,” but in terms of “in Christ” and “in itself.”  We could put it this way:  The church is indeed the world where the reign of God is breaking out and is made visible as such.  The church is still the world, but it is the world participating in the kenotic, self-giving love of God in Christ.  The world is no longer “in itself” but is now itself reconciled to God “in Christ.”  A world that is curved in upon itself, that is delusively “in itself,” is “the world” in the negative Johannine sense.  So, the church does not exclude the world, but is the world “in Christ.”  Also, the church does not include the world, but rather the church happens as the perpetual opening of the world to the coming kingdom of God.  The world “in-itself” has been overcome and is a delusionary abstraction; but precisely as such the church cannot think of itself as a reality that exists “in itself” as over-against “the world.”  And this is precisely what makes the church the church:  it is that community which is given to live unreservedly for and as the world reconciled to God in Christ.  And precisely therein is the church obedient to the Word of God and so rendered visible in a way no given world-historical entity, including the empirical church, could ever pretend to be, in-itself.

I need you in my world

Posted by on June 21, 2010 14 comments

Things have been way to serious around here lately.

Mission, skepticism, and uncertainty

Posted by on June 19, 2010 11 comments

The skeptic who in the face of missionary Christianity says, “Yes, but what about all those good Hindus who lead decent lives and don’t believe that Jesus is the only one?” is not really expecting to become a good Hindu or even to be friends with good Hindus. Certainly this skeptic does not plan to get involved at all in the problems of differentiating between good Hindus and bad Hindus but only to back away from the call of Jesus, who has always admitted that if we entrust our life to him and his cause, we will never be proven right until beyond the end of the story and cannot count on being positively reinforced along all of the way. What is thus stated in the form of a general rejection of all particularity in favor of a vision of universal validity it, when more deeply seen, more particular and more negative; namely, a specific pattern of avoidance of the particular claims of Christian loyalty in its continuing risk and uncertainty.

~ John Howard Yoder, A Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 112-13.

If I didn’t know better I’d almost think that Yoder’s channeling Lesslie Newbigin and Rowan Williams here.

The invalidity of the cushioned

Posted by on June 17, 2010 4 comments

If this lecture has a unifying theme, however, it is this. What is cushioned is likely to be invalid. What encourages us to defend the security allegedly bestowed by our traditions puts our Christian understanding in peril. That understanding is imperiled also, of course, by the cult of the alleged autonomy of faith, according to which faith is creative of its own objects. Here too there is flight to a security, albeit an inward security, a withdrawal from accepting the peril and the promise of the Incarnation. It is, I repeat, not with Establishment in the narrower sense that I am concerned in this lecture, but with the cultivation of the status of invulnerability, issuing in a devotion to the structures that preserve it. . . . But the issue of kenosis and Establishment is in the end an issue of spirituality. To live as a Christian in the world today is necessarily to live an exposed life; it is to be stripped of the kind of security that tradition, whether ecclesiological or institutional, easily bestows. We deceive ourselves if we suppose that we do not seek to hide ourselves away from the kind of exposure to which I am referring.

~ Donald MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars (Suffolk: Collins, 1969), 33-34.

The gift of life together

Posted by on June 15, 2010 4 comments

I was rereading Bonhoeffer’s Life Together the other night. Definitely a book to consistently return to. On thing that struck me afresh was Bonhoeffer’s insistence in the early pages of the book on the nature of life together as gift. Thus “The Christian cannot simply take for granted the privilege of living among other Christians” (p. 27). Communal life with other Christians is not something that is guaranteed or assured in the course of Christian life. Rather it is a gift which we must never take for granted. As Bonhoeffer drives home:

Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. In the end all his disciples abandoned him. On the cross he was all alone, surrounded by criminals and the jeering crowds. He had come for the express purpose of bringing peace to the enemies of God. So Christians, too, belong not to the seclusion of the cloistered life but in the midst of enemies. They find their mission, their work. . . . According to God’s will, the Christian church is a scattered people, scattered like seed “to all the kingdom of the earth” (Deut. 28:25). That is the curse and its promise. God’s people must live in distant lands among the unbelievers, but they will be the seed of the kingdom of God in all the world. (pp. 27-28)

Thus, as Bonhoeffer drives home, “when Christians are allowed to live here in visible community with other Christians, we have merely a gracious anticipation of the end time. It is by God’s grace that a congregation is permitted to gather visibly around God’s word and sacrament in this world. Not all Christians partake of this grace. The imprisoned, the sick, the lonely who live in the diaspora, the proclaimers of the gospel in heathen lands stand alone. They know that visible community is grace” (p. 28).

Life together, the actual experience of getting to go through life with Christian partners who mutually support one another in responding to the call of the gospel is not a given, but a gift. Not an ontologically given datum, but a dynamic gift that comes to us from the future, a foretaste of the kingdom of God, given as Bonhoeffer drives home, only in Christ (p. 31). And all of this should drive us to praise:

Therefore, let those who until now have had the privilege of living a Christian life together with other Christians praise God’s grace from the bottom of their hearts. Let them thank God on their knees and realize: it is grace, nothing but grace, that we are still permitted to live in the community of Christians today. (p. 30)

He personally is with us

Posted by on June 14, 2010 15 comments

To say that Jesus rose from the dead is, among other things, to say that in spite of the fact that his love for us in obedience to his mission led to his death — or in fact because his love led to his death — he is still present to us, really present to us and loving us in his full bodily reality. It is not just that we remember him or imitate him, or that he lives on in a religious tradition. The good news is that he rose from the dead, that he went through real death to a new kind of bodily life with us. So that when we encounter someone who needs us, when we find the hungry and the imprisoned and the homeless, we can really say that here we encounter Christ, not in some metaphorical way, but literally. He personally is with us. The difference between having faith in the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus and not having such faith is, at one level, the difference between really discovering Jesus in the needy and oppressed, and simply thinking that it is a rather beautiful idea. It is the difference between really believing, like Abraham, that God asks the impossible of us, to find life through death, creation through destruction, that God makes the impossible possible for us, and not believing in God — thereby making him just some part of the machinery of our world.

–Herbert McCabe, God, Christ and Us (Continuum, 2005), 39-40.

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