Category Archives: Johann Baptist Metz

Theology and Apocalyptic: Call for Papers

Posted by on February 24, 2010 1 comment

The Theology and Apocalyptic Group has put out the following call for papers for this year’s upcoming AAR meeting:

The “Explorations in Christian Theology and Apocalyptic” working group invites individual paper proposals for an “additional meeting” at the 2010 American Academy of Religion meeting on the following topic:  “Engagements with the Political Theology of Johannes Baptist Metz.”  We especially welcome proposals that engage the turn to apocalyptic within Metz’s theology and the ideas particularly associated with this turn in his theology, such as:  the “eschatological reserve”; “dangerous memory”; the Second Coming; discipleship; mysticism and prayer; the relation of the Kingdom of God to history; the nature and definition of “the political” and political authority/sovereignty (particularly “the authority of those who suffer”); and martyrdom/witness.  We also encourage proposals that explore these themes by bringing Metz into critical conversation with other political and liberationist theologians (such as Jürgen Moltmann, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Jon Sobrino); political theorists (such as Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben); and prominent political activists and theologians (such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, William Stringfellow, Jacques Ellul, and Will Campbell).  Paper presentations will be ca. 20 minutes in length and the panel will include an invited respondent.  Proposals should include your name, institutional affiliation, and the title(s) of the proposed paper(s), as well as a 250 word abstract for each proposed paper.  Proposals should be submitted via email to Nathan Kerr (nkerr@trevecca.edu) and/or Philip Ziegler (p.ziegler@abdn.ac.uk) no later than March 22, 2010.

Also, there will be a panel on Christopher Morse’s new book, The Difference Heaven Makes:

This will be a panel discussion of Christopher Morse’s new book, The Difference Heaven Makes: Rehearing the Gospel as News (Continuum, 2010). Panelists will include Katherine Sonderegger (Virginia Theological Seminary), Nancy Duff (Princeton Theological Seminary), Trevor Eppehimer (Hood Theological Seminary), and Donald Wood (University of Aberdeen). Christopher Morse himself will be present to reply. Phil Ziegler (University of Aberdeen) will chair the session. Details of time, place etc. will follow in due course.

Rigorism versus Radicalism

Posted by on March 11, 2008 7 comments

In The Emergent Church, Johann Baptist Metz contrasts two ecclesial responses to the church’s marginalization in modern Western culture.  He notes that many in the Catholic church respond to the decadence of bourgeois religion by insisting rigorously on certain points of Christian morality such as the prohibition of divorce and compulsory clerical celibacy as examples of this.  While not arguing against the church’s moral tradition as such, Metz does state that rigorism of the church does not call forth an alternative way of life that truly has the capacity to challenge bourgeois society at the level of social and political life.  He also notes the distinctive role played by money within the “rigorous” version of bourgeois religion.  It functions as a “binding symbol” and indeed as the form of “mediation between the Christian virtues”.  What this means is that the “public virtues” related to dealing with societal suffering are mediated almost exclusively by money.  On the model of moral rigorism the church’s moral task in the political realm is almost exclusively reduced to “a process of the mere giving of money.”

In contrast, Metz argues that the proper posture of the church in bourgeois society is one of radicalism.  What this means for him involves challenging the norms of society through “the all-embracing strategy of love to attack the dominant principles of exchange and barter as these spread insidiously into the psychic foundations of societal life, and overcoming the reification of interpersonal relations and their increasing interchangeability and transitoriness, the church is then radical without necessarily having to be rigorous in the legal sense.”  Likewise, here giving money cannot be the center of the Christian political ethic.  Rather the radical position insists on the tangibility of Christian love taking shape in actual relationships, rather than simply through various and sundry programs at which money can be thrown.

Metz sums up the contrast he seas as follows: “Rigorism springs more from fear, radicalism from freedom, the freedom of Christ’s call.” 

Great One-Liners by McCabe and Metz

Posted by on March 7, 2008 8 comments

McCabe: 

“Luther was perhaps the Ratzinger of his age.”

“We for the most part shy off being human because if we are really human we will be crucified.”

Metz:

“The shortest definition of religion: interruption.”

“Discipleship and the apocalyptic idea of imminent expectation absolutely belong together.”

The Messianic Future as Disruption

Posted by on February 26, 2008 4 comments

“The messianic future proper to Christian faith does not just confirm and reinforce our preconceived bourgeois future.  It does not prolong it, add anything to it, elevate it, or transfigure it.  It disrupts it.  ‘The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.’  The meaning of love cuts across the meaning of having.  ‘Those who possess their life will lose it, and those who despise it will win it.’  This form of disruption, which breaks in from above to shatter the self-complacency of our present time, has a more familiar biblical name: ‘conversion,’ change of heart, metanoia.  The direction of this turning, the path it takes, is also marked out in advance for Christians.  Its name is discipleship.”

–Johann Baptist Metz, The Emergent Church (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 2.

The Emergent Church

Posted by on February 24, 2008 2 comments

No, I don’t mean the current buzz word amongst western evangelicals for their version of how to coordinate a worship service.  Actually, ironically enough, this term, as far as I can tell was first used in 1980 by Johann Baptist Metz as the title of one of his books on political theology.  The Emergent Church is a trenchant critique of Metz’s constant enemy which is “bourgeois religion”.  In fact, his book bearing this title was intended to be titled “Beyond Bourgeois Religion”, but apparently the publisher wouldn’t go for that.

Regardless, I find it at least a bit ironic that the first book to be titled “The Emergent Church” would be a critique of bourgeois Christianity when the contemporary phenomenon that bears the same name is almost exclusively a phenomenon of the Christian bourgeoisie in the West!  Here’s a quote from the book:

“Did not Jesus himself incur the reproach of treason?  Did not his love bring him to that state?  Was no he crucified as a traitor to all the apparently worthwhile values?  Must not Christians therefore expect, if they want to be faithful to Christ, to be regarded as traitors to bourgeois religion?  True, his love, in which everything at the end was taken from him, even the whole majesty and dignity of a love which suffers in powerlessness, was still something other than the expression of a suffering with others, which the the unfortunate and oppressed, out of sheer solidarity.  It was rather the expression of his obedience, and obedience that submitted to suffering because of God and God’s powerlessness in our world.  So must not Christian love in following after Christ continually strive toward that same obedience?

More on Balthasar, Metz, and Conceptual Neatness

Posted by on February 21, 2008 2 comments

Earlier I discussed Johann Baptist Metz’s critique of Hans Urs von Balthasar on the basis of his alleged tendency to “sublate” the history of human suffering into the Trinitarian history of God in such a way that the particular historical character of such suffering is glossed over.  I think that ultimately such a criticsm of Balthasar fails to really find its target.  For Balthasar, the self-dispossessing, kenotic love of the Trinitarian God made known in Christ doest not give us a conceptual system that harmonizes the horrors of human existence and sin with the infinite redeeming love of God.  As Balthasar says in his superb little summa, Love Alone is Credible:

“We are therefore not required to bring a systematically conceived hell into harmony with the love of God and make it credible, or indeed to justify it conceptually as love (and perhaps merely as the revelation of self-glorifying divine justice), because no such system could be constructed out of a possible “knowledge” apart from or beyond love and at the same time related to it. We are required only not to let go of love, he love that believes and hopes and through both is suspended in the air so that its Christian wings may grow. Soaring in the air, I also necessarily experience the abyss below, which is only part of my own flight.”

For Balthasar, the claim that the infinite love of the Trinitarian God has entered into the fullest depths of human suffering and hell does not offer a conceptual justification for such suffering and sorrow, but rather speaks a word of vulnerable hope into the abyss of death that may be believed and acted upon.  It seems to me that Balthasar and Metz are actually after exactly the same thing, an apocalyptic proclamation of the radical newness promised in the future of the God of Jesus Christ.  Neither seek to justify or escape the abyss of human suffering, but rather seek to continue to traverse it in hope that the all-consuming love of the Triune God may be found therein.

Metz, Žižek, and the Politics of Apocalyptic History

Posted by on February 20, 2008 8 comments

One of the interesting elements of Johann Baptist Metz’s political theology are the multiple interstices between it and the theological-philosophical expostulations of Slavoj Žižek.  One of the essential points of continuity is the way in which both of the, drawing on Frankfurt School Marxist critical theorists, try to take seriously the realities of how modern capitalism has shaped history.  Both attempt to work out a form of critical social theory (and, at least for Metz, a praxis) that takes the situation of modern suffering and nihilism seriously.  A key convergence between these two thinkers on this point lies in how both reject theoretical strategies to fashion conceptual systems that provide guarantees of meaning and existential closure in light of the modern history of human suffering and death.  Žižek and Metz both insist in their distinctive ways that a theological reading of the modern age does not provide a seamless integration or sublimation of the history of human suffering into a divine history of salvation, but rather requires our reading of historical human suffering to become more radically historical and open-ended. 

God, for Žižek is not a guarantor of meaning, rather history emphatically manifests the absence of God.  For Žižek Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross manifests precisely the way in which humanity endures the complete annihilation of divine transcendence.  For Žižek God is not a guarantor of historical meaning beyond the absence of God in history, rather God is the event of that absence within which humans must labor and strive, in the face of the death of transcendence to realize the future of hope.  For Žižek it will not do for us to hope in God, rather we must realize that God hopes in us. 

Metz’s reading of the history of modernity ensconces a similarly stark frame of reference.  Like Žižek, Metz is against any tidy narrative of salvation history which renders intelligible and understandable the history of human suffering.  The history of human suffering is precisely a nonidentity for which no “explanation” can be given without betraying the distinctive character of that history of suffering.  Metz resists any theodicy which proffers simple closure in the face of the reality of radical evil.  Rather, for Metz it is precisely within the context of the inexplicable reality of radical evil that theology, prayer, and hope in the apocalyptic future of God in Christ must take shape.  For Metz, the Christian theologian must point to the radical openness of the future in light of God’s past of interrupting the world in Christ.  For the Christian theologian, the agenda is not to find a way to give the world’s history of suffering some sort of “meaning”, but rather to point to the radically new transformation that is hoped for in Christ’s apocalyptic invasion of the world.  By construing history apocalyptically, the theologian testifies to the world as a history which is held open for the redemption of the hopes of those who have died stripped of any hope whatsoever.

Both Žižek and Metz struggle to come to grips with the reality of the history of human suffering and the demonstrable absence of God in that history.  However, in Žižek’s “theology”, we are thrust ever and always onto the plane of immanence in which the being of God is identified with God’s absence into which we must radiate presence, grasping and fashioning for ourselves any redemptive future that may be.  We are left stumbling about in an ontology of the void.  For Metz, however, while not falling into a scholasticism which would seek to dissolve the ambiguity and dissonance of history, calls attention to the apocalyptic hope of God’s interruption of the world in Christ which functions as the church’s “dangerous memory.”  Metz constructs no fictive guarantees of meaning or closure, but points instead to the radical possibility of transformation in Christ which is rendered imaginable through the remembrance of Christ.  In contrast to Žižek, Metz, while fully recognizing the godforsakenness of the world, provides us with a way in which to go on living in the world of godforsakenness in hope.  For Metz, it is the apocalypse of God in Christ that alone promises a future in which we can hope for a resumption of life beyond the rupture of history, even as we stare the maw of that history directly in the face.

Metz, the Trinitarian History of God, and the Nonidentity of Human Suffering

Posted by on February 20, 2008 9 comments

In his newly-translated Faith in History and Society, Johann Baptist Metz makes a great many fascinating contributions to political theology, engaging seriously with the problem of human suffering.  In the process, he makes a number of interesting observations about how other theologians deal with the problem of suffering.  Taking Karl Barth, Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann, and above Hans Urs von Balthasar together as exemplifying a distinctly Hegelian trajectory, Metz notes the trend in contemporary theology to articulate a vision of God’s Trinitarian engagement of the world in Jesus Christ as the answer to the problem of the history of human suffering.  “In light of God’s kenosis in Jesus Christ, the nonidentity of human suffering is taken up into the Trinitarian history of God.”

However, despite appreciating the claims of Balthasar (whom Metz sees as the foremost exponent of such a theological vision, drawing solely on his Mysterium Paschale), Metz argues that such a theological “solution” to the history of human suffering is insufficient.  Rather, he contends that “the nonidentity of the human history of suffering cannot be ‘sublated,’ even into a theological dialectic of Trinitarian soteriology, without sundering its historical character.  For this painfully experienced nonidentity  of suffering simply is not the same thing as that negativity that belongs to dialectically understood historical process, be it even that of the Trinitarian history of God.”  For Metz, such attempts to draw the suffering of human history into the life of the Trinity through Christ’s kenosis is to replace the particular histories of suffering with a general dialectic of already-overcome negativity that is sublimated in the life of God.

For Metz this confusion of “the negativity of suffering” with “a dialectically mediated concept of distress” will always attend attempts to “conceptualize and interpret the rending of the human history of suffering within the dialectic of the Trinitarian history of God.”  Metz argues instead that “we have to rule out any conceptual, argumentative mediation and reconciliation between the redemption that has occurred in the past and is operative now, on the one hand, and the human history of suffering, on the other.  They lead either to the dualistic, gnostic eternalization of suffering in God or to an interpretive reduction of suffering to its concept.”

While I think that Metz has perhaps failed to read some of his interlocutors carefully enough (primarily Balthasar and Barth – he may indeed be right about Moltmann), there is certainly a helpful protest against any theodicy which would fabricate a kind of conceptual closure or systematic tidiness to the problem of suffering.  Metz insists that a proper soteriology that takes seriously the history of human suffering cannot be “worked out in a purely argumentative way; it must be done narratively.”  For Metz what remains essential is to narrate the dangerous, apocalyptic memory of Jesus Christ in such a way that it neither sublates or legitimizes the present, but rather calls it into question.  Metz leaves theology suspended precariously between eschatological hope and the nonidentity of the suffering world in which we live.  The theologian cannot offer a vision of soteriological closure, in which all questions are answered, but only attempt to nurture an alternative imagination which proclaims the apocalyptic coming of Jesus Christ which ever and again interrupts the world.

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