Category Archives: Theology

The Truth about Love: A Resurrection Sermon

Posted by on March 31, 2013 4 comments

And now, after the end, now at the beginning, will shall speak, yet again of Love. Love eludes us. Only slightly more frequently and more intensely does love seize us, make us love’s own in the very moment when we find ourselves most lethargic, most unable to take another step. At the moment when we know nothing of love, love owns us, makes us transparent to the actions and call of love.

Love is implacable. It will be satisfied with nothing other than the complete consumption of our whole self, indeed of the very notion of self. Love cares not for our self-thought, cares not for our constant introspection. Love is movement, the movement that happens precisely as our bitterness, anger, sorrow, and rage seem to consume every fiber of our being. Love is the short-circuit that somehow breaks through, somehow catches hold when every element of our feelings are captive entirely to hate, cynicism, rage, futility, tears.

Love brings us to our knees, draws forth our hands, making them to reach out in both supplication, and in service, precisely at the moment when all that we are clenches our fists. Love brings us to tears when our eyes have never been more tightly shut. Love is an openness that flows nonsensically, from a frozen, cold, dead, unopenable heart.

Love is slavery. A slavery more mysterious, more nonsensical than any we have known till now. It is the slavery of joy, a joy that persists in the face of all sorrow. It is not taught. It cannot be learned. The slavery of love cannot be bought, obtained, trained for, or made real by any power or process we could devise. One never knows it until it happens, until it takes hold. When suddenly, in a moment that calls for nothing other than wisdom, for measured, well-thought out decision-making, there isn’t even the faintest hint of a decision to be made. In that moment all that stands before us is the inevitability of the call of love. The call that can only call forth in us the response of obedience: “Here am I! Send me!”

Love is freedom. It is a freedom that persists in the midst of grief. It is a liberation that persists, dwells, never forsakes those who suffer at the hands of its call. Love is the liberation of the traumatized, the forsaken, the forgotten. But more than that love is the liberation from our petty dramas unto a life of self-abandonment. It is a freedom that breaks every fetter, save for the fetter that it, itself is. It makes all else irrelevant, inconsequential, utterly bereft of power. The freedom of love is the freedom from being held back, even by one’s most deep-seated pathologies, sins, violences, lies, and dysfunctions. The freedom of love is liberation unto gift, mission, shouts of praise—amidst the fullness of lament, protest, rage, and yearning that this world might give way to the coming Kingdom.

Love is desperation. Love screams for the consummation of its promises. Love never ossifies. Love calls forth, unceasingly. Love demands that love alone remain. Love cannot be contained, cannot be limited, cannot be reasonably dispensed, cannot be orderly. Love, being love, can do nothing other than demand, proclaim, and scream for its sovereignty, its victory, its fullness.

Love is hope. Love believes a future when the foundations crumble and explode all around us. Love believes a future when we sit in dust and ashes. Love screams against any resignation that would see our present distress as the final word. Love is a senseless, stupid hope, a hope against hope that there yet is another Word, a dawning Kingdom, a New Creation, a making right that is coming, and that cannot be stopped.

Love is boldness. It is a boldness that remains in the face of insurmountable fatigue. It is that small, imperceptible movement, that unnoticeable gesture of a hand, raising itself in protest against death. It is a resolve that remains when all reasons for hope have vanished from memory and thought. Love believes all things.

Love suffers. Love that does not suffer is no love at all. Suffering is the mark of true love. All love that seeks to hold itself back from suffering is the most repulsive of lies, the most abominable of counterfeits. No, love is only as it places itself in the path of pain, only as it abandons its safety, its desires, its rights, its reasonable requests, it’s hopes for satisfaction, for respite, for being cared for in return. Love is love when all these things melt away in the sheer gravity of Love’s imperative. Love is love when it suffers freely, asking nothing in return, save only to be remembered.

Love dies. Power triumphs over love. Love is trampled underfoot. It is the destiny of love to be defeated. Love is love precisely in that it gives itself over to defeat rather than dominate another. Love that refuses death has nothing to do with love. Love comes to an end because its gaze always lies outside itself. Love cannot secure its own survival, indeed, love is nothing less than the rejection of survival as a thing to be pursued. Loved only pursues the other. Love lives only for them.

Love rises. Love triumphs over death, over power, over reason, over fairness, over hate, over nature, over logic. The love that suffers, the love that dies, that very love has complete victory. Love is the movement from an unimaginable, extinguished future to a confidence that nothing shall ever separate us. Love is resurrection. It is the cry for resurrection and the coming of resurrection. It is death and life, abandonment and salvation.

Love will never leave us alive. Love will kill us. To love is to die. To love is to lose. To love is to weep, scream, and yearn for a victory that we can never own, never produce, never anticipate. To love is to give ourselves up to death.

Love will leave no one among the dead. Love will not finish its work until death itself is defeated. Love is death’s death. To love is to rise. To love is to have nothing, yet possess everything. To love is to have one’s tears wiped away, to shout for joy, to rejoice in a victory that we never owned, did not produce, and did not anticipate. To love is to be caught up, inexplicably in an indestructible life.
To love is to die alone, forsaken by God and humans alike. To love is to be resurrected into a life beyond anything we could ask or think. To love is to share the ambiguity, suffering, death, and future of Jesus of Nazareth.

Love is never something we do, never a practice we perform, never a thing we learn, never a craft in which we become proficient. Love is an inexplicable, unconscionable, and immoral grace that we learn only by undergoing it. Love is what God does to us, for us, with us, in us, and on our behalf. Love is God’s robbing us over ourselves, our sin, our power, our narratives of success, of victimhood, of all forms of self-seeking.

Love is the suffering of God. Love is the power that lies beyond all powers. It is the power of God to abandon everything for the sake of the worthless, the rebellious, the sinners, the unclean. Love is God’s refusal to let go of even one of us wayward creatures. Love is what God puts Godself through so that we might never be separated from God.

Love finds us. The only thing more true than love’s elusiveness is its coming to us in power. We are those who have been seized be love. In spite of ourselves—and really, really, it is in spite of ourselves—we have been found by love. Oh how love could be dismissed as foolishness had it not so surely found us! Had it not stormed forth from the tomb, wounds and all and gone ahead of us to Galilee! How easy it would be to brush it off and move one with real life had we not been found, been seized, been transfigured, been redeemed, been unforgettably loved, and loved yet again! How easy it would have been!

But such easy paths are no longer possible for us. Something far more difficult, and infinitely more wonderful has happened to us. We have been found by love. Our bloodlines have been redrawn by the coming of Love. Our flesh, our bodies have been claimed by the fire of an unquenchable love. We are left in the wilderness of love. We are left clinging to each other as the death continues to rise up in our sinews and souls. We weep together, we bleed together, we die together, we live together, we laugh together, we sing together, we shout together. We are together. And this is the work of love. And this love will triumph, for in Jesus, it has.

We only know it will be love: A sermon on 1 John 3:1-7

Posted by on April 23, 2012 7 comments

Brothers and sisters, here is the amazing thing that we have to deal with, that is so hard for us to understand. That is even harder for the world to understand. The thing that trips us up, the thing we cannot catch up with, that we cannot ever grasp is how great, how singular, how unprecedented, how utterly surprising and evernew is the love that God the Father has given to us in Jesus Christ. Through his act of love, uninterrupted, untainted, unqualified love, God has made us, in him, to be God’s own children, God’s own family. Make no mistake about it, brothers and sisters, that is what we are. And we are that, only in, through, and by God’s radical act of love in Jesus Christ, the Nazarene, the one we crucified, the one that the Father raised up, and who came back to us again speaking peace to us. The thing we cannot catch up with, that we can never grasp, never fully understand, is that somehow, through some miracle, God has made us part of God’s own life. We are God’s children! That is what we are!

And that, brothers and sisters, is why the world is confused by us, why they do not understand us when we speak about the Gospel. They don’t recognize us because they did not recognize Jesus, the one who has made us what we now are. Brothers and sisters, this is the miracle, that we are God’s children now. And yet, there is so much about this that eludes us. It is so weighty, so much greater than we can know and comprehend, indeed we cannot understand it. What this all means, what it will be, how it will be revealed, how we will live forever in God, what God’s victory shall look like, and what the world made new will be, brothers and sisters, these things we do not know. We cannot possess them, catch hold of them, grasp them, explain them, and hand them out to others as if they were goods and services. All of this is too wonderful for us.

There is only one thing we can dare to say we know. We know that when Jesus is apocalypsed, when he is revealed, manifested, when his transfiguring kingdom breaks forth in its ultimate fullness, when all this comes to pass we know this: that we will be like him. We will see him as he truly is. We will see, with unveiled faces, the fullness of the singular, radical, uninterrupted, and evernew Love that Jesus is. And then, brothers and sisters, on that day, we will be like that. We will finally shed all that remains of our blindness and our self-deception, and we will see the Love, the so-great Love of God that Father that is Jesus. And when we see it, we will be transformed. We will be like that. We will be loosed from all our hidden shadows and darknesses and be transformed. We will live, without reserve in that one great Love.

This is our hope, brothers and sisters. And every one of us who hope in this find ourselves working. We work, we struggle, we cry out, we yearn together to be made single-mindedly devoted to this Love. We strive to unify our divided hearts so that we might love without interruption, just as Jesus loves without interruption. We work for this, we encourage one another in this, we pray for one another in this, we weep with one another when we fail in this, and we keep on going together in this. We search, we pray, we yearn, we work, we study, we listen—all so that we may grow up into the Love that Jesus is.

And when we sin, when anyone sins, we shy away from this undivided Love. We cease to let it be the one true thing, our one true “law”. We seek to be unmoored from single-minded devotion. We long to divide things up once again into secret spheres where we can rule our own lives. When sin we are guilty of the worst sort of anarchy, an irrational refusal to have our lives transformed in the glory of the single-minded, uninterrupted Love of God that is Jesus. Sin is the refusal of this Love. It is the refusal to make this Love our one and only “law”. Sin is lovelessness.

And you know that this is why Jesus came to us brothers and sisters! This is why Christ apocalyptically came on the scene: To take this lovelessness away! In him there is no hint of lovelessness, but only the Father’s uninterrupted act of Love, the love that brings life out of death, new creation out of the present evil age, hope out of despair, praise out of sorrow, shouts of joy out of cries of grief. This is the Love that Jesus is. There is no lovelessnes in Jesus, no hidden shadow, no dark side. He came for one reason only, to destroy lovelessness wherever it exists in this world.

This is why, brothers and sisters, that no one who has been made part of God’s family through this Love continues to live in lovelessness. Those who keep on embracing power, control, domination, fear, and death, they haven’t understood this Love. They haven’t seen it yet. They haven’t tasted and known it yet. And when you, my brothers and sisters, when we fall back into lovelessness, we forget, we cease to live as what we are: God’s children. We pull ourselves back from the Love that God is and stumble backwards into the darkness that Jesus came to take away. When we are living in the Love that Jesus is, there is no room left for lovelessness.

So brothers and sisters, don’t let anyone make you believe the lie. The lie that one can be righteous, be moral, have integrity, be worthy  without living totally by Love. Everyone who lives out this Love is living in righteousness. There is no other ground, there are no other standards. To be righteous is to live the Love that is Jesus. There is no other righteousness, no other virtue, no other integrity, no other morality, no other standard by which we can assess ourselves. The only righteousness that God honors, that God creates, that God shares is the righteousness of self-abandoning Love. The only righteousness is the righteousness of crucifixion and resurrection. This is the only place we can live, this is the only hope we can stand on, this is the only life worth giving ourselves to.

Some truths to embrace:

  • The world does not know Jesus. To the extent that they know us, that we make sense to the world, to its way of running, we are not living as what we are, the children of God.
  • Our only hope, the only thing we have, is that who Jesus is will be our future. We know nothing else, we must seek for nothing else.
  • When we really hope for the Love that is Jesus, we find ourselves working together to love better. When we really hope, we really work, and we can’t imagine not doing it.
  • Sin is refusing to allow Love, the Love that is Jesus, to be our one and only law, our one and only rule, our one and only criterion for life and hope.
  • It is more important to refuse to be deceived than to figure out everything that we should do, or how to answer every question. The radical “No” of God to all forms of lovelessness must always be before our eyes. Only when we let God’s “No” to lovelessness reign can we hear God’s resounding “Yes” of uninterrupted Love.
  • The definition of Love is Crucifixion and Resurrection.

 

Freedom from innocence: A Sermon on 1 John 1:1-2:2

Posted by on April 15, 2012 5 comments

Brothers and sisters, let me tell you what I am doing in speaking to you today. Let me tell you what exactly I am trying to declare and proclaim to you. I’m here to tell you about that which is eternal, that which is ultimate, that which is greater than any and every created thing. I’m here to proclaim to you the things of first importance, that which we heard, and saw firsthand in Jesus, the Word of God who made us alive. Jesus was revealed to us, brothers and sisters, revealed right here, among us, he came to us and made us alive when we were dead. We all have seen this, and we all are bound and determined to talk about it, to make it known. We saw the mystery: the very life of God, the eternal life of the Living Father, this was apocalypsed to us in the Crucified and Resurrected Jesus. When Jesus came, we saw and experienced the eternal life of God. That is who Jesus was. That is what we saw, that is what we can never stop speaking about.

And why do we keep talking about this? What is it about this Life that has come to us as Jesus that makes us continue to declare it over and over again? Brothers and sisters, we keep on talking about this because if brings us together! When we share this Gospel, this message of Life abundant, we share in it together, in its trials and tasks, its joys and sorrows, its callings and blessings. When we declare this truth, the truth that in Jesus God made us alive when we were dead, when we affirm this together and live it out together, brothers and sisters, we are bound together in unity, in love, in fellowship. And this isn’t just something for us, some sort of enjoyable group friendship that we enter into, no. When we declare the Gospel together, when we live the Gospel together, we are drawn into unity with the Father, and with Jesus. This is no mere human friendship we get to enjoy, no, when we speak the Gospel, when we live the Gospel, God’s very own self, God’s very own life comes to us, abides with us, endures with us, and sustains us.

That is why we’re talking about this yet again, so that we can fully and completely enter into the joy of life in God!

So here is the message for you again. Hear it and believe it once again, brothers and sisters. This is the truth we must speak and the truth we must live:

The truth is that there is no dark side of God. God is nothing but light, nothing but unfettered, undistorted, abundant love. There is no shadow, no underside, nothing behind the curtain. God is pure and undivided light. So then, brothers and sisters if we claim to be living the life that God in Jesus has given us, the life that is pure light, pure love, pure self-giving, if we claim to be living that life and yet harbor hidden darkness, we make ourselves liars. When we carve out little spaces in our life that we order and control by methods other than self-giving love, we deceive ourselves. When we claim to be God’s people, the people of the truth, a people of forgiveness and love, and yet build up spaces in our life together that are run by the powers of control, dominance, self-assertion, fear, and self-protection, brothers and sisters when we do this we lie. When we do this we stop living the Gospel and fall back again into sin and death.

However, when we give up our grasp on these spaces, when we let go of those corners of our life run by power rather than love, then brothers and sisters we enter into the very life of God. When we release those secret places and powers to which we cling so tightly we are delivered, by God’s unbreakable love, into life together, a new life, a life cleansed of all sin, all guilt, all slavery. When our hands open and our idols are allowed to fall to the ground, then brothers and sisters the blood of Jesus, the blood we spilled, it becomes a cleansing flood of mercy, grace, and love. A flood in which we are swept away together, immersed in new life, ever again for the first time.

The worst possible thing we can do brothers and sisters is pretend we are innocent. When we try to establish ourselves, to give reasons, to re-narrate and explain our sins away, brothers and sisters when we do this we deceive ourselves. When we do this we hang on to those secret spaces, we cling to those hand holds that keep us from being washed away in the flood of Christ’s love and grace. We shut out the truth when we try to establish our innocence. The quest for innocence, the quest for defending our own virtue, that is the quest for falsehood and sorrow. When we strive to be innocent, we lock the truth of the Gospel out of our lives.

The alternative is simple, painfully difficult, but simple in its beauty and freedom: we must begin, not with explanation, with rationalization, with self-defense, but with confession. The answer to the problem of our sin, and its ability to poison our life in the Gospel is not to establish ourselves in virtue, not to strive for a justifiable innocence, but to confess. When we confess our sins we are drawn back into the truth. The truth that God is the one who is faithful, who is righteous, just as we saw in Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. God is righteous and not us. God is faithful and not us. When we confess our sins our hands open and our idols are finally thrown away. The Faithful One, the Righteous One, the Crucified and Resurrected One, this One comes to us, and forgives us, cleanses us, and throws us into life together and service in this broken world.

Whenever we search for innocence, whenever we defend ourselves morally, whenever we try to establish ourselves in virtue, we deny the Gospel itself. When we do that we call Jesus a liar. We shut our eyes to the cross, and turn our faces away from the resurrection.

Now brothers and sisters, understand that I am saying all of this so that we will be encouraged and empowered to stop sinning. But never forget that when we do fall, when we scramble to piece together our idols, when we furiously rush to carve out secret spaces of control and power in our lives, when we fall back into these forms of death, remember that Jesus, the Nazarene, the Crucifed and Resurrected one, he advocates for us in the presence of the Father. When we turn our backs on him, he continues to pour out his life of pure, uninterrupted love on us. Remember brothers and sisters that he is the Righteous and Faithful one and that he poured out his life to the fullest to bring us to God, to cleans us from our sins, and to deliver us from the slavery of death. He did this, brothers and sisters, not just for us. No! Not for us alone, but for this whole broken idolatrous, wretched world. This is who our Lord is, the One who will not turn his back of any of the dark corners of this world of rebellion, death, and slavery. Jesus has made himself life for all the world.

And brothers and sisters, this, this is the Good News. That we are saved, not by our innocence but by the faithful and unbroken love of the God we meet in the cross and resurrection. The God who is nothing but light, nothing but love. The God in whom there is no darkness. Let us turn once again to this God, let us cease striving for innocence, and confess our sins. Let us, once again enter into freedom, light, and life by the blood of the One who was Crucified, the one who was Raised, the One who Lives and will not be without us.

A really wordy paraphrase of Ephesians 2:1-10

Posted by on March 23, 2012 37 comments

A Sermonic Midrash on Ephesians 2:1-10
Preached on Sunday, March 18 at Church of the Servant King in Portland, Oregon.

Hear, listen, understand, and know, brothers and sisters what state you used to be in. Do not forget the slavery you once labored under. Do not forget the bondage that once owned you, dominated you, and beat you down. Do not forget that you once loved your slavery to sin and death. Make no mistake about it, in your former life, the life that you lived to yourselves before Jesus intervened, in that life you were nothing less than dead. You were not simply sick, not simply weak, not simply incomplete—no, now for the first time we have come to know weakness, sickness, incompleteness and failure—rather you were dead. As dead as any lifeless corpse being returned to the earth. Yes, brothers and sisters, do not forget this fact. Dead is what you were. Nothing less than dead. Cold, lifeless, impotent, and completely and utterly helpless. You had no potential in you for life, for love, for hope, for change, peace, and a future. All of this was impossible. Your slavery was complete, utter, and unbreakable. Do not forget that you were dead in your sins, dead by your own transgressions, dead by the tyranny and power of the Devil, dead under the yoke of principalities and powers. In every way, shape and form you were dead to the fullest. And there was nothing to be done.

And you lived this way, this death, this complete and total slavery, this was what you lived in. You were tossed around by the patterns, currents, and trends of this world. There was not even a hint of freedom. Everything about your life, your living-in-death, was ruled. In those days, blind to it though you were, your whole existence was dominated by the Prince of this world. The great adversary, the one who stands behind and in all the powers that shape this world, the enemy of life, the great hater of creation, he was your ruler, down to the very core. And oh, brothers and sisters he is still at work. He still flexes his power over all those who are disobedient, who still cling to their living-in-death. He dominates, oppresses, and enslaves. And this was once your story. This was once the truest thing about you.

Indeed all of us used to live this way. Each and every one of us used to live in death, and, God forgive us, we loved it. It turned us on, it made us exited. It motivated us, it aroused us. It drove us to get rich, to get secure, to make names for ourselves, to pursue, possess and sleep with the people we thought most attractive. This living-in-death animated every inch of our being, determined every facet of our motivations. It suffused our senses, it taught us how to see everything perversely, to enjoy nothing rightly. It made us excited to twist things by our own power and to our own ends. This was our nature. We were the children of this reality, this living-in-death. Our essence was to enslave and be enslaved. Our full and fundamental orientation was towards wickedness and self-establishment. We were just like everyone else in this world. Like every battered woman and child, like every violent and vengeful man. Like every jealous brother, and every bitter sister. Like every resentful mother, and every negligent father. Like every fickle friend, and duplicitous companion. Like every murderous stranger, like every opportunistic thief. Like every helpless slave, like every tyrannical slavemaster. Like every terminally ill cancer patient, and every perfectly healthy millionaire. We were just like all of these. There was nothing different about us from the whole mass of enslaved and enslaving human beings. We were dead. We lived in death and that was the truest thing about us. And there was nothing that could change this.

But. Oh, brothers and sisters, but! Nevertheless, this, though it was the whole story from beginning to end, this was not all. In the midst of all this death, all this slavery, all this transgression, in the midst of the utter and undeniable reign of every power of death and sin and Satan, there came something new. Something impossible. Something that could never have been imagined to come.

But God! The one forgotten and abandoned by us. The one rejected, despised, and ignored above all. This One, this Love beyond all hatreds this mercy beyond all vengeance, this Life, this death-destroying Life: This came to us. In the very center of it all. Right in the midst of it. At the highest and lowest point of our living-in-death, this came to us. Overturning everything in its path this Love, the Love of God did something that had never been imagined, something utterly impossible according to every pattern and potentiality in this world: It made us alive.

Jesus, God in the flesh came to us and loved us with an indestructible love. He let it all fall on him. Everything that makes up this whole world of living-in-death. He threw himself in the path of all of it. He flung himself across the path of each and every single person in this world. He threw himself into our prison, into our fortress of death and slavery holding nothing back, giving himself utterly and fully to death. He embraced our living-in-death without reserve. He took it all in, and let it have its way with him. He took it all in, so that he might have us, so that, unimaginably we might be with him. And that is the insane newness that has come to is. That is the divine madness that has irrupted into our world. That when we were dead beyond all hope, an infinite Love did the impossible. It made us alive. But not just alive, borthers and sisters, no. It made us alive together with him. The Love that has impossibly come among us is not content to restore us to our own lives. No, this Love, the Love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will do nothing less that make us alive together with Jesus, with God’s very self.

This is what we mean, brothers and sisters when we say that “by grace you have been saved.” When we say that, when we confess that, when we proclaim that, we remember and rejoice that this is what has been done. That we were dead—and nothing but dead—and now, impossibly, miraculously, madly, God has made us alive, not alone, or even together, but with Christ Jesus. God has done this.

And more than this, brothers and sisters, God has done something even more impossible, something even more mad. God was not content to simply raise us, for the first time to life, or even to make us to live in the presence of Jesus. No, God has done even more. God has seated us, brothers and sisters alongside Christ. His victory becomes our victory. His glory becomes our glory. His life becomes our life. His joy becomes our joy. His freedom becomes our freedom.

Why, brothers and sisters? Why has God lavished such unprecedented and underserved love, mercy, and glory onto us? What reason for this mad excessiveness could there be? What reason could God have to raise up emaciated child and vindictive murderer together and bring them into indescribable glory? Why did God do this? We know but one reason, because God wants to. The Love that God is desires to shower everyone he has made with immeasurable grace, with limitless kindness, with infinite forgiveness, with unending glory, with eternal joy. This is just what God wants to do, that is what the life of Jesus tells us, what it establishes, what it promises.

So do not be deceived, brothers and sisters. We are alive for one reason and one reason only. Because God has done this in and through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the faithful one. We are alive solely because God’s love has come upon us in the form of this One, this one who was faithful unto death. We had nothing to do with brining this about. Nothing of our own making, no potential within us, nothing we had contributed to this. It is nothing but God’s gift. No work we have done, no accomplishments we can claim contributed anything to this new life being given to us. We have nothing to boast about, nothing to claim, nothing to hold in our hands as if it were our own. No, we have nothing but empty hands in the face of what God has done in Jesus. God has made us alive and God alone has done that. We stand now with empty, open hands, hands which cannot grasp, cannot make, cannot seize, but can only ever remain open, stretched out to God in praise, lament, intercession, and joy, and to one another in welcome, embrace, forgiveness, and support.

And that is what God has now created us to be. He has made us what we are in Christ Jesus. Do not be deceived, brothers and sisters. Who you are now has nothing to do with any of that living-in-death that used to be true about you. It once was the only true thing about you, but now it is nothing but a lie. A false, powerless, defeated shadow. Do not imagine that it has anything more to do with who you are. Who you are now is who God has created you to be in Christ. In Christ God has created us to live towards God and towards each other with empty hands, with open arms. We are made, now, solely for praise and embrace. God has prepared this for us, brothers and sisters. He has set a way of life now before us, a life of empty, outstretched hands. A life where we can do nothing but move, reflexively from shouts of praise to God to unconditional embrace of all who cross our path.

God has prepared this path for us, brothers and sisters. For all ages God has destined us for this in Christ. To be set free from the living-in-death that was once our fate unto being alive with Christ, open to God, embracing all others in love. This is what God has made us to be. And that, now, is the only thing that is true about us. Brothers and sisters, do not fall back into the things that are no longer true, tempting though they may appear. We know that these things are death altogether. Brothers and sisters, remember, confess, proclaim, and enact the truth this day. The truth that God has made us alive with Christ, has enthroned us with Christ, has set us free from every slavery, from every domination, from every power of death and sin and hell. The truth that who we are is not who we were, but only who God in Christ has now and is continuing to make us to be. Open your hands and open your hearts to receive that truth, the one and only thing that is now true. That we are not who we were, that the world is not what it was, that nothing will ever be that way again, that the old age is passing away and the only thing that is something is a New Creation. Hear, brothers and sisters and believe that again. Turn again, with me, pray, praise, love, serve, repent, forgive, open, appeal, give, suffer, and rejoice together. For nothing will ever be that old way again. We are now what God has made us to be. That, and that alone is true.

Idolatry and participation

Posted by on March 21, 2012 115 comments

Lately, I’ve noticed several re-articulations of a theological trend we’ve talked about here plenty of times before, namely the position that the church’s practices mediate God’s presence and action in the world, form Christians to be virtuous selves in contrast to the acids of modernity, and make Christ concretely present in the world, when otherwise salvation would be simply a spiritual abstraction of some sort. What is still needed, advocates of this trend maintain, is an ontology of participation which insists that divine and human action are fundamentally noncompetitive, that God’s action for our salvation is not simply God’s but because of the ontological participation between God and the world, it is also our action, and indeed, the very notion of attributing action distinctly to God versus humanity is problematized. God’s action does not “exclude” but rather is mediated precisely through the church’s own social practices and rituals. So the story goes.

Anyways recent work done along these lines (and this post by my friend Robb brought it to mind for me) tends to argue against those critical of this position that somehow such criticisms simply do not take into account the fact that their position views divine and human action as “noncompetitive” and thus as practically indistinguishable. Once we see that point, it’s no longer problematic to have God’s presence and action possessed and mediated through the church’s social practices and rituals. However, this re-assertion is problematic on a number of levels.

Obviously those of us who are critical of the school of thought that articulates what we might call “ecclesial-practices-as-the-direct-mediation-of-God’s-presence-and-action” are fully aware that certain strains of postliberal and contemporary quasi-Catholic theological sentiment believe that divine and human action cannot be seriously distinguished and thus that the church’s practices simply in some sense “are” and “extend” God’s action, make God present, and bind God, making possible God’s concreteness in the world (this is Reinhard Hütter’s way of talking here, and this line of thought is also pretty clear in Sam Wells’ work, and is made very clear in Jamie Smith’s recent books, it is also articulated very plainly in David Fitch’s recent book, The End of Evangelicalism, if folks want to check out some references). Of course we know that folks think that divine and human action cannot be distinguished, are noncompetitive because of a participatory platonic ontology, etc.

However, I don’t see how any of these re-assertions actually substantially criticize or render problematic anything folks like Nicholas Healy, John Flett, Peter Kline, or Nate Kerr, Ry Sigglekow, and myself have argued. It just re-asserts the position we have argued (in our various and distinct ways) against without really attending to any of the arguments in question, or showing how it withstands the critiques made against it. It is argument by re-assertion, not by engagement. It does not show why we ought to believe in a platonic ontology of participation, why we ought to view divine and human action as distinguishable, rather it simply asserts that when you assume a participatory ontology it makes sense to think of the church’s practices as the extension and concrete reality of God’s being and action in the world. Well, of course it isn’t problematic to see ecclesial practices this way when you assume such an ontology, but why should we? These are the questions that I haven’t seen any answers to (unless “because modernity is bad” counts as an answer somehow).

Moreover, these articulations seems to me to often involve a patently false argumentative turn. Namely they tend to insist that there must be “an impenetrable ontological divide” between God and the world (throw in some stuff about Scotus and nominalism and how evil it is here) if there is to be a distinction of divine and human agency. The problem is there is no reason why this line should be thought to be true. Just because human and divine actions can be distinguished does not in any way imply that God is somehow ontologically locked out of the nitty-gritty of human life and action. Obviously God has broken through any and all barriers (sin, death, the Devil, etc) in Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. It seems strange to me that this radical act of God, the very act of defeating death, sin, and hell somehow is not adequate to bring God and humanity truly together in an unbreakable sense, a sense that we can depend on. That somehow if we don’t have this reality socially possessed and doled out through the church’s rituals and practices, it is simply something “spiritual” and ephemeral.

Moreover, the whole way in which “noncompetition” between divine and human agency tends to be articulated in these accounts rests on a rather odd misunderstanding of what attributing distinction of action means. It seems to be assumed that if God’s action is properly God’s, and thus, fundamentally not ours, that then we have somehow locked God out of the world. As already mentioned, this fear seems to me to manifest an odd lack of faith in the reality of Christ’s incarnation, life, death, and resurrection, but furthermore it seems to rest on a mistake about the implications of distinguishing between agents and their respective actions. I mean, you and I are both human beings but your actions are yours and mine are mine in a unique and irreducible sense. If you murder someone, there must be a real sense in which that is your action and not mine, our common human nature notwithstanding.

It seems impossible to read the New Testament depictions of judgment any other way, for there it is always people’s own unique actions (feeding the hungry, visiting the poor, etc.) form the basis of how they are judged. Likewise the whole logic of salvation in Paul rests on the fundamental distinction between divine and human agency (“this is not of your own doing, it is the gift of God, not the result of human works…” etc). Obviously examples of this could be multiplied extensively.

All this to say, being able to attribute a distinction of actions to God and human beings does not create an impenetrable divide between them in any way (any more than distinguishing your action and mine sets us on different sides of an impenetrable ontological divide). It simply recognizes that God is God and human beings are not God. This does not sequester God from the world, but simply recognizes that God is present and active to the world in freedom, not as a function of our “making”. What it refuses to do is amalgamate God, make God some sort of constituent part of the world-event, which is what I think perspectives like the one often articulated by advocates of ecclesial-practices-as-the-direct-mediation-of-God’s-presence-and-action cannot help but ultimately do.

This is why, I fear, in the end such articulations are ultimately idolatrous. In this ontological scheme God becomes the possession of the church, no matter how vigorously this is denied. The church’s practices become God’s presence, no matter how passionately this is nuanced. God ceases to be the free and living Lord and simply becomes the religious commodity that the church dispenses and maintains in its own social rituals and life, despite the pious verbiage in which this is couched. And that is why, eventually, I came to reject this theological trend, at least as an overriding program for doing theology.

A midrash on 2 Corinthians 10:3-5

Posted by on March 14, 2012 24 comments

For though we live fully as human beings, living fully in this world, loving this world, and suffering with, in, and for this world, we do not wage our war according to the pattern of this age, the old age, the age of death, the age that assumes and asserts its sovereignty and normality. For the weapons of our warfare do not belong to anything latent in the potentials and powers of this world; no, the weapons of our warfare are mighty, made for the work of demolishing fortresses, of striking off any and all fetters, of bringing freedom to every captive, of raising from the ashes all those who weep and have no hope; the weapons of our warfare are not of this age, they are not carnal, but mighty, and they are for the obliteration of every wall, of every chain, and every boundary. With them we tear down arguments, rational explanations, reasonable, well-balanced perspectives, and measured, non-overstated, nuanced systems of thought; we tear them down along with every arrogant and subtle obstacle that is raised up against the Gospel of God as made known in Jesus Christ. Instead we attack any and all of these thoughts, we bind them and take them captive. We render them powerless and make them obedient to Christ, the Crucified and Risen Lord. We leave nothing out, we hold nothing back, for all things will be liberated in captivity to Christ, the Crucified and Risen One.

The false glory of John Piper’s god

Posted by on January 16, 2012 23 comments

Recently I was asked (by Kait Dugan, check out her blog) about how John Piper (check out this video for some context), about whose perverse theology I’ve written about previously, manages to come to understand God’s glory as a sort of self-directed hegemonic tyranny. What are the theological moves that lead one to come to think “the glory of God” in terms of chauvinistic self-aggrandisement? Why would one come to conceive God as a self-directed center of power whose “glory” consisted of simply asserting and impose his own supremacy and domination?

My first instinct in responding to this question is to point out that it really isn’t as much of a formally (and that word is the key qualifier here) theological issue as it is fundamentally an issue of gender and power. Piper interprets God as a self-directed man, concerned ultimately which the maximization of his own power (which is of course “good” because this one particular male really is supreme and thus deserves and warrants this rigorous self-fixation). I think it really is just the upshot of thinking God according to the logic of patriarchy.

If there is a theological reason for it, I’d have to say that it is the functional (though not acknowledged or admitted) rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity speaks of a God that does not seek the maximization of any singular self or, but rather of a united yet multidirectional and primordially other-directed love. The God who is Triune never is concerned with “himself.” Rather “the Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand” and the Son has come “not to my will but the will of him who sent me” and the Spirit “will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears.”

The Triune God is never concerned with the maximization of a “self” since God is not a self, but rather a singular reality of three identities (to borrow some language from Robert Jenson). No identity of the Trinity seeks their own, but always and only seeks the maximization of the other(s). Thus the Son offers up the kingdom to the Father and the Father places everything in subjection to the Son and so on. The glory of the Triune God is thus the glory of an othering that seeks only to empower, never to claim power for one’s own. Piper’s nontrinitarian theology of self-directed glory is the denial and opposite of this. Indeed the “glory” that he proclaims is nothing less than the projection onto God (at the expense of the witness of the Cross) of patriarchal, homicidal power, the power of sin and death. This is the “glory of God” that he so adores.

Christ’s baptism, Christ’s confession

Posted by on January 8, 2012 1 comment

A fitting reflection I think, for this Sunday, the Baptism of the Lord:

When He had Himself baptised with water by John, Jesus confessed both God and [humankind]. A better way of putting it is that because He confessed God, the God whose will was soon to be done on earth as it is in heaven, therefore He confessed [humankind], the [humans] who are in view in this doing of God’s will. Because He is committed unreservedly to subordination to God, therefore He is committed unreservedly to solidarity with [humankind]. He who as God’s Son was very different from all [people], being one with the Father who sent Him, and therefore Himself God, negated this difference, this distance, this strangeness between Himself and others, even to the last remnant. He became wholly and utterly one of them, not in an act of secret or even public condescension, like a king for a change donning a beggar’s rags and mingling with the crowd, but by belonging to them in every way, by being no more and no less than one of them, by having no point of reference except to them. He became one of them, not in order to renounce full fellowship with them when the game was over, like the king exchanging again the beggar’s rags for his kingly robes, not in order to leave again the table where He had seated Himself with publicans and sinners , and to find himself a better place, but in order to be one of them definitively as well as originally, unashamed to call them brethren to all eternity because He was their Brother from all eternity (Heb. 2:11), a veritable King in this true form of His, and at His place of honour. With the men of His people, then, He received the Word of God which came to John and to which John bore witness. With them He looked forward to the intimated new act of God which would change all things. With them He looked forward to the establishment of God’s kingdom, the threatened judgment, the remission and taking away of their sins. With them He obeyed the call for conversion issued to his people. With all the rest He had Himself baptised with water. With them He thus confessed His sins. His sins? If we do not say this, we question and even deny the totality of His self-giving to [humankind], and therewith the totality of His self-giving to God. We say that He had Himself baptised with the rest only improperly, contrary to the meaning of John’s preaching and baptism, in a demonstration which had neither truth nor necessity for Him. We say at root that this was just a theatrical show. But it was not a theatrical show. The seriousness with which others, frightened before God and setting their hope in Him alone, confessed their sins, is infinitely surpassed hereby the divine earnestness with which this One, when faced by the sins of all others, their confusions and corruptions, their big and little acts of ungodliness, did not let these sins be theirs, did not regard, bewail or judge them from a distance with tacit or open accusation, did not simply characterise them as sins by His own Otherness, but as the Son of His Father, elected and ordained from all eternity to be the Brother of these fatal brethren, caused them to be His own sins, confessed them as such, and therewith confessed that He was baptised in prospect of God’s kingdom, judgment and forgiveness. No one who came to the Jordan was as laden and afflicted as He. No one was as needy. No one was so utterly human, because so wholly fellow-human. No one confessed his sins so sincerely, so truly as his own, without side-glances at others. He stands alone in this, He who was elected and ordained from all eternity to partake of the sin of all in His own person, to bear its shame and curse in the place of all, to be the man responsible for all, and as such, wholly theirs, to live and act and suffer. This is what Jesus began to do when He had Himself baptised by John with all the others. This was the opening of His history as the salvation history of all the others.

~Karl Barth, CD IV/4, 58-59.

The severity of hope

Posted by on January 5, 2012 13 comments

The reduction of hope is one of our greatest temptations. Hope, unlike optimism, nostalgia, or raw self-assertion speaks of a space in which all our abilities to “deal” with our situation have vanished. We have no raw data, resources, skills, or powers with which to get a handle on things, and are left only to hope. When have no reason or rationale to anticipate a resolution, we are left either to descend into despair, or somehow to inexplicably live in expectancy of a hope beyond our hopelessness, a Word that cannot be produced, but can only be cried out for, and if uttered, only received with thanks and praise.

The severity of hope is easy to close one’s eyes to precisely because it is so deeply severe. Allowing ourselves to live in expectant hope, when all the signs point to its irrationality and foolishness is supremely difficult and disarming. To venture into the realm of hope is come to the very edge of the void, to finally surrender one’s cleverness, resourcefulness, and courage and cry out for a salvation that is, quite simply impossible on the basis of all that is. As my friend Peter Kline has recently pointed out in his superb essay on Lady Gaga’s Marry the Night video:

The line between despair and hope is razor thin. Both face the future anxiously as a kind of empty darkness. The only difference is that whereas despair cowers before the darkness in fear, grasping for some-thing to stabilize the dizzying anxiety . . . hope leaps forward, dancing into the darkness with an inexplicable expectancy that love is present and that love will come. . . . Love is the impossible possibility of dancing the night away on the razor, treating it not as the precipice of despair, but as the edge of glory.

Walter Brueggemann makes some similarly helpful points in his essay “Faith at the Nullpunkt” in his The Word that Redescribes the World. Examining the crises of faith that Israel negotiates in the Old Testament, he speaks of the point of utter failure, in which the securities of Israel utterly break down in exile. It is precisely at this nullpunkt where the challenge of hope begins. In the face of hopelessness Israel is faced with the dual calling to, on the one hand “relinquish what is gone, to resist every denial and every act of nostalgia, to acknowledge and embrace what YHWH has ended”; and on the other hand “to receive what is inexplicably and inscrutably given by YHWH, to resist every measure of despair, to await and affirm what YHWH, beyond every quid pro quo, now gives.” But the crucial point in all this, the point at which we are all tempted tame and blunt the severity of hope is that we can assure and possess “no automatic move from relinquishment to reception; one does not follow necessarily from or after the other” (62).

The movement from despair to joy, from fissure to healing is not a movement that can be held in hand. We cannot anticipate or secure it. Rather, in the very depths of the darkness of the nullpunkt we can only cry out for it, only hope for it. Ultimately hope, if it is not to be reduced to a grasping for control, or a dishonest and self-possessed optimism, must be understood as that which

stakes everything on the unfettered “Thou” who is not in thrall to the reasonableness of any nullpunkt. All nullpunkt, in every sphere, have common properties. In the end what counts is the capacity of this “Thou” to intrude into the nullpunkt and override it. (Brueggemann, 71)

Hope, real genuine hope must not shy away from this bare point of hopelessness. If we are to avoid abandoning hope for nostalgia, self-assertion, or self-imposed blindness and despair we must not close our eyes to the point of dissolution, of emptiness and screaming in which the world, and all of us in it ultimately find ourselves.

The nullpunkt, in its many forms, is enough to evoke deep and raw fear. The exile offers a fear of abandonment. The pressure of chaos invites fear of obliteration. The immediacy of death bespeaks nullification and nonbeing. The nulpunkt carries the prospect of total nullification. Into that is spoken, “Do not fear.” The antidote seems modest in the face of the threat. Unless, of course, the antidote is uttered by one who is trustworthy. Everything depends upon that. The future always depends for Israel [and the church, the world, and ever human person] upon the trustworthiness of the One who characteristically hovers somewhere between the fear so palpably grounded and the faith so fragilely embraced. It is the pivot point of hope: “Do not fear!” (Bruegggemann, 71)

But this “Do not fear!” is not simply the assurance that there is nothing to fear. No, the word of grace which comes among us and tells us “Do not fear!”, the perfect love that casts out all fear (1 John 4:18) comes not before, but after and during the night of trembling in which blood is sweat from the brow of Jesus. The calling not to fear is spoken precisely into the face of that which is utterly and ultimately fearful. And this calling, this severe hope turns always and only on the one who speaks it. It can ultimately be true only if this one is indeed trustworthy and has and will overcome death forever. And it is this one, the Crucified Resurrected one who indeed speaks this to is, precisely on the precipice of hopelessness: ”Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hell” (Rev 1:17-18).

Advent and the end of religion

Posted by on November 27, 2011 10 comments

There’s a somewhat famous quote from Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison (November 21, 1943, pp. 188-89) on the nature of Advent: “By the way, a prison cell like this is a good analogy for Advent; one waits, hopes, does this or that — ultimately negligible things — the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.”

Interestingly in the same letter Bonhoeffer mentions how much he misses table fellowship and how he’s begun praying Luther’s morning and evening blessing every day. He then says: “Don’t be alarmed! I will definitely not come out here as a ‘homo religiosus’! Quite the opposite: my suspicion and fear of ‘religiosity’ has become greater here than ever.” So then, perhaps we must say that Advent, according to Bonhoeffer’s prior analogy, as a prison cell that can only be opened from outside, should be seen as the end of religion. All religion must have a door that can, at least partially be opened from the inside. Advent proclaims the end of religion as such, speaking of a God who must come to us wholly from beyond us.

To retreat into the comfort of religiosity, the smooth apologetic for Christianity that arises from proclaiming homo religiosus (or its more trendy equivalent these days, homo liturgicus) is to retreat from the very hope of Advent itself, the hope against hope that cannot be satisfied by out own designs, but only by the earth-shattering coming of God in Jesus.

Christian distinctiveness

Posted by on September 26, 2011 22 comments

The epistle to Diognetus is perhaps one of the more well known works from among the Apostolic Fathers these days, at least in popular theological discussions. This is due, less to its remarks on the “common silliness and deception and foolishness and pride of the Jews” (4:6 — yikes), than for the chapter that immediately follows it on the nature of Christian distinctiveness in the world. Among popular works in ecclesiology and various sorts of “church and culture” writings, this has been an incredibly popular chapter to quote over the last decade or so. And, interestingly it has been very popular with folks articulating some version of the “church as polis” model for understanding the church-world relationship. I find this interesting, and downright weird, really in that what the author of the epistle puts forth in this chapter seems downright contradictory to the positions he is being used to support.

The chapter starts out by explaining the nature of the distinictiveness of Christians in the world by saying precisely what does not distinguish them: “For Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity by country, language, or custom. For nowhere do they live in cities [Gk: polis] of their own, nor do they speak some unusual dialect, nor do they practice an eccentric way of life” (5:1-2). Interestingly, for the author of the epistle, Christians are distinct from the world, not on the basis of anything that would commonly be thought of as cultural – language, social customs, alternative political arrangements, origins, etc. are precisely not what make the church distinct from the world. On the contrary, according to the author, Christians participate fully in whatever cultural situation they happen to inhabit: “But while they live both in Greek and barbarian cities, as each one’s lot was cast, and follow the local customs in dress and food and other aspects of life, at the same time they demonstrate the remarkable and admittedly unusual character of their own citizenship” (5:4).

Here is the point of distinctiveness, according to the author: not that the Christian possesses an alternative cultural reality over against the ones in which they are set, but rather, that, regardless of their cultural setting, they manifest a distinctive character of involvement in it. The author goes on to describe this at length: “They live in their own countries, but only as nonresidents; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is foreign” (5:5). In other words, the distinctiveness of the Christian in the world is lies precisely in their ability to inhabit any cultural situation “as if not” to borrow the Pauline idiom (cf. 1 Cor 7:29-31). Thus, the distinctiveness of the Christian lies not in their cultivation of some sort of alternative habitable culture, but rather in the nonconformed quality of their involvement in whatever culture they happen to reside in. Thus, they marry and have children but do not commit infanticide or adultery (5:6-7); they obey established laws, but transcend them by love (5:10); they love their persecutors (5:11); and on the the list goes.

In other words, the furthest thing from the thought of the epistle is the notion that the church is distinct from the world by virtue of being polis or a culture of its own. Rather the emphasis is constantly on the quality of involvement in the life of the world which the Gospel calls forth. Christians are distinct from the world, not by any sort of cultural or cultic separation from the world, but rather by the form of their life in the world. It is the selflessness of their love for all (5:11) that sets them “apart” not merely from, but precisely for the world.

This bears a striking similarity to John Howard Yoder’s discussion of the nature of the distinction of the church from the world in The Politics of Jesus. Jesus’s message of self-giving love, and his call to reject patterns of power and domination (cf. Luke 22:25ff) envision “a visible structured fellowship, a sober decision guaranteeing that the costs of commitment to the fellowship has been consciously accepted, and a clearly defined life-style distinct from that of the crowd.” However, Yoder goes on to specify precisely what this distinct life-style entails: “This life-style is different, not because of arbitrary rules separating the believer’s behavior from that of ‘normal people,’ but because of the exceptionally normal quality of humanness to which the community is committed.” (emphasis added)

As with the author of the epistle, for Yoder the distinctness of the church from the world emerges precisely at the point of the church’s transformed involvement with the life of the world, an involvement rightly characterized as an “exceptionally normal quality of humanness.” In other words the church is most visible, most distinct precisely at the point that it is the most human, involving itself in the sufferings and sorrows of the world in the pattern of Christ’s kenotic, self-giving love. Thus, as Yoder concludes: “The distinctness is not a cultic or ritual separation, but rather a nonconformed quality of (‘secular’) invovlement in the life of the world” (p. 39 for all quotes).

In contrast to asserting the distinction of the church from the world in cultural terms (the church as its own polis or culture) in which the distinction is defined under the auspices of ritual (typically with the Eucharist or Baptism being turned into the cultic boundary between church and world), Yoder and the author of the epistle to Diognetus offer a different vision: one in which the church is distinct from the world, not in terms of cult, but rather in terms of Christ’s own calling of his disciples into kenosis in, with, and for the world. The distinctness of the church, and of the Christian thus comes to be seen, not in terms of the maintenance of boundaries, and the guarding of cultic gates, but rather in the calling to go “outside the camp,” finding the meaning of true discipleship and true Christian distinctiveness in the giving up of all pretensions to security and establishment, learning instead to simply let our power be brought to an end in weakness, in love, and in self-abandonment for the sake of the world for whom Christ died.

The irresistible devolution

Posted by on August 11, 2011 26 comments

One of the interesting things about the now old News Corp phone-hacking scandals is how evangelical and radical Christians who publish under their umbrella have gone about justifying their involvement with an entity that is demonstrably evil. For example, radical Christian and new monastic superstar Shane Claiborne is well known for his many books, including the bestselling book, The Irresistible Revolution which, as you are probably aware is published by Zondervan, a company own by News Corp.

For a radical Christian pacifist, who calls us to follow Jesus wholly, I found Claiborne’s response to questions about the approriateness of utilizing the News Corp to spread his message rather telling:

“I want to have the broadest readership possible,” Claiborne says by phone, “I don’t want to be someone who just speaks to the choir.” He says smaller publishers have their advantages but the books he has written for them cost “two or three times” more than what they would if Zondervan published them.

Claiborne, who has preached his message via Esquire, Fox News (also owned by News Corp), Al Jazeera and many others, says the key is to “protect the integrity of the message.” If he is convinced the medium won’t change the message, he will work with organizations despite not “[agreeing] with all of their approaches or decisions.”

But even if the message is protected, his work is being used to help enrich a rather well-maintained corner of empire. He feels “conflicted” about this. “I don’t think that the world exists in 100 percent pure and 100 percent impure options,” he says.

. . . . There’s good and bad in each of us, he says, “we are called to work on the log in our own eye, and I’m sure as heck trying to work on the compromises that I make so that those are minimal when it comes to integrity.”

His response, in other words is to oddly assert a sort of Niebuhrianism. Obviously in an ideal world we wouldn’t publish our radical Christian manifestos of hope with publishers who have no ethics and exist solely to produce profits, even at the cost of dehumanizing and oppressing others. But we live in the real world. In the real world sometimes we need to compromise with evil media empires in order to sell enough copies of our book. We may not feel good about this, but this abiguity is an unavoidable tension in which we must live if we wish to deal with “the real world.”

Of course this is exactly the sort of ethical logic that books like Claiborne’s constantly rail against, holding up by contrast the radical politics of Jesus. So when it comes to say, war, the answer is obvious: a complete and radical break with “the world” for the sake of faithfulness to the Gospel. But when it comes to money, and “soft violence”, the kind we don’t easily see, the kind that sustains corporate behemoths like News Corp, well then we have to learn to live in world where things aren’t so black and white. When it comes to “violence” (which always seems to mean simply an ethical disapproval of war) we must not shirk the duty of obedience and faithfulness. When it comes to money, influence, and success (even “good” influence and success in “good” ministries), well then we have to be ok with some compromises with the powers in order to get things done.

Of course one obvious difference between these two contradictory positions that folks like Claiborne tend to take is that simply saying “War is wrong” doesn’t exactly cost us anything or make us ask the hard questions about what violence really is and how it is happening all around us and in us. The reason money, influence, and success are so much harder to simply chuck under the bus of faithfulness and obedience is because we can’t do that without being self-implicating. And there’s the rub.

All of which seems to give further evidence to the fact that “war” and “violence” are not the preeminent capitulations the church has made to the powers. Indeed, arguing about why Christians must be anti-war may well distract us from the real issues, and indeed the real violence that the church consistently ignores for the sake of its own comfort and success.

Or to put an even finer point on the matter: What we really need to be able to do be honest about money. Nothing melts away faux radicalism faster than demanding the people talk about money and change how they relate to it concretely.

Christianity is not a cultural project

Posted by on August 10, 2011 24 comments

One of the central features of what we might call “post-evangelical discontent” is the general state of being sick of hearing about a “personal relationship” with God as central to the meaning of being a Christian. Talk about “personal relationships” with God is pietistic and individualistic drivel through and through, and we must move beyond it to talk about what really matters, namely embodied discipleship in the church, which is a political, cultural reality in its own right. What is vital for those seeking to move beyond their post-evangelical discontent is to stop fixating on such evangelical niceties and pieties, and understand Christian identity in terms of culture, that is the church as a specific cultural project that, through its own life and the virtues it forms in its members, embodies the kingdom in the world.

Now, to be sure I agree that talk of a “personal relationship” with God is theologically problematic, especially in its fundmentalist-evangelical use. The idea that God is primarily interested in having some sort of emotional involvement with us as precious individual snowflakes is, quite obviously stupid. However, I also find it problematic to move, through a sort of short-circuit from this insipid individual relationalism to construing Christianity as primarily a cultural project. The reason this is problematic is because Christianity is not a cultural project. To be a Christian is not to adopt some new cultural identity, ecclesial or otherwise (as the cross-cultural translatability of the Gospel message in the New Testament shows). To be a Christian is rather to be called to witness to the act of God in Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. This can happen in any culture and in many forms, which is part of the beauty of God’s ongoing work of raising up witnesses by the Spirit.

As such, we need to pause in our rightful distaste for false pieties before seeking false sanctuaries in construals of “Christianity as culture.” Statements like the following should be roundly rejected:

If you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God then you are a religious Christian. Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform. This makes us Christian.

It may interest folks to know that this statement comes, not from the pen of leading authors who write books on theology of culture, or the meaning of being the church in the post-Christendom world, but from Anders Behring Breivik, the architect of the recent terrorist attacks in Norway. I use this quote here not to say that the advocates of Christianity as a cultural project would somehow endorse Breivik’s actions; obviously they would not. My point is more basic: Christianity is not a cultural project and to construe it as such is always to set it in the service of some ideology or politics other than it’s call to witness to Christ. Just as we must reject false pieties, so too must we reject the false security that would have us imagine that Christianity is a culture rather than a calling that breaks into all cultures and forms of social life.

More on “place,” ideology, and incarnation

Posted by on June 7, 2011 14 comments

Some of this appears in the comment tread on yesterday’s post, but I thought it needed to be expanded into a post in its own right as well. As we consider what it means to think in terms of “place” and the church’s life, I want to be clear. My point is not that the church should not seek concretely dwell in and be concerned for its particular context. Rather my point is that we need to look not to “place” as a sort of cultural-theological category but rather need to ask “What place? Which spaces?” Inhabiting the culture of suburban affluence is not the same thing as inhabiting the culture of the urban ghetto, and we cannot include them both under the rubric of “place”, at least not if we are talking about how to avoid ideology.

In some of these discussions, as is often the case the language of “incarnation” has come up. If we relativize “place,” does that amount to a denial of the incarnation, in which God in Christ comes and dwells in a particular place and culture? If we are to be in the world as Christ himself was, does that not also mean that the church ought to enculturate itself, establishing rootedness, identity and longevity by stabilizing its life in a particular place, thus imitating and participating in Christ’s incarnation?

This use of “incarnation” I take to be an extremely widespread problem in a lot of contemporary ecclesiological and missional discourse and practice. It relies on an an unbiblical expansion of “incarnation” into a theological category that neglects the actual meaning of that doctrine in terms of the concrete history of Jesus Christ. That is to say, “incarnation” does not name a broad theological principle or metaphysical-ecclesiological quality. Rather it is a doctrine about Christ’s singular person and work that is derived from the radical event of his crucifixion and resurrection. “Incarnation” must be understood concretely in terms of Christ’s own history, his concrete story.

Taken in that light it becomes clear that the incarnation does not sanctify “place” (rootedness, cultural identity, etc.), though it continues to be taken that way. Rather we learn that the Word became flesh and tabernacled (skenoo) among us (John 1). Indeed when the Word comes to those who were “his own”, those who are his own people, those who concretely dwell in the land and the Holy Place of Jerusalem, it is precisely they who “did not receive him.” The mode of God’s “dwelling” is not that of rootedness, of Temple, but rather of Tabernacle, of sojourning without a secure “place.” And thus Jesus never “roots” his ministry anywhere but rather is found traversing all sorts of places, going to the Samaritans, Galilee of the Gentiles, and even to the houses of the Romans. He does indeed come to “the holy place” — only to be reject, driven out, and crucifed outside the city gate (more on this later). His ministry is not one of “inhabiting place” but rather of traversing place, venturing into abandoned spaces with the unclean and the marginalized. As such it is a profound theological mistake to jump from “incarnation” to a vision of rootedness, stability, a sanctifying of place. That is decidedly what Jesus does not do. Rather his whole ministry consists in the relativizing of “place”, especially the Temple, which of course was a major cause of his crucifixion.

Likewise, in the New Testament the incarnation never functions as a way of describing the scandal of the Gospel, rather it is an afterthought, a doctrine that is a mere consequence of the earth-shattering fact of the resurrection of the Crucified One. The notion that God would come and dwell with his people is not the scandal of the Gospel; that was Israel’s earliest hope as well attested throughout the Old Testament. The Scandal of the Gospel was that God would come among Israel as the Crucified One, the one cursed under Torah (Deut 21:23). It is Christ Crucified, not “Christ incarnated” that is the scandal of the Gospel. And it is always to crucifixion-resurrection, not “incarnation” that the Apostles call the church. That’s why I’m hesitant to allow “the incarnation” a sort of independent status to determine the nature of the church and its ministry. The pattern of the New Testament gospel is not from incarnation to “incarnational ministry”, but is rather from crucifixion-resurrection to cruciform self-abandonment. We need to understand “incarnation” from the cross, not the other way round.

Thus I must say again that the call to discipleship of the crucified leaves us in an unstable relationship with “place” and “rootedness” and “culture.” I’m haunted by statements like those in Hebrews: “Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Heb 12:13-14). Jesus comes among us, not as one who “inhabits place”, but as one who is driven out of the security and peace of “place”, rootedness, culture, etc. He is found outside the city gates, driven into the abandoned spaces along with the lepers, prostitutes, and the godforsaken. If, as Hebrews suggest, our calling is to “go to him outside the camp”, I think that should orient us, not towards the lure of stability, place, and culture, but towards the forgotten and hidden spaces in this world, the spaces that “place” crowds out and paves over, where the despised and the worthless of this world, “the poor of Jesus Christ” are abandoned, having no “place” to lay their head. That, it seems to me is where the church should be found, and towards which it should continually move.

“Place” and ideology

Posted by on June 6, 2011 133 comments

A while back David Fitch posted some thoughts on the power of “place” to overcome ideology in the life of the church. He states his argument, briefly as follows:

. . . it is only through “place” that we can break the cycle of ideological church. It is only through engaging in the practices of being the local expression of Christ’s body that we can break out of the entanglements of ideological cynicism. It is only in being the church of Jesus Christ, whose belief and practice is grounded in the Triune relation of God in the world, that we can avoid being ideologized. It is only in building communities that have their own internal integrity built in the on-the-ground participation in the Reign of Christ – that we can escape the ideologization of the church.  No longer dependent upon ideological structure – we can then discern – resist- participate in the world in non violent non-antagonistic ways. This of course (I would argue) is the nature of the incarnation and incarnational communities.

Now, I want to say at the outset that I understand that Fitch is emphasizing “place” (as many missional and new monastic folks do, including myself) in an attempt to combat certain elements of the contemporary evangelical church, such as suburban commuter churches in which the congregates don’t share much in the way of meaningful common life. In the face of churches whose members may live anywhere and not necessarily anywhere near one another, the call to “place” seems to make some sense. Certainly the church is not faithful if it construes itself as a sort of abstract meeting place that does not call us into common life and mission together.

However, I’ve grown increasingly less confident in the notion of “place” to do the sort of heavy lifting that is often asked of it. First of all, in contrast to what Fitch seems to suggest, I don’t see how its possible for us to construe “place” in and of itself as giving us a way to “break the cycle of ideological church.” “Place” speaks of location, stability, longevity, peoplehood, cultivation, it conjures up the images of land and home. But this seems to be part of the problem: Is not commitment to “place” the greatest source of ideology in human history? Are not wars fought precisely in the name of “place”? Is not the effort to carve out and secure “place” at the very center of ideological conflict? To speak of “place” is speak of establishment, and as such, far from becoming a site of resistance to ideology, it forms the place of its very birth. Could not the call to seize upon “place” have the exact opposite effect as Fitch intends? Might it not drive the church towards a territorialism, a possessiveness, that insists upon securing its own “internal integrity”?

We do well to remember that “place” is not neutral. “Places” are created by blood, by division, by violence. It is decidedly easy for the images of belonging and stability that “place” conjures up to imagine that it is simply benign and beautiful. But the truth is that it is not enough to call the church to embrace “place.” Rather the church must be called to critically question and act in response to the forces and powers that divide the world. It is not enough to say “place”; rather we must critically examine the nature of the different spaces in which we find ourselves. The “place” that is the urban ghetto is a decidedly different space than the suburbs or the uptown. They are not really “places” at all, but rather are spaces, created by various forces of social and political (and spiritual!) power. Embracing the “place” that is the urban ghetto is decidedly not the same thing as embracing the “place” that most middle class churches inhabit.

It seems to me that the more pertinent call to the church is not simply to embrace “place”, as if that were some overarching category. Rather the church must discern how different spaces are created in this world, how the principalities and powers seek to divide, enslave, and dehumanize those for whom Christ died and in whom he still suffers. It is into those spaces, the spaces claimed by the idolatrous powers that the church must be found if it is to be counted faithful to the Messiah who proclaimed salvation and restoration to “the least.” In entering these spaces we are not promised the security of “place.” Quite the opposite: “The Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” Discipleship calls us, I believe, not into the security of place, but into the insecurity of obedience, of suffering with and bringing the good news to those who are being ground under the oppressive wheel of the powers. It may be that “place” is not a gift we will always be able to claim or assume upon. It may be instead that we are called to die to the security of “place,” and be driven, by the Spirit to pour ourselves out as a drink offering with, for, and alongside those who are driven out of “place.”

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