Category Archives: Eschatology

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.

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.

Explorations in Christian Theology and Apocalyptic: Call for Papers

Posted by on April 20, 2011 Comments Off

Call for Papers

The Explorations in Christian Theology and Apocalyptic working group invites individual paper proposals for an Additional Meeting to be held during the 2011 American Academy of Religion meeting in San Francisco, November 19th – 22nd, 2011.

The group will host a panel session on the theme:

Jacob Taubes and Christian Theology.

The organizers would especially invite proposals for papers which engage in constructive theological reflection on the themes and arguments of  Taubes’ Occidental Eschatology (Stanford University Press, 2009) and the essays collected in From Cult to Culture: Fragments toward a Critique of Historical Reason (Stanford University Press, 2009).

Paper presentation will be approximately thirty minutes in length.

Proposals should include your name, institutional affiliation, and the title of the proposed paper, as well as a 250 word abstract.

Please submit your proposal via email to Doug Harink (doug.harink@kingsu.ca and/or Philip Ziegler (p.ziegler@abdn.ac.uk) no later than April 30, 2011.

Details of the Call can be reviewed on the Explorations in Theology and Apocalyptic group weblog here.

AAR: Explorations in Theology and Apocalyptic

Posted by on October 28, 2010 1 comment

For those of you who are also headed to AAR tomorrow, be sure to check out the sessions we’re offering this year for the Explorations in Theology and Apocalyptic Group:

(1.) A panel discussion of Christopher Morse’s book, The Difference Heaven Makes: Rehearing the Gospel as News (Continuum, 2010) will be sponsored by T&T Clark/Continuum and will be held on Saturday, October 30, from 6:30-9:00 pm in Marriott International 7. Panelists will include Katherine Sonderegger, Nancy Duff, Trevor Eppehimer, and Donald Wood, with Christopher Morse responding and discussion to follow. More information on the session and presenters can be found here.

(2.) A panel engaging the theme “Engagements with the Political Theology of Johannes Baptist Metz,” will be held on Sunday, October 31, from 6:30-9:00 pm in Marriott L403. The panel will include papers by Jason McKinney, Matthew Eggemeier, Kyle Gingerich Hiebert, and Christopher C. Britain, with discussion to follow. More information on the session and presenters can be found here.

Barth, the church, and the world

Posted by on June 21, 2010 9 comments

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

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

Kingdom-World-Church: Some Provisional Theses

Posted by on June 8, 2010 252 comments

by Nathan R. Kerr, Ry O. Siggelkow, and Halden Doerge

In a recent conversation on this blog regarding an important review, by Ry Siggelkow, I (Nate Kerr) suggested in the comments that to think rightly what it means to say that “mission makes the church,” that mission as lived proclamation of and witness to Christ’s Lordship is indeed constitutive of the church’s existence in the world, we will need to engage in a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the church’s relation to the world in light of the apocalyptic inbreaking of the Kingdom of God that happens in the historicity of Jesus Christ. In the course of those comments I offered to write a “guest post” in which I gave some indication of what I think those reconsiderations might entail. This is that post—which has come together with more than just a little help from my friends, Halden and Ry. Together we offer these reflections in hope that they may contribute to the task of theology in the service of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We should like to begin these brief reflections with an oft-quoted passage from the conclusion of John Howard Yoder’s Body Politics:

The believing body is the image that the new world—which in light of the ascension and Pentecost is on the way—casts ahead of itself. The believing body of Christ is the world on the way to its renewal; the church is the part of the world that confesses the renewal to which all the world is called. (Yoder, Body Politics, 78)

This passage and others like it from Yoder’s oeuvre have been the impetus for a number of contemporary modes of “ecclesiocentric” construals of the Kingdom of God in relation to the world. The church’s missionary thinking, so the argument goes, is ecclesiocentric just to the extent that the church ontologically precedes the world and, ultimately, supercedes the world with respect to the Kingdom’s eschatological fulfillment. As the late twentieth-century theologian and missiologist J.C. Hoekendijk has argued, however, such “church-centric missionary thinking” is itself a false start. For from within such ecclesiocentric thinking, Hoekendijk claims, the call to mission, or evangelism—that is, the call to proclaim and to embody “the gospel”—often turns out to be “little else than a call to restore ‘Christendom,’ the ‘Corpus Christianum,’ as a solid, well-integrated cultural complex, directed and dominated by the Church” (Hoekendijk, Church Inside Out, 15). That is to say, the church aligns itself with the Kingdom and against the world by way of the production of its own alternative, habitable culture. As John Flett has convincingly argued, mission thereby becomes tied inextricably to the extension of this “culture”; this culture, this particular way of life, just is the gospel that is proclaimed, and the church’s missionary relation to the world cannot but be a function of its own culture—gospel proclamation turns out to be a matter of the church’s propagation of its own way of life, and evangelism a mode of integrating the world into this particular habitable culture.[1] Thus, on such an ecclesiocentric reading of the church-world relationship, the church is most missionary precisely at that point at which the church is most intentionally “self-regarding” (Hauerwas). And herein lies the reason why we must insist upon resisting such an understanding of the church as ontologically “prior” to the world as such, in relation to the Kingdom: viz., it presents us with not only an ecclesiologically but missiologically idealist logic—such an intentionally self-regarding conception of mission requires the construction of another (“the world”) as productive and reflective of its own identity.

The problem with such an ecclesio-concentric understanding of the church’s relation to the Kingdom and the world, says Hoekendijk, is that it misconstrues the basic scriptural sense in which the kingdom of God is first and foremost the Kingdom for the world. The Kingdom is oriented from beginning to end towards the oikoumene—the whole world.

For this oikoumene the Kingdom is destined; world (kosmos/oikoumene) and Kingdom are correlated to each other; the world is conceived as a unity, the scene of God’s great acts: it is the world which has been reconciled (II Cor. 5:19), the world which God loves (John 3:16) and which he has overcome in his love (John (16:33); the world is the field in which the seeds of the Kingdom are sown (Matt. 13:38)—the world is consequently the scene for the proclamation of the Kingdom. (Hoekendijk, Church Inside Out, 41)

In short: “Kingdom and world belong together.” The order of God’s economy is thus “God-World-Church, not God-Church-World” (71). This is the order of God’s own missionary existence in Christ. And by participation in this missionary existence of God, we must give new expression to the church’s own missionary existence: the order of this existence must be that of Kingdom-World-Church, not Kingdom-Church-World.

What we should like to propose, then, is that the quote from Yoder with which we began these reflections should be read through the perspective of this alternative Kingdom-World-Church order. Precisely as such, we might better come to understand the implications of Yoder’s insight that mission has to do with coming to “see the church in relationship to the world rather than defining ecclesial existence ‘by definition’ or ‘as such’” (Yoder, Royal Priesthood, 78). The church only exists as “living from and toward the promise of the whole world’s salvation.” (Yoder, Priestly Kingdom, 12).

As such, the church thereby exists as one dimension of a thoroughgoing apocalyptic realism. That is to say, the church exists insofar as it is constituted by the manner in which, in the apocalypse of Jesus Christ, “the reality of God has entered into the reality of this world,” proving victorious over the fallen powers of this world for the sake of this world’s salvation (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 54). What really matters, then, for the church, is its mode of participation “in the reality of God and the world in Jesus Christ today” (55).[2] And that reality is without reserve that of the apocalyptic rectification of all things to God in Christ. That event of apocalyptic rectification is constitutive of reality itself; and the event of the church takes place firmly within that reality of the reconciled world “that is real only through the reality of God” disclosed in Jesus Christ (54).[3] The church thus exists as an ergon Kyriou (a work of the Lord), which means to say that the church exists for the sake of the unique and special share that it is given in the cosmic meaning of the sovereignty of this world’s living Lord. But precisely as such the church does exist, and its existence is precisely that of a special function and task. As to the nature of that special existence, function, and task, we should like to conclude these reflections. We shall do so by putting forward some provisional theses on the existence, nature, and task of the church. There could be more, of course, and these could be articulated with more depth and precision. But these are, after all, mere theses—and provisional at that.

Read more »

Revolutionary Christianity

Posted by on May 25, 2010 5 comments

David Rensberger, in his helpful article, “Conflict and Community in the Johannine Letters” points out the deeply revolutionary and apocalyptic nature of the Joahnnine message, especially in relation to Christology and the ethics of agape:

The author of the Letters defends incarnational Christology not just because it is “what you heard from the beginning” (1 John 2:24), though that is part of his appeal, but because it rightly expresses the nature of the God who is love.What is at stake, in this author’s view, is not the authority of tradition but the most fundamental theological insight of Johannine Christianity: that God, out of love, entered fully into the human condition, risking and suffering death itself in order to bring life to human beings.

This is not an essentially conservative theological position. It radically challenged the established religious cultures of its time, both Jewish and Greco-Roman, by insisting on the freedom of God to act in a way utterly unanticipated by tradition, a way that upset not only commonplace theological and philosophical assumptions but hierarchical social structures as well. What is happening in 1 and 2 John is not so much a struggle against revolutionaries as a struggle within a revolution. Neither side questions that the way of God is contrary to the way of the world (though the author tries to associate the opponents with the world in 1 John 4:3-6). The battle is over how the revolution is to be conceived: in its original terms as radical divine intervention in the world, or in a new way as radical divine opposition to the world. In a sense, it is a struggle over how to maintain the purity of the radical Johannine way, whether by preserving the pure teaching “heard from the beginning” or by purifying it still further from contamination by the flesh. The Elder is trying to prevent, not the success of a revolution, but the diversion of a revolution onto a path that he fears may cause it to fail.

It never ceases to amaze me how deeply the Johannine corpus delves into the most fundamental issues of Christian faithfulness, never disentangling but always bringing to the fore the inextricable connection between Christological confession of Jesus as the fullness of God, come in the flesh, and the ethic of radical, self-giving love. All of this is predicated on God’s own descent into the world in Jesus, this radical divine intervention that can only, to my mind, be described as apocalyptic.

In Jesus God’s Trinitarian agape has invaded “the world” (i.e. the system of powers and principalities whose dominion over creation is predicated on the power of death) and created a rupture within it, a rupture of self-abandoning love that goes to the cross for others. And in the sending of the Spirit this Christic rupture of love continues to break into history, giving men and women to one another in this same pattern, rhythm of cruciform love, the love that seeks not its own but willingly lays itself down for the other. The church is the sign and sacrament of this rupture within the rule of the fallen powers, this rupture of agape, of self-abandonment into love. It is only by this radical gift of God’s Trinitarian love, the love that breaks through the powers of death, that we are given to one another, to live together within this Christic agape. And thus it is only in a common life of constant prayer and doxology by which we continually offer up our own our bodies (Rom 12:1-3) to God’s agape that we can live and embody the gospel, the gospel of self-abandoning love.

And it is precisely in this self-offering, this abandoning of ourselves in love for one another that we stand, fully in the utter fleshliness of the Jesus’s revolution. There is nothing more concrete, nothing more fleshly, nothing more earthly, than this love, the love of Jesus Christ, and him Crucified. Which for us always must mean “Love one another, just as I have loved you.”

A Brief Apocalyptic Glossary

Posted by on May 22, 2010 5 comments

Some time ago, Dave Belcher posted a very helpful glossary on theology and apocalyptic. Given that La Perruque, sadly, is no longer active, and that Dave has retired from the blogosphere, he has kindly allowed me to repost it here for easier access. Thanks to Dave for this helpful post!

In the “Introduction” to his Christ, History, and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission, Theopolitical Visions (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2009), Nate Kerr notes that the term “apocalyptic has enjoyed not only a wide but diverse re-emergence in the theological disciplines over the past half-century, but in the humanities more broadly as well, especially within the disciplines of sociology, political theory, history, and philosophy” (11).  He then goes on to say, however, that what is lacking in this re-emergence — and what his book specifically seeks to address — is an account of “the difference that Christian apocalyptic makes for how we see and live in history today” (12).  As a sketch of what will follow, Nate then moves on to offer five themes that orient how he uses “apocalyptic” in his own study — let me just list those briefly:

1. Christian apocalyptic stresses the otherness and the priority of God’s action (12).

2.Christian apocalyptic has its ‘centre of gravity’ in the history of Jesus Christ (13).

3. Christian apocalyptic is cosmic and historical in scope (13).

4. Christian apocalyptic is constitutive of the meaning and shape of Christ’s lordship (14).

5. Christian apocalyptic is doxological and missionary (15).

If you haven’t yet read Nate’s book, at least go check out the Introduction, where he gives a brief summary of each theme, but this thematics is really fleshed out in the whole book.  One thing you’ll notice there is that Nate relies on the work of J. Louis Martyn for certain formulations — Martyn appears in footnotes to themes 1 and 5; and, as I have been closely attuned to the work of Martyn lately, I began to reflect on the juxtaposition of Nate’s thematics with Martyn’s understanding of Christian apocalyptic as he frames it in his commentary on Galatians.  Again, just as with Nate’s book, to get the full meat of this you really need to go read all of Martyn’s commentary — and I’m serious, it’s superb in a way you cannot even imagine.  Because Martyn’s work equally lends to an understanding of Christian apocalyptic amidst this (re-)emergence of apocalyptic in the other disciplines of the arts, let me also list the pertinent entries for Martyn’s understanding of apocalyptic from the “glossary” located at the end of his mindblowingly amazing commentary on Paul’s epistle to the Galatians (the kind of mindblowingly amazing that is able to cut straight through the obfuscation with a simplicity, clarity, and depth that are of the most penetrating sort).:

[The first five definitions set up a kind of counter-apocalyptic vision, a false gospel even, to which apocalyptic is cast as not only contrast but the truth of reality -- and as I have repeated here before, apocalyptic is first and foremost about the business of God's disclosure of the truth of reality]

Counter-apocalyptic vision:

forensic apocalyptic eschatology: a specific understanding of what is wrong, and a view of the future: Things have gone wrong because human beings have willfully rejected God, thereby bringing about death and the corruption and perversion of the world.  Given this self-caused plight, God has graciously provided the cursing and blessing Law as the remedy, thus placing before human beings the Two Ways, the way of death and the way of life.  Human beings are individually accountable before the bar of the Judge.  But, by one’s own decision, one can accept God’s Law, repent of one’s sins, receive nomistic forgiveness, and be assured of eternal life.  For at the last judgment, the deserved sentence of death will be reversed for those who choose the path of Law observance, whereas that sentence will be permanently confirmed for those who do not.  This kind of apocalyptic eschatology — focused on the religious doctrine of the Two Ways — is fundamental to the Teachers’ message.

Two Ways: Various strands of Jewish and Jewish-Christian thought in the first century preserved and interpreted the ancient portrait of God’s placing before Israel “the Way of life and the Way of death.”  To obey God’s commandments is to live; to disobey them is to die…Within this frame of reference, the Teachers used the terms “blessing” and “curse” to name the two actions of God they considered to be dependent on the path chosen by the Gentiles to whom they brought their message

nomistic: legal in the sense of being derived from the Law of Sinai

religion: the various communal, cultic means — always involving the distinction of sacred from profane — by which human beings seek to know and to be happily related to the gods or God.  Religion is thus a human enterprise that Paul sharply distinguishes from God’s apocalyptic act in Christ.

the Teachers: the Christian-Jewish evangelists who came into Paul’s Galatian churches after his departure.

Christian apocalyptic vision:

cosmological apocalyptic eschatology: a specific understanding of what is wrong, and a view of the future: Anti-God powers have managed to commence their own rule over the world, leading human beings into idolatry and thus into slavery, producing a wrong situation that was not intended by God and that will not be long tolerated by him.  For in his own time, God will inaugurate a victorious and liberating apocalyptic war against these evil powers, delivering his elect from their grasp and thus making right that which has gone wrong because of the powers’ malignant machinations.  This kind of apocalyptic eschatology is fundamental to Paul’s Galatians letter.

– J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Bible, 33A (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 587-88.

In my mind, juxtaposing Martyn’s definitions with Nate’s thematics (while not collapsing them — there are differences that need to be drawn out) can provide a helpful orientation for a theological vision of apocalyptic thought, a vision which is ultimately God’s vision, as I tried to suggest in my commentaries on Apocalypse, and a vision to which I have attempted to submit my own work and thought lately.  Ultimately, engaging with Martyn’s and Nate’s work has disclosed for me the rather difficult truth that theology can be done only in a mode of doxology, which is never to be separated from mutual service to others in and through the community of faith.  Apocalyptic theology, then, operates in a mode of lived prayer.

Posts on the church, apocalyptic, and mission

Posted by on May 19, 2010 4 comments

About of a year ago I posted an index of posts I had written on ecclesiology and apocalyptic. Since then I have gotten my own domain and, as such should have updated the links a long time ago. Anyway, here is an updated list for anyone who cars.

As far as I’m concerned the best effort of mine in this arena has been my series on “the church as apocalyptic event”:

Here are a number of other posts that are broadly centered on this topic from further back, dealing with various and sundry ecclesiological issues from an apocalyptic perspective:

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.

The Revolutionary Subordination: A note from Doug Harink

Posted by on February 22, 2010 1 comment

Many thanks to Doug Harink, both for his lectures which I live-blogged over the weekend, and for the great time of fellowship we got to have together. Doug has kindly sent me a follow-up note on the lectures that speaks to some key points about the matter of the “revolutionary subordination.”

Let me express my heartfelt and enthusiastic gratitude to Halden for generously live-blogging on my lectures on 2 and 1 Peter. I have read the blogs, and I must say that Halden’s parsing of my lectures is really spot-on—indeed, I think Halden has often stated the matter more clearly and succinctly than I did in the lectures. So maybe the live blog is better than the real thing! In any case, great job, Halden.

There is just one point I want to make about the discussion of “revolutionary subordination,” that I perhaps did not emphasize sufficiently in the lectures. Peter makes clear that the members of the messianic communities to which he is writing are free: “as free… yet as God’s servants” (2:16). This freedom is bestowed by the gospel that Peter has described in detail in chapters 1 and 2 up to this point. Such freedom comes through participation in the apocalyptic power of the gospel, and that means freedom with authority. To be a free person as God’s servant (“being aware of God”, 2:19) is to live in the messianic power and authority of the gospel, which power and authority, in conformity to the crucified Messiah, is exercised most precisely at the moment of submission. So also the gospels show that Jesus’ authority is most clearly displayed at the moment when he stands before the powers that be who will crucify him. He is neither resentful, nor a victim. (Cf. also John 13:3-5: “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table…and began to wash the disciples’ feet.”). Likewise Peter’s instruction to “submit” or “be subordinate” is a call to those who share in the authority and power of the messianic age, which share is revealed most perfectly in the grace that the messianic person shows to everyone else, regardless of their place in the social order. Such grace is the opposite of resentment or victimhood.

Born from, into, and for the apocalypse

Posted by on February 20, 2010 Comments Off

According to Harink the church is apocalyptic in three ways. It is born from the apocalypse of Jesus the Messiah. This singular event grounds and constitutes the life of the church, which otherwise would be “no people.”

Likewise, the church is born into the apocalypse of Jesus. The church is freed from the powers of the fallen creation into the coming Messianic Age. The church’s life and being is one of being given over to the radical presence of the new creation that Christ, in the Spirit has achieved in the cross and resurrection.

Finally, the church is born for the apocalypse of Jesus. The church exists for the sake of Jesus’s transformative unveiling in the world. We are God’s witnesses who live as the church in radical joy, the form of joy that is animated by our being captivated with the gravity of God’s act of liberation. We are born for the apocalypse in that, finding ourselves born from it and into it, we can do no other than work for it, proclaiming it in word and deed, in a Messianic lifestyle animated by doxology and servanthood.

An apocalypsed people

Posted by on February 20, 2010 Comments Off

Doug Harink calls the church “a people ‘apocalypsed’ through Jesus the Messiah.” What this means is that God’s revelation (which is salvation) takes the form of invading a world enslaved to other powers. The church is “apocalypsed” in that through the action of the whole Trinity (1 Pet 1:2) it is set free from the slavery that sin and death has wrought in the world. To be “apocalpysed” is to find themselves created and libertated by the act of God in Jesus.

That, according to Harink is what it means to call the church “apocalypsed.” It indicates the rooting of the church in the divine Trinitarian act of Jesus’s life, transfiguration, death, resurrection, ascension, and parousia. The people of God is born from the apocalypse of Jesus the Messiah, the resurrection, the new creation.

Apocalyptic action

Posted by on February 19, 2010 Comments Off

Harink makes an all important point in wrapping up. This apocalyptic-transformational Christology and eschatology that animates 2 Peter lends itself, not to any sort of resignation or passivity, but rather to action: “Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire?” (3:11-12).

The transfiguring apocalypse of Jesus is not merely a linearly future event, but a past object of faith (“We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain”) and a present object of experience (“participants of the divine nature”). Thus we do not simply wait for the coming of the apocalypse, we hasten it by giving ourselves over, in the Spirit, to Christ’s own mode of action and living (and here we see a connection with 2 Peter’s list of virtues: 2 Pet 1:5-7).

Because of Christ’s transfiguration, we are called, not to passivity, but to radical apocalyptic action, which, in summary means to subject all our actions to the lens of Christ’s own agape, the radical love that gives itself away for others, even to death.

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