on beauty and the holy longing

there is a really wonderful post over at the christian vision project by arts pastor david taylor. he reflects on beauty and the holy longing for God. taylor quotes from c.s. lewis which i will echo here:

What more, you may ask, do we want? … We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. —C. S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory"

Kingdom, community, church and congregation

A while back Linda raised some questions about community in a post modern time. I responded with a blogpost (which only Linda seemed to read). During our conversation Linda asked "wouldn't a local church be a christian community? i don't see why it wouldn't be".

I'd first like to move us away from the phrase 'local church' to congregation. There may be a better term than congregation, its purpose is simply to avoid using a term which implies that the local institutional arrangements of a particular denomination have any particular affiliation with the universal church, the Body of Christ. By congregation I mean the meeting together of believers spoken about in Scripture, so that would refer equally well to a Cathedral service or a 'house church'.
In that vein I'll try to avoid speaking of 'members' of a congregation. If we believe what Paul tells us then we are all members of onebody. To claim that we are members of multiple small bodies is to dismember Christ. To use the word members as if it means both organs of the Body of the living Christ, and also participation in a local institution, is to demean membership to the level of participation in a sports club (a frequent complaint by many of the fiercest proponents of the primacy of the 'local church'). If you consider that I am focusing on what it popularly if inaccurately referred to as semantics Nate will have to write a post on the importance of clear language to clear thinking.

The question Linda raises seems to be whether it is a logical impossibility that a congregation' should be a 'christian community'.
That seems an unlikely claim for me to make, given my skepticism towards similarly general claims by others. I make no such claim.

Instead I think that if we are concerned about community and Christianity in a postmodern era, then we should ask ourselves what the meaning of community is in the Kingdom of Heaven, and how this understanding of community illuminates how we view the Church, and congregations.

What role are congregations intended to play in the Kingdom of Heaven? It seems clear, to me anyway, that congregations are not the same as the Kingdom, although of course they are composed of those who are loyal to the Kingdom and seek to advance it. The advance of the Kingdom is not however synonymous with the kingdoms of individual professionals; increases in attendance, commitments, donations or volunteerism, indeed these are frequently opposed to the purpose of the Kingdom which is to set people free from sin, death, disease and their consequences, including religious legalism.
Instead the Kingdom advances every time someone is miraculously healed even if the healing is never claimed as a victory by a congregation or ministry and there is no record that the person makes a commitment in response. The Kingdom advances when for the sake of Yshua people fight political oppression, or successfully struggles to avoid pornography.
Congregations can help or hinder the advance of the Kingdom, help by equipping, supporting, organizing, bearing life through the sacraments; hinder by devouring the time, energy and money of people, by weighing people down with rules and expectations, and by misdirected zeal (which requires another blogpost). The advance of the Kingdom may transform a community, whether a family or a city, into a Christian community, or more importantly into a Christ centered community. It is this which I was referring to in the previous blogpost:

" The unlikeness of any church serving as polis stems rather from a very different source, the nature and function of the Body of Christ, intended as salt and light. It therefore seems unlikely that a church can serve as a 'community' but it could potentially transform a neighborhood or a town into a community."

How can we best understand community. If we begin with a Trinitarian understanding, that within the very nature of God there is community, and that participation in that community, individually and collectively, gives life, we can understand community as the life giving process of being included in the life bearing relationships of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

If the Church, which I take to be synonymous with the Body of Christ is intended to exist not for itself but to draw us into that divine community then it seems that the Church should not seek to constitute itself primarily as a community but rather should seek to transform earthly communities, acting as salt and light.
Christians may therefore help constitute communities, such as families, parishes, scholarly communities, (or yes Nate) even surfing clubs, and may seek to transform them, not necessarily into brand labeled Christian communities but into outposts of the Kingdom of God.

Christians may be supported in this by congregations and also by institutions. I have had hard things to say about the Webberian tendencies of institutions towards monopolization of resources for their own perpetuation. Even then I concluded that institutions are necessary for certain types of human activity, including I might add the bearing of traditions. By bearing traditions which enable us to grow in virtue institutions may therefore prove useful in advancing the Kingdom of God, to the extent to which they are subordinated to that advance.

It seems to me therefore that those who call themselves Christians should seek to be members of that community constituted by participation in the life giving relationship of Father, Son and Spirit, and to seek to transform earthly communities with this life, assisted by the institutional churches and congregations, as much as assistance is available from these sources.

urgent prayer request for rick meigs of friend of missional

rick meigs of the blog the blind beggar, friend of missional (that red button at the bottom of our blog) and the missional tribe had a very serious motorcycle accident a few days ago. he is in critical condition and had both lungs collapse and has many broken bones. it's a miracle he is alive! he has several upcoming surgeries scheduled. please pray for healing, alleviation of pain, finances to airlift him back to portland & other daily expenses, and of course peace for him and his family. more information with updates is at brother maynard's. please spread the word!

ht: makeesha

let's call it what it is: christian paranoia

have you ever heard a fellow christian imply that you shouldn't be reading books outside the bible? i have. have you ever heard a fellow christian say that you shouldn't be seen alone with a christian of the opposite sex if they are not your spouse? i have. what i want to know is where does this kind of kooky thinking come from?! thankfully, i'm not the only christian who thinks this sort of thing is just a tad bit off. here's what imonk said recently in a post titled on being too God-centered. he's being pretty polite about it if you ask me. i say let's call it what it is--christian paranoia. anyway, here is an excerpt from his post that has garnered over 100 comments: 

Many Evangelicals see a frightening and dark world. They are suspicious of art, music, literature and the imagination. Books are dangerous. Culture- be it high or low- is of little value. Those evangelicals who are not of that mindset know full well what the arguments are: How is this serving the glory of God? What is the value of this activity as compared to theology or worship? What is any of this when compared to God?

The reformed doctrines of depravity and corruption are applied to everything, and the only answer is God. But can the world of being human gain and keep its significance in and through the glory of God, or must it give way to the glory of God? That discussion seems to be going on in many different ways and places, with varying levels of helpfulness.

I am sad to say this, but there is a point at which the relentless God-centeredness of some believers makes them into the adversaries and almost the enemies of much that is good in human life. They become the enemies of normal, especially in the lives of young people, creative people and people who feel that life in this world is good and shouldn’t be devalued by religion. My recent experiences regarding the rosary at solamom.net are a perfect example. Soli deo gloria was the only reason anyone can have for anything at all, and that is not to GIVE significance, freedom, liberty and beauty, but to question the purpose for anything other than the constant study of God, God and more God.

from what i gather this sort of thinking is rooted in dualistic thought. it divides the world up into the sacred and the secular. e.g. going to church services, studying the bible, praying, etc. is "sacred" but just hanging out with your friends for fun, going to the beach, or reading a novel or a philosophy book is "secular". well, what i'd like to know is how do we exclude God from any area of life? as far as i can tell there really is no such thing as the "secular" world. that doesn't mean God likes everything that may be happening or that evil doesn't exist, but to claim that some things are "out of God's sphere or concern" just doesn't make any sense. 

so let's stop this nonsense about christians not reading anything besides the bible. anyway, anyone who knows the slightest bit about philosophy knows that there is quite a bit of philosophical thought referenced  in the bible. the bible is not some book that is completely devoid of culture; that isn't even possible. paul even quotes "your poets" and is obviously up on "the latest ideas" of the day when speaking at mars hill. heaven forbid, this must mean he is reading things outside of scripture. my fellow blogmate andrew has written a great post on understanding. basically, he says the problem isn't knowledge or understanding but leaning on one's own understanding rather than God's understanding. if God had a problem with people being knowledgeable then i kinda doubt he would have allowed for the book of proverbs, which is wisdom (applied knowledge), or praised king solomon when he asked for wisdom and knowledge to lead. 

as for not being seen alone with a person of the opposite sex, well, they might try reading a bit about how  jesus was known to hang out alone with women. yes, you read it hear folks! remember the woman at the well or possibly when jesus appeared to mary magdalene after he rose from the dead? 

ht: nate

american journalists sentenced to korean gulag

you've probably heard about the 2 american journalists who have been sentenced in north korea by their highest court to 12 years in a hard labor prison camp--the gulag. i find this chilling but hope it is just a political maneuver on n. korea's part. these two women, laura ling and euna lee, were on the china/north korean border investigating human trafficking when they were arrested. human trafficking is a horrible problem and needs as much attention as possible to be eradicated, but of course the north koreans don't want any light shining on that particular crime. 

please pray for the safety and swift release of these two women!

what is wrong with capitalism? the problem with the problem with capitalism

since a friend of mine mentioned online that she will be reading the book Money, Greed and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the Problem it reminded me of an interesting article i recently read over at the other journal. the article is What is Wrong with Capitalism? The Problem with the Problem with Capitalism. while i'm no economist and certainly don't claim to have the answers i do enjoy reading various perspectives. i really like this article's third way approach rather than getting bogged down in the capitalism vs. socialism debate. here is a snippet:

...the argument that Christian proponents of capitalism consistently make is essentially that given the alternatives, capitalism, warts and all, is the best that we can do. In other words, the rejoinder to capitalism’s critics is simply, and powerfully, what is the better alternative?

The answers typically proffered have not proven capable of bearing much weight. For a long time, Christian opponents of capitalism were bold in their assertions that socialism was the alternative, and for a while (in the midst of the global revolutionary climate that blossomed in the 1960s and lingered into the 80s) that conviction was at least understandable. In more recent decades, however, we are all aware of how actually existing socialism has not proven to be either particularly successful or paradisaical. As a consequence, while there are a few stalwarts who continue to praise socialism—albeit an “ideal” socialism properly distanced from anything actually tried thus far—many critics of capitalism have opted, almost by default, for at least a chastened, welfare capitalism, a capitalism with a human face. And such hopes have not of late enjoyed many victories, neither are the prospects for victory particularly encouraging.

The difficulty the question of alternatives presents prompts us toward a more immediately theological, or confessional, critique of capitalism. The opening is provided by the phrase, “Given the alternatives.” But what precisely, is given? Here we move from an unadorned empirical to a robustly theological argument (which, I will argue momentarily, does not surrender the empirical – to do so would leave me guilty of the crime of idealism, utopianism, etc.). For behind the supposition of what indeed constitutes the given, the way things are, resides an eschatological claim. What has God given? What is God giving? What does our economic vision confess about God? Or, conversely, what does our confession suggest about God’s economy?

Christian proponents of capitalism found their advocacy on the problematic eschatological claim that in effect capitalism is the best that we can expect in this time between the times. Said differently, Christian defenses of capitalism hinge upon releasing the eschatological tension between the “already” and the “not yet” by means of emptying the “already” of any immediate material (social-political-economic) content, with the result that we are left to ponder the capitalist status-quo as the “lesser evil,” as the best we can expect until at some future point God decides to act. There is but one age, even as we look forward to the age to come. There is no overlap; no transformation or redemption here and now, beyond the comfort offered the rich that they will be forgiven and the consolation offered the impoverished that in the next age things will be different.12 In this barren space, where we are locked in competition and struggle for scarce resources that God has hidden (like a cosmic Easter bunny) so that we might be prodded from lethargy to creativity, the best we can hope for is to find shelter in the shadow of (depending on which theologian you consult) the state or corporation while the market manages sin according to a utilitarian logic.

...

What is the alternative to capitalism? Surely the alternative is obvious. It is the Kingdom of God, where those who build, inhabit, where those who plant, harvest, and where all are filled and the agony that currently besets us ceases. This is to say, the question of alternatives is finally the eschatological one of the appearance of the Kingdom. Which implies that the question of alternatives is rightly answered only confessionally. Why? Because the Kingdom is not something we build; it is something we receive. It is finally not a product of our labor, but is, instead, given to us as a gift. All of which is to say that the alternative to capitalism is not something that we construct; rather, it is something we confess. And, it is worth noting, because the Kingdom is something we confess, the rejoinder about “the best we can do” loses its punch entirely as it is revealed to be thoroughly beside the point. The interesting question never was, “what can we do?” but the eschatological one of “what is God doing?”

other recent posts on the economy are: 

post consumeristic economy

ideas on sustainable economies: ecological economics & fair trade

The Book that Almost Turned me Atheist

I can read most Enlightenment-era atheists without a problem; I taught David Hume and Tom Paine (both of whom or neither of whom was really an atheist, depending on whom you ask) this spring, and although I could reproduce the shapes of their arguments for the sake of teaching them, neither strikes me as particularly convincing. Likewise Marx, who (again, depending on who's talking) might not have been an atheist proper but someone who hated the English Protestantism that surrounded him in his writing years for enslaving factory workers and serving as an opium for factory owners' consciences and who saw humanity's post-Revolution consciousness as participating in an order so different from what people know now that conventional theological/religious categories would not really apply, never really steered me towards denying Christianity, which I still think adequate to answer his criticisms, if only we would practice what we preach. Nietzsche was entirely too honest about what would come about with the death of God (namely the end of everything that self-righteous atheists hold dear in polite society) to convince anybody, and Freud is really just Nietzsche for affluent middle class dummies. I've not yet read Dawkins (though I plan to), but his forebear Carl Sagan, while he's a great popularizer of science, is no philosopher, and his arguments about "the Dark Ages" of Christian Europe ignore so much of what was actually going on that he draws pity from me, not indignation against "religion."

Ultimately I think that, for reasons of temperament and education and other such factors, I can't really imagine a polemic-from-outside that would, by force of dialectic or rhetoric, smash down the walls of Christian doctrine. I remember well that, when my friends underwent the crises of faith that so often characterize the college years (even at Christian colleges), I was more often than not the stable foil to whom they'd come. I don't think I was particularly good at playing that role (I have too many former-Christian friends to claim any skill at that), but it was my role nonetheless.

But there was one book I read in college that very nearly imploded my faithfulness to Christian teaching. I recently reread and have started writing about that book again recently because its argument so nicely illustrates some of the differences between polemic and didactic and mimetic theology that my dissertation explores. But reading through it again, eleven years after my first run, I once again found myself asking myself, "If this is what God is, why have anything at all to do with God?" As I did eleven years ago, I came out of it by revisiting the actual text of the Bible, but nonetheless, the rhetorical power of the book has not diminished despite a decade of living and reading.

What's the book, you ask? Martin Luther's The Bondage of the Will.

I suppose I should add that, in addition to the text of the Bible (the best cure for bad theology, always), the fact that this edition pairs Luther's treatise with the Erasmus text that occasioned it also helped. Erasmus, replying to a short publication by Luther, makes a case for treating the Bible as a collection of texts useful for teaching, reproof, and edification, asks rhetorically "... what profit has there been so far from these laborious inquiries, except that with the loss of harmony we love one another the less, while seeking to be wiser than we need" (40). He goes on from there to note that the theological disputes of his own day would have been perfectly at home on the World Wide Web:

I do not intend this to refer specifically to Luther, whom I do not know personally, and from whose writings I get a mixed impression. I say it rather of certain others better known to me who, if there is any controversy concerning the meaning of the Scriptures, when we bring forward the authority of the Early Fathers, chant at once, "Ah! but they were only men." And if you ask them by what argument the true interpretation of Scripture may be known, since both sides are men, they reply, "By the sign of the Spirit." If you ask why the Spirit should rather be absent from those who have illuminated the world by their published miracles than from themselves, they reply as though for thirteen hundred years there had been no gospel in the world. If you seek of them a life worthy of the Spirit, they reply that they are just by faith, not by works. If you look in vain for miracles, they say that the age of miracles is past, and that there is no need of them now that we have so much light in the Scriptures. And if you deny the Scriptures to be clear in such a point about which so many great men have stumbled in darkness, the argument returns full circle. (45-46)

Erasmus's case for ethical agency does not present anything radically new, and that's the main appeal for someone like me: his argument stems from the basic Aristotelian ethical argument, picked up by Thomas Aquinas, that praising and blaming human actions makes most sense when the human being in question could have done otherwise. As Erasmus points out, the plentitude of commandments and of conditional promises in the Bible does not directly state but assumes, because of the character of words and the ways they make up our world, that the hearers of God's oracles and laws and teachings might be faithful to them or not in a given moment. He's careful to note that he does believe in original sin and that human weakness keeps us, unredeemed, from surmounting hamartia, but he's willing to stop there, to allow original sin to be a judgment on the big picture of human existence, allowing that what human beings have always called good--those virtues of Plato and those virtues of Paul--are good because they partake of the human capacities that God calls good in Genesis.

The Cthulu-God of the Servo

I've not read very much of H.P. Lovecraft, but from the few stories I have read in his Cthulu mythology, his contribution to horror fiction was to invent grand entities, impossible to escape or to withstand, that take human life at most as a toy to be played with or snuffed at a whim and at least as less than a distraction. When Lovecraft waxes philosophical about living in a universe alongside and under such monstrous entities, he largely invents the modern horror novel, an intellectual space in which human goodness and badness mean precisely nothing and where the fate of human consciousness is less than insignificant to the true players in the universe.

Before I ever heard of H.P. Lovecraft, I got the same feeling from Luther's On the Bondage of the Will. That Christians should confess the sovereignty of God is not disputable, but Luther is not content with a mere affirmation of God's rulership: he wants to evacuate the vocabulary of rulership, to make the words by which human beings talk about good and evil meaningless when one talks about God:

Thus God hides his eternal goodness and mercy under eternal wrath, his righteousness under iniquity. This is the highest degree of faith, to believe him merciful when he saves so few and damns so many, and to believe him righteous when by his own will he makes us necessarily damnable, so that he seems, according to Erasmus, to delight in the torments of the wretched and to be worthy of hatred rather than of love. If, then, I could by any means comprehend how this God can be merciful and just who displays so much wrath and iniquity, there would be no need of faith. (138)

Later he makes the same evacuating move:

...it remains absurd (as Reason judges) that a God who is just and good should demand of free choice impossible things; that although free choice cannot will good but is in bondage to sin, he should hold this against it; and that when he does not impart the Spirit, he acts no more mildly or mercifully than if he hardened or permitted to be hardened. These things, Reason will repeat, are not the marks of a good and merciful God. They are too far beyond her comprehension, and she cannot bring herself to believe that God is good if he acts in this way, but setting aside faith, she wishes to feel and see and understand how he is good and not cruel. She would, of course, understand if it were said of God that he hardens no one, damns no one, but has mercy on all, saves all, so that with hell abolished and the fear of death removed, there would be no future punishment to be dreaded. That is why she blusters and argues so in the attempt to exonerate God and defend his justice and goodness.

Btu faith and the Spirit judge differently, for they believe that God is good even if he should send all men to perdition. (230)

And one more, just for good measure:

Since, then, God moves and actuates all in all, he necessarily moves and acts in Satan and ungodly man. But he acts in them as they are and as he finds them; that is to say, since they are averse and evil, and caught up in the movement of this divine omnipotence, they do nothing but averse and evil things. It is like a horseman riding a horse that is lame in one or two of its feet; his riding corresponds to the condition of the horse, that is to say, the horse goes badly. But what is the horseman to do? [...] Here you see when God works in and through evil men, evil things are done, and yet God cannot act evilly although he does evil through evil men, because one who is himself good cannot act evilly; yet he uses evil instruments that cannot escape the sway and motion of his omnipotence. (233)

Those are three of the more vivid passages that empty words like good, bad, praise, blame, and responsibility of meaning, but an anti-Aristotelian ideology pervades the text. Thus the traditional Biblical predicates of God--that God loves the world, that God is good, that God's wrath is against the violent--lose all meaning within this text. I am aware, to some extent, of apophantic theology and its insistence upon analogical rather than univocal meanings of these predicates, but this is something different: human justice and divine are not separated by analogy but by radical incommensurability. When Luther makes these moves, he destroys any possibility for meaningful talk about ethics, leaving in its place a divinity of formless power, who defines good simply by fiat and with complete disregard for any intelligible meaning for the word and love simply by "what the entity happens to do." Moreover, he renders conditional and imperative sentences meaningless, holding that when they come to a mixed group of the elect and the damned, the same statement simply reminds the former of their inability to carry them through while rendering the latter legally culpable for breaking them. (Why an entity not subject to justice would want to make a show Luther considers an impious question, the sort that reveals that the questioner is already among the damned.)

Luther is not always this way; his "On the Freedom of a Christian" in particular comes to my memory as a treatise that holds up the very things that On the Bondage of the Will empties of significance. And when he writes as a pastor, he's hard to beat. But this text's God is ultimately no more intelligible, and thus no more intelligibly good or loving, than Lovecraft's Cthulu.

And that's why, in 1998, upon first reading this treatise at the age of 21, I fear that my own horror got the best of me. We were assigned this text for an upper-division class on the Continental Reformations, and I'm certain that I was the most vocally resistant to Luther's arguments. I remember distinctly raising both middle fingers to the heavens in Dr. Farmer's class, yelling at professor and classmates, anyone overly impressed with Luther's "victory" over Erasmus, that if that's what God is, then... well, I won't write here what I yelled there. I'll just guess, judging by the look that Dr. Farmer gave me, that I had gotten scary in a hurry.

I had read my Nietzsche and my Freud before, my Marx and my Hume. But this was different; this was someone on the inside declaring God meaningless. Where a direct assault had failed, an Augustinian monk had nearly imploded Christian theology for me, creating a vacuum where the word "God" once stood. Where centuries of tradition had allowed for a plenitude of meaning and goodness, Luther demolished love and justice. Where everything that I'd picked up in my relatively brief time as a Christian said that God was generous and gracious, Luther would have me believe that, with regards to God, there is no injustice not because of a positive justice but because justice and goodness themselves do not, ultimately, mean anything. I came to realize in a hurry that, when theological polemic overreaches, it stops being any kind of logos at all, sinking into nihilism. I knew that whatever shape the Christian tradition would take, it would have to put limits on this kind of polemic theology.

What Came After

My Christian story didn't end there; although On the Bondage of the Will had done its nihilistic work on my soul, I believe to this day that in the following months and years God set before me enough compelling alternatives that I must attribute the sort of teacher I am today to grace rather than to my own effort. (Some would say I shouldn't blame God for such things.) I don't think it's coincidence that, in the second half of that semester, I read Paradise Lost's third book for the first time for my term paper in that class, and I also think that Providence, in the following semester, set before me three really good theology classes, one on how the Church has read the Bible through the ages, one on doing ethical theology via close reading of the New Testament, and one that explored the ways that Christians might live out the love of God inside of but not as a part of consumerism.

The next year I started seminary, learning Hebrew and Greek and gaining a familiarity with the text of the Bible that transformed me as a reader of texts and events. I came be the student of Robert Owens and Fred Norris, of Rodney Werline and Robert Hull. I read the theology of Augustine and of Aquinas, and I considered new ways of encountering the Bible from Walter Brueggemann and N.T. Wright. And I learned from David Bosch that Christianity is always a missionary endeavor and from John Milbank that every faithful encounter with Scripture is a time and a place when God signals the true nature of Creation. As years went by and I grew as a teacher, I moved to Georgia, when I rediscovered John Milton and Dante Allegheri, each of whom is worth a dozen systematic theologians (but then again, I'm a teacher of literature--what do you expect?). All along the way, the text of the Bible, as I taught it and meditated on it, as I prayed Psalms in the morning and contemplated Job and read the gospels again and again, reminded me, on every encounter, that our Holy Book stands as a genuine gift from God.

I know Luther fans won't like this, but I do think of On the Bondage of the Will as my forty days in the wilderness. Because I refused the nihilism of this treatise, I went on from there able to see the abundance of goodness and grace that the Christian tradition has to offer.

Back to the Luther

So why am I rereading this awful book eleven years later?

Dissertation work.

In the eleven years that have passed, I've decided that epic and tragic literature can do things mimetically that traditional theological treatises don't do well dialectically. And I'm taking one of my chapters to explore the shortcomings of dialectic and polemic for such purposes. Among the books that I'm using to demonstrate this inadequacy is Luther's.

I hadn't anticipated that, eleven years and three graduate degrees (almost) later, Luther's book would once again almost turn me against God. As I said before, I had to offset sections of Luther with sessions reading the actual text of the New Testament gospels just to remind me that Luther's reading is an ideological one, one that flows from a very particular set of prior philosophical convictions rather than the disclosure of the character of the text itself. What angers me when I've got Luther open but amuses me when I've detoxed is that, inside the book itself, Luther anticipates with obvious relish that people like me will respond as I do. He says that folks like me reveal our true colors, our ultimate allegiance to Satan, when we refuse his readings of things. He seems to imagine himself a gatekeeper of sorts, throwing out those who insist that God might mean what God says.

Ah, well. It takes all kinds.

Cross-posted from Hardly the Last Word