If you haven’t found your way over to the Image of Fish yet, you need to. Callid is my newest, bestest friend that I’ve never met. He’s brilliant, he’s bearded, and I like the way he thinks. This video is Callid’s explanation of postmodernism, and it’s good. So mosey on to the Image of Fish, comment, and subscribe.
Christian theology is spoken in a language of metaphors, and it always has been. These metaphors have always been enculturated, revealing just as much about the people engaging with the gospel as they reveal about the gospel itself. Throughout the history of religion, people have used ideas that they already understand to begin to fathom the unfathomable. Rabbi Elijah, a 10th century Palestianian thinker, records a midrash about the Oral Torah and the Written Torah:
What is the difference between the Written and the Oral Law? To what can it be compared? To a king of flesh and blood who had two servants and loved them both with a perfect love. He gave each of them a measure of wheat and each a bundle of flax. What did the wise servant do? He took the flax and spun a cloth. He took the wheat and made flour. He cleaned the flour and ground, kneaded, and baked it, and set it on top of the table. Then he spread the cloth over it and left it until the king would come.
The foolish servant, however, did nothing at all. After some time, the king returned from a journey and came into his house. He said to his servants: my sons, bring me what I gave you. One servant showed the wheat still in the box with the bundle of flax upon it. Alas for his shame, alas for his disgrace!
When the Holy One, blessed be He, gave the Torah to Israel, he gave it only in the form of wheat for us to make flour from it, and flax, to make a garment from it.
Seder Eliyahu Zuta, Chapter 2
Rabbi Elijah suggests that God has given to the Jewish people the text, and it is the responsibility of the people to make something useful out of it. For the Jews, this is what it means to be “Israel,” to be those who struggle and wrestle with God. I can resonate with this aspect of Judaism. I think that Christians should also struggle over the text and theologies that are handed down to us, making them our own. It isn’t possible for us to conceive of God without creating idols. This is particularly true for Christians, who worship a crucified, embodied God. To describe the paradox of this crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann quotes H. J. Iwand:
The cross is the utterly incommensurable factor in the revelation of God. We have become far too used to it. We have surrounded the scandal of the cross with roses. We have made a theory of salvation out of it. But that is not the cross. That is not the bleakness inherent in it, placed in it by God. Hegel defined the cross: ‘God is dead’ —and he no doubt rightly saw that here we are faced by the night of the real, ultimate and inexplicable absence of God, and that before the ‘Word of the cross’ we are dependent upon the principle of sola fide; dependent upon it as nowhere else… Here God is non-God. Here is the triumph of death, the enemy, the non-church, the lawless state, the blasphemer, the soldiers. Here Satan triumphs over God. Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation and doubt about everything that exists! Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of nothingness, it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way that no philosophy of nihilism can imagine.[1]
Metaphors are our only hope for speaking of the unspeakable. Moltmann goes on to say: “If faith in the crucified Christ is in contradiction to all conceptions of righteousness, beauty and morality of man, faith in the ‘crucified God’ is also a contradiction of everything men have ever conceived, desired and sought to be assured of by the term ‘God.’”[2] A theology of the cross, on which the idea of God dies, is the event that demands constant re-consideration, particularly for Moltmann, of the “idols of the Christian West.”[3]
There has been a debate in recent Christianity over the metaphors for justification (which I have mentioned on this blog before). Even though saying so has caused some minor drama in my personal life, I’ll say again that I prefer the metaphor of Christus Victor over the metaphor of penal substitutionary atonement. This is, in large part, because of the context in which we live — capitalism, individualism, etc. — as a hindrance to justifiable living by means of promoting only a self-affirming kind of justification. A friend and I were recently discussing this idea. I said, “we ought to look at what theology creates,” by which I meant that the value of a theology is in its ability to replicate the model of Jesus. When I think of penal substitutionary atonement and its effects in my own life, I just don’t see the gospel. I see competition, self-promotion, and legalism. I don’t intend to discredit the penal metaphor for justification entirely but only to insist that it doesn’t work for me.
There are certain parts of the ideas of René Girard’s christology — as I understand it — that appeal to me. For Girard, “humankind is subjected to the power of violence.”[4] “[T]he Gospels,” then, “do not offer a sacrificial interpretation of Jesus’ death on the cross (in the sense that God would need a bloody sacrifice to satisfy his offended honor), the Apocalypse , of which Jesus holds out the prospect, does not concern God’s violence and Jesus does not ascribe any violence to God in his parables.”[5] Girard understands the Gospel to be the only possible escape from the systems of evil that so often define human behavior. “So what must be given up,” Girard says, “is the right to reprisals and even the right to what passes, in a number of cases, for legitimate defence.”[6]
I think that there are certain things about Girard that are problematic (re-reading anachronistically the entire Hebrew Bible with a distinct distaste for the sacrificial system or the fact that his theory is bit of a grand narrative, for example). At the same time, Girard’s understanding of Christ serves as a metaphor that helps me understand what it means to follow Jesus. For me, it gives the gospel a certain demand for embodiment; the good news opens the way for us and requires of us that we live very differently. In this way, Girard’s theory of the cross does not justify us (if by justification we mean the certain declaration that things are settled), but it unnerves and disturbs us. It allows us to see the violence within us and leads us out into a new kind of life.
Having finished our Jedi training to the level of Apprentice, Lindsey and I agreed that Jediism needed some major reform. It seems to us that the Church of the Jedi has forgotten its roots and has chosen to become a self-interested clique. Rather than taking itself seriously, the Church promotes and endorses training courses (which one must purchase!) that are full of typos and misspellings. The training tasks that we did, though for the first level only, seemed asinine and arbitrary. So, in an attempt to redeem the noble ideas of Jediism, Lindsey and I have composed 9.5 theses (95 seemed a little ambitious).
9.5. The Jedi must be more committed to the Force than to any document, even this one.
In the end, my experiences in the Jedi church seemed sort of pointless. I felt like I was eavesdropping on the rainy day activities of a small group of friends on another continent. If this is what the Church of the Jedi is, then I’m not sure that I want to be a part of it. I can respect those who have chosen to join the Church of the Jedi, but I think I’m going to be withdrawing my membership.
The Entire Saga:
Yesterday morning after checking the forecast, I flipped through the channels in an attempt to delay the inevitable act of getting out of bed. Either by providence or coincidence, I came upon a particularly fiery preacher and paused to see what I might learn. Less than 30 seconds later, he said this:
The more you become like Jesus, the more repulsive you will become to the “unsaved.”
I was intrigued by his bold claim, so I tweeted it to see what my friends around the world thought. The responses that I received ran the gamut from “What Jesus is that guy following?” to “I can see where he’s coming from.” One comment really stood out to me.
From personal experience, it was the people who I found common ground with who first got me into the church – i.e. grunge rock and long hair (feel free to laugh, I just did). Ultimately, it was those who insisted upon declaring a strict “us vs. them” war between church members and non-members (salvation need not apply here – it was being seen in the right place at the right time on Sundays in the right clothing with the right haircut while listening to the right music) that drove me out of and away from the church for several years…
…it wasn’t until I got back in touch with a community who took me as I was and loved me regardless that I began attending regularly again. Ironically, it was the time away where I believe that I grew most spiritually. My current community is very understanding of that, as we’ve all been at low points in our lives, and continue to deal with them regularly. The biggest difference I see now is that my friends in this community are there with me, whether helping or grieving alongside – whereas those who aim to be repulsive to others different than them tend to look down and belittle those dealing through hard times, while maintaining a very safe distance from anything painful or ceremonially unclean.
The problem that I have with emphasizing the offensiveness of the gospel is that it quickly becomes a justification for being an ass. Staunch moral stances are made, lines are drawn, insiders and outsiders are created, and the hate begins to flow. Some Christians stand tall and proud, believing themselves to be pristine and the exemplars of Christian morality and American family values; believing that their offensiveness is the proof of their righteousness.
On the other hand, Paul seems to point out that gospel is “foolishness,” and Jesus certainly stirred up a fair share of controversy. The little Manis-implanted Kierkegaard in my brain hears statements like the one inspiring this post and screams, “WELL, DUH! Of course the gospel is offensive, counter-intuitive, and shocking” (I think that my inner Kierkegaard, however, would find the gospel to be most offensive to those who claim Christianity currently).
For me, the offense of the gospel should be love. Religion doesn’t give one a free pass to judgment and hatred. A belief in something often labeled the “Truth” doesn’t grant one the supernaturally-charged objective insight to definitively draw the lines between right and wrong, insiders and outsiders. On the contrary, the gospel dares us to be patient and forgiving, full of grace and hope. Morality, it seems, becomes the new idol, being worshipped as the only concern for Christian discourse. Christianity has a tendency to choose the moral high-horse over the lowly, self-sacrifice of the cross. I often wonder whether we are truly interested in living humbly in the way of Jesus or living haughtily in the way of being “right.” Do we worship and follow a crucified God, or do we worship and follow the pretentious gods that exist to affirm our self-righteousness?
I fashioned you from jewels and stone
I made you in the image of myself
I gave you everything you wanted
So you would never know anything else
Keane, “Spiralling,” from the album Perfect Symmetry
What if the most offensive thing about our lives was our love? What if we were so selfless, so humble, so patient, and so forgiving that it bothered people? And who would such love bother the most? The “unsaved,” or those who claim to follow Jesus but only follow him as far the triumphal entry?
Personally, I think a Christian should be one whose love is scandalous.
My friend Ian is a brilliant writer and story-teller. I asked him once how he did it. He said that he has to wait on characters who find their way to him from a dark wood in his mind. The characters are often shy, unsure of how to respond to the disembodied voice who will become their narrator. Eventually, these timid fictives step forward and begin to tell their story. For Ian, this is the place from which stories come, and these stories can be used to communicate any message, to stir up any emotion, and to prove any point. If you want to do theology or philosophy, says Ian, tell a story.
At times, I find myself nodding along, hearing the shuffle of hidden characters in the dark woods of my mind. I can see the beauty in the ambiguity of stories and parable — their fluidity and malleability to address the complex issues of human existence. I resonate with a desire to give my theoretical ponderings flesh and bones; to see and hear and touch what I say that I think that I might believe.
And at other times, I find such stories wanting, communicating the complex ethos of the wide range of experience, but unable to express the things that I simply need to say. I guess at times narrative seems evasive and elusive, creating opportunities for beautiful, glorious, disastrous re-interpretation (which is going to happen regardless of the genre). It seems to me that a straight-forward discourse — an “essay,” as one friend called it — is less likely to be misread. It is oftentimes simpler, more clear, and more precisely what I want or need to say. In these ways, it seems like a valid and sometimes necessary way of expressing philo-theological or theosophical ideas.
But I wonder if my need for such clear and concise discourse is the remnant of a post-Enlightenment rhetorical logocentrism. Maybe I’m afraid of the open-ended absence of a purely narrative approach to philosophy or theology and would prefer the “nearness” of a clearly presented and well-argued case. The question I’m left with is this: Is it bad to sometimes prefer discourse, and therefore, to uphold and perpetuate a logocentric belief that discourse will be more understood (or less misunderstood)?
This whole conversation reminded me of the debates amongst the Inklings of Oxford in the 1930s and 40s. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien asked very similar questions. Lewis was very proud of his first Narnia novel, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Tolkien, however, thought that the religious allusions were too blatant. Instead, Tolkien suggested, any religious implications ought to be buried deep within the story, so as not to detract from the story itself. Aslan was too obviously the Christ-figure and as such distracted the reader from the stories of Narnia.[1] More than that, Tolkien was appalled at Lewis’s theological ventures, believing firmly that such discourse was better left for the professional theologians, not the writers and scholars of fiction and literature.[2] And so their two great works, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, reflect their differences. Lewis chose a combination of allegorical narrative and straightforward discourse; Tolkien chose to hide his wisdom deeply in his stories of hobbits and wizards.
In my own life, I would say that Lewis’s approach has affected me more personally. In other words, I prefer The Chronicles of Narnia to Tolkien’s work. Tolkien’s insistence on hiding his message makes his stories epic — though at times overly descriptive and long-winded. Lewis’s fiction is witty, to-the-point, and, for me, nearly existential to read. As a theologian, Lewis’s work is sometimes lacking. He was, after all (and as Tolkien rightly pointed out), primarily a writer of fiction and a lover of literature. But despite that, Lewis made points in his theological works that he could not make so easily in Narnia. His simultaneous use of narrative and discourse offered Lewis a variety of paths to conversation, both with his friends and with his readers then and now.
A few weeks ago, I read an interview from Slavoj Žižek. In the interview, Žižek gives his take on the current political struggle over healthcare. Standing up for theoretical discourse, Žižek says:
My friend told me [that Norm] Chomsky said something very sad. He said that today we don’t need theory. All we need to do is tell people, empirically, what is going on. Here, I violently disagree: facts are facts, and they are precious, but they can work in this way or that. Facts alone are not enough. You have to change the ideological background.[3]
Of course, Žižek is describing politics, particularly as it relates to healthcare, but his point remains: Telling the story isn’t always enough. There are times that one must use theory to change ideology. If we can’t engage the theory, then our stories will be open-ended ammunition for whoever wants to use it (which, I agree, is the beautiful thing about using narrative). But occasionally, ideologies must be challenged, and to do that, theory must be engaged in discourse.
I like narrative philosophy. I like when philosophy is done through fleshed-out, evocative, subtle, and open-ended stories. But I also like the use of discourse and essays. They both have a place and a time. So, I prefer a “philosophy of narrative,” one that sees the world in both stories and theories; a communicative methodology that embraces the narratives of real people in communities striving to embody the ideals of their theosophical dialogue; a worldview in which people are recognized as simultaneously transcendent and immanent, summed up by thought and stories. After all, Christians are a people endlessly dialoguing about the incarnational event that can’t be captured in words.
::The Question::
What do you think? Tolkien or Lewis? Chomsky or Žižek? Purely narrative philosophy or a philosophy of narrative? Both? Neither?
Bloggers gotta stick together. At one time, it was the cool thing to do; you got yourself a Xanga or a LiveJournal, and you went to town, blogging primarily about the silly, mundane details of your fairly average existence.
But since then, people have become overwhelmed by the number of blogs on the variety of topics. We’ve all become our own favorite publishers, blogging incessantly and overwhelming our readers with too much, too often for fear of falling into obscurity. On the other hand, some have started to use blogging as a means towards viable writing careers. So, when I see a blog that tries to do just such a thing, and does it well, I feel that I have an obligation to let you know about it.[1]
So, allow me to introduce to you Callid Keefe-Perry and The Image of Fish.
So go check him out, subscribe, adjust your RSS feeds appropriately, and enjoy.
I talk about postmodernism frequently. It irritates my wife, my friends, and my co-workers (especially this one[1]) to no end. It seems that some people find it confusing, pointless, frustrating, or ridiculous. Fortunately for me, I have one friend who thoroughly enjoys my theo-philosophical rants and ravings nearly as much as I enjoy listening to myself rant and rave. His name is Andrew, and he is wonderful. Sometimes, we drive all over town in his fancy-pants Mustang talking about ridiculous ideas and doctrines that are absolutely unimportant. He’s been known to say incredibly profound things (“I don’t know, man; some human beings are outrageous.”) and to clickity-clack in my Chair of Pretention. Unfortunately, I don’t get to see Andrew all that often.
Recently, Andrew and I decided that we would taxonomize ourselves because labels always help make things easier. So, I am happy to announce that Andrew and I are “reasonable irrationalists.” See, I’m tired of people assuming that my explorations into postmodernism lead me to nihilism or the abandonment of logic altogether. Those accusations just aren’t true (Get it?)! Some people want to call a postmodernism like the one that I describe as “post-postmodern”[2]. Brian McLaren, though not a “scholar,” per se, has responded to such ideas:
Those who speak of post-postmodernism are, I think, assuming that postmodern means only this early negative phase. I’d rather refer to this early negative phase of postmodern culture as “the early negative phase of postmodern culture.” That will save having to add a lot of posts as new phases come along.[3]
For McLaren, this early negativity is not postmodern but “antimodern”[4]. Instead, actual postmodernism is “a synthesis of faith and reason”[5]. I couldn’t agree more with McLaren’s explanation. These post-postmodernisms are “enough to make a person go postal”[6].
If postmodernism is about pluralism, then it would be unfaithful to a postmodern attitude to absolutely reject all other worldviews. Instead, every absolutist approach is questioned, even the absolutely postmodern! The beauty is that in the tension is life; paradox is the only truly consistent, postmodern ethos. To be postmodern is to embrace both logic and mysticism.
So, Andrew and I are reasonable irrationalists. We enjoy our heady, logical, reasoned philosophical and theological ramble-fests, and yet such verbose maundering is absolutely meaningless without lived experiences that are beyond words. This is why I love what John Caputo says about the “event” so much.
The event can never be held captive by any particular instance of the event, never reduced to any present form or instantiation. It would be the height of injustice, not to say of arrogance, to say that justice is finally realized in some existing form, in some present person or state. The unconditional event is only conditionally realized in any time or place, in any word or proposition or discursive formation, in any ontic realization or actualization. The irreducible event is what reduces us to tears, to prayers and tears, for its coming. The event is what destabilizes all such relatively stable structures as attempt to house it, making them restless with the future, teeming with hope and promise, even as it is in virtue of the event that things are haunted by the past, made an occasion of dangerous memories, which are no less unnerving and destabilizing. The eternal truth of the event is its nomadism, its restless journey across barren deserts, or perhaps its venturing upon uncharted seas, in any case, its discontent with more sedimented, sedentary formations, even as the ancient charge that is laid upon us by the nomad is hospitality, to throw wide the door of welcome to its coming. Not only to welcoming its coming but to pray and weep over its arrival[7].
So, when I say postmodern on this blog, I do not mean the absolute rejection of reason or logic, the necessary descent into nihilism, or the welcome embrace of relativism and the dismissal of ethics or morality. I mean the reasonable irrationalism that my friend Andrew embodies.
This is it: our last set of Jedi training exercises. After today, I will be a full-fledged Jedi Apprentice in the Church of the Jedi, and you, dear readers, will be free from these pointless updates. However, don’t be lulled into a false of security; this is not the last time you will hear of Jediism on this blog. It is, after all, a central part of who I am these days.
Episode XVIII: Deja Do
I have a very bad feeling about this.
Luke Skywalker, Episode IV: A New Hope
The assigned task was to make a “To-Do List.” Didn’t I already do this on day 10? What the what is that?
Episode XIX: No, seriously.
I have a very bad feeling about this.
Luke Skywalker, Episode IV: A New Hope
I was supposed to write the solutions to my “To-do” list?! Like day 11?
Episode XX: This is disappointing
I have a very bad feeling about this.
Luke Skywalker, Episode IV: A New Hope
“Make a start on your to do list.” That sounds remarkably like day 12…
Episode XXI: Finally!
Try to help someone. What a noble goal. Finally, we get something that sounds worthy of a Jedi. It’s no Jedi mind trick, but hey. I’m only an apprentice.
In Moyer’s classes, we’re still reading the 8th-century prophets in the Hebrew Bible. I stumbled across these verses in Micah, and it reminded me of something I read for another paper I’m writing this semester:
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?The voice of the Lord cries to the city
(it is sound wisdom to fear your name):
Hear, O tribe and assembly of the city!
Can I forget the treasures of
wickedness in the house of the wicked,
and the scant measure that is accursed?
Can I tolerate the wicked scales
and a bag of dishonest weights?
Your wealthy are full of violence;
your inhabitants speak lies,
with tongues of deceit in their mouths.[1]
Micah is railing against the social injustice of the wealthy and those who cheat one another. Dishonesty runs rampant in Israel, leaving broken victims left in its wake. These prophets come onto the scene after the kingdom splits, when parties and factions are vying for the power that has become associated with Israel’s relatively insignificant and short-lived monarchy. These prophets come predicting exile, “[a] word for what happens when you still have the power and the wealth and the influence, and yet in some profound way you’ve blown it because you’ve forgotten why you were given it in the first place.”[2] Israel has forgotten who they were; they don’t remember Yahweh’s deliverance from Egypt (Micah 6:4) or the oppression they endured as slaves and strangers (Dt. 10:18–19). They have obsessed themselves with power. At this point, I hear the words of Michel Foucault ringing in my head:
in a society such as ours, but basically in any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse.[3]
Discourse, Foucault suggests, serves as the foundation of power relations that create “truths” capable of ordering society.[4] The power described in the prophets is the oppressive relationship of those merchants who hold the scales to distort the truth, to create new truths based on their influence over their customers. It is the deceitful “violence” of the wealthy. Essentially, the prophets and Foucault are concerned with the same issues of power:
In many instances I have been led to address the question of power only to the extent that the political analysis of power which was offered did not seem to me to account for the finer, more detailed phenomena I wish to evoke when I pose the question of telling the truth about oneself.[5]
Michel Foucault and the prophet Micah are raising questions about the nature of power in society and each individual’s involvement in power discourses. How do I participate in this discourse of power relations? Who do I think that I am? The powerful? Or the one affected by power? For Foucault, power is only truly power-ful when there is the “possibility of resistance.”[6] The masses are not controlled by power unless they give those who crave control the ability to master them. In fact, Foucault says that “power has always been impotent.”[7] For Micah and the other 8th-century prophets, the desire for power and dominance is the myth that has undone the identity of the people of God. In striving for control, the people have violated their covenant with the God who controls everything. The ones who will remain, those with true power, both Micah and Foucault say, will be those who are often considered “powerless”:
In that day, says the Lord,
I will assemble the lame
and gather those who have been driven away,
and those whom I have afflicted.
The lame I will make the remnant,
and those who were cast off, a strong nation;
and the Lord will reign over them in Mount Zion
now and forevermore.[8]
Every semester, Dr. Moyer has the students re-write Amos 5:21-24 in their own words. I figured I should give it a go, so I could offer my own version to the students.[1]
I really hate it when you get together,
and it doesn’t mean anything to me when you sit around and act spiritual.
Even though you crowd the altar, soaking its steps and rails in repentant tears,
I’m not listening to your sobs and wails;
Your offerings and financial sacrifices are asinine.
Just stop singing;
I’m not interesting in organs or acoustic guitars.
But justice.
Let justice wash over you and flow from you.
Let righteousness be a cool drink for the thirsty.
