Scripts, Imagaination, and Worldviews

Coming out of the recent discussion concerning the work of Walter Brueggemann, Anthony Smith raised the concern that all this talk of scripts is really just a throw back to worldviews. I strenuously disagree, and here is why.

During college, and being a faithful evangelic, I was all about discussions of worldviews and apologetics, especial reformed apologetics. Here, worldview indicated the rational basis by which we understood the world- all the presuppositions, attending arguments, and consequences of a particular belief system. The goal of Christian apologetics (which is the defense of the Christian worldview) was to show the consistency of Christianity, and the inconsistency of all other worldviews to explain reality.

Now, of course like many other young evangelicals, I got a good intellectual buzz from all of this, but then it wore off and other concerns crept in; like, why is the church still so screwed up if we have all the right answers? why do we still get divorced, abuse our wives and children? why are we slaves to capitalism? etc... So, one day, while having breakfast with my fiance at the Heavenly Cafe, just before leaving California to go to seminary, I made a shift in my thinking and gave up on worldviews as utterly too rational and unable to form us beyond consumer-capitalism. What I put in place of worldview, was the imagination, by which I meant the internal interpretive filter, or hermeneutic grid, which not only structures our rational ordering of the world, but all the irrational, unconscious desires, dreams, hopes, and fears. Then, during seminary I found that this shift was not all that original, but had been outlined by the likes of Marx, Freud, Lacan, and Riceour (and of course many others). So now I'm armed with words like "ideology", the "unconscious", jouissance, distantiation, and the interpassive subject, to go along with what I already know: i.e. "the clearing", will to power, language games, and differance.

So this is where scripts come in. We live by the scripts we have been give, and those scripts are generally not worked into our worldviews. The way an abused child interprets a raised voice (or raised arm) is very different than children who haven't been abused, regardless of the intentions of the adult. And in politics, words like freedom and democracy are very different in a consumer society than one which has been excluded from that system.

Therefore, back to Brueggemann, when he says that the script of technological-therapeutic-militarist-consumerism promises safety and happiness, he is not saying that this is merely a worldview that best articulates how to promote safety and happiness, but also that is molds and shapes us into thinking that safety and happiness (individual safety and consumer happiness) are the greatest values, rather than, say, justice and peace. So we could say that this presidential election is a war b/w worldviews (how best sustain American military and corporate dominance), but based in the same script (which says the freedom of Capital is paramount). And when we conceive Christianity as a worldview, a set of propositions which needs defending and enforcing, we end up distancing ourselves from the transforming power of the Gospel. But when we see it as a script needing creative interpretation (even as it interprets us) the acts of the Gospel become a transforming power b/w polls Life and Death.

Recent related posts:
Faith and Fantasy
Discipleship and Desire: The Death of the Self

Brueggemann conference

Walter Brueggemann's 19 Thesis: or, what he's thinking right now about things.
(Walter is an old testament theologian of the post-liberal/yale school mentality if that means anything to you.)

1) Everyone lives by a script.
2) We get scripted through normal nurture and socialization.
3) The dominant script of our society is that of technological-therapeutic-mulitarist-consumerism.
4) This script promises safety and happiness.
5) This script has failed.
6) The health of our society depends on moving beyond this script, but doesn't want to.
7) [The task of Christian] Ministry must de-script this dominant script.
8) This task is accomplished thru alternative scripting, or the funding of a counter imagination.
9) This alternative script is funded by the scripture and tradition of the Church.
10) This alternative script is about the Triune God.
11) This alternative script is not monolithic, total, complete, but it is rather a rag-tag, disjunctive collection hinting at a hidden God.
12) This rag-tag script can't be smoothed out or domesticated (not even by systematic theologies/ians).
13) This script invites adherent of text to quarrel with each other.
14) The entree into this alternative script is Baptism.
15) The nurture/socialization of this counter script is the work of ministry.
16) Most of us are ambiguous about this alternative script. That is, we really want both scripts and vacillate between them.
17) The space of ambivalence toward scripts is the arena of the Spirit.
18) Ministry is the manager of this ambivalence.
19) The work of ministry is necessary because no one else but the church (and synagogue) is willing/able to enter this open of ambivalence.

Other memorable ideas:
-Concerning violence in the Old Testament, Brueggemann says that "God is a recovering practitioner of violence." By this he means that God used to think violence was a good idea, but then gave up on it. However, like all addicts, He has relapses. Of which the cross is either the final deliverance, or another relapse.

-Concerning faith and knowledge: "We all have a craving for certitude, but the gospel is all about fidelity." By this he means that certitude is an epistemological category while fidelity is a relational one. And the way of the Cross is to depart from our certitude, to die to our answers/desires/scripts.

There is also much to say about the scripture, scripts, and the imagination, but I’ll put that in the next post.

Theological Conversation with Walter Brueggemann

...is where I will be until Thursday. It should be a great time.

Faith and Fantasy

Many, diagnosing the current ailments of the Church, contend that "We are where we are because of what we believe," meaning that the formal content of Church doctrines are cancerous, needing the radioactive treatment of postmodern, post-foundational philosophy (which is Brian McLaren's assertion). Now, certainly I have no serious argument that many doctrines (or at least their current formulations) are horribly deformed.

But posing the question in this manner assumes an unfortunate direct relation between knowing and doing, and therefore, reinforcing the priority of knowledge over practice (and speculation over affectation). This perspective overlooks the imaginative, or fantastic, aspect of agency, or the fact that how we relation our action to our belief is an creative act of interpretation. As Kevin VanHoozer says, "We have biblical doctrines, but secular imaginations."

So my point is that while some, or many doctrines, need revision (i.e. substitutionary atonement, premillenialism, etc.), our recent modernist method (or lack) of cultural engagement blinded the Church to syncretistic moves in relation to the Enlightenment, modernity, and even postmodernity. What the Church has generally failed to do is what Freudians would call "analysis", Marxists call "ideology critique", and the Church used to call "casting out idols."

So our ability to engage (and I don't even like that term anymore—"engage" sounds like Capt. Pichard on the Enterpise) the postmodern context, or liberal democracy, or global capitalism, doesn't just depend on recovering/articulating the Faith, but on articulating the idolatries/ideologies of the present age which insinuate themselves into the practices of the Church.

So the question is not how what we know affects what we do, but also how what we are doing doesn't accord with what we think we know. It is not what we believe, but how we believe.

complexity and capital: metaphysics and the market; or are justice and charity self-organizing?

(the second of three posts coming out of my summer reading of Lev Manovich concerning new media and technology. Here is the first.)
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What if all this talk about complexity, self-organizing systems, and the connectivity of life is really just the emergence of a metaphysic to under-gird global capitalism? As Len Manovich says in Abstraction and Complexity (an otherwise very intersting account of art and technolgy), "Just as the classical physics and mathematics fitted perfectly the notion of a highly rational and orderly universe controlled by God, the sciences of complexity seem to be appropriate in the world which on all levels - political, social, economic, technical - appears to us to be more interconnected, more dynamic, and more complex than ever before."

But shouldn't this collusion between science and the social order be questioned. Might not this marriage be the means of bondage rather than that of liberation? Isn't the logic of non-linear, non-hierarchical relations between the parts and the whole (the arche and telos, the cause and effect) the ultimate justification of the laissez-faire mentality of global capitalism which seeks to deregulate the entire globe for the free, spontaneous, self-organization of commodity exchange? Might not the paradigm of complexity be the new ideology which undergirds, and easelessly oils, the machine of global capitalism?

And conversely, are Justice and Charity even really self-organizing and spontaneous within a system? More often than not they are the explosion and violent reordering of a system. Justice and Charity would only be spontaneous and self organizing if we believed in the benevolence of the system, it parts and inputs. But is this what we really believe is the case of human systems?

And finally, if top-down or bottom-up reductionistic hierarchies can't be trusted, nor can the systems of complexity, whom can we trust? What specter within the system, what Spirit from beyond might moves us beyond these dichotomies?

Discipleship and Desire: The Death of the Self

What does "death to self" mean? Of course, it is not the literal/physical death of the body. So what part of the self is put to death according to the Christian discourse? While often thought so, this does not mean the death of desires or Desire, selfish or not. Why? Because merely placing the death (and therefore essentially life) of the self here, in desire, ends up affirming two discourses antithetical to the gospel.

The first is the discourse of Law and transgression which sees salvation in the denial of desire, b/c all desire is evil, which polarizes faith and works such that we can't make any sense of a good deed (thank to Kant's understanding of Duty and the ethical demand). This denial of desires drives wedge b/w justification (faith) and sanctification (works) which only confuses the development of discipleship.

The second is the discourse of liberal capitalism which confirms and legitimates all desires and distinguishes among desires only according to individual freedom and not on the communal good. Therefore, the outright denial, instead of the discernment among desires, ends up justifying the logic of capitalism instead of problematizing it.

Otherwise than Spiderman; or Beyond Superheroes

This is a serious post, even though it concerns a movie about a comic book. Last week I had the chance to finally read some of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas' writings, and I watched Spiderman (all because my wife's sister watched our son for a couple of days so we got to read and watch movies undisturbed. Praise be to God). Basically I read all afternoon, then I watched Spiderman 2, and then I was disturbed.

At first pass Levinas and Spiderman seems to be in agreement: the nameless face of the stranger, the other in danger demanding responsibility from Peter Parker; the non-reciprocal substitution of the self for the other because the poor citizen of NY can't help Peter in return (recall the scene on the train when the "people" resist Dr. Oct on Peter's behalf to no avail). And during Peter's time of testing, when he forgoes his superhero persona, we see him walk away from a mugging without helping, and all the audience can think (which is the pure manipulation of the movie) is, "This is wrong, Peter. You SHOULD help him. He is your NEIGHBOR!!"

But, unfortunately, even though within the movie Spiderman is the hero, the role model which every kid aspires to, we cannot follow him, and Levinas points the way. Why?

The superhero ethic that Spiderman presents us with ends up justifying our (as in the America public) lack of ethical/moral action. Only superheroes deal with ethical dilemmas, only they have choices. Movies like this teach us that "With great power comes great responsibility" (in the word of uncle Ben the wise), of which the reverse creed, which we the America public live by, is "Those without great power are without any responsibility." And isn't this generally the case with these comic book remakes (but I must note the exception of "Unbreakable' which is exceptional, but not a remake). These movies draws us in as an audience, presenting us with a dilemma which the superhero undergoes, which the audience then determining the good to be followed, and which, of course, the Superhero then does (even Matrix Reloaded follows this logic to a tee with Neo's choice for Trinity over humanity, which in the trilogy is a thoroughly predicable choice). The audience then feels as if they had actually undergone a moral dilemma (and acted rightly) just because they know how the superhero ought to act. But we haven't done anything but watch a movie, and more than that, we won't ever do anything, because only Superheroes have really dilemmas and only they have "super powers" with which to solve them.

So although we all know that Peter shouldn't leave that man helpless in the alley because he can it without getting hurt, where does that leave us? Would/Should we do the same thing? We might (will probably) get hurt. So, w simultaneously affirm the right thing to do but give ourselves a loophole (we are too weak). And this is the essence of the Superhero ethic, and the perpetuation of the ethics of indifference which makes America go round.

But, things would be different if these movies hinted at the possibility of everyone being a superhero, if they suggested that we were all beyond ordinary. Only then would we all enter into a non-reciprocal substitution with the Other. Only they could we respond in responsibility toward the infinite face of the Other. And what if we all were superheroes, and we all had a super power, might we then begin to act again? But what would our power be? And what transformed us?

And wouldn't us being superheroes be the perfect supplement to the fact that are all refugees, cast out as bare life? But again, whence this transformation and power?

And to these questions an political activist gives one answer, and the theologian another. (alas, again the division of the subject).

What Missiology can't teach the Emerging Church

or, dissolving the emerging church missions board!!

What is the Emerging Church? What are they up too? How do they conceive of what they are doing? Well, for many, they view themselves as missionaries (or missional communities) to the emerging post-modern culture of the West. But I disagree. (if you are short time, skip to the "culture" section, it's my harshest critique and most important).

Here's a familiar story (a true story many times over I'm sure): An overseas missionary comes home to find that his church has started a postmodern worship service. The pastor of this service, feeling somewhat confident in what he's doing, but a bit insecure next to this seasoned missionary ask, "So, what do you think about our servise? Pretty different, right?" The missionary answers, "Yes it is different. But you are doing just what I'm doing out in the jungles of Papa New Guinea, adapting to culture." This type of reasoning, which I've heard from several leaders of the emerging church, I totally disagree with. The tools of modern, or even postmodern, missiology don't apply directly, w/o modification, to the Western situation.

Here's why...
why we shouldn't use "missionary" or "incarnate" in the West using the three "c"s- "capitalism", "colonialism", and "culture".

Capitalism- global, market driven capitalism is the best missions agency in the world if we understand missions as adapting to culture and translating a message. Actually, capitalism understands that its not even about the message, but rather about desire (forming desire). If the Church understood that missions is about forming right desires they might actually start doing missions again!!! But too often the emerging church relies on sociological approaches which is no different from what advertisers do. I could go on...

Colonialism and Constantinianism- It is interesting that when we look at the modern missionary movement (i.e. the West evangelizing the Rest), we hear two stories of what happened; one from the missionaries, another from the converts. When we listen to the converts/natives we see that it is a matter of receiving (not giving) the gospel from God, of being faithful (instead of relevant) and a matter of our identity. From everything that I have read from the marginal theologies (african, hispanic american, latin american) the concern is not missions, but rather faithfulness. So might not missions, and the missionary perspective, have only arrived within a Constantinianism which not longer exists. In a post-Christian culture, rather than pre-Christian and therefore missionary, the issues is just as much faithfulness as it is missions. More could be said...

Culture- (this has two parts, and is a combination of the first two). First off, we don't live in a real culture but a faked one. Capitalism has ready-made cultural products, plastic artifacts made yesterday. Culture is virtually manufactured without substance. We no real Western real culture anymore to which we could be missionaly oriented toward. We are only engaging with a simulacrum. Secondly, if we are going to talk about "culture" and "identity" we also have to ask whether it is a minority or the majority culture? and is it given or chosen? More those in the minority their identity is given to them (it's called racism). Others projected expectations, intention, and abilities onto these minorities which they then have to deal with. It is not chosen, but given. But for many in the emerging Church (who happen to be white) being missional means reaching out and reinforcing the identities of those they encounter (ravers, hipsters, skaters, hippies, punks, etc.). The problem with this is most of these people are also white and they have chosen these personas, instead of having them given violently to them as in the minority/racial case. So we are trying to be missionally oriented toward a group of people who have chosen their identities, arranging church so that it might appeal to them (but of course they don't talk that we), and we think that through this we will create disciples. But that will never happen because we are reinforcing every thing we should be criticizing: market capitalism which perpetually fragments people from each other through niche marketing which the emerging church is mirroring instead of promoting unity through the discarding of fivolous identities. again, i could go on, especially on this point...

But i'll quit and see what happens.
so, in summary
1) we should disband the emerging church missions board, stop talking about postmoderns as if they were real people who identified themselves as postmodern, b/c there aren't any.
2) we should stopping saying that we are being "incarnational" b/c the church is already the incarnation of Christ as his Body. The question is are we being faithful?

New Pantagruel

The New Pantagruel has published my first real stab at relating theology and radical politics (you judge how successful). It is a combined reading of "justification by faith" and Zizek's fragile absolute, who is a Marxist of sorts. The conclusion is really just the introduction to a larger project that I'm only beginning to think through.

anyway..., I posted it here about 6 months ago for your thoughts and comments, but since I've met some other friend who read Zizek I thought I'd open up the comments here or at the pantagruel for some more discussion.

please, don't be nice. I can take some criticism....

and tomorrow, I promise that I will write about why the emerging church should use missionary terminology- and yes it has to do with post-colonialism, multiculturalism, and Capitalism.

Conversations: Emergent and Ekklesia

Two people walk into a bar (b/c both believe in drinking) and start a conversation. We will just pretent that they are called B. Mac and Stan H. representing Emergent and the Ekklesia Project. Let's listen in before they get to drunk to be coherent...

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(the question posed by an third party is "What is Missions?"

Stan. H.: "The Mission of the Church is to be the Church!" he shouts out roughly.

B. Mac. responds calmly: "The Mission of God is to save the World."

Stan H.: "But what are you saving people into when there is no distinction b/w the Church and the World? The Church must be the Church so that the World will know it is the World" quoting one of his own books.

B. Mac.: "But why would the World care what the Church is doing if it never sees the Church and has no affinity with it?" he says with deep concern for the lost.

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And so goes the conversation, each, and all their follower, presenting reasons for and ways of reforming the church, one seeking more faithfulness by the Church, and the other seeking more faithfulness to the World.

But the reality of this conversation, if we can speak so flamboyantly, is that this conversation needs to continue, and we need to diligently pursue it. Why? 1) Because in general, the Emerging Church has started as a pastoral movement concerned with issues of culture and evangelism, while the Ekklesia project issued forth as a movment from academia concerned with the Church and discipleship, and therefore will enhance each others discorse, bringing different questions, methods, and concerns to the table. 2) Each movement seeks renewal within the tradition they spring from, which is the mainline traditions for Ekklesia, and evangelical for Emergent. 3) Each is working on the same question but from different ends. Ekklesia from an ecclesiology to missions; Emergent from missions back toward ecclesiology.

So, to position myself (which is always hazardous and better left to you the community of readers to decided), I would say that I lean more toward the Ekklesia perspective, but deeply immersed in the Emerging Church. So generally, when I critique the Emerging Church it is not out of the love of criticism, but for love of the Emerging church, and not as an outsider finding fault, but as an insider hoping to fortify.

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And all this leads up to the gauntlet that I layed down yesterday concerning the use of missionary methods in the West, particularly N. America.

Emerging Church and Cool?

Several people have recently criticized the Emerging Church (maggi dawn and raw faith) while others have defended its need for relevance and incaration (emergent~kiwi). It is an interesting conversation, usually split between the Emerging Church ex-evangelicals trying to reclaim but not become Mainline, Catholic, Anglican tradition, and mainliners from those traditions defending themselves from the savanger EMers.

I recently posted my view on the relevant question concerning the EM (which emerging church.info is publishing next month, I think...), and concerning the mainliners question of resistance, so I won't rehearse it all here. (i must have been using my spidy sense...)

shortly I'll post some thoughts concerning the theft of tradition coming out of a recently conference, where i spent the entire time defending the EC (something I don't usually do).

and just to throw this out, I DON'T THINK THE EMERGING CHURCH SHOULD THINK IN MISSIONARY TERMS TO EXPLAIN WHAT THEY ARE TRYING TO DO IN THE WEST. IT IS NOT HELPFUL.

Virtual reality, Freedom, Incarnation

(the first of three, or so, posts coming out of my summer reading of Lev Manovich concerning new media and technology)
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What if the direction of virtual reality were reversed such that it is not us that enters into a virtual reality, leaving our normal plane of existence, but rather we are always virtual and the incarnation is God leaving his normal plane of existence and enters into our virtual reality, our copy/simulacra of reality.

Think about the Matrix. In the virtual reality of the Matrix, everything runs according to Laws and Programs which fulfill there destiny/function. But Neo comes in as one able to bend, break, augment these Laws according to his design. He brings freedom into the Matrix. And for us (humanity) this is how we must figure the break into and out of virtual reality-- the forced choice of Freedom conquering VR.

But what if the God's entering into our virtual reality is the opposite of this. Our VR is structure around freedom (even its forced choice), so might it be possible that this person would break with our Laws of freedom, conquering our VR with a new Law of necessity and function? And wouldn't this enable the great reversal where we see that our conquering of Law through Freedom is merely the greatest support of the Law, and God's conquering of Freedom through the Law is merely the greatest support of Freedom which is Love?

And of course, wouldn't this mean that Jesus' actions (and our repetition of them) would always seem irrational, impractical, insane, and leading toward death? And might this economy of sacrifice and love not signal the possibility of another life outside the laws of our VR: beyond selfishness and violence?

Ethics of the Other; Politics of the Same

I was brooding over the two different strains of postmodern ethics/politics while walking home from the train station earlier this week, and this is what I came up with conerning the differences b/w the "Other" and the "Same". From where did these two emphases come, and to which context are they addressed?
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Sprouting amid the ruble of post-war Europe, the ethics of the Other (represented by Levinas and Derrida) is meant to protect us against totalitarianism, at least the overt fascist expression with its attempt to exclude and destory all the doesn't conform (to the Same of the Party, Race, Gender, etc.). The ethics of the Other, therefore, stands against the totalizing effects of the Same (which might be the modern project) by reminding us of the irriducible and infinite obligation we have before the face of the Other, which never can be draw into our circle of understanding or sameness. So against the totalizing Same we must proclaim the Other.

However, within the soil of Easter European Communism and the emergence of global capitalism, comes the flowering ethics of the Same (Represented by Zizek and Badiou). This ethics, and its related politic, is meant to guard against a different totalitarianism, a more insidious exclusion and destruction based on the continual division and deterritorialization. Because of global capitalism's continual production of difference, and therefore distraction through the endless procession of the "new", the only way of standing against this fragmenting effect is to speak and promote the Same. Against the perpetually othering of capitalism, we must proclaim that we are all the Same.
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So we can speak of two different politics, nurtured in two different soils, resisting two different locusts. Our question then is, which pestulance is the greatest? which plant will has the greatest chance to bear fruit? and, lastly, might we consider a variety within our diets?

after Ekklesia

Well, the ekklesia conference has come and gone and with it all the major activities of the summer.   I'm sad and glad about it. 

For a run down of all the activities see AKMA's summaries (who I finally met in person).  Others I met offline for the first time were anthony smith from the Weblog and Ryan from Kankakee, Jennifer Collins from scandal of particularity.

Also hero's of mine that I either met or caught up with were Stephen Long and Ed Phillips from Garrett Seminary, Micheal Cartwright, Glen Stassen, Brent Laytham, Micheal Budde, Daniel Bell, Jonathan Wilson and of course Stanely Hauerwas. 

Tomorrow I'll post my note from the workshop I gave for you all to dissect and some other thought from the conference.

Ekklesia Conference

Is any one going to the Ekklesia Conference next week? 
If you are could you post a comment letting me know.  We should try to get the Chicago blogger together and at least meet face to face sometime while we are there. 

The Way of Life

Who are the people? What is the vision?
This is the vision of the Living:
The Living see beyond themselves and their own desires.
The Living see the basic needs and hopes of others as the same as their own.
The Living know that even “dead men walking” can turn away from death toward life.
The Living recognize and practice a “community of life.”
The Living know good and evil tendencies are in every human being.
The Living practice repentance and forgiveness.
The Living are peacemakers.
The Living seek justice for all.
The Living are informed by history.
The Living see beyond their generation into the future.
The Living seek the same opportunity for others that they seek for themselves.
The Living respect, conserve, and share the resources of the Earth.
The Living serve the spirit of love.
The Living would rather build than destroy.
The Living seek truth instead of lies and illusions.
The Living choose trust over suspicion.
The Living celebrate life:  
  In the smile of a child,  
  In the loving touch of hands,  
  In the sharing of food and drink,  
  In the healing of the sick,  
  In the unique quality of each individual person,  
  In shared laughter,  
  In shared work,  
  In the beauty and sternness of nature,  
  In song, dance, and story.

from the bruderhof community.

cavanaugh discussion

for those interested in willian cavanaugh's Theopolitical Imagination and/or the creation of the nation-state and the individual, see the discussion over at scandal of particularity.

the prepubesant nature of christian radio

The entire time I spent in a car last week I listened to Christian radio. Not because I naturally do this, but because I was teaching at a youth camp, and every time we got in a van we started listening to the alternative christian rock radio station. Through spending a week with jr. higher and listening to Christian radio at the same time, I made a very sad discovery.

All the songs were perfectly accessable to these jr. highers.

Every thing that we listened to for an entire week could have been understood a kid who have barely reached puberty. Christian radio basically perpetuate a pre-teen understanding of God, life, and the gospel. The problem is that most people who listen to these stations are adults.

My church is spending the summer digging into the Psalms, looking at life, the hard/difficult/confusing side of life, but the Christian subculture as viewed through Christian radio doesn't even acknowledge that side of life.

I'm grieved that there is an entire segment of the Church acting prepetually prpubesant. What is to be done?

what i've been reading

in place of a really post, ill let you know what i've been reading and where I'm going.

Most importantly is the stimulating conversation stemming from the university without condition. They are reading The Perverse Perseverance of Sovereignty which discusses globalization and the nation-state. Other interesting articles relating this topic which I'm working thru are john milbank's Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror and william cavanaugh's wars of religion and the rise of the state and the world in a wafer. (both of which are in his Theopolitical Imagination and are brought to you by the jesus radical library.)Excerpt from World in a Wafer to show the trajectory of his thinking: "What I hope to show...is that globalization does not signal the demise of the nation-state but is in fact a hyperextension of the nation-state's project of subsuming the local under the universal."

After spending so much time on critical theorists/theologians I decided to revisit my hermeneutic root and picked up Paul Ricoeur's From Text to Action , esp. his essays on ideology (which zizek and badiou would despise) and also his Oneself as Another . As an intro to Ricoeur I would hightly recommend from text to action.

I've also been reading up on new media as mediated through Len Manovich. I'll be blogging about this soon as i'll be reviewing The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society for the matthew house project. This is some great matter for reflection in all this media/technology stuff.

so that's what I've been reading while I was away.

"the doubtful address of faith; or why faith is over-rated"

part one and two are diagnostic; part three is constructive. read in the order you see fit.)

Part One: Intro to Problem
"No one doubts anymore because faith has been banished! A life of faith has vanished, and with it the ability to doubt."

My primary concern is with discipleship and spiritual formation within the Church, but this reflection could be easily extended beyond ecclesial walls (see a gauche's "In Defense of These Deflated Meta-Narratives"). My premise is that we no long know how to truly doubt because we no long believe.

But let me begin again...What doubt am I talking about? Let's make a distinction: there is philosophical doubt and existential doubt; or there is methodological doubt and personal doubt (from hear on out I'll refer to "philosophical" and "personal" doubt because my homiletics professor would like the alliteration…).

Concerning the first, philosophic, the history is well known. Amid the religious wars which had engulfed Europe after the Reformation/Renaissance Rene Descartes began his quest for a universal foundation of human reason on from which he could evaluate conflicting epistemological claims. In other words, he was trying to find that one place from which everyone could agree. Methodologically this led him to doubt everything until he found that something of which it is impossible to doubt. From this process came is famous dictum, "I think therefore I am." And from this radical doubt springs the Enlightenment, the search for pure reason through the doubting of everything received whether it be tradition, religion, family, or even perception.

However, there is one catch. This radical "life of doubt," or philosophical doubt, was pursued for the explicit purpose of banishing all personal doubts. It was the Descartes, awash in epistemological chaos, full of personal doubts and anxieties that entered into philosophical doubt. Philosophical doubt was a retreat from and panacea for personal doubts, and the Enlightenment took up this quest diligently. Therefore, once the philosophical process is over, there is no longer any need to doubt, because now we have a certain answer for every personal doubt.

Part Two: Consequences
While those better informed might tease out the consequences of this "life of doubt" in our contemporary life, I will focus on the Church. The "life of doubt" has affected both the mainline/liberal as well as the conservative/evangelical church.

For the mainliners, the use of modern epistemological tools coupled with radical cynicism resulted in the deletion of much of orthodoxy replaced by culturally sensitive theological ambiguities which portioned off Christian identity. It left them with a radical critique of the faith such that the form barely consisted without content.

But the conservatives did not fair much better. In fact they might be worse off for their appropriation of Enlightenment doubt. Using the same epistemological tools, yet for a different use, conservatives began a militant defense of the faith, but not grounded in faith, resulting in a semblance of orthodoxy. They defended faith through doubt, thereby denying the faith of Paul/Abraham which moves from "faith to faith" (Rom. 1:17).

The relation of doubt and faith have been all screwed up, where now in much of the Church, real personal doubt is not allowed to be spoken. We are left with either radical doubt or militant faith, both of which kill true doubt and true faith. We aren’t allowed to question, we can’t voice our concerns, we can't speak our doubts, because this would be a betrayal of modern faith, which demands certainty.

Part Three: The Doubtful Address of Faith
So this is the difference between the "life of doubt" and the "life of faith." The "life of doubt" ("I doubt therefore I am") can truly only give answers. The "life of faith" can truly ask questions. In this "life of doubt" I must fill the in abyss with answer after answer, frantically dousing the fires of ambiguity with coolly reasoned answers b/c I can't persist in perpetual doubt. But the life of faith ("I belief therefore I am") floats above the abyss, suspended by the address to and from anOther, able to fully enter the questions and ambiguities of life precisely because doubt is not our horizon, nor the constitution of our being, but the voice of faith amid the complexity of existence.

This brings us back to the practices of discipleship and spiritual formation. The "life of doubt" can't bring to speech actual doubt. But the "life of faith" can bring actual doubts to speech. True faith, even during the dark night of the soul, even in the winter of disorientation, true faith can bring its doubts to God. It still addresses God and vocalizes doubts. This is seen continually in the Psalms. The Psalms are nothing but a persistent addressing to God the concerns of our lives. No matter the situation, the Psalmists are still talking with God. Can we cultivate in our Churches this doubtful address of faith, or are we too quick to answer the personal doubts of others?

Illustration of Job: Think through the life of Job, his suffering, his calling out to God, his receiving answers from his friends (orthodox explanations of what is happening and who is at fault). His wife advises him to curse God and die. But Job questions God and lives. His three friends come around and give him answer after answer, but he is never satisfied. So Job questions God, and demands an answer from God himself, not anyone else. But when God arrives, God doesn’t even offer the correct answer to Job’s question, there is no explanation. Only more questions. One questioner to another questioner. There are no answers, only questions. For Job, and for us, questions are the answer. Questions addressed to God, spoken to God, directed toward God, not the void or nothingness, and not silence and mute depression. Job in the midst of doubt and suffering still addresses God because there is still a relationship. And God, even though he questions Job, affirms the relationship through his questions.

So how can we affirm/encourage the doubtful questioning of faith? Or will we continue to replace true faith with the answers of doubt?

Concluding Aphorisms:
In the life of doubt, both doubt and faith are ultimately to be feared b/c they both close the space of the subject.

In the life of faith, both doubt and faith are embraced b/c they keep open the space for the subject to participate in/with Another.

Doubt ruptures relationships, but Faith forges them.

---
these thoughts brought to you by walter bruggemann's spirituality of the psalms and robert pfaller's Negation and its Reliabilities:
An Empty Subject for Ideology?.

i've returned

now that i'm finally back, and june is finally over, i hope to start blogging again. I've been doing a bunch of reading and thinking, just no writing...

so starting tomorrow i'll begin with my promised post on "the doubtful address of faith" and then move on from there.

in the mean time, i've changed some of the links to the side and updated the books i'm working through.

Signing off for a week

I'll be back next week, hopefully with a more regular blogging schedule.

The Time of the Universal/Invisible Church

(more thoughts on time and ecclesiology prompted by Graham Ward's Cities of God)

Recently (for about 2 years now) I have raged against the motion of the Universal or Invisible Church first promoted by Augustine and later used by the reformers to justify their separation from Catholicism, and currently used (by evangelicals) to refer to all those who are truly saved throughout the globe. I don't like the idea of the Invisible Church because it is usually deployed as a justification for the lack of unity with in the Church, even it bitter divisions. In a time when the most effective witness to the power and peace of the Gospel is the visible unity among diversity of the Church amid warring communities, (race, gender, class, tribe, state), it seems the doctrine of the Invisible Church engenders a lack of concern for how the visible church is doing. "It's alright that the visible Church is as fragmented as the rest of the world, because it’s the Universal/Invisible Church that really matters!" they say.

But perhaps I may have been too hasty... As I mentioned in the previous post, just as there is no place of cultural engagement between the Church and culture, but a Time; so too there is not place of the Universal/Invisible Church (as if it were an ideas to be mapped onto the globe), but rather a Time of the Invisible Church. The Universal Church is attainable in Time (the Final Judgment), not an escaped into an ideal space. In this way this doctrine becomes a motivation for unity rather than an excuse for division. Or have I missed something?

ecclesiology is a time, not a space

(i said I was going blog light, but this just popped out while I was working on something else. that's why it's so rough...)

There is no space of cultural engagement, no place of overlapping interests, no room in the public square for the Church. The place of intersection between Church and culture is a myth. There is only Time. The Church is in another Time. Our culture's time is Now, eternal present of enjoyment, fulfillment, and pleasure that must be perpetuated, or the eternal present of pain, lack, and dissatisfaction which must be escaped. But the Church springs from the past of Christ giving of his Body and races toward the future of being gathering into his Body; the past of the Last Supper to the future of the Wedding Banquet.

In this other Time, the Church journeys to a different rhythm, entering and exiting cultural artifacts and situation, oriented toward the real presence of past and future. And b/c of this it is only possible for the Church to remain truly in the present.

There are no overlapping spaces between Church and State, or Church and University. The Church marches through those spaces according to its own trajectory, gathering all that is good, true, and beautiful, while scattering all evils, lies, and deformity.

for the time being

well, june is here. I have so much that I want to write about, but so little time to do it. Besides preaching twice at my church, going on a week long vacation, a good friends wedding, and preparing to speak at a week long youth retreat, I'm still trying to find time to hangout with my 11 month old son Soren (who is sitting next to me while I type) and time to spend with my wife.

So, while I want to write about 1)Doubt as true faith, 2) why the Emerging Church looks suspiciously like global capitalism, 3) why evangelicals don't really believe in preaching even though they claim to believe in Scripture, 4) the "time" rather than the "space" of cultural engagement, and many other topics, I will probably not get to any of these until July, which is when summer really starts for me.

So, while i'm not signing off for a month, it will be blog-lite as my brain power is diverted offline for these various projects. peace be with you.

What African Theologians can teach the Emerging Church

-----

Below are some of the preliminary notes that I've been preparing for a workshop I'm co-leading at this years Ekklesia Project Gathering with Scott Bader-Saye. They are still rough. Please help me think through the issues. This will also deepens my previous "Post-Constantinian Cultural Studies" post.

(in 3 parts: Part 1 is an introduction to the Problem. Part 2 will will examine the question of Identity as Bediako sees it through the lense of Patristic and African theologies. Part 3 will look at an appropriation of this method for our postmodern, Wester context.)

Part One

1. Intro: The question of relevance and identity.
Relevance- The tyranny of the new- that which is always coming is our Fate. Our future is always just ahead of us, never arriving, but toward which we long to be relevant. This is Modernity, always making something new to free us from custom/tradition/culture. As Stephen Long says, "Modernity is the endless repetition of sameness under the illusion of difference." We think we have moved on, yet all is sameness. In our modern era the search for relevance is seen in evidentiary apologetics, seeker-sensitive churches, Contemporary Christian Music and the Broader Christian subculture. And the quest for relevance is also seen in the missionary impulse to reach emerging generations, to reach skaters/surfer/ravers/hipsters and urbanites. If they are post-rational, post-literate, post-individualistic, intuitive, aesthetic, and image-drive, then let's be and do that. Unfortunately, while seeking to reform and transform the modern Church, the Emerging Church movement many time continues to fall prey to the perpetually new and the drive toward relevance undergirded by a missionary theology of contectualization which in a Western setting ends up creating more and more niche market Christian consumers rather than a subversive unified church.

-As we will see, the ancient church fathers and current African thinkers were/are not seeking to be relevant to their surrounding culture, but are seeking a definition and expression of their own particular Christian identity. So, I want to explore the significance of replacing the project of relevance with the project of identity. Let us not seek to be relevant but to express our identity as follows of Christ, as Christians within the particular cultures that we are in.

2. Problem of Identity posed by Kwame Bediako.
The Problem of Identity:
p. xi "I have felt the need to seek a clarification for myself of how the abiding Gospel of Jesus Christ relates to the inescapable issues and questions which arise from the Christian's cultural existence in the world, and how this relationship is achieved without injury to the integrity of the Gospel."
- This is a question of the gospel and cultural existence, not of gospel and culture as some whole or reified object. Culture is not a thing to be related to. Rather we should speak of cultural agents.
p. xv "The basic argument which underlies the various chapters is that the development of theological concern and the formulation of theological questions are closely linked as an inevitable by-product of a process of Christian self-definition." (p. 7) The more enduring problem is not the question of orthodoxy, but "the Christian's response to the religious past as well as to the cultural tradition generally in which one stands, and the significance of that response for the development of theological answers to the culturally-rooted questions of the context."

Identity/Self-Definity=Religious past and cultural/tradition present.
Who are we (past) and where are we (present) intersect in the question of identity. Where we are culturally effects how we perceive ourselves, and who we are effects how we stand where we are. For the Fathers it was who are we as Christians uniting the OT and NT in Christ, and where are we in the Graeco-Roman world. For African Theology it is who are we as African Christians in relationship to Mission/Wester Christianity (religious past) and Traditional African religions (cultural present).

The question then at the end of part 1 is, What is the religious past and cultural present of Western Christians?

Part Two

The Question of Identity: Ancient Parents and African Siblings
Two test cases: Early Church Fathers and African Theologians

Ancient Parent- -church fathers interacted w/ both Judaism and Graeco-Roman culture. The question of Judaism concerns their religious past, seeking a dis/continuous relationship with it. So they appropriated OT and NT as the unified revelation of Christ. The question of identity in this is who are we is relations to our religious past. The question concerning Greaco-Roman cultural tradition is who are we in this place, and how can we understand this tradition through Christ.

i.Justifying Identity- or the Triumph of Barbarism
Tatian and Tertullian sought to vindicate Christian Identity against Hellenism. They wanted to show that Christianity in no way came from, or was indebted to Greek thought or life, and that Hellenism (its philosophical systems and religious life) were dangerous to Christian identity. In fact, Greek philosophy is really a misunderstanding of Moses, who is much before Greek philosophy, meaning that Christians are more ancient than Greeks. (Tatian). This vindicated the Truth of the Gospel outside of and before Greek criteria of acceptability/rationality. Also, Tertullian was still arguing for the right to exist and think as a Christian. His viewpoint is not the evaluation/engagement of culture, but a religious question of faithfulness amidst paganism. Yet, for both Tatian and Tertullian a defense of Identity loses its ability to be an effective witness within dominant culture. (see p. 140)

ii. Identity as Fulfillment- Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria
These theologians seek to establish Christian identity as not just the culmination of the Jewish tradition, but also as the apex of Greek tradition. Justin is not attempting to fuse Christian faith with Greek ideals, rather he attempts to show that the best and brightest of the Greek philosophical tradition, in thoughts, and in persons, was the work of the eternal Word, because Truth has only one source, and that is Christ. The fulfillment-culture Justin Martyr "But his spirit of wisdom was present in very man as his highest intellect, so that not only does Christ represent the culmination of the prophecy of a single religion, even though that is the most ancient religion, but He is the incarnation of the Universal Intelligence which it has been the hopeless struggle of every philosopher to understand." The answer to the sneers of the philosophers that Christianity was not worthy of an intelligent man's consideration was thus the counter-attack that philosophy had failed, and that only in Christianity was the end of philosophy to be found.

African Siblings- For African Theology it is who are we as African Christians in relationship to Missionary/Western Christianity (religious past) and Traditional African religions (cultural present). Concerning Missionary Christianity, instead of positively appropriating their religious past like the church fathers, they are needing to critically disentangle themselves from Western Christianity. They are de-westernizing Christianity in their process of self-definition as a means of dealing w/ their religious past. And concerning their cultural present, African Theologian see Christianity as fulfillment of Africa traditions.

i. Fulfillment of Africa- The theologian Idowu sees that God was already at work in africa, revealing himself as the one God. Africans are really monotheists. Mbiti sees Church as the fulfillment of aspirations of tribe, family, community. Aspirations are not destroyed, but fulfilled in the church.

ii. Indigenous Church: Idowu- Indigenization of the church. "We mean by it simply that the Church should bear the unmistakable stamp of the fact that she is the Church of God in Nigeria. It should be no longer an outreach or a colony of Rome, Canterbury or Westminster Central Hall in London, or the vested interests of some European or American Missionary Board…the Church in Nigeria should be the Church which affords Nigerians the means of worshipping God as Nigerians; that is, in a way which is compatible with their own spiritual temperament, of singing to the glory of God in their own way, of praying to God and hearing Hid Holy Word in idiom whih is clearly intelligible to them…She should be…the spiritual home of Christian Nigerians, a home in which they breathe an atmosphere of spiritual freedom."

iii. Indigenous Church: Mbiti "Mbiti makes a distinction between Christianity on the one hand, and the Christian Faith or the Gospel, on the other. Christianity, which 'results from the encounter of the Gospel with any given local or regional community/society,' is always indigenous and, by definition, culture bound. The Gospel is God given, Christianity is a result from the encounter with the Gospel in a local cultures. African theologian John Mbiti says, "We can add nothing to the Gospel, for this is an eternal gift of God; but Christianity is always a beggar seeking food and drink, cover and shelter from the cultures it encounters in it never-ending journeys and wanderings." Also, "To speak of 'indigenising christianity' is to give the impression that Christianity is a ready-made commodity which has to be transplanted to a local area. Of course, this has been the assumption followed by many missionaries and local theologians. I do not accept it any more." This is Mbiti’s argument against contextualization (which assumes an unchanging essence of Christianity.

These are my summary notes of Bediako's text/argument. In Part 3 I will look at an appropriation of this method of "theology and identity" based in religious tradition and cultural present for our postmodern, Wester context.

Part Three

Indigenous postmodern Faith- Now, back to our initial question: How can we replace the project of relevance with the project of identity. What is the religious past and cultural present of Western Christians?

a.Religious Past- coming to terms w/ our religious past, or who are we by examining both:
i.De-westernizing: living beyond the encroachments of Enlightenment rationality and practices which evacuates the Faith of it power. (Resourses: in this aspect, our global siblings are paving the way).
ii. Post-Constantinian: living beyond the abdication of the Church to the State as the agent of salvation in its various manifestations through history (Constintine, State Church, Privatized Faith), esp. the current form of Evangelicalism underwriting the liberal-democratic project. Yet, this is not merely overcoming the form, but living with the specter of that very history, which is not a history imported from another as in the African case, but our own history. (Resources: Parents and Siblings can't inform our dis/continuous appropriation of history, but projects such as Radical Orthodox and The Ekklesia Project are supplying tools.)

b. Cultural Present: (post-/high-/late-modernity)- coming to terms w/ our cultural present, or where are we.
i. For Westerners, we are not dealing with current pagan religions (which African, Asian, Indian theologian must contend with). Rather we live in a secular and post-secular culture.
1. Secular in the sense of living: after the Industrial Revolution where everything sacred turns to vapor through manufacturing and science; living after/in Capitalism where all relationships are transformed into producer and consumer.
2. Post-secular in the sense that religion and the spiritual have been reintroduced into society/culture as a commodity exchanged and changed like any other material and semiotic product. The sacred is not a special-effect disconnected from a way of life.
ii. In addition to this material revolution there is the Intellectual Revolution of the Enlighten which defines the cultural horizon of the West. But just as a pagan religion that Bediako might investigate in Africa, the Enlightenment has its own myths, stories, hopes, fears, and ways of life which giving meaning to the human project, just like any religion, and its called liberal-democratic-capitalism.

c. Fulfillment culture-
i. As discussed in Part 2, we should take the perspective of the Church as the fulfillment of any particular culture, rather than merely an antagonistic counter-culture. It is not a we will change for you (relevance), but we accomplish (in identity) what you desire to be. Instead of appropriating postmodern elements/forms, we look to where they point and show that in Christ (in his body the church) they are fulfilled. -This is exactly what postmodern /theologians should be doing, and I think what Radical Orthodoxy is trying to do. Philosophy, w/o theology, has failed in the Western world, just as Greek philosophy failed when it tried to appropriate Moses and the Scriptures. While couched in religious terms rather than intellectual, Justin celebrated that efforts of certain Greek before Christ and calls them Christians even though they might be considered atheists, b/c of their willingness to denounce idolatry and misguided religion. This is similar to calling Derrida, Foucault, etc. allies because they critique that idolatrous nature of Modernity.

ii. However, this task is complicated because our culture has no clearly articulate vision of the Good toward which it is aiming. The only Good for the West is Freedom which has ended up hanging itself on the leash they tied religion to (religion which always thwarted Freedom in their opinion.) So how do we fulfill the aspirations of a culture which has non besides consumer choice? Unlike the ancient Fathers and African brothers, we must first take the negative route of articulating the void, exposing the lacks and false leads of Western culture. (this is where the real work begins, and where I'm just begin so I don't have must to offer here.)

As we negotiate b/w our religious past and our cultural present we will find our identity Christians within postmodernity (rather than merely receiving it from modern missionaries to the postmodern generation), and through this we will seek the fulfill of the culture we are immersed in, rather than a superficial relevancy.

5. So the questions i'm still working on
a. What are the contours or intersections of our identity- global, urban, postmodern?
b. What are barriers to expressing our identity?
c. How do we link this identity to the universal Church?
d. Who are the missionaries? Who are the natives?

a great post from a great site

I don't usually just link to another site, but I think this is really great post. It's a 20 point rant against the Christian sub-culture by Adam Smith. It pretty much sums up what I think also.

What African Theologians can teach the Emerging Church: Part Three

-
Indigenous postmodern Faith- Now, back to our initial question: How can we replace the project of relevance with the project of identity. What is the religious past and cultural present of Western Christians?

a.Religious Past- coming to terms w/ our religious past, or who are we by examining both:
i.De-westernizing: living beyond the encroachments of Enlightenment rationality and practices which evacuates the Faith of it power. (Resourses: in this aspect, our global siblings are paving the way).
ii. Post-Constantinian: living beyond the abdication of the Church to the State as the agent of salvation in its various manifestations through history (Constintine, State Church, Privatized Faith), esp. the current form of Evangelicalism underwriting the liberal-democratic project. Yet, this is not merely overcoming the form, but living with the specter of that very history, which is not a history imported from another as in the African case, but our own history. (Resources: Parents and Siblings can't inform our dis/continuous appropriation of history, but projects such as Radical Orthodox and The Ekklesia Project are supplying tools.)

b. Cultural Present: (post-/high-/late-modernity)- coming to terms w/ our cultural present, or where are we.
i. For Westerners, we are not dealing with current pagan religions (which African, Asian, Indian theologian must contend with). Rather we live in a secular and post-secular culture.
1. Secular in the sense of living: after the Industrial Revolution where everything sacred turns to vapor through manufacturing and science; living after/in Capitalism where all relationships are transformed into producer and consumer.
2. Post-secular in the sense that religion and the spiritual have been reintroduced into society/culture as a commodity exchanged and changed like any other material and semiotic product. The sacred is not a special-effect disconnected from a way of life.
ii. In addition to this material revolution there is the Intellectual Revolution of the Enlighten which defines the cultural horizon of the West. But just as a pagan religion that Bediako might investigate in Africa, the Enlightenment has its own myths, stories, hopes, fears, and ways of life which giving meaning to the human project, just like any religion, and its called liberal-democratic-capitalism.

c. Fulfillment culture- -
i. As discussed in Part 2, we should take the perspective of the Church as the fulfillment of any particular culture, rather than merely an antagonistic counter-culture. It is not a we will change for you (relevance), but we accomplish (in identity) what you desire to be. Instead of appropriating postmodern elements/forms, we look to where they point and show that in Christ (in his body the church) they are fulfilled. -This is exactly what postmodern /theologians should be doing, and I think what Radical Orthodoxy is trying to do. Philosophy, w/o theology, has failed in the Western world, just as Greek philosophy failed when it tried to appropriate Moses and the Scriptures. While couched in religious terms rather than intellectual, Justin celebrated that efforts of certain Greek before Christ and calls them Christians even though they might be considered atheists, b/c of their willingness to denounce idolatry and misguided religion. This is similar to calling Derrida, Foucault, etc. allies because they critique that idolatrous nature of Modernity.

ii. However, this task is complicated because our culture has no clearly articulate vision of the Good toward which it is aiming. The only Good for the West is Freedom which has ended up hanging itself on the leash they tied religion to (religion which always thwarted Freedom in their opinion.) So how do we fulfill the aspirations of a culture which has non besides consumer choice? Unlike the ancient Fathers and African brothers, we must first take the negative route of articulating the void, exposing the lacks and false leads of Western culture. (this is where the real work begins, and where I'm just begin so I don't have must to offer here.)

As we negotiate b/w our religious past and our cultural present we will find our identity Christians within postmodernity (rather than merely receiving it from modern missionaries to the postmodern generation), and through this we will seek the fulfill of the culture we are immersed in, rather than a superficial relevancy.

5. So the questions i'm still working on
a. What are the contours or intersections of our identity- global, urban, postmodern?
b. What are barriers to expressing our identity?
c. How do we link this identity to the universal Church?
d. Who are the missionaries? Who are the natives?

part three is coming

but I was wasting my time doing this...

Which poem are you? Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold You're probably strongly political, and a pacifist. Hey, and you're also slightly depressing. You think a lot of things suck and are pointless. Congratulations!

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

What African Theologians can teach the Emerging Church

Part Two
The Question of Identity: Ancient Parents and African Siblings

Two test cases: Early Church Fathers and African Theologians
Church Fathers- -church fathers interacted w/ both Judaism and Graeco-Roman culture. The question of Judaism concerns their religious past, seeking a dis/continuous relationship with it. So they appropriated OT and NT as the unified revelation of Christ. The question of identity in this is who are we is relations to our religious past. The question concerning Greaco-Roman cultural tradition is who are we in this place, and how can we understand this tradition through Christ.

i.Justifying Identity- or the Triumph of Barbarism
Tatian and Tertullian sought to vindicate Christian Identity against Hellenism. They wanted to show that Christianity in no way came from, or was indebted to Greek thought or life, and that Hellenism (its philosophical systems and religious life) were dangerous to Christian identity. In fact, Greek philosophy is really a misunderstanding of Moses, who is much before Greek philosophy, meaning that Christians are more ancient than Greeks. (Tatian). This vindicated the Truth of the Gospel outside of and before Greek criteria of acceptability/rationality. Also, Tertullian was still arguing for the right to exist and think as a Christian. His viewpoint is not the evaluation/engagement of culture, but a religious question of faithfulness amidst paganism. Yet, for both Tatian and Tertullian a defense of Identity loses its ability to be an effective witness within dominant culture. (see p. 140)

ii. Identity as Fulfillment- Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria
These theologians seek to establish Christian identity as not just the culmination of the Jewish tradition, but also as the apex of Greek tradition. Justin is not attempting to fuse Christian faith with Greek ideals, rather he attempts to show that the best and brightest of the Greek philosophical tradition, in thoughts, and in persons, was the work of the eternal Word, because Truth has only one source, and that is Christ. The fulfillment-culture Justin Martyr "But his spirit of wisdom was present in very man as his highest intellect, so that not only does Christ represent the culmination of the prophecy of a single religion, even though that is the most ancient religion, but He is the incarnation of the Universal Intelligence which it has been the hopeless struggle of every philosopher to understand." The answer to the sneers of the philosophers that Christianity was not worthy of an intelligent man's consideration was thus the counter-attack that philosophy had failed, and that only in Christianity was the end of philosophy to be found.

African Fathers- For African Theology it is who are we as African Christians in relationship to Missionary/Western Christianity (religious past) and Traditional African religions (cultural present). Concerning Missionary Christianity, instead of positively appropriating their religious past like the church fathers, they are needing to critically disentangle themselves from Western Christianity. They are de-westernizing Christianity in their process of self-definition as a means of dealing w/ their religious past. And concerning their cultural present, African Theologian see Christianity as fulfillment of Africa traditions.

i. Fulfillment of Africa- The theologian Idowu sees that God was already at work in africa, revealing himself as the one God. Africans are really monotheists. Mbiti sees Church as the fulfillment of aspirations of tribe, family, community. Aspirations are not destroyed, but fulfilled in the church.

ii. Indigenous Church: Idowu- Indigenization of the church. "We mean by it simply that the Church should bear the unmistakable stamp of the fact that she is the Church of God in Nigeria. It should be no longer an outreach or a colony of Rome, Canterbury or Westminster Central Hall in London, or the vested interests of some European or American Missionary Board…the Church in Nigeria should be the Church which affords Nigerians the means of worshipping God as Nigerians; that is, in a way which is compatible with their own spiritual temperament, of singing to the glory of God in their own way, of praying to God and hearing Hid Holy Word in idiom whih is clearly intelligible to them…She should be…the spiritual home of Christian Nigerians, a home in which they breathe an atmosphere of spiritual freedom."

iii. Indigenous Church: Mbiti "Mbiti makes a distinction between Christianity on the one hand, and the Christian Faith or the Gospel, on the other. Christianity, which 'results from the encounter of the Gospel with any given local or regional community/society,' is always indigenous and, by definition, culture bound. The Gospel is God given, Christianity is a result from the encounter with the Gospel in a local cultures. African theologian John Mbiti says, "We can add nothing to the Gospel, for this is an eternal gift of God; but Christianity is always a beggar seeking food and drink, cover and shelter from the cultures it encounters in it never-ending journeys and wanderings." Also, "To speak of 'indigenising christianity' is to give the impression that Christianity is a ready-made commodity which has to be transplanted to a local area. Of course, this has been the assumption followed by many missionaries and local theologians. I do not accept it any more." This is Mbiti’s argument against contextualization (which assumes an unchanging essence of Christianity.

These are my summary notes of Bediako's text/argument. In Part 3 I will look at an appropriation of this method of "theology and identity" based in religious tradition and cultural present for our postmodern, Wester context.

What African Theologians can teach the Emerging Church

Below are some of the preliminary notes that I've been preparing for a workshop I'm co-leading at this years Ekklesia Project Gathering with Scott Bader-Saye. They are still rough. Please help me think through the issues. This will also deepens my previous "Post-Constantinian Cultural Studies" post.

-----

What African Theologians can teach the Emerging Church
(in 3 parts: Part 1 is an introduction to the Problem. Part 2 will will examine the question of Identity as Bediako sees it through the lense of Patristic and African theologies. Part 3 will look at an appropriation of this method for our postmodern, Wester context.)

Part One

1. Intro: The question of relevance and identity.
Relevance- The tyranny of the new- that which is always coming is our Fate. Our future is always just ahead of us, never arriving, but toward which we long to be relevant. This is Modernity, always making something new to free us from custom/tradition/culture. As Stephen Long says, "Modernity is the endless repetition of sameness under the illusion of difference." We think we have moved on, yet all is sameness. In our modern era the search for relevance is seen in evidentiary apologetics, seeker-sensitive churches, Contemporary Christian Music and the Broader Christian subculture. And the quest for relevance is also seen in the missionary impulse to reach emerging generations, to reach skaters/surfer/ravers/hipsters and urbanites. If they are post-rational, post-literate, post-individualistic, intuitive, aesthetic, and image-drive, then let's be and do that. Unfortunately, while seeking to reform and transform the modern Church, the Emerging Church movement many time continues to fall prey to the perpetually new and the drive toward relevance undergirded by a missionary theology of contectualization which in a Western setting ends up creating more and more niche market Christian consumers rather than a subversive unified church.

-As we will see, the ancient church fathers and current African thinkers were/are not seeking to be relevant to their surrounding culture, but are seeking a definition and expression of their own particular Christian identity. So, I want to explore the significance of replacing the project of relevance with the project of identity. Let us not seek to be relevant but to express our identity as follows of Christ, as Christians within the particular cultures that we are in.

2. Problem of Identity posed by Kwame Bediako.
The Problem of Identity:
p. xi "I have felt the need to seek a clarification for myself of how the abiding Gospel of Jesus Christ relates to the inescapable issues and questions which arise from the Christian’s cultural existence in the world, and how this relationship is achieved without injury to the integrity of the Gospel."
- This is a question of the gospel and cultural existence, not of gospel and culture as some whole or reified object. Culture is not a thing to be related to. Rather we should speak of cultural agents.
p. xv "The basic argument which underlies the various chapters is that the development of theological concern and the formulation of theological questions are closely linked as an inevitable by-product of a process of Christian self-definition." (p. 7) The more enduring problem is not the question of orthodoxy, but "the Christian's response to the religious past as well as to the cultural tradition generally in which one stands, and the significance of that response for the development of theological answers to the culturally-rooted questions of the context."

Identity/Self-Definity=Religious past and cultural/tradition present.
Who are we (past) and where are we (present) intersect in the question of identity. Where we are culturally effects how we perceive ourselves, and who we are effects how we stand where we are. For the Fathers it was who are we as Christians uniting the OT and NT in Christ, and where are we in the Graeco-Roman world. For African Theology it is who are we as African Christians in relationship to Mission/Wester Christianity (religious past) and Traditional African religions (cultural present).

The question then at the end of part 1 is, What is the religious past and cultural present of Western Christians?

Post-Constantinian Cultural Studies

post-constintinian Cultural Studies
Spinning off my last about reinventing my blog I thought I would go back to some of my earlier posts which in a sense set the direction of my continuing investigations of theology and culture. (so this is a reworked former post. but that's ok no one was reading my blog when I wrote it).

Coming out of my reading in African theology (Theology and Identity) I've come to see the necessity of learning about "media studies" and "communication theory." (this is coming from a guy who usually bashes things like this b/c it seems like an attempt to become "relevant.")

I'm at this place b/c (summarizing Bediako): Who are we (past) and where are we (present) intersects in the question of identity as Christians. Bediako says that we locate our position through reflecting on our "religious past" and our "cultural present." The Church Father's grappled with who they were as Christians in relation to their religious past, Judaism, and where they were culturally in the Graeco-Roman world. And for African Theology the question of identity it is who are we as African Christians in relationship to Mission/Western Christianity (religious past) and Traditional African religions (cultural present).

So the question for us at the end of modernity in the West is "what is our religious past?" and "where is our cultural present?" The first question follows the trajectory of a Post-Constantinian reflection. The second question for African theologians leads right through an understanding of Traditional African religions, but for those in the West it leads through both the "Enlightenment" as the source/lack of values and symbols, and through "cultural studies" b/c media/culture enables the symbolic exchange of meaning/referencing (i.e. what religion usually does in societies.).

Therefore, it is necessary to understand how mass media (film, tv, radio, internet, etc.) effect and enable the "work" and "world" of culture in the west. This is not so that we can be "relevant" to others, but so that we can truly understand our own "identity" as follower of Christ in N. America.

And while I think that many Christian culture watchers as definitely wanting to understand the "sign of the time" so that they might know how to live, I think that too often it just means commentary on movies, music, or politics w/o diving any deeper than the surface of these medians. What we need is not to "notice" that media shapes culture and then use "media" to share the gospel (as consevatives do with the arts- pimping the arts). We need to dig deepers, looking at how the foundations of "consumer culture" shape us, how the media links with Ideologies which subvert the gospel, and how technologies alienate us from ourselves/bodies/other, or how they might emancipate us.

And because of this conviction I"ve been spending the last six months learning about Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis (must of it mediated through Slovoj Zizek), as well as reading through Baudrillard and other cultural theorists.

All this to say, the basic project of my blog is to investigate the question of Christian identity along the axes of our religious past (Modern Constintinianism) and our cultural present (Western Consumer Capitalism).

reinventing my blog, for the first time

I've thinking about my purpose for this blog, why I write and why the way I do. I recently came across this from pressthink that summarizes how I think about this blog. Maybe you all can relate. Do you all feel the need to write often, in short bursts, to keep readership up, or to keep people intersted? I know I've felt that pressure.

from the pressthink post:
"Why are PressThink posts so long?

When I started asking around about how to do a weblog, I got many kinds of answers. The one advisory every informant gave was: you must write in short bursts. That's the style, some said. That's what works, said others. And, most suspicious of all, that's what busy, web-cruising readers expect. They don't have time for your leisurely thesis, I was told. By everyone.

So you decided to be contrarian and go the other way?

No, contrarians are annoying. I didn't set out to write long essays; it happened as I tried to turn my ideas into posts that said something others weren't saying, and got some notice. I set out to be unrestricted: free to figure out for myself what works, what PressThink wants to be.

"People don't have time for..." reasoning was meaningless to me, and I didn't trust it. It wanted to restrict my freedom to write what I think, but the whole purpose in starting PressThink was liberation: "Wow, my own magazine. Now I can write what I think." It's the same for most webloggers, I would guess. My interest was users who did have time for depth, in whatever number they may prove to exist, ocean to ocean, post to post.

But it's more like: this is my magazine, PressThink... If you like it, return. In a tiny and abstract way, perhaps, my blog is part of the media marketplace, competing for eyeballs with re-runs of Law and Order. But not really. PressThink, a free citizen in a voluntary nation, doesn't have to behave like a market actor. Thus my experiment in long form."

I'm pretty much in agreement with pressthink. So along those lines, i'll probably continue writing once (maybe twice) a week like I have been, posting little essays on what i'm reading and reflecting on. what writing stategies do you all use, or appreciate in other blogs? Why do you all do what you do?

answers to questions

last week I proposed three questions stemming from the comments on my article "A Revolutionary Community :: Repositioning Justification by Faith."

they were:
1) How does the particularity of Jesus 'break out' of the capitalist ideology (the Real of Capitalism)?
2) Where does the Church fit along the particular-universal line?
3) What is Love, and why does it 'break out' of capitalism?

here is my brief answer to questin #2:
Where does the Church fit along the particular-universal line?
put simply, the Church is the space where the particular expands and becomes universal. It is where the particular participates with the universal. Through Jesus, who cancels economic-political-ethnic-gender division in His body through death by the power structures of the World-System, makes available a new Life. And our participation in that Body (through the Baptism and Eucharist) moves us through the particularity (maybe I should say singularity) of Jesus to the Universality of mankind entering the Divine Life of God.

Alain Badiou has written a small book on Paul where he investigates how Paul theorizes the "event" of "resurrection" and how it produces a revolutionary "subject." His project is explicitly self serving as he appropriates Paul for his own political/theoretical agenda, but he still makes a multitude of insight comments which we can learn from. So maybe I'll write a piece investigating Paul's revolutionary "subject" but adding an ecclesiological component which Badiou excludes by necessity. I guess it would be a part two to the Zizek/justification article and would answer this question more explicity.

stickin' to the man

check out this attempt to move beyond criticizing Capitalism...I feel like a new pair of shoes.
"For years, Nike was the undisputed champion of logo culture, its swoosh an instant symbol of global cool. Today, Phil Knight's Nike is a fading empire, badly hurt by years of "brand damage" as activists and culture jammers fought back against mindfuck marketing and dirty sweatshop labor.

Now a final challenge. We take on Phil at his own game - and win. We turn the shoes we wear into a counterbranding game. The swoosh versus the anti-swoosh. Which side are you on?

Adbusters has been doing R&D for more than a year, and guess what? Making a shoe - a good shoe - isn't exactly rocket science. With a network of supporters, we're getting ready to launch the blackSpot sneaker, the world's first grassroots anti-brand, with a ground-breaking marketing scheme to uncool Nike. If it succeeds, it will set a precedent that will revolutionize capitalism."

More here.
thanks to the oozeblog for the tip.

a proposal

thank you all for the comments on the article I posted. a couple of important questions has been raised that I intend to address, and one that I want all of us to address.

the questions raised from my article are:

1) How does the particularity of Jesus 'break out' of the capitalist ideology (the Real of Capitalism)?
2) Where does the Church fit along the particular-universal line?
3) What is Love, and why does it 'break out' of capitalism?

and the question I want to raise for all of us is:
How does the Church break out of capitalism, or capitalist ideology?

I propose that you all write an answer (or on the way to an answer) on our various blogs (and then leave a comment here so we know). And if you have written previously on this topic, maybe you can re-post your entry of link it. And for those without a blog, just email it to me and i'll post it...

maybe this could be the first joint project [grid blog] of the "sjlbvdnzv school of graduate studies"? [see side bar there...and anglo-baptist: spread the word!]

A Revolutionary Community :: Repositioning Justification by Faith

I would really like some feedback about his article that I've written. It concerns a recent Marxist re-appropriation of Christian and how it might help us remember lost aspects of Christian theology, particularly the political aspects of "justification by faith." This article fits in as a small book review of Slavoj Zizek’s "The Fragile Absolute" and its correlation to Luther's view of justification. The New Pantagruel has considered publishing it, and I want to thrown it out here for some helpful comments and critiques, and any lapses in clarity or logic. It's long for a blog post, but short for an essay, about four pages.


A Revolutionary Community :: Repositioning Justification by Faith


In a way similar to the destruction that Pauline Christianity wrought on the Roman Empire, Zizek wants to use a reconfigured Christianity to ease the grip of liberal-capitalist hegemony. "What Christianity did with regard to the Roman Empire, this global 'multiculturalist' polity," he confides, "we should do with regard to today's Empire." (George Mason)

Introduction

Amidst the onslaught of New Age spirituality and a surfacing religious awareness within philosophic deconstructionism, what is a poor 'dialectic materialist to do? When Capitalism is taken for granted as a force of nature, where might an ailing Marxism find support? For Slavoj Zizek, shelter is found under the wings of an unlikely source. Zizek sees the most important repositioning in these 'postmodern times' lying in a reconciliation of Christianity and Marxism. In The Fragile Absolute Zizek attempts to appropriate the subversive core of the Christian legacy as a means of breaking out of the logic of Capitalism: the desire of "unbridled productivity" and "unbridled consumption". Given the historically apolitical (and/or apathetic) standpoint of the Western church, Zizek's view of Christianity as a politically revolutionary approach is particularly surprising.

Zizek's Revolutionary Community

According to Zizek, Marx was not radical enough in his break from capitalism because he assumed, along with capitalism, the goal of "unbridled productivity." "Socialism failed because it was ultimately a subspecies of capitalism, an ideological attempt to 'have one's cake and eat it', to break out of capitalism while retaining its key ingredient." So the criticism that Marxian Communism is an impossible fantasy is correct. Zizek explains that Communism/Socialism is the utopian dream, or fantasy of Capitalism, the desire of limitless productivity, which is consumed by limitless desire. According to Zizek, Marx's mistake was to think the object of desire (unbridled productivity) would remain even when its cause/obstacle (oppressive capitalist social relations) was abolished. However, as actual existing Socialisms reveals, this was not the case. Marx was merely extending Capitalism to its idealized form rather than escaping its logic.

Through many twists and turns, weaving together Marxism and Lacan psychoanalysis, Zizek points out how the Christian legacy "breaks out" of the vicious cycle of (symbolic) Law and Desire. As he notes, "There is always a gap between the object of desire and its cause, the mediating feature or element that makes this object desirable." This cause/obstacle makes the object desirable, but not in or of itself. If you take away the obstacle then the desire dissipates. Capitalism thrives within the production and maintenance of this cause/obstacle. The Christian legacy escapes this logic not by denying/fulfilling Desire, a Desire caused by the Law, but by means of Love, which unites the object of Desire and its Cause. "In love, the object is not deprived of its cause; it is, rather, that the very distance between object and cause collapses." Love is directed toward the object of desire in and for itself, even in spite of itself. Love desires the object, in a sense, in spite of its lack of desirability; Love loves in spite of what it loves, not because of it. This breaking out of the cycle of Law and Desire begets an alternative community, "un-coupled" from social hierarchy and oppressive relationships. This revolutionary community, not regulated by the Capitalist
production of desire and difference, offers universal humanity to all. This "authentic psychoanalytic and revolutionary political collective" is Zizek's redemption of Christianity.

What is to be done with this suggestion? Do we affirm this appropriation of Christianity as a politics of love beyond desire, or reject it as the hopeless task of joining religion and politics? By means of a detour through "justification by faith" we can evaluate Zizek's proposal and reposition the real "break out" of Christianity.

Luther's Desire and Justification's Degeneration

In his short book, The Justice of God, James Dunn briefly outlines how part of our understanding of "
justification by faith" was obscured during the Reformation, becoming overly individualistic, exceedingly
introspective, and excessively judicial in imagery, thereby losing its communal and relational focus. While
an Augustinian monk, situated within a Roman Catholicism of indulgences and purgatory, Martin Luther's
conscience ached with guilt over his sin before "the justice of God," i.e. that God punishes all
unrighteousness. God, for Luther, was to be feared, not loved. But under a prolonged reading of Romans,
grappling with the strange manner in which Paul refers to "the justice of God" as a means of salvation,
Luther made his critical 'discovery.' Luther realized the decisive (f)act of God is not that He is "Just" (
condemning the wicked), but that He is also "Justifying" (acquitting the wicked). From this emerged his
doctrine of "justification by faith" not by works, along with attendant theories of substitutionary atonement
and imputed righteousness. However, it seems that Luther read much of his own Medieval Roman Catholic
situation into Paul's letters distorting what the Apostle was really saying. He held two faulty assumptions.
Luther assumed Paul had gone through the same agonies of conscience and guilt over sin before a blameless and
just God. Luther also assumed that Judaism, like his own Catholic Church, was a legalistic religion of human
striving, or works righteousness, from which he reasoned that the doctrine of "justification by faith" set
him free from the system of earning God's favor through receiving God's righteousness, i.e. justified by
faith.

The problem with this view, as Dunn and many others have recently pointed out, is Paul does not read as if he
is plagued by a guilty conscience, and Judaism does not read much like a works based religion. Paul nowhere
sounds like he has a guilty conscience before God because of his sins. Instead he says he was blameless in
regards to righteousness within the law. Also, the Judaism of Paul’s day, and the one we can read about in
the OT, was based in God's gracious election of Israel, His giving of the Law as a means of a covenant
relationship, and His continued dwelling with Israel even in the midst of their sin. The prophetic recalling
of God's continuing righteous actions toward an unworthy nation bear witness to this. So it seems Luther
retrojected his context back into Paul’s situation distorting his understanding of "justification by faith,"
and turned it into a doctrine concerning personal salvation which then marched toward Enlightenment
individualism.

Israel's Desire and Law's Degeneration

Luther, however, was not the only one who misunderstood God's purposes concerning salvation. Within Paul's
context, the doctrine of "justification by faith" is not meant to answer the question "how is one saved?" but
rather "who is in the covenant community of God?" As N.T. Wright notes, "The purpose of the covenant was
never simply that the creator wanted to have Israel as a special people, irrespective of the rest of the
world. The covenant was there to deal with the sin, and bring about the salvation, of the world." The point
of the covenant was the restoration of God's righteousness in the world, and the reconstitution of humanity
to its radical potential. However, during Paul’s time, “while Gentiles are discovering covenant membership,
characterized by faith, Israel, clinging to the Torah which defined covenant membership, did not attain to
the Torah. She was determined to have her covenant membership demarcated by works of Torah, that is, by the
things that kept that membership confined to Jews and Jews only, and, as a result, she did not submit to
God's covenant purposes, his righteousness."

Therefore, back to Zizek's point, Israel's vicious cycle of Law and Desire did not deal with sin and guilt as
Luther believed (and as many Protestants still think). The Law was certainly the cause/obstacle which
sustained their Desire, but the object of this Desire was not for what the Law forbade. Rather their object
of Desire was initially God, who gave them the Law. But the (covenant) Law degenerated into the (symbolic)
Law when Israel allowed her Desire for God to collapse into the maintenance of a boundary distinguishing
Israel from the Gentiles, becoming a justification of Jewish nationalism. The maintenance of Law became their
object of desire, which led to their failure to attain the universal purposes of God. The logic of the Law
was inverted from its universal intention, degenerating into a boundary delineating Jewish particularity.

Paul's doctrine of justification

Now continuing again with Luther, for Paul the issue at stake in the doctrine of "justification by faith" is
not one of soteriology (how one might be saved), but mainly of ecclesiology (how we define the covenant
community). As Dunn states, "the Christian doctrine of justification by faith begins as Paul's protest not as
an individual sinner against Jewish legalism, but as a protest on behalf of Gentiles against Jewish
exclusivism." Paul's Damascus road experience was a conversion from a 'zealous' attachment to Israel's
distinctiveness set up according to the Law (as a boundary marker b/w Jew and Gentile, particularly expressed
through circumcision and food laws). Paul was a rigid nationalist who had forgotten that Israel's election
was meant for the benefit of the Gentiles also, not to their exclusion. But through his dramatic encounter
with Jesus, Paul was converted from the particularity of Judaism (a nation), to the particularity of Jesus (a
man) through whom universality was made available.

For Paul, justification by faith was therefore not merely the conviction that sinners cannot rely on their
own merit to earn God’s favor (although Paul would certainly agree with this). Rather, it is the conviction
that God's grace is no longer limited to a particular people (defined as those who follow the Law), but that
God's goodness and mercy are made universal, to all peoples regardless of social hierarchies, through Faith.
Through Christ, all are justified, because God’s grace is not locked into a certain people, but mediated
through a certain person, our Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Messiah, Savior.

Christ's Universal Community

This then is the "break out" of Christianity; this is the formation of an alternative community. Beyond the
structural antagonisms, differences, and desires of consumer Capitalism which splinters race/class/gender,
the universality of humankind is offered in the community gathered around the particular man, Jesus. It is
through faith in this work of Jesus that we are un-coupled from social hierarchies, not merely through a Love
beyond Desire. Israel affirmed the universality of God through the particularity of their human community
according to Law. Zizek, denying God, affirms the universality of mankind beyond the Law through Love. But
Christians affirm the universality of mankind through faith in the particularity of God, i.e. the particular
identification of Jesus as divine. This community, uncoupled from social hierarchy and oppressive
relationship, is based in Christ, through whom the law of sin and death (desire and difference) has been
destroyed, through whom all antagonistic relationships have been subverted, and true humanity is offered
universally.

Or to put it differently, only through an individual can individualism be subverted (that menace of
modernity); only through the particular man can we enter a community beyond the particular differences of
mankind. If Luther is a type of consumer individualism, and the Judaism of Paul’s day a type of global/
tribal sectarianism, then the community of Christ breaks out of both, fusing the particularity of the man
Jesus with the universality of God’s grace to all humanity. Christ is the only basis for a revolutionary
politics beyond the Capitalist production of desire. He is the only basis of an alternative politic which can
“ease the grip of the liberal-capitalist hegemony."