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."

people and links: this weekend I was in Grand Rapids visiting my wife's family. While there I was able to have breakfast with James K.A. Smith who teaches at Calvin College and recently published a book (Speech and Theology) with Radical Orthodoxy. I first heard about him through his article at the ooze concerning the ecomonics of the emerging church. I had a great time with him discussing the Emerging Church, Radical Orthodoxy, and the relation of both. also, he has started blogging and I think you all should know about it, so check it out here.

also, postmodern culture has come out with a new issue. I recommend looking though it (and past issues). In particular there is a review of slavoj zizek's newest book which investigates the relation of "dialectic materialism" and "theology" toward a critique of "deconstructionism." Zizek is basically saying that Deconstruction is simply the lastest liberal/capitalist ideology.

anyway, (thanks to stephen long) i've been reading through Zizek trying to figure out his relation to Christianity, and what we can learn from him, and this book is next. but I'll write more about my interest in Zizek soon.

Community: beyond a western/pomo justification

now that title might sound a bit pretension, but here's the scoop. As many of you know i've been trying to read beyond my white evangelical theology which currently is leading me through Hispanic America theologians. and here is one of my observations.

To put it simply, for postmodern westerners longing for a return to community the prime source is the inner life of the Trinity. I.e. the foundation of community is from above, springing from the tri-personal life of the Trinity. (You can see this at perichoresis and a recent discussion led by Stanely Grenz which i was part of).

Now from the hispanic american perspective i've noticed that the foundation for community is not the Trinity, but rather Christology (the practices of Jesus which affirm universal humanity). This is community from below.

Now of course these aren't exclusive consideration or opposing perspective. But I do think it is interesting that white/pomo types look at the Trinity from the perspective of how it might inform their interpersonal/spiritual relationships, as means for moving beyond individualism, while the Hispanic thinkers look at the Trinity from the perspective of its socio-economic consequences (i.e how does power/love/sharing
relate).

so my question is, while trying to reclaim a communitarian theology through a retrieval of Trinitarian theology, are pomo westerners merely still perpetuating an apolitical "community" which continues to neglect the concerns of true community?

solidarity with Latin America

many of you have probably already seen robyn's recent posts on latin america martyrs, but if you haven't please do check them out. In postmodern theory, the is much talk about listening to marginal voices, and the discourses of the oppresses, so talk the time. They are a stunning portrayal of what God is doing outside of the American Empire. There are some long posts, but well worth the read.

Daily Life and the Eucharist

Daily Life and the Eucharist--So, how does this relate to the proverbial person in the pew? What difference does this have to do with our daily lives?

first off, the reason why Milbank's proposal is appealing to me is that it sees the different images of atonement (ranson, sacrifice, victory) as linguistic metaphors rather than literal statements of Christ's atonement. "Theories" of the atonement spring from taking one of these metaphors literally to the exclusion of the rest. I'm tired of all these theories of atonement. Where are the theories of reconciliation, or adoption? For this is where the gospel is headed...(interestingly, Milbank's latest book is called "Being Reconciled" so maybe he feels the same).

Second, all Christian action (practical daily living) needs a frame of reference to give it meaning. But every action is preceeded by a "structuring of the world", a defining of reality, which makes our actions meaningful. In this way the symbolic act of framing the world is before the physical act in the world. Our exchanging the sign of Forgiveness (which unites us to the person of Forgiveness) frames the world of all our action. The moment of language is before reality; the imagination before the action. (in this way we see how the Eucharist is more than mere rememberance, nor a spiritual feeling, although I would still want to affirm the significance of both).

third, eucharist as sign which doesn't shift, sign of the same rather than perpetual difference and change. In a society of planned obselescence, consumer fickleness, and political double-speak, the Eucharist continues to signify the same, unchanging event, centering our reality.

lastly, in an age where we have left an understanding of the both "use-value" (the function of an object) and "exchange-value" (what we can buy/sell an object for)[Marx], and entered an age of "sign-value"[Baudrillard] where an object merely signifies something else, or something we aspire to (i.e. wealth, status, cultural sub-group identity; think of name brands and what they signifies. Thinking the Eucharist as linguistic sign allows it to enter into this dialogue and transform it, uniting use-, exchange-, sign-values b/c the element function as natural sustinance for the body, represents the exchange from death to life in Christ body, and is naturally a sign which we pass signifying the reality we aspire to.

The second and fourth aspects I think hold the most promise for connecting daily life with the Eucharistic practice. However, there is much more thinking that we all need to do on this.