RWANDA AND THEOLOGY

No More Transgressions: immigration and Christ's invasion

2011-01-28T21:35:00.000-05:00

If you haven't updated it yet, I have a new blog post over at my new blog:

http://veeritions.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/no-more-transgressions-immigration-and-christs-invasion/

Thanks for making the move!

Moving On...

2011-01-17T14:43:00.001-05:00

I haven't started blogging there yet, but I am moving my blog, now called, Veeritions. Switched to wordpress, but mostly, I'm neither planning to go to Rwanda nor to be ordained in the Anglican church. Thanks for making the switch.

Politics and Presidential Passion

2010-12-22T17:21:00.004-05:00

James K.A. Smith recently blogged about Mark Lilla' NYT article regarding Obama's overly intellectualized engagement with the world. As Smith summarizes, Obama and others "lapse into the rationalist whine about people being governed by their passions and keep hoping they'll be be "rational" like us (we're not)." Instead, Obama and the democratic party need to understand that the way to lead is "to harness, direct, and channel the passions."

I want to make two quick comments. First, Lilla criticizes Obama for having the wrong "underlying assumption about human nature." For Lilla, the problem is ultimately intellectual: if Obama had the correct intellectual understanding of human nature, he would engage in politics differently (meaning correctly, like us). Thus, Lilla's critique ends up performing the same mistake he criticizes: he tacitly assumes that core force behind Obama's "intellectualism" is intellectual (and even provides an intellectual history of the mistaken idea). No attempt is made to consider why Obama might resort to a detached, intellectualized description of the democratic losses.

This leads to the second comment, which is, in fact, just a reference to another NYT piece that explores the bind Obama is in as a black president in a country that still fears the "angry black man." To ask Obama to stir up the passions and exhibit an emotional or passionate outburst is to presume Obama's anger will be received in the same way as the public anger of a white male leader. Obama knows it won't. Lilla and Smith err in thinking that the problem Obama must navigate is one of the individual "unconscious" (from Smith's title). In reality, the problem Obama must navigate is one of the "social" unconsciousness, that is, the problem of being a black leader in a country that still has not come to terms with its own racism, past and present (for another recent example, we have Haley Barbour's recent comments about the civil rights era and the subsequent reactions).

On a sidenote (which is actually at the heart of the matter), I found it interesting that Lilla gives a subtle but still clear "Eurocentric" and "intellectual" account of the 20th century conflicts. Lilla says, "this balance between enlightened self-interest and moderated passions disappeared in the rapid industrialization of the 19th century. Once self-interest was blessed, there arose a capitalist ideology justifying the limitless accumulation of wealth, and in response to it a socialist ideology justifying the violent defense of class interests. The passions of greed and resentment were excited and set against each other, causing violent conflicts that disturbed Western countries well into the following century." I wonder whether an "individual" and "intellectual" account of the problem necessitates this abstraction from the colonial dimensions of "limitless accumulation" and "violent conflicts" of the 19th and 20th century including the racial configurations of contemporary American politics. This mistake would then be a contemporary example of what Fanon criticizes Sartre of doing, that is, providing an account of anthropology, community, and politics that fails to describe our social reality because it fails to account for "the lived experience of the black man [sic]."

Silencing Speech, Speaking in Tongues: Bonhoeffer and the Beginning of Theology

2010-12-16T16:13:00.004-05:00

"Teaching about Christ begins in silence." D. Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer begins his lectures--transcribed and formed into the book Christ the Center--with these words on the silent beginning of theology. It's a complicated opening.

The silence that precedes "teaching about Christ" cannot be discerned before this teaching actually commences. Not all silences are this silent beginning: the silent foreground of teaching "has nothing to do with the silence of the mystics, who in the their dumbness chatter away secretly in their soul by themselves" (27). The only way to distinguish "proper silence" (27) from this silent "chatter" is to refer to what follows this silence (teaching about Christ or self-enclosed chatter). It thus seems that theology has no beginning, for its proper beginning--silence--is constituted only after theology is already under way; and its commencement (teaching) can only begin properly, as real theology and not empty chatter, out of a proper silence (which is absent when it begins, or is its absent beginning). "To speak of Christ means to keep silent; to keep silent about Christ means to speak. When the Church speaks rightly out of a proper silence, then Christ is proclaimed" (27).

For Bonhoeffer, the beginning of theology is not under our control. Theology begins not with our own silence but in our being silenced. Theology begins in an encounter whereby a word within our words claim to be the end of our words. In the midst of our chatter, our impressive mystical silences, our vibrant declarations, and our most dedicated writing--as we busy ourselves with our study (logos)--comes a word, a logos "from outside study itself" (28). This "transcendent" one in the flesh, before our eyes and under our hands (1 Jn 1), makes a startling claim: it claims that our order, study, classification (logos) is "broken up, superseded and in its place a new world has already begun" (29). What answer can we give?

We can attempt to absorb it, admit our limitations and weakness, and then maintain that we (and generally we alone) display this truly human humility. This moment of self-negation is a subtle form of self-affirmation: it is we who recognize the limitations of human knowledge. It is we who produce the proper discourse (culture), a discourse whose limitations are inscribed in its very production, and therefore, a discourse (culture) towards which all others ought to strive. Whether through direct assault, a reserved interrogation, or even an enthusiastic embrace, we move the same way, towards a "new world" that has not "already begun" but that will begin or has begun in, with and through us.

Theology begins with our exclusion. It begins therefore, as we are on our sinful way--not with us or through us, but in spite of us. Theology is not a discourse we can control. "The proletarian does not say, 'Jesus is God'. But when he says, 'Jesus is a good man', he is saying more than the bourgeois says when he repeats, 'Jesus is God'" (35). Bonhoeffer acknowledges that the question of theology--who are you--"remains ambiguous" (35); we often cannot tell whether "who are you" means "how can I deal with you" or is the question of faith, of a dethroned and delimited reason. We do not know what we say.

Pentecost by Alexander Sadoyan

Theology begins with this exclusion. We cannot exclude ourselves, and so, theology begins with the confession of our inability to confess--we do not know what we are saying when we say, "Jesus is God" or when we hear others say, "Jesus was a good man." We do not know what we say--that is the beginning of theology. Theology begins then with our silenced speech, or, what is the same thing, with our speaking in tongues. The words of a language that I cannot learn pour forth from my lips, and the question that remains is not how do I speak thus but who is the one who calls (forth) this speech? This question of "who" can "only be put legitimately when the person questioned has revealed himself and has eliminated the imminent logos" (31). It is a question that we can ask only as those who have been set aside (judged) and yet upheld (forgiven). Who knows whether we have spoken rightly?

Theology, for Bonhoeffer, begins as our speech is liberated from this need to speak rightly. It begins with the gift of another('s) tongue in our mouth (Cixous), a silencing speech that comes before us and opens our lips: O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.

The Promise and Failure of "the Secular"

2010-12-08T23:10:00.008-05:00

One of the strange features in the Milbank article discussed in my previous post was his mention of the necessity to physically defend "the physical space" of the church "in the name of secular justice." This surprising endorsement of "the secular" reminded me of a working document released a little while ago by the Roman Catholic Church, on the Church in the Middle East. This document laments the lack of the separation of religion from politics in the Middle East and proposes the necessity of a secular government (modeled on European forms of religion, secularity, and government of course). It seems a surprising move coming at a time when the pope is encouraging Europe to reconstitute itself through a return to Christian roots and the abandonment of secularism.

The secular is a precarious situation for these thinkers. It is the simultaneous promise and failure of Christendom (Western Christianity's global triumph). The secular is an incomplete conversion, and therefore is both a failure of conversion and the grounds for, the first steps towards, conversion.

In Contracting Colonialism, Vicente Rafael explores the grammatical and theological modes of a dominating Spanish Catholic mission and its partial embrace, redirection, exploration, and reinterpretation in Tagalog society. It's a book about "translation and conversion," as the subtitle has it, and also about space (the same word, reducir, was used to speak about resettlement, translation, and evangelism, 90). The book recounts how Spanish missionaries had to convert the space--to "Europeanize" it--for the sake of the mission. As Rafael says, "For the Word of God to be delivered, the site of its exchange and circulation had first to be circumscribed" (87). Tagalog society was built upon aquatic channels; in fact, the word for their communities was the same word for a large boat, barangay (88). Out of this considerable fluidity, missionaries had to create order (meaning, an order they recognized). They had to resettle/translate/evangelize (reducir) and to do so, they restructured the communities based on schemas for reorganizing those in the New World and modeled on the cities of the Roman empire and the architectural tastes of the Renaissance (this is "the European"--Europe constituting itself beyond its borders).

It is this spatial reorganization that is, in fact, the birth of the secular. What the colonial missionaries and administrators realized is that social space could be converted without the conversion of the people. These missionaries created a Christian social space that was inhabited by people who did not confess Christianity (or whose confessions were deemed suspect). The social space was split, both Christian and also simultaneously not Christian. The Christian doctrines, beliefs, and liturgical practices are the inessential origin of the space: the city still runs even if the church is empty or filled with people who have no idea--or more accurately, a very different idea than the Spanish--of what is actually going in there. Religion becomes privatized, an internal affair of the mind, precisely because the social space--in an effort to prepare the society for conversion--was released from any essential connection to the church's life. The secular arises in and as this partial conversion, a mark of the failure and promise of Christian colonial missions. The secular is a space that escapes Christian domination precisely through the advent of Christian rule: for the sake of evangelism, secularism, which simultaneously produces a space and mode of life that elides conversion. Or, alternately, the secular is the production of Christian domination: the secular is a world built by Christians to stand in continual need of Christian rule (grace perfects and completes nature).

If this analysis is correct, then I think it becomes a little more clear what is at stake in the simultaneous endorsement and rejection of the secular. The rise of the secular gave rise to the exigency of colonial rule: the social space was split, unstable, and therefore demanded rigorous and constant surveillance, domination, control by the European Christian powers. The secular marked a first phase in conversion, a dangerous, risky, violent, and incomplete severing of the social space from both Christian and indigenous beliefs and practices. Without its completion (its subordination to a fully Christian realm), it is a precarious realm on the verge of departing from true, divine order (i.e., from the rule of Christendom). However, within a world seen as sheer chaos, the secular is the first moment in and the promise of a future stabilization. The secular is the Christian production of a partially conquered space, a space that is simultaneously a promise (for completion, a beckoning for further Christian incursion) and a threat (the possibility of failure, of the space and peoples to resist this further conversion).

A Violent Being: Milbank and Fanon Between Love and Power

2010-11-29T22:45:00.002-05:00

"However, this means that the realm of total mutual exposure, the realm of weakness within which "all defences are down," might ironically be seen as requiring defence against an exterior which refuses this exposedness." John Milbank, "Power is necessary for peace: in defense of Constantine"

It would probably be better to keep my peace and not read John Milbank. Ever. But I did and I want to engage what he has written from another trajectory of violence, the germinal violence of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon, like Milbank, is looking for a space of intimacy. Consider the beautiful and prayerful lines at the end of the book: "Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other? Was my freedom not given me to build the world of you, man?" (206). It's a desire for a world with intimate possibilities, a world where the mediation of whiteness ("there will always be a world--a white world--between you and us" 101) no longer disrupts every relationship.

Despite this seemingly similar desire for intimacy, Milbank and Fanon are obviously worlds apart, especially since, as I have suggested and continue to argue, Milbank's theology is ultimately a continuation of the colonial logic Fanon will fight to destroy, even through violence.

Milbank, in the quote at the head of this post, depicts a hostile exteriority which must be violently held at bay and kept separate from an interior realm of mutual vulnerability, a space where "all defenses are down." This realm--this space of "government" or "ruling" that is also etymologically linked to the "royal"--this royally governed space of "total mutual exposure" must be violently rendered safe, indeed invulnerable, to the violent refusal of intimacy that defines the exterior. Outside of this realm of intimacy are those who refuse all intimacy. And this hostile realm is encroaching, violently--for why else would a violent "defense" be necessary (and, the absence of any specification simply inscribes even more forcefully the associations Milbank intends and weaves throughout the text in other places--it is an Islamic space)?

This exterior is denied what Milbank declares to be an essential component of all violence: vulnerability. "Any exercise of violence always leaves one vulnerable." But the exterior is what refuses this exposure, this vulnerability before another. It is, therefore, surprisingly, necessarily, non-violent. And the realm of peace, a realm of the "power of weakness" is, also surprisingly, essentially violent. Charity cannot emerge without power, and power, even in weakness, necessitates violence. Accordingly, within the logic of Milbank's argument, the realm of defenselessness is not only defended by violence, it is itself violent and must violently keep out that which is incapable of actual violence, the exterior.

The illogic of Milbank's position is contained within a greater (il)logic, what in Fanon's text is termed "delierious Manichaeism": "good-evil, beauty-ugliness, black-white..." (160). Fanon's famous chapter on the "Lived Experience of the Black Man" chronicles the fruitless attempts to appeal to the master of these terms, to dialectically overcome them (or out-narrate them). The binaries represent a profound refusal to investigate the hyphen, the space between. Ugliness/Evil/Black/Exterior must be separated and overcome ("under no condition did he want any intimacy between the races" 99). In this situation, any appeal to the other is already blocked: "so they were countering my irrationality with rationality, my rationality with the 'true rationality.' I couldn't hope to win" (111). The exterior/evil/black/ugly is not a point from which one can approach or engage the interior/good/white/beautiful. It is a privation, already excluded and incapable of assimilation. For Milbank, the exterior is, therefore, neither violent nor peaceful but something far more insidious: the exterior is the unimaginable, the horrifying excess that cannot be contained and therefore demands, all the more urgently, our attempts to "extend the powerful reach of the very sphere of powerlessness itself," the reign of the true human, the reign of violence and love.

"Power is necessary for peace" because both violence and peace name modalities of the interior space that must guard itself against an unruly exterior. It is this unruliness, or perhaps, unruledness, that is the ultimate, defining characteristic of the exterior. The exterior is simply that which the interior does not rule, and this unruledness is both real and unimaginable for Milbank. It is an ever-present threat (and thus both named and left unnamed) but lacks any ontological depth: to be--the true/good/beautiful--is to be ruled. Fanon names that royal sphere and ruling power of being: whiteness.

"In the world I am heading for" says Fanon, "I am endlessly creating myself" (204). Fanon is insistent in proclaiming this space of positive unruledness. It is no mere negation of colonialism but is a positive affirmation, an "unleash[ing]" (205) that invites "the reader to feel with us the open dimension of every consciousness" (206), the dimension of every consciousness that renders it inaccessible to human domination or historical determination. "The density of History determines none of my acts" (205), for it is humankind's "destiny to be unleashed" (205). It is, therefore "through self-consciousness and renunciation, through a permanent tension of his freedom, that man [sic] can create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world" (206). The destiny is both known and unknown, and within this "permanent tension" Fanon points us to the possibility of love, of human communication and intimacy even between black/exterior and white/interior.

Blasphemous Confessions

2010-11-07T20:04:00.006-05:00

Such blasphemies, because they are violently extorted from men by the devil against their will, sometimes sound more pleasant in the ear of God than a hallelujah or some kind of hymn of praise (Luther, Lectures on Romans).

A recent post at AUFS has enticed me to make a few comments on my own understanding of "confessional" theology. Duke is a place that prides itself in producing confessional theologians, theologians who write in and for "the church," whose theology is situated within the historic confessions of faith ("orthodox"), who take seriously "the grammar" and "liturgical performance" of "the historic Christian faith." To put it briefly and polemically, Duke intends to produce Christian theologians. As such, it has placed much emphasis on what it means to be "properly" Christian.

Many a Duke student--especially white male students with some kind of evangelical background--find themselves torn between two particular Christian traditions, Catholic and Anabaptist (I myself almost landed in the former). The fact that students--and faculty--can flutter between these two historically antithetical confessions of faith reveals the peculiarity of this new confessional theology. It is not so much the particularities of distinct confessions that matter but the particularity of confessing at all. To draw on the language from a previous post: what draws both the Catholic and Anabaptist traditions together is their Christian particularity, in particular, their (American) performance as ethnicity. The confessional theology being sought is not a particular confession but the confession of Christianity as particular, as a kind of ethnic social group to which one belongs and which shapes the entirety of one's experience of the larger social world. It is this more rigorous social formation--the "virtues," "grammar," and "tradition"--that Duke seeks to engraft students within.

This production of Christianity as a kind of communal ethnic formation requires discrete attention to proper and improper performances of "the tradition." To ground oneself in the "wrong" tradition, in an aberrant or wayward Christianity, is to ground oneself in a kind of misbegotten or contaminated form of life. Accordingly, discussions of orthodoxy and heresy permeate the halls, without any awareness that the ecclesial power structures that historically subtended those discussions are absent. More accurately, and with Foucault in mind here, the structures of "sovereignty" needed to make declarations of heresy/orthodoxy meaningful have been transfered from the ecclesial authority to the larger ecclesial body. It is the church, in fact, the divinity students themselves, who bear the responsibility to detect and excise heresy while promoting and preserving the "virtues" of the proper, particular, Christian social world. To produce itself as "peculiar people," the church body as a whole must renew its classificatory powers, distilling its own proper form as it overcomes or expels various aberrations ("heresies," "the secular").

In the introduction to Christ the Center, Bonhoeffer states that "Teaching about Christ begins in silence" (27), which is not a methodological silence or attentive listening but a "silence before the Word," that is, before the "Counter-Logos" who unseats the authority of the "human, classifying logos" (29). The silence, therefore, is produced by an interruption; it is not the silence before speaking commences but the silence that irrupts when the speaker is confronted. It is the silent hesitations of "dethroned and distraught reason" (30), the halting of our thought when confronted by the Counter-Logos who cannot be "assimilated" to our thought. The counter movement of the logos is this logos' historical flesh, the flesh of God. In the "incognito of the Incarnation," the ambiguous presence of God stands before us and declares "himself as judgment upon the human logos" (30). The ambiguous presence of God interrupts our thought and halts our (feigned) powers of classification and discrimination.

For Bonhoeffer, theology is then not primarily confessional (a confident speaking with/together, or simply a confident, forceful speaking) but interrogative, a questioning (who?) oriented towards the person who questions it. Theology attempts to listen to this this who--the counter logos, Christ. It therefore is oriented towards its own dissolution. Theology attentively listens to the one who proclaims its dissolution and within this proclamation, claims to uphold it ("in a new and relative status" 33). As it is being set aside--dying--theology finds its life, not in itself, but in the Logos that come to it from beyond its discourse and dwells with it (forgiveness). As it comes to life in the moment it is set aside, theology does not seek solidity in any mythical origins (tradition, ethnic roots) but only in the one who is this "gracious God" (38), the one who forgives it, and in so doing, releases it from the attempt to produce or procure its own purity. Acknowledging its impure origination, theology seeks to listen to the person who may speak to us and also be addressed by us in various, impure and even (as Luther has it) potentially blasphemous phrases.

To try to summarize and simplify this a little: theology that clings to its ability to determine when it and others are being blasphemous trusts too much in itself and too little in the graciousness of God. As Luther says, the remedy for these thoughts is not to be worried about them.

Columbus Day: Ralph Ellison and the Waters of Meribah

2010-10-12T19:53:00.016-04:00

My previous post suggested that attempts to construct the proper grounds on which to meet the other is an attempt to control the relationship, even if that comes masked in good intentions. What must be clarified is that to reach out and actually touch the other, in Fanon's language, is to be exposed to another whose existence you cannot control and whose consciousness you cannot predict. This exposure provides a helpful way to approach Columbus and anti-Columbus day festivities.

There are those who fail to recognize that this day of celebration--of hope, promise, freedom, unlimited potential, national glory--is also a day of mourning. Fearful of what it would mean to recognize the painful and brutal legacy that begins in 1492, they vaunt the American ideals with such febrility that any query will be lost within the din of celebration. "What was that? Can you speak up? Did you say you hate America--because that is what I heard."

On the other hand, those who do recognize the atrocities that began in 1492 often end up stuck in the mode of condemnation, a mode that also ends up missing the voices of those whose histories they claim to uphold.

In an interview, Ralph Ellison was asked:

Isn't there a sense in which the white audience expects a Negro to be angry about the conditions of being a Negro in America?

To which he replied:
I'm afraid so, and if the conditions were good I think that many white Americans would expect the Negro writer to be angry because he wasn't white. I mean you have that thing operating underneath. More seriously, I try to use an approach that isn't dictated by my anger or my lack of anger, not by my protest or any lack of feelings of protest but by the logic of the art itself.

I'm afraid so, because it means the white audience actually ignores his art and dismisses him. Like those stuck in the mode of celebration, those stuck in condemnation actually miss the voices of those around them. To thoroughly and exhaustively condemn the past is, in a sense, to ignore those who suffered through that history. To expect and celebrate the "angry negro" author is to make that author's voice unnecessary: I already know the story, and I prove my innocence by expressing (what I think is) the same opprobrium.

What is needed is a kind of openness to the logic of the art, of the relationship, of the interaction itself, a mode of being with the other that does not need to master the discourse and relationship before it occurs. Theologically, this means that you and I meet not within the confines of our own histories--our spheres of mastery--but within the history of another who draws our histories into his own and then discloses to us what our stories mean. I cannot anticipate in advance what he will say--and, knowing who this one is (the one who came in the form of a slave), those of us who benefited are (at least) a little afraid. After all, what if I listen and they tell me they don't want my shared sense of outrage but want their land back--what will this savior say? And what if they tell me to sell what I own, give it to the poor, and come live with them--or they with me--what will this savior say? Will he tell me that this is his grace and provision? Am I willing to listen to that voice? Today, if you hear God's voice, do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah.

Beyond a Common Ground: Levinas, Fanon, and Touching the Other

2010-09-28T20:36:00.007-04:00

"To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity." E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 51

This past weekend I went to a conference at Duke Div on "Friendship at the Margins." During lunch on Saturday, various "practitioners" were invited from the community to lead sessions on how friendship influences their ministry. I led one about forming friendships with refugees.

One of the concerns I had with both the book and the conference was the way in which it was assumed those on the "margins" would want to be "our" friends, and that we would be able to form these relationships fairly easily once we simplified our lifestyle (so our extravagance wouldn't cause us guilt or our new friends shame or envy). I focused my presentation on the profuse existence of needs in any resettlement process (agency needs, refugee needs, volunteer needs). I then turned to look at how race and assimilation enter into the process of becoming friends. What does it mean for a group of white volunteers when a refugee clearly expresses to them his preference to be part of the white community and shares his dislike of his Mexican or African-American neighbors? I asked the group how they thought friendships could form given the confluence of these needs and the added pressure of racial assimilation.

The major point I tried to get across was something along the lines of Levinas: when we try to secure the conditions of our friendship, of our intimate interaction with another, we miss the other person. To approach the Other, as Levinas says, is not to proceed on the basis of one's capacity or in faith in the neutrality of a common ground. I do not proceed out of myself to meet "a theoretical idea of another myself" (84).

To use the work of another thinker I've spent more time with--I'm just starting with Levinas--Frantz Fanon, at the end of Black Skin, White Masks, utters a profound and defiant refusal to give up on a world of mutual interaction, a world where we can meet the other, and touch the other, without the disruptions engendered by the racial, colonial world. Throughout this work, Fanon acutely marks the way the form of "the white man" stands between, and therefore disrupts, various relationships. In my talk, I tried to get the participants to enter into this tension, and to feel the urgency of the question: how do we reorder relationships beyond the delusions of the colonial world.

What Levinas and Fanon both point out is that the very attempt to get a hold of these relationships, to reorder and master them, to form them so that we don't err, is to enter into what Levinas calls a relationship to "totality" and what Fanon would call colonial domination. For both thinkers, such an approach assumes that the other must be encountered on my terms or in my space (whether accepted as my own or disguised as "neutral"), and that it is my obligation to make sure these terms are set (fairly, benevolently, harmoniously, peacefully, etc). As such, it inevitably bring the Other under my power and actually violates the relationship it intends to secure.

We do not need to work out how to reach the other but should stop trying to work this out and just touch the other, let ourselves be seen and felt by the other. The mediation of "the white man" is no obstacle because, as Fanon works out through Cesaire, the white man inside him was killed in a baptism of blood, and therefore cannot stand in the way. The Other always exceeds my idea, even my sinful idea, even the idea of a world civilized--formed into a totality--by colonialism. "Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other? Was my freedom not given me to build the world of you, man?" (Fanon, 206).

Post-nationalistic Theology and Fictive Christian Ethnicity

2010-09-19T10:04:00.004-04:00

There was recently a discussion at the Inhabitatio Dei blog about whether "postliberalism" was a defined and coherent school of thought. Instead of searching for the commonality within one stream ("postliberalism"), I am interested in looking at a trajectory which holds together even a larger number of theologians (e.g., postliberalism and radical orthodoxy). The trajectory linking many contemporary theologians can be called: the production of Christian identity beyond nationalism, or to make it a little shorter, post-nationalistic Christianity.

E. Balibar, in "The Nation Form" (printed in __Race, Nation, Class__), clarifies the relationship between the rise of the modern nation state and religious identity. Nationalism did not ultimately arise as an analogous form of religiosity, for despite whatever commonalities one can find between the two, the difference remains even greater. The transfer of religious ideals--"the sense of the sacred and the affects of love, respect, sacrifice, and fear which have cemented religious communities" (95)--to the nation presupposes this difference. Otherwise, "it would be impossible to understand why national identity, more or less completely integrating the forms of religious identity, ends up tending to replace it, and forcing it itself to become 'nationalized' (ibid). To describe nationalism as simply a modern religion is to render oneself unable to account for the way nationalism absorbs, replaces, and modifies the very category of religion.

Post-nationalistic Christianity attempts to interrupt this nationalistic absorption and transformation of the religious community. Various post-nationalistic theologians attempt to rupture a kind of civic hold on Christian discourse by refusing to place Christian terms within a larger, broader, communal framework (enlightened, secular, American, religious). The attempt to articulate Christian communal identity within the language of these (self-professed) larger communal forms is the acquiescence to a nationalistic absorption of Christianity. Christianity loses its distinctness as it becomes merely one of many symbolic discourses striving to articulate something more fundamental than its own terms (human solidarity, transcendence, the divine, freedom, love, etc). Christianity is ultimately subordinate to and supplanted by a community that transcends and determines it, as this community itself (America, Britain, Europe, the West, the global community) fully embodies the ideals symbolically expressed within Christianity.

To escape this nationalistic absorption and domination of Christian identity, these theologians imagine/produce a Christian identity that is in some way prior to and hence uncontaminated by the rise of the nation. This Christian tradition is a viable, living tradition through its set of shared communal practices and grammar/language. Whether through an embrace of liturgical Latin or a careful analysis of the grammatical norms of Christian speech, this traditional community actively re-produces its life, and therefore, is a living community today. This language/grammar is embedded within the life and practices of this cultural tradition, and thus to enter into the language/grammar is to also enter into this cultural form that precedes or escapes the formation of national identity.

Practices and grammar presuppose structures for preserving and inculcating the communal life. To speak the grammar rightly is to be tutored by and formed within these communal institutions (the church, the confessional, the liturgy, the reading of Scripture, the sacraments, etc). The nationalist absorption of this alternative community functioned both by insisting on alterations to the language/grammar and also splitting the language of the community from its cultural form (separating theology from liturgy or ecclesial life); therefore, these post-nationalistic theologians reclaim both the fullness of the Christian grammar and root it firmly in its ecclesial, communal life.

Finally, these post-nationalistic theologies believe that, through this return to a traditional, discrete, and proper Christian form, the Christian community can engage the world confidently. By critiquing the nationalistic formation of community, and by claiming to represent a significant and more appealing (whether aesthetically, virtuously, or rationally) communal life, these theologians imagine a Christian engagement with (and betterment of) the outside world that is not apologetic but is based on a robust self-confidence in the integrity and probity of their distinct cultural form.

The problem is that this imagined "return" to a community somehow prior to the rise of the nation is itself part of the formation of nation. To return to Balibar: "It is fictive ethnicity which makes it possible for the expression of a preexisting unity to be seen in the state" (96). The imagination of an ethnic community preceding the state happens after the state forms as a way to make such a formation seem natural. Given that religious communal identity is altered by the rise of the nation, religious forms themselves will have become embedded in the production of "fictive ethnicity." To attempt to return to some pre-nationalistic religious form is to both ignore the way religion has become part of the production of fictive ethnicity as well as to reproduce the very ways in which fictive ethnicity is imagined. To summarize Bailibar: language and cultural institutions (school, family) are the two pillars that support the production of the ethnic community. Linguistic norms separate out the proper and improper instantiations of the community; schools ensure that these linguistic and cultural norms are instilled in the population; the family becomes a contested site since it is now necessary to ensure the proper and prevent the wayward reproduction of the ethnic community. Racial identity arrises as ethnic communities merge into one large community seen as coterminous with the national community and undergirding the state.

Given the previous outline of post-nationalistic theologies and Balibar's analysis of the production of fictive ethnicity, one suspects that this Christian communal identity operates as a kind of fictive ethnicity. The Christian community is distinguished as a distinct linguistic and cultural form. Behind the various institutional components (church, liturgy, catechesis, confession, creeds, etc) lies a singular Christian community (hence it is an ecumenical theology); the institutional forms function to create, reproduce, and display the natural life of this community (hence a focus on ecclesiology and liturgy). The institutional forms display the inner logic of this community (its virtues) as well as preserve the (distinct, peculiar) community from outside, contaminating influences (hence the genealogical quest to identify the moment of corruption and to remove the lingering effects). Renewed attention is paid to the proper formation and reproduction of the community ("orthodoxy")--the past historical forms ("tradition") must be preserved for the sake of the survival and proper salvific function of the community (hence the urgency of the theology and its interest in missions). Outside sources must be excluded, or at least rigorously purified, before entrance (one sees this not only in theological discussions--where a source is excluded from conversation by virtue of its improper, unorthodox, origination--but also in the wish for longer and more rigorous paths towards conversion). "Though formally egalitarian, belonging to the linguistic community--chiefly because of the fact that it is mediated by the institution of the school [church]--immediately recreates divisions...The greater the role taken on by the education system [ecclesial institutions] within bourgeois societies, the more do differences in linguistic (and therefore literary, 'cultural', and technological) competence function as caste differences, assigning different 'social destinies' to individuals" (103-104). As a fictive ethnic group, the Christian community inherits the same unresolved tension between assertions of egalitarian universalism and the rigorous concern to preserve its particularity.

I share many of the concerns that drive these post-nationalistic theologies but unfortunately, I do not think they take into account the way race and fictive ethnicity intervene in any attempt at "retrieval." The religious world is set inside the racial world, and one cannot imagine a religious community that escapes "the nation form" without giving serious theological thought to the way Christian identity functions as a "fictive ethnicity."

On Milbank's Imperialist Refusal of Difference

2010-09-06T16:24:00.007-04:00

From the AUFS blog I saw that John Milbank has recently attributed the problems of "political Islam" to "the lamentably premature collapse of the Western colonial empires (as a consequence of the European wars);" This should surprise no one, as Milbank expressed those thoughts in the essay "The End of Dialogue," published the same year as his famous Theology and Social Theory (to cite one place). Given Milbank's comfortability with Orientalist categories of thought (East, the West, Islam, the Third World, etc) and his overt endorsement of (or at least sympathy for) the imperialist and colonialist framework within which those categories function, the difficulty for those of us disturbed by Milbank's theological imperialism is to find a way to respond. The framework of thought is invincible as any objection to it will simply be dismissed as evincing a "culpable" or "criminal" naivety, or worse, the taint of Eastern-Protestant-Islamic-Modernist-Antiquated-Secular influence.

It's an odd conglomeration but it is, at bottom, the singular force Milbank ultimately deems responsible for the chaos in the world, the chaos Milbank has an intellectual and Christian vocation to subdue. The singularity of this diverse group reveals that Milbank's thought operates according to a strict binary between "us" and "them": all obduracy to Euro-Catholic control can be lumped together in a singular group ("in much of the wahhabi tradition...one finds something like a parallel to Protestantism"). The defining characteristic of this odd and always shifting group is its divergence from and resistance to"the" Euro-Catholic rule. Thus, the label "modern" is seen as part of this oppositional group when it is contrasted with the "traditional orthodox faith," whereas in the previous sentence 'modern' is a term of approbation linked to the "female emancipation" that stems from the "sustained source of feminism," Christianity. To be modern in the good sense is to be rooted in this Euro-Catholic vision of global order; to be modern in the pejorative sense is to depart from it. Thus, there is an "interestingly, radically modern approach to the reading of the Qur'an" exhibited by a minority of Muslims. "Interestingly," because modern in the positive sense and yet still Muslim--a surprising point where the binary (us/them) might break down.

Milbank contends that the Islamic tradition is not monolithically bad, and that there are actually some reasons to hope that Islam could "evolve" into a more positive religious force. However, this evolution will be Islam's evolution toward "an ecclesial or more 'church-like' mode of organization;" that is, into a closer analogy of Euro-Catholicism. As Islam becomes more mystical, indirectly political, priestly, liturgical, sacramental, focused on the journey and not the destination of the pilgrimage, neoplatonic, and concerned with esoteric and not literal meanings of Scripture, it will cease to be part of "them" and will be aligned with "us." Thus, the form of harmonic difference is simply a nondifferential difference, an irrelevant difference, for they will basically become like us (and thus the binary still reigns supreme).

Given that an "evolved" Islam is at heart an Islam that endorses and adheres to Milbank's vision of Christianity, it's hard to see what difference will be left that makes it "Islamic." Perhaps the absence of a confession of Christ's lordship would be the difference, which would then demonstrate that Christ also has very little to do with Milbank's theology (the cultural form at the heart of Milbank's theology can be instantiated without Christ). And it is difficult to see what an "Islamic path to Christ" would look like, if the path to Christ entails a more or less thorough identification with Euro-Catholicism (as articulated by Milbank).

A more or less thorough identification: it's an attenuated phrase, like much of what Milbank says. "Islam, on the whole, is more equivocal...in many Muslim countries...perhaps the majority of Muslims...there is some evidence that...there are significant minorities...among some interpreters of Qutb (such as in Iran) one tends to find...a certain amount of openness...Jews are often more alert to the dangers...Islam has largely taken..." All these qualifications throughout, and yet, nearing the end, we read "Islam possesses no 'church'...Islam does not provide a trans-political vision of universal human society...the Islamic genocide of...the dangers manifest by current Islam." The qualifications produce a rhetorical sense of moderation (Milbank appreciates the differences...) which allows Milbank's radical reduction of difference to be subtly yet more violently reinstated at the end. For the sake of a better Islam, Islam must be subjugated to Euro-Catholic cultural forms. Since there are some small strands of this culture within Islam, Euro-Catholic Christians can and ought to form them in this way. Since they are small and minor traditions, such a transformation can only be secured by Euro-Catholic rule. Finally, since the differences between Islam and Christianity are irreducible, such Euro-Catholic rule must be perpetual: Muslims must be continually coerced into striving to become what will forever escape them, that is, a proper (Western, Christian) human community. That is missions-qua-Milbank, which is utterly incompatible with missions-qua-scripture (Acts).

Discipleship and Bourgeois Theology

2010-07-18T19:17:00.005-04:00

It took me many years to free myself from I called in my memoirs the 'bonds of my class.' I know that even today there are many who accuse me of behavior instilled by the 'bonds of class,' especially some feminist women. Perhaps they are right and one never overcomes the class into which one is born. I don't know.
--Simone De Beauvoir

It's an honest, and a bit terrifying, account of her life as an intellectual: born into a bourgeois family, Beauvoir wonders whether she was ever able to overcome these class bonds and think for and from a different social situation. Is she able to transcend the class--and the cultural forms that went with it--into which she was born, or does she remain, despite her best efforts, another bourgeois intellectual? She doesn't know, and this confession is remarkable given her vast erudition and relentless pursuit to understand herself and the world into which she is born.

This question--whether one's class formation remains the ultimate horizon of one's understanding of life--has stayed with me over the past few weeks. Are our theologies ultimately expressions of our cultural formations--forever trapped within boundaries that structured our personal development (boundaries of race, class, gender, and geographic location)?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote Discipleship (previously published as Cost of Discipleship) with this question at the forefront of his mind. In the famous first section on "Costly Grace", Bonhoeffer wages war against a "cheap grace" that enables us to "remain as before in [our] bourgeois-secular existence" (50). Cheap grace "absolved an entire people" (53) in advance, a people who are now free from the call to obey a crucified God but who could live as other people live, secure and confident in their attempts to strengthen their own national existence through the exclusion of the weak and the unclean (i.e., the Jew).

Bonhoeffer obviously does not want grace to simply be the divine justification of our sinful, bourgeois-secular lives--we can't get out, and grace tells us, don't even try, just accept forgiveness. However, his answer in this first section appears to be: try really, really hard and then, after you begin with your own failed efforts, grace will show you the way forward. Besides being a thoroughly bourgeois answer (of the religious variety), the answer is theologically problematic. If grace is not the presupposition of our action, then what is?

Bonhoeffer offers a different way of reading this opening chapter when he says that "cheap grace is, thus, denial of God's living word, denial of the incarnation of the word of God" (43). Cheap grace is the attempt to claim grace; costly grace is to be claimed by grace. Cheap grace is a grace--and hence a God--at our disposal ("grace became the common property of a Christian world" p. 46). Costly grace is to find ourselves and our world under assault. In cheap grace, the incarnation is the affirmation of all we hold true about ourselves and our own people. In costly grace, the incarnation marks God setting aside our people and our own lives.

The incarnation is the divine encroachment, the divine transgression (as in "going across," crossing the border that affirms, justifies, and secures our position in the world). To enter into discipleship is to accept God's incursion into our sinful world. It is to say 'amen' to the God who bypasses the boundaries that establish our identity, and in moving across them, exposes them as sinful attempts to secure our own salvation apart from God, judges them, and then brings us to life beyond them. If there is a way beyond "the bonds of class," it is the way of the cross, of discipleship to the living Word. It is therefore, like Beauvoir's assessment, never certain in itself but maintains a faithful hope in the power of God: "for mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible" (Matt 19).

Why Resettle Refugees?

2010-07-14T10:40:00.009-04:00

I met with a pastor yesterday to talk about how his church could be involved with refugees. He mentioned that he had previously helped about refugees from Laos. He talked about how the government had armed locals to fight, promising them a better future, and then withdrew, leaving them to be persecuted. Later, they invited these people to come over as refugees but they gave them barely enough to even get started. He then said, “America has a history of doing this—sadly. They offer to help, promise a better life, and then don’t give you enough to even get started on your way—it creates a lot of frustration. Indians know it, African Americans know it, and I think those Laotians know it.”

I tried to give a thoughtful response that didn’t sound like a disingenuous sales pitch but telling the new hopes of one of the younger, high school refugees doesn’t actually answer the larger question. So, what is a good answer? Why should churches invest time, money, and energy into the refugee resettlement program, especially when it may seem like another example of the US promising a better life but not putting in the resources to make it happen?

In my volunteer orientation, I frame our ministry with these verses from Ephesians 2: Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh…were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ…So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.

Most of our churches have failed to remember that we are Gentiles. Our people were not the people with whom God chose to dwell. Our people were aliens, strangers, separated from the blessings of life with God, and without hope in the world. But in Christ, we who were once far off have been brought near. We who were aliens were brought into a covenantal life with God—a life which was not ours by right, not ours because God was the God of our ancestors, but ours because God was abundantly merciful to us in Christ.

The Church serves refugees because refugees witness to us what it means to live as Christians. They remind us that we are bound to a people who are not our own, but on whom our salvation depends. Our place in the household of God is not as natural heirs but welcomed guests. We are saved because borders were crossed and strangers were welcomed as fellow citizens (or, in Rom 11, unnatural branches were grafted in). The church, therefore, is a place of compromised or broken borders: we do not establish or control the boundaries of the kingdom of God. We are saved because those boundaries were crossed, and therefore, we live expecting them to be crossed again. We live expecting our savior to continually cross over into our lives and to call us to follow him as he lovingly bypasses the divisions we think secure the safety and salvation of the world.

The US government is bringing people who have histories of exclusion—refugees—into our cities. Even though the system has its problem, the Church should be grateful for this opportunity to remember the gospel and share it with others. Working with refugees reminds us that at the end of every story of exclusion is a greater story of reconciliation: we are brought near to God by the blood of one who was excluded and left to die on a cross. As the Church remembers that salvation comes from the One who crossed the border separating us from God (sin) and God’s people (no covenant), the Church can share with our new refugee neighbors that the love of God, and therefore the love of the people of God, knows no boundaries: neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom 8:38-39).

Theology and Obedience: Bound to the Transgressor

2010-07-11T19:23:00.013-04:00

As I've spent the past year reading Barth in my spare time, I've slowly started to figure out what he is doing with certain repetitive gestures. Throughout his Dogmatics, Barth will say things like "the Christian theological tradition has always been in agreement that..." (IV/1, p. 179) and "the mystery which is alone relevant in Church dogmatics [is]..." (177). He will frequently make a brief aside that such-and-such belief is part of the Christian confession, or such-and-such is an attribute of the Christian God.

It's tempting to read Barth--and I think many people do read Barth--as stabilizing a kind of strong form of Christian theology--theology is done in and for the church. Theology is the church's reflection on its own grammar, its own language of belief, its own confessions. The faith is handed down to us and our task, as theologians, is to seek to understand it (faith seeking understanding....). Barth, on this way of thinking, is ultimately concerned about restoring a properly Christian mode of theological reflection: theology can speak confidently to the world when it is situated back within the life of the Church. Theology exists in obedience to the faith that has been, is, and will be proclaimed in the church.

For Barth, as I understand him, the continual asides referring back to "the Church's beliefs" function not to signify the proper context of theological reflection--the Church--but the proper object, Jesus. Barth is keenly aware that theologians are tempted to reflect on an abstract God that reflects their own exaggerated sense of themselves: theology is a picture I draw of myself extended to perfection. To prevent theology from becoming self-aggrandizing anthropology--reflections on idealized versions of ourselves disguised as reflections on God--Barth reminds himself, and his readers, of the object of his reflections. The quick phrase, the Christian conception of God, or, the God of the New Testament, or, the God of Revelation, signifies, as it were, a prayer uttered in weakness: I believe, help my unbelief. It recognizes our tendency to stray from the God who is Jesus Christ and to prefer to reflect upon another God, an abstract God of our own creation, a God who is more reputable, more respectable, more holy, proper and masterful than the God displayed in the form of a slave, the God who came in weakness, suffering, and the likeness of sinful flesh.

The God of Revelation is not the God who gives us proper forms or patterns of speech so that we can accurately articulate (or maintain a dignified silence regarding) the divine nature. To remind us that the divine nature must be understood in Christians terms is not only a reminder that we cannot know what divinity is except as Christ reveals it to us; it is also a reminder that we will find this revelation offensive and shocking, and further, that we are called to be obedient to the God who reveals himself in this offensive way. God is revealed in the flesh of one content to be seen as and killed for being a transgressor--no, not just content, but determined to walk the path of the transgressor to its bitter end (from baptismal repentance to death on a cross). This revelation transgresses our own boundaries; it marks God’s incursion into our own lives in a way that disrupts our ability to create and abide within what we take to be proper markers of creaturely life. God comes to us in the form of one who is the antithesis of all our aspirations: weak, not strong; vulnerable, not impervious; servant, not master; sinful, not righteous; ugly, not beautiful; law breaker, not law abider or enforcer; slave, not free; limited, not boundless; poor, not rich; Jew, not Gentile; a bastard, not one of proper pedigree; a blasphemer, not a pious believer; a heretic, not a member of the orthodox religious community.

For the glorious Creator of the heavens and the earth "it is just as natural to be lowly as it to be high...to be little as it is to be great, to be abroad as to be at home" (192). God is just as content to be found in great places as lowly places, and therefore neither place in itself assures us that God will be found. To be repeatedly told that such and such is part of the Church's confession is to be reminded that theology is not a reflection on our ideas of the divine life but a reflection on the God who comes to us as a slave and calls us to subject ourselves to his life. In theology, then, we continually ask that God will transgress the boundaries we set for God, for ourselves, and the world. The constant refrain throughout Barth's writing--"as the Church confesses"--is a reminder that God has and has promised to continue to be a transgressor for, and towards, us. It is a reminder, therefore, that we are not left to set our hope on our own purified thoughts or constructed/inherited tradition; the one we do not want--the true God we cannot control and who violates our ideals of divinity--comes to us anyways, claiming us, and calling us into his service. To think as Christian theologians, as members of the Church, is to return continually to this prayerful request: lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, for thine--Jesus, weak servant of God and humankind--is the kingdom, power, and glory, for ever and ever.

The Samaritan Savior: immigration, missions, and the foreign love of God (Part 3)

2010-04-26T21:19:00.001-04:00

I want to conclude by bringing out four implications, the first two relating to how we see ourselves and see others, and the final two relating to how we live as missionaries.

First, Jesus comes to us, but as a Samaritan. We have already seen how this form breaks our tie with our own people. Our savior comes to us but not as one of us; he comes to us from outside, as an alien. We have to follow him, but he is not the image of our people. In fact, he’s closer to the counter-image, the opposite, of everything we pride ourselves in being. Jesus shows us that our salvation is not tied to the destiny of our people. We need not make our people “the right” kind of people; nor do we need to assure others that we are indeed the right kind of people. Our people--our folk, good people like us--will rightly leave us on the side of the road. They are not our future. Our hope does not rest in our people, in the strength or goodness or purity of our people. It rests only in the miraculous help that comes to us, Jesus. But Jesus comes to us as someone like Tanveer, someone we think our people must exclude. And if he comes to save us in this form, then salvation means that Jesus comes and breaks our connection to our own people. Jesus comes to us, but as a Samaritan.

The second point is the same, but with a different emphasis: As a Samaritan, Jesus comes to us. He may come in the form of the alien, but he really comes to us. He really comes and saves us. We are now free to desire others beyond our own people. Jesus first had to break our tie with our own people; now, he brings us to actually desire to be with these foreigners. We can desire to be with them. They are not revolting; they are witnesses. They remind us that help will come to us. We can move beyond our revulsion, through tolerance and into...miracle...love. Desire. Jesus comes to us in that form, the form of the alien, and so now we are able to actually desire to be with the alien. We can see someone like the Muslim immigrant from Pakistan, Tanveer, not with fear, confusion, or revulsion but with the loving desire to be known by him and his people. Our desire is free, free to follow the one who comes to us as an alien and an outsider; it is therefore free to seek to be love and be loved by the alien and outsider. As a Samaritan, Jesus comes to us.

We’ve placed ourselves in the story and heard the scandalous claim that we are half-dead and unable to demand that God or our fellow humans come to our aid. But Jesus came, restoring us to life and giving us a mission: go and do likewise. If we stopped short of this command, we would miss the story. This brings us to the third and fourth point.

Third, The Samaritan Jesus calls us to follow him. In missions, we are given the beautiful gift of watching Jesus become strange to us. We learn to see how much we still think Jesus is the image of the best of ourselves (and our people). In missions, in following the Samaritan Jesus, we watch that image dissolve before our very eyes. We begin to expect that Jesus won’t look like us but that he will be found among those who aren’t anything like us. When we follow him, we joyfully discover his surprising presence among those who are not our people, who are nothing like our people. In being called to missions, we are given another grace, another gift, the gift of finding ourselves welcomed by a strange looking Jesus. The Samaritan Jesus calls us to follow him.

Finally, we are called to follow the Samaritan Jesus. We are called—what a blessing. We are called! This is not an ethical or religious obligation. It is a gratuitous gift. Let us rejoice; we are called to follow him! It was a gratuitous gift that he came to our aid at all. He could have left us on the side of road. But he came. And though he came, it would have been understandable if Jesus wanted us to stay at the hotel, hidden, out of sight. I came to you, and I love you, but you are ugly, so stay hidden. But no, he comes and says, you, follow me. As you are, in spite of all your wounds and failures, come, be with me. Walk with me. Be part of my work. Be my spokesperson. See the life I will bring. Tell others who may not see it. Tell them that there is indeed a savior. Tell them that I love them and see them and am moved with desire and loving pity. We are sent to tell the world of this savior. He is not one of my people, but he came to me anyways. He pitied me. He saw my wounds and was not revolted; he poured out his oil and wine, the very substance of his life, so that I could live. And he is with you and your people now, already, before I came. He is with you. I know, because he was with me before I could call his name. And he is with me now. And I am learning to see him with you too. That is our calling into his mission. What a gift! We--even we lawyers--are called to follow him. We—even we lawyers—are called to bear his name. Let us rejoice.

The Samaritan Savior: immigration, missions, and the foreign love of God (Part 2)

2010-04-26T21:17:00.001-04:00

We don’t want to hear this. We don’t want to hear that we are not the saviors but the naked person, covered in blood, bruised and broken, on the verge of death, incapable, lost, without hope and unable to even give voice to our needs. That is us. That is you. We don’t want to hear this word. We want to look at ourselves and say, hey, I’m a pretty good person; I know what I’m supposed to do as a Christian and I generally do it (and at least I know enough to know that I will fail and need grace). I’m doing alright for myself, and for others. I can help my neighbors. I can offer them my strength. I can serve them with my wisdom. I can really help them. Just tell me who they are, who needs my help, and I’ll go.

Jesus looks at us and asks incredulously, who are you to ask that question? You are half-dead and for you to ask “who is my neighbor” is absurd. You can’t come to anyone’s help—you are naked and in a ditch. And nobody will come to you. Your own people are walking to the other side of the road. The other side of the road. They won’t even approach you. They won’t even come over to look at you. Your friends will not help you; your religious community—your church, your small group—won’t even come close to you in this state. Your fellow citizens will look at you with pity, and then turn away, and walk to the other side of the road.

We often wonder: why don’t these religious leaders come to help? I think the reason is simple: they do not need to come over. These are the most pious and most devout people the audience would know. They’re the moral heroes of the day. Surely, if there were some ethical or religious obligation to come to your help, they of all people would come. It’s like Jesus saying, “so, a guy was beaten and left for dead on the side of the road. Gandhi walked by, and upon seeing him, he crossed to the other side of the road and then kept on going.” We would be shocked. This is crazy—this Jesus character is talking like a crazy man. But we are polite people—good neighbors--so we keep quiet, and listen, and hear Jesus continue: “Then, a little while later, Mother Teresa walks down the same road and upon seeing this guy, she too quickly crosses to the other side of the road and continues on her way.” This is insane. That’s Jesus’ point. We need to hear about both of them because we might excuse the failure of one of them. Maybe Gandhi was having a bad day; you can’t be the pinnacle of moral virtue all the time. But both Gandhi and Mother Teresa. Now that can’t be a coincidence. Apparently, they need not (or should not) come to your aid. If anyone would help you, certainly they would. And if these two don’t need to assist you, nobody will. If Mother Teresa and Gandhi will leave you on the side of the road, then you know for sure that nobody else is going to help you.

When we put it like this, we capture the scandalous force of Jesus’ story. Jesus is making clear that nobody is obligated to come to help us. Jesus is telling us that we have no right for God or any fellow human to come to our aid. Those who know the law, those who know the proper ethical and religious systems, the ethical heroes of our time, they will walk to the other side of the road. And this is what’s shocking in the story: Jesus doesn’t say that they are not wrong. Maybe they recognize a higher religious priority; maybe they see a fuller ethical picture. What does their reasoning matter to you when you are in a ditch and about to die? What matters is that neither of them comes to give you help.

It’s hard to admit we are half-dead. It’s extraordinarily difficult to admit we need God desperately and that we need others desperately. But what we absolutely won’t accept is that neither God nor our neighbor has to help us. God could leave you where you fell, in your sin, in your misery and death, and still be God, without a blemish and in full and utterly praiseworthy glory. You cannot compel God to come to your aid, to save you from your sin. God does not owe it to you to come to your side. And if God is not obligated to rescue you, nobody is.

That’s hard to hear: nobody ought to come to my side. Nobody ought to come, but surprisingly, a miracle, someone does come: the Samaritan. Jesus comes to us, in the form of the Samaritan, in the form of the outsider, the alien, the impure, unclean, and religiously confused Samaritan. To make the scandal of what Jesus is saying stands out to us: Jesus comes to us as someone like Tanveer. A Muslim illegal immigrant with a criminal record involving a deadly firearm. That’s the form in which Jesus comes.

Jesus comes to us in this form, as the one we’d leave in the ditch (or in a cell) without a second thought, as the one we’d rather not even see, let alone interact with. In front of this one, the Samaritan, we lie exposed, naked, an awful, bloody, unsightly mess. Half-dead and all alone. And to our surprise, this one, who of all people should leave us in the ditch to die, comes over to our side, and looks at us. He sees us and does not turn away. We are exposed but he is not revolted. He takes pity on us. Moved with pity, the Samaritan pours out his oil and wine for us (think baptism and communion here, that’s all I’ll say, this foreigner pours out his oil and wine for us). Moved with pity, he binds our wounds, and carries us half-dead to a hotel. Moved with gratuitous, unnecessary pity, he appoints someone to care for us, promising to return and pay any extra debt we accrue.

That’s the story Jesus just told us. We asked him a question, hoping to justify ourselves, simply wanting to know how to be good neighbors. And Jesus told us this story and with it, in this story, he destroyed all our attempts at self-justification: he tells us we’re half-dead, without a hope of salvation, but that help will come in the form of a Samaritan, an outsider we’d rather hate. And then he asks us a question, “who was a neighbor to the man who fell to thieves,” and we reply rightly, “the one who had mercy on him.” So, to the question, “who is my neighbor” Jesus now forces us to say, the one who shows us mercy. The neighbor is not the one who depends on us but the one on whom we depend--and yet want to exclude--namely Jesus. (repeat that). I am not the good neighbor; Jesus is.

Now we can hear what Jesus means when he says, “Go and do likewise.” He means, “Come and follow me.” You cannot try to be the good neighbor—you are half-dead, abandoned by your own citizens and heroes. You were left on the side of the road, and it should be clear by now that nobody is going to stop to save you. But help does come and you are--miracle--saved. And, if that miracle were not enough, now Jesus says to you, “God and do likewise.” Follow me. You have no strength to bring yourself or anyone else to life; but I do. Come with me. Do what you are not in a position to do, follow me as I bring healing. You could not get to the inn; but help came, you were brought to the inn, and there, you were saved. Now go, follow this savior. Do likewise. You can, if he is with you. So, go, follow your Samaritan savior.

The Samaritan Savior: immigration, missions, and the foreign love of God (Part 1)

2010-04-26T21:02:00.014-04:00

Tanveer Ahmad was born in Pakistan, in 1962, the fifth child in a poor family. As an adult, he made his way to his brother’s store in Saudi Arabia and from there started traveling. One time, he came over to the U.S., to New York, and fell in love with the city. He eventually got a visa to come over to the U.S. and headed straight to New York in 1993. Eventually, as often happens to new immigrants, he ended up in Texas, working at night in a gas station. The store was in a bad location and was robbed, repeatedly. During one robbery, he pulled out the store’s unlicensed gun to stop the criminals; the cops came to the store and fined him for brandishing the weapon. Though he left Texas to work in New York as a cab driver, that incident would continue to haunt him. It would undermine his attempts to get a green card, especially after 9/11. Being a Muslim immigrant from Pakistan would make it difficult to renew his visa; having a “disorderly conduct” charge involving a deadly weapon made it impossible. In 2005, having failed to get proper documentation, Tanveer overstayed his visa. His roommate had done the same thing with his student visa. After a raid by immigration officials to capture his roommate, Tanveer was told by these officials to report to immigration. Tanveer did, where he was promptly arrested and placed in one of the many the detention centers, which currently hold a total of over 500,000 people awaiting deportation. In this for-profit, private prison, Tanveer suffered a heart attack. His pleas for medical attention were ignored. Eventually the guards took him seriously but had to first request permission from their superiors to take him to a hospital. Tanveer died at the hospital, and became one of over one hundred people who died in custody while awaiting deportation, many of whose deaths are connected to medical neglect, and some to abuse.

This story sadly captures the problems and failures of our immigration system in post 9/11 America. And it is with this background in mind--the background in which we live today--that we should read a story so familiar to us, the story of the Good Samaritan. We need to read the G.S. in light of immigration, undocumented workers, and national security. We need to think about the G.S. with Tanveer’s story always on our mind.

Tanveer’s story helps us see what is at stake in our ethical and political decisions. His story makes us ask all the more urgently, who is my neighbor? We want to know what it means to be a good neighbor. We don’t want to wait while someone else dies in custody, while another family is torn apart, while another immigrant’s pleas for medical attention are ignored. But in these times, who are my neighbors? Think back to Tanveer’s story: was Tanveer my neighbor? I’d never met him. I’d never heard of him until I read about him in the paper, after he died. Was he my neighbor even before I knew him? Suppose I did know him--did that make him my neighbor? Are his family members in Pakistan my neighbors? Was Tanveer my neighbor when he overstayed his visa and broke the law? And what about the prison officials, the guards who ignored his cries for help, are they too my neighbors? Almost without knowing it, we’ve become overwhelmed by questions--the questions of the lawyer.

The lawyer comes to “test” Jesus. He asks him a question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus turns the tables and asks him a question in response: “What does the law say?” We know the lawyer’s answer: love God and love our neighbor. Jesus accepts this answer, saying “you have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.” But the lawyer isn’t satisfied, and wanting to justify himself, he asks, “who is my neighbor?”

Most of us get lost here. We notice the phrase “wanting to justify himself” and say, ha, gotcha. We know what this is about. He’s being legalistic. He’s trying to earn his way to heaven. He wants to know the details so he can make sure he gets it right and gets blessed by God. What we forget is that the lawyer’s question is our own. It’s the question we’ve been asking.

These are all natural questions; they sound like good, important, ethical questions. But we forget, they’re the lawyer’s question. Like the lawyer, the question we mean to ask is: how can I be a good neighbor? We want to know how to fulfill our neighborly duties. That’s our question; and it is the lawyer’s question: “who is my neighbor” really means “how do I make sure I’m being a good neighbor?”

Ironically, that is the question we generally think the G.S. answers. We take the story to mean that anyone, everyone, the person in front of you in need, these are your neighbors. Your neighbor is the person who needs your assistance. We’ve heard sermons and repeated sermons to our friends on this point: whoever is in need is your neighbor. We think that is the point of the G.S.. We think so because we ask the lawyers questions. We, like the lawyer, want to justify ourselves. It’s natural. Given the stories I told, it seems essential. We don’t want to do that—we don’t want to let our neighbors die. And so we ask someone, an authority, a teacher, about what is expected of us. It’s natural; it’s what we really want to know. But that is the very question Jesus attacks in the parable. It’s the kind of question Luke draws our attention to—and, wanting to justify ourselves, we ask, who then is my neighbor?

So then, we lawyers, we people who want to be good neighbors, we ask Jesus a natural question, at least natural to us: Teacher, who is my neighbor? Jesus responds with a parable.

Now, the fact that Jesus responds to us in a parable should put us on our guard. It’s not a good thing. Parables aren’t demonstrations of how clever Jesus is. They aren’t signs of his religious genius, his moral integrity, or his pedagogical brilliance. In chapter 8 of Luke, Jesus clarifies why he speaks in parables. He says, "The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that,

" 'though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand.'

Jesus speaks in parables as a sign of judgment. It’s a sign that things aren’t right, that Jesus is intentionally tripping us up—I speak so that they may not understand. We could spend hours trying to understand the purpose and function of parables, but this isn’t a sermon about parables but about the G.S., so let me clarify what is important for our purposes with an example.

Growing up, you learn to tell the signs your parents give when they are about to snap. For my mom, we call it “the thin lip.” If you say something, and she is holding back, on the verge of tearing you apart but remaining calm, she does the thin lip. Her face hardens, and her lips narrow, and she stares at you. And if you are smart, you stop whatever you were you doing, you quit talking, and try to quietly and politely excuse yourself. When you see “thin lips” you know that you better watch yourself and pay attention. If she speaks, you better listen. It’s a sign, saying. Alert! You’re in danger! When Jesus speaks to us in parables, it’s a sign saying, watch out, pay attention, tread carefully, stop and listen. Don’t presume you know what is coming, but slow down. Listen! A lot is at stake and you’re going to miss it.

So, now that we have at least a general sense of what is at stake in the parable, let’s look at what this familiar parable is actually telling us. The key to understanding the story is to remember that the key figure in the parable…is Jesus. They often are. Jesus is the kingdom, as a mustard seed, as a pearl of great price, etc. Jesus is also the Good Samaritan. The early church understood this and held fast to this point, but most of us miss it. We want to be the Good Samaritan. Instead, we are told that Jesus is the Good Samaritan and that we, well…we are the person beaten by the robbers, left on the side of the road, and barely hanging on for life.

Sex, Colonialism, and Anglicanism: the ethics of mourning.

2010-02-14T21:34:00.011-05:00

When I have time, I enjoy reading the New York Times online with my morning breakfast. As I opened the "world" section of the paper, I noticed a headline and read the article at once: "Same-Sex Couple Stirs Fears of a 'Gay Agenda.'" I shut the computer and finished my breakfast, trying to think through the problems, again.

Skyler and I have been talking a lot about the Anglican church in Africa and the issue of homosexuality. We are Anglicans, in AMIA (and so under the Rwandan Anglican church), and want to go to over to Rwanda. We've also been following the Ugandan Anglican Church's response to the proposed bill that would allow the execution of homosexuals (interesting enough, a bill that came a month after three American evangelicals gave a series of talks on the evils of the gay rights movement, how it would destroy a family-based society, and how homosexuals can be converted into heterosexuals--read more HERE).

The article I read at breakfast discussed the arrest of a same-sex couple in Malawi after having a party to celebrate their engagement. The whole article painfully illustrates the complexities of even holding a discussion on this topic between the two continents, let alone reaching some kind of mutual understanding. For instance, the article quotes the Rev. Zacc Kawalala, who says, "The West has its gay agenda. It wants to look at Africa and say, 'If you don't accept homosexuality, you are primitive.' But we're not as wicked as the West." Another person comments, "These immoral acts are not in our culture; they are coming from the outside. Otherwise, why is there all this interest from around the world? Why is money being sent?" Discussing a different case, in which a person was arrested for putting up posters supporting gay rights as human rights, a police spokesman commented, "You wouldn't allow a poster that says, 'Let's Rape the Women,' would you?"

Within these few quotes we encounter the history of European and American imperialism, in the idea of its "agenda," in its self-professed superiority over the "primitives," and in its attempts to control politics through finances. We have the creation of a cultural unity by the declaration of the "transgressor" as fundamentally and irredeemably "alien" (the purity of Ugandan culture being safeguarded from the "threat" of homosexual acts by declaring these deeds "foreign"). This cultural practice is, sadly, something countries in the West share (note, not "used to have"). Finally, we have a question that vexes our own political institution, namely, that we all agree government needs to legislate morality, we just disagree on whose morality it ought to legislate. The idea common among many that homosexuality is wrong but that the government should not legislate against it depends ultimately on the evaluation of how socially "harmful" such an act is to the political body (I will have to speak further on this attachment to the governmental investment to "ensure, maintain, or develops it life"--to quote Foucault--at another point). And if this latter analysis is correct, then we return to the first two problems with even more force: how do we talk about these problems beyond "the West's" past and present assumption of "cultural strength"? Given the deep history of imperialism, how can we expect those who've experienced the horrors produced by our imperial endeavors to not assume that we are, once again, trying to export our own sense of our superiority? In short, we can't figure out how to discuss these questions within our own country, even among the predominantly white, middle-to-upper-class Americans that form a large portion of the Episcopal and Anglican church. How can we do it across these divides?

It is perhaps this seemingly insurmountable divide that points us in the exact direction we must travel: we cannot discuss the question of sexuality apart from the operations of European/American, Christian, colonial endeavors. The inability to "bypass" this painful, problematic history forces all of us to go right through it, into the middle of it, and try to find our way out. The "West's" arrogant pretensions are cut out from under it by this lingering awareness of its guilt, a history that cannot be forgotten or evaded, but must be confronted and mourned.

It's the "Western" Anglican church's inability to mourn this tragic history that creates its tendency towards amnesia. As Behdad argues in a different context, this kind of amnesia functions as a "Freudian notion of negation," a "repudiation, by means of projection, of an association that has just emerged" (__A Forgetful Nation__, p. 4). In "negation," one "may acknowledge an event, but the subject either denies its significance or refuses to take responsibility for it" (p. 4). The refusal to take responsibility often takes the form of projecting "his or her guilt onto others by blaming them for what has occurred, attempting thus to hide the implications of his or her own action" (p. 5). The Church of Uganda identifies this kind of projection in the issue of women's ordination. They say that comparison of women's ordination to homosexual ordination is insulting, for the patriarchalism of Western Christian missionaries actually curbed the religious leadership of women traditionally found in Ugandan society, and that Ugandan Christians started allowing women into positions of leadership before the West. In other words, the Western church tries to secure the high ground by projecting their own sinful heritage (patriarchalism) onto the African church; they then tried to use this "disavowal" (they are backwards and guilty, we are moral leaders) to advocate their continued leadership (as "innocent" moral authorities).

The conservative American Anglicans under African leadership (AMIA), have often used this post-colonial context to berate the "liberals." However, placing oneself under the authority of bishops in Rwanda does not ipso facto mean that the colonial history has been effectively confronted, mourned, and surpassed. Churches like AMIA have the ability, and calling, to remind the "Western" church that it cannot declare itself a moral authority on sexuality and dismiss its African brothers and sisters. To do so is to take the position, again, of imperial sovereignty. But these AMIA churches do this not from a place outside of the problem, but from an awareness that they too have been formed inside of the problem.

Perhaps it would be easiest for white, Western Anglicans to start by mourning the loss of their cultural supremacy as well as their sinful enactment of and attachment to this supremacy. Most realize that the project of imperialism was indeed sinful (though most mistakenly think of it as "safely" lodged in the past and overcome); but recognizing that a broken attachment was/is sinful does not mean one no longer suffers from the loss of it. The loss must be acknowledged, which is why the mourning must address both the loss of the sinful power and the sinfulness of the power now lost.

This ethical stance of mourning is not an attempt to stall the church, to bide our time, to wait passively or ignore the political urgency of people who face jail, and possibly death, for being gay. Much needs to be said. But we won't get anywhere if we keep trying to ignore or evade our guilt, for our attempt to render ourselves "innocent" not only ignores the imperialist history, it reenacts it. To begin with mourning necessitates starting in a place of dependency--we do not know how to mourn this history, and so we cannot mourn it alone, but we must seek the help of those whose did not benefit from the cultural supremacy but suffered under it.

(it should be noted that I stuck with the term "western," sometimes in quotes, sometimes not, because it was introduced by the persons in the article and it provided a convenient shorthand; it should be read with all the typical qualifications and disavowals.

LOST: Living Beyond Meaning

2010-02-11T22:05:00.008-05:00

In the latest episode of LOST (season 6, episode 2), Jack Shepherd is, once again, confronted with a situation that he can't understand and yet requires concrete action. Sayid, after having died and come back to life, is tortured by his saviors. Jack decides he must act and confronts the people (the leader and his interpreter), demanding to know why they tortured Sayid. They explain to Jack that they were "testing" him, that Sayid failed, and that he needed to take a pill. For the medicine to work, Sayid must take it willingly, and only Jack can get Sayid to take the pill. So, once again, it is all up to Jack. He must talk Sayid into taking the pill, or Sayid will die. At least, so they say.

But who to trust? Jack doesn't trust them; he says he doesn't even trust himself. You can't blame him. The situation strikes us, the viewers, as almost banal: of course, here we have another life and death situation in which a main character must decide what to do, and more importantly, who to trust, and in which appearances are inherently suspect. We've seen it again, and again, and again. Our frustration at the plot matches Jack's: we are all sick of this inability to make sense of the story. Or, more precisely, we (the audience and the characters) have grown weary of the incessant collapse of meaning as providing the "drama" of the action. We know they can't make sense of their lives; they know they can't make sense of their lives; we won't even speculate as to how they are going to comprehend their lives on two different planes of existence, between a past that does not (or did not...) exist and a present they tried and failed to obliterate (or did they...).

LOST revels in this loss of meaningful explanations. To focus on this episode--we have again a confrontation between Jack, as scientific doctor, and a green, homemade, "chinese medicine" pill. Neither science nor spirituality has helped. Jack has done them both, but neither gave him the ability to make sense of the island. The characters are shackled by a complete inability to get hold of their situation, to understand it, to discern when they are acting freely and when they are being manipulated, when they are helping and when they are harming. Good and evil are beyond them, or they have moved into a situation beyond good and evil.

They are beyond good and evil, not because they have exposed traditional ethical categories as tools of the weak to reign in the power of the strong, but simply because those terms are useless. Is it "good" or "evil" for Jack to give Sayid the pill? It's too simple given that Sayid died and came back to life, that he doesn't know what is in it, that it is offered by those who saved Sayid's life and then tortured him, etc. And that is only focusing on what Jack knows (or at least thinks he knows). What about all the interminable facts that he (and we) do not and perhaps cannot know? What is good and what is evil then? Who's to draw the distinction? Does it even matter? Is there really a difference?

Jack and Sayid place the question back to trust. Who do you trust? But that question unravels when you no longer trust yourself, when you are consumed by a kind of grief (or refusal to grieve), by a sense of failed responsibility and lost lives. It is at this point that I think LOST has entered its most theologically interesting terrain. For LOST is forcing us, as an audience, to make sense of a subject, an agent, who is not the center or ground of meaning.

When we ask whether something was meaningful, we implicitly add to you. Jack has lost his ability to make sense of the events; they are meaningless because they are meaningless to him. Meaning is acquired through interpretation--we provide the meaning. To put it philosophically, we are all Kantians, whether we like it or not. We all implicitly assume that we must make sense of things.

Instead of either celebrating or attacking this position, LOST places it in crisis. The subject is overloaded by inconclusive, partial, inexplicable, and misleading data. Not only is a governing interpretative framework lost (a way to organize or categorize everything, e.g., science and/or religion), but the subject itself is starting to crack. Jack no longer knows who he is, where he is, when he is, how he is, and so he cannot figure out what to do. Should he give the pill to Sayid or not? He'll take it himself--see what happens! Jack's motivating force is now centering on his need to avoid further guilt--he can't handle any more deaths on his hands. If he just withholds the pill, he could be guilty, if he gives it to him, he could be guilty, but if he takes it, then maybe he won't be guilty. Maybe. Who knows? Jack doesn't. Not only has he lost trust himself, he has lost any sense of who he is (leader, failure, doctor, savior, deluded fanatic, etc). He does not know what he does, nor who he is. How does he--how do we--act in a world with that has lost all objective and subjective meaning? The world is not meaningful, and we cannot make it so.

The idea of a stable, external meaning was lost for us centuries ago (philosophically secured in Kant); the subjective production of meaning is gone too. LOST assumes both of these points, and then explores the ramifications of these facts. LOST explores a world in which providence--any kind of external, sovereign, divine control--cannot even be thought. The only way for such an idea to get any traction, any force, would be to base it in our hope, our mental belief, our organization of the world as if such a fact--that God oversaw the world--were true. The meaning would be one I produced through my belief (regardless of its truth) that God is ordering and sustaining our historical lives. But we have even lost that ability. We must now live beyond both the illusion of external meaning and the illusion of being able to provide such meaning ourselves.

This collapse of all meaning is not a new situation; in fact, it is precisely the situation in which Karl Barth wrote (sorry to be more predictable than LOST). From 1945-1951, Barth wrote his account of creation, that is, in the aftermath of WWII and the holocaust, the Swiss theologian who was exiled from Germany for his refusal to swear allegiance to Hitler, wrote out his doctrine of divine providence. And he says, right at the beginning, "It is quite plain what God wills as the Lord of the being created by Him, and as the Lord of its history, namely, what is the meaning and purpose, the goal and therefore the glory of His lordly action. It is not plain because we have lifted the veil of this history and discovered its secret. It is not plain because we have perceived, planned, or determined it ourselves. It is plain because God Himself has revealed it to us in His Word. And He has revealed it in the simple way in which He has revealed Himself--and we must take this seriously--as the triune God who as the Father is over us and as the Son is for us and both in the unity in which as the Holy Spirit he creates our life as a life under Him and again for Him" (CD III/2, p. 33-34). God is over us and for us (and ruling over us because God is for us). That is the simple and plain truth, written by this theologian living in the ruins of Germany.

It is simple and plain. History, our lives as creatures, "do not have their purpose and goal in themselves or apart from the purpose and goal to which the covenant work of God hastens" (36). Our lives are really made meaningful, but not by us. Our lives are not meaningful in themselves; history has no meaning in and of itself. History has meaning inside of--on the basis of--God's gracious decision to be with us and for us (so that we could be with and for God). History is not a meaningful order; it is precisely the disruption of ordinary meaning, of predictably unfolding events within themselves, by the one who is Lord over history for our sake. The ground of history comes from outside creaturely history (God) within creaturely history (Incarnation). To put it more simply, the meaning of history is found only in God's address to us, Jesus Christ. But this meaning is not a weapon, as if Christians now possess a meaningful sense of the world, and therefore ought to rule and govern and organize those who cannot make sense of the world. To think that way is to still place our trust in the subject, in the person who can secure his or her own meaning. That history is meaningful only in Christ means that no history is meaningless, nobody's history is meaningless, because all history and all bodies have been brought inside of Christ. We need not master the chaos, the collapsing order, the conflicting and irreconcilable perspectives because they all have already been mastered, by Jesus. We need not find our meaning because our lives have been made meaningful...without our help.

In this light, the drama of LOST loses its edge because the struggle for meaningful action is misplaced. An action is meaningful neither when it accords with some immanent, self-contained world trajectory (e.g., the upwards path of evolution, or the rules of the island) nor when it accords with my own personal structure of meaning. An action is meaningful when it is put to use by Christ, for his purposes. The meaning rests neither out there in the world nor in here, in my mind. It rests in him, in Jesus, the God who has willed to be, not once, but continually, gracious to us.

If this is true, then I am free from the task of having to provide some order to the world so that I can act in a meaningful way; instead, I am free to entrust my actions to the One who gives life meaning, trusting that he will continue to be gracious and forgive me, and hoping that, by his grace, whatever I do, will be of service to his glory.

(I should mention you should check out Brian Bantum's blog post on LOST, HERE).

Seeing the Neighbor: Immigration, Race, and the Good Samaritan

2009-12-22T17:35:00.014-05:00

note: this is a presentation I am working on; all comments would be much appreciated. I've also added Roman numerals to help you navigate through this longer piece:

I. Focuses on Ellis Island and the history of excluding immigrants by race;

II. connects the exclusionary practices ("optics") of Ellis Island to earlier slave auctions and to present day practices of racial profiling.

III. Looks at the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), alluding at points to the discussion in Part I

IV. Examines more closely how the story of the Good Samaritan challenges the "invulnerable seeing" discussed in Part I

V. Concludes by looking briefly at how working with refugees--work that I do--fits within this discussion.

On January 1st, 1892, Ellis Island officially opened. In the following three decades, over 70% of immigrants to the U.S. would be processed there. The decades preceding and following this moment were marked not by an open, receptive embrace of the “tired, poor, huddled masses.” Instead, these decades were filled with an increased focus on immigration, race, and citizenship, and with the refinement of techniques for excluding those deemed unworthy to belong.

In 1870, twenty-two years before Ellis Island opened, Congress passed the naturalization act. Previously, one could not become a “naturalized” citizen--meaning a citizen of the U.S.A. despite being born in another country--unless one were a free white person. The act in 1870 did not erase the qualification of being white but was expanded to include immigrants from Africa. The act was intended to complete what began with the 14th amendment: to grant citizenship rights to those who had been enslaved. However, by not erasing the racial component of citizenship but expanding it, Congress tried to answer the problem of slavery while still continuing racist policies of exclusion. By specifying that free whites and persons of African descent could become citizens, the 1870 Act solidified the link between race and citizenship, for it excluded a growing immigrant population, the Chinese. In 1875, five years after the 1870 Naturalization Act and 20 years before the opening of Ellis Island, Congress passed the Page Act. This act, as well as some legislation following it, focused on “oriental women,” women who disrupted the white social body by supposedly carrying diseases and working in the U.S. as prostitutes. These acts began a more intensified classification of “undesirable immigrants” by focusing on nations and races; the Page Act explicitly declared its focus on “subjects of China, Japan, or any Oriental country.” In 1882, ten years before Ellis Island opened, Congress passed two acts that helped further expand the notion of undesirable immigrants: it passed the “Chinese Exclusion Act,” which completed what began 1870--the exclusion of Chinese immigrants and the denial of American citizenship to Chinese persons. The other immigration act in 1882 barred “lunatics, idiots, and persons liable to become public charges,” meaning those it deemed unemployable, from entering the States. In1891, one year before the opening of Ellis Island, Congress modified this act by adding to the list polygamists and those carrying contagious diseases.

The focus on health, as should seem obvious from preceding summary, is not just an isolated health issue but one that is intertwined with issues of race, national identity, gender, and the social body. Immigrants were consistently seen as threatening to contaminate, whether by altering the “racial” identity of the American public or corrupting “American” morals and political ideals. In 1891, immigrants became marked as the corrupters in a different sense: they were a threat to the physical health of the American social body. The operations at Ellis Island continued to heighten these associations of race, class, and disease.

Upon arriving in New York, two different teams would inspect the potential immigrants. One team would go into the first and second class cabins; here, the focus was on finding the social aberrant, the one who did not fit, who was not genuinely a 1st or 2nd class passenger. The inspectors would wander around the cabin, looking for signs of illness and for passengers who did not look or act like 1st and 2nd class passengers. Disease and social class were so closely linked that passengers in these cabins who produced signs of ill health were suspected of being lower class individuals. The examinations of these wealthier passengers, therefore, was not explicitly to screen the health of these wealthier immigrants; the screenings were designed to prevent poorer passengers from trying to escape observation by mingling with the higher, healthier classes. The examination also inducted these wealthier immigrants into a kind of self-screening, whereby the manners and appearances of wealth must be strictly adhered to, or the advantages that came from wealth would be stripped: in other words, these classes were taught that if they didn’t keep up looking, talking, and acting like persons of wealth were supposed to act, they would be marked and handled like persons in the lower classes.

Unlike those traveling 1st or 2nd class, every person in the “steerage class,” the more crowded quarters for poorer travelers, was taken off the boat, put on a barge, and transported to Ellis Island. Here, examinations did not consist of inspectors wandering around the room; on the contrary, on Ellis Island, every immigrant had to undergo a direct, hands on physical examination. Each person in this class had his or her body handled; at one point, their eyelids would be held open by a metal buttonhook to check for signs of an eye disease, trachoma. Those who were suspected of having this--or another disease--were marked with a piece of chalk on the back of their clothes. These persons were then sent to private rooms for a more exhaustive examination.

Ellis Island was not just a place for an intensified medical observation--one that produced a linkage between class, immigration, and contamination--the island also enabled medical experimentation. Physicians set up laboratories, testing new medical techniques and drugs on the immigrant population. One of the most prominent physicians of the day, who also worked at Ellis Island and wrote a series of articles in Popular Science Monthly, actually viewed the Island as “an experiemental station in the mental and physical examination of immigrants” (quoted in Behdad, 134). The state was invested in screening the mental and physical “fitness” of the immigrants. Besides the health exam, psychological profiles were given to immigrants; their IQs were tested; some--those suspected of being idiots or lunactics--were even subjected to shock therapy. The unfit--mentally and physically--were a threat to the nation’s health and had to be excluded.

This focus on class and disease did not replace the earlier discourse of race and nation; it actually went hand in hand with developing notions of racial inferiority. The general well being of the immigrant--physically and mentally--became linked to ideas of race. The health and survival of the American--meaning Northern European, Anglo-Saxon--social body depended on the exclusion of inferior races, for these races were seen as prone to disease and mental instability. In 1911, a congressional committee on immigration created a large manual to assist immigration official with the racial classification of new arrivals. By 1921 and again in 1924, Congress used this new racial “knowledge” to pass a new set of exclusionary acts, acts which used quotas to regulate how many immigrants from each population were allowed. Immigrants would only be accepted in numbers that were proportionate to the make up of America before Ellis Island opened, before 1890, that is, before the high influx of non-northern European immigrants. The Chinese had already been excluded; the exclusionary acts of 1921 and 1924 ensured that most immigrants would be from Northern Europe. Ali Behdad, whose work I’ve been relying on throughout this examination of Ellis Island, argues that the focus on health and disease is actually what led to the increased interest in racialized exclusions. The medical hygienists and doctors granted a kind of scientific authority to racial stereotypes, linking harmful germs to harmful genes (p. 132), and creating a vision of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants as threats to and pollutants of the “American” social body.

The growing body of racist classificatory systems enabled a kind of short cut for the screening process. The racial “clues” allowed inspectors to work faster, to read the immigrant bodies and discern their fitness with greater ease and (supposed) regularity. This kind of observational sorting is similar to another, earlier moment of invasive and racist screening, the process of buying slaves (a connection Behdad makes but does not explore, 133).

II.

In Soul By Soul, Walter Johnson provides a detailed and disturbing account of the way slave buyers sought to acquire and display the ability to read a slave’s body. Like the examiners at Ellis Island, slave buyers had to be quick studies, equipped with a vast array of racial and medical knowledge, and able to access that knowledge immediately. They had to move from “visible sign to invisible essence” (Johnson, 139), discerning the truth of the object through the power of their own observation. The slave’s body was broken down into a series of components: skin color, skin texture, hair color and texture, muscles, teeth, breasts, abdomen, eyes, feet, scars, callouses, etc. These parts were then analyzed and classified, arranged in a variety of ways in order to give the buyer a sense of the fitness of the slave--physical, as well as intellectual and moral. For example, a fainter complexion might mean illness if the rest of the body was darker; if the general skin tone was light, it could mean trouble in a male (combining masculine strength with white intelligence) but could be an asset in women, making them more suited for work in the house. Sometimes the slaves would be asked questions; their characters could supposedly be discerned not just from the content of the answer, but from the demeanor, the tone, and the way the answer was phrased. This preliminary examination could be, if desired, followed by a more thorough and private examination, where the slave would be stripped and examined, an examination that blurred the line between economic self-interest and erotic desire.

The observation of bodies was a display of mastery--both to other white men as well as to the slaves being sold. Under the eyes of his white audience, the slave buyers established a kind communal mastery, whereby the elevated slave was exposed, analyzed, and judged by the community of white men. The slave sellers and slave buyers competed with each other for mastery over the readability of black bodies. The sellers tried to disguise, and the buyers tried to uncover, the truth supposedly clearly written on the black bodies. Though the two parties might seem opposed, they actually worked together, for both the buyers and sellers contributed to an optics of mastery. They both created a spectacle in which white men were always the ones who saw the truth, and black people were the objects, the bodies, they read. Both slave buyers and sellers were invested in the creation and defense of this optics, whereby the white community saw and black bodies were seen, analyzed, and sorted. The theatrical spectacle of the slave auction produced a form of communal interaction, and even a community, whereby one group was brought together by the power of its vision (the white community) and another group was marked as the potential threat to this group, a threat that reinforced the need for this community to perfect its ability to see and discern the truth supposedly displayed on these bodies, and to exclude (or, more precisely, to break) those deemed unfit for this community’s use.

This kind of imprecise empirical knowledge, whereby slight physical clues are interpreted as signs of a hidden reality, not only stretches back from Ellis Island to the slave auction; it continues today at the immigration border. Immigration officials are taught to rely on a kind of tacit knowledge, through which they learn to detect when something is “off,” when reality is not corresponding to the perceived stereotypes. Race, national origin, class, gender, profession, clothing, and all other kinds of detailed information are used to sort immigrants into those who are acceptable and those who need further examination. For example, an INS (Immigration and Nationalization Service) employee noted that sweaty palms are an ambiguous sign; a young person from a Latin American country could be running drugs; whereas a European woman with the same condition might just be nervous. INS agents, like slave buyers, are invested with this “authority to interpret” (Behdad, 151). Their training and experience supposedly provide them with the knowledge through which they can accurately judge and organize the wide variety of details they perceive. In responses to questions, they are looking for faint traces of an accent, grammatical errors, bodily gestures, in short, any and all observable details that might betray a hidden secret and ensnare an undesirable immigrant. Also, like the slave buyers and the agents at Ellis Island, this racial and cultural knowledge is imprecise and does not frequently achieve its stated goal: unhealthy slaves get purchased, poor persons pass as wealthier immigrants, and criminals cross into the States without detection.

Though these practice of observation and reading bodies might not effectively curtail the admittance of an unwanted person, they do allow the display of a kind of observation power, a power that can read, examine, and probe the body and mind of the person being observed. Its failure to exclude all or even most unwanted immigrants (or slaves) only reinforces the necessity of this observational power: at the American borders today, on Ellis Island in the early 1900’s, and on the slave block in the antebellum period, the public body was under threat of being corrupted and undermined by its acceptance of undesirable persons and contaminated bodies. The very failure of the practices of observation only heightened the sense of the threat--these unwanted forces that threatened the economic, social, and racial health of the nation might actually get in. The undesirable immigrant--unhealthy, racially inferior, impoverished, and morally corrupt--is not stopped by the practice of observation but is in fact produced by those forms of knowledge: the most undesirable immigrant is not the one that is easily excluded, but the one who might sneak past, the one who could already be among us. The failure then, of racial observation (whether at the slave block, at Ellis Island, or on the border in post 9/11 America) actually helps reinforce a sense of urgent threat, a state of emergency. The policing of the slave and immigrant body helps establish the need to police the entire social body, for the government is invested in maintaining a healthy, pure, economically productive, and properly ordered social body. These undesirable persons could be here now, and the only way to preserve the health of the social body is to recruit all “legitimate” citizens to police the social body, looking for signs of aberrations, and making sure they themselves do not deviate from the healthy norm.

As a way of highlighting the connection between these three different historical stages, I want to note the way vision operates on all three scenes. At every stage, there is a community bound together by its power to see without being subjected to the gaze of those seen. The slave buyers see the slave but do not consider themselves open to be seen by the slave. The doctors on Ellis Island see and examine the poor, non-Anglo-Saxon immigrant, but they are not subjected to his or her sight. The border agents today see--and with the help of technology, become almost “all seeing”--without having to expose themselves to the other’s sight. It is not that the slave buyers or immigration officials are invisible; no, they are seen, and this visibility is important. They intend to be seen as those who see, as those who screen and are not subjected to this process of screening: they intend to be seen as those who see but are immune, unaffected, by the sight of others. Those they see are supposed to experience both the fact that they are seen and that their own sight is irrelevant--they are seen but have no power to see. Let me be clear: it is not that those who were seen did not have sight, or that they accepted the message that their sight was irrelevant. Slaves, for instance, found ways to draw attention to the “invisible” observer, to make these invulnerable spectators aware of their vulnerability to the slave’s sight. However, the slave market, Ellis Island, and the borders of America today, are designed to create the existence of two groups: those who are exposed (vulnerable to another’s sight) and those who see without vulnerability (who see without being themselves exposed). This attempt at invulnerable seeing is understood by its practitioners as essential to the vitality of the social body: without these practices of invulnerable seeing, and the exclusions this sight allows, the social body would be infiltrated by corrupting forces (the bad slave and the bad immigrant). The very life of the nation is understood to depend on these exclusionary optics--the undesirable immigrant must be made visible--and made to submit to visibility--so as to be prevented from contaminating the American social body.

III.

With this long history of visual interrogation and exclusion in mind, let us turn to the familiar story of the Good Samaritan. In Luke, the story of the Good Samaritan follows the “testing” of Jesus by a lawyer. In a public setting, the lawyer stands up and challenges Jesus, asking what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus responds with a question--what is written in the law? The lawyer responds that we should love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind, and that we should love our neighbor as ourselves. Both are quotations from the law, so they answer Jesus’ question, and in a way that is so accurate that Jesus says, you’re right; if you do it, you will live. Not satisfied with this answer, the lawyer then asks--wanting to justify himself, as Luke says--well, who is my neighbor? Jesus replies with the story of the Good Samaritan.

The question, who is my neighbor, seems to be a legitimate one. In fact, we often read the story as giving a straightforward answer to the question, telling us that our neighbor is the one who needs us, or is in fact anyone and everyone. But given that Luke states that the question is asked by one who was “testing” Jesus and who wanted to “justify himself,” we should be hesitant to take the story as a simple answer to the question. As Karl Barth, a 20th century theologian, wrote regarding the lawyer’s question, “If he had no wish to justify himself, he would know the commandments in that case, and he would then know who is his neighbor, and everything else that has to be known at this point” (CD I/2, 418). The question--who is my neighbor--is a failed question, not because the answer is obviously universal (everyone is your neighbor, stupid) but because it reveals a wrong mindset, a mindset focused on self-justification.

Before we start to harp on some supposed “Jewish” tendency to misuse the law, or think that they could “earn” grace, let us feel the weight of the question. Given the history of slavery and immigrant exclusions, don’t you want to be able to get the right answer, to know who is your neighbor? Don’t you want to be able to ask--and answer--the question, who should we let immigrate? Given the obvious failures, don’t you want to make sure we get this right? I want to be welcoming, to be hospitable, to show love to my neighbor--just tell me who my neighbor is and I’ll start. Before we preach against some supposed Jewish legalism, let us appreciate how much we want to, and how often we actually do, ask that question. It is a question that stems from the desire to get it right and act accordingly. It is precisely this question that the story of the Good Samaritan takes away from us. Jesus takes away from us the question, how do I make sure I get it right, how do I ensure that I am (and know that I am) a good neighbor.

Immediately after asking the question, who is my neighbor, the lawyer is told a story in which a man is going from Jerusalem to Jericho, and falls into the hands of robbers. As the story continues to unfold, it becomes clear that this fallen man is not my neighbor but the one who needs a neighbor. Let me restate this point, because we often miss it. The lawyer asked Jesus to tell him who his neighbor is, not how he ought to be a good neighbor. Jesus answers the question--who is my neighbor--with the story of the Good Samaritan. The neighbor, therefore is not the one who needs me, but the one who gives me help. The lawyer had not asked a generic question--what defines “a neighbor,” but a specific question--who is my neighbor. Maybe it dawned on the lawyer, maybe it didn’t, but it should dawn on us that when Jesus tells us that our neighbor is the one who gives us help, we are being asked to identify ourselves not with the Samaritan, but with the fallen man, the one who is stripped, beaten, robbed, and then left “half dead.”

The first move to undo this self-justifying question is to remind the lawyer--and us readers--that we are half dead. The self-justifying question, who is my neighbor, presupposes that we are in a position of power, that we are able to see who our neighbor is and help accordingly. The question “who is my neighbor” is not a question on the lips of the half-dead. If we are able to say anything at all--and given that we are half-dead, it is not clear that we are able--it is simply the words, “help me.” The inquiry regarding the identity of our neighbor--who is my neighbor--is the inquiry of someone who has forgotten that he or she is half-dead. Jesus takes the question--how can I be a good neighbor--away from us by reminding us that we need the good neighbor, for we are half dead and forgotten on the side of the road.

Jesus continues the story, for we--the lawyer and ourselves, the half dead people--are told that two people pass us by. We lie, helpless, and those we think will come to our assistance, our own people, the devout, the religious persons, a priest and then a Levite, walk on by. The priest and the Levite not only leave us, they cross the street to avoid us. Jesus pays no attention to their motive; the only clue we get is that Jesus does mention the motive of the Samaritan. The priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan all “saw” us--we’ll return to this vision--but only the Samaritan was “moved with pity.” The other two, by contrast, apparently, were not moved by pity by the sight...of us, the half dead lying on the ground, covered in our own blood and filth.

Not only are we half-dead, but our own fellow citizens and religious community pass us by. They see us, but not with pity; they see us with horror, perhaps with disgust, or perhaps with fear of becoming unclean (after all, those who touch a corpse are ceremonially unclean and we certainly look dead). Regardless, not only are we half-dead, but we are without any seemingly natural community to help us. The proud Jewish lawyer--and we proud 21st century American Christians--are being told that not only are we half dead but our community will not come to our aid.

But then, along comes the samaritan, “the foreigner,” (Barth, 418), the one who we’ve excluded and who likewise excludes us, the one from whom no help should be expected. This one shows us mercy, and therefore, according to the story, this one is our neighbor.

The early church understood this to be a story first and foremost about Jesus. Jesus is telling the lawyer about himself--Jesus is the neighbor, the good samaritan. Jesus, the one we’ve exposed to a rigorous, public examination, the one whose truth we’ve tried to read through our powerful questions, this one who’ve we stood up to test and before whom we seek to display our righteousness, this one is the one we need. Jesus is the Good Samaritan. He is the one we need, who comes to us in the form we do not want, the form of a samaritan, an outsider, someone who is near to us, but still foreign, and so someone we think ought to be forcefully excluded. God comes to us half dead persons in that form, in the form of the one who ought to be excluded. He comes to us and tells us--you are half dead and only I, because of my goodness, would even stop to take the time to pity you, and help you. Only I would pour out my wine and oil--my blood and my life--to save you.

Jesus then asks us, the lawyer, “which of these three”--the priest, the levite, and the samaritan--was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers? Jesus asks us--you, who think you can justify yourself, who is your neighbor? We answer, along with the lawyer, the one who showed him mercy. Our answer shows we’ve still missed it.

If we hear the story, and identify with man who fell into the hands of the robbers, then the answer to our question is not an abstract, “the one who showed him mercy,” but a concrete, “the samaritan,” meaning, you, Jesus, you are my neighbor. You are the one who took pity and did not cross to the other side to avoid the taint of our sin and our death. You stepped over to us, pouring out your oil and wine on our wounds, and then promising to pay whatever it will take to save us from death. You Jesus, are my neighbor, and I live only by your mercy.

But we do not want to live by that mercy. We do not want to hear that we are half-dead and pitiable, that even our fellow citizens would pass us by if they saw us in this state. We do not want to be exposed--to be seen--as weak, vulnerable, disfigured, helpless, and near death. We do not want to hear that we can only live by God’s merciful pity, his condescension and his unwarranted sacrifice. We do not want to hear that we do not recognize the God we profess to love; we do not want to hear that the God who saves us will be seen by us as a samaritan, as the one we think we ought to avoid. Like the lawyer, we want to justify ourselves, we want to be good neighbors, to have the knowledge and ability to fulfill what is required of us. We do not want to live by mercy.

Jesus ends the story by saying to the lawyer--to us--“go and do likewise.” It’s an answer to a question we didn’t ask. We never asked how do I act like a good neighbor; we asked who is our neighbor. Jesus knows what we meant, and so he tells us, go and do like the good samaritan, show mercy. But this is not any person saying this; it is Jesus who says this, and Jesus says this after the parable, after he has destroyed our attempt to justify ourselves. Go and do likewise now means, simply, come follow me (Barth, 419). The question, who is my neighbor, has been taken from us--for we now see it is a stupid question to ask when we are half dead and in desperate need of help. Only now, after having been told the truth of who we are, are we told to go and do likewise--only now, if he have ears to hear, do we hear Christ’s words: come follow me, the Good Samaritan, the one whom you did not know and did not want to know, the dangerous foreigner, the one who crosses your boundaries and sees you in your helplessness, and yet has mercy.

IV.

This story of the Good Samaritan disrupts the practices of exclusion and the optics of invulnerability that mark the slave auction, Ellis Island, and the continued policing of our borders and entry points today. I want to draw out more clearly a few of the way Jesus is leading us to see, and love, our neighbor in a different way.

First, Jesus makes clear that we have nothing to offer to show that we ought to belong. Let us place ourselves back in those first and second class cabins. The health inspectors were not closely examining our health, unless we showed signs of not belonging, of not performing--looking, acting, talking, dressing, etc--like persons of this class. In these cabins, we were assumed to belong--to this class, and hence to the nation--as long as we dutifully fulfilled our role, as long as we showed we were worthy, that is, as long as we demonstrated that we were not like those in the steerage class. We, unlike those steerage types, are healthy, wealthy, articulate, strong, hard workers, intelligent, and, of the right heritage (racially and culturally). To those of us who have been formed into this class and given this pressure to distinguish ourselves as successful, and hence truly belonging, Jesus says--you are half dead. You have nothing to offer. Your own community will pass you by--for you are helpless, you are a sinner, you are damaged and near death. Every time you try to distinguish yourself as worthy of belonging, you have to hide yourself and exclude others; you have to try to become unseen and invulnerable masters over other people. But Jesus sees you, he sees that you are empty and half dead, and he has pity. He comes to help. Do not hide yourself, do not try to distinguish yourself and cover up your vulnerability, for in so doing, you might end up excluding the one who has come to your assistance, the good samaritan, Jesus Christ.

Secondly, if our salvation depends on Jesus’ compassionate sight, and Jesus comes to us in the form of the Samaritan, then our salvation depends on our visibility. Once we have been freed from the need to prove our ability to belong, Jesus allows us to live without attempting to appear invulnerable. We can be seen by others because we know that we have been seen--in our sinfulness--and not excluded. What the Good Samaritan makes clear, though, is that Jesus does not offer us the easy way out. The ones we would like to see us in our weakness--the priests of our own community--walk on by. The one we want to exclude, the Samaritan, is the one who sees us and has pity. Jesus is telling us that we cannot just drop the mask for those we accept, those we have already welcomed into our community. Jesus tells us that we must drop the mask and expose ourselves to those we want to exclude. We have no choice. We are half dead and need to be seen. We are willing to be exposed because our only hope is that someone will see us and have pity. It just may be the undocumented worker, the unhealthy immigrant, or the ungrateful refugee will be the person God uses to remind us that we are seen, and loved, even in our brokenness.

Thirdly, not only are we called to be seen, we are no longer able to read the body of the other. The invitation to follow Jesus is an invitation to live by faith and not by sight. If Jesus comes to us in an unexpected and hidden way--in the form of a Samaritan--then I can no longer trust my sight. I cannot trust in my ability to note the style of clothing, the skin color, the hair cut, the body posture, the accent, and all the other details I use to try to “classify” the one I see; I cannot trust that my attention to these details will lead me correctly, for Christ comes to me in the form of one I would want to--we would all want to, and did--exclude. We must now give up the desire to discern the truth of a person from his or her external markings. It is not how one appears to me that determines who is my neighbor; it is how God chooses to use them. My neighbor testifies to me that, although I ought to be excluded and passed over, God has seen me in my misery, and had compassion. My neighbor witnesses to Christ’s mercy, and I can never tell by appearances who Christ will use to bring me this witness. However, I can be confident that it is not the person I would expect. I will be told of Christ’s mercy by those I would prefer didn’t see my misery, by those I would like to exclude, by those I think threaten me and my community. And if this is the case, then I cannot try to move from my vision of a person’s body to the truth of who they are. I cannot classify them, for I know that my systems of classification would exclude the one I need the most, the Good Samaritan, Jesus Christ. I must see differently, no longer reading the truth on their body, but exposing myself to their sight, and letting them speak to me who they are, and who I am to them.

Fourth, we never leave this position of dependence and vulnerability. In the story, the Good Samaritan entrusts us to the inn-keeper; telling him he will come and pay for whatever it took to bring us back to health. Christ came to us by mercy, and it is on the basis of this mercy that we continue to live. We never move beyond our neediness; we never move beyond our dependency on Christ. Therefore, we must live prayerfully, asking Jesus to come again to us who are half-dead. We have seen that by following the Good Samaritan, we do not need to prove we are worthy of belonging, we are free to be seen, and we cannot try to discern a person’s essence by looking at their body. If this is the case, then following the Good Samaritan means we are left in a state of exposure. We are willing to let ourselves be exposed, to let our sinfulness be seen. We do not try to protect ourselves by securing our place on the inside. We do not strive to maintain the health and purity of our community by excluding those we think will damage its well being. We allow ourselves to be exposed, continually, and therefore, we depend, continually, on signs that God is with us in our vulnerability. We must always live by Christ’s mercy; we keep our eyes open, praying that we will see Christ, even when Christ comes to us in an unexpected form. Every time our eyes gaze upon another’s appearance, every time we want to mark them as unfit and unwelcome, Jesus calls us to slow down, to turn to prayer, and to ask where Jesus is with this person, and to beg Jesus to speak to us through this person. We cannot sustain our own lives; our existence depends on God’s faithfulness. The parable of the Good Samaritan reminds us that it the one we think we should exclude who might be Christ’s messenger. We do not know beforehand, and cannot know, and so we pray that God would give us welcoming eyes and receptive ears, to listen to the words of the one we want to force outside of our community.

By way of conclusion, I want to mention how working with refugees fits within this picture. I have been speaking of immigration in general, but I work at World Relief, at a refugee resettlement agency. In this work, I find myself--and the churches I work with--exposed to the temptation to justify ourselves. Refugees can easily become useful signs to show how righteous we are. Through them, we (and our country) can affirm ourselves as “good neighbors.” They are welcomed in as those who reinforce our own sense of our hospitality; and they are given the pressure to measure up, to distinguish themselves, as worthy of belonging. Hopefully, it is clear to you why I think that is a problem. Working with refugees can help bring to light these sinful patterns in our lives, and to let us follow Jesus into a different way of being with others.

The question we have to ask is not whether we want refugees here but whether it matter to us that they are here. Refugees are coming, and the complicated motivations that lead our nation to accept them aren’t really relevant to us. What is at stake for us is whether we care. Working with refugees has the possibility of disrupting our lives, of forcing us to see and be seen in different ways. We cannot rely on our normal habits and patterns--these are people we do not know, whose language we do not share, and who are forced to do something most of us have never done, namely, rebuild new lives in exile. Some of our instincts, we will learn, stem from a long and sinful history that shapes our identities; our instinct to evaluate refugees, to see who will measure up either by working hard or being grateful for our beneficence, is something that Jesus will challenge. Other times, Jesus will use what we know or are coming to know as a way to witness to his love for these new arrivals. It might be as simple as looking them in the eye, or trying to learn a word in their own language--small things that affirm they are more than just problems or potential threats, and that we are willing to open up our lives to them. No matter what, working with refugees will shape who you are--they will shape who you are. If what I’ve said about the Good Samaritan is right, then it might just be the case that what you will hear and see through these refugees is the good news on which your life depends. It will no doubt come to you in an unexpected way; but we live by faith in the promise that it will come, that he will come, to us, and bring us back to life.

Strangers Welcoming Strangers: reflections on Matthew 25:31-46

2009-11-27T16:17:00.011-05:00

I spent this Thanksgiving with my uncle; we are the closest family he has (a four hour drive away), my aunt (his wife) having died a couple years ago and his son (my cousin) spending the holidays in jail. It's a long story, the details of which don't need to be divulged. For my uncle, what mattered was that he was still able to share the Thanksgiving meal with family. It also helps that he loves food and Skyler (my wife) is an amazing cook.

The holidays bring with them an increased awareness of family. However, for me, this focus on family began a couple months ago, in relation to my work with refugees. Familial relationships matter in working with refugees. Some refugees have left their families to flee; some have family members who are in "no contact," meaning, for instance, that a brother left the Bhutanese refugee work to find work in India and has not been heard from since he left, three years ago. The government regulates how we house families (how old children can be before they must be in "same gender" bedrooms...I'll withhold comments on this governmental investment in constructing "proper" familial structures).

A few months ago, I met with a refugee who has been in the U.S. for many years now and is working on an masters degree in refugee public health issues. He told me about how, when he came, he had a family member here to welcome him and help him navigate the complexities of adjusting to life in the U.S. We talked about how much harder it is for refugees who have no family, no one to welcome them, and how we both wished the church would become family to these refugees and welcome them.

I've started using this discussion, coupled with a few verses from Matthew 25 ("I was a stranger and you welcomed me"), to begin my orientation with new churches and volunteers. Every time I do it, though, I feel dishonest. I know the scripture is more complicated than I make it seem.

For instance, Jesus never tells us to seek him in the stranger (or sick, hungry, thirsty, naked, or imprisoned). Nor does Jesus ever promise that we will see him in these people. In fact, the story of judgment presupposes that those who served these people did not know they served Jesus, nor were they expecting to find Jesus there at all. Those who ignored these people likewise did not know who they were ignoring.

What bothers me the most, however, is that the story is not about generic individuals but about two peoples, "the nations" (v. 32) and the king's "family" (lit. "my brothers," v. 40), Gentiles and Jews.

The image of the shepherd separating the people comes from Ezekiel 34, where the prophet rages against the "shepherds" of Israel, who not only neglected the sheep (failing to strengthen, feed, heal, search, find, and guide the sheep) but actually fed on the sheep (v. 4-8). God will reject these shepherds (v. 10) and will come and be the shepherd (v. 11) of these scattered and abused people (Israel). In this process, Israel will "no longer suffer the insults of the nations. They shall know that I, the LORD their God, am with them, and that they, the house of Israel, are my people" (29-30).

Given this background, the strangers, hungry, sick, and imprisoned should be seen as specifically the scattered and abused people of Israel, Jesus' "brothers," or, as Paul puts it in Romans 9 (an important text to keep in the back of our minds here), "my brothers according to the flesh."

Matthew 25, then, retells a story about Israel's failed leaders, God's assumption of that leadership, and the people of Israel being rescued from these poor leaders and the abusive nations into which they were sent. If this is the case, then Jesus' retelling of Ezekiel's story of judgment implies that the most important thing we do is not taking care of our own people, or of all generic people, but of this particular people, the people of God, Israel. Our service to, or neglect of, the least of Israel determines our status before God. To neglect Israel is to neglect Israel's King, and hence to neglect God. Likewise, to serve Israel (the lowliest among them) is to serve Israel's King, and hence to serve God.

If this were all Jesus meant, then it would be surprising that, upon finishing this story, Jesus is compelled to talk about his crucifixion (26:2) and the leaders begin conspiring to kill him (26:3). What is so scandalous is Jesus' assertion that he is this Son of Man (a term he uses for himself throughout Matthew), and thus that Jesus is the embodiment of God's rule, the replacement of the false shepherds ("chief priests and elders" 26:3), and the one through whom Israel and the nations will be blessed. Those who serve him by serving the lost sheep of Israel will "inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world" (25:34). Jesus has the audacity to declare not just what will happen at the end of time but that he is the one who determines what will happen. Jesus does not just see what will happen; he is what will happen. He is the kingdom, the true ruler, the one who has authority to declare the truth of the end times.

Scripture often plays with the tension between the hidden and revealed, the present age and the age to come. This passage pushes that tension further: for it reveals the basis of judgment that was hidden until the time of judgment. Neither the sheep nor the goats thought that their salvation hinged on what they did with the least of Jesus' family. Both are surprised--the basis of judgment was hidden from them until the time of judgment. But in the story, in which the basis of judgment is only revealed at the time of judgement, the basis of judgment becomes unveiled before the time of judgment. Unlike the sheep or the goats in the story, we are explicitly told that our judgment depends on serving Jesus through the service to lowly Israel. Through Jesus, we now know what he teaches nobody knew until the time of judgment.

In the story, we are never told why the "righteous" served the lowly of Israel. By telling us--Gentiles!--the basis of judgment, Jesus provides us with a new way of seeing our action. We, the nations, are not left in the dark but are allowed to see the truth of our actions. In Jesus, we outsiders are welcomed into the family of God; in Jesus, we are given access to what has been promised to Israel, the blessings of God's kingdom. In Jesus, we see that we are in fact bound to Israel, and hence welcomed into the eternal life prepared by Jesus' Father.

We have no right to hear what Jesus says. We have no right to know about eternal life, or judgment. We have nothing of our own that would make us legitimate heirs. We are reminded at the beginning that we are the nations, those into whom Israel was scattered and by whom Israel was trampled. As these people, the sinful nations, we are now reordered and called into service. We are told to do what we did not know we ought to do--serve God's people, Israel. We are told to believe what was beyond our knowledge--that Jesus is the Messiah of Israel, and hence the ruler of the whole world. We are welcomed, now, to do what was beyond our ability to do--to love (and not seek to destroy) the elect people of God. No longer are the scattered and rebuked people of Israel a sign of our rejection (even their judgment testifies to the fact that they are, and we are not, the people of God). In Jesus, we see that these people are a sign of our hope. In Jesus, we see that they are not a sign of our rejection but a sign of God's gracious presence to us. In Jesus, we who were "far off" see that we are no longer "foreigners to the covenants of the promise" (Eph 2). Jesus tells us what we had no right or ability to know--that we are bound to Israel, to Israel's King, and hence to the true God of all creation.

It is through our call to welcome scattered Israel that we are also called to welcome the strangers among us, for me specifically, refugees. We approach the refugees, however, not as those on the inside who are gracious enough to welcome them in. We approach them through the knowledge that we ourselves are strangers bound to a people who are not our own, Israel. Our lives are not just open and receptive, capable of accommodating (and assimilating) the "aliens" in our midst. Our lives exceed our control, overflowing our own boundaries. In being bound to Israel, our existence is ecstatic, standing outside of itself. We do not need to guard our own identity; it is already mixed. By being bound to Israel, we are free to be all things to all people: we have nothing at stake in being a pure people, in having a distinct identity, in being peculiar or noteworthy. We have no ability to control or shape our identity; we are bound to another people and told that this binding is an act of grace. We believe, and thus we serve the lowly in Israel, and through this service, we find our lives flowing out into the lives of those around us, to those who are strangers among us, including refugees.

Serving refugees reminds us that our lives are not just supposed to be open but ecstatic, not just receptive but transgressive ("stepping across"). We are called to live in an uncomfortable exchange, a series of flows and leakages. Our lives are to be marked by seepage, by moments that escape our own confines, and we find our own lives strangely intermixed with those beyond our normal boundaries. We do not need to distinguish ourselves from anyone else, for we have already been marked as strangers welcomed into the household of God and therefore we know that nothing is alien to us. The most ungrateful and belligerent refugee is not our project but our brother or sister, another Gentile, a fellow foreigner, called by Jesus into the blessings of God's people, Israel. We welcome them as family, as one who like us has been called and bound to another people, the Israel of God. We welcome the stranger not just because we were strangers but because Jesus continually calls to become strange again, to recognize and rejoice in our status as foreigners blessed in Israel through Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of Man, the creator of heaven and earth.

with thanks to Micah D., for his friendly critiques.

Mexican and Arabic Bread

2009-11-22T20:48:00.008-05:00

I keep looking up syllabuses online, using google to search for things like "race and u.s. immigration syllabus" or "refugees and american cultural studies syllabus." I want to find the right books, ones that will help me theorize the connections between imperialism, racism, immigration, assimilation, gender, etc. I work with refugees; in fact, I often work with white churches, trying to help them work with refugees. I should also say I work in the South.

A week ago, I woke up at 7 am in a panic. I had a day off and I wasn't stressed by the amount of work I still had to do. I was stressed by the kind of work I was doing. I thought to myself, "my job is to help white southern churches establish paternalistic relationships with refugees." I had been listening to Timothy Tyson's __Blood Done Sign My Name__, a memoir set within a larger portrait of the history of racism in North Carolina. At one point in the book, he describes white middle class Christians who felt good about themselves and their charity as long as the African-Americans displayed the appropriate gratitude. They gave, out of their abundance ("blessed to be a blessing," some might say). They gave in a way that made them feel better about themselves while simultaneously masking the violence that structured white-black relations (and also produced the wealth, the blessing, out of which they gave). The white benefactors could feel good about being on top because they were generous and were "well liked" by their black servants. The charity actually served as an attempt to restore the fact of mastery ("they" depend on my kindness) while hiding its violence. It was a violent charity, so to speak, and I woke up fearing I was producing a new form of it, no longer with African-Americans but with newly arriving, dark skinned refugees.

My response was not surprising: initial shock, and then, research. I could see that race, immigration, assimilation, American culture, Christianity, gender, and imperialism were all somehow tied together. I knew that one could not talk about refugees without talking about the history of American immigration (which cannot be understood apart from race, gender, and imperialism). But I wanted help in seeing how it all worked together. I wasn't seeking knowledge to gain simple mastery; I wanted to know because I wanted to help others--and myself--to move beyond it. I didn't want my work with churches to become another form of violent charity. But perhaps I'm still a bit too much of the academic, thinking that books are the solution to everything.

On this past Friday, a little over a week after my terrifying realization, I was driving an Iraqi refugee home. He often helps me move heavy furniture (though he refuses, as do I, to move any more of those $10 dressers we found). We've become friends--he's now been to my apartment and met "my family" (he laughed, likening our dog and our cat to "tom and jerry"). On Friday, as I was driving him home, he asked if we could stop by a Mexican bakery. Apparently, Mexican bread is pretty similar to Arabic bread and he wanted to pick up a few roles. We pulled into the parking lot; I advised him before he stepped out to make sure he didn't walk into any potholes filled with water. I sat in the car while he ran into the store, obviously hurrying, either to make sure he made it in before the store closed or so as to minimize the inconvenience for me.

He came out of the store with a couple of bags of bread; I thought it was a bit excessive (he doesn't live too far from the bakery, he could certainly come back in a few days). He got into the car, tied one of the bags closed, and then pushed it by my backpack in the backseat: "This is for you, Tim." I have worked with him enough to know not to argue. He is on food stamps and cash assistance, still waiting for us to help him find work. Yet every time I come to pick him to help me move furniture, he insists that I first sit down and drink juice. If I refuse, he will insist.

I wanted to offer him money but I knew that would only insult him. I thanked him for it. And I thought to myself, I am so stingy, I am so dominated by fears of scarcity that I would never think of doing that. Both my wife and I work, and I would probably debate whether to spend a couple of bucks to buy someone bread just to see if they like it. I have to force myself to offer my favorite teas to guests instead of being thrilled to share with them something that I love. It's not just a deficiency in the "spiritual gift" of hospitality. My imagination has been thoroughly shaped by ideas of scarcity and self-preservation.

Though it is enormously frustrating, I don't know how much time I will have to read all the good books I found. However, that one interaction with my refugee friend taught me a lot about immigration and assimilation. Though I don't know how race, gender, and imperialism shape the way we think about immigration and assimilation, I pray that my friend will resist all our efforts to make him a "self-sufficient" individualist. I pray that he will continue to disrupt the ways in which we--at least I--so often live in the mode of fearful self-preservation (a fear which is, I think, connected to forms of mastery, for fearful self-preservation only makes sense if I am still under the illusion that my life, and the world around me, are in some way under my control). I needed that witness; I needed to be given a few Mexican rolls that apparently taste like Arabic bread (and tasted to me a lot like standard dinner rolls). It was an act of charity that had no trace of violence; and for that, and for the rolls, I am grateful.

Foreign in a Domestic Sense

2009-10-08T18:58:00.013-04:00

Two days ago, I went to a food bank for the first time in my life. I was so new I hadn't even considered that there might be a line. There was, and since I arrived right when it opened, I was at the very end.

I stood there, silent. Some people talked to one another; two women who hadn't seen each other in a while started catching up. A man sat in the shade, away from the line, waiting for the door to open. I thought he had the right idea. Even though it was October and the morning looked like it would rain, the clouds kept pulling back, letting the sun heat up the air. I wondered how quickly the line would move, and whether I should have put on sunblock. My poor, fair, white skin--it burns so quickly.

I was the only white man there and one of three white people. I saw one of the women accompany another person inside--a caseworker. I remember thinking, people who oppose affirmative action and want "race neutral" criteria should stand in this line. Being "color blind" just turns a blind eye to the reality that our country is still deeply shaped and scarred by racism.

I was not there with a client. But I was not picking up food for myself. Eight refugees from Congo (they had fled to Gabon) needed food. The previous week, one of them had told me they had no more food; I gave him some money and then 20 minutes later found out from the landlord he had been looking for a ride to buy wine the day before. He found one, apparently, and now had wine but no more money and no more food. So I was there, standing in line, waiting to get my bag.

Ever since I joined an AMIA church (Anglican Mission in America), I've been bothered by a simple observation: we are a nearly all-white church under the leadership of an African church (the Rwandan Anglican church). Working at World Relief (refugee resettlement) has only made that question more intense: why are predominantly white churches eager to make space for Africans and Burmese Christians, yet often detached from Hispanic and African-American congregations? The question took on a more subtle emphasis while I stood waiting: what am I doing, standing here in line, disconnected from the African-American congregations all around me, picking up food to help an African family?

The African family speaks French; only the dad speaks a little English. It makes having a conversation quite difficult but between my broken, high school french, lots of gestures, and repetition we manage. At least I think we do. Yet I could not think of anything to say to the two men standing next to me in line. Later in the day, in a different line, I joined in the common conversation, telling what food banks I had been to that day, whether there were lines, and learning where I should go if I still needed more food. The time went much faster than when I stood in the first line--my first time in a line--struggling to think of something to say to my neighbors.

I started a book--I know, a surprise--called "The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture," by Amy Kaplan. The first chapter is titled "Manifest Domesticity," and looks at the way "domestic space" and "foreign space" are intimately connected (as she puts it in the last sentence of the chapter, "'Manifest Domesticity' turns an imperial nation into a home by producing and colonizing specters of the foreign that lurk inside and outside its ever-shifting borders," p. 50). She begins the book through a discussion of a famous case regarding Puerto Rico's status as neither a full-fledged state, nor a sovereign nation. It was, as the case said, "foreign in a domestic sense." Strange, but close to home.

I had read that introduction the day before I went to the food bank. It didn't help me find something to say, but it gave me a new way to approach the questions I had been asking since I started at World Relief. It's often easier for white people, like myself, to strike up new ground with foreign foreigners, Africans or Burmese, than with those who are "foreign in a domestic sense." As I stood in line, I knew I was connected to the other people in the line, that my story intersected theirs in very real ways. But I can't tell that story. I've been trained to ignore it--and it has taken the patience and kindness of others to help me realize that much. But I've also been raised to be the master narrator, to tell the story--sing the song--of myself and all others. I've been raised to think that all other stories fit within my own and that I am capable of telling a story that includes them all. But there, in that line, I could not figure out what to say. I needed someone else to begin the story, to start the conversation, so that I could finally speak.

Perhaps we, white American Christians, find it easier to go to Africa than to the African-American church in our own city (perhaps even in our own neighborhood) because we feel we can start fresh there. It's easier to pretend (please note the emphasis on pretend, fantasize, imagine) that our interaction is fresh, that it is free from a long horrible history of violence and injustice. We can engage in dialogue--mutually beneficial dialogue--because we (think we) know what we ought to say. We can speak of "cultural differences" because the boundaries seem clear: Rwanda is foreign in a foreign sense (which, as Kaplan will argue, isn't actually as foreign as we think--but it is still easy to see it that way). The African-American congregation who hosted the food bank and let me stand in line is certainly much closer to home.

Jesus calls us Gentiles to join a people who are not our own, to let another people tell our own story for us, and to realize that we only know God as guests in another house (for the stark presentation of it, read Mark 7.24-30). I felt something of how uncomfortable that can be.

In the 1930's, Karl Barth wrote that "salvation means alienation, and 'salvation is of the Jews' (Jn. 4.22). And because people will not be alienated even for their own salvation, they roll away the alienation on to the Jew" (CD I/2, 511). Salvation, according to Barth, means something like becoming foreign in a domestic sense. If that is so, then my hope for salvation is in fact deeply connected to the African-American, Hispanic and other "domestically foreign" congregations around me. I depend on them to continue to confront me with the good news of alienation--and I hope that Jesus will graciously prevent me from rolling away that alienation onto others. I depend on them to teach me just how far my alienation must go. And I depend on them to continue to show me that even, or precisely, in this liminal space, Jesus offers a joy so deep it will outlast and finally heal the deepest wounds, even the wounds sustained by being marked as foreign in a domestic sense (let us not forget that crucifixion was reserved for domestic foreigners, non-citizens under Roman rule).

On Faith and Doubt

2009-09-20T18:53:00.009-04:00

Thursday evening, Skyler (my wife) went to a healing service--not an Anglican, Book of Common Prayer type of service, but a charismatic, revivalist type of service. I stayed home, tired, still trying to adjust to my new job and not wanting to be around any more people.

The service, apparently, was one of the best she has ever been to--and Skyler has been to a lot of these kinds of events. The speaker told some typical stories about healing but changed the script when it came to the actual healing portion. Instead of calling out certain people to come up and receive prayer from himself, the speaker started bringing up people from the audience to pray for sick people. It was, I think, an important reminder that it is God who heals the sick, not the charismatic leader. Skyler said she saw a small, quiet woman who had never received a "word of knowledge" get a picture of a 50 year old man with a throat problem. The speaker asked if this picture described anyone in the audience, and an older gentleman walked up to the stage, untied the bandana around his neck, and revealed to everyone a tube going into his throat. The speaker then asked the woman to pray for the man, in her own words. The woman gently placed her hand on the man's forehead, asked that God would heal this man, and immediately, he falls backwards (into the arms of the body catchers required at any charismatic service).

As Skyler was telling me, I started joking that it was an elaborate ruse--you know, where the speaker plants a couple of people in the audience to help make a dramatic presentation. I didn't actually doubt the prayer service; it just seemed humorous to describe the service as well-scripted hoax. It reminded me of a Flannery O'Connor novel, Wise Blood, which describes the desperate and ultimately unsuccessful attempt of a young man, Hazel Motes, to lose his faith. One of the main characters in the story is a street preacher who pretends to be blind, Asa Hawks, or, more accurately, pretends to have blinded himself, which he had promised to do as an act to "justify" his faith, to demonstrate his devotion. Only, on the night of the event, he preached on the blindness of St. Paul, poured wet lime on his face, but never managed to get it in his eyes. He spent the following years pretending he succeeded, roaming the streets as a blind evangelist.

Saturday, two days after Skyler's experiences at the healing service, I sat drinking coffee with a friend I hadn't seen in a few years. After doing the normal "what have you been up to, what are you planning to do, and do you still keep up with this person from our shared past," we started speaking more openly about how we were actually doing. She shared with me that she hasn't opened her Bible in over a year, that she had been in a really unhealthy relationship, and that for the first time in her life, she finds herself doubting God. I sat across from her, sipping my coffee, praying desperately that God would give me something helpful to say. I couldn't think of anything that wasn't trite, superficial, or downright insulting. So I just told her that. I told her that I wished I could find a way to bring some healing to those wounds, to lessen her pain, to help her see Jesus in this mess, but there wasn't time and my words would be insufficient. We talked some more, about doubt, about God, and about our lives. I finally told her I thought she was angry at Jesus and that if there is anyone it is safe to be angry with, it's Jesus. Jesus has a peculiar ability to enter right into our anger, our despair, our doubt, and our outright disbelief.

When people doubt God and seem to be about to "lose their faith," we normally panic. We try to diagnose the problem as quick as we can, and then find the solution. It's urgent--their salvation is at stake. We start quoting them our favorite Christian slogans; perhaps we buy them some books on Christian apologetics, or, we tell them that their doubts are only an intellectual veneer covering a deeper, more personal matter. It's not that the beliefs are now questionable; they are just angry, or selfish, or scared, or determined to sin and so they shut out God with these intellectual defense mechanisms. To us, the doubter is a problem, to themselves, and to us. We need to fix them, or help them fix themselves--fast.

It's a humorous response, when it isn't actually harmful. It's humorous because we ought to know better. The moment we see doubt, we panic, and lose all of our theological sense. We start acting as if faith were our own intellectual commitment, the product of our will, a result of our ethical behavior. We start acting as if faith wasn't a gift from God, completely out of hands and beyond our control. We start demanding that the doubter believe even though we know that No one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:3).

Ten years after Wise Blood was published, the second edition came out, with no changes except the addition of a single paged preface. She mentions that many interpreters found Hazel Mote's integrity to lie "in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind [Christ]. For the author Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to."

It is his incapacity, his inability to get rid of Christ, that defines Hazel Motes. His faith is not some heroic work but an event that occurs to him, something he endures and even resists, but something he cannot escape.

There is a lot of theological debate regarding whether it is "faith in Christ" or the "faithfulness of Christ" that is central to Paul's theology (in passages like Gal. 2:15-21). I think it might not be as big of an issue as we think. Perhaps our faith is not something we produce, whether on our own or through grace. Perhaps it is closer to something that occurs to us. It is not our act, but a continual disruption of our lives. It is not an ability, but an inability. Even in our doubt, we find the obnoxious, ragged figure of Christ flitting about. Jesus isn't disturbed or bothered by our doubt, disbelief, or rebellious sin. He has placed himself on that path, becoming sin for us, so that we no longer have anywhere to hide from him. He entered into our damnation--as the Apostle's Creed says, he descended to hell--so that, even at what would seem to be the place furthest from God, hell, we would still find God. His faithfulness to us produces our faith: he continually shows that we no longer have any place to hide from God. We have no way out, no escape; faith is simply the recognition that even our path away from God is precisely the path on which Christ encounters us. It's not our triumph, but Christ's: it is a gift, that is, grace.

And so, to my doubting friend, after some thought, what I would like to say, is simply, that it's okay. Jesus can handle your doubts. And my prayer is that you would know Jesus is with you in your doubts, and that you are not alone, even there, even in the loneliness, even in the anger, even in the disbelief. I pray that you, and me, would see that our faith is not the outworking of our inner resolve but the result of Christ's refusal to be without us. Faith is not a boundary marker of who is in and who is out; faith is our recognition that Christ has not left anyone out, including us. As Paul puts it Christ died for all; therefore all died (2 Cor. 5:14). Or, as Desmond Tutu put it, In God's family, there are no outsiders. All are insiders. Even in your doubt, or, especially in your doubt, you are not outside of or apart from Christ. I pray that Christ would continue to haunt you and me, and that at every wrong turn, we would meet the one who tells us that every path now points us back to him. Even the path of doubt.

Now to him who is able to keep you from falling, and to make you stand without blemish in the presence of his glory with rejoicing, to the only God our Saviour, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority, before all time and now and for ever. Amen. (Jude 1:24-25)

Two Tongues Behind These Teeth: reading scripture beyond mastery

2009-09-17T20:00:00.018-04:00

Sometimes it's easier to begin with words that are not mine, but belong to another--foreign, in a sense. Outside (foris), on the other side of the door (fores), coming from a far and distant land. In a quotation, the outside becomes my own, or, from the opposite side, perhaps I am forced to walk through the door. But neither option interests me here. I am seeking something else, something that is neither inside nor outside, neither the air coming in nor passing out. The words I want to quote are words that can never become my own; I can never bring them in, nor can I ever fully exit into them. They have a different master.

To quote words that are still being spoken, no, that are still addressing, no, confronting, interrupting my own speech. I can never begin, or each beginning is just a stutter, a gasp of breath as I prepare my monologue, only to be silenced before the first word passes through my lips. The momentum cut short--silence! Listen to me! The shout muffles my exhale and hinders my speech. I am not mute, only speechless, but it is uncomfortable nonetheless.

A confession: the interruption is probably only vexing because I think I have the right to speak and to be heard. To get a word in edge wise, to have to insert my voice in a gap, to make a claim with my posture because my voice cannot be heard are not skills I have had to learn. I presume from the beginning to be a master over the words. I was born into that position, and it has always been cultivated. Gifted and Talented, Honors, AP, a B.A. with a thesis, a Masters degree. As a small boy I sat in the back of the class, ignoring the teacher--with her permission--to work at my own, accelerated pace. I have been reared to think that my voice ought to rise above the rest, and so, I take a deep breath, as I have been prodigiously prepared to do, and start to form the first word in my mouth, with my jaw pulled back and my lips parted to say what I have been taught to say--I--when, from somewhere beyond me, a shout--listen to me!

These words I cannot quote because they are addressed to me. I cannot bring them in, I cannot analyze them, I cannot exercise control. They are a command that renders me powerless. Whose tongue is trying to enter my mouth? Note: my mouth.

It is not with a word, a shibboleth, that we will manage to pass. Tongue in our mouths, we must change tongues, another tongue must come into our mouths, and into our bodies another body (Cixous, __Stigmata__, 107).

A living tongue in my mouth, a tongue that silences me and claims my speech--my mouth is no longer my own, and yet, do I not have the same tongue? A single mouth occupied by a foreign tongue, a tongue from outside that now dwells behind the wall, behind my teeth. A tongue that claims my own tongue, that has the power to render me mute, that does render me mute (or, what amounts to the same thing, for Paul, that blinds his eyes), and yet, commands me to speak. My words are still my own, and yet, strangely, they have been taken away from me.

Part of me wants to claim that I am brought into a kind of liminal existence (ex-sistere), between two tongues, but that is too easy. And false. I still have my same tongue, and, after all, we can never stand (sistere) in the pause between each breath. But now, with my tongue, or, in fact, my tongue itself, is claimed by another tongue, brought under its authority and freed--yes, freed--to do what it could not do on its own, that is, to respond.

For Christ's sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him (Phil 2:8-9). Or perhaps Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant (2 Cor 3:5-6). And again, I will boast all the more gladly of my weakness, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me (2 Cor 12:9). I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified...My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God (1 Cor 2:1-5). And most clearly: we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus' sake (2 Cor. 4:5).

It is not a matter of being silenced, of possessing a new tongue, but of being freed from attempting to master this other tongue. The one who speaks to me does not ask me to drop my own language, to abandon my tongue, but claims my very words for his and her own purpose (presuming you are willing, as I am, to refer to the Spirit in the feminine). My speech and my proclamation are not an exhibition of my mastery, Paul declares, but were hollowed out and made weak so that Christ's power would be manifest.

I take this to be a hermeneutical principle. As Karl Barth puts it (yes, again with Karl Barth), Scripture itself is a really truly living, acting and speaking subject which only as such can be truly heard and received by the Church and in the Church (CD I/2, 672). Scripture is not a dead voice. I cannot imprison it in a forgotten past or absorb it into my own poetic or mystical or ethical present. It stands outside of me, yet within me. I neither go out nor absorb--I am wounded by it: stigma stings, pierces, makes holes, separates with pinched marks and in the same movement distinguishes--re-marks--inscribes, writes. Stigma wounds and spurs, stimulates (Cixous, p. xiii). I have suffered the loss of all things. Which means, as Paul makes clear, freedom, life, joy, salvation: wounded so the power of Christ may dwell in me.

It would be foolish to make concrete proposals here--as if, after all of this, we could list off a series of hermeneutic principles. I do not mean that there are no principles, but only that the principles come later, to help us when we tire of the voice and want to find new ways to claim those words as our possession. They help us resist the urge to rip that foreign tongue out of our mouths. The fact that we--confession, that I--so quickly want to find some stabilizing principles reveals just how uncomfortable I am when I discover that I am not the master. But fortunately, Scripture resists all of my attempts to bring it under control, for it does not claim to exist for itself but to point away from itself. It points away to the one who brings freedom and joy to all those he wounds--a new name and a new life to those rendered incapable of mastery (and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him, Gen 32:25).

It seems fitting to give the final word to someone else, and so I will quote a passage I have quoted before, but to which I keep returning:

Writing is a passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me--the other that I am and am not, that I don't know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live--that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me, who?--a feminine one, a masculine one, some?--several, some unknown, which is indeed what gives me the desire to know and from which all life soars. This peopling gives neither rest nor security, always disturbs the relationship to "reality," produces an uncertainty that gets in the way of the subject's socialization. It is distressing, it wears you out; and for men, this permeability, this nonexclusion is a threat, something intolerable (Cixous, Sorties, in __The Newly Born Woman__, 86).

Scripture, Sinners, and the Fractured Anglican Church

2009-09-11T20:05:00.020-04:00

I have spoken, frequently, of the sinful nature of the church and Christianity. I have posted a Barth quote on a few occasions: The "sum total of even the Christian religion is simply this, that it is idolatry and self-righteousness, unbelief, and therefore sin. It must be forgiven if it is to be justified" (CD I/2, 354). I have hinted at and made allusions to the present separation between Anglicans and Episcopalians. But I have skirted the issue. I want to at least make one post that more directly engages the question. I have a lot to say. But I want to try to focus mostly on the role of Scripture.

If we take the Barth quote as a concise summation of what I've been aiming at over the last few posts, then we are led to the following conclusion: any exegesis or interpretation of Scripture must be forgiven if it is to be justified.

Not surprisingly, I'm going to unpack this conclusion with....some more Barth.

There is no more dangerous subjectivism than that which is based on the arrogance of a false objectivity. Not the fact that Holy Scripture as the Word of God is obscure and ambiguous, but the fact that it is the Word of God for the Church on earth, and therefore a teacher of pupils who are lost sinners, is what makes the much deplored divergence in its understanding possible, and, unless the miracle of revelation and faith [meaning concretely the work of the Holy Spirit] intervenes, quite inevitable. (CD, I/2, 553).

Barth is not elevating Scripture to the level of divinity, as if it originated in heaven and then dropped down, unblemished, from the skies. For Barth, Scripture is the Word of God in the sense that it continually becomes the Word of God. Scripture does not imprison God; it does not give us a hold on God, a way to control and place ourselves as lords standing over and against God. Scripture continually becomes the Word of God. Scripture, therefore, does not stand on its own but depends on the continual work of God. "The witness of Holy Scripture is...the witness of the Holy Spirit" (538). That Scripture reveals the Word of God depends on something outside of Scripture, the work of the Holy Spirit. It is a miracle that Scripture is the Word of God.

It is a miracle we hate and wish to reject. We want something more substantial, something much more immediate and direct, something that we can get our minds around (and get our hands upon). We turn to tradition, to culture, to reason, to mysticism, to ethics, to the individual, to the Church, to the creeds, to the Fathers, to Thomas Aquinas, to Luther, to Karl Barth, to anything, or anyone, even to biblicism, to give us some kind of assurance that we have heard rightly. That we--and that always means, and not them--are in the truth, exist as the bearers of the truth. We want direct access to revelation, to possess it and hold it, to claim it as our own and justify ourselves with it. We want to win, and we are always tempted to turn the Bible into a book that assures that we win, that our beliefs, our knowledge, our actions, our piety, our theology--our lives--are good enough and strong enough to win. Biblicism (what those on the left call "fundamentalism") ignores our dependency on the Spirit, and hence forgets that there is no direct access to revelation in Scripture. It forgets that only the Spirit removes the veil that makes Scripture obscure, that prevents us from encountering God's Word--Jesus Christ--in Scripture (cf. 2 Cor 3). Or, it presumes too quickly that it has the Spirit. The Spirit opens my eyes, not yours, and I live confidently (and hence with complacency). Regardless, I know I am right, that I read Scripture rightly, and that I am on the inside, on the side of truth, on the side of goodness. It never crosses my mind that I might need to repent. It never crosses my mind that the first and last thing I must do, whenever I read Scripture, is to repent.

The "conservatives" see the "liberal" Episcopalians as placing themselves as lords over Scripture. They do not like the text, so they ignore it, or proclaim a revelation that "completes" it. In a global context, African and Asian bishops have protested that the Western Anglican churches have acted with the typical, but lamentable, Western hubris. God's revelation is proclaimed by the West; the backwards "rest" need to hurry up and get with the times. They wonder why people embedded in a culture that is without a doubt sexually disordered (for a quick example, which Amy Laura Hall used in class, consider the production and consumption of pornography here) feel they are in a position to declare to the rest of the world a new word regarding human sexuality. However, the fundamental point is neither sexual disorder nor imperialist arrogance; the breaking point is the refusal to submit to God's Word.

That, at least, is how I see the debate shaping up, and like any debate, both sides want to win. Both sides claim that the other side fails to read Scripture properly. But that raises the fundamental question: how do you know when you are reading Scripture rightly?

That is the question we want to ask, but it is, I think, the wrong question. It is a question that can only be answered in a way that provides self-justification. The appropriate turn is not to some kind of agnosticism. That too would still be a claim to possess the right way to read Scripture. Nor is the way forward to simply proclaim our inability to read Scripture rightly. That path would eventually lead to mysticism, or atheism, or some other claim to be in the right (see my post on the "true standard religious game"). As Luther put it: the Holy Spirit is no skeptic.

How, then, to proceed, without trying to win? How to move forward? The first step is to accept that Christ has bound us to Scripture, that we cannot move away from it, nor we can ever make it our own. We are dependent on something that is itself dependent. We are not free to move past Scripture and find God apart from its testimony. We are bound to it. But it does not bind God. Its witness, its status as "the Word of God," depends on the work of the Spirit. We are dependent on something that is itself dependent, and hence, something that can never be brought under our control. We are never the masters but only claimed for obedience.

The Word of God is necessary for us. It is also sufficient. But this sufficiency does not lie in itself--how could it--but in the sufficiency of God's grace in Christ Jesus. We need not worry about whether Scripture is "inerrant" because its testimony does not point to itself but to the Word of God, Jesus Christ. Scripture is not worried about cleaning up its own contradictions and discrepancies precisely because the authors of Scripture wrote as witnesses, as those who attest to something beyond themselves. The sufficiency of Scripture lies in Christ and the gift of the Spirit. Scripture is good enough for us because it truly points beyond itself, to the one who truly holds us in his hands, Jesus Christ. (But remember, Christ has bound us to Scripture, and so we never have access to Christ apart from the witness itself, the Words of Scripture).

Let me try to speak more plainly. Both the liberals and conservatives (to make crude generalizations) are attempting to bypass the weakness of Scripture. Both are seeking a way to possess Scripture, and to possess Scripture, they need to supplement it. Conservatives postulate a kind of direct access. Scripture says X. Boom! End of story. They forget that Scripture itself depends on the Spirit, and that the Spirit speaks through Scripture to sinful people. Liberals postulate a cultural supplement. It's the march of human freedom. Of progression. Of love. And this cultural thread either bypasses Scripture completely or absorbs it within its own trajectory. Scripture's voice is either not binding at all, or it is binding but, not surprisingly, it articulates the cultural thread within which we are already located (using a variety of "exegetical" methods to justify the approach). To put it crudely, I have not yet met someone who was adamantly opposed to homosexual unions until they read Scripture and then, after reading through the Bible, became convinced that they were wrong and that God clearly approves of such unions. Both sides, therefore, want to supplement Scripture (elevate it beyond its, meaning our, weakness) and neither wants to embrace the necessity of repentance.

The way out that I am suggesting, unfortunately, isn't really a way out. It doesn't actually solve the issue. But I think it is the only Christian way forward. It involves these two key points. First, we exist in a twofold state of dependency: we (A) depend on the Spirit to speak to us (B) through Scripture. We are dependent on Scripture, which itself is dependent. It's a position of weakness, but one of joy, for we wait with expectation for God to reveal Godself to us, to speak to us again of God's love for us in Jesus Christ. In Christ, we wait without anxiety because we know we are safe in his hands. Secondly, in light of Christ's extension of forgiveness, we begin our exegesis with the freedom of repentance. The Word on which we depend tells us again and again that we are always in need of God's grace and that grace is to be found! Our piety may be something for which we will have to repent; but we can repent, because we know we are secure in Christ's hands! In short, revelation tells us that we are sinners, justified by, not exegesis, but simply by the faithfulness of Christ.

Maybe at a later date, and after reading some more Barth, I will be able to sketch out a bit more clearly what exegesis from within a posture of weakness and repentance involves. But for now, I simply want to suggest that all of us need to take quite seriously the fact that, at the end of the day, we will all need to repent for where we stand. It's the only place safe for us. We must be forgiven if we are to be justified. Including, and especially, for our Christianity; which means, including, and especially, for our readings of Scripture.

*I stole the language of "winning" from J. Kameron Carter.*

Can I wear your clothes? (missions and alienation)

2009-09-05T16:01:00.015-04:00

Portrait of Nicolas Trigault in Chinese Costume, by Peter Paul Rubens, 1617

The early Jesuit missionaries to China translated themselves into the native garb. As a religious order, they first wore buddhist robes, projecting an image as new, religious messengers. The first missionary, Michele Ruggieri (1543-1607) made the decision, saying, "Now the robes are being cut and soon we will be made into Chinese" (quoted in __Journey to the East__ by Liam Matthew Brockey, p. 33). The robes, however, were soon dropped, as the missionaries decided on a new image: as educated literati. The Buddhist monks were not as socially powerful as Ruggieri imagined; his first companion, Matteo Ricci, donned the outfit of a mandarin scholar (of Confucius), and even grew out his hair and beard so as to allay himself more closely with this educated and socially powerful class. When describing his new costume, Ricci declared that the robes were "very similar to what the Venetians use in Venice" (43).

The robes were habitable because familiar: the missionaries could see themselves in those clothes. The robes were habitable because the Chinese were habitable: soon we will be made into Chinese. Not so different. Literate. Educated. Hierarchically organized. A different experience from the Africans. Primitives. Without proper clothing, proper society, or proper religion. Not even the inverse, but the absence: a human void (quick, take the empty land!).

If I had time, I would love to investigate missionary fashion. Clothing as the marker of a habitable population. A people we think approximates us. Or is too far away. Whose outfits--or lack there of--suggest a human absence. The naked savage. Lacking civilization. A bad thing. Then a good thing. When people tired of civilization. The noble savage. We can now see ourselves in their naked bodies.

Our image of ourselves, standing in between. No encounter. We create the identities. Who do you say you are? No response. Or, every response, a translation. Who do I think you say you are? What? I can't understand you. What language are you speaking? (I was told earlier this week, by an Iraqi refugee, that I would soon learn to speak refugee....)

There is no point lamenting our inability to have a direct encounter. We can never move beyond ourselves. We must be thrust out of the way. From outside. Someone must take our place. If they dare.

Salvation means alienation, and "salvation is of the Jews" (Jn. 4.22). And because people will not be alienated even for their own salvation, they roll away the alienation on to the Jew (Barth, CD I/2, 511).

Let us not lie to ourselves. Any "alienation" that comes easy is another form of donning chinese clothes. An easy move. I have already absorbed them. They can reflect me. I can see myself in them. They are habitable, so I will wear their clothes. No alienation, just absorption. In their clothes, I translate them. More so, I absorb them. Engulf them from within. I hypostasize their culture. It is I who hold up their lifeless clothes. It is I who animate. It is I who am....the Spirit.

Blasphemy. The dangerous edge of empathy, of seeing myself in others. A loving attack, all the more vicious because it is an empathy over which I am the master. The terms are under my control. I choose whose clothes I will wear.

No one will be alienated, not even for salvation. It is an offer we refuse, a gift we reject. But to refuse our own alienation, to reject salvation, is to...turn against the Jews. To roll off our alienation and place it on another, the Jews (how often "primitive" African religion was understood as a degraded form of Judaism...).

We cannot be saved "unless we are prepared to become Jews with the Jews." Barth penned this in the 1930s. "By being hostile to Jewish blood, the world simply proves that it is the world: blind and deaf and stupid to the ways of God" (511). "In the Jew, the non-Jew has to recognize himself...and in the Jew he has to recognize Christ, the Messiah of Israel" (511). The one we rejected, the one on whom we rolled off our alienation, the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. Let us be clear: the one who comes to displace us is the one we want to kill. The one we do kill. But, by the grace of God, the one who lives again!

Christ's flesh, a space of alienation. A wound. The stigmata--an opening of the flesh, a making of space. A way of becoming habitable by what is foreign.

In Jesus, we are brought out of the dialectic of habitation. No longer are you the one who threatens to occupy me, to cut open my flesh. Nor I to you. A space exists between us, which neither of us can occupy, or, more properly, a space which already occupies us both: a shared wound.

For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.

To live for the one who died and was raised for us. It is a call to alienation; to salvation.

It's a call we know we will resist.

Not a matter of changing clothes then. Of entering "the other." Of celebrating difference. The offer of alienation is a devastating offer. A gift of becoming ill at ease. It makes us hesitate. We no longer know where we stand. Or, more precisely, we finally see that where we stand (and who we are) is never something we can possess. We cannot speak the truth of who we are. Someone stands in our way, blocking our vision, halting our speech. It is either a terrifying assault. Or a gift of joy. This one is the end of ourselves--hallelujah!

In the end, the clothes don't matter. You are never a space I can inhabit. Yet, we can never leave each other behind. We are bound to a space between us that neither of us can navigate. Which doesn't mean it is impassible. For it is a space that has already been traversed. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. (It is only from here that we can move beyond Rilke, who wrote, "love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other").

Lord Jesus, help me love my neighbor, the stranger whom I despise (the samaritan!), the one who speaks to me of my own alienation, and who therefore, I want to reject. Help me see them as a reminder of your grace, as a testimony to your resurrection, and as a renewed invitation to live by your Spirit, with thanksgiving and joy.

The True Standard Religious Game

2009-08-29T09:14:00.008-04:00

I kept looking out my window at the buildings instead of watching the cars in front of me. A new town. I had never heard of it until I was asked to come out there for my interview. Driving through High Point, I searched for landmarks, tools to help me make a quick exit. I was also looking for landmarks to confirm that I was in a conservative, southern town. It's a habit I picked up somewhere, even though I grew up in a small, conservative southern town. Or especially because I grew up there: condescension proves I have grown beyond it.

It wasn't a navigational landmark, but I became quite fascinated by a small brick building with a couple of small windows, the True Standard Holiness Church. I started my mental attack immediately. True Standard? Am I going to find the old church, the Standard Holiness Church down the road? Is it redundant to qualify the "standard" with "true"? How have they determined what the true standard is? How do they know they embody it? Why do we Christians keep trying to justify ourselves as embodying the "true" standard? Do we need to split churches every time we think we possess the true standard?

The barrage of questions didn't last long. Suddenly, I found myself in a kind of religious crisis. Like my church? The AMIA. "Orthodox" anglicans. Turning to tradition (a claim to possess the true standard!). Those sinful Episcopalians. Not to mention the debates within AMIA. Are we anglo-Catholic? How high of a liturgy? What can we alter in it? Should the sermons follow the lectionary? What does it mean to be "anglican"?

Oh no, I thought, I'm one of them. I'm part of the "true standard" church. And there is no way out! Not that I'm trapped in AMIA. But that I'm trapped in a "true standard" church. It's not just them, it's me. It's my Christianity that is frail; it's my Christianity that amounts to nothing more than contradiction and sin. My Christianity! My faith--petty! Insignificant! A display of sinful arrogance and self-justification!

"Christianity twisted like a snake in the hands of those who sought to us it: millenarian prophets, authoritarian and radical missionaries alike, British abolitionists, Khoekhoe preachers, and racist settlers all sought to control its language in a climate of intense power struggles, but none was able to establish final ownership" (Elizabeth Elbourne, "Prelude" to __Blood Ground__, p. 5).

A whole book investigating the complexities of Christian language, the way it is used in our world, or, for this book, in the world of colonial South Africa. It's disturbing. Where do I fit in the scheme? More importantly, where is God? What does Jesus think about this dizzying array of options? About our complex motives, the factors beyond our control, the forces that make us the specific sinful humans we are? Is Christianity just like any other language, a tool to be used within power struggles? Is it nothing but another game of violent self-assertion?

I couldn't find an answer. I started wondering: is this a religious crisis, a crisis of faith? Two days after my ordination interview, and I'm wondering whether there is anything worthwhile in Christian faith. Or, at least more worthwhile than any other product of the sinful human race.

But what are my options? To give up? To embrace atheism? But that is simply another option within the "true standard" religious game. I see through all this depraved religiosity, I see the root and the cause, and I have now risen above it and will call others to the true standard!

Starting a new church won't get me out of it either. Didn't all these schisms occur because a group thought it possessed the true standard? The same thing, over and over again. A rejection of one standard becomes, unsurprisingly, a new standard. Even the rejection of all claims to possess "the true standard" becomes a new standard, the standard. Nor can I just abstract from these concrete religious assertions and find solace in a pure, mystical religion. Mysticism, in this sense, is simply cautious atheism: I see through this utterly human construct called institutional religion, but instead of seeing nothing (atheism), I see a pure truth above and beyond the sinful institution. Behold, the true standard!

There is no place outside of this circle. A "turning against the religions...is manifestly impossible, whether in the form of mysticism or in that of atheism. For in making this judgment it will have to judge itself...The real crisis of religion can only break in from outside the magic circle of religion and its place of origin, i.e., from outside man" (Karl Barth, CD I/2, 324).

What, then, is the way forward? How do we move beyond the true standard religious game? If Barth is right, we don't. We accept the condemnation. We make no claim that Christianity, in any form, has escaped the game. We "must not allow ourselves to be confused by the fact that a history of Christianity can be written only as a story of the distress which it makes for itself" (337). "Even Christianity is unbelief" (338). The "sum total of even the Christian religion is simply this, that it is idolatry and self-righteousness, unbelief, and therefore sin. It must be forgiven if it is to be justified" (354).

We accept the condemnation. We trust that Jesus will forgive us, especially for our religion. We stop striving to justify ourselves, to vindicate our religion, to contrast our purity with the sinfulness of others, to proclaim our possession of a way beyond religiosity. We too are judged. But in Jesus, we are forgiven. We need not find a positive spin on our history. Our history has been taken out of our hands; we do not need to find security in our ability to construct a purer religion. Not "only our security before God, but the very security of our being and activity, and therefore our security in relation to men, rests absolutely upon our willingness in faith and by faith to renounce any such securities" (332). We are free to renounce them because, in faith, by Jesus Christ, we do not need them. Our security before God does not rest on our Christian religion; it rests on God's gracious forgiveness of our sin. Christianity is the true religion, according to Barth, always on the analogy of justified sinners. It's false and sinful when considered in and of itself. Its truth, just like its justification, lies outside of itself, in Jesus Christ.

My "orthodox," "traditional," "anglican" church can either point towards itself, towards another form of the true standard religious game. Or we can accept a more humble and insecure place, as another form of sinful religion, and, hopefully--and this is what is peculiar to Christianity--as a witness to Christ's mercy on us pious sinners.

The Weakness of Christian Missions

2009-08-12T15:54:00.006-04:00

"In the world of religions, the Christian religion is in a position of greatest danger and defenselessness and impotence than any other religion. It has its justification either in the name of Jesus Christ, or not at all." Karl Barth, Dogmatics I/2, p. 356.

For Barth, Church history should be told as the long, lamentable, and predictable story of the various attempts Christians have made to evade this position of weakness. Christian history reveals "the attempt which the Christian makes, in continually changing forms, to consider and vindicate his religion as a work which is in itself upright and holy. But he continually feels himself thwarted and hampered and restrained by Holy Scripture, which does not allow this, which even seems to want to criticize this Christian religion of his" (337). The history, therefore, is a history of our stumbling; it is the history of our attempts to become masters of ourselves, to vindicate ourselves, and therefore, of necessity, to detach ourselves from Christ and flee from his judgment against our religiosity, self-confidence, and self-assertion.

While tracing the various attempts to assert Christian truth as our own possession, Barth touches on the "comprehensive readoption of the missionary task" (336) during the modern period, especially towards the close of the 18th century. The new "confrontation" of Christianity with non-Christian religions went in the wrong direction since the "sending Church was itself seeking its strength at a different point from where it could be found" (336). The missions stemmed from a new Christian self-assertion, not from a new commitment to Christ's mastery. It is not as though these missions were completely ineffective in witnessing to Christ; however, God's gracious unveiling through these missions had to go against the "tendencies and directions" that dominated these missions. To put it concretely: the recipients of European, Christian missions encountered Jesus in spite of these missions! Reading through Savage Systems by David Chidester is a perfect illustration of this point: that anyone encountered Christ in the South African missions is the work of the Spirit usually in opposition to the operations of the colonial mission.

Barth provides a helpful way to interpret and move past the missional failings exposed by Chidester. He analyzes a shift that begins back in the 16th century and explodes during the 18th century in which "revelation" becomes understood within the more general idea of "religion," instead of religion being approached only on the basis of revelation (Jesus Christ). Once this shift took place, "revelation" became "a historical confirmation of what man can know about himself and therefore about God even apart from revelation" (289-290). Revelation fulfills our own notions about religion, our own sense of who God is and who we are and ought to be. Revelation confirms and extends--perfects--our own projects and concerns. (Barth argues that without this history in mind, "we are defenseless against the 'German Christians' of our own time," meaning, the Nazi Church, 292).

For Barth, the fundamental sin that underlies this whole movement is a rejection of the lordship of Christ. No longer is it held that "Jesus Christ is now his Lord, and man belongs to Him, and lives under Him in His kingdom, and serves Him, and therefore has all his consolation in life or death in the fact that he is not his own but is the property of Jesus Christ" (292, emphasis added). Barth places this rejection of Christ's mastery within our attempts to master others. In the missionary encounter, "we must not try to know and define and assess man and his religion as it were in advance and independently. We must not ascribe to him any existence except as the possession of Christ" (296, emphasis added). Thus, behind the turn to "savage comparisons" stands a rejection of the lordship of Christ over both our own selves and those we encounter. To master the others (and be masters of ourselves), we have to undercut all of our dependence on the mastery of Christ.

Rejecting the sufficiency of Christ's lordship, European missionaries strove to display the superiority of Christianity over the variety of other religions (or absences of religion). No longer content with the final (and hence only) word coming from the gracious forgiveness of Jesus, missionaries had to come up with some other final word justifying Christian truth. It must be a word imminent to themselves (otherwise it could not be used to elevate them above the others). Christian theology starts taking "refuge in reason or culture or humanity or race, in order to find some support or other for the Christian religion" (357). The options are various, but they all coalesce around the same practical result: they explain Christian superiority, non-Christian inferiority, and therefore justify Christian domination (one wonders what the missions in South Africa would have looked had no attempt been made to see what the "natives" were in and of themselves but only to look at them as those already claimed by Christ's lordship...).

Barth recognizes that this self-assertion--the rejection of Christ's mastery--could be accomplished without any explicit deviations from Christian language. The transformation of Christianity into a vehicle for self-articulation (and hence self-mastery and world-mastery) happened most often within the confines of Christian language and through. The rejection of Christ's mastery was sometimes bold and upfront; but often it was hidden behind pious language (and even hidden from those involved in the transformation). For Barth, this is not surprising since Jesus Christ exposes all religion to be nothing more than "idolatry and self-righteousness" (314). Even, and especially, the Christian religion. In fact, the problems of modern, colonial missions are born from our frequent desire to forget that "the sum total qualities of even the Christian religion is simply this, that it is idolatry and self-righteousness, unbelief, and therefore sin. It must be forgiven if it is to be justified" (354).

The Christian religion cannot point to itself to ensure its security and stability within the encounter and confrontation with various religions. In and of itself, it has nothing meaningful through which to distinguish itself as superior. Jesus Christ calls us to remember this situation. We are sinners, saved by grace. The question of the truth of the Christian religion is simply this: "who and what are they in their naked reality, as they stand before the all-piercing eye of God?" (356). In response to this question, Christians can do nothing other than point away from themselves (even from their own concrete structures and ethical programs) and point to Jesus. It is only in Christ's mercy that we stand before God as righteous. This righteousness is never a righteousness we possess, and hence it is never one we can deploy to distinguish ourselves as superior to others (or others as inferior to ourselves). The Christian religion is not the truth in itself; it is the true religion only by God's mercy and forgiveness in Christ. It's calling, therefore, is not to "out narrate" other religions; nor is it to "persuasively embody" the truth of its superiority. Even the posture of weakness, insecurity, or self-emptying does not demonstrate the truth of Christianity. Our standing before God does not depend on our rhetorical skills or our moral effort; it stands (or falls) with Jesus Christ alone. Christian religion has a claim to be "the true religion" only as it points to the truth and "proclaims it" (358). This work of proclamation is not a "power or authority of its own" but is the action of the Holy Spirit (359). Therefore, it is not an action it can point to so as to establish its own truth; it is a work that depends only on God's free mercy.

It is for these reasons that revelation--God's judgment and forgiveness of us in Jesus Christ--pushes the Church into a position of utter weakness. As Christ's possessions, we are called to see all others as also already possessed by Christ. Neither "we" nor "they" exist apart from Christ's mastery. Therefore, the truth of who "we" are and "they" are is a truth we cannot articulate. Nor need we. The truth has already been spoken regarding who we all are: we are all sinners living under the gracious lordship of Jesus Christ.

Far from undercutting the need for missions, this situation enables the Church to fulfill its mission. For its mission is not to replace Christ but to witness (by the Spirit) to Christ's continual work (in the Spirit). Since the church's life is not its own, neither is its mission. Since missions is God's work, we need not worry that we exist in such a weak and impotent position (regarding other religions). We need not flee from the insecurity in which we stand. God's word to us in Jesus is our security; and God's power--not ours!--is made perfect in our weakness. Within this weakness, the church is not free from the temptation to proclaim itself. But it is put on guard. It is threatened. And we hope and pray that we will continue to remember our precarious position; we hope and pray that we will not cease to proclaim the sufficiency of Christ, and Christ alone. We hope and pray that our mission will be, by God's grace, a real witness to the Spirit's mission.

The Irresponsibility of Christian Missions

2009-08-10T15:53:00.003-04:00

In his discussion of the Holy Spirit, Barth claims that "the outpouring of the Holy Spirit exalts the Word of God to be the master over men, puts man unavoidably under His mastery" (I.2, 270). When the Holy Spirit is conceived outside of this relationship to Christ, the Spirit "is always transmuted into a quite different spirit, the spirit of the religious man, and finally the human spirit in general" (I.2., 251). The Spirit's work can only be considered in relationship to Christ: the Spirit always and only draws us under Christ's control.

Barth slowly unpacks what it means to "have our master unavoidably in Jesus Christ" (270). One of his explanations really struck me and I want to quote it at length.

"To have our master unavoidably in Jesus Christ is to exist in an ultimate and most profound irresponsiblity...[The Word of God] does not impose on us a new and final and frightful, because unending , responsibility. It claims our response. It claims our will and action. It claims the achievement which is, of course, required of us. It claims all this, not as an autonomous work, the success of which we ourselves must guarantee, but as an act of service, in the fulfillment of which we are borne and covered by the work it does itself. From this aspect, too, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit signifies the relativising of the question who and what we are in ourselves....As the people we are we have to participate in that work of the Word. Not as those who have to finish the work, to reach the goal, to bring in the results. In our very participation it is foreseen that we are men, and disobedient men, and therefore quite unsuitable for the work. Our participation does not depend upon our fitness for this work. It is a participation in spite of our unsuitability. It rests on the forgiveness of sins. It is grace...It is not a participation which involves anxiety and worry whether we can really do what we are required to do. Of course we cannot do it. That is the presupposition of our participation. Only one thing is required of us. As those who cannot do it ourselves, and never could, we have to participate when the Word does it. It is a matter of the receiving and adopting of man into participation in the Word of God. This participation corresponds to what took place in the incarnation of the eternal Son of God. It is the basis of the life of the children of God, that non-autonomous life which is a life only of grace and of faith. And when man is placed under the Word and under the command of hte Word, he is really free. Free from worry about himself. But also free from worry about others. And free from worry about the whole development of human affairs in the Church and the world. In the ultimate and decisive question, the doing of the will of God in all these things, he has no worries at all, even when he ought to be weighed down in all the penultimate questions regarding himself and others and the Church and the world. That the will of God should be done in all things is what he can and should pray when the burden seems likely to crush him, and then it will not crush him. But the very prayer, Thy will be done, is in fact an admission that I need not worry about it, because it is not my business. I am not responsible. This burden, the burden of my own and others' sins, does not lie upon me. It lies solely and entirely upon Jesus Christ, upon the Word of God...I can never invest myself with the dignity of the Word, the dignity of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ alone bears it and can bear it. Our relationship to Him must always consist in our knowing and saying and confirming and attesting and living out the truth: that He careth for you. And in this very freedom, in this ultimate absence of responsibility, it is self-evident that we have to hear the freedom of God and the revelation of God....

[The Old Testament prophets and Paul in the New Testament] do not really aim to do what God does. They aim only to participate. They do not do the work: they assist. It is in this way that they are the recipients and witness of revelation...They do not need to be ashamed of the Gospel, because it does not need their own dynamic. And it does not need it, because it is itself the power of God, and indeed, for salvation (Rom 1.16)" (I.2, 274-276).

Missions is free from responsibility, and therefore, free from anxiety. It does not produce results; it witnesses to God's work. It is the Holy Spirit who draws people to the Father through Christ. Strictly speaking, we are not necessary for this work. The work is necessary for us--Christ binds us to it ("go into all the world"...). But we are not there to do Christ's work. Our function, our calling, is to witness to Christ's work (the great commission is preceded by Christ's claim to possess all authority, involves our calling to make disciples of Christ, and is followed by the confirmation that this work will only be accomplished because Christ will be with us by the Spirit. Further, the mission of the Church begins at Pentecost, with the coming of the missionary, the Holy Spirit, further signifying that missions is strictly speaking, not our work).

Conversion is not our work, nor is it our responsibility. It is out of our hands. We engage in missions because we want to witness to the Spirit's work of forming disciples (disciples are "formed and directed by" the Word, not by us, 276). Missionaries make the bold step to witness to this work, not in the confidence that they have been brought out of disobedience, but in the knowledge that God is faithful to the disobedient. Missions proceeds from this place of freedom, which is a place of irresponsibility, of lacking responsibility for ourselves, the Church, and the world.

The temptation for Christian missions is to assume responsibility, to take the work out of Christ's hands and back into our own. This temptation is an attempt to live without dependency on the Spirit--conversion is our responsibility, and thus is our work, which the Spirit may help, but which is a work ultimately in our control. However, the Spirit does not assist us in our work of making disciples but brings us sinners under the mastery of Christ. Therefore, our prayer should not be "Spirit, enable me to convert these sinners to Jesus" but "Spirit, reveal Jesus to us sinners." In other words, a properly irresponsible missions begins not with the question of how we faithful disciples may inspire faith in the faithless, nor even in the prayer that the Spirit speak to the faithless through us faithful disciples, but in the prayer that the Spirit would continue to reveal God's faithfulness in Jesus Christ to us faithless sinners.

Any time we think of our neighbor as the one who needs our faithful witness, we have placed ourselves in opposition to our neighbor and our mission is headed down the wrong path. Our neighbor--the "nonbeliever," the "sinner," the "disparaged or oppressed," whatever our preferred designation of the recipient of our missionary work--is not the one who stands in dependence on us but is the concrete reminder to us that we stand with them in dependence on God's mercy and care. It is a reminder that may, and often does, contain a judgment on us, for in this situation of dependence it is always possible that they, and not us, are the ones participating in Christ's work. When God speaks and calls someone to witness--as with the samaritan woman at the well, John 4--it might be that God views us, the disciples, as an obstacle to be sent away and then challenged to imitate the one we would ordinarily think needed (to be like) us. Christian missions begins with the acceptance of this humiliation, for it knows that in this humiliation--in this judgment on us, sinners--Christ brings mercy.

Natural Theology and Colonial Missions

2009-08-06T15:43:00.006-04:00

I'm currently reading Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa by David Chidester. It's part of a larger reading project which could simply be titled: "Oh no, I'm going to be a missionary....". The critical aspect of the project will involve reading books that describe various missionary practices and theologies as they pertain to the "project of civilization." The shape of the modern world is the product of Christian missions (it was the Pope who blessed the "age of discovery" as a part of the Church's mission and divided the world between ruling European powers). J. Carter has argued that the idea of race is born out of a theological discourse (if you want a kind of genealogical point of origin, he points to 15th century Spain, and the blood purity laws passed against Jews: race develops from the biologization of heresy). I want to get a better grasp of how missions was configured and deployed from this point forward; the goal is to better identify, clarify and personally feel the problem of modern missions. The constructive aspect of the project is to find a way forward. I hope to read some more general works on missions, but I'm expecting to get most of my help from Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. These two theologians identified the problem of Christian missions (though they didn't call it that) and started to push theology past it. Through Barth and Bonhoeffer, I hope to reconfigure a theology for Christian missions.

In Savage Systems, Chidester highlights a peculiar feature of colonial comparative religion: when the colonial boundary (the "frontier") is being contested by an indigenous population, the people are deemed to have no religion. However, "when the frontier closes, and hegemony has been established, a dominated subjected people are discovered to have a religion that can be inventoried and analyzed" (69). For example, the Hottentots lacked a religion from 1600-1654, then had one once a European settlement was established. When this establishment expanded, the Hottentots were again deemed areligious (from 1685-1700). Once the expansion ceased and the settlement was stablilized, the Hottentots were seen to possess a native religion. However, the colony started to spread again in 1770 and thus the Hottentots were again deemed to lack any religion (69). Even when they were deemed to have a religion, it was a religion that either resembled the stubbornness of the Jews or the superstition of the Catholics (70): "the Hottentots were credited with a religion that discredited them" (70).

The difference between Jews and Catholics seems to be based on a different failure. Jews stubbornly resisted Christian conversion, and thus exhibit a moral failure that explains their nonconversion; Catholic superstition is a sign of ignorance. Thus, the Hottentots' resistance to Christian conversion stemmed from either a moral or an intellectual failure. The intellectual failure was ultimately traced back to a different kind of moral failure, laziness. All three features could be tied together; Georg Meistert claimed in 1687 that the "absence of any religion among them was equivalent to their lack of literacy and industry" (45). Given their "bestial" language (37), the Hottentots necessarily lacked the ability to produce any kind of natural religion (and therefore, any proper human society, and therefore, any proper humanity per se).

Even though the recognition or denial of Hottentot religion constantly shifted, the missionaries zeal to analyze and discover (or produce) the native religion remained constant. Whether the verdict was positive or negative, the question was always being posed (and not only by missionaries but also by travelers, explorers, scientiests, and colonial administrators). No observer thought that the Hottentot's would exhibit the marks of "revealed religion," but they all pondered whether they were capable of producing a natural religion.

Natural theology, in the broadest sense of the term (especially as it is developed on the mission field in colonial Southern Africa), is the search for a merely natural (meaning, non-divinely inspired, not revealed) religiosity. What the European observers tried to catalogue was whether Hottentots had any idea of God, a transendent creator, and whether they developed any kind of rituals and ethics to relate to that idea. They knew that the Hottentots had various customs and rituals; the question was whether these rituals marked the presence of a rudementary knowledge of God or whether they marked mere superstition (and hence ignorance, laziness, and the absence of religion).

Chidester catalogues how the answer to this question varied according to the solidity of colonial control. In short, fighting natives had no religion (and hence were subhuman); conquered natives were religious after all (and hence capable of being absorbed into civilization). What interests me is how this compartive procedure stems from the search for a "point of contact" within the indiginous culture that would prepare it for the gospel. If the people resist the gospel, then they either lack a cultural starting point altogether (which makes them less than fully human), or they exhibit a cultural moral failing that prevents the gospel from taking root (laziness or stubbornness).

The search for a point of contact thus brings with it a compartive procedure. The missionary's native culture--a culture that has accepted the gospel--bears the marks of proper human culture. It has proven to be receptive to the gospel, and therefore (either naturally or by grace), has been brought out of sinful resistance. Those who refuse the gospel fail to measure up to the proper form of human receptivity (modelled by the missionary's culture). They lack what the sending community possesses: industry, civilization, intelligence, language, literacy, piety, a proper understanding of authority, etc. The resistant native population, within this strategy of comparison, can only be registered as a lack, as an absence, as the inverted image of the (colonial) missionary. They therefore lack religion. The dominated population is no longer violently opposed to the colonial settlement; they therefore exhibit some kind of potential harmonization within European conquest. They have some unformed religious potential.

This comparative natural theology held a privileged place within colonial missions. Missionaries (and other European observers) continually searched for--and registered (or produced) the presence or absence of--an African "unknown God." Convinced that there ought to be a "point of contact" (an African natural religion), European missionaries expressed shock at how uncivilized (and bestial) the areligious African were. Once they were brought under colonial control, their continual resistance to the gospel was read as a deformed religious response (on model with the Jews and Catholics). Natural theology, therefore, operated as a kind of intellectual backdrop (already worked out in missional polemics with Muslims, Jews, and later Catholics) through which to register the human differences encountered in the colonial world. The debate surrounding natural theology (i.e. Karl Barth's strident rejection of it) ought to be placed within this context. Natural theology is not just a doctrine but a disposition, a way of inhabiting the world that carries with it certain procedures of comparison and judgment whose concrete force can be most properly felt on the colonial mission field. In other words, the practical outworkings of natural theology are what Chidester describes in, and calls, "Savage Systems."

The Secularity of the Word (Barth, Summary of I/1, §5)

2009-07-23T11:34:00.002-04:00

Invariably, then, faith is acknowledgment of our limit and acknowledgment of the mystery of God’s word, acknowledgment of the fact that our hearing is bound to God himself, who now leads us through form to content and now from content back to form, and either way to Himself, not giving Himself in either case into our hands but keeping us in his hands.

Karl Barth, I/1, p. 176.

After discussing the form of the Word of God (§4), Barth examines the nature of the Word of God (§5). In this section, Barth works out how the Word is spoken to the creature without becoming the creature’s possession. The Word spoken to the creature is Jesus Christ (153), God with us, and hence the what is actually a who, and as a divine who can never be equated or placed under the control of the creature. Accordingly, Barth shifts the emphasis from the what to the how: if God’s Word--which cannot be “anticipated or repeated” (132)--is spoken to us in three forms, how is it spoken to us?

To answer the question how, Barth invokes the distinction between form and content. The Word (content) is given to us (unveiled) but in a hidden (veiled) way (form). The content (the Divine Word) is never accessible apart from the form it takes as a free address to specific, sinful creatures. The form, for its part, only bears the content by virtue of the divine freedom and grace: whether the form truly is the Word of God depends solely on God’s free choice.

God speaks concretely, and since it is God who speaks, God’s Word is productive: God’s Word claims fallen humanity for Godself, and in so doing, creates a new situation and a new being (one who is summoned to respond to God’s claim). God’s Word precedes, and hence does not depend, on the human response: “the Church is the Church as it believes and proclaims that prior to all secular developments and prior to all its own work the decisive word has in fact been spoken already regarding both itself and also the world” (155). Mission can only precede on the assumption that “the heathen” is “already drawn into Christ’s sphere of power” (153).

If the form can never guarantee the content, then we can never speak about the how of God’s Word except in response to God’s actually spoken Word (164). Since God’s Word never comes at us directly, but indirectly--in the garment of fallen, creaturely reality--all “we think and say about its how has its substance not in itself but outside itself in the Word of God, so that what we think and say about this now can never become the secret system of a what” (164). The indirectness of God’s Word can never be dissolved; it never becomes clear (and hence possessed): “the veil is thick. We do not have the Word of God otherwise than in the mystery of its secularity” (165). The form of God’s Word is an “unsuitable medium for God’s self-presentation” (166). Unsuitable, but not impossible. The form veils the unveiling: “He will not and cannot unveil Himself except by veiling Himself” (165, emphasis added). The veiling is necessary, not for God, but for us. “If God did not speak to us in secular form, He would not speak to us at all” (168). Christ enters into our world, the world of estranged creatures, the secular world. Therefore, “to evade the secularity of His Word is to evade Christ” (168).

One cannot peer behind the form--the garment of fallen creation--to get hold of the content (divine Word). Humans never have a direct hold on God. The Church is not “outside with God” while the world “is inside without God” (155). Barth offers two arguments against this church-world distinction. First, the Word of God is spoken to the whole “world of man standing over against the Word of God” (155). Therefore, “the world cannot be held to its ungodliness by the Church” because Christ has already spoken to--claimed--this ungodly world (155). Secondly, due to the distinction between form and content, we can never guarantee that our own words actually convey the Word of God. Considered “in and of itself our thinking is irrefutably non-christian” (176). To place the Church outside of or over against the world necessitates placing our faith in the propriety of our own speech (our “Christian grammar”). However, our faith rests not in our thoughts--the form--but in the one who has pledged to be with sinful humanity, i.e., God’s Word, Jesus Christ. The “real interpretation of its form can only be that which God’s Word gives itself” (167). We can never interpret the form ourselves but always depend on God’s Word to interpret itself. The church, therefore, can never interpret its own form, and thus can never set itself over against the world. The Church knows itself only in faith, that is, in God’s Word, which it can never possess but on which it always and constantly depends.

Barth’s use of the form/content distinction actually undermines the coherence of that distinction. Ordinarily, we think of the form/content binary along the lines of the split between sign/signified: what is present to us (form/sign) provides what is absent (content/signified). Instead of providing a deconstructive analysis of the endless deferrals within language (différance), Barth fundamentally places language--at least the language of proclamation--beyond any self-mastery (whether mastery over a stable or an unstable linguistic order). The content is not a what but a free who: linguistic operation has its goal and meaning outside of itself. Barth sets up no analogy of being whereby we can discern (and hence regain control of) this linguistic transcendence (169, 173). The presence of God within our words has no basis in these words but only in God’s freedom to be with us (through the Spirit, 181). Therefore, the linguistic practice of the Church (it’s “grammar”) is an exercise in humility, weakness, and dependence: without any guarantee that our words will actually become proclamation of the Word, we continue to speak our secular words, confident that God’s grace and forgiveness in Jesus will redeem our words, since God has already brought all words inside of God’s Word, Jesus Christ. Far from leading us to disparage our creaturely words, we can find new delight and pleasure in them, knowing that God is free to be with us (speak to us) in any word, and knowing that God only comes to us in the poverty of our own speech.

Bonhoeffer and the Relative Importance of Life Together

2009-07-18T09:54:00.008-04:00

I recently had a conversation with our priest about small groups in our church. During the meeting, I made a brief remark that Bonhoeffer, in _Life Together_, begins his description of communal life by discounting the value of it. I decided I should write out what I meant. What follows is taken from a longer paper I wrote yesterday. After the section posted here, the paper turns to "Life Together and Small Group Structures" to defend the value of small group multiplication as a way to remind ourselves that our communities are not ends in themselves but means for Christ to encounter (and means submitted to his work for his glory). I should also note that I haven't really edited the paper. But it's been over a month since my last post, so I thought I should add something.

Bonhoeffer begins his little book on Christian community, Life Together, with an attack on, of all things, the celebration of communal life. After announcing his intention to examine “our life together under the Word,” Bonhoeffer states, “It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians. Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies” (17). He then quotes Luther, who more provocatively asserts, “The Kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the devout people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what you are doing who would ever have been spared” (17-18). The Church does not exist to stay together, to cling to its own kind. On the contrary, Christians are called to “dwell in far countries among the unbelievers” (18). Christian life, even life together, is life under the Word, which means life submitted to Christ, the one who obediently went into the “far country” (Barth) to dwell with those who were not like him but were instead rebellious sinners.

Bonhoeffer’s subordination of community to Christ corrects an overemphasis on community. Christian community can only be praised after it has been devalued. Community is not our mission. It is not essential but a privilege, a gracious gift (18), and one which not all Christians have (or have continually). It is subordinated to Christ, the one who died alone (17), in the far country, for the sake of us sinners. Its value, therefore, never rests in itself but only in the one it worships, Jesus Christ. Finally, Christian community is composed of sinners (23), and therefore it is a community that can never be placed in opposition to (or closed off from) “the sinful world.” The community that shuts out the unbeliever or the stranger, the weak or the useless, may actually shut out Christ (see p. 38). To isolate the community from the world--or to place the church in opposition to the world, which amounts to the same thing--undercuts our mission, ignores our present existence as sinners justified only by grace, and risks shutting out the source of all grace, Jesus, the righteous one who dwells with sinners. All of these conclusions follow from the words of Luther placed by Bonhoeffer in the second paragraph. Life Together begins, therefore, with the stark but realistic (and necessary) reminder that our communal life is, strictly speaking, only a means and never the end, and hence, only of value insofar as it points us to our end, Jesus Christ.

This denial of the inherent value of community does not lead Bonhoeffer to assert the superiority of individual life--the book after all, is still about community. Bonhoeffer refuses to make any form--whether communal or individual, or some blend of the two--essential for Christian life. There is no right way because every step, every supposed path, exists only under the lordship of Christ. All attempts to find the right form miss Bonhoeffer’s main point: no form can guarantee that Christ is present, and therefore, all forms must be continually questioned and continually brought back into submission to Christ.

By placing communal life in service to Christ, Bonhoeffer forces us to allow Jesus to stand between us and every relationship: “we belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ” (21). All relationships have the meaning in fulfillment insofar as they point us to Christ; therefore, Christ is at the center of all relationships. As the center, Jesus Christ stands between me and my neighbor, me and my enemy, me and my friend, me and my lover. Christ even stands between myself and me. As Augustine famously puts it, Christ “is closer to me than I am to myself.” No relationship escapes Christ’s mediation, and any relationship that tries to bypass Christ’s mediation is a sinful one. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ. Only through Jesus. We can never belong to each other directly.

Jesus’ position as mediator between myself and all others destroys any attempt of heroic individualism. To assert that one can go it alone--just me and Jesus--is often an arrogant denial of Christ’s presence in and through others. We think we are strong enough, smart enough, holy enough to sustain our lives with Christ alone. But we can never be certain of our own resources; we never can rely on our strength. The one on whom we rely, Jesus, has told us where he is to be found: in our neighbor. God “has willed that we should seek and find His living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of a man” (23). Jesus tells us to rely on the words of our brothers and sisters, and therefore, as people dependent on Jesus, we obey. We seek Jesus in community. We trust that Jesus will speak through the mouths and lives of those around us.

Nevertheless, we do not seek others to fill our needs, we seek Jesus in and through others. Communal life often functions as an extension of individualism. To return to the introduction, individualism is just a certain form of communal life (and hence a communal form that cannot be ended by advocating people join a community). Aware that we are finite, limited, weak, and insecure, we seek to draw others into our own “sphere of power” (33). We seek to sustain our lives--our individual, self-possessed lives--through others. Community functions as “human absorption” (ibid). Here “one soul operates directly upon another soul” (ibid). No longer does Jesus meet us through the other--and hence place himself between us and another. The other person directly satisfies our needs. They are attached to us, as extensions of ourselves, as members of our body (the original definition of a slave). We function through them; they sustain us.

This direct contact often takes the form of love but it is in fact simply the other side of domination. The other cannot be released because the other serves my needs. I need them, and that need determines our interaction. The other person is simply an extension of my own body, my own life. Love as direct contact--what Bonhoeffer calls “human love” (34)--is the desire for a community of slaves; it is the desire for a community to serve me. Whether this desire is expressed directly (“oppression”) or more subtly and coercively (“love”), the result is the same: the other person is brought under my control so as to serve and meet my needs.

Christ, as the mediator of all relationships, destroys any hope of “direct contact,” and therefore undermines all coercive relationships and communal forms. Since Christ stands between me and every other person, I “must release the other person from every attempt of mine to regulate, coerce, and dominate him [or her] with my love” (36). For Christ’s sake, we release the ones we love. We do not hold onto them, as if they were tools for the satisfaction of our own desires. We see other people as what they truly are--persons for whom Christ died. We see them as they already are “in Christ’s eyes” (ibid). This means that we lose the ability to judge others, for they are ones judged by Christ. We are willing to let go of others--to not try to influence them, but merely to “meet [them] with the clear Word of God” and let them be “alone with this Word for a long time” (ibid). Knowing that it is only through Christ that my needs are met in another person, we are free to let go of that person (or that group of people), trusting that the same Christ will continue to satisfy our desires. Forgoing all attempts at direct contact, we place our faith not in the relationship with the person but in the one who mediates--and hence controls and orders--that relationship. The relationship is never “an end itself” (35); it exists in order to serve Jesus Christ.

In Jesus Christ, all our relationships are eternally secure, for we know that we will be with our Christian community through all eternity (25). We are free to let go of our community because we trust that Christ holds all things together, and therefore, in and through Christ, we are still united to those we love. Knowing that we do not live by the experience of community but only through Christ (39), we are free to love each other truthfully, to honor one another’s freedom, and to sacrificial serve those in, and those outside of, our present community.

Witnessing: Barth, Cixous, and the Art of Writing

2009-06-09T16:27:00.011-04:00

"Witnessing means pointing in a specific direction beyond the self and on to another. Witnessing is thus service to this other in which the witness vouches for the truth of the other, the service which consists in referring to this other...Standing in this service, the biblical witnesses point beyond themselves...One might recall John the Baptist in Grunewald's Crucifixion, especially his prodigious index finger. Could anyone point away from himself more impressively and completely ('he must increase, but I must decrease')...This is what the Fourth Evangelist wanted to say about this John, and therefore about another John, and therefore quite unmistakably about every 'John.'" Karl Barth, CD I.1.4.3, 109-110 [112].

So much to say about this painting--but we are only following one path here, the path to which Barth points us, the path of pointing away. Follow the prodigious finger.

To go ahead and say it: the phallic finger. Prodigious--extraordinary in size, abnormal, a miracle perhaps. Or a monstrosity. Perhaps all--that prodigious finger is not an end in itself. What it is--abnormal, excessive, monster, miracle--comes not from within, but from without. From where it points. Or, to whom. But Barth is right: it is a prodigious finger/phallus.

The object of desire, the one to whom the finger points: the monstrosity of (as) Christ. The prodigy, prodigium, Latin for monster. Or omen. Christ, the prodigy, the monstrous omen. "The prodigy is not only prewarning, but activation of the calamity at hand" (__Greek and Indo-European Etymology in Action: Proto-Indo-European *aǵ-__, Raimo Anttila, 114). The prodigious finger pointing away, pointing to the prodigy, the calamity at hand, the death of Christ.

Here we enter into the undoing. The phallic finger does not inscribe itself. It is not the goal, or object of attention. It exists in the painting as a sign, as a witness, as something to move past. It is magnified, enlarged, made prodigious so as to draw attention to its shrinking. Above the finger, it is written: he must increase but I must decrease. Enlarged, to draw attention to its shrinking. To his shrinking. To he shrinking.

Let us turn from shrinking and look at the large--and grotesque--feet of Christ. With the nail through the center, and blood dripping off the individual toes. The feet must have died first. They look ashen; even more than the rest of the dead, diseased, broken, bloody body. (I remember stories, in the Bible, about covering feet, and laying at the feet, and recall: a euphemism). Prodigious, dead feet.

Jesus' hands are also unusual. His fingers point--not to another person in the painting, but to the one absent, God, above. If there were time--I'm trying not to ramble...--we could examine those hands. One other person imitates those splayed fingers--Mary Magdalene, the smallest figure in the painting. Also, the only other one (besides Jesus) who isn't standing on her feet. The prodigious finger, pointing away from itself, towards the one with opened, uncontrolled, grasping hands. And thoroughly dead feet. (He came in the likeness of sinful flesh...).

"Writing is a passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me--the other that I am and am not, that I don't know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live--that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me, who?--a feminine one, a masculine one, some?--several, some unknown, which is indeed what gives me the desire to know and from which all life soars. This peopling gives neither rest nor security, always disturbs the relationship to "reality," produces an uncertainty that gets in the way of the subject's socialization. It is distressing, it wears you out; and for men, this permeability, this nonexclusion is a threat, something intolerable" (Cixous, Sorties, in __The Newly Born Woman__, 86).

The permeability, the vulnerability, speaks of the end of self-mastery. Christ is the end of self-mastery. The death of human autonomy (self-government); the shriveling up of the enlarged...feet. For men, this is a threat. He must increase, I must decrease. The object of desire--the one to whom John's prodigious finger points--the crucified Christ. The death of the "phallogocentric" economy. Desired. Desirable. Lovely and teeming with life.

Cixous emphasizes writing; she performs a new writing, one not intoxicated by the desire to contain, conquer, control. Free from self-mastery, which involves (by necessity) an opposition to others: I, not you, am master. Beyond mastery, a different space, another way to write, another way to live, another way to relate. She thinks she's merely dreaming.

"Without the ambivalence, the liability to misunderstanding and the vulnerability with which [preaching] takes place, with which it is itself one event among many others, it could not be real proclamation" (Barth, 91 [94]). God speaks--the event of God's Word occurs--not in spite of, but through the weakness of our proclamation. To be a witness is to be weak. To be a witness is to have one's whole life amount to the task of pointing away, of highlighting not the self, but another. Not any other, either. But the Wholly Other--the Weakest Other, God in flesh.

Barth sometimes downplay the importance of the human form, the style of the presentation ("dogmatics does not seek to give a positive, stimulating and edifying presentation," p. 80 [82]). But he fundamentally recognizes its importance. The form does not guarantee that God speaks. God speaks always out of God's freedom. Nevertheless, one can point to Christ in a way that actually points to oneself (the kingdom of the Selfsame, in Cixous' terms). One can witness to one's strength; which means one can point away from Christ, and thus, even in the form of witnessing, one can fail to witness at all. The form matters. The way we write matters. It displays who we think we are, and, by God's grace, the one to whom we point.

To write in a way that embraces the dead, prodigious, monstrous, saving omen of Christ. And his dead feet. A challenge. Joyful, exhilarating, and terrifying. "For men, this permeability, this nonexclusion is a threat." The threat of losing control. "She lets the other tongue of a thousand tongues speak--the tongue, sound without barrier or death" (Sorties, 88). A beautiful picture of the feast we celebrated two weeks ago--Pentecost. Life beyond the dead feet. Come, Holy Spirit.

Thoughts on John 20:19-23

2009-06-05T11:19:00.005-04:00

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

It was evening on that day, the same day, the first day of the week. Earlier that day, before the evening gathering, before the doors were locked, when the morning darkness still lingered, Mary Magdalene approached the tomb--we know not why--and saw that the stone no longer blocked the entrance. The stone had been removed and the tomb was--empty. She ran back to the disciples--who had not gone to the tomb with Mary, we know not why--and Peter and John joined her back at the tomb. They entered into the open tomb, saw the discarded linen wrappings and the carefully folded cloth that had covered Jesus' face, but Jesus was gone. The disciples did not linger but returned to the house.

The disciples left, but Mary stayed, weeping outside of the tomb, weeping for the lost body of Jesus. Two angels appear--though Mary does not see them as angels--and ask her why she is weeping. She tells them and then, right after she finishes speaking, she sees Jesus standing there--though she thinks him a gardner. She tells the gardner to help her locate the misplaced body of Jesus, but the gardner speaks her name, and she hears--and then she sees, the Lord. She returns to the disciples, to the house where, later that same evening, the door will be locked.

When it was evening, on this day, the first day of the week, after Mary, Peter and John had entered the empty tomb, after Mary had heard Jesus' voice call her name and had seen the risen Lord, once the disciples had gathered together, and once the doors of the house where they met had been locked for fear of the Jews, when all of these events had finally lined up (or been strung together), Jesus came and stood among them.

Jesus enters--but not through the door. Jesus enters through the locked door. It is no mere demonstration of his power, a new trick, a test drive of the new, resurrected body (I wonder if this thing will pass through walls...). No, Jesus--whom they now know, or at least should now know to be alive, resurrected--is locked out. Why? Fear of the Jews.

The doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews. The place of entry--locked. Unlike the tomb. The stone was removed; but the doors were locked. Why was the stone removed--why not pass through it like the locked doors? Or, conversely, why not knock on the door? An open passage way and a closed one. For the one person who needs no passage way, for the one person who is the passage way (I am the gate...).

The door, the stone. The place of transition, and mechanisms to prevent transition: locked doors, covered tombs. And the fear of the Jews. Why are they afraid? And what good do they think a locked door will do? You don't have to be resurrected to get past a locked door. Why are they hiding? Do they not believe Mary? Or are they afraid--not only of the Jews, but of Jesus. Perhaps. Is it not the case that our fear of others and our fear of God are related? Our failure to trust God leads to locking the doors against others. Locking the doors, fearing the Jews, closes us off from God. The door, the place of transition, is closed. To "the Jews," and hence also to Jesus. To lock out "the other" necessitates locking out Jesus.

Jesus doesn't condemn the locked door. He bypasses it. He comes into the place he is excluded. And his first words, "Peace be with you." He passes through the blockade and stands in our midst. He has no need to coerce us into letting him in. He enters through the locked door, affirms his and our peace, and shows his wounds. Then the disciples rejoiced. The order is not peace, rejoice. But peace, the displaying of his wounds, and then rejoicing because we finally see the Lord (why does Mary not need to see the wounds but only hear her name...?).

The door that closes out the other, and closes out Jesus, has been circumvented. Bypassed. Passed through, and rendered useless. Peace offered, wounds examined, vision restored--rejoice. And now, the repetition. Jesus repeats the peace. The first peace restored. What is the point of this new peace? Is it mere repetition? No, it is a peace not only to be reconciled, but to be sent out. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. Receive the Spirit.

After passing through the locked door, Jesus sends us out. Out of the locked door. With the first peace, Jesus bypasses our locked doors. With the second peace, he sends us out of the room. Beyond all locked doors. Sent as Jesus was sent. By the Father, through the Spirit. Sent like Jesus, the one whose wounds were just displayed. Sent out, away from the locked doors. Sent out vulnerable, weak, compassionate. Wounded. Filled with the Holy Spirit.

It is not a calling we want. We prefer locked doors. We would prefer closed tombs. The one who left the tomb moves through our locked doors. The first peace is scary, but comforting. The one we love--alive, and at peace with us. But the second peace--to be sent out, like him, that is too much. We do not want it. We cannot sustain it. We like our locked doors. Receive the Holy Spirit.

If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained. How can we retain the sins of any if we are sent out in the form, pattern, and image of Jesus, the one sent to subsume all sin? How can we refuse to forgive sin when we know we would rather lock our doors and hide in our self-created (and hence false!) sense of security? We who are terrified of that second peace--and thus know ourselves to be sinners--how can we do anything but rejoice in the forgiveness of sins?

The Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of him who came bypassed all barriers, who is himself the point of transition, the Spirit of this one, the risen Jesus, given to us. Not offered to us (would you like the Spirit, it's pretty great, it fulfills your needs and will sustain your life, come on, you know you want it, it will really deepen your piety and liturgical performance and social justice...please...). Not offered or explained, but given. Before we have a chance to say no. Before we think again about what he just said, before we realize what it means to be sent as Jesus was sent. Given to us--as grace. As encounter. Regardless of our locked doors, our fears, weakness, insecurity, bigotry, and sinfulness. Encountered by grace. Filled by the Spirit, and told: step out of your hiding place, abandon your post behind locked doors, and be sent--out, unafraid, weak and vulnerable, into a world radically transformed, a world in which all barriers are meaningless because the excluded One has risen. Sent out. To a world where there are, ultimately speaking, no "others" because there are no truly locked doors.

unmasking the unmasked

2009-05-28T11:10:00.005-04:00

In "Unmasked!", Cixous examines the Theatre as a place free from misogyny, a space free from "countless symptoms, stiffness, blindness, treachery, uneasiness, hypocrisy, death and rape drives, denial" (179). What I find interesting, and want to look at briefly, is how Cixous tries to ground the religious on a kind of misogynistic hatred of "the unclean" and yet, in the end, her exploration of Theatre deploys not just religious language, but also the same kind of binary oppositions she wants to avoid.

The religious, for Cixous, operates along the logic of clean-unclean. The Bible (she quotes from Leviticus) creates clear boundaries, inside-outside, and outside is a "no man's land," meaning, the outside, is the feminine. A woman giving birth to a son is unclean for a week; for a daughter, the uncleanness lingers, twice as long (Cixous, 173-74). The unclean is not just the outside, it is at the boundary, or a place of mixture. Cixous declares that true writing is a "free traveler along edges and abysms...That writing suffers in fact the fate of birds, women, the unclean" (174). Through the economy of cleanliness, the world becomes divided, separated, and built on oppositions. No longer is creation seen down at the root, where "nothing is simple," where everything is "twisted, doubled up, entangled" (175).

Cixous turns to Theatre as a refuge from this religious economy (or order) of cleanliness. In Theatre, all boundaries become blurry, and therefore everyone, male and female, lives in a kind of (feminine) border area, a "no man's land." To enter into the Theatre, as an actor, is to become undone, "stripped from head to foot down to one's self" (179). The actors lose themselves; they become unknown, disfigured, "practically to the point of becoming nobody" (180). The mask comes on, and now the person(a) is a new person(a). The mask prevents the stripped-self from "getting its face back" (180). All who enter are negated: "one woman one man or the other, the space is ready to receive them without distinction, as to sex, age, race. There is no particularity" (180); the Theatre is a "kingdom that stretches beyond oppositions and exclusions" (181). In the Theatre, in acting, we come to know that "all creatures contain infinite possibilities of being an other. One possibility is just as good as another" (182).

Yet, this theatrical space is reconfigured and spoken of only in terms of inside-outside, of inclusion and exclusion, and hence, as a religion. The Theatre "was once a Temple...and doesn't forget it" (179). Is this a Temple-beyond, a truly new space, a new kingdom? Or does it also bring with it the same logic and the same code?

I shall speak about the actors. They have arrived.

Undecided, detached, undressed, without any rank, unarmed, without any particularity. Joyously prepared for fate. There are no brothers, there are no wars. He might have been she....They have become unknown (179).

Religious idealism at its best! A glorious scene, the kingdom fulfilled, here and now, in our midst, and I am....inside!

For there are 'the happy few,' a small number, the miracles, a handful of charming grains of sand in the desert of millennia. (177).

And I am...she is....one of those few! I do not favor closing borders, I exist on the boundaries, and thus, I am...inside. A new inside. The boundary as the inside. "This extreme boundary state can last only so long as it is performed, acted, created" (182). Theatre is, therefore, liturgy, or ritual, whereby I am brought from the outside into the inside, into the kingdom. And the kingdom is here, at the Temple of Theatre, and not there, not elsewhere.

To be in the kingdom is to be beyond particularity--there is no particularity. The kingdom of the boundary, the kingdom of difference is now the universal kingdom. Difference so wide spread, so celebrated, that it ceases to be, or make, any difference. An unreal difference. Is this not a return of Enlightenment, of Kant's Cosmopolis: the universal society, now founded on the theatrical reduction-as-celebration of difference. To contain infinite possibilities is to contain all possibilities, which means to contain all differences within a single, universal. Through acting (and watching), "a transfiguration comes into the bare shell" (181). To peer behind the mask (unmasking) reveals, not a new kingdom, but the old, the empty, universal, all-powerful, ever elusive self-defining self. Now, however, it is defining itself in its indefinite, undefinable qualities. Nevertheless, behind the mask, is the same old ideal, universal self.

Be that as it may, one should not let go of Cixous too quickly. For, where can we go? Back to a more benevolent ordering of religion, of inside and outside (i.e., the Christian colonial project)? Can we be certain that our own returns, our own attempted escapes, fare any better? Has not Cixous done what we all do--the best we all can do? Has not unmasking "the unmasked" also unmasked every unmasking, including our own? Is not her critique on the religious a religious critique of the religious, and hence, an important critique of our religion (and religious critique)? To put it plainly: in dismissing Cixous, do we not end up doing what we criticize her for doing? Cixous reveals so clearly what we have to avoid and yet, in the end, fail to avoid. All of us.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:21-25, ESV).

Christians long to (and often have) interpreted Paul here as speaking of his life as a "religious" or devout Jew prior to his encounter with Jesus. But this misreading simply leads to the illusion that our own attempts to escape the logic of "death and rape drives" are vastly superior to Cixous. A simple reading of Church History should be enough to show that this is wrong.

"Only in God can men be so utterly dismembered" (Barth, Romans, 286). Dismemberment is not our work, it is God's. Our religion--even that of the Church Fathers, or the Reformers--stands just as firmly under Christ's condemnation and forgiveness as does Cixous' religion of Theatre. But what the Church sees that Cixous does not, is that in Jesus, there is a way to live beyond mere particularity (seen as opposition) that does not become empty universality: that is what Paul calls life in Christ. However, what the Church must recognize and confess is that Cixous does not see this possibility in Christ not simply because we have not embodied it (which is true) but because we have not embodied it while proclaiming to embody it. Jesus, like the Theatre for Cixous, became a way of articulating our own thoughts, dreams, and visions of the kingdom. But Jesus, unlike the Theatre, should, can, and in fact does stand against our Jesus-religion (and every religious striving). In Jesus we can acknowledge the sinfulness of our religion, and know that Jesus is not just against us, but for us, and with us, even in our sinful religious strivings for a better world.

Life in Jesus is not a new self-possessed form of life; it is not one religious option among others, and therefore, as Barth strives to make clear, it can never be contrasted with others. "Perhaps also--in so far as we are 'not we' and 'have not'--those 'others', that is to say, the many who are contrasted with us, cease to be others who do 'not have', but are they who hear us speaking in their tongues the wonderful works of God" (Barth, 274). We are on the outside, as those who have not, like others who have not, speaking about God's faithfulness to us--all of us--who have, nothing. Life in Jesus does not allow us to create a new inside, for he has brought all "outside" into his body. To bring Cixous back: Jesus is the "no man's land," the feminine, unclean, crucified, weak, enslaved, and victorious Christ. In Jesus, our own failings to justly inhabit the world are exposed, condemned, forgiven, and restored. We live, not on the new inside, trying to condemn or convert the outside, but on the outside, knowing that every outside is already inside, and only exists inside, inside of the no-man's land of Jesus' body, a land we inhabit without ever possessing.

Second Time Around, with the Help of Cixous

2009-05-22T15:58:00.011-04:00

"Broken men, we dare to use unbroken language. We must not forget that we are speaking in parables and after the manner of men [Rom 6:18]" Karl Barth, __Commentary on Romans__, 221.

"At a gallop, the snail! We scribble while crawling in the wake of God" Helene Cixous, __Stigmata__, 39.

"We don't have the last word: truth always has the word before, and we runt out of breath at its heals" Cixous, 37.

Perhaps Cixous is a better way to get at Barth. Or, as Barth would prefer, to get past Barth, to move beyond the signpost to stay on the heals of...Truth.

"Without End, No, State of Drawingness, No, Rather: The Executioner's Taking Off" is an essay on writing essays. Cixous writes to capture the creation, the moment of unfolding, or "the passing (of the) truth" (Stigmata, 28). She does not seek the finished thought, the clean product or the polished idea. She does not pretend to say the last word. She writes essays. Not probings, or musings, or ponderings. No aimless wandering thought; nor first stabs at the truth. But a wrestling, or, as she says, a combat: "every drawing (is) combat(s) itself. Drawing is the emblem of all our hidden, intestine combats. There we see the soul's entrails" (36). The essay is a drawing; it captures the combat.

We combat--what? Ourselves? Not exactly. We strive--because "truth strikes us. Opens our heart. Our lips" (29). We are encountered--we catch a glimpse, an internal sight (in-sight), a momentary vision, and we stumble. We struggle. "Truth strikes us." We cannot draw or write a crisp thought--"how then to draw a firm footing, when our soul is merely a staggering...We all go along at the same pace, with an uncertain foot" (38). Our soul staggers along and so we fight within ourselves. We struggle along after the truth: "time, the body, are our slow vehicles, our chariots without wheels" (39).

Theologians (including myself) are often "those who seek the finished. Those who seek to portray cleanly, the most properly" (28). Barth, like Cixous, reminds us of our place--we are broken, our vision is partial, limited, fragmented; it is--we are--a collection of glimpses and struggles of faltering steps, hesitations, and approximations. We (our thoughts) are never ultimate, but perpetually penultimate, perpetually a step behind, and hence, never resting, never secure, always--questioning. Advancing through and with and in questions, or as Cixous puts it, "We are advancing backwards" (38). Advancing because struck...by Truth. Backwards because the moment--the happening or event--occurs to us, creatures.

We are encountered--and so we speak. Cixous tries to write off repentance, but the idea circumscribes her essay. The word 'repentance' "jumped on to my page, it spread everywhere, however much I denied it. One says this word and that's it" (40). Why the adamant refusal to repent--"we who draw are innocent" (28)? Because the situation is impossible. She is--and we are--compelled to speak, and yet we must speak what remains beyond us--we must speak the Truth. We are struck by Truth. We "don't have salvation: it is dealt us like a blow, we faint. We awake with a start, quick a pencil, and take down the ultimate glimmer of illumination, however much we say: 'what's the difference, we've seen our vision already,' we never resign ourselves" (39). We never resign because we are compelled to speak, to write, to draw...furiously. Quickly. Boldly.

Yet Cixous recognizes something problematic in writing essays. The self is uncommitted. It seeks to justify its hesitancy. It knows it will encounter errors--how can it not--and wants to reassure itself: "error is not lie: it is approximation. Sign that we are on track" (29). That response should settle the question. Yet 'repentance' keeps invading the text. Repentance lurks because the defense might be only a justification. What if our defense is...a lie? Error is not lie, but what if we should repent of our errors? What if we should write, or worse, should have written, something other than an essay? What if we ought to dare to use an "unbroken language" (Barth)?

"When one is poorly informed, one hesitates to take a position. And there was powerful official misinformation" (Gourevitch, 139). The words of Bishop Misago, a man accused of supporting Hutu-power, of preventing Tutsis from reaching places of refuge, of calling Tutsi priests "cockroaches," and of promising police protection to ninety Tutsi schoolchildren who were slaughtered (by those police) three days later. Hesitancy is not always a virtue. Cixous agrees; and the theme of repentance haunts her essay.

Barth, like Cixous, recognizes that we cannot comprehend the meaning of our existence. Nevertheless, both Cixous and Barth agree that Truth encounters us in our "twilight" (Barth's phrase). The "righteousness of God in Jesus Christ is a possession which breaks through this twilight, bringing the knowledge which sets even human existence ablaze. The revelation and observation--of the Unknown God--whereby men know themselves to be known and begotten by Him whom they are not" (Barth, 226). In Jesus, we see Truth as a person (I am the Truth; In the Beginning was the Word..and the Word became flesh), and not just any person, most certainly not an ambivalent person. Jesus is a person for us. In Jesus, we see God as a person for us; we see God bearing our sins for us. We see--it hits us in a moment, like a flash. The twilight is ripped apart by lightning--we see, and yet, the vision is lost. So begins our stumbling.

Nevertheless, our stumbling is not the final answer. Though broken, we dare to speak an unbroken language. We dare--and can dare--because we know that what we say is a parable. We are free to make an error--to stumble forward along the heels of Truth--because we see that Truth is a person, and this person is for us. We repent because we know, in Jesus, we are forgiven. We are free to act, to speak boldly, to draw cleanly because we know that neither our finished products nor our struggling attempts can bear the stamp of Truth; we know this, and yet, we know that, Truth has condescended to come into our terms, to speak our language--to come in the flesh, in the form of a slave, under the conditions of our sin. We can repent for our errors and our sins because we know that our best efforts fall short--the unbroken language is beyond us--and yet, the one from outside, the Eternal Truth, has been drawn into (on the pages of) our stuttering. We stutter without shame not because we live without the need of forgiveness, but because we are forgiven. Because we are forgiven, we can live...without knowing who we are. "As soon as we draw (as soon as, following the pen, we advance into the unknown, hearts beating, mad with desire) we are little, we do know know, we start out avidly, we're going to lose ourselves" (Cixous, 26). In Jesus, we see that this loss of ourselves is our judgement-as-forgiveness, and thus, a joyful retrieval of our (still necessary) stumbling. "I advance error by error, with erring steps, by the force of error. It's suffering, but it's joy" (Cixous, 29).

*I am trying to let Cixous help me rethink my last post on "Pragmatic Identity." I'm hoping to think through a bit more clearly what it means to live from beyond ourselves, as well as to open up the possibility of this ecstatic existence being, well, joyful.*

Pragmatic Identity

2009-05-21T20:03:00.002-04:00

"The Gospel of Christ is a shattering disturbance, an assault which brings everything into question" Karl Barth, __The Epistle to the Romans__, 225.

"We are under grace, and we are ourselves the objective of its attack" Karl Barth, 216.

"May God never relieve us of this questioning! May God enclose us with questions on every side! May God defend us from any answer which is not itself a question! May God bar every exit and cut us off from all simplifications!" Karl Barth, 254.

"Broken men, we dare to use unbroken language. We must not forget that we are speaking in parables and after the manner of men [Rom 6:18]" Karl Barth, 221.

A major theme in the Commentary on Romans is that grace produces something in us beyond our possession. Grace is the dissolution of our selves, of every human possibility, even and especially the most religious and pious of human endeavors. But the "new self" is not the object of empirical observation; it is not equivalent to a certain mystical experience or ethical standpoint. The person that I was has died in Christ. I now live in Christ, or Christ lives in me. Yet this new person that I am eludes my own understanding. I know who I am...by faith. But faith is faith in the unseen. Therefore, the life I live now is one that is beyond my own understanding. We live by faith, not by sight.

In discussion about the future of Rwanda, I frequently hear two ways of "moving beyond" Tutsi and Hutu differences. The first option places our hope in a new national identity: a person is neither Hutu nor Tutsi, one is simply Rwandan. The other option eschews the language of national identity in favor of religious identity: one is not Hutu, Tutsi, or Rwandan, one is Christian. The problem with these attempts are numerous. First, everyone still knows who is Tutsi and who is Hutu and everyone knows that these distinctions continue to carry weight: one cannot speak of of one's place in or after the genocide without recourse to these identities. Secondly, one cannot dissolve and restructure identity by changing the words. Thirdly, the national option still operates on a structure of inclusion/exclusion and cannot cope with hybrid or unclear national identity (e.g., what about Tutsis who were born to Rwandan parents outside of Rwanda and only came to Rwanda 5 years ago, and thus after the genocide?). Fourthly, the religious option also generally follows a pattern of exclusion (what about Rwandan Muslims, a small group of people but one that generally didn't participate in the genocide). Fifthly, and more problematically, the religious option fails to question how Tutsi and Hutu were constructed as racial identities as part of the process of Christianizing Rwanda. While it may be true that colonial missionaries and later Rwandan priests converted people to "the church" instead of to "Jesus," one can say that about every Christian failing and thus it is a fairly unhelpful thing to say. Further, every preceding generation that creates a "Christian" culture has been reminded by the following generation just how worldly that "Christian" identity was. Finally, both the religious and the national responses presuppose that the only way forward is to construct a new form of identity. They are both committed to providing a new story through which I (we) can clearly articulate my (our) sense of myself (ourselves).

It is on this final point that I find Barth confusing, but helpful. To be helpful Barth has to be confusing, for he is trying to undermine our attempts to use Christianity to disclose the truth of who we are. Barth is struggling to make us uneasy about who we are. The Gospel shatters our sense of ourselves, as Americans or Rwandans, men or women, Hutu or Tutsi. It is a shattering disturbance of who we are as Christians! No identity, whether national, racial, ethnic, communal, local, individual, gender, sexual or religious (including Christian!) can withstand the judgment of Jesus. All forms of identity are brought into Jesus' body and there, in his body, brought to death. All forms of identity now live in--and only in--Jesus' body. They have all been questioned and judged.

But what comes after? A new, superior, and holy form of identity? By no means! The same ones, only, not the same. We are who we are...but also not. We are dead to those old forms, yet, still living in them, or perhaps, Christ is now living in them through us. It's hard to say. We are undoubtedly new creations, dead to sin, alive in Christ, filled with the Spirit. Yet, this new "I" seems distinct from my conscious self. Who, then, am I?

The key, I am beginning to suspect, for sorting through the problem of identity in post-genocidal Rwanda is the same as sorting through the problem of identity in the late-modern or post-modern global era. The question is not about creating a new self or new national (religious, racial, etc) identity. The question is about how to live without one.

But that is still too easy. The struggle is how to live with various, competing, and ambiguous identities without making these ambiguous forms operate as new solid or self-possessed forms (e.g., hybridity or ambiguity as the new "authentic" cultural form). We cannot place our hope in a new national or even religious identity for Rwanda, or for the U.S.A. We cannot do so because we know that any idea of ourselves that we can articulate, grasp, and represent is a merely human form of life. If so--if the "new" form of identity stands as one human possibility related to others--then it must fall under the judgment of Christ.

Nevertheless, we cannot abandon this process. We are committed to speaking the truth about ourselves. Those who profess faith in Jesus must bring every aspect of who they are--gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, weight, etc--to Jesus and let Jesus have his way with it. The end result is not a brand new, "untainted" or "pure" form of existence--it is a relative human form, reworked, altered, and now much more questionable and unclear than before! We never know who we are but must always receive who we are again, anew, from God. Who are we, then? May God enclose us with this question on every side!

*I don't think this is the clearest post. My basic point is that one cannot erase Hutu or Tutsi identity anymore than I can cease being a white guy. Nevertheless, in Jesus, I find my whiteness drawn into question, not in a way that makes me more confident (that my being is the "universal" mode of human existence or that my being is a perfectly fine particular mode of being) but that makes me less confident, more uneasy (who do I identify with and why? whose lives help me understand my own life, and why them?). It is not that this tentative form of existence is now the new, superior form. However, being enclosed with questions on every side reminds us that we are always asking and answering these questions as humans, as God's finite and broken creatures. It opens us up to more pragmatic answers to questions about identity--we can only give limited, partial, stuttering answers to the question, and only in response to particular questions in particular spaces asked for particular reasons and in hopes of a particular result. We never know if we got it right but place all of our confidence in God's judgment and forgiveness in Jesus Christ.*

utopian genocide

2009-05-14T10:14:00.004-04:00

"Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building...[Genocide] was promoted as a way not to create suffering but to alleviate it. The specter of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual--always an annoyance to totality--ceases to exist."

Philip Gourevitch, __We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda___, 95.

It is tempting to analyze a few aspects of contemporary American politics from this perspective (post-9/11 wars, the reasoning behind torture) but I will resist. Instead, I want to think about the role and function of utopian thinking in Christian theology. It isn't something I've thought about--and Micah D., if you read this, you should let me know what you think.

Genocide builds community in two distinct ways. First, it brings the community together against a common enemy, a plague or parasite that must be eliminated. Secondly, the community is brought together for the sake of a better world. The first aspect--being against an enemy--is subordinated to the second aspect--being for a new world. The prospect of a new life, a new community, and a new world explains the necessity of being against the enemy. After all, the enemy is the threat to this new order. Genocide is never an end in itself, but a means to an end. The end--the desired goal of genocide--is a new community and a better world (or perhaps a new situation for an existing community, again, for the sake of a better world).

One can trace this genocidal logic back even before colonization (which is where H. Arendt lodges it). The genocidal logic was built into late-medieval Christian identity, in which Spain needed to expel the Muslims and use blood purity laws to keep track of Jewish converts in order to stabilize Christian European identity. Right during this time--late 15th century--Spanish explorers started discovering "new" worlds. Very quickly, these "new" worlds became spaces in which (and through which) Europe could build a new world (and through this new world, express its own identity). Europe began the process of "reinventing Eden" (to use the title of a great book on the conquest of nature and peoples). It was this quest for a new world--a new, better, harmonic, edenic world--that justified the abuses of those deemed "native" and the land on which they dwelled. Acquiring the land was necessary for building a better world; civilizing the natives would bring them into this new world. Those who were lost were unfit for this new world. Some--Africans--were fit to labor for this world but must, like Moses perhaps, remain outside of the promised land: they are useful for but unfit to live in the new world.

Since genocide is an exercise in the quest for a better world, is there any space for the utopian in Christian theology? What do we make of the "kingdom of God"? How do we rethink the story of fall/redemption given the way a genocidal impulse has been operating within this story since at least the late middle ages (redemption from the fall through spreading Christian civilization)?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer says (in "History and Good [1]" from the __Ethics__), "Christ did not cause the world to cease being the world, and every action that seeks to confuse the world with the kingdom of God is a denial of both Christ and the world. By grounding responsible action in Jesus Christ we reaffirm precisely the limits of such action. Because we are dealing with worldly action, this responsibility has a limited scope. No one has the responsibility of turning the world into the kingdom of God" (224).

For Bonhoeffer, every dream of utopia fails Christologically, for it fails to realize that in Christ, "the world that is passing away has been claimed by God" (224). All human reality has already been taken on in Christ. To try to build a new community ignores the fact that Christ has loved and claimed this already existing sinful community. The community--as it presently exists--has been claimed by Jesus, and thus there is no reason to try to create the kingdom of God on earth.

But does not this claim by Jesus reconstitute the community? Yes! There is neither slave nor free, male nor female, Jew nor Greek! But doesn't this reconstitution of the community in Christ enable the utopian project to begin afresh? No! Why? Because the community is reshaped and formed by Christ (through the Spirit). It is never a human work; the formation is not mediated by our community (or any outside community) but is Christ's work (it is this point I've been trying to work out in the exchanges with Nick). The Church testifies--witnesses--to Christ's work and urges others to see and believe it as well. But it does not possess a form itself that it can then reproduce elsewhere (that belief lies at the very foundation of Christian imperialism, past and present).

So, then, are utopian writings banned? To use a Pauline expression--by no means! But they are welcomed as judged and forgiven. In other words, following every utopia stands Christ's "not my will but yours be done." God's work is God's work, not ours, and our calling is to surrender our dreams and hopes to God. Utopian thought can be valued and appreciated as long as one never forgets that any utopian scheme is sinful and must be surrendered to Christ (placed inside of Christ's cruciform obedience). We are not excused from wanting to see a more just, more peaceful, more loving and harmonious world; we are not freed from our longings to see a new creation, a reconstituted Eden. But we know, and must continually remind ourselves, that these dreams are dreams to be surrendered. They are dreams to be brought into Christ's body, and from there, within that cruciform space, they are dreams that can be embraced. In Christ, our dreams can be cleansed from our hidden hatred of the world (of the merely human); our hopes can be reordered by Christ's love for the world and for humans as they exist now. Our actions, therefore, can be organized not by the attempt to create a new world but to let the world exist as the world--to let those in the world live merely human lives. This work is always partial, always limited, always risky, and hence always needing humility and always standing in need of grace and forgiveness. "Ultimate ignorance of one's own goodness or evil, together with dependence upon grace, is an essential characteristic of responsible historical action" (Bonhoeffer, 225). "In God's own good, human good and evil are thus overcome" (227).

We never know if our actions coincide with God's good (e.g., Judas' action of betraying Christ actually coincided with God's good...). Far from excusing us to do evil, this fact causes us to know that even our best attempt to do the good might be horrendously evil (it certainly was for those missionaries trying to bring the natives into Christian civilization...). We must let go of any attempt to be justified, righteous, good, beneficent, or otherwise free from blame. But, instead of prohibiting action, the acknowledgement of our guilt frees us to act--as merely human actors striving after a merely human world (the merely human world that God has loved and reconciled to Godself in Christ).

Utopian writings can be valuable--but only from within this perspective: they are valued as long as one is reminded that what is hoped for is ultimately sinful and must be brought into judgment by Christ. Therefore, they are extremely valuable--like everything else "merely" human. But, like everything human, they must be filtered through Christ's love for the individual as he or she is now. That only spells the death of utopia if utopia is nothing more than the hatred of the concrete, historical human person. But if that is all utopia is, then genocide--hatred of the concrete human for the sake of the ideal human community--will always be at the core of any utopia. And genocide will remain the most accurate expression of utopian ideals.

Telling History: Barth and Foucault

2009-05-06T14:56:00.006-04:00

"History is a synthetic work of art. History emerges from what has occurred, and has one single, unified theme." Karl Barth, __The Epistle to the Romans__, 146.

People generally assume that "postmodernism," whatever else it might be, is a suspicion of single themes, of meta-narratives and fundamental truths. The theologian John Milbank argues that this assumption is misguided. For him, all the atheistic postmodern thinkers, despite their protests, actually end up expressing a single historical theme: the theme of violence. For these thinkers, according to Milbank, the basis of being and historical occurrence is rupture, chaos, or violence. The postmodern thinkers--again, despite their protest--do in fact read all history to fit a certain meta-narrative, only now it is the meta-narrative of struggle, of will to power, of violent assertion and counter-assertion, of one rupture after another, after another. Milbank goes on to argue that this "ontology of violence" is itself a matter of faith: nothing can prove it; at best, it is a matter of taste, and so, one which Christians can (and ought to) reject for a variety of reasons.

Milbank's read of the postmodern, though containing some validity, ultimately misses what is at stake for many of these thinkers. Take Foucault. For Foucault, telling history--as genealogy--emerges as an attempt to unmask the usual way of telling history in terms of "origins." Historians search for the time before the Fall, for that ideal moment before the chaos ensued. They tell of the glorious rise and inglorious fall of the people. The historian highlights the glorious origin in order to "map the destiny of a people" (Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, 81): once the descent--and reasons for the descent--are seen, the people can move past them to reclaim (presumably in a new, superior form) that glorious origin.

The genealogist resists this task of writing history. It exposes what is suppressed, held under, masked and ignored during the writing of history (as destiny). The genealogist uses history "to dispel the chimeras of the origin" (80). History, in the hands of the genealogist, no longer produces a stable identity for the people. By highlighting the ruptures, the contestations, the slippages, the impurity, the confusion, and the variety within a supposedly single history, the genealogist removes the possibility of using history to construct a coherent communal identity. There is no pure or stable "us" and hence there can never be a pure or stable "them." History "becomes 'effective' to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being" (88). Although we want to tell stories that place our communal lives on solid ground (divine guidance, human genius, noble intentions, evolutionary progress, or historical necessity), the "true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference" (89). The genealogist uses historical knowledge to attack the narrative of history as destiny: "knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting" (88).

Yet, the danger still lurks within Foucault that this cutting use of knowledge only reinvigorates the will to power. Even the less aggressive image of carnival--"Genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival" 94--leads to troubling questions: who is this figure that delights in the play of appearances; what economic structures support the joyful exuberance of nihilism; is not this subject who flits in and out of masks simply another form of enlightenment individualism, the rugged, self-sustained white male; finally, is not the joy fleeting and the danger great, since every shift opens up another rupture and there is never a place to rest?

Barth would grant Foucault's point that "history will not discover a forgotten identity, eager to be reborn, but a complex system of distinct and multiple elements, unable to be mastered by the powers of synthesis" (94). But for Barth, Foucault's criticism must remain at the level of history, of immanence, of life here and now and in their own terms. But even here, where Foucault sees closure, Barth sees a closure that is also an opening. Might not the endlessness and nonsense of historical occurrence (not progression or unfolding, just empty occurrence) point to something beyond it? Might not the value of history be in the fact that it stands under this KRISIS (Barth's favorite word for it), that the temporal is only the temporal and is not in fact the eternal? What if the harsh judgment of history--it is violence, sin, and death!--is not denied, but affirmed by God? What if God actually declares that our best historical endeavors and most glorious tales are nothing but forms of idolatry and violence? But then, what if the impossible has occurred, and that this judgment on all history has been born by one who is in the middle of history--as God? What if the violence of history has been brought inside of God's very life, inside of the body of Jesus Christ?

The wounds of history, the violence and the rupture, cannot be denied. One cannot "renarrate" history so that it seems more peaceful and harmonious (pace Milbank). The violence and destruction can only be judged and condemned. But is there nothing left? Is there nothing beyond the judgment? There is--the impossible made real--the resurrection of the dead. In Jesus, God brought all the wounds of history into Christ's body and there, in that broken body, judged them. But in Christ, the faithful servant of God, we see that this judgment meant our redemption; the No of God includes God's Yes. In Jesus' body we see what Foucault could not see--that the chaos of history does not have the final word, for it has already been judged, and history itself--ALL history--has been reconciled. This reconciliation IS the one, single theme of history: in Christ, God was reconciling the world to Godself.

This theme, however, is never a theme we can possess; it is a theme we can sing, a theme we can proclaim and to which we can bear witness, but it is not a theme we possess. We cannot retell history to stabilize our identity; we cannot tell history as destiny. Our gospel is merely a "nevertheless" at the end of the story Foucault and countless others tell. And that weakness is its power. And that power--the power of the weak Christ--gives us strength to turn back to God and to find in Christ the healing of all our wounds and the forgiveness of all our sins.

___

This long post, though a bit more abstract, is intended to clarify the telling of the church's history in the colonial structuring of Rwanda (my last post). I realized that my previous post made it seem like Rwandans simply took over the colonial identities given to them and then brought them to their logical conclusion (genocide). The history is always much more complex, much more nuanced, and much more varied--but it must be told. Milbank's option--"harmonious" renarration--obviously won't work but neither will Foucault's. I tried to use Barth to show a different way of narrating history, one that will give do justice to both oppressors and oppressed (and those who in many ways are both). It is not history as destiny, nor history as rupture, but an even weaker telling of history--history as seen in light of God's "nevertheless." God has graciously taken my history (and all history) out of my hands and brought it into his Jewish body (more on that later) so that I could live through and in and beyond my history by his strength. It is by this truth--a truth believed but not seen--that we are called to live.

Also, the response given at the end is an attempt to work within Barth's book on Romans. And, the page numbers to the Foucault piece come from __The Foucault Reader__ ed. Paul Rabinow.

Civilizing the World: Missionaries, Hutus, and Tutsis

2009-05-04T09:55:00.005-04:00

During the "exploration" and colonization of Africa, European intellectuals kept stumbling upon a disturbing fact: the Africans were not always the uncivilized brutes they ought to have been. According to racist ideology--summarized beautifully and disturbingly by Hegel--true Africa (and Africans) lacked all historical, cultural, and intellectual development. To account for the appearance of progress and civilization within Africa, Europeans restructured the "biblical" basis for enslaving Africans, the Hamitic Hypothesis.

According to the Hamitic Hypothesis, Africans descended from Ham, the son of Noah. The curse of servitude upon Ham's descendants, therefore, applied to the Africans: African enslavement was divinely-ordained. During the early 19th century, this hypothesis was flipped upside down. Now, the Hamites were not Africans; they were more like a middle ground between Europeans and Africans. The Hamites were the civilizing force within Africa; they were not indigenous to Africa, but came to Africa, settling there and bringing cultural advancement along with them. By the 1870's, this hypothesis gained such strong ground that a group of theologians and missionaries at the Vatican I council could call on a mission to rescue the "hapless Hamites caught amidst the Negroes" (Mamdani, 86).

In Rwanda, this Hamitic hypothesis was used to explain the differences between Hutus and Tutsis. Even before colonial times, Tutsis had been the leaders over Hutus (which became a single ethnic identity only after Tutsi rule: Hutus were all those who weren't Tutsi). During the colonial period, this hierarchy was altered in two ways. First, the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi became racialized. Earlier, one could "become" Tutsi by climbing the social ladder. In other words, the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was permeable: it wasn't common, but one could--and some did--move from one group to the other. The colonial period made the distinction a racial distinction, and hence closed: one was biologically either Hutu or Tutsi and there was no movement between the two.

Secondly, the colonial workers explained Tutsi rule through the Hamitic hypothesis: Tutsi's were natural leaders because they were not, properly speaking, African at all! They were a foreign and superior settler race (Hamitic). They represented, therefore, a kind of degraded Caucasian presence. Tutsis were not white, but they were not African (like the Hutus).

Missionaries and church leaders recognized this "Tutsi" superiority from the outset and organized Rwandan society around it. At one point, many Tutsi leaders were resisting conversion to Christianity. The Belgian authorities started deposing these non-Christian leaders--they were "unredeemable" and hence unfit to rule. To fill the vacancies, the Belgian officials appointed Hutu leaders. Christian missionaries (here, Catholic) were shocked: the colonial officials were undermining the "traditional" and natural social arrangement (Mamdani, 91).

It is an interesting shift: the Belgian colonial administration thought it was more important to have Christians (whether Hutu or Tutsi) in leadership positions, whereas the missionaries believed Tutsi leadership was essential. To place Hutus in positions of power undermined not just the missional-colonial structure in Rwanda, it undermined the very logic and rationale of the European civilizing mission: racial superiority justifies European hegemony, and if the logic of racial superiority is denied (between Hutu and Tutsi), the justification of European rule will be denied as well. Only the racially advanced can rule in a civilized fashion; accordingly, any instability in the racial order (European--Hamitic/Tutsi--African/Hutu) undermines the whole project of Christian civilization.

One of the many problems in this situation--and there are so many--is that the state's pragmatic interests would have better served the Rwandan people than the Church's Christian convictions. If Hutus had been allowed positions of power, perhaps the sharp distrust between the Hutus and Tutsis would not have escalated. Perhaps the identities between the two would have not have become hardened, perhaps the Hutus would have had ways to protect themselves....But the Church was committed to a particular vision of the world (and its place in it, at the top). The Church "acted as both the brains and the hands of the colonial state" (Mamdani, 99). It governed the state--prophetically, one might say. It challenged the state to live beyond mere pragmatic calculation, to see things from a biblical perspective, to understand what was at stake: not just Belgian power, but the Church, Europe, [and] the kingdom of God!

Why tell this long history? Why implicate the church so heavily? What does that mean for us--for me--today? First, the situation in Rwanda highlights the problem of modern theology. Fanon (my last post, May 2nd) points out in the 1960's what was true back in the 1800's and even before then (to the medieval era): Christianity and the Church were the expression of European civilization, and more importantly, the project of European civilization (to bring all others into the true and authentic expression of human existence, Christian/European culture). Without a doubt, this problem still exists (think of the "clash of civilization" and the "culture wars" rhetoric prominent today); we are still in it. Though very few would endorse the Hamitic hypothesis or use the language of race, most Christians can't help but feeling that Christianity has something central and essential to offer to the project of modern civilization (whether through direct oversight or through outside "prophetic" witness to the state). The terms have certainly changed, but are we certain we have left the problem behind? Do we even know how to diagnose the problem?

Secondly, to move beyond Hutu-Tutsi difference in post-genocidal Rwanda, one cannot just appeal to the "baptismal" unity, to "Christian" identity, or to "Rwandan" identity. Unless we analyze how all of these identities can be articulated as forms of cultural possession (we know who we are, and who we are is set off against, separate from, and opposed to some others, whether Congolese, Muslim, or whatnot), none of them will help move us beyond the problem.

Thirdly, as a white American male looking into the situation from afar, I have to find ways to speak into the problem without positioning myself as the new western missionary, possessing the truth--the latest gospel--of who we all are and how to effectively bring everyone else into it. How can I preach or teach in this situation? That is a real question and a real problem.

TLM

*All references to Mamdani come from Mahmood Mamdani, __When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda___.*