(Ir)religiosity

If God in Christ dies for real on the cross then what is the meaning of the resurrection?

My contention would be that Good Friday is not superseded by Easter Sunday, that the resurrection does not supplant the crucifixion.

The problem, I think, is that we are too quick to separate Pentecost from the Resurrection.  Pentecost marks the entrance of the Holy Spirit into the faith collective, the arrival of a new signifier which, after Christ’s death on the cross, is immanent to the collective itself.

The collective, then, is one that is deprived of its support from the Big other, as Zizek would put it.  Christ is raised in the community of believers through the liberative power of the Holy Spirit.  The entrance of the Spirit as the life of the collective spells the end of God as transcendental signified and the beginning of God as emancipatory event.

The resurrection of Christ does not involve a mere return or reduplication of his prior presence.  Rather, it involves the repetition of that presence with critical difference (i.e., the Spirit).  The logic of resurrection is in fact the logic of repetition.  The absence of God qua Big other, of God qua transcendental signified is overcome (that is, repeated, resurrected) with the presence of the Spirit, with the entrance of a new liberative signifier immanent and intrinsic to the community.

Under this sign, with the power of the Spirit, and the galvanizing memory of God’s crucified body, the community of believers perpetually enacts a non-identical repetition of Christ’s gesture under the conviction that Empire can never repress such a memory absolutely.  Indeed, there will always remain a liberative surplus, an emancipatory kernel, which opens up the space for crucial theo-political praxis and social antagonism.  It is here, in this tear in the ontological fabric of Empire, where God’s event pierces and violates its supposed immanence, that Christ is indeed resurrected.  And it is incumbent on the community, on its participation and repetition.

Shortly before he was martyred, Archbishop Oscar Romero wrote, “If I am killed I shall rise again in the Salvadoran people.”  Similarly, in an important scene of V for Vendetta, V states that “ideas are bulletproof.”  When Easter is celebrated in anticipation of Pentecost one can properly claim that the most important and liberative idea of all is in fact crucifixion-proof.  While God as transcendental signified may have died on the cross, the idea of God’s kin-dom surely did not.  The instruments of torture and state-sponsored terrorism cannot hold it because Empire can never maintain absolute hegemonic control.  Even as God is dead, even as God is eclipsed, Christ is risen, made present in the community through the power of the Spirit.  And it is through this dangerous, galvanizing memory that the church enacts critical repetition, in (e)sc(h)atological anticipation of the consummation of the (in/re)surrection.

“Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?”

There are basically two reactions to the notion of Good Friday.  On the one hand, some claim that the goodness lies in God’s redemptive work in Christ, of “saving” through the world the violent, bloody sacrifice.  Suffering is intrinsically redemptive.  This is, of course, the main thrust of most atonement theories.  A less popular reaction, on the other hand, is to question whether the label itself and to note irony of naming this day “Good” Friday.  How can there be goodness in an execution, in a state-sponsored act of terrorism?

I find both of these positions lacking.

Today, as I am increasingly inclined to do, I want to riff on the minor chord, on what has been repressed in our dominant understandings of the cross.

What if the goodness of Good Friday lies not in the presuppositions of classical theology but in the other side of the binary that has not been privileged in dominant discourse?  What if the goodness about this day is not that Christ dies in anticipation of Sunday, but that Christ dies for real, that God, as evidenced in Christ’s death cry on the cross, is forever eclipsed?

And what if in that event the power of God is revealed as God’s powerlessness, as God’s weakness?

Good Friday, or so I would want to argue, needs a recovered sense of kenosis. Or, better yet, we need to take kenosis more seriously.  The logic of the cross — and the incarnation — is that of immanent transcendence.  In this event, God’s transcendence is rendered immanent, transcendence is reifed not as that which is somewhere “out there” but that which transcends a particular form of immanence (e.g. state violence or, more generally, the state itself).

What is at stake is how radical we are willing to be, indeed, how Christian we are willing to be in our theology of the cross.

John Caputo puts it quite well (it is a long quote but worth the read):

Is Jesus really unable to come down from the cross, or does he only seem to be (dokein)?  Remember, the world is what is there, in all its violence and strength.  Are we to think that being this helpless mortal frame, he holding his infinite power in check.  Are we to think that he can come down but that he just does not want to because he is trying to make a point?  Is he really nailed there, or is that just an appearance or semblance (dokesis)?  Is his weakness voluntary, in which case it is a mask for strength, an even greater show of strength?  In the world, there are real (Roman) nails and real (Roman) crosses and real imperial power.  The Romans are real.  If the kingdom Jesus preached were a kingdom of real power, he could, by a might roar — nay better, by a soft word — from this mouth, spring that nails from his hands, thrust away the spears from the hands of the soldiers, heal the wounds of his flesh, and shatter the cross into a million splinters in a dazzling display of sheer might.  But his kingdom did not belong to the world, to the realm of meeting power with power.  His strength was the weak power of powerlessness — my God, my God, why have you abandoned me? — not the real power of the world, and so he was killed, quite against his will and against the will of his Father.  But in the powerlessness of that death the word of God rose up in majesty as a word of contradiction, as the Spirit of God, as a specter, as a ghostly even that haunts us, but not as a spectacular presence.

That is God’s transcendence.

On the classical account of strong theology, Jesus was holding back his divine power in order to let his human nature suffer.  He freely chose to check his power because the Father had a plan to redeem the world with his blood.  But if his Father had changed his mind, those Roman soldiers would rue the day they were born, as they will certainly rue it in eternity.  On my accounting, that is to misconstrue this scene solely in terms of power, mundane power pitted against celestial power.  On my accounting, Jesus was being crucified, not holding back; he was nailed there and being executed very much against his will and the will of God.  And he never heard of Christianity’s novel idea that he was redeeming the world with his blood.  His approach to evil was forgiveness, not paying off a debt due the Father, or the devil, with suffering or anything else.  His suffering was not a coin of the realm in economy of the kingdom.  The kingdom is not an economy, and God is not in attendance at this scene as an accountant of divine debts or as a higher power watching the whole thing from up there and freely holding in check his infinite power to intervene.  This is more rouged theology, weakness fantasizing about an orgasm of power — if not power now, then power later, when we can really get even with those hateful Romans.  This is not the weakness of God that I am here defending.  God, the event harbored by the name of God, is present at the crucifixion, as the power of powerlessness of Jesus, in and as the protest against the injustice that rises up from the cross, in and as the words of forgiveness, not a deferred power that will be visited upon one’s enemies at a later time.  God is in attendance as the weak force of the call that cries out from Calvary and calls across the epochs, that cries out from every corpse created by every cruel and unjust power.  The logos of the cross is a call to renounce violence, not to conceal and defer it and then, in a stunning act that takes the enemy by surprise, to lay them low with real power, which shows the enemy who really has power.

The effect of situating God on the side of vulnerability and unjust suffering is not, of course, to glorify suffering and misery, but to prophetically protest it, to give divine depth and meaning to resistance to unjust suffering, to attach the coefficient of divine resistance to unjust suffering, which is why suffering is the stuff of dangerous memories.  The call, the cry, that plaint that rises up from the cross is a a great divine “no” to injustice, an infinite lamentation over unjust suffering and innocent victims.  God is with Jesus on the cross, and in standing with Jesus rather than with the imperial power of Roman, God stands with an innocent persecuted for calling the power that be to task.  The name o God is the name of a divine “no” to persecution, violence, and victimization.  Accordingly, as we have just argued, God’s traditional top-down “transcendence” must be re-conceived in such a way that all of its resources are deployed on behalf of lowliness and the despised.  The effect of speaking of God’s transcendence is not to support and top off presence with a hyper-presence, but to disturb presence with difference and to allow the lowliest to rise in divine splendor.

The Weakness of God, 43-45.

Interestingly, this logos of the cross brings together Caputo and Zizek, two thinkers that are otherwise theoretically in-congruent.  Zizek maintains that God dies in Christ for real, that in Jesus’ claim of disbelief on the cross God as “Big other” is unmasked.

Similarly, Caputo holds that on the cross, God is revealed as event, as the site of resistance against illegitimate power — that power is reifed in terms of weakness.  The binary itself is short-circuited.

For me, the goodness of Good Friday lies in the dangerous, galvanizing memory of Christ’s crucified body on an instrument of state torture and repression and the revelation that God as transcendental signified, the arbiter of cosmic meaning from above, does not exist.  Rather, God is revealed as event, as an event of subversion and social antagonism, an irruption in the privileging of pure presence.  As God dies in Christ I am reminded that God is forever eclipsed and I am left with the faith collective to wrestle with the aftermath, with the reality that God is revealed in the repressed, the forsaken, that site of marginality is the very site of divinity.

Below is the manuscript — more or less, I tend to deviate quite a bit — of the sermon I will be preaching this morning, Transfiguration Sunday, at Quincy Community UMC.  It is based on the gospel text for this week (Luke 9:28-43).

In 1993, Greg Mortensen attempted to climb K2, the second highest mountain in the world.  For Greg, the way up was literally the way up the mountain, to the summit.  But Greg never made it to the top of K2.  There were problems with his crew and on the way back down the mountain Greg was separated from the rest of the group and wandered into a remote village in Pakistan called Korphe.  The people of the village cared for Greg and after spending time with them, Greg realized that the village had no school and no system of education for the children.  Once he returned to the States Greg decided to raise enough money to build a school for the children of Korphe.  This endeavor eventually grew into the Central Asia Institute, a non-profit organization which builds schools for remote villages in north-eastern Pakistan.  Greg recounts his journey in the best-selling book Three Cups of Tea which the Sunday School class has been reading over the past several months.  But these schools are only being built because Greg wasn’t able to reach the top of the mountain.  Three Cups of Tea was written because, in a sense, Greg failed.  Or did he succeed?  It seems that in the end Greg discovered that the way up, the real way up, was the way down — down into the village in Pakistan, down into a world were children had no access to education.  Down into the problems of the world where he could make a difference.

The way up is down.

We see a similar story in our text today.  In Luke’s gospel, Jesus takes three of his disciples — Peter, James, and John — to the top of a mountain to pray.  Now, I doubt that this mountain was as massive as K2 but it was high enough that Jesus felt he could be alone to pray.  This is something that Jesus does many times.  According to the Scriptures, Jesus would go alone, or sometimes with a few disciples, to a mountain or some other secluded place, to pray and mediate often.

But this time it was different, at least that is Luke’s version of the story.  According to Luke, while he is praying Jesus’ face begins to glow and his clothes begin to dazzle.  Then, suddenly, Moses and the prophet Elijah appear next to Jesus and Luke tells us that they begin to talk to Jesus about what he is to “accomplish in Jerusalem,” an obvious reference to Jesus’ passion and crucifixion.

Now, we have all been to the movies with all the new special effects, so let’s image what this scene might look like.  Jesus is on a mountain, his face and clothes are dazzling, and Moses and Elijah appear and start talking to him about his future trip to Jerusalem, the capital city.  Not exactly a calm, still event, right?  It seems to be pretty spectacular.  I mean, Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson could probably do quite a bit with that on the big screen and I imagine it would be pretty true to the story, at least that seems to be Luke’s version of the story.  But where are the disciples during all this?  Luke tells us that they are so weighed down with sleep that they can barely stay awake!  Really?  Barely stay awake?  How could they miss this?  Moses, one the great heroes of their history who led their ancestors out of slavery in Egypt, has just appeared and Elijah, one of the great prophets is with him.  I mean, these are famous people that Peter, James, and John would have heard about growing up.  And to top it all off Jesus’ clothes are dazzling.  But yet the disciples can barely stay awake.  I mean, imagine it — what would it be like if Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy suddenly appeared right now, right here in this church?  And what if Pastor Susan’s clothes started dazzling?  I think most of us would be wide awake.  But Luke tells us the disciples can barely stay awake.  In fact, they don’t even say anything until it is time to go back down the mountain and then Peter says something like, “Oh, but this is such a great experience, let’s stay.  And we’ll build a church here, in fact, we’ll build three churches, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”  It’s almost like Peter has woke up and realized what’s going on and he doesn’t want the experience to end.  We all know what that’s like don’t we?  Have you ever been part of an experience that you didn’t want to end?  Something that you wanted to prolong as long as you could?  Almost as soon as Peter says this a cloud appears and a voice says, “This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him!”  And then, just as fast as they appeared, Moses and Elijah are gone and Jesus heads back down the mountain.

For Jesus, the way up is down. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Hedges, one of my favorite journalists, describes it:

War comes wrapped in patriotic slogans, calls for sacrifice, honor and heroism and promises of glory. It comes wrapped in the claims of divine providence. It is what a grateful nation asks of its children. It is what is right and just. It is waged to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil. War is touted as the ultimate test of manhood, where the young can find out what they are made of. War, from a distance, seems noble. It gives us comrades and power and a chance to play a small bit in the great drama of history. It promises to give us an identity as a warrior, a patriot, as long as we go along with the myth, the one the war-makers need to wage wars and the defense contractors need to increase their profits.

But up close war is a soulless void. War is about barbarity, perversion and pain, an unchecked orgy of death. Human decency and tenderness are crushed. Those who make war work overtime to reduce love to smut, and all human beings become objects, pawns to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the scenes of eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded, all combine to spin those in combat into another universe. In this moral void, naively blessed by secular and religious institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions, our strict adherence to moral precepts, come unglued. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions that fill our days. It lets us see, although the cost is tremendous.

And then there are the words of Jesus, “I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly.”

And then there is this.

Does. Not. Compute.

I’m pretty sure when Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers he wasn’t referring to the Colt variety.

The inaugural theme over at Open Table Theology is over the Imago dei.  Yesterday, thanks to Matt Scott, I kicked off the conversation this month with my post “The Relational Image of God:  Embracing the Other.” I am re-posting it here and I would invite you to visit Open Table Theology and join in our dialogical experiment.

“God created humankind in God’s image,” so the old aphorism goes, “and we returned the favor.”  No doubt it is true.  Appeals to God and God’s nature have been made to justify some of the most horrific atrocities and some of the most beautiful miracles.  “God” becomes the ultimate judo move, the Ace in the hole, the secret weapon that can be used to appeal to the better and worse angels of our finite human nature.  When you stop and think about it our view of God and God’s nature  and our ideas who or what God is have implications for everything.  Literally.  Everything.  Not to mention the Imago dei.  What does it mean to be created in the image of God?

We could phrase it in different way and ask the same question St. Augustine posed so long ago in his Confessions:  what is it that we love when we love our God?  Who is it that we love when we love our God?

Whatever our answer I think most of us will agree that whatever this image entails, it is common among all human beings.  That is to say, we are all created in God’s image. All.  The terrorist and the freedom fighter, the American and the Arab, the Muslim and the Christian, the homosexual and the heterosexual, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, progressive and evangelical — all share this common thread.  We all have something within us, call it a divine spark or our common humanity, we all share this essence, this characteristic, this divine stamp upon our being.  It is inescapable.

Torturing the Divine Image?

This raises some interesting questions.  A little over a month ago a Pew Poll revealed that most churchgoers — 54% to be exact — believe that torture can sometimes be justified.  Torture.  Torture?  Towards another human being created in the image of God?  What does that say about our view of God and God’s children?  A few days prior to reading the Pew Poll I stumbled across one of those “new” bibles that are all the rage these days.  This one was called The American Patriot’s Bible and it claimed to convey the ways in which “the story of the United States is wonderfully woven into the teachings of the Bible.”  What of other nations?  Are not citizens of every nation created in the image of God?  What kind of God privileges the United States over the rest of the world?  I wonder, what does this say about Americans’ view of the image of God when we publish jingoistic bibles and the majority of us support torturing others for the ‘good of our country?’  Is the Imago dei only valid if one is American?  Is particular only to us?

God is beginning to look more and more like Jack Bauer and Christians more and more like nationalistic Americans than we might care to admit. Read the rest of this entry »

The mystery of God for himself culminates in the words of Jesus on the cross: ‘Father, why did you forsake me?’  At that moment, God is completely abandoned by God and thus shares the human experience of being abandoned by God.  In this way, it is the moment when ‘Christ becomes fully human,’ the moment when ‘the radical gap that separates God from man is transposed into God Himself.’  On the cross, God abandons himself totally and in this way the absolute identity of God and humankind is realized.  Or, as Žižek puts it: ‘When I, a human being, experience myself as cut off from God, at that very moment of the utmost abjection, I am absolutely close to God, since I find myself in the position of the abandoned Christ.’

– Frederiek Depoortere in Christ in Postmodern Philosophy (115)

Today God is eclipsed….and we are left to wrestle with its aftermath.

It’s been almost two months since I initially watched The Dark Knight.  Since then a quote toward the end of the film from has been bouncing around in the back of my mind.

“It’s the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and uh, look where that got you. I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all, part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!”

This comes at a crucial point in the film when Harvey Dent, with the help and prodding of The Joker, begins to assume his alter-ego of Two Face.  But I’m not really interested in that as much as I am the implicit critique of the established Order; not order in a sense of complete lawlessness and immorality, but Order in the sense of coercion and the artificial creation of consent to the violence of power. Read the rest of this entry »