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On Radical Orthodoxy’s Qutbism

Saturday, January 1, 2011 — Anthony Paul Smith

A certain theoretical homology between Radical Orthodoxy and Qutbism hit me this evening while doing some background reading for the Speculative Medevialisms event. The connection was made while reading Bruce Holsinger’s chapter on Derrida’s medievalism in The Premodern Condition, which uses Catherine Pickstock’s polemic against Derrida in After Writing as a foil. It’s been awhile since I’ve read Pickstock, but Holsinger’s criticisms seem to me unassailable and crystallized some misgivings I had with Pickstock’s texts way back when about the flatness of her reading. But, that isn’t surprising since, after all, this was Holsinger’s goal. What is, well, perhaps not surprising, but interesting, was the structural similarity between Pickstock’s “utter lack of rhetorical modesty” (as Holsinger diagnoses her constant use of words like ‘only’, ‘optimum’, ‘alone’, ‘genuine’, ‘real’, and the like) and the same lack of rhetorical modesty in the Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in "the church", fascism, Gnosticism, Qutbism, Radical Orthodoxy, Red Tory. 18 Comments »

Astonishment

Thursday, December 2, 2010 — Adam Kotsko

I am consistently amazed by how often conservative Christians, including conservative Christians who will often argue in principle for the use of arguments from authority and the assertion of non-negotiable axioms, accuse me and my friends of being close-minded.

Posted in "the church". 33 Comments »

“Good theology” and “bad theology”

Thursday, September 9, 2010 — Adam Kotsko

In the hallowed halls of the theology blogosphere, one often reads that a given position “is just bad theology.” The confidence with which this verdict is reached makes me think that there is some clear standard of what counts as “good theology,” and after years of careful fieldwork, I believe I have hammered out the basic rules for writing theology that will be considered “good” by bloggers. The guiding principle is as follows: good theology unashamedly embraces Christian particularity. This principle has the following consequences: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in "the church", Barth, Christian theology. 33 Comments »

Interview in the local newspaper

Sunday, July 25, 2010 — Christopher Rodkey

I just thought I would share that I’ve been interviewed by the local newspaper about the absence of young adults from the church.  Of course, as I expected, only a fraction of my interview made it into the final cut of the article, but I think it’s important to connect with the public in this way in my ministerial self-understanding as a “public theologian.”  And I am grateful to the newspaper and Andrea Gillhooley for including me.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in "the church", Shameless Promotion. 1 Comment »

The “Apocalyptic Theses” and the preferential option

Tuesday, July 20, 2010 — Adam Kotsko

Via a pingback from Todd Walatka — which highlights a concern Brad once raised about the need for low-church ecclesiology to be taken seriously — I find this interesting insight on Nate Kerr et al.’s “theses”: namely, the liberation theology language feels tacked on. They quote Sobrino to the effect that the church’s mission to the poor preceeds the church itself, but as Todd says:

Saying that the preferential option is at the center and heart of the church’s mission (and is the mission) seems overstated within the general flow of the theses. It seems that the most basic mission of the church in the theses is to witness to the apocalyptic transformation accomplished by God in Christ, which may include the preferential option, but is not identical with it.

He then goes on to point out the specific lack of continuity in terms of liturgy:

Thesis 4 is indicative of the differences here. In this thesis, the danger of liturgy is to see a direct correspondence between our work and divine work, to see it as our (successful) seeking after God. The danger is an idolatrous misconstrual of our place in the event of God’s grace. Liberation theologians also offer very strong critiques of ritual and liturgy (see, for example, Segundo’s The Sacraments Today) but in a different key, and one that flows directly from the preferential option as the mission of the Church. Their central critique is not that liturgy raises our action too high but rather that it devalues human action by ideologically focusing our attention on the reconciling action of God in liturgy and away from the demand to build the Kingdom beyond the liturgy.

Thinking in more specifically theological terms, I wonder if what is at stake is a different concept of God’s freedom in Barth and in liberation theology. Where Barth’s concept of divine freedom is always thought in terms of divine transcendence, it seems to me that the liberation theologians — as represented by Gutierrez’s brilliant On Job — see God’s freedom as a kind of contagious freedom, one that drives us to take responsibility for our actions.

The freedom of transcendence is perhaps always a hierarchical mode of freedom, where God is free to be God and we’re free to acknowledge how unworthy we are of God (which then is supposed to have good effects, though the logic here seems reminiscent of the South Park “underwear gnomes”) — by contrast, the liberating freedom is a “flattening” freedom that empowers human action instead of just inexplicably forgiving it.

Posted in "the church", apocalyptic, hierarchy, liberation theology. 23 Comments »

Sermon: “What’s Really Wrong with Sodomy”

Tuesday, July 6, 2010 — Christopher Rodkey

This is part of my sermon for last Sunday at Zion “Goshert’s” United Church of Christ in Lebanon, PA, where I have been pastor for two years.  The lectionary reading from the Gospel was Luke 10:1-20.  I used a bit of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah from Robert Crumb’s fantastic The Book of Genesis Illustrated as a visual aid for the worship service.

In the Bible we find Jesus here sending out seventy evangelists.  Remember that before there were seventy commissioned by Jesus, there were 12 original disciples.  As you surely know, numbers are always important in scripture.  The twelve disciples represent the twelve tribes of Israel; and Chapter 9 of Luke begins by talking about the twelve.  But now, Chapter 10 talks about the seventy, as back then it was generally believed to be seventy Gentile, or non-Jewish nations.  But what is symbolic of the number seventy is that the seventy Gentile evangelists will be sent into Jewish towns, and the problem then becomes how they will be accepted as foreigners into the towns.

Much of this passage of scripture is concerned with Jesus offering instructions on how to deal with what will be a foreign culture to the seventy, which is Jesus’ home culture.  But along the way he condemns those towns who are not welcoming or hospitable to a fate worse than Sodom.  Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in "the church", sermons. 38 Comments »

“The church” as anti-market

Monday, June 28, 2010 — Adam Kotsko

There is a reflexive tendency for “the church”-fetishists to claim that the practices of “the church” are ipso facto anti-capitalist. I find this opposition curious. I’ll grant, for instance, that the experience of going to church is dissimilar from that of shopping or going to work. But is difference simply the same thing as opposition? If so, then it seems like you could say that virtually any religious practice is anti-capitalist — just to throw out a couple examples, Shar’iah law outlaws charging interest, and Amish practice obviously takes a different view of technological progress.

So why is “the church” a privileged site of resistence to capitalism in these people’s minds? At bottom, I suspect it’s because capitalism developed out of Christian society. And here’s where it potentially gets weird, because it taps into a long-standing pattern that seems to be specifically Christian — namely, believing that one’s enemies are acting solely out of perversity. In Trachtenberg’s study The Devil and the Jews, he brings this up over and over again: the underlying logic of medieval anti-Semitism was based on the assumption that the Jews actually knew that Christianity was true, but rebelled solely out of a desire to be evil. Something similar happens with Satan’s fall, which is gradually removed from the “mythological” narrative that would attribute jealousy to him and is turned into an incomprehensible motiveless malignancy (as in Anselm’s De casu diaboli).

These “the church”-fetishists are not consciously embracing such a simplistic theory, but the thought pattern seems to be informing them. We can tell that capitalism is anti-Christian (and Christianity is anti-capitalist) because living in a Christian society must’ve been so self-evidently desirable that anyone who would depart from it must’ve been driven by an insane desire to negate Christian values for their own sake. One can also detect this attitude in Milbank’s narrative of modern “nihilism” as a Christian heresy — despite the sophistication of his genealogy in Theology and Social Theory, the game is given away in the summary itself: modernity is defined solely in relation to Christianity and solely as negation.

Posted in "the church", economics, Milbank. 37 Comments »

Thoughts on “Kingdom-World-Church”

Thursday, June 10, 2010 — Adam Kotsko

Nate Kerr has co-written a piece with Halden Doerge and Ry Siggelkow on the missionary nature of the church. It is natural that Nate would return to this question since it was such a hang-up during the hugely disappointing discussion of his book on various theology blogs — the fetish for “the church” is strong among theology bloggers, and in many cases it seemed to actively impede the understanding of a book that many of those same bloggers claimed to love more than life itself.

In general, the position advanced in the piece is what one would expect Nate to advance — a Barthian “insubstantial” ecclesiology, where the church exists for the salvation of the world rather than the world being saved through incorporation into the church as a substantial entity. I think of the Barthian church (and here one could also draw a connection to Dorothee Soelle) as a kind of avant-garde of humanity that is waiting in joyful hope for the day when it will cease to exist as such and simply be dissolved into the redeemed world, and in my forthcoming book Politics of Redemption I wind up putting forward a similar view of the Christian community.

There are plenty of responses to Nate that berate him for having an insufficiently strong ecclesiology, and those of you who are bored at work might find them to be a good way to kill an hour or two. (Executive summary: Nate needs a stronger ecclesiology.) I’d like to ask a few questions from another direction, centered on Nate’s key concept: “mission.” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in "the church", mission. 49 Comments »