[Since Global Christianity (syllabus) is my more "experimental" course this quarter, similar to the devil course last spring, I thought it might be appropriate to post my capstone lecture notes here, as I did with the devil course.]
[Since Global Christianity (syllabus) is my more "experimental" course this quarter, similar to the devil course last spring, I thought it might be appropriate to post my capstone lecture notes here, as I did with the devil course.]
This year I was fortunate to be part of a panel on “The Body of Christ” put on by the Bible, Theology, and Postmodernism group at the AAR. Presenters approached this theme from various directions — Mark L. Taylor critiqued Agamben’s category of bare life by arguing that his messianism is devoid of any reference to “crucified flesh,” Shelly Rambo put forward the idea of a “spectral Jesus,” and Jon Berquist discussed the Body of Christ in connection with the work of “the postmodern philosopher Paul.” I have posted my paper, entitled “Zizek and the Excremental Body of Christ,” on Scribd.
Ben Myers has a post up ostensibly about the virtues of reading in a society where “progress is worshiped”. Of course reading is good and should be prized, though I’m not willing to go all the way with Myers’ assertion that reading is an act of theological resistance (whatever that might mean, we’re never told that by theologians who proclaim that Christianity is the true site of revolution and resistance). What really struck me, though, was the antagonism towards progress, towards the idea that our global society worships progress, which strikes me both as a bit too retro (Horkheimer and Adorno did this better than any theologian) and, more importantly, wrong.
In London today the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gideon Osborne, delivered the UK’s spending review. For those who don’t know, this is essentially the budget and sets the spending agenda (in this case the lack of spending agenda) for the current government’s expected tenure. Gideon announced massive cuts to education, both for schools and universities, social housing, an inadequate spending increase for the NHS, a cut in community policing, and an increase for intelligence services. This government has essentially ended, for the foreseeable future, New Labour’s restoration of a society that valued social welfare. A number of independent think-tanks have come out saying that the poorest will be hit hardest by these spending cuts (George Eaton’s blog summarizes this) while the richest in the country will continue to pay less tax and this all despite the Con-Dem coalition’s constant braying of “fairness”. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
I have shared with you my struggle to get my students to understand the dialectic. Today, going over the section of Ruether’s Sexism and God-Talk where she talks about the “conversion experience” of feminists and then even more where she talks about the relationship between the feminist “base community” and the institutional church, something started to click. Using Cornel West’s description of the dialectic as “negate, preserve, transform,” my students were suddenly able to fill in the gaps themselves and more than one said, “Wow, you could really use this on everything!” Hegel would be proud.
I also thought that this would be an appropriate time to share Ruether’s thoughts on the relationship that critical and transformative movements should have with the institutional church (Sexism and God-Talk, 205-206):
A feminist base community is an autonomous, self-gathered community that takes responsibility for reflecting on, celebrating, and acting on the understanding of redemption as liberation from patriarchy. Such a community might take on as many or as few of the functions of Church as they choose….
The formation of such feminist base communities does not necessarily imply a sectarian rejection of institutional churches. People who find their primary support in such feminist communities might also participate in various structures of institutional church life…. The creation of “liberated zones” in at least some sectors of institutional churches would be seen as one of the “fields of mission” of the base community.
The exodus out of the institutional Church into the feminist base community would be for the sake of creating a freer space from which to communicate new possibilities to the institutional Church. The relationship between the two becomes a creative dialectic rather than a schismatic impasse. Indeed, precisely as one takes seriously one’s responsibility to transform the historical Church, it becomes essential to have a support community that really nurtures liberated ways of living together rather than remaining crabbed and frustrated by religious experiences of alienation and negation of this vision.
A dialectical relationship between base community and historical institution is also necessary if one is serious about the communication and historical transmission of the liberating options of the base community. By retaining lines of communication into the historic institution, one can also find ways to communicate these options to a much larger public than is possible from the resources of a small group. Many other groups of people can hear that “good news.” New communities can be touched by the flame and take fire. Some parts of the historical structures then become vehicles for transmitting the message of the Gospel as redemption from patriarchy. Eeven if the base community itself dissolves, the historic institution becomes a means of transmitting the memory of these new options to other groups and new generations. Only by this creative dialectic between renewal community and historical institution is the Church regenerated by the Spirit within history. This is the inescapable paradox of living in the liberating community within the framework of historical existence.
That seemed relevant to recent discussions about “the church.”
I’ll note that once we tackled this particular dialectic, my students were so eager to apply it to new things that they asked whether the institutional church also undergoes its own dialectic in its relationship with the base community. We concluded that it does in fact, and that the process is best summarized as “negate [these communities are evil and Marxist! GAH!], preserve [but people do seem to really like them...], co-opt.”
I’m starting to think that my liberation theology course is being haunted by the ghost of Hegel, because every time I think that I’ve explained the dialectic to them, the next book we read overturns what I’ve said.
(It makes me think that I need to read Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic, and indeed if any of my readers are journal book review editors who could hook me up with a copy in exchange for a review, you know how to contact me.)
Already the first week in, I am noticing a clear difference between my two classes: Classical Christian Thought and Liberation Theology. I am spending an equal amount of time preparing for both, I am very familiar with the literature for both (though perhaps moreso for Classical Christian Thought), and both classes have featured lively discussion — yet I feel less confident about Liberation Theology, more anxious.
Paradoxically, I think it might be because of my instinct that Liberation Theology should be easier to teach: it’s very contemporary, it deals with “social justice” issues that many of the students already identify with very strongly, and it’s fairly easy reading stylistically speaking. More than that, even if my practice is far from what it should be, my immediate feeling upon reading a text of Liberation Theology is, “YES! This is what the gospel is and should be about!”
I was energized this summer as I was doing my preparatory reading, excited about the prospect of teaching this bracing texts. What I’m finding, though, is that for the students, there are many obstacles — the whole “religion” thing, first of all, but also what they seem to perceive as a one-sided insistence on poverty.
I feel really confident when I can just do a lecture to provide background and context, or when I can follow along in a text and do “live” interpretation — but figuring out a way into this whole mindset is a completely different challenge that I can’t face through simple preparation and competence. In a very important sense, the class is intrinsically “about” much more than mastering a predetermined content or even learning how to read a new type of texts. On both those fronts, the task is almost too easy. Yet even deciding how to say what else I’m up to or should be up to is very difficult.
Luckily I at least have the assistance of the liberation theologians themselves in discerning that and in achieving it as well. Sobrino’s No Salvation Outside the Poor is on the docket for this week, and it’s much more forceful than Boff and Boff’s intro text — uncompromisingly simple in a way that simultaneously allows greater complexity to emerge, and of course completely unconcerned with talking out of both sides of his mouth to satisfy church authorities, which should help. And then Gutierrez’s On Job will address the core question of theodicy (a major question for several of the students, both in class and in their reading responses) that liberation theology arguably only intensifies compared to other theologies.
Perhaps learning how to teach liberation theology is, for me at least, the equivalent of learning how to teach tout court — and therefore not something I should expect to have under my belt after a year or a quarter, much less a week.
If you want to avoid becoming angry, try not to read Boff and Boff’s Introducing Liberation Theology and Ratzinger’s “Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation’” in rapid succession.
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