Theology & Peace

This Pound of Flesh

2012-02-09T11:26:00.000-08:00

OK it's true, it's been too long since the last one. I apologize.

A blog is supposed to be something on a quick tempo, a smart, digital-style frequency, not every new moon!

I would really love to do that. But somehow I can't. It goes with being a theologian-in-residence of a radical new theological movement: you need time to let the coffee percolate. It's partly the subject matter I must choose, and partly the method or style in which I comment on the material. The first is challenging, the second has been called (well, once anyway, to my hearing, and not to mince words) "ponderous..."

Take for example what I want to talk about right now: death overcome by resurrection. That's a challenge. The Greeks laughed at Paul for even bringing it up, and it's still foolishness (and a scandal) to most philosophers. So then, how shall I approach the topic? Well, I want to root it in human and material possibility, not in the sheer miraculous. And at once you see what I mean. To move away from the mythical and the fairy tale and the imagined supernatural, is to stretch people's thoughts further and deeper then they often want to go. It is indeed asking them to ponder, to think more deeply, to weigh the matter with all its mass and gravity. And if this thing is weighty, or heavy to lift with the mind, the easy option is to dismiss it, to drop it. But then if you let it drop nothing changes. There is no new vision.

And yet there really is a new vision to communicate, and it is always my dream and desire to do so, So let me see, one more time, if I have lightened the load if only a smidgeon, enough to tempt you to bear the burden of my blue-moon blog!

In all the recent firestorm over the existence of hell, or "eternal conscious torment" as its juicily called by true believers, there was very little mention of resurrection. This is strange because resurrection is the New Testament selling point to the pagan world, the new deal that beat out several existing versions of the afterlife. John says the wicked are raised to judgment (5:29, an open-ended concept which is not the same as a sentence to eternal torment) but you'd wonder why God would bother at all if the wicked are already in conscious hell (judged spiritually at point of death, as the broad Western tradition has it), unless God was particularly sadistic and wanted acute bodily agony added to the spiritual pain of perdition. However, putting all that aside, the point is something happens to the WHOLE of humanity and this is consistent with the restoration of all of creation as Paul describes it (Romans 8: 19-21).

So what happens? What, you could say, is the deep meteorological forecast for that glorious day of resurrection?

According to Karl Rahner there is no rigid distinction between the material and the spiritual. As he explains it the "spiritual" is simply the possibility of matter to "return" to itself in relationship. Matter is always bent in or over on itself and ultimately the reason for this is that matter is rooted in an absolute relational ground which is God. Again according to Rahner, the first place we know the singleness of matter and spirit is in the human. So good theology does not invent a scheme of essential forms of being and then fit humanity to it, as the Greeks did. Rather it lets humanity itself teach the radical unity of matter and spirit.

The discovery of mimetics by Rene Girard powerfully underscored the human unity of matter and spirit. You could say imitation is the spiritual. The fact that I become so totally identified with the "other", either in violence or compassion, is the event of the spiritual. There is nothing else to it. And the discovery by neural science of the actual neurons which make this happen--the repetition within our own nervous systems of motor signals received from outside ourselves--demonstrates conclusively the identity of the spiritual and the material.

We know that this kind of imitation also happens with animals, but recent experiments show it happening even at some level in plant life. Plants emit chemical signals for self-defense which other plants are then able to imitate. It seems beyond doubt that material nature is constantly wired into itself, repeating the "other" in itself and in relation to itself, all the way up and down the chain of complexity, from human to atom and back to human again.

In a framework like this resurrection is simply the time and place where the relation of matter to itself reaches an intensification which is completely generative. It is the point where human beings imitate an unending, boundless form of life, and all creation does the same with them. The ideal of "hard" science is always to find the indestructible, the infinitely powerful, the bottomless well of energy. This is a distorted copy (read violent) of the true current of life which is so astonishingly gentle, so nonviolent, so loving, as to be virtually invisible to normal human culture born in and through violence. The biblical story is of a millennia-long struggle to shape a space and an experience that can provide the authentic signals of this other life. The person of Jesus is the masterpiece of this process, the definitive set of signals corresponding to genuine endless life, and the cross is the single summary of those signals. It makes perfect sense that the cross and Jesus' death into the depths of the earth should translate in the space of thirty six hours into resurrection.

Both Paul and John used the figure of seed and sowing for resurrection. In doing so they intuitively cast this event in its most natural and correct frame: "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit...." To be a Christian is to imitate in life and death the revolutionary material transformation brought by Jesus.

And so, yes, the challenge is to think like this rather than some magical supernaturalism. The power of the resurrection is truly divine, but it is not Thor-like, a lightning strike from an angry above. It is rooted in an inconceivable gentleness that has taken aeons to fold over on itself and become the astonishing message of the gospel.

Most Christians I have encountered much prefer the lazy thinking of supernaturalism. They want ghosts, spirits, a world beyond, and some fairy-tell scene of resurrection essentially redundant to the afterlife. It is this supernaturalism which in fact has fostered the fractious and cruel idea of the "Rapture": resurrection as an other-worldly event for the the privileged few followed by disaster on earth. A true regard for gospel resurrection cannot but place it at the heart of the material realm, which God created as good and for the sake of final Sabbath blessing. And, oh yes, in this context "the resurrection of judgment" could easily mean a dramatic and painful crisis of truth for anyone who died in willful violence. What the outcome would be afterward is hidden from us. But it seems hard to believe that with creation transformed in explosive life before their eyes anyone would still choose not to be part of it.

So, how is that for pondering?

And I'm telling myself now the word ponder is related to "pound," i.e. sixteen ounces. To ponder like above is to weigh and value the "pound of flesh" God has given us. It is the only medium in which we can possibly know the ultimate amazing mimesis of resurrection!

Tony Bartlett TinR Theology & Peace

Millennial God

2012-01-03T12:23:00.000-08:00

Imagine this. A man arrives in a small, isolated village. He teaches the people a song. It is very beautiful and they sing it almost all the time, together and individually. Communications improve and people come from far and wide to hear the song. Strangely no one else learns to sing it except the villagers. But everyone loves to hear it sung and it plays continually on the radio, on the internet, in movies, on iPods, on planes. After a while everyone is so used to it that they forget entirely that it came from the villagers. They dispute as to which radio station or media conglomerate owns the rights to the song, and the disputes are never resolved. In the meantime the song continues gaining in popularity and people play it over and over. One day a Ph.D. student doing research discovers where the song came from. Her research is definitive and proves the song belongs to the villagers. Even more importantly she goes to seek out the village. But strangely she finds it deserted. There is no one there. Possibly they all died. Or, perhaps, they just dispersed and are now spread throughout the world. But to all practical purposes they no longer exist, so they cannot claim the song. To whom then does the song really belong?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In a recent blog Richard Beck--a featured speaker at our next T&P conference--said "many churches are jerk factories" (sic). A little later in the piece he softened his stance and said he was exaggerating of course.

In one of my own blogs about a year ago I compared Christianity to a bomb that had gone off in the world, changing everything, and the churches were little more than a cultural relic from a time before the bomb was fully exploded. As such they provided a kind of Sunday vacation from lived-world reality, which in fact no longer needed or wanted their institutional program. I found myself later telling a concerned pastor I had likely exaggerated.

Yet another magazine blog I came across asked why the Millennial generation seemed to be abandoning the churches, including evangelical churches. The writer concluded it was because when they go to church, "instead of hearing about how to live with those who’ve been kicked to the curb, how to be Christ to a world caving in on itself, they hear about how the church’s job is to maneuver itself into positions of power, respectability, relevance, etc". Along the way the writer had also reflected on an apparently more comfortable explanation given by some within the churches. The Millennials have been seduced by an essentially secular culture, their youthful passion and idealism now recruited by a world that sees itself simply on its own terms without the need for an outside meaning (i.e."transcendence").

I think in fact there is truth in both answers given and from a radical perspective. It is certainly more than possible to challenge Christian practice and its lack of human credibility, and this is Beck's point too. But in the background it is also undeniably true there is an entirely different set of cultural references for young people, and these are not the same as the ones traditionally relied on by Christianity to get people coming to church. The idea of eternal salvation, or its opposite, becomes less and less insistent when compared with the pressing concerns and possibilities of the actual world and actual human history. The reason why it was possible to be Beck's "Christian jerk" was because the major meaning of life in the churches has always been to get to a heavenly elsewhere, and if one way or other you had paid your way then you were golden, further discussion closed. But now that scenario is much less plausible or acceptable if progressively the sensed meaning of life is life itself--i.e. how to make life on earth succeed. And so the issue of Christian credibility comes round to join the issue of cultural sensibility. The culture itself demands a different kind of Christian.

But here is the kicker.

What if cultural change is precisely the effect of Christianity? What if the ability of our world progressively to condition its own meaning, without reference to a God of the afterlife, is itself the outcome of the gospel? What if over long years and on multiple fronts the worldview instilled by Jesus has set the earth free to be more and more its own authentic space of human life--even and paradoxically as that space builds up greater and greater threats to itself? What if we take the Lord's prayer at its word, that Jesus came to fulfill the project of creation through the Father's kingdom here on earth? Or the text of Daniel employed by Jesus, that the coming of the Son of Man, the Truly Human One, is dynamically opposed to all the false kingdoms of history which disfigure the human? What if our era is in fact a time when all this is becoming implicitly understood, when the space of the earth is implicitly embraced as the final space of God's design?

Of course the great majority of people do not see it as God's design in this way.

God is out of the equation. Philosophers have spoken, influentially, of the death of God, the flight of God.

But what if "God" has died, or taken flight, because really and truly our concept of God was terminally faulty, and little by little we've come to understand this, again because of the gospel? You can only get a jerk-factory church if God himself is a jerk. And he has pretty much earned the reputation: an alarming dual personality, with a sadist readiness to fry his creatures for all eternity, and heck, we all better get used to it; and, on the other hand, a mawkish sentiment of love for those on his good side. No wonder people like this God, and then rapidly go off him. He is entirely within our image, manipulable according to the deepest human template We can use him to hate, and then we can twist him to love.

John's gospel tells us "No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known" (John 1:18). Which suggests that really we have no categories for God except whatever is derived from Jesus, and that leaves the question much more mysterious and mystical. We are called to encounter our "God" as the endless gentleness of love, so profound and so radical we can hardly imagine it. In order to come anywhere near we must hang around Jesus continually. The incommunicable God is communicated only by the absolutely powerless one.

Which suggests in turn that the church is both less and more than it ever was. Less, because it does not have a privileged business line to the truth--it does not own the song any more. And more, because it can, against the background of a song sung by all the world, begin to realize the deepest human meaning of the gospel. The church may possibly learn to sing the song in and among its own members rather than simply listen to recordings which it claims legally to own. Instead of the factory churning out products people respect less and less, it might become a laboratory for the breakthrough of a new human life for which all are longing

The role of the christian is not to set up a church as place, as essential freehold for salvation, but to live more intensely than the world the change that is taking place in the world. The God of the new millennium is in the future, our future, because the past is always structured out of violence. Love (and the song it sings) always belongs to and gives birth to the future.

Tony Bartlett

Note to Mimetic Theorists: The 1% are not Scapegoats, the 99% are

2011-12-19T06:38:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I wake up and the earth is flat. My body is convinced that the earth stretches out more or less indefinitely on either side, and up above is a very big benign God who is going to put everything right totally pronto with an infinitely fine sense of justice and, yes, love too.

Then I stand on the floor, everything whirls round and gravity shifts like a roller-coaster, and I know with terminal clarity that I'm on this tiny piece of rock with a molecule-thin layer of air hurtling through space at unimaginable speeds, and I've really got to figure it all out myself. It's Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks, not The 10 Commandments with Charlton Heston. That's when the normal day gets going.

A moment later someone switches on some micro apparatus out of which pours an unbelievable volume of noise and the words are mostly to do with some person being incredibly angry about something and somebody. That's when I know I am a human being.

But then I remember I have a Ph.D. and have studied mimesis. So I can do this! I can work the problem, just like Tom.

In the late twentieth century a number of converging pathways showed that the human ape is radically imitative (mimetic), to the extent that imitation provides a powerful explanation for his near-limitless violence and also the way he always finds scapegoats to excuse and displace it. And, oh, yes, one of the converging pathways was, amazingly, the Christian bible which showed itself an acutely accurate demonstration of these phenomena, and at the same time, by natural implication, that Christ offers a decisive way out.

So, you bet, there's a chance of saving this ship, and I and a number of brave folk have set to tinkering with what we think is the instrument panel on the strength of the theory. The earth may not be flat and there is no big God in the sky box, but we can rescue this spinning rock at this eleventh hour because there is a germ of gospel hope in the rock itself, in its human components touched by the Spirit. Like good old Tom, and with the help of Houston (Risen Jesus) we can re-rig the space capsule for a safe landing. We might even make it into a completely alternative life system, a life-star, so to speak, full of peace, love, solidarity and joy.

I sit down at my desk and log on to the planetary computer, the thing we call the internet, and the way so many of us eager astronauts communicate and try in our way to fly the planet. And then all the earth's spinning and flailing and yawing and pitching hits me like an explosion. Wow, this thing is waaay out of control! There are wars and uprisings, hurricanes and earthquakes, hunger and thirst, lies and arrests, suffering, hatred and death.

What to do? Really? What to do especially if you have a theory of everything?

Well, first perhaps a little recent history. Rene Girard is the father of mimetic theory. His major book, his Das Kapital in a manner of speaking, is Things Hidden since The Foundation of the World. It was published in English in 1987, and is coming up for its English-speaking 25th anniversary. (It was first published in French in 1978.) The impact of this work, along with his previous development of his thought and his subsequent writing, led in 1990 to the foundation of an academic association dedicated to his theory, the Colloquium On Violence And Religion (acronym Cov&r). This organization is responsible for the ongoing academic application and exploration of what is called the mimetic model. The academic world of course is an intellectual world and fosters pure thought and research. Girard's last full-length work, a book called Battling to the End, by its very title confesses quite a pessimistic view on humanity's ability to pull out of its favorite sport of killing.

Ahh, a further increase in the angular velocity of our crazy spinning rock! This time nudged onward by the very author who laid out the main diagnosis of the problem, along with its inherent solution! Or is he in fact trying a desperate gamble, like a man accelerating a car toward a cliff in order to prevent his friend in the passenger seat shooting him with a gun? Who knows? I for one am definitely looking forward to the last-minute swerve, if not from Girard certainly from the spinning rock.

A number of other organizations have sprung up dedicated to mimetic theory. One of these is our own Theology & Peace, for which I am writing here. We were formed in 2007 as a conference organization, after a number of people, myself included, felt that Cov&r, with its broad academic purpose, did not offer enough pro-active concern in theology to stimulate growth in faith and practice. So, yes, let's take the medicine on the road.

But then there is more to theology than a particular conference organization and 2011 has surely provided the most powerful external jolt to in-house reflections. A different wobble has been introduced into our spinning rock by popular protest movements from the Arab Spring, through indignados of Spain, to the Occupy phenomenon here in the U.S. Largely and consciously nonviolent these uprisings of the downtrodden and dispossessed have brought to political consciousness younger generations previously unvoiced and they have raised a flag to theologians aware Jesus likely has a stake in this somewhere.

As I now finally get into my day, fiddling on the keys of my laptop while drinking coffee at my imaginary social club (which is actually a bookstore), where for a moment I kid myself that everything in the world is about writing or chatting, and hence words, gentle biddable words, I come to the point I have wanted to make since I got out of bed. And from hereon this blog might get perfectly serious.

There has been a "Girardian" reaction to Occupy, also heard in some evangelical circles, which I find both intellectually superficial and functionally Pharisaical. To the Occupy language of "We are the 99%, oppressed by the 1%" it objects that for Christians it is always "We are the 100%", no exclusions. Hence, yes, we feel sympathy with the situations and sentiments expressed, unemployment, indebtedness, loss of homes, loss of faith in the political process, but no, this language of social differentiation is definitely not the gospel. So stop it, please, at once!

And the mimetic concept of the scapegoat is turned like a huge cannon on the protesters and in one shot their moral claim is blown away. End of game. Mimetic Theorists 1, Occupy 0.

There is so much wrong with this it's hard to know where to begin.

From an historical, structural, social and economic perspective the 1% are those who excluded the 99%. You don't have to be an economist and understand the mechanisms of capital accumulation to know that those already with money have an enormous leverage which average people don't and that leverage came from somewhere. Beginning from aristocracy whose forefathers grabbed land by force (Normans in England provide a casebook example) and continuing through factory and business owners who drive down wages and stash the proceeds, wealth is always structurally tainted ("unrighteous mammon" as Jesus precisely called it). But if you also factor in the credit derivatives which caused the 2008 crash, opaque instruments where no one really had to guarantee anything while making huge profits (check bank bailouts for final liability), the Occupy case is spectacularly correct. The great majority have been scapegoated by the gilded few.

This is counter-intuitive for a Girardian mind to accept but it is intelligibly, mathematically the case. Now, of course, if Occupy was to go on a rampage down Wall St. stringing up financiers from the lamp posts then, yes, these would immediately also be scapegoats, victims of crowd mimesis and violence. But isn't it absolutely, painfully plain that the majority of people in the Occupy camps strove mightily to avoid this outcome and so preserve the clear structural truth of the 1% as scapegoaters?

To abandon the structural truth is to turn mimetic theory into a cookie-cutter formula, a shibboleth claiming pious validity but masking a deeper human reality, viz. the poor. It is to make Girardian thought a right-wing social armor. Which brings us in turn to Pharisees.

I do not use the word "class" readily, because it has been infused with violence by Marxist rhetoric. It is a word easily conflated with violence. But if we take it in a purely sociological or taxonomic sense there can be no doubt that Jesus in the gospel of Matthew, chapter 23, addressed the Pharisees as a class and launched a stinging critique of them as such.

Why? Because Jesus saw the structural features of Pharisaism as deeply antagonistic to the gospel. In Luke he launches a similar but shorter critique against the wealthy, in the "woes" of chapter 6. It is the attack on the Pharisees which is by far the most blistering. This class of men represented a severely demanding response to the law, but in the process they missed the simple radicalism of the gospel, and their concern with minutiae was precisely what blocked them from that radicalism. Could we say that Jesus scapegoated the Pharisees? No, not unless he wanted to hurt them and kill them at the same time as he exposed their systemic avoidance of his truth. But of course this is not the case. Rather he attacks their practices and ideas trenchantly and deeply and thereby carries through a class critique. A class in this instance is the accumulation of power and violence in a particular group made available through the generational build-up of sacred order around them. The Pharisees were probably a religious 1% (only six to seven thousand of them according to Josephus) but they were highly influential and Jesus as a teacher and preacher of the in-breaking of God's newness was obliged necessarily to take them on.

To object to a nonviolent critique of the 1% therefore runs the risk of siding with Pharisaism and being itself functional Pharisaical, which is the appearance of goodness but the denial of its radicalism.

Gospel radicalism is expressed in solidarity with those who do not have power, those who are poor and downtrodden. Solidarity places the individual's bodily life somehow on their side, at their side. Solidarity is what saves nonviolence from superficiality and pharisaism. A coruscating piece written by a desperately ill and indebted woman and shared on facebook by a fellow gospel astronaut, demanded solidarity from progressive evangelicals. These evangelicals seem to have had something of the same reaction to Occupy as some mimetic theorists. It was this piece that pushed me into writing the above, seeking one more time to nudge along our spinning rock within its own crazy dynamics.

Ah well, I'm back home and it's almost time again for bed and sleep. For the comfort of a flat earth!

Tony Bartlett, T&P Theologian-in-Residence

Pitch Your Tent!

2011-11-19T22:04:00.000-08:00

As George Orwell said, one of the first victims of tyranny is language. But, conversely, one of the first flowers of freedom is the refreshing of language. And that means not just language but our sign system generally.

With the shutting down of the Occupy Wall Street camps in Oakland and at Zucotti Park, New York, there is perhaps a sense among the well-thinking that authorities have drawn a containing line around a posturing parade which has no attainable goal. Sure the protesters expressed a valid point and they had the right to do so--it does seem outrageous that a small segment of people both helped create the financial crisis and were able then to profit from it. But camping out on the doorsteps of the centers of power, making temples of capital look like refugee camps, well that quickly became offensive to good taste and a threat to established order. The application of crushing force (police in riot gear, use of "bean bag" projectiles, choke holds, pepper spray, multiple arrests, exclusion of journalists and cameras, the trashing of a voluntary library and other property) all this was the minimum necessary to return people to their senses. The protesters--who according to right-wing talk radio are just commies and hippies living in their mothers basements--will be sufficiently discouraged and return dejected to their dwellings.

Apart from the fact that the Occupy movement seems to have no intention of going quietly, but is constantly finding new places to gather and protest, this reading of the events fails completely to grasp the truth of what is going on. "Occupy" was never about a program on a mainline political stage or even a standard mobilization of public opinion on the streets. It was about something much more primordial, changing the very ground on which we stand. It was and is about changing meaning itself. And the rise of such a movement in our time has literally a "significance" which cannot be overstated. Nobody alive today in the U.S, will forget that in 2011 there came to public attention the leaf-shoots of an epochal growth in our collective human possibility.

Occupy Wall Street is a renewal of cultural language. It has given a vivid new currency to a number of words, like "occupy", "people's microphone", "ninety nine per cent". But even more than spoken language it is its concrete language of tents and tarpaulins, drums and bodies, associated directly, but in non-business terms, with centers of high finance that has interjected new meaning. Here are human beings intruding themselves as real actors in an arena where they are not supposed to be, and just by doing this they have changed the meaning of those places. They have taken the cheesy T.V. immediacy of the reality show and applied it creatively and subversively to Wall St. And this is what really causes the outrage. How dare they! They have no right to be here, here is where we are, invisible to everyone! Not them and their drums. But, no, they intend to remain, intruding real bodies which are undergoing real and painful real world-effects, into a sacred space supposed to be isolated from those effects. No wonder that the movement has been compared to Jesus' action in the temple!

And that brings us directly to the heart of it all. The argument in my book Virtually Christian is exactly the way the figure and story of Jesus have infiltrated the sign system of the world so that, whether it knows it or not, it begins to repeat gospel motifs of compassion and nonviolence. This effect is not one of legal personal salvation but of long-term human infiltration and transformation. The Occupy movement is one more aftershock of the gospel, exposing and challenging the principalities of this world in the way of Jesus.

What I'm saying represents no intention religiously to canonize the movement or anyone in it. In human affairs there is endless opportunity for things to go wrong, and they very probably will. But this does nothing to take away the the catalyzing role of Jesus in the semiotic veins of Occupy. The effect of Jesus at this level has no formal relation to doctrinal belief, or church membership, but it is working consistently to change the root construction of human meaning.

For many people such a concept may remain unrecognizable, or for some even heretical. I am not concerned here to try and answer such responses with amplification or rebuttal, but purely to reflect a sense that what is happening has everything to do with what it means to be Christian today.

There was something very appropriate about the way the U.K. version of OWS found a home on the land outside St. Paul's Anglican Cathedral, London. And what happened there represented the enigma that official Christianity now find itself facing. The proximity of the camp brought the resignation of two high-profile churchmen, attached to the cathedral. First Canon Giles Fraser, because he could not countenance the possible use of force to evict the camp. The second was the Dean of the Cathedral, who had agreed unnecessarily to shutting the doors of St. Paul's for the first time since the 2nd World War, and subsequently found himself in an impossible position. There was clearly an enormous tension set up between the fluid language of the gospel celebrated by the tents at the door and the traditional meanings of an established church formed in massive stone at the heart of London's financial district.

The vibrant tension in meaning caught the eye of others in England and another group set up camp outside Exeter Cathedral two hundred miles away from London. Bishop Michael Langrish complained."This is pure copycat, they have been outside one cathedral, now they are outside another." What the bishop painfully missed was the obvious fact that language is copycat, and that's what was happening! The spontaneous camp outside his ancient cathedral had seen the electric arc of meaning between the cathedral and the tents, and they wanted to relay it further!

Christianity today is called to make a massive conceptual shift to see that its ultimate reference is not the eternal beyond, but the very world around them as infected with the new meaning of Christ. Its own most proper language--Jesus and his nonviolent forgiving death realized in startling new life--has become unbound in the world, beyond anyone's magisterial power to control or monopolize. The result is at once both disorientation and a thrilling reorientation. The Bishop of Exeter was disoriented, those who pitched their camp outside his gothic walls were discovering, like Israel in its tents, a radically new orientation.

In some crazy way the world had become the church, growing the language of nonviolent change, freedom and compassion, while the church has become the world, speaking the old language of hierarchy, heaven and a business of brokering the ticket to get there.

But what does this mean for those who want to practice "church"?

It is possible that some ministers and leaders situate themselves conceptually in the new emerging matrix. They may be motivated personally by the concrete transformation brought by the gospel. But so long as pastors have not significantly transferred the focus of their operations to the symbolic boundaries, to the border areas of this world-become-church, then no one is going to notice anything new. The difference might be clear in the pastors' minds, but if they do not set about changing the signs of their work, in resonance with the way Jesus is changing the root language of the world, then they may as well be preaching the theses of medieval scholasticism.

The church's metaphysical function is so deeply entrenched that its default role is precisely that of the guardian of metaphysics, and it is almost impossible for people to see past that. What I am describing is called organized religion and, one way or another, it invokes the stock religious piety of the grand old God sitting above the clouds dealing with sinful humanity by means of his "exotic financial instrument", the death of his Son. Jesus bailed out our debt--you could say God, like one of the big banks, sold it to him--and so long as we agree to that, by confession or some form of regular practice, our souls are preserved from an immortality of torture and promised instead an immortality of bliss. Our mortgage will be paid for us and we'll get our mansion in the sky...

Only a consciously elaborated new set of signs can change this discredited-but-still-dominant notion. Only a new set of signals can get people to enter a new paradigm. Some possible examples include: non-traditional or discovered meeting spaces, names and images that make what is familiar appear strange, use of the body in worship that places us in an undefended relation to the Spirit, and above all communicative programs that present the human condition of violence and its transformation by Jesus as the meaning of the biblical story.

But don't let the blog tell you what signs to create! The whole point of a new language is that it generates itself exponentially, exactly as the "tongues of fire" descending on the first Christians enabled them to communicate to each person "in his or her own language" without need of prompting. Go pitch your tent on the borders of the church somewhere, in the place where the world-become-church perhaps already has set up camp. For the Word is made flesh and he tents among us!

Tony Bartlett, at AAR 2011 San Francisco

Living in the Luminous Shadow!

2011-10-26T07:02:00.000-07:00

In my book Virtually Christian I described a world radically infected by Christ. There has been a two millennial drip, drip, drip that has soaked our culture in the compassion and forgiveness of Christ, like soaking a Christmas cake in brandy!

You don't see it? You think things are worse, more violent, more unjust, than they have ever been? And has not Christendom (Christian Culture) been one of the main culprits of the heedless violence in the world?

But how would you know that unless a source of compassion had made you exactly that degree more aware?

My argument is not that things are objectively better or worse. My argument is that our minds have been changed by Christ. And now because of that things can and may become better!

The underlying logic is no different from Rene Girard's basic thesis, that the gospel has intelligently revealed the victim at the source of human culture. All I have done is added the necessary layer of Christ's compassion as the "luminous shadow" that throws this victim into relief. Plus the narrative of that shadow in culture, showing how it has progressively provided the sign and seed of transformative meaning throughout our world.

Especially in his latest work Girard accents the negative transformation. In Battling to the End he says that "The Passion brings war because it tells the truth about humanity...The Passion leads to the hydrogen bomb..." Ever since the gospel revelation of the victim humanity has lost its ability effectively to blame the scapegoat and so re-found the human order on violence, yet at the same time it has refused to renounce violence. Placed in an untenable situation by the gospel humanity continues to have recourse to violence, desperately and in larger and larger doses, until it finally unleashes nuclear war.

This is a highly negative gospel reconstitution of human history, and there is no doubt truth in it. But if the Passion leads to the bomb, that is the case from the perspective of the old unreconstructed humanity. Even more surely and powerfully the Passion and Resurrection are producing a new human way, a new creation. This has to be the case because the negative effect can only be provoked by the prior radical presence of positive meaning. The problem is in recognizing its effectiveness. At first sight it does not seem able to change political or economic patterns, nor most social or intellectual ones. It takes place in cracks in the system and can easily seem to evaporate when you would most like to see it work. But the luminous shadow is necessarily there, underlying all the travail of our modern world, prompting a progressive turn toward compassion, forgiveness, sharing, nonviolence.

Once you develop an eye for it you begin to see it more and more readily. I continue to be amazed at the act of the British Government in 2010 apologizing for the massacre in Derry, N.Ireland, in 1972, known as Bloody Sunday. This was one of the main triggers provoking the violence of the IRA with the support of the Catholic population, leading to over twenty five years of urban warfare. Those acquainted with the history of the two major islands off the coast of Europe are used to hearing of 800 years of English attacks on Ireland. Bloody Sunday could be seen as just one more in an interminable list of murder and wrong visited by the greater military power on the weaker. But then for the British government to turn around and apologize so resolutely and fully on something in living memory indicated suddenly that a new contemporary principle is at work. The healing effect was enormous.

Robert Downey Jr.'s recent appeal for forgiveness for Mel Gibson also ranks as a clear case of the luminous shadow. Gibson's pariah status in the film industry is well known, first having made a movie about Christ that pushed Jewish (and other) sensitivities to the limit, and then offending directly with a drunken rant against Jews on the occasion of his arrest for drunk driving. Robert Downey told how Gibson had given him work about fifteen years ago when he too was a pariah and no one would cast him because of his record of drug abuse. Gibson did so then on the condition that Downey accepted responsibility for his actions and was ready to offer forgiveness to the next person. As it turned out that person was Gibson. Downey appealed to an audience of Hollywood's great and glitterati :"Unless you are without sin, and if you are you are in the wrong (expletive) industry, you should forgive him and let him work.”

The cuing of Christ's compassion, to the degree of a direct quote, was unmistakably part of the appeal (and ironically layered into the situation by Gibson's own movie) and it exploded around Twitter and the blogosphere in a wildfire of fascination. Could/would Hollywood respond to this sign of the gospel? Whatever the answer there can be no doubt that multiple signs of Christ's compassion were lit up in people's brains, whether they agreed or not.

And that's the point. At the level of sign, of meaning, the compassion of Christ is irrepressible, irrescindable. It's never going to go away! It can be rejected of course. But it will keep returning, more and more insistently, and at some point it can and must be accepted. "If I am raised up I will draw all humankind to myself!"

The effect of the sign of the Cross is a geological sedimentation that over the years creates a new human landscape. It is like all those billions of tiny shells that produce limestone and over time are pressed upward by the earth to form great mountain ranges. Every individual shell is a shift in the neural structure of the human brain impacted by the sign of Christ's compassion. Little by little all those shifts are giving rise to a new humanity. To what forces can the largely nonviolent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt be attributed if not some profound change in human sensibility? And what is the seemingly leaderless and inchoate, and yet intensely communicative and symbol-producing activity of worldwide Occupy Wall Street if not to a tectonic rumbling in the deep structures of human meaning?

The gospels themselves use images of large-scale organic change. They say the Kingdom of God is like leaven which completely transforms the shape and constitution of a huge batch of dough. Or they show Jesus at a wedding changing a vast quantity of water into wine, in one stroke morphing the concrete senses of a human community from horrible failure to amazing success.

What it would be like if Christian churches lost their purpose of brokering eternity and supplying a sense of metaphysical worth, to being schools where people learned this new meaning of humanity; period?

But even if the churches don't do this it is still happening any way. Happening all round us.

In many ways the feeling of actual contemporary Christianity comes more authentically outside of church than in it. Outside has a resonance of a new transforming humanity but inside can almost completely lack it. The inside's traditional symbol system refers intimately to another, heavenly world and the rightness communicated from it. It was developed over thousands of years, both the time of Christianity itself and of other thought worlds preceding it into which Christianity tapped. So going into church with the watershed change I'm talking about in mind is to discover this place is actually designed not to represent it! The experience of the churches could in one sense be compared to walking into pagan temples in the first century while the message of Christianity was running around on the streets outside!

But when Christian communities begin to understand that their key meaningful context is not another world to which we are destined after death, but in fact this one--because it is pivoting on the compassion of Christ--then all the symbolic references change of themselves. And when Christian communities live fully in a transformed symbol system like this, well, what will that mean? Nothing less than the rebirth of Christian faith!

Tony Bartlett, TinR

Money, it's a Crime: Jesus and the Banks

2011-10-19T10:21:00.000-07:00

It must have gotten pretty bad out there.

For folks to begin invoking Jesus as a solution to the world of finance, the end of the world itself must have arrived.

Recent posts on Facebook and images of street-theater in the finance district of London U.K. have depicted Jesus casting out the traders and money changers from the temple. The surface message is that Jesus does not like investment banks and derivatives, but to get Jesus in on the act really suggests something quite a bit more serious.

It is a hint of a very profound disillusion with the world of financial speculation, and a shaking that goes to the foundations even of profit-driven capitalism itself.

If you check Jesus in the gospels he does not talk of reform of money or wealth. Rather he's about a root and branch stripping away of these things as principles of human organization. He replaces "get" with "give", and a worldview of scarcity with a lifeworld of abundance. "If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return....Give and and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put in your lap." (Luke 6:34-38)

Bringing Jesus into the discussion on the banks is like setting a camp fire in the built-up California canyons during the Santa Ana winds. You're asking to burn the whole place down.

People's willingness to mention Jesus in this connection, therefore, does seem like sign of the end of the world, or at least of a world. It is one of those "stars falling from the skies" things, a portent of the imminent breakdown of the established order as such.

The whole history of Christendom (actual Christian culture) is a series of unhappy compromises between the radicalism of Jesus and the actual way human beings do business and wish to continue doing. This is evidently true in regard to the issue of violence, but it's also the case in respect of money.

The latest and perhaps most effective compromise in connection to money involves a theme of personal election, whereby enormous wealth is given to a few by a form of divine decree. This can be expressed as economic dogma: the rich must be allowed to be rich for they are the only true generators of wealth. Or, it can come in Christian terms for Christian voters: a version of Calvinist election mixes with prosperity gospel to supply a God-given right to unconditioned wealth.

And then, by a perverse but watertight logic, the wealthy truly are entitled, while those who depend on Social Security have a false "entitlement" attitude. The first have the purity of divine right behind them, and the second only sinful human resentment.

But there is a crucial piece missing from the whole discussion, a piece that changes the entire perspective by which we judge wealth. And once again we have the epoch-making insights of René Girard to thank. He has given us the concept of mimesis which tells us that we value things according to the eyes of the other. It tells us our desire is mediated. (And his insights have recently received clamorous backing from the discoveries by neural science of "mirror neurons.")

If wealth was in any way simply objective, like a mountain of twenty thousand feet, or a river ten feet deep, then we'd be able to draw a measure and say yes, that is wealth. But there is an intrinsically comparative element in wealth. People with houses in the Hamptons or the D.C. suburbs probably look pretty wealthy to the rest of us. But living in those places they always have their own differentials: the size of the frontage, the number of rooms, the yacht, the private jet. And then, for the people with all those things, there remains the truly astonishingly rich. The ones who can book rooms in Dubai at $25,000 a night, who have art collections with Van Goghs and Renoirs, who can purchase newspapers, T.V. stations, private islands, football teams, and much more, more than we can imagine!

Definitely all these things have a material elements--you can't play without marbles--but they exist within a framework of being seen by others, of a shared desire that gives them their final and truest value. Even the most exclusive private yacht visited by a handful of privileged guests is seen and desired by them, and behind them stands all the lesser yachts seen by everyone else. Those billions of glances of desire are implied in the glances of the privileged few who have also shared those other glances, and carry them with them, and so say on behalf of everyone "this really is the best possible yacht in the world." Through them the eyes of all the world are trained on the most private, privileged of possessions, giving it its worth.

If this is in fact the case then it is humanly impossible--anthropologically impossible--to claim that wealth is individual and not shared. Everything is shared; it's simply in my hand not yours! But neurally and humanly it's in both our hands!

This anthropology of the mirroring of wealth then becomes the reason why a certain brand of theology has to be called in service to create a fiction that wealth is really individual. "God" is in people's minds the only unaccountable, incomparable, unmediated being. And so to give wealth its rights it has to have the backing of such an incomparable entity.

But apart from the fact that this is Greek essentialist theology and not a Trinitarian God, it is fundamentally not human. It does not respect, it does not look to, humanity.

Because here's the thing: if wealth is shared neurally or psychically between us, it means that in a fundamental human sense it belongs to everyone. That's where it's meaning comes from, from everyone. It is a common good! You can't have wealth without the other person, and without all the other persons. Wealth is something we create together and thus by its internal human logic we have to dispose of together. We can dispose of it using Greek theologies of election (i.e. the rich must stay rich) which necessarily involve endless rivalry, struggle and, in the end, plain insanity. Or we can dispose of it by a New Testament gospel of gift, something which changes the inner dynamic of mimesis from rivalry to love.

How this plays out in practical detail is a matter for actual politics. But the principle is clear and can only have clear results. We live in a shared universe. We can make that a matter of constant absurd rivalry, always seeking to expropriate what can never be expropriated. Or we can come into the space of God's intention, having created such a shared world in the first place. We can come into the space of Jubilee, the Israelite institution whereby all debts were rendered null on a systematic periodic basis (every fifty years). We can come into the area of the Lord's prayer where the same action is a condition of the prayer itself, and in a permanent present tense: "Give us today our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors..."

We can come into the space of a compassionately shared world, rather than a violently shared one. At least, that would seem to be the case once you bring Jesus into the picture!

Tony Bartlett, Theologian in Residence

9/11 : Ritual In Perpetuam?

2011-09-17T10:45:00.000-07:00

As the tenth anniversary came and passed I hesitated within myself how to approach the topic.

I did not join my voice to those who mourned the victims or mourned the missed opportunities for peace, or both. I am not insensitive to either. Of course not. The anguish for the people in the Towers touches everyone in New York. Everyone knows someone who had a friend there or who was herself in the immediate area. Then came the wars, and their anguish is ever and overwhelmingly present, the defining U.S. narrative of the 21st century.

But there is a dimension to the whole thing that happened that day which has always exceeded the standard ritual commentary, and which has continually bothered me. How could I voice it evenly, or intelligibly, when the whole world was weeping?

Only now perhaps when thoughts and emotions have settled into the everyday, and yet the commemorations still echo, may I propose a small unsettling postscript...

"Ritual commentary," and right there I said it. Not everything human beings do is spontaneous. In fact very little is. A great deal of it is programed by the group, by responses the group models to us and expects from us. Ritual is a broad and rich name for this collective programing. One of the huge things about Jesus is the way he talked and the way he acted broke across this programing, like a rip current breaking against a tide, creating enormous historical disturbances and counter eddies. Perhaps what Jesus did was the only truly spontaneous event in history!

When the first plane struck the North Tower at 8.46 a.m. I was on my way to teach a class in the Department of Religion at Le Moyne College, Syracuse. The title of the class was "Ritual Performance." I heard the news on the car radio and at that point of time, probably a few minutes after it struck, there was still speculation that this could be a small private aircraft that had veered badly off course. When I arrived at the college I remember saying immediately to a colleague, that I hoped it was indeed an accident and not a terrorist attack. He shook his head down at his desk as if I were idiotically naive. At 9:03 a.m. the crash of the second aircraft into the South Tower proved him entirely correct.

Classes were canceled for the day, as numerous students and teachers began anxiously checking on friends who may have been in Lower Manhattan. Other students and professors stood around the hallways watching events unfold on the T.V. monitors. And there perhaps was my first clue.

As the course syllabus said, "The central question of this course is the value or power of ritual today." We were using a book called "Liberating Rites" in which the author, Tom Driver, argued ritual was a basic form of ordering and re-ordering the world and which did not depend on a prior rationality. It creates its own reason. "Rituals are primarily instruments designed to change a situation. They are more like washing machines than books..."

As people drifted about in a state of half-disbelief and the T.V. relentlessly screened the towers falling, people fleeing, firemen fainting, the crashing of two more planes, it felt just like that: we were in the middle of some wildly beating laundry machine that had erupted from the sky and whether we liked it or not we were being shook. showered, rinsed, spun, wrung out, and we would never be the same. All that was left was to expect the continual repetition of these events, in imagery, in words, in memorials, and the full scale reality of a world-making ritual was upon us.

My special contribution to the course was an attention to movies. Again according to the syllabus: "Movies act as a kind ritual, in some ways far removed from ritual and yet highly ritualistic in phenomena they present." What I meant, and of course presented to the class, was the violence of movies, the unquenchable stream of blood and death in so many films. Rituals provide us with a repertoire of primary signs, so often rooted in violence, and movies continually exploit and re-energize those signs. So, again the images on T.V....on-screen intense moving signs of planes and fire, of fear, destruction, death.

Returning home that day my overpowering sensation was "This was cinematic, far too cinematic..."

The choice of city, the Big Apple, famed New York, setting of hundreds and hundreds of movies... The attack on the WTC and its Twin Towers, symbols themselves of modernity, the Western economic and cultural system and the heaven-scaling character of its architecture... And the weapon, a plane! The icon of international power and success, yet always containing an element of fear, now turned entirely into a threat, a missile. There were direct echoes of the 1996 movie, Independence Day, in which giant spaceships flown by hungry nomadic aliens vaporize skyscrapers and whole cities, and the White House, the target of the fourth 9/11 plane. Or the 1998 movie Armageddon, in which a rain of meteorites the size of "Basketballs and Volkswagens" unleash disaster on New York city, including a shot of the Twin Towers themselves, one of them on fire with its top blown away.

All of 9/11 represented a coding, a dense, sophisticated, electronic set of signs whereby some of the things most dear to Americans, to their self-image--and the images of that self-image and to those images already under threat within themselves--all of this got replayed in real time and living history as real catastrophe. How could this fiercely cinematic ritual not embed itself like a multiple barb in the national psyche? How could it not infect us like some devilishly designed mental virus loaded with fear, pain and anger? And how could it not provoke the re-ordering of everything in unhesitating retaliatory violence?

These were my thoughts, confused, jumbled, inchoate, but very, very real. I was asked to speak on a panel of religious figures hastily assembled by some churches. I tried to express myself in these terms, but I don't think anyone understood. Perhaps they still won't. But the forces that brought about the attack in this sense of a total event, its mise en scène of the truly terrible, were truly intelligent in their ability to reorder our world. And it is precisely this intelligence I resist in the spontaneous counter-current made possible only by Jesus!

Driver quoted Shakespeare's King Lear, suggesting the possibility of terrible violence done by humans for its own sake. "I will do such things,--what they are yet I know not,--but they shall be the terrors of the earth." In Driver's view killing is the performance of something absolute which is also a ritual beginning and a beginning of ritual.

René Girard goes deeper and his thought was also a key part of the course. Girard tells us that we don't have ritual or performance first and then killing. Human culture, humanity itself, is birthed out of catastrophic violence that creates a sacrificial victim that creates a ritual that creates a world. Both Driver and Girard would agree that 9/11 was a ritual beginning but Girard would be more systematic, seeing it as "the renewal of sacrificial resources". And Girard goes further still. He teaches that Jesus and the gospels manifest that whole process back to us. They shine a light on it. So that we know it and can choose an entirely different way, a nonviolent way, of ordering a world--a riptide of grace founding the world in compassion, forgiveness, peace, life.

But part of the gospel's shining a light on the process is that human beings have to a lesser or greater extent all become knowledgeable of what the whole thing is and how the whole thing works. And that is why the terrible intelligence that actually designs a total event like 9/11 is possible. In some fearful appalling way 9/11 is a radically Christian event. The violent manipulation of our symbolic space in order to produce a new ritual resource could only happen in a Christian universe. It could only happen in a world where Satan had to some extent been demystified so that Satan now acts with a devilish degree of conscious designer cunning. As the movie has it, "The devil wears Prada." Or, to say it another way, in the 21st Century Satan is also Christian!

But then that also means, in Ignatius of Loyola's famous discernment advice, he must leave his tail sticking out. The intelligence, the design, shows. We are no longer blind pawns in a primordial eruptive event, participating without consciousness. For if Satan is conscious all of us are! Satan can't outsmart Satan. We know, deep down, we are being played, and the fury of reaction that often follows when something like this is suggested, shows that those invested in the ritual know it too.

Jesus with his counter tide of grace has set us free from a universe built on founding violence. Whatever and whoever the particular agents of 9/11 the cosmos birthed by Jesus does not conform to its twisting of the world into a new sacrificial framework. Jesus said "I have seen Satan fall like lightning" and his revelation continues to destabilize all violent ritual, including this one.

It is not a comfortable situation for the world in general or the U.S. in particular, and I believe the progressive destabilization of the North American political space flows from an already-punctured attempt to give it a new sacrificial foundation. There is no other political way forward except a new shaping of society on the gospel pattern of compassion, forgiveness, peace. The ever more desperate movement to negate these values politically is itself a last frenzied attempt to shore up a Jesus-embarrassed archaic world order.

There can be no longer any ritual in perpetuam. There is only the blessed disturbance of grace.

Tony Bartlett

Brief Notes on Love

2011-08-26T05:44:00.000-07:00

Love is a wine that flows in the veins of all things, in the dust of the planets no less than the song of the robin.

God is love, is this love, a fire which reaches round the world, given to all without discrimination.

God who is love is a solar flare exploding into space engulfing the planet, sending her signals into every smallest gap of unseen particles, into every shadowed space of human awareness.

But love can only really show itself at the cost of itself, and that cost fools the proud human observer into thinking all there really is is darkness, violence and chance. And normal human perception within a world of violence will no less conclude that the world only gives birth to love exceptionally, as doomed to failure.

In the story of Jesus, the God of love could only revealed be by being thrown out of the world. But in the process of exclusion this love is seen clearly, visibly, by those with eyes.

Subtly that exclusion becomes the most profound entry, overture and overturning, of everything...

Human culture built for the interests of the violent continues to disfigure all concepts of divinity.

In some ways it is worse in official Christianity. The legal payoff and punishment notions of salvation have dulled and disfigured the fire of love out of recognition.

But the bottomless passion of the divine is unconquerable, the beat of its heart, the timeless rhythm of the deep, beyond all quelling. The more intense and intoxicating this divine passion is the more it is deep, hidden, soundless and humble. But its hiddenness and humility are the product not of weakness but exactly of strength, of amazing ultra-strength.

To pay attention to divine love, to plunge to the level of its hiding, is to be amazed beyond words. To be struck dumb and senseless. And to emerge a completely different kind of person.

Invisible Hand Revealed, Outstretched as Compassion!

2011-08-21T12:40:00.001-07:00

"Standard and Poor"--sounds like a run of unimpressive high-school results. It is in fact an august institution which hands out these judgments itself, not on school students, but on business and financial entities, including national economies. (The name does not refer to valuations as such: it comes from Henry Poor who began compiling data on railroad companies back in the 19th century.) As anyone who has not been on a Trappist retreat in the past weeks knows, the US has for the first time slipped into the A- range, judged for lack of credit-worthiness.

The assessment followed the so-called debt-ceiling crisis in which Congress seemed to drive the world economy to the edge of a cliff, only at the last moment to swerve away. The whole performance did not make for confidence and it's not at all surprising that some symbolic authority would wag a reproving finger. But a final judgment on the situation cannot be restricted to the scholasticism of high-finance. Everything here has a theological bottom line. And far from allowing the mysteries of economics to deter comment, theology cries out for a hearing, like the blood of Abel itself.

To get to that we must first give a snapshot of the major players in the field and their ideas.

G.B. Shaw said that if all the economists to the world were laid end to end they would not reach a conclusion, and he was likely thinking of the debate between Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Or at least between the division of thought their names have come to represent.

On the one hand, Keynes argued against the idea that supply magically creates its own demand, that if you give capitalists the chance then their spending on investment will create the wealth that leads to buying of goods. He insisted instead that in the midst of recession the government has to stimulate the economy by reducing interest rates, while increasing spending on things like services and infrastructure.

On the other hand, for Hayek, government spending impedes recovery by depriving the private sector of capital for investment, and moreover inevitably restricts human freedom. For Hayek the free price system is what keeps everyone free, but it is itself a bit of a mystery. Prices are a spontaneous order "the result of human action but not of human design."

And, again for people who've not been vacationing in outer space, there are distinct echoes here of the position of some Democrats and the commentator Paul Krugman on the one hand, and the newly minted Tea Party on the other.

So where's the theology in it?

Through the work of Rene Girard theology has discovered the crucial factor of imitative (mimetic) desire: it is a core biblical motif demonstrated at the heart both of human violence (Cain and Abel etc.) and of Christ's power to change us to compassion and love. What would it mean if we applied this anthropological and theological insight to economics? The results could be intensely illuminating and could possibly change the "dismal science" of economics into something filled with the possibility of light!

How is it that things have value? If we begin with this economic question Mimetic Theory can help considerably. It tells us that we always imitate the desire of another in relation to an object. We may think we desire the object spontaneously, but there is always the shadowy present of the other whose prior relationship to the object shows that it is desirable.

When something is brought for sale to market (or shopping mall) we can concentrate on the thing in question forgetting the human hand that has produced the object and/or is offering it for sale. But just because we don't pay attention to that hand doesn't mean it has gone away. In fact it is exerting an even more intense fascination just because it's hidden. The riot of advertizing that takes place around goods for sale simply displaces and amplifies the human relationship to the object in the original production. That beautiful model showing off that diamond ring, she's just a deflected substitute, a glamorous stand-in, for the miner who mined the ring and the dealer who brought it to town! We might think it's her good looks that makes us want to be like her and have her ring, but in fact her body-look, her clothes, everything about her, are themselves held out as desirable by a further chain of other desire-instilling-relationships going on basically for ever.

Consumer desire is a gigantic self-referring universe, a vast self-feeling nervous system with a billion billion synapses, all coming down to that single image that will make us want the ring!

But what happens when there is a breakdown in the system of desire? This is the crucial question Keynes and Hayek were dealing with, writing as they were at the time of the great depression and arguing about its causes and its remedies. Their classic version of breakdown was the boom or glut, the apparent over-production of actual stuff that no one wants and, therefore, no one gets paid for. A year when there is a huge harvest of tomatoes makes those enormous piles at the market less and less salable. In a situation like that no one shows any desire for tomatoes! Of course once you are in a recession the amount of goods goes down precipitously and looks nothing like a glut. But the economists saw that as its initial premise: a boom followed by a bust.

But there is also the situation much closer to home and closer to my argument. The market itself can create the conditions of "glut" by deliberately inflating it with stuff no one can actually pay for, as in the 2008 housing bubble and bad-debts banking crisis. In this instance it is not over-production, but the deliberate manipulation of money and desire to the point where one fuels the other and a moment is reached when people realize there is not enough actual material wealth in the system to sustain it, and the whole thing comes crashing down. It's the inverse of a glut; it is an unsustainable emptiness, a vacuum. And it can only be brought about by phantasmagorical desire detaching itself from the actual universe and expanding to infinity.

You see what I mean? The whole system is complex and fluid but from a Mimetic Theory point of view you can always be sure that desire or the lack of it will influence the value of goods and the overall value of the market in which those goods are traded. Certainly there are objective factors--there is the object! There are actual tomatoes and actual houses. But it's the subjective element of desire that truly drives the system. This is surely what Hayek was referring to in "the result of human action but not of human design." It's human desire which drives the thing but it is not recognized or planned in any way, still less is it willingly surrendered to any principle, rational or spiritual, other than its all-powerful self.

Sooooo, back to our dueling economists. Whatever its cause, when desire bottoms out in the system, and business grinds to a halt, what do you do then?

Simple enough. Each in his own way says you have to get desire working again, you have to get it back in the system. Keynes essentially believes you can cheat desire. You have to introduce more money and stuff into the system so people begin wanting it and working to get it and thus producing themselves. Then everyone will begin to want goods more and more, and so on. In a nutshell, you have to create demand (desire).

Hayek says, no, no, no, that will never work! If you just give people stuff no one will ever desire anything. What you you have to do is actually the reverse. You must stop government spending, you must get rid of easy money, you must stop taxing, in order to free up the capitalists to begin over the making of real wealth. That way goods will be desirable and the great avatar and icon of desire--namely money, mammon--will itself be desirable once more and and the whole system will work again. (Well, he doesn't precisely say this, but his insistence on the sacrosanct freedom of prices and their autonomous character can only mean this.)

Hayek 's viewpoint is currently being applied in Greece, Ireland, Britain and Spain, under the name "austerity", which implies a temporary self-denial for the sake of longer term pleasure. But then lurking in the depths of it all is the greatest inciter, the last infallible fixer of the system, the terrible dragon begetter of desire in its rawest purest state--war! Nothing is more guaranteed to rebirth the order of desire than war, telling us what is really desirable by destroying everything else! Therefore both supporters of Keynes and supporter of Hayek historically agree on this. It was the immense government spending on war industry that truly dragged Europe and the U.S. out of the depression era. And these days no member of the Tea Party seriously wishes to dent the huge share of tax revenue soaked up by U.S. military spending (+ or - 50%) for current and future wars.

What then is the theological conclusion?

Hayek and the Tea Party are essentially on the right side of desire. But they are on the wrong side of history. We cannot continue to run the world in this way. Everyone knows it. Everyone knows there are not enough resources for exponential desire on the part of seven billion people. Alternately you cannot pauperize a large proportion of these same billions in order to protect desire for a privileged few. Most of all, everyone knows that if you precipitate a major war in order to restore the productivity of desire there will ultimately be no productivity at all.

Keynes was right in a better sense . The government has to spend in the midst of a recession. But that cannot be argued for classical economic reasons, as if the argument can be won out of pure mathematics. We have to see that the strange work of desire is more and more exposed for what it is, and because of that be prepared explicitly to invoke a new principle.

The "invisible hand", the "not by human design" are shown for what they are, the endless shell game of imitated human desire. What is at work, and has made things work in an apparently magical way, is the unseen and spontaneous mediating power of the model. But once we reveal the trick, once we see that invisible hand, we are able and indeed called upon to realize the possibility and the promise of something new.

In this very moment, at this very time, because of this growth in human awareness a new generative principle is intruding into the human equation, into politics itself. Unconscious desire progressively is rendered implausible and is displaced by surrendered-to compassion, a changed internal scenery that allows the other to be, to live, by virtue of my being one with her in her humanity. As time goes on this imitated compassion can and will be as neurally powerful and generative as imitated desire.

Sounds impossible, absurd? Not if you see that we have no choice. Human history has been pushed to its crossroads. And those who claim that the Gospel is central to their lives have no other voice that to say, yes, this is possible, this is what our belief teaches us! The Christian churches and Christians in general are called by the very urgency of the time to put our capitalist culture on notice that it will only survive by a new economics of compassion. We say, Blessed are the Poor!, rather than All Hail Standard and Poor!

Tony Bartlett, Theologian-in-Residence

Sign Of The Human

2011-07-27T06:28:00.000-07:00

I am more used to my backyard than perhaps any other space on God's earth. Five years ago we put a picture window in the back wall of the kitchen providing an uninterrupted view. I see trees and plants, squirrels, groundhogs, deer, once or twice a fox, a turkey, and one night I swear there was the yowl of a coyote!

Nothing could be more natural.

At the same time I sit at the table in front of this window and I look at words and images on my computer screen, speeding their way across hyperspace. Inches or thousands of miles in seconds or less, it doesn't seem to matter. What could be more artificial? The leaves on the trees bud, mature and die in one narrow fixed space over a whole season. My thoughts and the signs that carry them fly about their electronic universe like winged silicon gods, without any solid body to hold them.

But wait...

This distinction between natural and artificial, between solid and electronic, is it so real, so assured? That leaf up there, quivering at the end of a branch, is it not just as much a product of complex information transfers, of enzymes, gravity, photons?

For sure, we see and describe these things in terms of quantifiable energy, but energy states are not actually different from information states once we get down to subatomic physics and how particles move and shift at that level. For example, in photosynthesis a packet of light (photon) is absorbed by the leaf to make it grow, but in a slightly different form (i.e. at a different wavelength) it is the means by which we see!

The only final difference with information, therefore, is the "mirror" of the human brain which captures things in images and signs. It is the fact of the human observer.

Today we are so intensely aware that in the midst of all the small particle transfers of energy there is this incredible fact of human meaning achieved through signals in and around us. The world of computers and media has enormously increased my sense of the flow of energy/information. It has plugged me into an exploding world of signs and shown me how everything human is wonderfully made out of communication. What we call a human being is something like a center of communication through signs, like the arrivals and departure screens at airports but not just for planes....it's for everything!

Another way of saying the same could be that a human being is the tipping point of the universe where creation begins to reflect back to itself its own energy/information process and and it does so as signs. The universe has become the scene of meaning as human sign...

Enter John's gospel and "In the beginning was the Word..."

Wow! How cool is that, that two thousand years ago the "theological gospel" understood that everything begins with signal, sign, word, Word? John of course is not talking just any sign or word. He is talking Jesus. He is talking the nonviolent Crucified and Risen One. Here is the sign or meaning that starts everything over and starts it for the first time. But it also establishes thereby the general principle that the human world is composed of the sign, and does so long before computers made it factually obvious. In my opinion, this one liner and everything it means have been a pivotal factor in bringing forth our world of hyper-communication.

The gospel is communication. It is good news. And with that outbreak of information the modern age was truly born (and inside that its wilder child, the postmodern age). Gone is the thick mythic world of gods and demons, heavens and hells. Gone is the lofty world of ideas belonging to a pure realm of thought. Gone even is the comforting fate of inevitable death. Instead we have the explosion of communication, of talk and story. And at the heart of talk and story there is the endless concrete choice between killing and forgiveness, retaliation and life. And within that, and because of it, there is the nagging insistence that even beyond death the word of life will pursue us, not allowing any complicity with fate and its violence.

What a stunning word! What a sign! And now because of this singular Word, because of the way it has shifted the character of actual culture, it means a crucial amount of the sensed information of our world is full of God. The God of compassion and forgiveness known in and through the sign of Jesus is broadcast through the actual contemporary sign system in all its immense variety and vitality.

The spiritual human consequences are immense. Anyone anywhere knowing her world through its signs is necessarily impacted by this God. The impact may not be powerful, it very probably will not be conscious. And, equally probably in many, many cases, it will be resisted, opposed, even hated. But anyone with an eye and a heart of compassion will pick up all around them this wonderful new human reality.

In the past this kind of experience has often called contemplative and indeed that is what it is. But the word contemplation has a tone of heavenly truths--the framework of Greek thinking which sees truth as abiding in a perfect place beyond this world, or, at least, belonging purely to a spiritual order and accessed in a purely spiritual way. But the fact of the matter is that Christian contemplation has always been very concrete and sensuous, awakened by historically concrete signs and images. The "visions" of the mystics testify to this.

However, what I am talking about is much more general and diffuse than a saint's pure-hearted love and identification. It really is a cultural condition: one mixed in with a great deal of other stuff, some of it neutral, much of it negative, but in the last analysis it is the constant presence of Christ at the heart of our concrete world.

Our world is under the pressure of Christ at an internal generative level. Once again this is not any kind of mathematically obvious fact; it does not impose itself by force. But it does mean that a Christian does not and cannot look outside of her actual human world for the truth of Christ. It means that the human world is itself the stuff of the divine, that God has become an organic part of the human system. It means your neighborhood, your city, your mall, it's all a virtual church! It means that despite the contradictions, the killings, the betrayals and the danger, Christ indeed has the victory. It means that forgiveness and peace have become the one and only true meaning of the world: Satan has indeed fallen like lightning and the semiotic reign of violence is collapsing.

It means love is the normal and constant sign of being human. It fills my backyard just as much as my computer, my computer just as my backyard...

Tony Bartlett

Three W's and Three Anthropologies...

2011-06-23T09:12:00.000-07:00

What is happening to us? I mean the U.S. (Yes, the U.S. is us! I couldn't have said that five weeks ago..)

It seems we are morphing into the domestic population of a 21st century Super-Rome, kept happy and stupid by a dole of bread and circuses, while the elite live on secluded estates and our armies trample across the world, fighting off barbarian hordes?

Sound vaguely right? The only major difference in the terms of comparison--a weird but totally crucial difference--is that in ancient Rome there was something called Christianity. It was a small subversive movement, frequently despised and persecuted, which did not believe in killing...

Huh?

Yes, that's right, there's a huge disconnect, because now we also have Christianity, and it not only not small and subversive, it has become imperial Western society's dominant religious institution and its traditional worldview. How can that make any sense?

How can this thing called Christianity have effectively allied itself with its own great symbolic opposite? And not just allied, but over time produced its own unique and mighty hybrid?

Responding to this disconnect demands some kind of framework of understanding. And my hope is to present that, to provide a handle on this most extraordinary contradiction and conundrum for believers. What follows, therefore, is a somewhat longer blog, an attempt to gain traction in what feels like a vertical free-fall of two related identities: Christianity and America, America and Christianity.

I want to say ultimately there are three different "anthropologies" at work in Christianity and America. I think anthropology is a better core concept than theology, because an anthropology is about how you relate at a primary level to other humans, whereas theology is so often what you think about God. Thought about God is so easy to lose track of, and quickly become meaningless. Whereas how we relate to others is always concrete. Anthropology, therefore, determines theology, and is more primary than theology. Good theology grounds itself in anthropology as, I believe, Jesus taught, showed and lived.

x x x

This is an over-achieving blog for sure, but worth it if you consider what's at stake and you follow it through to the end! It continues in two main parts; the first is context, the second response. I admit I will be hugely summarizing and condensing. But the benefit of summarizing is concentration. And concerted reflection is so badly needed today in contrast to the mind-emptying blur of information we normally live within.

First then, the contemporary context which will help set up the framework. I want to talk about the WWW.

No, I'm not referring to the World Wide Web, but rather Weather, War and Wealth.

To begin then with Weather...it's impossible to deny climate change. The only real question posed is whether the change is critical and whether humans are the cause. As regards the first half of the question the sheet ice in Greenland and Antarctica is visibly decreasing. As a result of these and other factors the International Panel on Climate Change estimates that the global average sea level will rise between 0.6 and 2 feet (0.18 to 0.59 meters) in the next century (IPCC, 2007).

The tiny mid-Pacific nation of Tuvalu can serve as the canary in the mine. As the sea level has risen, Tuvalu has experienced lowland flooding, saltwater intrusion affecting its drinking water and food production, coastal erosion and increasingly destructive storms eating away at its land mass. Its leaders are now asking Australia and New Zealand to accept their whole population as environmental refugees--so far to no avail. What is happening to Tuvalu today can happen to the U.S. barrier islands tomorrow, including Long Island...(http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2001/update2) And its landlocked mirror inverse--ferocious wildfires from California to Arizona--is already happening.

As regards the human causation here is the verdict of the United States National Research Council. "There is a strong, credible body of evidence, based on multiple lines of research, documenting that climate is changing and that these changes are in large part caused by human activities. While much remains to be learned, the core phenomenon, scientific questions, and hypotheses have been examined thoroughly and have stood firm in the face of serious scientific debate and careful evaluation of alternative explanations.” (United States National Research Council, Advancing the Science of Climate Change.)

But then expressly at this point other voices will be heard, questioning the figures of studies like this, or citing other studies, loudly claiming that anthropogenetic climate change is a hoax. In other words what is happening to the people of Tuvalu is just part of standard cycles of geological and meteorological shift. To attempt to take on a sense of human responsibility, and thus a regime of good environmental practice, is a plot to restrict freedom and to deny the inevitable tough truths of earthly nature and suffering.

Exactly! In this response we are dealing with ideology and theology, modes of thinking which shape the world in advance for us before we even open our eyes on particular situations. In this case they assert that we are each of us free in a supremely isolated legal sense while we all live in a physically fallen world. And any attempt to think and act otherwise is to deny the true message of individual salvation in another world, and corollary supreme rights of the individual!

Next up, War.

The U.S. is now engaged in three, four or five wars, depending on how you keep count. The conflict in Iraq has cost $3 trillion plus (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090302200.html), a mind-boggling sum which I fully believe: the hidden costs of war are exponential and always exceed any audit. As of the end of May this year 4457 US soldiers have been killed and over 32,000 seriously wounded. Iraqi "extra deaths" are not reliably recorded but are conservatively in the region of half a million (the famous Lancet report put them 654, 965 in 2006, and the Opinion Research Business in London put them at 1.2 million plus in 2007). Refugees are in the region of 2 million plus. As we all know the initial justification for these terrible events-- the presence of WMD (weapons of mass destruction)--has proven perniciously and perfidiously false. But this was the bill of goods that was sold us, and once again individuals and websites can be found still arguing the case. And that is to say nothing of the popular association of Sadam with 9/11, which was fully denied by none less than G.W. Bush, but for many remains fixed as dogma.

Which again strongly suggests there is some kind of ideology or theology shaping these assessments and the actions that flow from them.

The motive for the war in Afghanistan involved toppling the Taliban and yet now it seems the U.S. is in dialogue with yes, the Taliban! Don't get me wrong. I support this wholeheartedly, but then what was it all for in the first place? Is there such a thing as a good Taliban, different from a bad one, and how do we tell them apart? Moreover, a lot of this war has been prosecuted via aerial drones and rockets unleashed on people and territory with which we are not legally at war, i.e. in the Tribal Territories in the north of Pakistan. Once again it is a question of the extremely fluid facts related to our chosen war-making and the way an overall ideology or state of mind persuades us to continue to engage heedlessly in these murky, murderous undertakings.

Yemen/Somalia/Libya take your pick, we have some sort of armed engagement going on in these places. The CIA, an organization founded in 1945, has taken on a largely unaccountable role where it can engage in lethal actions at the behest of the president. It begs into play yet again a comparison to Rome: the Praetorian Guard loyal to the Emperor alone!

The overall conclusion here is that war for the U.S. has taken on a life of its own. It is not only justified ideologically but becomes its own self-justification, reinforcing in turn the violence in our spirit and theology. As Heny Giroux says, "War, violence and death have become the organizing principle of governance and culture in the United States as we move into the second decade of the 21st century."

Finally, Wealth. The facts here are pretty straightforward. Since 1980 the U.S. economy has doubled in size but the average person's wages, adjusting for inflation, have remained more or less flat. Before 1980 the top 1% of U.S. earners took home 10% of total income. Now they take home over 20% and own over 40% of the nation's entire wealth. Before 1980 the top tax rate for the wealthy was 70%. It's now 35%. And if you add in capital gains they end up paying only 17%. (Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTzMqm2TwgE&feature=player_embedded). It means that the present generation has witnessed an unprecedented transfer of wealth to a very small minority.

This can only have happened if the population was in some way prepared to accept the transfer. And they could only be so willing--who gives up wealth for no reason?--if ideology and theology had told them it was necessary. There was an episode of the Colbert Report in which Stephen Colbert was interviewing Michael Moore who had just presented these facts. Colbert in his faux right-wing manner retorted that the money belonged to the wealthy as a matter of right, because they had earned it. There was nothing faux about the automatic credibility of the argument he echoed. It "rang true" because so many people have accepted it as true, that wealth, even vastly increased wealth as a share of the national pie, belongs to the individual as a simple matter of personal right.

The point of this example, as in all the others, is not so much to argue the particular case--although it is obvious where my own sympathies lie. What is essential is the way a set of preconceived notions or attitudes bends critical thought in a certain direction.

x x x

This leads to the second and crucial part: the response.

I have used ideology and theology almost interchangeably. One of the established meanings of the first is a political way of thinking resistant to factual contradiction. Theology is not so often seen in these terms. It can certainly be understood as resistant to factual contradiction, but because of the device by which it is conceived as separate from politics, i.e. it belongs to a supposed internal, spiritual, private area of human existence, it is not so often blamed. But Christian theology because it is as much to do with the world as it with God can in fact easily create and feel like an ideological position. It is in fact the major ideological undergirding of the present power structure in the U.S.

Immediately you say this, however, you create all sorts of roadblocks in people's minds. If Christian theology is a matter of private faith how can it be public ideology? If Christian theology is about a transcendent God how can it be tied to a given political structure?

The way through is to turn to anthropology. Any theology carries with it an anthropology and to think of it as somehow pure of one effectively masks the anthropology and makes it that much more inevitable. Indeed it turns theology into ideology. Unmasking its hidden anthropology will demonstrate theology as ideology. Revising the anthropology in light of the gospel can make it authentic theology.

We may therefore say there are three major brands of anthropology today competing for the voice of Christian theology.

The first is the one at work in all the examples above and that I have in many ways already described. It may be summarized as follows. Every human is individual both in his/her own eyes and in God's eyes. As individuals in collectives they are also rule-bound, but this impinges on freedom.. So we must always remain free to reject the rules and to settle our affairs with violence. The single rule for Christianity is to accept Jesus as your Savior and then his blood cleanses you in the sight of God. You can refuse, but if you do you will be sent to hell. If disputes arise between individuals we have lawyers or guns which can sort things out. If disputes arise between nations we have war, lots of it. Finally God as the supreme individual settles everything with supreme violence.

The second anthropology is very different. It can be illustrated in terms of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus led his hearer to the question "Who was a neighbor to that man?", i.e. to a moment of disclosure where there is no given limit to being a neighbor. And this is possible not because there is a rule, but because there is disclosure of compassion as the core human relation. "Love your neighbor as yourself" is not a rule but a disclosure of the truth that the neighbor is the self, and vice versa. We are free but our freedom is poised between two radical alternatives. If we do not link to others through love we will link necessarily through violence and it will always get worse. Thus, in respect of the first anthropology, its invocation of violence as sanction brings about the very crisis Jesus is warning us against.

This is also authentic evangelical anthropology because it is grace not works. The first anthropology is works because it invokes law and violence which are supremely human products. (See summary at Romans 4:15, "The law works wrath!") It is only this anthropology that introduces something radically new into the human equation: the possibility of relating to the other in self-abandoning love.

The third anthropology can contain elements of both the first two and is hard to pin down. What is distinctive about it is the way it idealizes things, removes them to the level of mind, essence, idea. It loves the "Cosmic Christ" because that provides the sense that everything is already perfect and the perfection can be accessed by our minds. It idealizes "the church" as the symbolic space of salvation already achieved. Because essence and symbol are at its core it can easily slip into a facile universalism where "all paths are equal" and there is no recognition of the generative violence at work in human culture. Because of this it is also prepared at certain moments to concede the case to violence as regrettably necessary--it has no radically alternative anthropology. At the same it idealizes love and peace so long as they come in more-or-less-achieved symbolic form. I will say at once that many "progressives", including myself, generally inhabit this twilight anthropology and migrate back and forth to the second as they feel able.

To conclude, therefore, the first anthropology is fundamentalism, the third is liberalism, and the second is something new. It should not have a name beyond that because it has to be created each time anew. It is not law or ideal. It is love. And it is generative. Anything lively and good in the third lives by virtue of it. And even in the first those who accept the law of love can and will discover it for themselves. It is this generativity that puts it at the heart of anything truly emerging and which promises, even and especially at a moment of crisis, to bring something radically new to U.S. identity.

Plainly also this new thing stands in profound contrast with the first anthropology of violence, the one that has haunted the soul of Christianity beginning from the 4th century and has continued to invite ever more demons in through the course of the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and up to the present. The three W's of Weather, War and Wealth are simply the latest marching orders of this ancient Legion. It is high time, and past time, to speak in the liberating voice of Jesus, "Come Out!"

Tony Bartlett

The Oath

2011-05-29T09:34:00.001-07:00

On May 19th I went down to the Federal Court House and became a US citizen. Instead of God Bless America the Spirit of Syracuse women crooners should have been hitting Subterranean Homesick Blues, Dylan's caustic rap on being American and young in the sixties. That song, and others like it, shaped how I felt about the US back in the day, and would have made a much better soundtrack to the occasion. I always imagined myself right there with Dylan ducking between some crooked Cold War spy and a frontier-scout dealing who-knows-what, all the while hounded by a guilty sense of fate. Coming now to America for real, was I still dodging destiny or was it truly an offer of something new?

Johnny’s in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I’m on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he’s got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again
You better duck down the alley way
Lookin’ for a new friend
The man in the coon-skin cap
By the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten

I stood there with all the other immigrants (thirty odd from twenty one nations, places as diverse and distant as Uzbekistan and Argentina) pledging my allegiance to the flag and the United States which it signifies. I had done my best to condition my oath to an intentional lifestyle of nonviolence and, fair enough, the federal officer at the interview had accepted, without skipping a beat, the conscientious refusal to bear arms. But the oath continued... "to perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law," and I had agreed to that. At the time I felt "noncombatant" was the key word which allowed me to go along in conscience. But this morning it struck me, there in front of the judge and the flag, that I was pledging myself to a nation that saw itself for ever and always on the brink of war. Nothing about pledging yourself to peace or the welfare of your fellow human being.....

Through my twenties the US was in Vietnam. It seemed that war went on for ever. I identified with the students at the time who saw the far eastern engagement as a piece of brutal militarism in the cause of capitalism, waged against Vietnamese peasants who wished simply to live and work in a country governed by themselves. Plus it seemed that many young Americans felt they had no stake in the fight and wanted out. It always seemed the young people were the good guys on both sides of the big pond.

But then we were all getting older and the Cold War shifted focus from the far east to Afghanistan and the build up of nuclear weapons in Europe. Even though it seemed anti-war had been victorious in response to Vietnam the battlefield had simply morphed and moved location, and the dangers had become more acute and terrible. Thatcher and Reagan were remaking the world economically and politically and the voice of protest seemed effectively neutered. It was more or less at that time that my own life changed dramatically and, as I concentrated on survival, "Power to the People" sounded like nothing so much as on old hippie rant....

I would dream about far away places. I would go constantly on these dream trips up through the mountains, or on a long train journey, but I never thought it would be the USA. Essentially I was trying to get away from a previous life, and any place would have done. Yet it was the USA it turned out to be.

And, of course, that makes sense. The USA is the single most evident place in the world where people who wish to start over have sought to come. America is the place where the whole Western world started over back in the sixteenth century and it's been rebooting the universe every since. I really am grateful to get to be a part of this country and its immense sense of possibility. But pledging allegiance, especially with all those references to arms, well it doesn't sit easy, and, in point of fact, what private personal sense can it have?

So I have to say for the sake of self, and any integrity I might claim, that when I made the pledge I did so in a way that went deeper than militarism, far deeper. As a kind of apologia to the past and promise to the future here then is what I do mean.

I do not pledge loyalty to the US in the Enlightenment sense that supposedly moved the framers of the constitution, the belief in effortless rationality, in self evident truths. Neither do I do so in the popularly believed frontier sense, the manifest destiny to conquer all that stands in the way, leaving no stone unturned.or enemy unconquered. Nor at all did I do it in the Holywood movie sense, of the belief that anyone with half a brain and willingness to work hard can become as rich as Bill Gates..

I take the oath of loyalty to the USA in a sense which I believe underpins all these expressions of human self-projection. I am committing myself to something which in fact gives life and breath to the whole exceptionalist and expansionist mood even as it is almost completely unrecognized and constantly distorted and disfigured by it. What is at work in America is the spirit of deep freedom and boundless possibility communicated by the Christian gospel and instilled in the veins of Western culture. There are two things that can push men and women out into the unknown. One is greed for conquest and the other is faith and hope. And the third is a profoundly muddied mixture of the two.

This last state is what characterizes the US and its history but that should not blind us to the authentic presence of the gospel in the mix. Pledging myself to the US is really pledging myself to the work of the gospel in human culture. It means promising myself (with apologies to Dylan) to a "subterranean life-quick news" that knows no ultimate boundaries of state or race, of politics or party, of pride or past. For me the US is the land of Holywood in the core sense of imagination, the land of fluid and constantly re-envisioned self-image. It is the place where a dynamic idea can take hold and sweep all before it, and that is so because the most dynamic idea of all---of God-made-flesh--is at the root of its borderless self- meaning. The US is a long difficult work of human transformation. Ranged against its positive outcome are all the risks of wealth and war, of paranoia and anger, and now in addition climate change and environmental breakdown. But the boundless horizons of the US are encompassed finally in one world because they are radically shaped by the hope and love of the gospel.

I am o.k. to take this oath, therefore, because it is a spiritual error waiting to correct itself (which is par for the course for just about any other oath I have taken). All our words, just like the whole earth, are under the long slow arc of divine possibility and one day that one great Word will make all those other, lesser ones true. "Look out kid. It’s somethin’ you did. God knows when, but you’re doin’ it again!"

Tony Bartlett

Holes

2011-04-22T04:43:00.001-07:00

Anyone who writes (or is driven to write) has some single big thing around which his or her writing is always turning, always navigating. It's an unavoidable bump in the road which the individual's work comes up against, goes over, or simply crashes into, perhaps sometimes breaking down completely.

In good writers, the best writers, this bump is hugely productive. There is enormous skill and discipline exercised in returning to the bump again and again and making the writing do the most amazing things, sailing over the bump, screeching round it, even dislodging the bump entirely and carrying it off like a trophy impaled on the front of the hood. I think of themes of "affliction" and "the void" in Simone Weil, the continual dissolution or disillusion of the ideal in Orwell, the vast undertow of sensuality held in check by Augustine's relentless tide of thought.

I am not putting myself in any way in this company, just simply recognizing the community of the bump: And I have to say, in my case, it something to do with space. More precisely, the lack of it. My bump is really a big hole in the road.

Probably many people lack space. Perhaps even most people on the planet are prisoners of worlds not their own, where they don't actually belong. But it was my poor fortune to be exiled from space in a very particular way, one in which the sucking away of space reached into the depths of my personal being. I was chosen to be a Roman Catholic priest from an extremely tender age by a combination of genuine spiritual instinct and an upbringing that saw the surrounding culture as, in so many words, evil, with the Roman Catholic church as the only viable social alternative. Add the default Platonism of RC discourse back in the fifties and what resulted was the vacuuming away of a huge amount of the earth and its actual territory.

Because of this I used to love travel to foreign countries. As all the signs and symbols were strange I didn't have to assume automatically this was bad space, and it was possible briefly to relax. Now at a point in time when I am about to become a U.S. citizen I rejoice in a perception of the basic neutrality of U.S. landmass for me. It's not native soil, but neither is it alien like my actual land of birth was.

But then what is truly good space? What would it be to experience space as life? It is the possibility of breathing freely. It is moments and occasions when your being and person flow seamlessly into the surrounding environment and you are at one with your world. It is connectedness to everything because the signs and signals of grace have filled the world with peace, joy, love.

Here is Simone Weil, and I have to say I feel a certain affinity with this particular writer's bump!

"All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass."

She is talking about empty space and how it can be experienced as grace. I am talking about something somewhat different, the denial of space completely. But then they are related, because if at a certain point the lack of space can be accepted voluntarily as an emptiness, a letting go, a desert waiting to be filled, then in line with what she is saying--but widening the frame to the full scriptural dimensions-- it can make real world transformation begin.

The tension of Christian existence is never toward annihilation--it does not produce Nirvana, the blowing out of the real. Rather it is toward an astonishing reconstitution of the real, the recreation or refreshing of our world by love, with and in all its variety and splendor. To believe in Christ in a world of violence is never simply a vague wishing away of the human space. There is always the concrete witness of the Spirit as love which is a strange physical ability or power to accept the disassembly of the present real and connect it at once to the assembly of the final real. And in fact the only way to reach the final real is to undergo this disassembly which is the overturning and undoing of all our human violence.

In the present Holy Week and Easter time what better description could there be of the cross and resurrection? Crucifixion is the ultimate denial of space: unable to move, to go anywhere, to hide yourself from shame, your own body your intolerable fixed point. But then in the unfathomable depths of the Christ exactly this non-space became an endless space of grace, the inexhaustible sign of love for the real. How could this infinite space of love not be raised up in deathless life? How could it not become the new creation witnessed by Mary of Magdala on one ordinary first day of the week back in first century Palestine?

As for all those holes in the road? Really, perhaps just openings to an empty tomb...

Tony Bartlett

Sunday Bomb and Second Sowing

2011-04-13T10:22:00.000-07:00

Sunday morning and it's like a bomb's gone off.

The streets are deserted. No survivors.

I sit at my desk, part of the aftermath, resolutely unable to go to church. And why should I? The arena in which the gospel must now be sown has moved on from those medieval landscapes, Catholic or Protestant, in which all the churches were born. This is now the postmodern world, the bombed out world.

The post-Christian world. The apocalyptic world.

Moreover, it is exactly the kind of world which the more it sees itself as post-Christian the more it is uniquely Christian.

The truth is all the people wiped off the streets by the Sunday bomb are floating in some strange comfortable Jesus-loving space, without gods, without shame, and with a world fully harnessed for their good, for their proper human narrative. Certainly, yes, there are growing threats and crises to terrify us--and that is another reason why it's correctly called the Sunday bomb--but if that should drive people back into church they could only go with a built-in sense of cynicism that would quickly drive them right out again.

It is a European world and increasingly a North American world. A world brought about by long exposure to the gospel and an equally long exposure to the church and its multiple fatal compromises with violence, with war, with hierarchy and its uses. So the streets are empty because, simply put, you can be a better Christian staying in bed than going to church.

And, emphatically, that's not just a negative reaction. The streets are empty because they are also full, thick with human meaning, a meaning gradually put in place by the relentless spread of the authentic Christian spirit of community and brotherhood under the rational guise of Greek democracy and rights. And now there's also the internet, a technical explosion of communication that does and can only mimic the communion of love dreamed of in the scriptures.

For sure there are churches that remain open. There are the traditional gangly spires and faux facades dotting the landscape, offering the comfortable persuasion that nothing really has changed. God is in his heaven and these are his chosen means of preserving the divine order here on earth as in heaven. Even so they uphold a Sunday ideology that has less and less credibility and is little more than a cultural relic, a kind of Sunday vacation from lived-world reality. Fundamentalists understand this and carry the old-time Sunday fight to the rest of the week, invoking their Sunday fantasy against all-comers. Only the community churches and mega-churches really get it. With their rock bands, multi- media, sports clubs, kids spaces and general Starbucks ambient they make Sunday as much like the rest of the week as possible. But of course in the process they strengthen the Sunday bomb. People can just as well stay at home if it works better for them!

The Sunday bomb is an exhausted Western post-Christendom basking in the irradiated glow of the Christian gospel that can never be unannounced, never un-exploded. God has become one of us, the ordinary everyday human, leaving all the gods undone and all their empires exposed. Everyone feels it, lives in it. Christianity has in fact won while the churches have lost, because they grew up battling the gods and doing deals with the empires. And, connected exactly to that, the Sunday bomb now leaves us an intensely dangerous world, full of failing empires armed to the teeth.

What is needed then is a second sowing of the Christian message, a fresh seeding in a soil that has been hybridized and prepared by the gospel itself. (With its own epistemology--of uncertainty and hope, its own strange metaphysics--of relationship, its own psychology--of desire affirmed as love.) Now is the time for an ekklesia that is faithful to the full radicalism of the gospel, for it is the only thing that can truly take root in a bombed-out irradiated world.

Communities of this ekklesia are not identified by Sunday worship, because they belong to the Sunday bomb not the Sunday of heavenly order. They belong to a world full of the anxiety and chaos of the absence of the gods, to a world where war has become the only mode of public existence. Taking root in this world they can show the way on the impossible path of forgiveness, the only path there is left. And the world itself understands this. It is haunted by the possibility of the impossible, and cannot believe in any Christianity short of this. The world itself is looking for communities of a second sowing, intentional gatherings of nonviolence, contemplation and common life, full of hope and truthfulness in an irradiated world.

And, oh, I can agree, it's not impossible that such communities also meet on Sunday. But I haven't found one near me.

Tony Bartlett, T&P Theologian in Residence

"True Grit" That Grates Against The Gospel: Calvinism, Popular Culture and the 21st Century.

2011-03-29T15:34:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to hold it in but I can't. It's bursting inside of me!

I have held back before out of respect to those who have roots in these traditions, and from a sense of the tortuous paths by which we all got from where we were to where we are, so who wants to disturb old ghosts anyway...? But today everyone in so many ways is uprooted from past worlds these inhibitions cannot work indefinitely.

And recently I have come up against the issue directly.

So now, here it is. I've got to ask. What is up, really, with the Calvinist worldview?

I recently had an online conversation with someone who shared it. He was, as far as I could tell, scouting Girardian thought, agreeing that it was important in showing how, yes, we do tend to scapegoat people, but as an account of redemption...whoahh, never! It was all to do with the incommensurable, metaphysical role that God had to play in our salvation. A role that makes God's very identity. Take this away, it seems, you destroy God.

I am not entirely sure of all the details of my friend's position, as I am well aware that there are numerous distinctions and sub-genres in this area which would repay a good six months hard study. But I do know the line went dead--game over, end of call--the moment I expressed myself in terms of the need somehow to say "Yes" to the invitation of Christ. Yes, as in "I believe, I will follow this way." As in "You're offering me something totally incredible but you don't impose it on me." As in Peter's reply to Jesus' honest question "Will you too leave me?": to wit, "You have the words of eternal life, so no we will not leave, and yes we will continue to follow in the knowledge that it is only you who have the strength and the power to allow us to follow in the first place."

But according to the Calvinist worldview--which in fact is the Augusto-Calvinist worldview (i.e. beginning with Augustine at the end of the fourth century)--this "Yes" does not matter a whit. Everything is God's foreordained choice.

What!

The recent shock of encounter with this thinking in fact goes back behind my online conversation to a movie released late last year and a review of it by Stanley Fish in the New York Times (12/27,'10, "Narrative and the Grace of God: The New 'True Grit'"). Because, you know, if something's in the movies the issue is definitely serious: it's a matter of popular culture. Fish concluded his review by calling the Coen brothers' version of True Grit a "truly religious movie". What he meant by this is the film's portrayal of a total disjunction between any average sense of human justice and what the biblical God (as he reads it) actually metes out. The theology looming over both the review, and that of the original book by Charles Portis, is the classic Calvinist worldview. As Fish expresses it: "There is no relationship between the bestowing or withholding of grace and the actions of those to whom it is either accorded or denied."

He gives an example from the novel in which the young heroine, Mattie, answers the question of why her father went out of his way to help a man who quickly turned on him and killed him (which murder supplies the plot-engine in Mattie's efforts to bring the murderer to human justice). She replies, "He was his brother's keeper. Does that answer your question?" Fish then goes on to gloss her words: "Yes it does, but it doesn't answer the question of why the reward for behaving in accord with God's command is violent death at the hands of your brother, a question posed by the Bible's first and defining event, and unanswered to this day."

In other words the bible is concerned about human violence but has plainly no answer for it, and meanwhile the necessary theological implication is God allows human history to go rip because he has his own supremely relationless scheme of "justice" to apply. So in fact the final hero of the book, and its movies, is "Rooster" Cogburn, a deputy U.S. Marshal, who is simply the best at killing, who consistently kills rather than negotiates, and is therefore the one who imitates God best. Make no mistake, this book and its movies are about U.S. popular religious consciousness. The Rooster of the original movie was the iconic John Wayne ("Fill your hand you son-of-a-bitch!") and the fact that a remake of the movie appears now, with religious overtones strongly marked (sweet singing of "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" as credits roll), is no accident in a situation where the U.S. is at war with a string of nations based in a non-Christian and, therefore, non-elect religion. I watched this movie from the last free seat in the theater and during the religious silence it imposed I thought these people were receiving a mainline dose of theological violence. The way we are depends on the kind of God we worship.

If I thought this God was all the God there was I would feel inclined to launch the most terrible blasphemous j'accuse against him.

I would say this God is murderer who does not even have the decency to put his hapless victims out of their misery but tortures them for eternity as his preferred form of killing! J'accuse!

I would say this God was less than human, less even than all sentient creatures, because he did not know how to relate, did not in fact care to relate, and that he would feel much more at home, like Nietzsche's spider, in some other cosmos where there are only rocks and dark matter to knock up against! J'accuse!

Most of all I would accuse him of not being worthy of Jesus, who as a real human being kept the company of sinners, ate and drank with them while they were sinners, loved the rich young man even though that man turned away from him, was talked into a miracle by a pagan woman, was anointed by a woman who was a sinner, wept for Jerusalem, and died praying for his torturers. J'accuse!

But of course this God does not exist, and I do not have to imagine myself in quite this melodramatic (and hopeless) situation.

This God does not exist because he is not like Jesus, and that is by far the best reason.

But we can also easily deconstruct how such a "God" got put in place. The God of this worldview is a hyper-Roman God. He is a combination of the redemptive narrative of the bible and the harsh legal mindset in which Augustine was trained and to which he gave a metaphysical turn. God is the supreme law-giver and when scripture says he makes a ruling that is not part of a much larger creative exercise of new human meaning, worthy of a creator God, it is a once-and-for-all imperial edict. Thus far from representing a "Reform" Calvinism is Roman legalism deprived of mediating social structures and then raised to the n'th power, to the level of pure consciousness.

But then, we don't even have to rely on deconstruction to free ourselves of this "God". The emerging human sciences of the 21st century, the frames of thought which tell us what we're like as human beings, they assert more and more forcefully that we are supremely imitative creatures. We are not made of law and we are not made of metaphysics. We are composed of an unbelievably sensitive and reactive structures of imitation. For this reason any God who made us this way, in his/her "image and likeness", would have to possess the possibility of relationship and response to an eminent degree. The best word for that, in respect of God, is "compassion", the ability to enter profoundly into the situation of another, to take it on, and in so doing to change it, into love. If in the past we have thought of God in terms of law and metaphysics that is because these are the hardened shapes of volcanic lava left us after terrible explosions of imitative rivalry and violence. Now we are seeing beneath these strata, to their formative energies, we can begin truly to conceive of God as a power that can re-shape us from our white-hot human core outward.

For which reason Calvinism, along with its parent Romanism, can only be seen in the 21st century as anachronistic, the survival of a form beyond its time. In the world of satellites and facebook where we are rendered continually sensible to the lives of other the only God that makes any sense is not made from the grit of violence but the grist of compassion. The true God is the grain of Christ crushed into bread for our sake, in order that we might assimilate such love to and as ourselves.

And, yes, we need to say "Yes!" Just like Adam on the first morning of creation in response to the exuberance of life, but this time round with the knowledge that then we got off to a completely false start. This time the "yes" is the truest freedom we possess, to respond to the relationship of compassion that God has first formed with us through Christ, that makes the imitation of compassion possible. Freedom is an extremely tenuous reality, but it is real. It is exercised mostly in surrendering what seems like freedom but is really servitude, in favor of a relationship that breaks in upon us in the deepest quality of self-giving. It pervades our world and we can let it pervade us, letting our will die to the former way and allowing the way of Christ to grow in us. This is human transformation. This is redemption for the 21st century.

Tony Bartlett, Theologian in Residence

P.S. My confidence in popular culture was restored after True Grit was nominated for 10 Oscars and came away with exactly none.

The Unspeakable (and) Glenn Beck

2011-03-19T15:22:00.000-07:00

The strong word at work in the title carries two meanings. Usually it refers to something morally and socially repugnant, as in "the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable," Wilde's merry quip about men and women who dress up in scarlet jackets and ride huge horses to hunt the fox. It may, however, mean something deeper, much more elemental and dangerous, as in Thomas' Merton's use.

According to Merton the unspeakable is exactly what is not spoken, what in fact may not be spoken, what may not be raised to the level of human discourse. In his book Raids on the Unspeakable it applies to the vast empty space at the heart of language where the true character of our public world resides. It is the guilty collective violence and murder on which society thrives, plunged in the abyssal silence on which the rest of our inconsequential conversation depends.

It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience ...

The amazing truth, however, is that exactly here with Merton's "raids" the blocked realm of the unspeakable is now--at least partially--accessible and open to speech. The information of our systemic violence is available and transmissible because the figure of Jesus has made it so. The Crucified and Risen has entered the pit of the unspeakable with an equal and answering compassion, a movement which both discloses the abyss of murder and in the same moment fills it with the endless possibility of nonviolence and forgiveness. Merton says as much about the cross in the same book, commenting on the way the "magicians" of official Christianity have always tried to turn the shock of divine mercy back to the cosmic order created by violence.

The cross is the sign of contradiction--destroying the seriousness of the law, of the Empire, of the armies, of blood sacrifice, and of obsession.

But the magicians keep turning the Cross to their own purposes. Yes, it is for them too a sign of contradiction: the awful blasphemy of the religious magician who makes the Cross contradict mercy!

This of course is the ultimate temptation of Christianity! To say that Christ has locked all the doors, has given one answer, settled everything and departed, leaving all life enclosed in the frightful consistency of a system outside of which there is seriousness and damnation, inside of which there is the intolerable flippancy of the saved--while nowhere is there any place left for the mystery of the freedom of divine mercy which alone is truly serious, and worthy of being taken seriously.

We can usefully apply some of this profound insight to contemporary events.

In a casual remark on his radio show the Monday after the tusnami in Japan, Glenn Beck proved himself to be just such a religious magician, speaking with "the intolerable flippancy of the saved".

He said, "I'm not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes," and then he quickly added, "I'm not not saying that either."

In other words he casually invoked a crushing divine violence, because invoking and channeling violence is his stock in trade as a T.V. and radio broadcaster. He also thought it a cute thing to say because he feels untouchable from a "theological" point of view. After all who can know what God really is or does? But there is also a more visceral sense in which he feels he's on safe ground. The received "God" of Western Christian tradition can very easily be understood as the sort of maniacal revenge freak who would occasionally flip and send a tsunami on a random human target who, in this latter instance, happened to be the Japanese.

This is of course "unspeakable" in the first old-fashioned riding-to-hounds-in-velvet sense. It's plainly disgusting, and plenty of other commentators have expressed outrage at Beck's remarks. But Beck is also treading on the other sense of the word and this is where both his game is truly played and where in fact his game is up.

Beck, and other media personalities like him, are always maneuvering for the right leverage point to establish the void, to find the vantage place from where they can tip an individual or a group into the bottomless abyss of justified violence. They have an instinct that this is how power and the everyday world are created, how in this tried and trusted way the cosmos is divided comfortably between the saved and the damned, and how many people long for it to be that way again. But as Merton in fact demonstrates, and theology derived from Girardian anthropology shows, it is not possible anymore completely to cover up the abyss. The victim, of whatever race, nation, creed or orientation, will always return to visibility because of the extraordinary action of Jesus shining the light of compassion in the void.

This means that Beck and his ilk are fighting a losing battle. Rant and rave as much as they may, the face of the victim will appear behind them like the Risen Christ behind the soldiery of Rome on Easter morning, filled with the gentle splendor of a creation alive with compassion.

It is not important to come to God's defense and say, "Glenn you've got it wrong, God is nothing like that..." This is a pointless and self-defeating argument because at that level, truly, who can know? What is much more relevant is the way the argument has been outmoded by the agency of the gospel itself. What is at stake in the gospel is not primarily the nature of God but the nature of humanity, and the way that is changed by Jesus. And with that change progressively the nature of our understanding of God changes. We see God with the lens that Jesus has provided, and that lens is a new human possibility of a universe based in compassion.

And it is the change in humanity that Beck is resisting. His very bluster and braggadocio are testimony to the impact of compassion. He has to offend against it grossly and clownishly in order to try and turn back its power. He and Limbaugh and O'Reilly and others have to keep up a continual barrage of bully-boy and thuggish talk in order to stem the counter tide of compassion. They are terrified of the silence itself, from which wells the tears, the cries, the peace of Christ.

Merton's comment of blasphemy is then appropriate, in the way Jesus himself described it. Jesus said the unforgivable sin was "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit" and this is precisely the Spirit of forgiveness and compassion let loose in the world. You cannot be forgiven for such a sin because precisely you reject forgiveness! What you ladle out to others must inevitably be inside your own heart, the intolerable flippancy of the saved which in truth rejects salvation. We must therefore have compassion for Beck, even as we reject his words and his way. He is basically terrified of the tide of compassion sweeping the world because of Christ, and in seeking to hold it back he is standing outside of history, outside of time, outside of creation itself. Even if he call down nuclear annihilation on his enemies it is annihilation of himself that he is bringing.

Tony Bartlett, Theologian in Residence

Re-Wiring Wisconsin And The Whole Wide World!

2011-03-14T06:27:00.000-07:00

This is getting too serious to ignore.

I normally wouldn't venture on the topic, given I come originally from England where "socialism" is perfectly polite public speech, and so perhaps I lack cultural sensitivity to comment in the US context. But don't worry what I'm saying is really very little to do with that whole traditional framework. And that's the serious point!

In Wisconsin Governor Walker pushed through a bill stripping bargaining rights from public sector workers. Originally linked to a budget proposal the legislation became a piece of flat-out union-busting.

And it's not just Wisconsin that's on the line. Over a dozen states are considering similar legislation as a way of balancing books by undoing union agreements as well as making cuts in local government programs for schools, health care, social services etc. As in Wisconsin the overall effect will be to weaken unions to the point of rendering them meaningless.

Michael Moore on the Rachel Maddow show called this "class war" and issued a call to working people everywhere to mobilize, demonstrate, protest. Without resorting to that exact nomenclature a chorus of mainline church voices has been raised, urging the protection of workers' rights and supporting collective bargaining, but to no effect. Walker and other Republican politicians like him are gambling that the present political climate in the USA, backed up by a compliant corporate-owned media, will allow them to make economies on the backs of their workers while a tiny minority of super-rich experience an epochal shift of taxation and wealth in their singular favor. Michael Moore's hope of an Egypt-style mobilization seems fanciful While the official Christian voices raised to defend workers appear politically negligible.

The political language of workers' struggle and its church theological support were evolved in conditions of 19th century industrialism. In the dense setting of the new manufacturing cities and the long, crowded, dangerous workday of mechanized factories it was impossible for workers--and any who accompanied them--not to feel a huge sense of collective identity. Automatically this identity would and did define itself in fierce opposition to the group of people who owned the factories or the mines, who hired them and fired them, and at the same lived at a vastly different level of material well-being. It was the experience of this mass of unhappy humanity that convinced Engels and Marx it would be England which would witness the first communist revolution.

Well, as we all know, it didn't happen that way, none of it. Instead progressively living standards of workers in the Western world improved, and at the same time a mass media developed which substituted the collective and anonymous identity of the Radio and TV audience for the solidarity of workers at the pit-face or production line. And now, yes, the internet is a different phenomenon, allowing individuals to communicate one-to-one in large numbers; however, its ability to mobilize must depend on relationships of solidarity that are already there--it cannot create them. And that solidarity is what is missing in the West. Or at least still to be revealed.

For the truly critical thing is the anger and hostility directed against the owners, the bosses, those in power. This is what has classically "mobilized" the masses. But by constant media orchestration popular anger in the U.S. has been made to feel thematic, not against super-wealth, but against government taxation and social legislation. The very thing that should appear as the "class enemy" is what many ordinary people seem to be siding with, against themselves! And it's very difficult to see how the voices of Michael Moore or statements from bishops can turn that round. Therefore the whole notion of class struggle seems outdated and futile.

But hold on here, am I expressing here some sort of pure nostalgia for the good old days of workers' revolution, now gone but much regretted? Not at all. I put this out front and center in order to show how things have changed (really) and so clear the way for a whole new sense of solidarity and identity. From this point of view the loss of workers' political identity in mobilized anger against their bosses is a good thing. All that is based in an old violent anthropology. In its place, I believe, there can and will emerge a much deeper solidarity, one even more subversive and eventually much more effective against the legislation in Wisconsin. It's time is coming, and it's high time the churches caught up with it and their teaching about it became consistent, conscious and persistent!

Mimetic anthropology indicates how deeply wired to each other we all are, and in a way that potentially goes much deeper than mere class solidarity. Sure, we can connect powerfully as the crowd in opposition to the blameworthy oppressor, but because of unconscious imitation of the rival we can end up no different from the one who is oppressing! In contrast compassion might seem weak and directed only toward those who are too helpless to help themselves. But on closer study we can see Jesus has released into the world a radically re-wired compassion, a solidarity with everyone, simply as a way of being in the world. And there is no limit to the lengths to which this compassion can and will go.

This new compassion brought into the world by Jesus is in structural opposition to the brutal individualism of right-wing politics. And now in its light the right wing are overplaying their hand.

By continually stripping people of the protections of social policy it makes the real solidarity of Jesus stand forth, a limitless, self-giving, transformative sense of being human. Naturally in the short run this does not help the public sector workers, as it doesn't help the city schools and state welfare programs. And it doesn't stop the ever growing threat of random or manipulated violence when people individually and collectively are driven crazy by the lack of care and meaning in society. But all this together simply acts vastly to increase the urgency and centrality of transformative anthropology and the task of the church to teach, preach and live according to it.

The word of this anthropology cries out to the church, "Let's be done with insurance-policy salvation for the hereafter, just as much as good works for God's approval, and let's hear instead Jesus' radical intervention in the human condition, and especially now in the 21st century. Jesus teaches human solidarity in and for itself as a new way of being on the earth, a radical re-wiring of humanity, and it stems directly from his own transforming humanity raised up by God for all to see. The one and only act of salvation!"

The more this teaching penetrates our Western mind the more the idea of possessing a billion dollars while a family is scraping by below the poverty line will become as inhuman and barbaric as ritual sacrifice to ensure a good harvest.

And if that seems like a harsh comparison remember I am not talking rhetorically, to score a point, but in terms of anthropological actuality. Human compassion as a dominant way of being in the world has to come, and will come, because truly that is all that is left us!

Perhaps then, to change the image, we could say that the character of Gov. Walker's policies are in effect like the tsunami in Japan. That natural disaster fills us with horror but also very quickly compassion, with an overwhelming desire to help and make good the disaster. Because of the brutal policies now gaining vogue in our society the same thing will happen in terms of our inner cities, our poor, our weak, and the world's poor and weak. We will come to see selfish ideological politics as a kind of tsunami, wrecking our world, but then in the same moment that will become an infinite call to help and make good.

So here's what I think. Any people who are demonstrating in Madison or in any state capital across the nation, yes, be there, get there, raise your voices. But do so not from the old 19th century righteous anger against the bosses, rather from the deep emerging well of compassion that Christ has broken open within us, brimming up to change the face of our earth.

Tony Bartlett, Theologian in Residence

To Hell With Hell? Or Gehenna At The Gates?

2011-03-03T14:56:00.000-08:00

A couple of recent books have hit a main nerve in the Christian body of meaning. Their argument undermines the idea of a place of eternal torment as punishment for sin, suggesting the traditional Christian concept of hell is misconceived at best and harmful at worst.

Sharon Baker called out the fire marshal against hell's flames with her Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You've Been Taught About God's Wrath and Judgment. But it is Rob Bell's Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived that has the full brigade tearing out of the station, at least it seems so if we are to judge by conservative evangelicals desperately blocking the road. When advance publicity about his book alerted the media it briefly became one of the top trending topics on Twitter, with Bell denounced by some for heresy.

I have every sympathy with neutralizing this standard piece of pulpit bullydom--we all remember sermons on the mind-boggling endlessness of suffering awaiting the sinner. There is simply a stark implausibility of a God of love keeping his private torture chamber going for interminable ages when at any time he could reverse the situation with a nod. But the danger in dropping the concept is that the scriptural passages from which it is derived lapse to the level of meaninglessness and embarrassing rhetoric. What after all was Jesus saying when he warned about Gehenna?

Just about everyone knows that the word refers to the smoldering fire of Jerusalem's trash dump, situated to the south and west of the Kidron valley. (And if not these books will be sure to enlighten.) No one imagines that hell is to be found there, literally, at ground zero just outside the Holy City. So at once we recognize Jesus was using a metaphor or trope. But for what?

Jesus did not think in a Greek other-worldly way. He was not talking about a metaphysically split-level cosmos as is now second nature to Christian consciousness. Heaven was simply where God lived. And the key issue for him was the direct reign of God in and on the earth, the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven (God's realm) here. More importantly still, not only did he preach this kingdom but he enacted it, he made it happen with everything he said and did.

But what would happen once he had introduced the kingdom and people did not respond? The result could not be business as usual, but an enormous rolling crisis, one that he helped precipitate by introducing the kingdom in the first place. Gehenna, therefore, is Jesus code for a a distinct human possibility, the historical and existential reality of violence devouring humanity both externally and internally if it refuses the good news of peace.

Mimetic anthropology has enabled us to see this in analytic terms. But it is Jesus himself who is the driving force.

Take the passage at Matthew 5:21-22. "You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not murder'; and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the Gehenna of fire" [conveniently rendered 'hell of fire' in the translations].

Jesus' ascending order of consequence would normally be reserved for what we would call "serious crime" like murder or blasphemy, but he relates it simply to interior anger and its verbal expression. I have never ever heard a preacher say people would go to an eternity of torment for calling someone a jerk--that would just be too much to believe!--but it makes perfect sense if the fire he is talking of is the self-consuming fire of human anger and violence. And the ascending consequences which are this-worldly (the judgment of scribes and then of the full Sanhedrin) mean the fire is logically the same: this-worldly. Moreover, when we step back to view the teaching historically we can see that his actual teaching has consistently turned our attention to the human springs of violence and their absolute consequences.

But not only did he teach, he went to his death as the innocent victim of collective violence and in doing so he exposed its age-old mechanism for all to see. He showed us--by not retaliating--how violence is indivisible, and yet we seek all the time to blame and kill the other so we can feel falsely in the clear.

However, once Jesus unmasked this self-duping mechanism and made us recognize that all victims are innocent, violence itself comes into crisis. It begins to lose its "natural" cultural force, and it must--and can only--redouble its efforts to impose its old power: just as an addict's drug waning in effect has to be used in ever greater measure. This redoubling violence is in fact the fire that does not go out, the one that burns endlessly, exponentially.

In our contemporary era we know exactly where the exponential fire has led--to the limitless terror of nuclear war and the limitless war on terror. Rene Girard in his latest book, Battling To The End , assembles a persuasive argument that the direction of our world history tends inevitably toward a cataclysmic end--"the implacable law of escalation" as he calls it. In other words Gehenna is at the gates, waiting for us.

At the same time Jesus did not make a distinction between this-world relationships and relationship to God (as for example in the Lord's Prayer to the Father--"forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors") so it's evident also that the fire of violence encompasses an "interior" personal state--of alienation from the Father. We can see, therefore, how the fire of actual violence can also be an internal existential state, and one that can accompany us even to death.

The point of death may be experienced as an absolute violence, one afflicting the individual and which at the same time the individual levels reciprocally and hatefully against life. At this point we are up against a drawn curtain. We can see no further than this possibility. At the same time we must also count in here the New Testament teaching of universal resurrection, of the righteous and unrighteous together. What I would personally judge is the possibility of bitter self-annihilatory violence must be granted, but alongside the enormous magnetic power of a reconciled nonviolent creation revealed in resurrection. Without the freedom to refuse there is no freedom to love, and yet with the triumph of the new creation it's hard to conceive of even a negative echo remaining.

At any rate the concrete historical sense of Gehenna is now increasingly clear. Because of mimetic anthropology, but also plainly because of contemporary history, we clearly see as hell recedes in our imagination violence moves to the fore.

What would it mean then if evangelicals could jettison their inheritance of a fixed metaphysical eternity of torment for an historical existential sense of the violence which we generate both within and outside ourselves? What if they were to realize that they are still conceptually in thrall to medieval Catholic doctrine? That they have found a way to be free of it (being "saved") but it is this that they are saved from, and so they are not truly free! That in fact the narrow doctrine of salvation stands against Roman Catholic works as the nicotine patch stands against cigarettes. It's a great deal cheaper and possibly better for your health, but still basically the same chemical formula!

So, again, what if evangelicals were to put the considerable effort they expend in trying to save souls from hell into combating war, greed, fraud, poverty, destruction of the environment, precisely as the hell that Jesus is seeking to save us from? What would the earth possibly look like then? I think if they did the revolution in Egypt would look like a mere break in the clouds in comparison to a day of full sunshine. Would it not mean anything less than the rebirth of first-century Christianity in a twenty-first century world?

Tony Bartlett, Theologian in Residence

God and the Jesus Bees

2011-02-14T05:18:00.000-08:00

God is a word. What does the word mean?

Everybody thinks they know what the word "God" means. How many times do we hear it, "O God!" If everyone's saying it all the time, they must understand it, right?

Well, not so fast. Is "God" in fact Allah, or is he Krishna? Or Yahweh, or Zeus? Or is she Aphrodite?

"Oh well," others reply, "that's a very narrow pettifogging approach. It's evident those are just all the different names we give to the single Supreme Being, all different routes to the same truth which is revealed in different places under different aspects. And, by the way, this Supreme Being is very kind and good and wishes we would all just get along, and that means we have his/her permission to run all the names together."

Now hold it right there. Where are we getting this information from? People who claim it must be very smart, because there are other people who say very clearly only Allah is God, and that's it. And still others say there is no God at all. So they obviously don't have their hotline to the truth.

Is there a hotline at all?

Isn't it more likely that "god" is a sound we make to evoke a complex of human feelings and relationships to do with ultimate power and meaning, and that this is all we can know for sure. The anthropology of Rene Girard digs deep into this area and claims it was violence that gave birth to the primal word/concept "god' (or "deus" or "theos", etc.) and the word packs into itself a deep stratification of anger, fear, calm, peace, gratitude, all rolled up around a dim distant memory of a victim who was the incarnation both of all evil and all good. And then, later--I would add--there is probably a layering of Greek speculative metaphysics, about First Mover, Mind, the Highest Good, etc. So the primitive feelings are overlaid with some sophisticated ones.

"Come on," you say, "it's nothing like that at all! The thought of God as it has come to us in the West is highly specific and personal. God is a powerful Creator who has done a lot of concrete things in regard to his creation and holds out a promise of eternal happiness on the one hand and a threat of eternal damnation on the other. You can't get much more precise than that!"

But isn't this now in contradiction with what we were just saying above about a benign universal concept of a Supreme Being? You see what I mean? Really, we have very quickly looped in a big circle and it's a hard one to get out of. Either on the one hand we're diffusing the thought of God into vague generalities or on the other we're making God highly personal and, with that, really rather demanding!

So are we not driven again back to the the idea simply of god as a word, a human production, full of human elements? Indeed if we look closer at this last received notion of God in the West we can see there is a very obvious human element or category at work, and that is "property" or "possession". And it has had a very definite role in making "God" seem so real and concrete.

God made us, and set everything up for our good, giving us a paradise to play in.

Then we screwed up badly and got thrown out.

Then this God sent his Son to save us literally from a fate worse than death, from eternal damnation which is the consequence of our screwing up. But now all we have to do is agree with the contract that God has made, by means of his Son, and bingo! we're good to go.

This scenario is all about property and things. We're things that belong to God. We stole this thing away from God. So God sent this thing, his Son, to pay the thing back. And now this thing that we are, is safe. Unless of course we don't get in on the contract and then this thing we are is doomed to go to a very bad place/thing, which is hell. And in the midst of all this God appears as the main thing.

The whole thing is thingified, because the meaning comes from one of the most basic human practices, barter or economic exchange, which is all about things. There's nothing that objectifies the world more than economic exchange. It's all literally about having or not having. I've got this thing which I'm willing to give up so long as you give me that thing you have. But should you renege on the deal, should you steal my thing or not give me what you owe, then all hell breaks loose. Exchange is very close to violence; in fact violence lurks behind it and gives every-thing involved in it its intensity and power. It makes everything involved in exchange a real thing!

So me, God, the blood of Jesus, heaven, hell, these are all incredibly real in Western imagination because of the power of exchange. But it's precisely the violence behind all that which causes disgust and then makes people back off into vague generalities and for which unfortunately there is no clear warrant.

But now think about it, and here we have come to the real point of the foregoing. What if an individual should come along in the midst of time, in the midst of human history, and claim that only he knew the Father God, and then proceeded to live and die in such a way to give evidence with his life, that this Father God is in fact Love, and all the way. Love that went to the bottom, no conditions, unto death and even beyond death....

What if a man should come into the world who lived and spoke, acted and died in such a way that the whole story about him continually changes your way of thinking? And not just in speculative terms, moving the pieces of furniture about inside your head, but in terms of the tools of thinking itself, giving you an entirely new set of furniture, a new set of signs, in fact a whole new house to dwell in?

What if this man lived and died in a way that was so profound he subverted the whole order of thought itself? What if every sign associated with him sets up a resonance inside you that begins to change the very construction of your mind and it does so in relation to others who are similarly being changed, because this meaning really can only work collectively, in love?

What if the signs associated with this man gradually began to isolate love and nonviolence as the best definition of life and so we begin to see him as a medicine for our meaning, establishing only the fluid relationship of love rather than the violent exchange of things? And especially rather than he himself as the supreme object of violent exchange! What if empties the universe of things entirely because in fact he empties it of violence and fills it with relationship alone?

Would not this individual then change the very meaning of God along with everything else, and he alone have the right to do so? Would he not in fact teach us that Godself is willing, and always was, to take the side of the victims of history--victims of a violence which is the huge and almost inevitable risk of human freedom? Would not God as Creator then be rightly understood, not as violent power, property and ownership, but, actually its reverse, a movement of self-surrender in love? And then last but not least, would not the one who showed us this himself evoke-- in a moment of recognition that he single-handed had changed the human-system including the meaning of God--the amazed exclamation, "my lord and my god!"

The only adequate image I can find for this thought of Christianity is the old one of the caterpillar and the butterfly. Except even that does not work entirely. But going with if for the moment we see the caterpillar does not have to have its soul saved and float off to a heavenly otherworld in order to become a butterfly. It simply goes into a deep self-reimagining, a deep self-deconstruction and reconstruction according to a code that it is somehow placed in the caterpillar-self. And shazam! a totally new beautiful creature. So good so far, but the code for a new humanity does not come organically inside of us but through the story and person of Jesus who is himself the code. Embrace Jesus and all the signs associated with him and shazam! a new humanity!

But even that is not entirely adequate, because it doesn't happen shazam! and it doesn't happen simply with individuals on their own. So perhaps we should shift our image to bees! Together they share a code that enables them to build a beautiful honeycomb filled with honey. None of them can fulfill the code individually, but they do collectively, and they do so over a period of long labor. Are not Christians the Jesus bees infected with the Jesus code which enables them cell by cell, drop by drop, to create a new universe? One filled with the truly divine honey of love! And because it is code, one developed through Jesus for humanity, it also means that other people who do not call themselves Christians can pick it up anytime anywhere. So perhaps that benign Supreme Being stuff is just a poorly articulated way of recognizing the Jesus revelation of honey!

Tony Bartlett Theologian-in-Residence

God: Goad or Code?

2011-02-02T06:51:00.000-08:00

Taking the bible as a whole you have to admit nine times out of ten God appears to be shaking a long stick with a sharp point, always about to poke it in someone. Thinking some more you might reflect you can go from the word “god” to the word “goad” by adding a single vowel, the sound you make when you go to the dentist! “Ahhh Go(a)d is threatening to stick something sharp in someone…again!”

This is only a word game, of course, but perhaps there is a serious point. Words are “sounds plus meaning” and when we write them down we do so with little squiggles which mark the divided sounds and so separate the meanings. We never think about it when we’re blurbing full-on in speech or text, but everything is in code for us humans. We swim and live in a sea of code, and to change the code is to change the meaning. Change it at a deep enough level and you change the whole sea, the whole meaning of existence.

To understand the apparent savagery of the bible you have to step back and look at it from a larger, wiser perspective, one in fact that thinks of the bible in terms of code.

And the new techniques of internet and website language can really help us here. If you study the creation of websites you learn that an important element in a website is something called metadata.

Metadata is information about when and by whom a website was created, and the language or tools used to write it. To understand how important metadata is we can usefully refer the concept to the interpretation of ancient texts.

For example, Plato’s dialogues are very hard to interpret as one continuous body because we have very little information as to when any one of them was written. So which ones represent his early thought, and which his mature thought, and by what steps did he move from one to the other? We can’t be certain, because Plato left us no metadata-style information.

In contrast the Bible is rich in metadata. For example, the prophets are very often explicit about who they are and when they’re working. And of course books like Exodus and Kings situate themselves squarely in historical situations with historical actors. The investigation of this historical material constitutes a lot of what is called “biblical criticism” and involves many fusty hours of labor for seminarians.

But, as I just said, metadata is not just about “when and by whom”, it’s also about the language and tools used to create something. This is where the concept gets really interesting, and helps us go a good bit beyond traditional biblical criticism!

The original language of the web is something called HTML. As I understand it HTML is a series of “tags” or little signs that tell the computer how to treat a bit of information and where to put it on the screen. It was this language that enabled our computers to recognize information coming from servers and translate it into text and images. Do you remember the first time you saw an internet screen, the slightly awed sense that this thing could give you real-time visual information about any organization, place or individual in the world? It was a qualitative step-up in human experience and it was made possible by HTML.

Well, it was made possible by version #1 of HTML. We’re now about to get HTML5, a new generation of internet language, “to improve our web experience” as they say. And so, part of the metadata of any website has also to be what version of HTML (or other possible internet languages) the writer is using. Without knowing this essential information anyone trying to interpret that website—to de-code it and truly reflect what the writer is doing—runs a huge risk of misreading everything and possibly messing up the website!

So, here’s the thing. Here’s the huge cash-out of this illustration. The bible has its own metadata embedded in it. And it’s not just about when and by whom, it’s about the original breakthrough language being used in it. It contains code about itself, about its basic language, and the metadata tells us there are essentially two versions of its language, 1.0 and an upgrade, 2.0. A good bible student has to know both and be able to tell when we are reading one and when we are reading the other! Above all she knows that when God appears as pointy-stick Go(a)d this is an imperfection in the original code, one exposed and fixed by 2.0. But the writers of 2.0 could only have known this and figured out the upgrade by embracing and working with the language of 1.0 down to its last “jot and tittle” (Matt.5:18)! Let me explain.

According to René Girard language is birthed in violence and the production of sacred order through violence. So human language has always had a built-in interest in disguising its violent origins, in mythologizing them, and has continued to do so since the beginning of human culture. But—once more according to Girard—the Hebrew Bible has an extraordinary concern to uproot those violent origins, to subvert them and expose them. And so the bible begins a pathway of setting humanity free from a social and cultural order founded and framed in violence. Now using the model of internet languages, I would say that what Girard is talking about is the emergence of a new human language, beginning with 1.0. And I would suggest the metadata indicating the first emergence and writing of Bible 1.0 can be found forcefully at the beginning of Exodus, where it says that God heard the cry and the groaning of an enslaved and suffering people (2:23-25, 3:7).

I believe this to be a critical writing of metadata, an embedding of a radical code in every sense, and it seems to me essential that a student of the bible would know this. The root language of the Bible is of liberation from violent oppression and oppressive violence, and Exodus 2 & 3 is a key place where that root coding is recorded.

But in a world founded culturally (and even before that neurologically) in violence it is extremely difficult to bring violence to the surface without detonating more actual violence, and beginning in the hearts of the oppressed themselves. How can the oppressed suddenly go from a dazed sense of inevitable suffering to a belief in their liberation, and not do so in terms of a powerful separating and retaliatory violence? The oppressed are probably the last people to ask for an enlightened sense of non-retaliation! Hence Exodus rejoices in the slaying of the Egyptian firstborn and the drowning of Pharaoh’s army. And in the same book Moses makes no bones about quartering the camp with the bloody swords of the Levites in order to retain purity of worship of the single God of the Exodus (chap. 32). Violence remains the dominant form of making meaning despite the message of liberation from its effects! Nothing surprising there.

Nor is there anything surprising, as things develop. The prophets no longer see the encroaching violence of surrounding nations as the marching of the Fates—now one nation up, now another down—but neither do they see it as a horrible aberration. Rather it becomes the fearful punishment inflicted by Go(a)d on his own people for reason of their own oppression of each other and their invoking of other injustice-complicit gods. The chosen people remain under the pressure of a radical new source language but it is extremely difficult for them to emerge fully from the original human coding of violence. The radical meaning of liberation is re-integrated in the universal human idiom of violence because it is so difficult wholly to imagine another one.

What is truly surprising, and proves that the Bible is genuinely all about a new human code, is that even as their history continues in bloodstained footsteps the writers continue to worry the whole issue at its margins. And really more than the margins. The book of Genesis is prefixed to the entire saga of Exodus-through-Deuteronomy probably sometime during or immediately after the exile, so creating the Torah. Why is it there—because we need an account of human origins, of creation? Partly. But that account itself is so wreathed around with the questions of peace and violence that we have to see it in fact as a first sketch of Bible 2.0, written by a brilliant author after the more primitive tradition of Exodus became established (even though Genesis likely made use of early source material).

At all events we can see Genesis as deliberately seeking a break in original violent coding, and so foregrounding and critiquing what comes after it in Exodus. Genesis climaxes with the epic story of Joseph, a story of attempted murder and then fraternal forgiveness. Given its position, “at the head of the book”, this particular story has to be an outstanding instance of metadata, and one that intentionally goes much further than the original metadata of Exodus. Its writers are at the cutting edge of biblical 2.0, taking the original language of Exodus and moving it toward its deep and true potential.

2nd Isaiah, however, is the moment when the 2.0 code finds its full authentic grammar. "Behold my servant, whom I uphold…a bruised reed he will not break, and dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice” (42:3). Again I think it is indispensable that the bible student recognizes this moment for what it is, that it is the breakthrough of a truly new human language. Without an understanding that a qualitatively new coding based in nonviolence is emerging the student could easily lapse into some gross atonement doctrine—i.e. exactly the way that Christendom has reintegrated 2.0 into normal human language (thus making it exponentially more violent: God requires the death of his Son in order to be appeased….) Other candidates for 2.0 are the books of Job and Jonah, both of which can be read as highly sarcastic attacks on die-hard devotees of imperfect and corrupt 1.0; and then parts of Zechariah and Daniel which are very likely influenced by 2nd Isaiah.

But of course for the Christian the supreme 2.0 moment is the life and death of Jesus, the moment the code perfected itself in a single individual. Jesus read the Hebrew bible and integrated its revolutionary new language of humanity in the depths of his own person. For that reason Jesus becomes himself a supreme instance of biblical metadata, a coding that in one single line, so to speak, gives us the whole project of biblical writing. That is why “there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). There is no other single “sound plus meaning” which can in and of itself set us free for a new way of being human. And so through Jesus the whole issue of violence as a method of God goading us into obedience or good behavior disappears. He is rightly called the savior and we say truthfully through his blood we are redeemed. But, again, this is not some ghastly cheap pay-off to God so as to avert God’s blistering cosmic violence. Instead everything is information, data urgently offered and received. It is a translation of our inherited cultural coding into something wonderfully new, an infinite loving nonviolence in the face of cosmic human violence. We have to pay attention and willingly accept this new coding as our own.

If we don’t then we are left with the goad, now not something that God is or does, because Jesus as new human meaning shows us also a God who is without violence. But if we refuse this meaning we are left with the goad of our own violence, goading against ourselves, against others. This is the meaning of “Gehenna”, Jerusalem’s permanent trash fire which Jesus used as code (what else?) for the self-consuming fire of human violence, internal and external, that must and will overtake us if we refuse the new human source language 2.0.

This is why when Jesus appeared to Paul he said, “I am Jesus whom you persecute….It hurts you to kick against the goad ” (Acts 26:14). In other words it is you who are offering the violence, not me, and it only hurts yourself, because you are in fact kicking against yourself, knowing now that I am the truly new human. You are just making your anger worse, causing more and more mayhem, until you give in finally and accept 2.0!

Tony Bartlett, Theologian in Residence

Sign of the Gun

2011-01-11T05:01:00.000-08:00

We’ve all heard it, “guns don’t kill people, people do”, the duplicitous logic of no-gun-control. Well then, how about this variation on the undeniable human component in killing? Words kill people, and so do images, in fact any of the elements of the complex human sign-system that people use can be responsible for producing actual lethal violence against others.

Jared Loughner’s murderous attack on an Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and a constituency crowd gathered at a Tucson supermarket on the morning of January 9th is now known to at least half the planet. In the seconds it took for him to empty the thirty rounds of his Glock machine pistol he killed six people and injured fourteen. The general opinion, based on reports of Loughner’s attendance at and dismissal from a community college, as well as his on-line postings, is that here was a very seriously disturbed individual. Words like “psychotic” and “schizophrenic” are freely bandied around.

But Loughner’s deranged state of mind is also desperately and dishonestly invoked by those who were responsible for stoking the fires of his unhappy imagination in the first place, in order that their talk and their imagery may continue to inflame the mind of America and yet never be held accountable. They say he was a lone “nut job” and no one is politically answerable. As if the drug peddler should come upon a fatality from an overdose and say this is nothing to do with him, because the victim in fact had a history of lung cancer. As if the words and imagery these people continually use to infect and affect people suddenly come to a full stop at the ear of an individual truly vulnerable to them.

For sure there has also been a reckoning with the poisoned political climate which prefaced that fateful morning. The local Sherriff of Pima County where the event took place, Clarence Dupnik, went on TV and suggested that hate speech, mistrust and rhetoric against government had a direct causal link to the attack. Several politicians appeared on the Sunday morning talk shows attempting to cool the temperature of political debate. Numerous commentators (including a prophetic warning months ago from Giffords herself) indicted Sarah Palin’s map with the gun-sight crosshairs over the congresswoman’s Arizona constituency as incitement to violence. Giffords’ Republican opponent, Jesse Kelly, also has to live down a June political event called “Get on Target for Victory” in which voters were invited to shoot a fully automatic M16 with the candidate.

Naming these connections is important but what needs to be understood is the way they are anything but trivial or superficial. It is not simply a matter of a “climate” that is somehow exterior to us. This kind of language and imagery touches a nerve at the root of our souls, a very dangerous one: the semiotics of violence, its sign-system, mobilizes us first in our deepest being and, after that, out come the semi-automatics!

The terms, signs and signals of armed violence are used to bring supporters of political movements to a state of energy and confidence that will ensure actual electoral and political victory. At a certain point I am sure that is the one and only intention, but it is already an extremely dangerous and culpable game which can and will spill over into overt violence at any moment. Jared Loughner was someone who complained about brainwashing and you could say that his fear was self-fulfilling. Violence has a deeply infectious quality to it and someone drinking at its politically-licensed fountain can quickly find themselves with a gun in hand. This is true of the population in general but it’s true in particular of the isolated individual, of the lone wolf looking somehow to make an impression. The general repetition of codes and cues invoking armed violence can work on a fragile sense of self to produce an acting out, which promises meaning to life but in fact brings catastrophe. There can be little doubt this was the case with Loughner.

Today in a sign-saturated world, where the codes of violence are so universally present in entertainment, there is a political temptation to use violent signals as a short route to power, but without thought for the consequences. As if signals and imagery can exist in some detached world of communication, solely as a language to shift opinion, but without becoming facts. We know now only too brutally how quickly they become facts.

Jesus was extremely aware of the way a violent world and its signs could be “downloaded” into individuals so they became possessed by violence. The Gerasene demoniac had a “legion” of demons within him, i.e. a division of Roman soldiers at full battle strength. Jesus set him free, and many like him, by the absolute regenerative peace he communicated.

Jesus also was very aware of the power of signs, of words and language, in their own right. “But I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken. For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned." (Matthew 12:36-37) He’s not talking about simple offhand remarks, but the overall use of words, the way they can produce life or death, and it is a vitally serious consideration.

I believe perhaps the one good thing to come of this terrible episode is to make us more conscious of the power of signs, of images, of language, and to take up their challenge anew. Followers of Jesus do not fight on the battlefield, but they do continually engage in a struggle over signs, words and meaning. Their gospel of peace “Goes out through all the earth, (its) words to the end of the world.”

Tony Bartlett, T&P Theologian-in-Residence

Girardian Thought Is Materialist, But So Is The Gospel!

2011-01-03T08:21:00.000-08:00

Growing up in a Roman Catholic household materialism was the most wicked sin, more wicked even than Protestantism. At least the Protestants believed in Jesus, but the Communists—the all-time poster boys of materialism—just believed in dust and machinery. How awful was that? To believe that kind of thing you had to have dust for brains.

In contrast we, as Roman Catholics (and o.k. tagging along the Protestants too-- except I found out later they’re actually way ahead here) believed in the spirit, the great amorphous quality that stretched you beyond the earth, that put you in contact with the enormous force way above everything, the truth itself, big G., God. If you dropped spirit from your human equation you were a walking worm, struggling up inexplicably from the slime, and doomed to head straight back down there.

Another sense of materialism, linked morally but not metaphysically to the first, was consumer wants and purchases, the practical view of life as consisting of T.V.s washing machines, new cars, clothes, toys etc. In contrast to communism, which almost by definition was excluded for believers, this other form of materialism was a high risk condition, something like a family illness, insidiously creeping into the souls of Christians and choking off the springs of communication with the other, spiritual dimension. A smart new Rover or Jaguar saloon (upscale British cars for the uninitiated) would not exactly send you to hell (in fact the local parish church would relish a brace or two in the parking lot) but there was a general sense of an inverse proportion: the more Western wealth the less real devotion. Ah well, what were you going to do…

Well, indeed: if this latter kind of materialism was a spiritual malaise back then, it’s a full-blown mutation now. With the endless permutations of electronic paraphernalia which now are imperative for average human life there is almost no turning back. We all need the computer terminal, rich or poor, and digital phones are like an extra human limb which we scratch every five minutes.

All this has crept up on us, in hardly more years than since the outset of the century. Our material conditions have changed enormously, and they continue to do so, but our theology has hardly changed since the Middle Ages. Except, that is, for the amazing possibilities offered by the thought of Rene Girard. In short, Girard offers us an understanding of human beings (an anthropology) which decisively ends the old Greek-influenced Christian thinking of matter/spirit division and plunges us into a new world where spirit and matter are effects of the same extraordinarily supple, single structure of the human. Girard discovered mirror neurons before mirror neurons were discovered. He discovered that we are intimately inhabited by the “other” just as the other is by us; that there is an absolute lack of borders between humans as desiring beings; that the human world is by nature a shared space and all this crossing of boundaries and shared space is the spiritual of the material!

O.k., actually he has not, to my knowledge, ever exactly said the last bit, about the spiritual and the material. In fact a few years ago I was at a meeting of Girardian scholars and one of the more eminent was smart enough to realize this was a problem and worried it publicly: however, in the opposite direction. He told us “We asked Girard explicitly whether there was a soul and Girard said there was”. Well, we sure were glad to get that sorted out! Nevertheless, the fact that the question had to be asked, and to the highest authority, showed clearly there was an issue.

It meant that mimetic theory had already subverted the classic Greek solipsistic soul and brought us into a very human world, one which is much more to do with the exchange of inputs and information (interdividuality) than any ideal intellectual self. And then came the science of mirror neurons to prove it: my most intimate self, my desire for this or that, my feelings about this or that, all that is already a neural copy of what you are doing or what is happening to you, and of course vice versa. Love, therefore, the “greatest of the gifts” and the one that endures for ever, is simply (but wonderfully) a meeting and merging of neural pathways…

We are walking a fine line. The sin of materialism is to say love is nothing but the meeting and merging of neural pathways, i.e. ultimately it is dust, the stuff we see these neurons continually break down into. And to believe that the present storm of neural inputs--as our contemporary way of being human--is all there is, that would be and is apocalyptic. The materialism of Dolce and Gabbano, Goldmann Sachs, Rover and Jaguar, any of those names to conjure with, becomes actually very “spiritual”. It leaps up, desire over desire, building its city in the sky without any dust at all, until finally the bubble it creates must and does explode...

Yet at the same time the deep provocative materialism of the gospel remains. Christians call Jesus God because in our very human meeting and merging with Jesus we find an infinite love. And the abstract teaching of “hypostatic union” means that “God” (big G) at some point is marvelously and truly the same thing as Jesus’ neural pathways. For what other sense of “person” is there for a human being than the one we find fluxing, growing and relating to others along those neural routes? (It’s worth pointing out that the discussions of the first centuries decisively rejected the notion that the divine “bit” of Jesus replaced or displaced the human “soul”, i.e. the Greek-style immortal essence. Instead they invented the new relational category of “person” to describe the identity of Jesus and the eternal Word. So you don’t have to look further than Jesus’ neurons to find the second person of the Trinity. Which means also that God him/herself copies those human neurons relationally: “He who has seen me has seen the Father”.)

All of which ups the ante enormously for confessional Christianity. It can no longer be a matter of getting folks’ passports properly stamped for a final exit from here to the heavenly spirit-world. Rather it’s a matter of following the human situation to its radical and wonderful consequences in and through Christ. This is a materialism with a very different turn from the various philosophical or consumer materialisms. In fact you could flip the whole thing on its head and say that Marxism and Darwinism, as well as Madison Avenue, are just false starts and/or distortions of the root materialism of Christian thought and existence. None of these versions of reality could flourish if not against the background of radically materialist Christian culture. All of which leads me to say the only real enemy of Christianity is Christianity itself—either it dissipates itself in various idealist Greek displacements, rather than go the whole way with its materialism, or it blows itself up in fundamentalist violence because its materialism is just so demanding.

We are called in Jesus to turn our neural pathways into the endless torrent of divine love. As the Psalmist says: deep calls to deep in the roar of many waters. The depths of God are not ours to conceive in some hokey Greek essentialist way. But they are ours to meet and merge with in the depths of our amazing Christ-nerved humanity.

Tony Bartlett, T&P Theologian in Residence

Politics & Theology

2010-12-21T06:49:00.000-08:00

It’s very difficult to intervene in the US political debate without seeming partisan, or showing some sign of scorn or vindictiveness. To tread on the territory theologically does not exempt you from the danger, it could increase it. But the Word should never be silenced: it has a long history of talking truth to Pilate, doesn’t it?

But today, in point of fact, it’s a good deal more complicated than that.

These days Pilate could be attending church and it wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. In speaking about politics, therefore, you may quickly be speaking about some version of established Christianity. Which means politics today are already theology.

Take the recent debate over Obama’s tax package. On the political right, there’s a bottom-line argument that taxes are bad per se (including and especially for the very rich). Behind the dogma of trickledown economics (continually exposed by Paul Krugman, nobel prize-winner for economics) there lurks an implication that all redistribution of wealth is an illegitimate imposition on the Christian man and woman. Ah, yes. There it is, showing up like a mother tongue, a theological layer to the discussion. For where else can that easy, righteous, and ferocious assumption come from except theology, the certainty of a theological truth? And a very powerful one at that. It goes like this: God saves individuals formally, one at a time through the cross of Christ, and any attempt to invoke a necessary collective sense to existence (apart strangely from the universal requirement to spend on the military) is an evil reversion to sacraments and works. Forget that Jesus said you cannot be my disciple unless you give up all your possessions (Lk.14:33) and the way to give them was to the poor. These are superfluous remarks on the part of the Lord.

They are superfluous because this stripe of theology believes Jesus’ teaching is simply a series of symbolic and ultimately tiresome commentaries on the single, obsessive demand to be “saved”. Jesus’ pedagogy and practice are by no means a radical intervention in the core structure of our humanity. They are not about this life, about life during life; rather they are always about a legal contract dealing with life after life, life after death.

It’s true that down among the churches the political exploitation of theology only carries so far. It’s not just mainline churches which are losing members. Evangelical churches have lost and continue to lose droves of young people disillusioned with the tendentious character of some of this politicized theology (or theologized politics), The sense that this thinking supports the agenda of the rich, and the circles of power hidden within circles of power, becomes a major turn-off. And at the same time there is a steady shift of evangelical-style churches and theologians who are making a quiet exodus from the human narrowness of this approach, seeking a more historically and humanly relevant salvation, and one that reflects the overarching narrative of the scriptures.

But on its own this exodus does not create a different climate of political discourse. Really it makes little difference at all. What happens in fact is the airways and the political talk shows, and the millions influenced by them, remain immersed in the high-tide of individualist theology. They represent the toxic reservoirs of a theological era whose heyday is a bygone, but continues very much to be a payday.

By virtue of being a longstanding cultural default this kind of theology permits radio and T.V. presenters to assume a righteous theological tone, as if anyone who thinks differently is neither godly or American. They then add in a roiling anger, which of course has a “biblical” pedigree but is also very much a contemporary zeitgeist in the U.S., something which these presenters both harness and stir up. From a Girardian perspective it seems pretty straightforward to identify this anger as a snowballing sacrificial crisis resulting from the ever-increasing undifferentiation (free-floating violence and rivalry between groups and individuals) in U.S. society.

So what then is the solution, if any? To reply politically in the same angry tones is really just to stoke the fires. That is why the strangely radical thing for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to do back in October was to hold a Washington “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear”, i.e. to try and stake out a presumed middle-ground between extremes and mock the escalation of rhetoric. But the trouble is in the face of a sacrificial crisis with theological overtones sanity and comedy have very little chance. Ginned up “anti-government” anger had a direct effect on the last elections and the political direction of this country. Which brings us straight back to theology.

Because the terms of the debate are set theologically the job of advancing a new theological paradigm is both urgent and truly radical. In other words it is a matter of taking the discussion to theology itself, of carrying through some kind of theological renewal that is itself a subversion of past theological models. Theology and Peace seeks to do this from the starting point of anthropology. It claims that we really cannot do theology without an underpinning of anthropology. That theology itself is both a product of anthropology and an overturning of anthropology: because violent human thinking and action have produced our thought about God, but in Christ it is progressively transformed from within. Into what?

Into something wonderfully new, something generous and forgiving, something loving and supportive of others and their needs. By means of mimetic anthropology we understand from the get-go that “no man is an island”, that we are all "a piece of the continent.” Individualist salvation before God completely ignores the structuring effect of the other on who I am, on what I hate, on what I want. It ignores the modeling that is always taking place between the other person and me. But rather, on the contrary, we should say because of the pre-conscious imitation that is always going on between humans, none of us is saved alone, and conversely none is damned alone. We are saved precisely because of what others do for us and because of what we do to others, and we are damned in the same measure.

In short, the gospel does not put before us a choice between killing and not killing, between hatred and co-existence. No, it says either we provoke others (scandalize them) with our desires, our arrogance, our rivalry, our indifference, or we come to their assistance in peace, forgiveness, love, and giving. Jesus’ whole program is much more subtle and profound than we have given him credit for. Because he is implicitly using a mimetic psychology he says indeed the choice is between scandalizing or healing, between provoking and reconciling. That is what the six antitheses in the Sermon on the Mount are all about—telling us to deal with the mimetic roots of behavior (not “an eye for an eye” but “turn the other cheek”) before it comes to actually breaking one of the commandments… And as for sacraments, in the light of this anthropology we can say there is a pre-sacramentality to all human existence. Because the “other” signs to me, at an organic level, what is either good or bad, the other truly is a sacrament of myself, and I of the other. And there is no getting away from it, for Protestants as little as Catholics. We either give good signals (learned from Jesus) or we end up in murder. (Note how these sacraments are not about salvation-by-works, the mass etc., which is another form of legalism, but what they’ve always been meant to be—living signals of a new human existence.)

So, you get the point. If politics were ever to embrace this theology, rather than the present horrible meta-legalism, how different would North America look? How different the world! We have miles and miles to go before it can seriously take hold. And of course it must seriously impact Christianity first, something which can happen only hand in hand with practice, with experimenting and discovering how a human change in Christ might be shaped today and how on that basis our thinking will change. We have our work cut out for us, but then again has not the core signal of a transformed world already been transmitted? We live in its radiant radio-frequency. Indeed, isn’t that the "peace on earth" message of the Bethlehem angels? I wish a Merry Christmas these days, and the birth of Christ in our world every day!

Tony Bartlett, T&P Theologian in Residence

Proximity & Peace

2010-11-11T04:13:00.001-08:00

I read recently the summit of Mt. Everest now has network cell phone service.

This blog, on this Theology & Peace webpage, is part of the digital electronic storm that effectively puts everyone everywhere in contact with everyone everywhere.

And don’t the words “everyone, everywhere” inevitably recall the description given to the rule of faith back in the fifth century—what is believed everywhere, always, by everyone? But this time the “catholic” thing is not a religious belief or organization but a way of being human and it has every chance of totally shaping our human destiny.

Before reflecting more on this in light of Theology & Peace, let me quickly report a couple of points connected to our emerging theological enterprise and its webpage. The Board of T&P recently amped up its theological commitment by appointing a “Theologian in Residence”, someone whose job is to foster our doing theology in key planning and formation areas , and in web communications precisely like this blog. The person given this job, through the 2011 conference, is yours truly. I am thankful for it and can hardly think of a more wonderful thing to be doing at this moment in time. (Isn’t it so absolutely beautiful that my “residence” as a theologian is not in the hallowed precincts of a cathedral close but among movable meetings and the electrons of the internet?)

The other point is also related to our web presence. Jim Warren has been volunteering as our web management person since early in the year and doing a fantastic job. Now he has been appointed to the job officially and we can look forward to his services through 2011. I mentioned Jim and used something he’d written in my last blog (find it directly below). His original piece can be seen at his own website which is one more compelling strand in the multiplying Girardian network of books and websites (go to http://www.biblicalpeacemaking.org/ and click on the Articles tab).

But what about this electro-catholic media world, this self-generating, constantly redoubling world of digital communication? I also read recently that 15 million new cell phone users are added in India every month. (That’s right 15,000,000!) According to a study released by the Kaiser Family Foundation today’s 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those 7½ hours. The name given to the research is appropriately “Generation M2”, a generation that is media times itself, a generation living inside a virtual space made of media.

I have tried to find terms that adequately describe this stunning new level of human experience. A couple of candidates have been “horizontality” and “proximity”. The first refers to the dimension of human awareness implied by constant communication across planes and surfaces. It makes the lived world of sense experience self-multiplying, a bit like being in an endless hall of mirrors where the mirrors themselves create scenes and sensations that are then reflected by other mirrors, and so on indefinitely. My guess would be that this would subversively alter any traditional sense of the cosmos where meaning and truth trickle down “from above” and are mediated by appointed hierarchical figures. Instead the immediate world of sensed experience provides the realm of meaning, if only because it continues powerfully and again and again to replicate itself all around us.

The second term, “proximity”, evokes the element of communication between human individuals. The Nielsen Co., analyzing the cell phone bills of 60,000 subscribers, discovered that the average 13- to 17-year-old sends and receives an incredible 3,339 text messages a month, over 100 a day. Even if these figures were somehow exaggerated they tell us that there is an enormous flooding river of communication between people, especially youth, and this must continually set desires in motion and work powerfully against traditional or inherited self-images. Everyone is depending on everyone else for who they are and what they mean. The movie The Social Network makes plain the origin of Facebook in the mobilized desires of individuals in a specialized social group—originally the students at Harvard—who all want to appear as cool, hot, successful, sexy, desirable. The movie is a highly perceptive account and makes clear that this dynamic pre-existed the internet (of course), but it shows how the internet has now created a virtually universal social scene and one where these exchanges of desire play out in minutes across cyberspace. What Proust described of an elite and restricted cast of members in the long summers of Combray now belongs to over half a billion people updating their status, or checking on someone else’s, moment by moment.

From a Girardian perspective this can look pretty dire. It means there is truly an enormous crowd out there with all the terrifying, onrushing power of the mob. There have been a number of well-publicized cases of cyber-bullying resulting in the suicide of an individual, giving us the word, ugly in every sense, “cyberbullycide”. And aside from the individual cases there is a continual random tide of violent and hateful expression released on public comment forums like CNN online news, Youtube, etc. There can be little doubt that the anonymous communication of the internet can give breath to a free-floating rage without restraint of custom or community. Girard’s technical term for this is “undifferentiation”, meaning the situation where the absence of clear lines of social difference between people produces a steadily rising tide of anger and violence. Not at all a pretty picture.

However, from a Christ-centered point of view horizontality and proximity can mean entirely the opposite thing, and this is surely the emphasis we want to give at Theology & Peace. Jesus is the one who first provoked the horizontal world—Emmanuel, God-with-us. And the intense proximity of the digital universe cries out for an even more immediate proximity of the face-to-face. Ah, would that the church understand this! In the world of cell phones and Twitter the gospel offers a subversive realization of the horizontal and the proximate, one that brings to effect the radical underlying project first provoked and intended by Jesus. The immediacy of the group that can look into each person’s face and forgive and love, rather than the serried ranks of formal worship, this is the one real and salvific response to the digital explosion around us. What would the church be like if it conceived of itself as an endless honeycomb of cells or groups practicing relational nonviolence, rather than various versions of the skyscraper office? Would not this respond to our electro-catholic world with a much more authentic relational wholeness, the life of the Trinity in our veins? We are in a world transformed, one catalyzed into life by the destabilizing forces of the gospel, but we continue to act as if we were serving a god of a pre-gospel world.

Tony Bartlett, T&P Theologian in Residence

Of Pears, Peers, Spit and Tears

2010-08-25T11:06:00.000-07:00

This blog already appeared on the Wood Hath Hope site. But it seemed far too "Theology and Peace" to warrant not posting it here. Coming to grips with Augustine has to be part of any renewed theology of peace.

Jim Warren, my Christian magician friend, sent me a piece he’d written, on a passage in Augustine’s Confessions. He’s commenting on the famous episode where the coming giant of Western theology is telling how as a sixteen-year-old, he once robbed a pear orchard. From the vantage point of his now forty-plus years and evolving Christian consciousness, Augustine is musing painfully on why and how this shameful act was possible. He did not do it for the pleasure of eating the pears for, as he says, he threw most of the “enormous quantity” to the pigs. The picture he paints is rather of a gang of boys spurring each other on and, as Jim relates it, clearly an instance of the power of mimetic or imitative desire. Here is a key passage which Jim quotes:

It is true that if the pears which I stole had been to my taste, and if I had wanted to get them for myself, I might have committed the crime on my own…(and) I should have had no need to kindle my glowing desire by rubbing shoulders with a gang of accomplices. But as it was not the fruit that gave me pleasure, I must have got it from the crime itself, from the thrill of having partners in sin. (II.8) Jim then comments: “So Augustine penetrates to a much more profound level of insight than the typical romantic idea that the thief steals because of the intrinsic desirability of the object. Desire was certainly at work, but in a way different from how we typically frame it. He describes himself possessed that night by a “glowing desire,” kindled from “rubbing shoulders with a gang of accomplices.” (II.9) The image is one of kindling a fire by the friction of rubbing wood against wood. The desire thus kindled does not have an independent existence; it does not originate within Augustine himself, in isolation, as a function of his relation to the pears. Rather, this desire springs into being as a function of his relation to his cohorts.”

In other words, it’s not the pears but the peers… Jim says that Augustine’s psychological analysis brought him very near to the insights of Rene Girard about the imitative character of desire, including its frequently violent outcome, as in the theft and destruction of a harvest of pears. What then struck me was the following. 1) Yes, Augustine has incredible powers of introspection and is right on the track of mimetic desire, and 2) he completely misses it as a structural principle! The reason he was so close to this anthropological principle and yet did not identify it is because he subsumes the whole thing within the Platonic metaphysics of the immortal soul and a doctrine of original sin. And this led me in turn to reflect on how profoundly the whole Augustinian framework has affected Christianity and how it is now at last all changing. I can’t believe how plain it all now seems, and I hope I can make it just as plain in the next couple of paragraphs!

Augustine is one heck of a smart guy. He is called by his contemporary Jerome (the same Jerome who translated the Greek bible into Latin) “the founder anew of the ancient faith” (Epistola 195). When I first came across this remark I thought it outrageous but I feel now it was no exaggeration. The first thing you need to know about Augustine is that he was a rhetorician, the most brilliant of his generation (and perhaps a thousand years after that as well). Today we would be more likely to call him a writer (his literary output was truly amazing) because he is so absolutely good with words, phrases and composition. So, thinking about Jerome’s remark, the first flag is that he is the producer of texts and a complete master of his craft.

Secondly if you read the Confessions you will see that Augustine’s path to conversion to Christianity came via a prior conversion to Neoplatonism (actually he calls it Platonism and in terms of the basic derivation of the philosophical viewpoint he is correct). Without going into any kind of detail—which is unnecessary because we are all so profoundly affected by the spirit of Platonic thought—we may say that what Augustine got from Plato was the intellectual conviction of a heavenly otherworld made available by the immortal intellectual soul which carries in itself the light of that world. Here he is, talking about his encounter with “the books of the Platonists”: These books served to remind me to return to my own self. Under your guidance I entered into the depths of my soul… I entered, and with the eyes of my soul, such as it was, I saw the Light that never changes casting its rays over the same eye of the soul, over my mind…. What I saw was something quite, quite different from any light we know on earth. It shone above my mind…. It was above me because it was itself the Light that makes me, and I was below because I was made by it. All who know the truth know this Light, and all who know this Light know eternity. It is the light that charity knows. (vii, 10)

Cutting to the chase, I would say that what Augustine is doing here, and throughout the Confessions, is constructing the Christian God out of Platonic thought, just as Plato constructed the true otherworld out of the intellectual soul and the death of the body. Plato goes round and round in a circle from innate ideas (like math) to the immortal soul which remembers them, to the return to the heavenly realm by the soul after death of the body. It’s very important to underline that effective construction of any circle of thought involves the casting out or elimination of the element that disturbs it—in Plato’s case the body. Deconstruction in its contemporary sense is the path of reflection which brings to light the cast out or eliminated element in the construction of any circle of thought. In Augustine’s case what is cast out—on top of Plato’s casting out of the body—is historical or earthly salvation, the very thing that the gospel proclamation of God’s kingdom seems to be urgently proposing! And so Augustine crossed a line, refounding Christianity on eternal principles derived from human cultural violence, i.e. the casting out of something (the body and the earth). Ever since Christians have gone round and round in an eternal circle, from the God beyond this world, to the soul intended to live with this God, to the almost complete devaluing of the earth and history, and back again to the God beyond.

It is true of course that Augustine is too much of a Christian and biblical scholar to get rid of history and historical salvation completely. When he’s commenting on the books of the Platonists he says he learnt so much about God and the Son of God in them, but he also says that what he didn’t learn of was Christ’s self-emptying and his redemptive death and the coming of charity or love by these means. (vii, 9 & 20) Nevertheless, these elements are included at a subordinate rhetorical moment after he’s laid out what he’s learned from the books, and so the essential framework is maintained. He even says: If I had not come across these books until after I had been formed in the mould of your Holy Scriptures and had learnt to love you through familiarity with them, the Platonist teaching might have swept me away from my foothold on the solid ground of piety, and even if I had held firm to the spirit in which the Scriptures had imbued me for salvation, I might have thought it possible for a man who read nothing but the Platonist books to derive the same spirit from them alone. (vii 20) In other words the final intellectual and aesthetic reference remains these books and nothing he has learned in the scriptures has provided an alternative intellectual principle. Later in his career Augustine did add what he considered a biblical notion to his thought of God—predestination of souls for heaven or hell. But this simply made things worse. By adding historical initiative to an eternal concept—a changeless divine will beyond the world—he ended up with the absolute inverse of a God of history: a God who has made up his mind for ever and always about the saved and the damned and nothing on earth—including the incarnation of the Word itself—will make any difference. In other words the casting out of history is even more absolute, and the construction of the dogmatic circle ever more fixed.

But now—and this is where all this has been leading—we have the emergence of an intellectual framework not borrowed from Plato, one arising directly from the scriptures themselves, and able to provide a rigorous meaning related directly to humanity and its history. This is what Jim was talking about, what Augustine guessed but then saw in terms only of the soul and original sin. Through the work of Rene Girard we are beginning to see that imitative or mimetic desire is not just a chaotic effect of some mythic sin by our first parents but it is the principle itself of humanity. It is what produces human beings, through their intense ability to imitate, through the violence and group victims this produces, and through the consequent birth of ritual, language and law: the emergence of human culture. But then, and of astonishing importance, it is the bible which is the singular narrative which has revealed all this to a self-deceiving world and at the very same time the possibility of a new human way. Deconstruction itself has to be part of this pulling away of the veils and it means we are now in a completely new situation.

What, therefore, is the goal toward which the gospel is leading, if not a new anthropology, a new way of being human? Rather than the immortal soul as the final point of reference we have a new humanity of love, shown us in Jesus, rising up against the world of violence and beyond all deconstruction because it does not exclude or eliminate anything. All this of course demands a whole lot more treatment, but let me give a quick illustration of what I’m saying. Instead of an eternal principle somewhere off the earth we are offered a new anthropological principle very much on the earth, the dramatically new humanity of Jesus.

In recent bible studies we have been reading the gospel of John and in that context I was struck by the mention of bodily fluids! Nothing in John’s gospel is there by accident. It all has a sign value or what also might be called the character of a signal. It’s meant to lead you deeper into the new thing that is so hard to sense at first. If the gospel talks about Jesus’ spit mixed with mud (9:6) or about his tears (11:35) these are signals to lead us deeper into Jesus’ new humanity. They are not there just to satisfy curiosity. And what is this humanity? It is the absolute handing over his self, his body, to others in love. Spit and tears join with the water and the blood which flow out at 19:34. They are all signals of endless self-giving, of expenditure without reserve, and it is endless or without reserve both at the moral level of Jesus’ character and person, and at the ontological level of how this character and person are raised up as deathless after they have given themselves to the last. In other words, spit and tears become grace: a grace lodged within spit and tears, as spit and tears, not as some ethereal, otherworldly immortal soul. Or, to carry the deconstruction all the way (and in admittedly a challenging image), the only immortal soul we now know is spit and tears condensed, evaporated and raised up for ever, as love.

Tony Bartlett

Theology and Peace Conference 2010: Interview with Board Member Tony Ciccarello

2010-06-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

Theology and Peace Conference 2010: Interview with Board Member Tony Bartlett

2010-06-10T12:59:00.000-07:00

Theology and Peace Conference 2010: Interview with Participant Jason Mach

2010-06-10T12:56:00.000-07:00

Discounting 313

2010-05-23T06:13:00.000-07:00

I already posted this blog on Wood Hath Hope but it seemed too obviously T&P not to have it here--with a different title! It's all about new spaces.

First, just a little history.

In the year 313 the Roman Emperor made Christianity a licensed religion. Constantine said licet, let it be permitted. For the first time in its history the movement of Christianity had official and final Roman approval, and it was already older then than the present U.S. Republic. Imagine that: 275 years without any secure government recognition, without having a king or an emperor at your back, without a sure place in society, without public symbols and celebrations to declare your right to exist. 275 years of civic contempt, mixed with oblique influence when people of status became Christian, then punctuated at other times by outbursts of lethal persecution.

When Constantine gave state permission to Christianity he had just won a decisive battle in which he had invoked the Christian god—a voice had spoken to him in a dream (in a later account it became a vision) telling him that he should emblazon the heavenly sign of Christ on the shields and helmets of his soldiers. He thus began the process of the militarization of Christian faith. True, there were already Christian soldiers in the Roman army, but they were there because they had been pressed into service, and seemed faithfully to adhere to the church’s absolute prohibition on killing--if not why was there no hint of a rebellion when Christian soldiers were subject of a harsh purge from the army under Diocletian about twenty years before? In other words they were there as a formal fill-up-the ranks presence, ready the moment the war was over to abandon the profession. Constantine realized somehow that it would be possible to enlist the support of this radical yet influential movement by calling a halt to the bitter persecution of his predecessors and then progressively according rights and privileges to the church, and at the same time creating the self-serving myth that the Christian god had spoken to him directly pledging his support. Christians of course had to want the end of persecution, and they probably shared a general desire for the peace of Roman society rent by continual civil war. Whatever the reasons the combination of Constantine’s moves got the Christian movement to accept the deal he offered and progressively they saw all this as the work of God. (There is at least one monumental image of Constantine’s vision adorning the walls of the Vatican.) A fateful hour had dawned, the seduction of Christianity by the state and its military apparatus. Within the space of one year the bishops were ordering Christians to remain in the army (Council of Arles, 314), within a decade there were religious wars with Christian orthodoxy on one side and heresy on the other, and within a century Augustine had formulated his doctrine of “just war”. The rest is history.

Or a kind of history.

When the emperor says licet Christianity is licensed. It’s allowed to exist by the say-so of the archaic human system built on the death of the victim. And then very quickly it appears that Christianity agrees reciprocally with the state’s mode of existence, with its violence. Christianity becomes franchised by the state, by a human system of violence. And in return Christianity franchises the state, its relentless natural violence. A separation-of-church-and-state motif does not overcome this, rather it effectively masks it. Within the separation lies a mutual collusion. And if biblical people invoke Romans 13 (submit to civil authority) as proof of apostolic support for this situation they conveniently overlook both the vastly different condition of Christianity at the time of Paul’s writing (a tiny apolitical group) and Paul’s more basic theological distinction between the Christian body and the wrath of this present world order.

As is obvious all this has been hashed out before. The discussion between the Christian peace tradition and the position of the mainline “just war” churches is old, bitter and unresolved. What I’m saying, however, wants to add something different. The franchising of Christianity by the state is breaking down from within. The crisis of violence in our 21st century world is of itself dissolving the implicit alliance of Christians and the state, instead opening up a new space where Christians are unfranchised, unlicensed, unofficial….

A new possibility is emerging, created by our contemporary historical crisis of elective wars that never end and the parallel systemic experience of destruction of the environment. The world system can be seen to be terminal and this puts people in a new situation, especially Christians who can recognize that this new situation is, in an amazing upside-down way, the transforming work of Christ. If Christians have colluded with the state and its just wars, Christ and the gospel of the forgiving and innocent victim never have. And so the more and more the world resorts to violence the more and more its violence is seen as...violence. The act of violence becomes implausible, inconclusive, inept, crazy. Our history is spinning into greater and greater chaos because of the refusal of the true answer--the forgiveness and compassion of Christ, which at the same time become the more evidently necessary the more they are refused. Thus Christ has opened up a new opportunity for his followers to return to their original unfranchised, unchained state, to find the gap in the world order where they can truly exist.

In this gap the gospel is free to speak itself in boundaryless transformative terms, without distinction of friend or foe, terrorist or freedom fighter, us and them, righteous and impure. I quote Scott Hutchinson. “The forgiveness at the heart of gospel life removes barriers, loosens bonds, unburdens, sets people free, leads to the mutuality of gifting and being gifted. Exhilarating, fulfilling, and terrifying! The source, of course, is God, whose radical self-giving transforms and endlessly offers life.” And progressively the actual space that Christians occupy is no longer demarcated by the built walls of their franchise but by this new open unmediated space that Christ has created in our time, dissolving the historical nexus of 313.

Tony Bartlett

Culture's Noise, God's Silence

2010-05-04T07:01:00.000-07:00

Theology and Peace board member, Adam Ericksen, discusses the insights of both Rob Bell's Pneuma video Noise and mimetic theory.

For more of Adam's work, please see The Raven Foundation at http://www.ravenfoundation.org/

Forced out of The Matrix

2010-04-23T10:22:00.000-07:00

Two of my friends who serve on the Theology and Peace board have, at different times, used the image of "The Matrix" to describe the relationship of Girardian Christians with the culture around us. It always seemed an interesting analogy, and I've even used it in a sermon. But I only recently came to understand it fully.

You may remember the "Matrix" film trilogy, in which human beings have lost a war to machines and computer programs, and are now kept in pods where the energy their bodies generate is used to power their mechanical and electronic overlords. To keep the humans pacified, their brains are linked to a computer program which causes them to see a pleasant, ordinary world where they live full, if imaginary, lives. Only a small group of humans know the awful truth, and they struggle to free their fellows from their bondage.

In recent weeks, I think I have come to an awakening of my own, and like many such experiences, it has been jarring and painful. A few weeks ago, I received a call from a parishioner, saying her house was on fire. I quickly headed to the scene of the fire, and stood with two church members and friends as we watched firefighters come and go from their smoky home. In the course of the couple of hours I was with them, I was told that the fire had been intentionally set. That would be the first of many shocks, that day and in the days to follow.

My administrative assistant, who also did bookkeeping for our congregation, was arrested and charged with two counts of arson. She was subsequently charged with theft, for having allegedly embezzled more than $100,000 from our church. Within a few hours, my world was turned upside down. A woman I had trusted enough to have given her a key to my own home sat in jail. The arson victims were without a home. Nothing I knew when I woke up that morning seemed to be true anymore.

The next few days would bring more shocks. Those shocks would bring me to realize that we live in a violent world. I've known this in theory, I guess. I've been reading the works of Rene Girard for a few years now. I know his contention that human culture is founded on violence. But my congregation, and I, could always see the violence as somewhere else, someone else's problem. We felt insulated from it.

Now, violence had touched us more deeply than we could have ever imagined. A violent crime had been committed in our midst. In the Book of Acts, Saul of Tarsus is confronted on the road to Damascus with a horrible reality--he has been violently persecuting Jesus and his followers. In a moment, what he saw as his duty, the dictates of his faith, a thing worthy of honor, is revealed for what it really is--the violent persecution of innocent victims. For Saul, this is a crisis. He neither eats nor even sees for three days.

I can relate. I fell into a deep depression and lost 10 pounds in the first two weeks after the arson fire. I saw violence everywhere. The detectives, whose power is based on coercion and fear, were in our office quite a lot, complete with holstered guns, in those first few days. My assistant was jailed, cut off from family and even from those of us who would like to have had an explanation for her actions. And she faces decades in a place of violence and pain. Having lived in this culture, she sought a violent solution to her problems, leaving suffering victims in her wake.

My congregation has been wonderful, caring for the needs of both families affected by these events with prayers, and meals (we're Midwestern Christians, after all). Yet I worry about the possibility of conflict. I ask those who are angry to imitate Jesus, and not the offender, in their reactions to these events. Most listen to me, for which I am grateful. Some do not. I have come to understand that revenge is imitation of one who has wronged us. As Christians, Rene Girard has taught me, we make a choice to imitate Jesus. I am grateful for this insight, and do my best to pass it on to others around me.

I know now that the world is a violent place. Like those poor struggling humans in "The Matrix"; like Paul on the road to Damascus; I have been confronted with a reality that is both freeing and painful. I now see that Jesus came to free us from our violent ways, to offer us another path. I understand why Paul was in such crisis that seeing, eating, functioning was too painful. I don't think it's too much to say that I have shared that experience with Paul. I can no longer pretend that my world is peaceful and safe in the way that I believed it was 5 weeks ago.

After being blinded on the road, after three days of struggling with the revelation of his own violence, Paul meets Ananias, a member of the Damascus church. Ananias does the most remarkable thing...he embraces Paul. Paul, the persecutor of the Church, is embraced by the very Church he had intended to destroy. This new community becomes Paul's safety and solace, and the Holy Spirit becomes the source of his strength.

I, too, have had to find new sources of safety and strength. Police with guns no longer help me feel safe. An adversarial system no longer seems like a source of justice. But, thanks to the insights of Rene Girard, I know that my strength comes from following Jesus. The Holy Spirit stands with me and advocates for me in this violent world. Something like scales have fallen from my eyes.

The weeks and months to come will bring new stressors. There are court dates yet to come. I will again be confronted with the painful realities of life in this culture founded on violence. I know, however, that I will not go through these moments alone. My congregation has stood together well, striving to be the Church in this new reality--and getting it right a remarkable majority of the time! And the Holy Spirit will stand with me, strengthening me and reminding me that all of this will end in resurrection.

I am deeply grateful to Rene Girard and those who introduced me to his work, for helping me make sense of these difficult days. Theology and Peace has been invaluable to me, and I am honored to work with the T&P board to make this knowledge available to others.

Horizontal Reform

2010-04-18T06:53:00.000-07:00

Tony Cicariello—who is on the Theology and Peace board— sent me a copy of Hans Kung’s open letter to Pope Benedict XVI, printed in the Irish Times last Friday (4/16, available at http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0416/1224268443283.html).

Kung is the lion of Catholic liberalism, author of significant theological work, including rapprochement between the Catholic tradition and Protestant faith. In his letter he states that he and Joseph Ratzinger (now the pope) were the youngest theologians at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), and are now the oldest actively working. He says the Roman Catholic church is in the worst credibility crisis since the Reformation and the present pope is very largely accountable. In particular he holds Ratzinger institutionally and personally responsible for engineering the global cover-up of child rape perpetrated by priests. He ends by calling for reform, and especially that the RC bishops should summon an ecumenical council to deal with the crisis.

It’s so telling that a theological voice dating from fifty years back is calling for a council. How can it possibly happen? Not only is the episcopal college full of Vatican placemen but the necessary theological groundwork is just not there. Where today are the Rahners, the de Lubacs, the Congars, the John Courtney Murrays?

At the same time, the revolution today is not in theology as such: it is carried in and by the information world.

This is a completely different human system that the one the Vatican knows and is shaped by. The Vatican is all about the control of meaning through a vertical information system. But today information and meaning are transferred across a horizontal surface which has no allegiance to traditional vertical operations.

In this world not only is the Vatican at a loss, but much more positively Christian meaning can arise anywhere, and does. It is irrepressible. In this kind of world RC reform is going to happen locally, and communicate itself across a horizontal surface.

It’s high time members of the RC tradition began to grow a para-Catholic church, locally based, emergent, welcoming, vitalized by mimetic anthropology and transformational faith. Then the episcopacy would sit up and take notice. And then ultimately it might be possible to have a truly profound and generative ecumenical council. Let’s see, San Francisco I ?

But in the meantime why not try T&P 3, in Chicago 25-27 May!

T&P Blog

2010-04-14T06:31:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Theology & Peace blog. Contributors to this blog will be trusting, suspicious, full of hope, despairing, loving, forgiving, angry, frustrated, funny, prosaic, curious, cynical, compassionate, tough. I.E. fairly representatively human. What’s going to be different is a sustained sense that overall God is making human beings better! What other purpose could God possibly have? If God is either i) about punishing humans or ii) waiting for us to die so he can bring us to a better place, or iii) a combination of both, then God is so all-too-human as to be really a human construction. If on the other hand God is like Jesus and is concerned to shock this world into creational perfection through enduring love, well that’s much more worth the trouble. That God is so perfectly human! Mimetic anthropology, mirror neurons, nonviolence, peace, high culture, popular culture, mainline church, emerging church, online, offline, all these and more are in the toolkit of the writers. We’d love to have you with us. Peace!