More Mystery, More Enigma

I am coming to enjoy mystery and enigma which cannot be solved. They are tension, as such. Tension cannot be possessed, objectified, or codified by us. Tension can only be experienced, lived, related to and in.

In our time analytical knowledge is prized, taught, and sought after. This form of knowledge only works through possession. Hence this form of knowledge denies that contradiction exists. Contradiction cannot be known. This tension which cannot be possessed cannot be, and therefore is excluded from the realm.

Sadly we all are contradictions. We are all in tension. People cannot remain human and be possessed or objectified. When possessed, they become objects of analytical knowledge. They are no longer human. They become quantitative, not qualitative.

We can, however, know one another as humans: in contradiction and in tension. This is not analytical knowledge, but dialectical knowledge (perhaps even speculative knowledge). We are defined by our relations. We define ourself by our relationships. These create the tensions within us.

The analytical annihilation of mystery in our time has destroyed our faith in our ability to know in this other way. We are further from one another. And the deepest wish of analytics is to have everything objectified and possessed. This is harmful to us, as individuals and as a culture.

I need mystery, tension, and contradiction. I need to understand relationally. Only then can I find meaning. And meaning is why we are all here.

This is Why I Love Liturgy

A work, a performance, can be taken as worship – even as the Book of Common Prayer says we are unworthy to give it – because God meets us there:

Thesis 4: Christian worship does not lie in a realm outside of religion. To seek a direct correspondence between leitourgia (“the work of the people”) and divine action is to forget that worship itself is a “perpetual factory of idols” (Calvin). Furthermore, such easy correspondence risks fetishizing and instrumentalizing worship. The problem is structural and runs deep; in truth, the very discipline of “ecclesiology” is prone to idolatrous self-aggrandizement. Thus the critique of religio strikes at the very heart of Christian worship.[6] The occasion for sin occurs preeminently as leitourgia—the “work of the people” to self-justify, to strive to stand aright before God. Indeed, worship is the site marking our deepest estrangement from God. But this is not the final word! In Jesus Christ, God decisively wills to be God-for-us and so our idolatrous “work” becomes the site of our reconciliation with God. Reconciliation occurs not as exchange or production, but as a gratuitous event of grace. In this event the Spirit “takes up” our “work” to stand aright before God and transforms and transfigures our prideful attempts to “make a name for ourselves.” Our worship only becomes true praise, then, as our “work” loses track of itself under the great pressure of God’s own doxa. Such doxa happens as the event of God’s grace evokes gratitude “like the voice an echo.” Indeed, “Gratitude follows grace like thunder lightening” (Barth, CD IV/1, 41).
[HT: Inhabitatio Dei

How To Read

Justice David Souter is talking about how to read, interpret, and judge the Constitution. This, just as well, could have been writing about how to read the Scripture. Well done. Take into account the contradictory/opposing trajectories within meaning for you. I can’t even add anything to it. It is that good. Not a coincidence he is an Episcopalian. They understand these things.

Natural Theology

I am, by and large, shocked that Protestant theology has refused natural theology a place. I’m reading De Visione Dei by Nicholas of Cuza right now, and I love every chapter. I am so taken up by this neo-Platonist natural theology. I find it so very compelling. It makes so much sense out of our experience, Scripture, and the place where both meet. I can’t ignore it’s argumentative force, I am compelled to agree with so much of it.

But Protestantism has gone hand in hand with the “Enlightenment” ideal of rational objective Aristotelian proofs. And correspondingly they’ve got no natural theology. The best they can do is the best Aquinas could do – God in the uncaused causer. Neo-platonism is capable of so much more.

I don’t understand why we’ve given it up. I really don’t.

Update

Kind of elucidates my point. Reading over that seems to be far less than what my, admittedly, cursory readings of Augustine, Bonaventure, and Cusa accomplish.

Really Texas? What Gives?

Studying theology, and therefore history, I understand the necessary, importance, and motivations behind revisionist history. But this is just too far.

First:

There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

Making policy decisions without consulting experts, or promoting yourself as an expert without any credentials whatsoever makes you a dilettante. I’m a little scared of turning into Jim West here, but what gives? I’m utterly amazed that anyone can read history the way they are attempting to.

Revisionist history can be held in respect when the overall society agrees with a general way of interpreting the historical data based on their ideology. The ideology, at the same time, recognizes that it purposefully glosses over specific points in order to create a polished and complete narrative. That is not what is happening here. This is willful disdain for the general and accepted interpretation of history. It would be one thing to say: “I don’t agree with the current interpretation and here is my evidence.” It is quite another to rewrite the books with your ideology with zero evidence. I expect, quite quickly, for this to get shot down (or disregarded) because it can never conform to the accepted interpretation. Nor does it have any explanatory power whatsoever to go beyond the current accepted interpretation.

To give a historical and theological dimension to this: there is no question that exilic editors created revisionist history about the golden years which preceded them. There is no question that Luke-Acts portrays Christianity in an acceptable light to the Roman Empire – despite it’s formative leader Jesus being crucified as a political insurrectionist. What none of these writers did, however, was act in a position of power to remove items from written history [i.e. not removing them in their "curriculum": their collected literary works later received as Scripture]. What these writers did do was offer new evidence and new rhetorical interpretations of older evidence.

I don’t imagine that Texas will actually affect other curriculums or the textbooks that would affect other curriculums (the articles worry, but are split over the possibility). For a long time I have looked with shame at the educational system I’ve been, and continue to be, a part of. At the graduate level, I can finally say, that the education system has a chance to make a huge difference. Sadly, not many people get that far because of the failures in the system well before this level. I feel very, very fortunate and thankful to be able to receive and use all these various tools to look at the world, and myself in the world, in such a more nuanced and powerful way.

More on Why I Like Rowan Williams

It is not just the eyebrows folks:

But ‘where Jesus is’ is in itself quite a many-layered notion. Jesus is in the neighbourhood of God the Father and so when we stand where Jesus is we too are in that neighbourhood and we learn his language of his relation to God the Father. But the incarnate Jesus is also in the neighbourhood of the chaos and the suffering of the world – a world he has entered to transform… To speak in those terms is really to paraphrase the epigram which I think originates with the great Irish Benedictine, Columba Marmion. He spoke about Christ being simultaneously in sinu Patris and in sinu peccatoris: in the bosom of the Father and in the bosom of the sinner. Christ is simultaneously in the neighbourhood of the Father and in the neighbourhood of the sinner, the formlessness, the shapelessness and dissolution, the dis-integrity of creation. He is in the heart of both realities, simultaneously. And that, of course, suggests that when we as baptized persons come to be in the neighbourhood of Jesus, that same dual proximity is what we have to get used to.
Lecture

Keep on reading. It is fantastic. [HT Inhabitio Dei]

Glenn Beck is a Complete Idiot

… the Dead Sea Scrolls, you know what they are? … So here’s what happened. When Constantine decided that he was going to cobble uh together an army, he did the um Council of Nicaea, right, Pat? (Pat: Yea.) The Council of Nicaea, and what they did is brought all of the religious figures uhh together, all the Christians and they said, “Ok, let’s put together the Apostles’ Creed, let’s you know, you guys do it.” So they brought all their religious scripture together, that’s when the Bible was first bound and everything else. And then they said, “Anybody who disagrees with this is a heretic and off with their head!” Well, that’s what the Dead Sea Scrolls are. They are those scriptures that people had at the time that and they said, “They are destroying all of this truth.” Whether it’s truth or not is up to the individual, but at that time those people thought that this was something that needed to be preserved and so they rolled up the scrolls and put them in clay pots and they, they put them in the back of caves where no one could find them. They were hidden scripture because everything was being destroyed that disagreed with the Council of Nicaea and Constantine. That’s what those things are.
[HT]

You couldn’t get it more wrong if you tried.

Ah, Philosophy

[SMBC]

On Education

Seth Godin, as a marketer, talks about education. Education has always confused me. They told me I went to one of the best schools on Long Island. I graduated in the top 25% of my class. I slept through two of my senior year AP classes. I’m not that smart. I realize there are many people much, much smarter than I.

The commoditization of education, as Godin points out, is a massive problem. Those people who, of course, seek to consume commodities (the helicopters) they seek out what they know.

There are many in my generation, and in the next it seems, who are going around this trend. They appear to be happier. This is a present state of being, who knows if it will last. The massive difference is that they, for the most part, are not building wealth (not money, mind you) in where they are. Some, particularly the entrepreneurs, are building wealth. More than a few continue to go on (myself included) getting graduate degrees. Finding the amazing professors who can teach you is certainly the right way to go about it.

It seems to me that the answers, tentatively, is to find someone who can teach you. Whether it is a professor, a professional, whoever. Find someone who has accomplished what you want to. Get to know them. Get interested. Ask them questions. If they are passionate, and you are passionate – they will help you along. That is how you learn. Through people.

America’s God

Hauerwas is, I think, the most culturally aware theologian. Most thinkers, especially Protestant ones, could never make this kind of a statement: ” …America is the exemplification of a constructive Protestant social imagination.” Most religious thinkers in our time are either, so consumed in their shaping the ethereal they have lost the physical, or focus on hot button issues. In both cases there is an entire absence of historical grounding. This lack of historical grounding, in my opinion, creates a serious lack of grounding in reality.

Of course, Hauerwas is right. American Protestantism had no instituted and bulwarked Catholicism to guard against compared to Europe. Moreover, the lack of any sacramental influence creates the focus on the ethereal we see so often in American Protestant theology.

American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce interesting atheists in America. The god most American say they believe in just is not interesting enough to deny. Thus the only kind of atheism that counts in America is to call into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty, and happiness.

That is a scathing denouncement of American theologians and churches. As we so often here, they don’t stand up for anything except the right to life, liberty, and happiness. It is strange to hear freedom being talked about in churches. It sounds exactly like how we use freedom in political conversation. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why. I almost never use the word freedom. I do use the word ‘free’. But, I use it in a much different way, the opposite of being bound – always with an inward referent. Hauerwas’ comment also explains why religious pushback against pro-choicers is so large. Their vitriol is based against the right-to-life, so they must be non-believers, heathens, pagans, backwards, and un-American.

I could go on forever in this essay finding connections. But one more stuck out to me, and it has to do with Larry Lessig’s recent TED presentation:

Tocqueville descriptively confirmed the normative point made in the Massachusetts Constitution: “I do not know if all Americans have faith in their religion — for who can read to the bottom of hearts? — but I am sure that they believe it necessary to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion does not belong only to one class of citizens or to one party, but to the entire nation; one finds it in all ranks” (Noll, 10)

The loss of this maintenance of institutions is bad thing (note: republican there does not mean right-wing Republican, think publican, citizen, not political preference). Society’s loss of citizen institutions will cripple it by creating – even more – vast swarms of individualism with no common ground or experience. Like species on the Galapagos being separated so long they can no longer reproduce: only here we’re talking about the reproduction and mutation of ideas. The lack of common DNA (common experience) stamps out the ability to relate. With no citizen groups to demand their ability to re-use their ideas the only interested groups left are corporations backed with money. And the populace loses their ability to live creatively in the world. If the world, however, is going to throw away their institutions – as it seems they are doing – perhaps the Church has a chance to step up. That is of course if churches don’t blow it. They have to realize what is happening as well. Lessig puts his finger right on all of this when he talks about how republicans understand “church” as a concept where things and rights are given away.

It all depends on if churches remember their God to be the God of the entire world. Not the god of their nation idealized in individualistic democracy.