Taking Off and Landing

In his Theology and Social Theory, Milbank makes the claim that, since there was a time at which there was no secular space, a time in which there was not yet such a thing concieved as “autonomy”, all things since then are cribbing off the original, cheap knockoffs of the real deal.

To break it down: ever since the world decided that it was going to be “autonomous” and put theology in a privitized corner, things have gone awry, not because the basis for the world’s social sciences was totally off target; it was rather because their basis were theological and became heretical. To give one example…

Around the late 15th century, theology shifted from thinking about the Trinity in terms of three persons to thinking about a divine will. The result? Politics followed suit, thinking about the way that we operate as humans in society, not as people in communion with one another created by God, but as autonomous wills in conflict; rather than reflecting God by participation, we saw ourselves now as reflecting God by willing things, and in that, making things happen, to the detriment of others.

It’s an interesting idea, that the dominant ways of thinking of the western society are theological at their core, that for all its best intentions to separate out church and state in order to more accurately manifest a more perfect union, a theology underlies civil society’s actions just the same. A concept of God inescapably underlies it all, though to be sure, the god of civil society is more a concept than a person, the metaphysical glue holding the system together.

This is one among many reasons I get nervous to hear politicians speaking in religious language. In his book, God’s Politics, Wallis talks about the predominant Republican religious language, which appeals to a lot of Americans, and the Democrats growing use of it. To be quite honest, this completely misses the point: to artificially use religious language is to misunderstand that, all along, you’ve been operating theologically anyway. In the case of Howard Dean, for example, citing Job as your favorite New Testament book makes you look ridiculous, not just because everyone knows that his favorite OT book is really James, but because even Dean…thinks theologically, whether he knows it or not.

Like it or not, love religion or despise it, you’ve been operating out of a framework that has something to say about the way reality is structured. Milbank argues that, at the core, the social sciences derive from theology, and so, theology speaks in direct conversation with things like politics and economics, for no less reason than theology is the thing that politics and economics are trying to be, only without the true resources to do so.

So, tip your glass to the queen of the sciences, theology. Love her or not, you prostrate yourself in action and deed to theology, with your words and your loves giving yourself to a story of how things are that is greater than yourself. If Milbank is right, then all our thinking about politics is ridiculous outside theology, for it was from theology that politics was born, and it is in theology that it will find its only satisfactory end.

In a day and age when politics has degenerated into the inevitable battle of wills, it seems nearly prophetic that the very vision politics seeks to create is in its very midst: the church, which joins without coercing, and changes without self-destructing– accomplishing that which politics claims to do, and showing itself to be the true Mother of political practice.

There’s a few ways to look at the theological method, the “conversation of the faithful”, as it were:

1) Theology is a matter of conflict with a subsuming synthesis arising, a la Hegel.
2) Theology is a matter of ascertaining the whole movement of God from the manifest forms of the Spirit’s movement, a la Schliermacher.
3) Theology is a matter of the church working out faithfulness in the context of the church, a la Hauerwas.
4) Theology is a matter of proclaimation of biblical doctrine, a la Calvin.

Myself, I tend towards #3 with a touch of #2, for reasons I won’t go into here, except to say that I find it necessary to listen to those that abide by both 1) and 4), given that the Spirit works in surprising ways. Some might argue that it’s the only way the Spirit works–in those ways that confound us, if for no other reason than to keep us honest. There was a time I leaned towards #1 in reaction to the time I was staunchly #4–you live and learn, and hopefully don’t get killed in the process.

With that in mind, I find it absolutely necessary to be in conversation with those to the right and left of yourself, relatively speaking, though theologically speaking, I’m not sure there’s so much a right and left as there is faithful and unfaithful…let’s call things what they are. Scripture itself knows nothing of right and left, only of following or not following.

As such, the Evangelical Underground is accepting nominations for blogs. Not that I’m looking for a nod, but at Keith’s suggestion, I just thought I’d mention that they’re out there. Do what you will with that information, but frankly, I think it’d be kind of funny to have myself listed among some of the…um…more politically conservative blogs that dominate this list. I consider myself to be in the evangelical world, given that I’m not Catholic or mainline, though as someone once noted, I’m on the “fringe of evangelicalism with [my] left-leaning views”.

So there you have it. I don’t ask for much. But give me an in to this part of the conversation that I find myself more distanced from for whatever reason. If nothing else, I think it’d be kinda cool to find myself in the same list as Scriptorium and some of the more Reformed blogs. So, kudos to Keith for nominating me, and here, I end this self-serving post.

{Insert inflating ego here.}

Kudos to you if you recognized this is an Uncle Tupelo reference, first of all. If not, it’s your loss.
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The wise Dr. Chip Conyers once said that he had no desire to be a liberation theologian, or a conservative theologian, or a Reformed theologian, or any other kind of theologian…except a theologian. He wanted, in his classes, and for his students, to be nothing more than a theologian, one who spoke about God. I won’t turn this into a lamenting session for the loss of such a wise man from this Earth, except that I think about him more and more and how wise this statement was–the refusal to link oneself to any theological agenda in the pursuit of being an honest theologian, honest with experience, honest with tradition.

To be fair, no one comes at any theological agenda apart from the forum of experience or tradition. Any content of theology is made true to us only by our experience of it. For example, we know Jesus as Savior only because we are related to Him as such, not because He first fits some ontological category of ours as Savior. Without connecting people to God, Jesus would not be Savior. In the same way, our approaching the strange world of theology is a matter of it being made a solid part of who we are by way of its contact to us. This is true for a number of reasons, the first being that theology is not a matter of right thinking primarily, but right being.

Oppositely, we are the products of tradition that to some extent stands outside experience. I grew up in a Methodist church that took the function and role of the Eucharist dead seriously, even if it didn’t take sin as such. We are all inheritors of tales and traditions that come to us from somewhere outside the grind of going to work and making a life for ourselves that we can’t explain, but only be thankful for.

The blog world is spinning with talk about what kind of theology is needed for the world: emergent theology? liberation theology? post-liberal theology? Reformed theology? Black theology? Eastern theology? The located centers of the necessitated theology are as diverse as the people calling for them. But I suspect there’s something fundamentally wrong with this way of looking for the theological resources to fight whatever particular manifestation of sin plagues their world.

The problem with looking even to older systems of Reformed theology or Orthodox theology is that both of them are “Biblical”, and yet contradictory at points. All theology ultimately finds its feet in Scripture, making any system flawed from the onset that attempts to encapsulate all of Scriptural teachings or motifs into a coherent and seamless whole. For example, what to make of the fact that Augustinian theology finds its center in the will of God and liberation theology in the activity of God? Both find their feet resolutely and comprehensively in the waters of Scripture, albeit in different parts of the stream.

There seems to be no other way. One of two things must happen: 1) Theology as a systematic project must be abandoned or 2) Theology must be reconciled to being larger than any one particular place or time. The problems with both these options is the same: either theology is totally a worthless enterprise and nothing can be said of God or theology is such an enormous enterprise that nothing can be said of God.

Or there’s a third way…that theology is a project of the church, historical and universal, that what the local body does in conjunction with the wider body of Christ, past and present, is theology–that the speaking of God that is intrinsic to theology is a practice, a teasing out, and not a logically static programme alone. In this way, theology is rescued from the relativists and the dogmatists–theology is that which 1) the church does 2) in its context 3) in conversation with the larger body.

Blame this post on John Milbank, who’s effectively undermining every thought about the social sciences I’ve ever had as I muddle through him. Or blame it on an ineffable God who delights in communicating and not as we see fit.

Francis Fukuyama postulated a number of years ago, that with the collapse of Communism, we were witnessing what he termed “the end of history”, not that the world was coming to an end, but that a dominant ideology (democracy) had emerged that had now proved itself to be the best that could be done. What would happen now, according to Fukuyama, is simply tinkering with the machine–improvements along a single theme.

As one who grew up partly in the shadow of the Cold War, I remember watching movies about the Berlin Wall and being aware of something monumental happening when it came down. I wrote a massive and massively wrong paper about the foundations of the Russian collapse as compared with the French Revolution when I was in high school. And knowing what I know now, I wish that Fukuyama was right. I wish that I could agree that liberal democracy was the best we could do, or that it wasn’t what people inclined to do the best for themseleves first would come up with, either in pure democracy or the aberrant forms of facism.

I wish, I suppose, that history would in that sense end, and as a Christian, know that it will, but in a far different way, and with far different structures arising than liberal democracy concieves of.
But was he on to something? Will the history of our own minds end first?

You see, I think the history of my own mind, as it were, is at an end. The major clashes are done. I sit at the computer, and there are no major wars going on, just the extension of the dominant vein of thinking. There was a time when liberation theology duked it out with orthodoxy and little factions of Neibuhr rallied against the mountains of Bonhoeffer and Barth in my mind, but those days are gone. For the most part, I know what I think and barring some major revalation, like that Barth was secretly a 33rd degree Mason or beat children, I’ll probably stick with their explanations.

The wars are over and done. All the rest is cleanup. And that’s what’s so boring–when the fighting is done, what’s left is real peace–not a tenuous peace that waits for new war to emerge, but peace that wonders why those fighting haven’t just quit yet in light of something so much better than what they have. It’s quiet between the ears these days.

Gregory of Nyssa writes a great deal about the cataphatic knowledge of God, how even in eternity, we will be moving forward in our knowledge of God, pressing into the mountains of Eternity. I just suspect that for the moment, my brain has conceded that what there is to be known is too daunting of a task, and what can’t be known is too beautiful to dissect. And so, here I am, tinkering with a machine that is as good as it’s going to get for the time being.

So, in conclusion, go read a book. Go pet a dog. Eat vegetable soup. And put the big questions on hold for a moment. They’re not going anywhere.

If you’ve heard of Waco in the last four years, it was probably in regards to a) Bush’s house in Crawford, b) the Baylor basketball player being murdered or c) a missionary team from Antioch Community Church getting in trouble overseas. Today, Waco again graced the front page of the NY Times, courtesy of the ACC. You can read it here. I might add that this is not the first time that ACC has sidestepped the local church and left the local priests to clean up their international mess.
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There is a time to support the Christian community–the 95% of the time when courtesy and understanding should undergird our dialogue. This is not that percentage. This is the woodshed session.

I say these things with reservation, given that the intentions of going to a tsunami-wracked land are honorable. My intention is not to question their devotion to Christ, which shames me, but to question their actions, which were, er, unwise at best.

First, let it be stated that I have big issues with the way they went into the country claiming to be NGO, and then proselytizing. Is sharing of the Gospel wrong? Of course not. Is sharing of the Gospel wrong when what people need first is food and water? No, because the Gospel is to shelter the homeless and give food to the starving. With millions separated from their families and without clean water, the first order of the Gospel in such a situation is not to play with children, but to make sure that tomorrow, those children will be alive and well.

Now I guess would be the time to mention that after Kansas City, I spent the next day looking for opportunities to go serve in Sri Lanka. Ironically, what I found were opportunities to give money. Why? Because there are groups that have been in that part of the world for DECADES, who know the people, the situation, the conditions, and who know that sharing the Gospel in a place like Sri Lanka means a whole hell of a lot more than verbalizing the plan of salvation–and in this time, what those already there need are not more bodies, but more prayers. So, thanks ACC, for setting back the local Sri Lankan church in the effort to show people that you’re a “global church”. The complaints are coming, not from upset Muslims, but from the local church, which has worked to plant roots, only to have well-meaning but uninformed missionaries upset the wagon.

Granted, they went with a national Sri Lankan, but again, to completely ignore the local church condition, to go, as missionaries, and not work in tandem with what God was already doing in this place, is to assume that, without your presence, God has nothing to say. There’s much to be said of the arrogance of such assumptions, that they were going to be a help and not a hinderance by not working in tandem with the established churches. But that’s not where I want to camp. To go and disregard the counsel of the local church already in a place is a condemnation upon itself.

What really pisses me off in this whole deal, is that in their zeal to reach the nations with the Gospel, once again, a missional team has not bothered to consult with the locals, going in like gangbusters, as if the God of the Universe had no witness there prior to their arrival. If God is a God of all the nations, as ACC and others profess, is it conceivable that perhaps God was already ahead of them, and that the wiser way to manifest their love for Sri Lanka was simply to stay at home, raise support, pray, fast, mourn, and send medically qualified personnel?

The problem with a disembodied Gospel is nothing new. The Gnostics brought it in; the Montanists carried it along; Christianity is rife with the tendency to make Jesus a system rather than the manifested hands and feet of the church. If you’re going to pray for someone who does not yet know Jesus, don’t pray for their arms–pray and believe on behalf of their heart, broken far worse than their bodies. Pray and work on behalf of their families already gone. Let the Gospel flow out of your sweat, and pray to God who heals bodies and souls.

Offer comfort; offer aid; let your arms be the arms of Jesus; let your explanations come with the asking; let your prayers be the undergirding force of your actions, but don’t disparage the rest of the church by being the savior of the world–the post’s been filled quite aptly, thanks. Reckless and faithful are not the same thing; wisdom and abandon are not exclusive properties, but I would argue, children of the same Father.