Fallen Into Knowledge

We were talking about the things in a church service that can derail the momentum of the service – a poorly placed announcement, for example.  And it seems that the liturgy has just this role: to lead us through the corporate experience of Christ’s presence in the community.  This experience – which includes experiences of penitence which leads to confession, experiences thankfulness which leads to praise, etc – can be called the spirit.  It can be called spirit in a perfectly non-religious sense, “the spirit of a room,” but Jenson insists that this experience is also the Holy Spirit.  If this is the case, then that poorly placed announcement is nothing less than the quenching of the Spirit:

If the language of our gospel-address is broken and unnatural in its speech rhythms, if we read texts that set us glumly aback just as we are well launched into declamation, if ‘free’ prayer simply means clumsy and repetitious prayer, this is not merely an aesthetic misfortune; it is quenching on the Spirit.  If music provides no way for the congregation to move singingly together, it is quenching of the Spirit.  If our speech has no grandeur, it is quenching of the Spirit.  The American black church knows this.  So does the white church – but it wants the Spirit quenched.

- Robert Jenson, Visible Words

I’m testing a new blogging editor and also thinking about reviving this poor, neglected blog.  It has been nearly a year since this site has been updated, and I have to admit that it has been good:  blogging, like journaling (another writing habit that I do not practice) had become burdensome – mostly I felt guilty for not updating enough.  I may continue to not update enough, but I am feeling again like I want to nurture the practice of writing, and this provides a ready made outlet.  So, here goes!

I’ve been tagged in a meme by David, who seems to think that I have refined tastes in music.  Unfortunately I don’t, but the poor hapless soul that happens across this page will be subjected to my music preferences nonetheless.  At least the albums don’t automatically start playing!

Here’s the deal:  I am to rattle off my favorite album from each year starting the year I was born.  Since I had no preferences for music (other than the music my mother made on the piano as I was falling asleep, of course) before my teenage years, these are the albums I like now:

1978: Blondie: Parallel Lines

1979: Pink Floyd: The Wall

1980: B-52’s: Wild Planet

1981: U2: October

1982: The Clash: Combat Rock

1983: Violent Femmes: Violent Femmes

1984: The Doors: Best of the Doors

1985: Tears For Fears: Songs from the Big Chair

1986: Beastie Boys: License to Ill

1987: REM: Document 

1988: Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man

1989: Bad Religion: No Control

1990: Dire Straits: Money For Nothing

1991: U2: Achtung Baby -  this was my first and remains my favorite U2 album

1992: Emmylou Harris: At the Ryman

1993: Soundtrack to Schindler’s List

1994: Tom Petty: Wildflowers

1995: Smashing Pumpkins: Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

1996: Cake: Fashion Nugget

1997: Pink Martini: Sympanthique

1998: Gillian Welch: Hell Among the Yearlings

1999: Moby: Play

2000: Aimee Mann: Bachelor No. 2

2001: Five o’Clock People: In the Bleak Midwinter

2002: The Velvet Teen: Out of the Fierce Parade

2003: The Black Keys: Thickfeakness

2004: Jolie Holland: Escondida

2005: The Decemberists: Picaresque

2006: Cat Power: The Greatest (although Tom Waits’ “Orphans” takes a close second)

2007: Iron & Wine: The Shepherd’s Dog

2008: Black Keys: Attack and Release: (which is a great album, even if its not the best Black Keys Album)

Carl Schmitt asserted that the most basic political distinction is that which divides friend from enemy.  This distinction, Schmitt was quick to point out, does not entail any animosity, but merely points to the boundary of our community:  Friends are part of the Us, whereas enemies are the Other, strangers, those who our outside our boundaries.

The Bar-Bar peoples.

This friend-enemy distinction has been leveraged by the church in a couple of related ways to establish the realm of the Other.  For one, it is sometimes used to draw lines across the category of those who call themselves “Christian:”  dividing between Protestants and Catholics, for example, in order to claim that one or the other is not properly “Christian.”

This distinction, or something analogous to it, also typically governs  how churches choose who to partner with for “ministry.”  We draw a line across groups doing humanitarian endeavors:  we consider partnering with christian organizations and typically don’t consider partnering with organizations who are not Christian.  Which is to say, we tend to apply the “do not be unequally yoked” language when deciding on ministry partners.  THese are not the only terms Christians have at their disposal, however:  we have another, “Neighbor.”  

Can we insert into this friend-enemy distinction the concept of “neighbor” such that we can conceptualize partnering with organizations who aren’t Christian - affirming and supporting their humanitarian mission without giving up our identity as Christians? 

I have again picked up Zizek’s Parallax View, in hopes of finishing it this time ’round, and also because this passage has been on my mind since I first encountered it months ago:

So what is the Master-Signifier?  Let us imagine a confused situation of social disintegration, in which the cohesive power of ideology loses its efficiency: in such a situation, the Master is the one who invents a new signifier, the famous “quilting point,” which stabilizes the situation again and makes it readable; the university discourse which then elaborates the network of Knowledge which sustains this readability by definition presupposes and relies on the initial gesture of the Master.  The Master adds no new positive content - he merely adds a signifier which, all of a sudden, turns disorder into order, into “new harmony” as Rimbaud would have put it. [...] all fears are exchanged for one fear; that is to say, it is the very fear of God which makes me fearless in all worldly matters.  The same reversal that gives rise to a new Master-Signifier is at work in ideology: in anti-Semitism, all fears (of economic crisis, or moral degradation…) are exchanged for the fear of the Jew…. And is this same logic also discernible in a horror film like Spielberg’s Jaws?  I fear the shark, my friend, and have no other fears…. -Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View, pg 37

it would be easy to see the Master-SIgnifier as relating only to ideologies we don’t like - political ideologies - democracy, freedom, terrorist all have approached the status of Master Signifier in recent memory. We fear the terrorist in large part because he (presumably) is unknown, a shadowy figure.  This is the genius of the horror film; the monster we don’t see is scarier than the monster we do see because we can project all sorts of anxieties on the unseen and unknown.

I wonder, however, if it is nearsighted to see the master-signifier as only a way to criticize political ideologies we don’t like.  Nearsighted firstly because such use tempts us pretend that there are areas of life that external to ideology - the objectivity temptation.  But nearsighted also because Christian Theology spends much of its time explicating the meaningfulness (readability) Christian Discourse in light of its Master Signifier, and that crises in Theology are most often crises in the content of the Master-Signifier.  It is just this content which at once is so important and is normally treated as a given (what is the definition of terrorist - or of freedom?).  To be a heretic, also, is to be differently disposed as to the content of the Master-Signifier - Jesus was not wholly Man, etc.

What other areas can be explicated by means if this Master-Signifier, and what are the limits of this idea?

Partly because I’ve been tagged by David, and partly because I haven’t updated this site for too bloody long!

1. One movie that made you laugh:
Thank You For Smoking

2. One movie that made you cry:
Dancer in the Dark

3. One movie you loved when you were a child:
The Swiss Family Robinson - seriously, what’s cooler than living in a treehouse?

4. One movie you’ve seen more than once:
Serenity

5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it:
Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior

6. One movie you hated:
300

7. One movie that scared you:
Blue Velvet - and just about anything by David Lynch

8. One movie that bored you:
Being John Malkovich

9. One movie that made you happy:
Kung Fu Hustle

10. One movie that made you miserable:
Crash - David Cronenberg’s verson.

11. One movie you weren’t brave enough to see:
Donnie Darko

12. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with:
Ana Pascal, Maggie Gyllenhaal in Stranger than Fiction

13. The last movie you saw:
The Counterfeiters (highly recommended)

14. The next movie you hope to see:
Up the Yangtze, or maybe Noise

This morning I kicked off a new sermon series in the book of Deuteronomy.  Here is and exerpt from my manuscript:

Moses’ goal is to inculcate obedience in a new generation, in a generation that had not experienced those events.  The key word is remember:” bring to mind again the story that forms you, the story that brought you about as a people.  Any account of Israel’s faithfulness has to be embedded in the story of God’s prior faithfulness.  Not just faithfulness as belief, but I think - and this is critical also for us - faithfulness as obedience.  Moses tells the story of the exodus, and it is from within  that story that he recounts the Law.  I think its really important to keep this in mind, that Moses begins be recounting the story of God’s faithfulness: before he starts in on the law, before he points Israel forward to the promised land, he starts by looking back at the events that shape this people - the events that constituted Israel as a people.
In many respects our place in the world is similar to Israel’s here:  we are called aliens and foreigners in the land, we are called to live faithfully - called to a way of life that is different from our neighbor’s, we are called to live in a way appropriate to a land that we have never experienced.  We have been constituted and are being shaped by events that we did not experience - the death and resurrection of Christ.  Moses’ advise to Israel is to Remember, bring up our story - the story of God’s faithfulness, and even the story of our unfaithfulness.  To retell it, to tell it for the first time to our children.  We usually think of this sort of story telling in Sunday school terms - we are to teach the youngin’s the bible stories.

But Moses does not stop with the story of God’s faithfulness, but also recounts Israel’s sometimes faltering response.  He does not varnish the truth - Israel’s failures as well as successes are told to this new generation.   We could easily lose hope if we try to place our spiritual state in a story of our faithfulness; and in fact, in such a story our unfaithfulness needs to be hidden from our own view as well as from the view of others.  But Moses places the story of Israel’s faithfulness and unfaithfulness in the larger and more secure story of God’s faithfulness.  We see this move also encoded into the Law:  Israel’s calendar is a testimony to God’s history of with the people.  This is how liturgy functions fro us as well:  we are called to find our lives not in the story of national glory, or in the story of self-achievement or any other self-indexed story: rather our day-by-day lives are shaped and carried along as they are found in the yearly and weekly retelling of our common story - the story of the Cross.

The big news today, of course, was Barack Obama’s speech on race in America.  Let me say this first off:  it is a really good example of political speechifying. We have nearly forgotten how powerful political language can be.  Those who criticize Obama for only being able to talk pretty miss the point - that is the primary responsibility of a politician.  It must be remembered that this speech, which was so well done, is political; while I am sure that Obama really does believe these things, his language is aimed at securing for himself the office of the President of the United States.  I don’t mean by that to demean him, or that by noting this fact we can sweep his comments away.  In fact, I don’t want that at all:  eloquence like his is painfully absent from the American political landscape.

However, I do want to take notice of the way in which theological language is leveraged toward political, nationalist ends.  Obama is right that slavery is for America a kind of original sin; he is right that racism has been institutionalized and that America is still suffering the consequences of this division.  David commented as we talked about this speech this morning that Obama even appropriates language from Black and Liberation Theology in his analysis of race in America.  Obama’s speech functions as a sort of sermon: he embeds his analysis into a narrative of salvation.  He has a Hope and he has a Belief.  But his narrative of salvation from racism is the narrative of American prosperity, not the narrative of the Cross.  His hope is in the decency of americans to pull themselves up by the bootstrap, to manufacture for themselves salvation from the divisions that and scars that mark America’s national identity.  And here, by exchanging the narrative of American prosperity and goodness for the narrative of Christ’s Cross, this becomes idolatry.  The state cannot save us.

Also, by exchanging the narrative of American prosperity for the narrative of the Cross, Obama truly does repudiate Reverend Wright and any narrative of human fallenness which can only be reconciled at the foot of the Cross:

The Christian message on race is quite simply the gospel…”in this new creation we are neither Caucasian, African, Asian, male nor female, bond or free.  We are a third race.” How then did Christians begin to think of race as a third category?  According to Campbell, they did so when the emphasis in Christian theology began to be on humans rather than God.  Nothing is more indicative of such an emphasis than the presumption by modern liberal Christians that the race problem can be solved politically.  Such a presumption serves to legitimate the modern nation-state, which, ironically has been the primary agent for the categorization of people by race. - Hauerwas and Coles, “Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary.

While I certainly welcome any move that truly does resist the oppressive and demonic forces of racism, I think that we must be careful not to get sucked in by the theological language of the state.  This is especially hard for American Christians to do:  American politicians are well practiced at employing such theological language for nationalist ends, and American Christians are equally well practiced at having their interests appropriated by the state.

What is the Holy Ghost’s function in the life of the church? Haunting.

“something profoundly discomforting, even if one can certainly want a ghost’s presence, as one may want, for a time, for the ghost of a past friend or relative” - Romand Coles

Jesus says, as is recounted in John’s gospel, that the Spirit will come as a comforter, and as one who reminds. Isn’t this also integral to haunting? We are not haunted by something completely foreign to us.  But the ghost serves to remind us.  And yet the haunting is disconcerting:  we are left uneasy.  Likewise the Holy Spirit reminds us of our past - that we are those called to Christ - and also urges us onward to the future - toward our calling to be the Imago Dei.

I’ve stopped using the concept of inerrancy in discussions about the Bible; mostly because the way I describe the Bible’s authority and God-givenness do not require me to make reference to inerrancy.  It just isn’t a question I am forced to ask.  Even for people who do talk about inerrancy, usually to affirm it, it is not an essential doctrine; that is, it is required only in conjunction with particular arguments for the authority of the Bible.That being said, and in light of this, I ran across a couple of interesting passages in the fourth chapter of Schmitt’s “Political Theology” that casts the relationship between inerrancy and authority in a new light:

Infallibility was for [De Maistre] the essence of the decision that cannot be appealed, and that the infallibility of the spiritual order was of the same nature as the sovereignty of the state order.  The two words infallibility and sovereignty were ‘perfectly synonymous.’

And,

In practice, not to be subject to error and not to be accused of error were for him the same.  The important point was that no higher authority could review the decision.

For myself I have taken to using the word “normative” to describe the Bible’s authority, as in, “when we say that the bible is scripture we are making a claim about its authority for our community.”  But I think what I am trying to get at is that last point; that there is no higher authority to which we might appeal.  This distinction between capacity for error and being subject to criticism is an interesting one, is is sustainable?