Fallen Into Knowledge

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?

The Pearl Church’s “Theology Reading Group” read Bonhoeffer’s Life Together this month.  I was struck, this time though, by the last chapter, on Confession.  This is a practice about which Protestants seems especially afraid.  While even Bonhoeffer sees the possible danger for abuse in practicing confession, his description of its power is compelling:

In confession the break-through to community takes place.  Sin demands to have a man by himself.  It withdraws him from the community.  The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous his isolation.  Sin wants to remain unknown.  It shuns the light.  In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the being of a person.  This can happen even in the midst of a pious community.  In confession the light of the Gospel breaks into the  darkness and seclusion of the heart.  The sin must be brought to light…. Since the confession of sin is made in the presence of a Christian brother, the last stronghold of self-justification is abandoned.  The sinner surrenders; he gives up all his evil.  He gives his heart to God, and he finds forgiveness of all his sin in the fellowship of Jesus Christ and his brother.  The expressed, acknowledged sin has lost all its power.  It has been revealed and judged as sin.  It can no longer tear the fellowship asunder.  Now the fellowship bears the sin of the brother.  He is no longer alone with his evil for he has cast off his sin in confession and handed it over to God.  

Every year, some group places white flags in the park blocks to represent people killed in Iraq. This year the red flags represent US soldiers killed, the white flags each represent “at least” 5 Iraqis killed. The flags cover several city blocks.

Carl Schmitt’s conflict with liberalism lies in liberalism’s insistence on the “rule of law”  At the core of liberalism stands the assertion that law is prior to sovereignty, that a system of laws can be made to govern human society.  Schmitt thinks not: human life is too unpredictable, and can never be subsumed under a set of laws, no matter how complex.  At the end of the day, sovereignty is never located in law but in a person.  Schmitt’s famous “state of exception” is focused on just this point: the sovereign is not just the one who makes the decision concerning the exception, but the sovereign also emerges / is revealed by it.

For Christian Theology, political and otherwise, the status of Jesus as King subordinates Law -   Jesus is truly Lord of the Sabbath.

Schmitt finds the “rule of law” (and, consequently, liberalism) problematic because of the ways in which law constrains human relations.  Human relations, when mediated by Law, are mechanized; and humans are thereby objectified.  We catch a glimpse of this in the Mark 2, when Jesus and his disciples are innocently plucking grain on the Sabbath.  The disciples are grist for the law’s operation: insofar as they are recognized by the law, insofar as they are found under the law, they are recognized as lawbreakers.  Just as the doctor cannot diagnose “health” (so the truism goes) so also the Law does not recognize Justice or Goodness or Mercy - or even Subjects at all - but it can only capture deviants.  Thus, to be included in the law is to be a lawbreaker.  On the other hand, to be included, found, under a king is to be a Subject.