the church and postmodern culture: conversation

After Nietzsche

There are very few people whose name would invoke hatred amongst many "Christians" and love amongst many "atheists." One such name is Friedrich Nietzsche. The interpretation of just one passage in his The Gay Science has sparked this great controversy. In it, Nietzsche states at one point that "God is dead"¹ and this one sentence has caused most theologians to abandon reading anything associated with Nietzsche. This one statement, taken out of its context, has supposedly created an army of atheists who see Christianity through these lenses that God is dead. There are some theologians, though, who have tried to acknowledge Nietzsche and re-appropriate things in Nietzsche (such as this death of God) into a new movement.

Acknowledging this diversity of thought, there are many questions to answer and many problems to resolve. First, what did Nietzsche mean in The Gay Science when his madman states that God is dead? To answer this question, it will be necessary to look at the rest of the passage to understand the phrase as well as the historical location of Nietzsche to understand his implications. The second question deals with those that have re-appropriated Nietzsche in theology: did these people understanding Nietzsche's meaning or did they supply their own context and arguments for their ideology? To answer this, it will be necessary to look at their application of Nietzsche and compare it to the answer to the first question. The last question to entertain is whether or not one can re-appropriate Nietzsche's "death of God" into theology and if so, how? The full answer to this question may be beyond one single essay, but I hope that enough will be seen in the other answers to make this answer obvious.

Nietzsche's Words

As I have already noted, Nietzsche's "death of God" is possibly the most misunderstood area of Nietzsche's works and has served as the basis for misunderstanding the rest of Nietzsche's works within theological beliefs. This section of The Gay Science, titled "The Madman," is where any investigation should begin. The madman is very specific in naming the murderers of God. He is less specific as to how God is murdered, but that is answered when Nietzsche's historical location is understood. In the section in question, the madman first asks "Where is God gone?" before answering his own question: "We have killed him,--you and I!"² It seems clear that for Nietzsche, the murderers of God are the people of the madman's time. Yet, are these the same people of Nietzsche's own time or are they some other people? How should these people be described?

The most amazing description of the murderers of God are that they are related to the religious as the madman went around spreading his message among the various churches. These churches have become "the tombs and sepulchers of God."³  As such, it seems logical to conclude that Nietzsche is implying that the priests and clergy are guardians of a cemetery and no longer ambassadors of some living (or even resurrected) God. Yet this does not bring us closer to the murderers of God. We must turn to more of Nietzsche's works to better understand this. Later in The Gay Science, Nietzsche states that Schopenhauer first saw that belief in God was a lie.⁴ Furthermore, Schopenhauer raised this as a problem with the rest of Europe; and it is this European conscience that finally ceased tolerating this lie.⁵  This may bring us closer to discovering the murderers of God than what is first seen. Through this, it may be assumed that God's murder occurred years (if not centuries) before Schopenhauer.

Jumping back in history, we can see when God became a tool of man for Nietzsche: the Jews and early Christians. First, the Jews begin interpreting "all happiness as a reward, all unhappiness as punishment for disobeying God, as 'sin.'"⁶  As "sin" is introduced through the Jews, it becomes a device for the priestly class to maintain the order they want. To Nietzsche, the Jewish priests did not stop there and they began falsifying their history to further their control over others. For Nietzsche, the Jews continued to negate the ideals of what was natural and seen in all of the non-Jewish people. Through this, the Jews were able to form Christianity to suit their own needs:

The 'holy people,' who had retained only priestly values, only priestly words for all things and who, with awe-inspiring consistency, had distinguished all other powers on earth from themselves as 'unholy,' as 'world,' as 'sin'--this people produced an ultimate formula for its instinct that was logical to the point of self-negation: as Christianity, it negated even the last form of reality, the 'holy people,' the 'chosen people,' the Jewish reality itself.⁷

Christianity has become the ultimate form of Judaism in that it even rejects its own true self. Nietzsche further sees the death of God being embedded in the fact that God is never found. There is no evidence anywhere for Nietzsche in the historical, natural, and even the supernatural. The death of God was the creation of a god. In Nietzsche's mind, this is found clearly in Paul: "The 'God' whom Paul invented, a god who 'ruins the wisdom of the world' ... is in truth merely Paul's own resolute determination to...give the name of 'God' to one's own will."⁸  The death of God is a will to nothingness, a call to nihilism.

Back to the madman, we find that individualism is what killed God as the madman asks, "Shall we not ourselves have to become gods, merely to seem worthy of it [killing God]?"⁹ In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes that God died of pity. Nietzsche also mentions in Zarathustra that God dies many times. This resonates with Nietzsche's thoughts of eternal return—to will something to occur eternally. Yet, in order to keep within Nietzsche's critique of Christianity, it seems fair to consider that the death of God is brought along in part by the Judeo-Christian priestly class who have replaced God with their own puppet and covered this up with a lie in the myth of the resurrected Christ. Shockingly, Nietzsche respects this one aspect of Christianity because it was a creation of new values.

Nietzsche's World

Nietzsche's phrase "God is dead" may be understood now in terms of who and how, but it still needs to be placed in the context of Nietzsche's meaning. There still remains to be determined whether or not Nietzsche's "Christianity" was synonymous with Christianity as a whole or just in terms of a single section. Some see Nietzsche in terms of the Christian church contemporary to his day much like many see Kierkegaard in terms of the Danish church at his time. If Nietzsche was reacting primarily against the German Lutheranism of his day, how much of his critique is still applicable to theology today? If Nietzsche's criticism was also in view of Christianity as a whole, we must discover how accurate are his depictions of Christianity and how should they affect Christian theology.

It should be noted that the figure of Jesus appears to largely be excluded from his critiques of Christianity. He says in The Antichrist, "Jesus has been understood, or misunderstood as the cause of a rebellion; and I fail to see against what this rebellion was directed, if it was not the Jewish church--'church' exactly in the sense in which we use the word today."¹⁰ As such, it would seem that in some ways, Nietzsche is aligning himself with Jesus against both Jews and Christians. Jesus was not some Redeemer/Son of God figure of salvation but rather a human who has displayed a "psychological reality of 'redemption.'"¹¹ This makes Nietzsche's attack on Christianity much different as he sees some characters in the historical development of Christianity in positive light. Nietzsche is thus very pointed in his critique and not simply writing against anything labeled "Christian." Through this, then, it should be noted that Nietzsche's "opposition to Christianity as a reality is inseparable from his tie to Christianity as a postulate."¹²  That is, we cannot separate how Nietzsche believes Christianity is in theory from what it is in practice.

The Christianity which Nietzsche is radically against is the Christianity of the institution, the Christianity of doctrines. Nietzsche's primary critique of Christianity is that it lies. Contrary to some interpretations of Nietzsche which place his perspectivism first and foremost, Nietzsche does exhibit consistency in seeking out truthfulness; he does suggest that there is a truthfulness to be found and embraced. In the twisting of the slave morality and ressentiment into good, Christianity has made weakness a virtue and strength a vice. By doing this, the Christianity of doctrines has made faith into a matter of simple belief. This "faith," says Nietzsche, only makes being a Christian a negation of that word. Faith is doing, not just believing. Mere belief is only a "cloak, a pretext, a screen behind which the instincts play their game."¹³ It is this revaluation which drives Nietzsche to begin his own revaluation. Nietzsche is not attacking all morality, but rather what he perceives as bad morality, the Christian morality of guilt.

Nietzsche Appropriated

Now that we have some understanding of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity and the "death of God," we should look at how it has been understood and appropriated in theology. Mark Taylor is one of the few who have appropriated Nietzsche into a working model of theology. In his Erring, Taylor notices in sections of Christianity something similar to Nietzsche's madman: individualism. Taylor points out that it was Luther's conception of Christ living and dying pro nobis--"for us"--that has radically shifted the focus of theology from God to self. It is important to note here that the it is the turn towards individualized faith, the turn towards the self as a moral agent capable of being separated from his actions that is in question. This turn to the self has resulted in the slow removal of God, however defined, from the personal and public sphere. Morality, that hammer of control the Jewish priestly class used, has become nothing more than suggestion as Nietzsche sees people like Kant creating their own morals and their own categorical imperatives. There is no longer some kind of transcendent God, even if the people have not yet acknowledged it or their participation in it. God is dead long before people realize it. This individualism, Taylor notes, is radically linked to the Enlightenment and, more specifically, Descartes. While Descartes radicalized doubt, he also made truth something individualized, an I with certainty.¹⁴  As such, Taylor interprets the men of the Enlightenment the ultimate murderers of God. Taylor consistently links the death of God with the death of the Christian God. As I have noted above, this yet another instance of the many deaths of God.

Taylor continues to follow Nietzsche's thought as he expands on the individualism that has killed God: "If the master is God and the slave man, then man's murder of God is an act of self-deification."¹⁵ This is an echo of Nietzsche's sentiments from earlier: the murderers of God have attempted to become gods in order to seem worthy of this event. As such, this death of God "appears to be the birth of the sovereign self."¹⁶ Taylor does not end there. Taking this further, he expands on this death of God and states that it also brings about the death of the human self. As Nietzsche has indicated in The Antichrist, the creation of Christianity is ultimately a perfection of Judaism by the Jews as it negates even itself.¹⁷  It is no coincidence, then, that ultimate death of God, as it brings the birth of the sovereign self would also bring with it the death of the self. This is the nihilism which Nietzsche saw now as something to be embraced but as something we must pass through. By accepting the death of God and entering into the act of creation, man can overcome this murder of God and return to the natural order of noble things and, possibly, beyond the notions of good and evil.

It is through this fullness of nihilism that theology must pass in order to rediscover the oldest God. This God is not the self, but also not the radically Other. The path of nihilism is the one that can navigate theology safely between the rock and whirlpool that past theologies and philosophies have found. Through this path, there can be a radical rebirth of God in the middle place. As a measure of trust, theology should allow play in the future, not seeking to lose the pathos of the self or the ethos of the divine. Through this wandering and playing, we find the essence Taylor calls erring. It is through this purposeful drifting and transgression that theology may resurface from its own death and we can possibly find God for the first time.

----

01 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964): 125. *All references for this book are to section numbers, not page numbers.

02 Nietzsche, The Gay Science 125.

03 Ibid.

04 Nietzsche, The Gay Science 357

05 Ibid.

06 Nietzsche, The Antichrist in The Portable Nietzsche, Kaufmann, Walter ed. (New York: Viking 1954): 25. All references for this book are section numbers, not page numbers.

07 Nietzsche, The Antichrist 27.

08 Nietzsche, The Antichrist 47.

09 Nietzsche, The Gay Science 125.

10 Nietzsche, The Antichrist 27.

11 Nietzsche, The Antichrist 33.

12 Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche and Christianity (Henry Regnery 1961): 6.

13 Nietzsche, The Antichrist 39.

14 Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984): 22.

15 Taylor, Erring 25.

16 Ibid.

17 Nietzsche, The Antichrist 27.

Specters of Political Theology

Could it be that what we have come, often errantly and confusedly, to call "postmodern theology" is evolving into a post-secular political theology?

Having been pushed the past month toward reading Mark Lilla's provocative, timely, and superlatively readable book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (Knopf, 2007),  I began to wonder if we are increasingly recoding the passions of our respective faith commitments in the language of the political and the passions of the political in terms of faith.  Lilla maintains that is what in fact we are all doing.  He writes somewhat sardonically in his introduction: "Today we have progressed to the point where we are fighting the battles of the sixteenth century". (p. 3)

With this thought in mind I was struck in reading Jack Caputo's What Would Jesus Deconstruct? -  the soon forthcoming title in the Church and Postmodernism series - how equally theological and political it happens to be.  The two messages mutually reinforce, and are symmetrical with each other.  Not that Caputo pulls any punches with his politics.  He names names.  Speaking as a progressive Catholic, he spends a lot of time lambasting conservative evangelicals and their political minions in the "religious right" (and to a lesser extent the traditionalist Catholic hierarchy) in the name of Jesus, which isn't routinely done these days, though I admit to having done it myself.  But what makes Caputo's new manifesto so interesting - and probably infuriating to most of the old-guard evangelical establishment - is the way he asserts that "deconstructive theology," as it has been called here in this space, has a straight-line political payout.   

I will be frank and state for the record that I don't really go along with him in drawing these connections, mainly because I don't read Derrida, not to mention any kind of "Derridean" theology, in quite the same way, or because I've always had a hard time extracting any sort of politics out of deconstruction.  But they do follow elegantly from Caputo's own version of deconstructive theology, as evidenced in The Weakness of God (Indiana University Press, 2006), and his view of Jesus as first century rabb(i)le-rouser is far more accurate than earlier generation of "political theologians" (no relationship to the current crop) who tended to view Jesus as mainly a good European socialist (Moltmann) or as the pre-incarnation of Che Guevara (the liberation theologians).   That is probably why most megachurch pastors these days don't spend a lot of time exegeting for their congregation why Jesus became so enraged at the money-changers.

When deconstruction became fashionable during the 1980s in America, it was of course bashed by the cultural right, but for all the wrong reasons - mainly, the villifiers had no clue what they were talking about.   More tellingly, it was even more aggressively flayed by the old left, who had a better, though not necessarily an intelligent, understanding of it.  What they asserted was that deconstruction led to a passivity, a hyperindividualistic interiority, and a strange sort of "esthetized" (as opposed to "anesthesized") thumb-sucking that was prima facie traitorous to the cause of political revolution.  It was similar to the what "new left" said about the hippies in the 1960s or, going even further back, what the Cromwellians said about the Quakers during the English Revolution.   

What changed things?  Derrida himself - who else?  About the time of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 Derrida really got religion, and at the same time he also got politics.  The so-called "later Derrida" is all about the mutual relationship between politics and religion.   His key writings are the essay "Force of Law" and his books Specters of Marx and Rogues, the latter of which is his response to the situation immediately after 9/11.   The fascination that Derrida himself  had with the thought of the Nazi toady Carl Schmitt remains strange to this day, though it is evident that he rescued Schmitt from obscurity to make some points in his post-post-structuralist phase he could not have done any other way.  It is even more curious that the same fascination has now spread to the new generation of political theologians who talk about the latter's pet issues - the question of sovereignty and the "state of exception." 

Every major and up-to-date "postmodern" thinker these days, in Europe at least, is About Schmitt, if I am permitted a play on the title of a famous and tragicomic movie that starred Jack Nicholson.  Why is that?  At one level Schmitt raised his own "specter" of a good democratic rationale for suspending democracy, a specter that materialized with the collapse of the Weimar Republic in Germany concurrent with Hitler's accession to power and has haunted all civil libertarians since that fateful September morn (which happens to be my own birthday) in 2001. But, more significantly, Schmitt in a stroke showed why the religious and the political cannot be separated, which is Lilla's point.  "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they are transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver - but also because of their systematic structure."  (Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab, University of Chicago Press, p. 36).   

So-called "fundamentalism" of necessity has its politics, as does deconstructive theology.  Derrida was pre-occupied with something he called "democracy to come," a term that annoys Zizek, the romantic Marxian, to no end.  But the democracy to come could not be disentangled from Derrida's uniquely Jewish construct of the "messianic," which historically has always been avenir, "to come."    Do we decode these "political theologies" in terms of  their politics or their theologies, or is that impossible because of their "systematic structure"? 

The Brit magazine The Economist, perhaps the best weekly window and most informed site of commentary on the new global postmodernism,  which my new book in this series explores, proudly calls itself a "liberal" periodical.  But it is a different sort of liberalism from much of America's current trendy kumbaya liberalism which increasingly also styles itself as "postmodern," or vice-versa.  It is a liberalism that whistles past the graveyard and shares a few of anxieties that tragically turned both Schmitt and Heidegger into fascist fellow travelers (the latter far more than the former) because they knew liberal democracies, even on today's globalized scale, could easily succumb to the "Weimar syndrome" of pluralism without conviction, leading to the "strongman" reimposing the "will of the sovereign".   

This week it has a "special report" with the chilling title "The New Wars of Religion" (See the link to the first article at http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10015219).  The thesis of the series, which takes a global perspective with many local case studies, is that what Derrida called the "return of religion" means we are in for a stormy ride during the next decade or so.   Forget your leftish prejudices about the "evil theocrats" on the Christian right who want to turn America into a new Geneva that sends gays and abortionists to the gallows or your rightish biases about the clear and present need for the defenders of democracy to fight jihad with, er, jihad.   If you've got religion, you've got a political struggle you're going to throw in your lot with.  In other words, you're going to be operating with some sort of postmodern political theology.  Political Islam is not a peculiar sort of "postmodern challenge."  Nor is militant fundamentalism.  It's the new norm, even if it doesn't seem normal. 

What does a postmodern Christian do?  It all depends on how you read Scripture.   Or the tradition.  Or what theologies you choose to link the two.  I myself like the "my kingdom is not of this world approach," but I don't think that occasions any obvious politics.  Just because we've seen the fraudulence in the premise "follow Jesus, vote Republican," we don't have to turn it upside down and say, "follow Jesus, vote Democrat."   Or "follow Jesus, become a green."  I myself have done all of that, including being a Christian Yippie in Berkeley.  Does anybody remember the Yippies?   Been there, done that.

But Lilla's premise really bothers me.  Are we really back in the sixteenth century?  Well, maybe we are.  But that was also the period of the Reformation.  Maybe the "next Reformation" is really now, which is what I would not at all term "the pretty postmodern." 

The "real" (in Zizek's sense) postmodern is messy as hell. 

Zizek and Evangelicals in America: A Proposal, by David Fitch

I have been working on a book project entitled These Kinds of People: Evangelical Fundamentalism and the Moral Life. The book starts off by noticing the bad public image evangelicals have acquired in recent years via the explosion of negative literature and mass media aimed squarely at the evangelical right. This image often displays evangelical Christians as arrogant, coercive and violent in regards to politics, strangely dispassionate towards social justice, and morally duplicitous in our personal lives. Since I am doing theology from within an evangelical context, and I write as an evangelical, I am concerned to say the least. In the book, I ask whether we evangelicals are these people we are accused of being. I seek to examine whether our doctrine and church practice gives us reason to believe we indeed produce this kind of character in our people. The book combines a broad analysis of culture with theological methods informed by the theology of character and virtue (as developed by Hauerwas and friends). The book aims to push evangelicals towards reform in becoming a people worthy of the label "disciples of Christ."

One of the riskier moves in the book is to propose four public figures as symbols of who evangelicals have become in the American culture of the first decade (early part of the decade) of the new millennium. They are George Bush, Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay of WorldCom/Enron debacles (both evangelical Sunday School teachers), and Jessica Simpson, daughter of an evangelical youth pastor. Admittedly there are a host of objections with these choices, which I hopefully engage in the setting forth of this thesis (so please don’t hammer me on this at least for right now). I also outline several ways these four figures can function as sites for cultural analysis of evangelicals and their place in America. One of the ways I examine these figures in culture is as symptoms of what drives evangelicalism itself. Here, I use "symptom" in a way influenced by philosopher/cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek. I offer the following take on Zizek’s symptom and how it might be applied to understand the place evangelicals find themselves in within American culture today.

For Zizek a "symptom" goes beyond the popular psychological notion of an external sign which points to a disturbance below the surface of one’s psyche. For Zizek, a Symptom (I’ll now capitalize symptom whenever I am using it in terms of Zizek’s theory) can work within a culture to expose an unfulfilled drive, the unspoken void around which that culture (its Symbolic order or even ideology) has been formed. An image, an explosion of media activity surrounding an event, a popular movie, a flurry of publishing can expose something hidden and unspoken that drives a culture’s meaning system. What we see and hear on the surface may be compensations for what the culture itself lacks at its core. The good news here is that exposing these kinds of Zizekian symptoms in cultures like America and/or evangelicalism opens them up for change and transformation.

For Zizek, cultural symbolic orders exist to advocate certain purposes and legitimizations for being. They are in one sense ideologies. These meaning systems "mask the Real of" an absense which no one wants to face up to (Sublime Object p. 45). For instance, the U.S. "shock and awe" bombing and invasion of Iraq in order to "bring democracy and freedom to Iraq," might mask the fear of the U.S.: that if it really does allow every one to be free, it will not have enough oil. The irruption of the bombing "in order to bring freedom" reveals how little we do believe in freedom. And so every cultural system (the Symbolic Order) is prone to "irruptions of the Real" which reflect back to its participants the Real that is hidden within the ongoing system of meaning. These irruptions are cultural events that will not fit within the current explanation of things. These irruptions are cultural symptoms of something much deeper being exposed.

I propose, following Zizek, that Bush, Ebbers/Lay and Jessica are all symptoms of an evangelicalism that will not fit neatly within its system yet exposes something much deeper about ourselves as evangelicals. I suggest that indeed these figures may be irruptions which we should pay attention to because they expose the lack behind our own beliefs and practices as evangelical Christians. Some might see Bush, or Ebbers/Lay and especially Jessica Simpson as exceptions to evangelicalism. In other words, these figures are not symptoms of anything evangelical, they are merely tragic examples of those who failed at being good evangelical Christians (i.e. backsliders). Zizek’s approach to the Symptom in culture cautions us against the easy answer that labels these people as backsliders, failed evangelical Christians. Instead Zizek implores us to see these figures as not just exceptions to the rule that need to be dealt with according to the existing system of meaning (bring them to repentance and reconciliation within the evangelical church). Rather these are irruptions within the evangelical order that reveal the lack which drives the system’s existence in the first place (on this see The Plague of the Fantasies, p.127). In other words, Bush, Ebbers/Lay and Jessica Simpson are symptoms of something deeply lacking in our evangelical way of life, our culture of what we believe and how we practice it.

To give another example of how a cultural Symptom works for Zizek, a cultural Symptom is something like the homeless populations amidst capitalist societies. The homeless reveal the immanent logic of how the politic of capitalism works, the underbelly which drives it (see here again Plague of Fantasies , p.127). Capitalist ideology may say that its goal is to rid humanity of all poverty and scarcity of resources as evidenced in this homeless person in the street. According to capitalism, this homeless person just needs more capitalism and then he/she wouldn’t be homeless. Zizek however would suggest that the homeless person reveals the true drive behind capitalism, the way it plays upon the fear of poverty and the fear that we all might become this homeless person if we don’t work harder. Zizek would see the homeless person as a part of the immanent logic of capitalism, the way capitalism works. He sees in the homeless person a Symptom of capitalism as an exploitive system that could not exist without him or her (the homeless person). In fact, capitalism needs the poor to justify its existence. Without scarcity and the fear of poverty, the struggle for more wealth inherent in the system would die. The homeless man therefore is a Symptom that points to the Real beneath the system of capitalism.

I contend in a similar way that Bush, Ebbers/Lay and Simpson are symptoms which reveal the underlying logic that drives evangelicalism. They represent what evangelicals fear yet what we have become. They reveal the lack within that drives us to be the kinds of persons we have become. Each one of these figures irrupts onto the stage of American culture and evangelicals react. Sometimes evangelicals embrace them to the point of supporting them with a national uprising (as in George Bush), sometimes they support them via their local church (Ebbers/Lay) and then sometimes evangelicals distance themselves claiming they have been unfaithful to their cause (Jessica Simpson). But in each case, there is a struggle to make sense of each figure as an evangelical Christian. Yet they cannot finally be assimilated. In this very moment, I contend, Bush, Ebbers/Lay and Simpson represent an irruption revealing "what we are not" despite what we claim to be.

For Zizek, it is exactly at the point when the irruption of the Real happens, when the Symptom cannot be assimilated by the given Symbolic order that a "surplus" appears. As a way of explaining "surplus," think of how many of us evangelical fundamentalists have been told not to drink, smoke or have premarital sex. These are the famous "holiness codes" of the Southern Baptists and holiness denominations. This is part of the symbolic order of our evangelical culture. We notice however that obesity abounds everywhere in the most heinous of ways, especially among our pastors. Yet evangelical officials remain strangely silent about it while they tell us not to drink or smoke. We cannot explain how the fundamentalist pastor who tells us not to drink or smoke is terribly obese in the terms we are given by the "holiness codes." We must instead ignore it or look the other way. Yet it is in the manfestation of this surplus that the lack in the System is revealed. The holiness codes simply do not address our appetites! There is a surplus uncontained by the holiness codes! The obese fundamentalist pastor is an irruption of the Symptom!

How do we explain the symbol of the obese Southern Baptist preacher? Zizek advocates that the surplus that cannot be contained by the symbolic order has to be displaced (in Freudian-Lacanian terms) towards another object and in so doing this object (object petit a) reveals the truth of the Real behind the drive. It is in this manifestation of the surplus that the lack in the System is revealed. The surplus which the symbolic system (holiness codes) could not contain irrupts in the over enjoyment (jousiannce in Lacan’s terms) of food by the Southern Baptists. In so doing, the irruption and the fixation on the object reveals the lack which lies at the heart of the person formed out of this culture. What does the obese pastor reveal about the truth of our lives together in evangelical orthodoxy? Is it that we really do prefer alcohol and tobacco to Jesus? Is it that the Christian life is really plain unattractive when put next to the attractions of American hedonism? Is then Jerry Falwell’s obesity the Symptom of what is missing in the authoritarian rules concerning abstinence of alcohol, tobacco, dancing and movies for all Southern Baptist clergy and students who go to Falwell’s Liberty University.

In the same way, I want to consider how the figures of Bush, Ebbers/Lay and Jessica, and the events surrounding their lives, are symptoms irrupting that reveal the lack within our evangelical belief and practice. I will consider a.) the moment of satisfaction (jousiannce) for Bush aboard the USS Lincoln in 2003 announcing "Mission Accomplished!" in the execution of the war in Iraq, b.) the self righteous acclaim to capitalist success according to all the rules for Ebbers and Lay, and the delight Jessica shows in her own sexualization in the media as "acts" (in Zizekian terms) which reveal the lack behind what drives the Symbolic Order that is evangelicalism. In so doing the characters of these figures is revealed. In so doing, the true and tragic "subjectivities" are revealed that have been formed in some way from evangelical doctrine and practice. Something very Real is exposed about their character as evangelicals in their respective failures and the extreme justifications mounted around them in the media. They become more than personal biographies. They become symbols of the kinds of people evangelicals have become in American culture. And with this cultural material, we can ask if evangelical doctrine and practice has anything to do with these kinds of people? Is this what evangelical doctrine and practice produces? are we these kinds of people?

More to come in the coming months.

Radical Orthodoxy Colloquium

traditio presents:

[Click for larger jpg | Click for Full PDF]

My friend Pete asked me to post this announcement about a colloquium on Radical Orthodoxy being held at Baylor (Waco, TX) in November, the week before the AAR starts in San Diego.  It consists of various panels (see here) going from Tuesday November 13 - Thursday November 15th.

There will be papers on "How the Jesuits Invented Modern Higher Education" by John F Montag SJ; "If Jesus is Fully Human, He Must be God" by Aaron Patrick Riches; "Nihilism, Art, Theology and the Prodigal Son, Or, There is no Sex outside Marriage" by Conor Cunningham; and a panel discussion on Radical Orthodoxy with John F Montag SJ, Patrick Aaron Riches, Conor Cunningham, Peter Candler, Tony Baker, and Robert Miner (chair).

It definitely sounds like some good discussions will be had.  While no promises can be made at this point, they are trying to hopefully get the panels recorded for posting online somewhere as well.  If that happens, I will provide the requisite follow up post.

Postmodern Liturgy? A Conversation About Christian Worship and Postmodernism

Over the past several weeks I've enjoyed some wonderful discussions with the staff of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship around Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?, trying to think together about what this might mean for the life of worship and discipleship.  This is an outstanding crew of thoughtful, passionate, creative folks and it was a treat to think out loud about these matters over the past couple months.  One of the Institute's maestros, Nathan Bierma (sub-maestro to the maestro of maestros, John Witvliet), has posted some thoughts about the book, as well as some snippets of the conversation in a mp3 file that non-academics might find helpful.

The Geometry of Architecture and Church

In The Geometry of Art and Life, Matila Ghyka says that the mathematics of architecture are about ratio, proportion and analogy. Ratio is a set relationship between two measures or numbers, proportion is developed in a series of relationships (in time), and analogy is the link holding them together. Imagine a rectangle with sides whose measures are 2 and 3. Now imagine a rectangle with sides whose measures are 4 and 6. Those two rectangles are in proportion with each other, and the analogy between them is 2.

These, however, are mere numbers. Geo-metry means “earth-measure.” The numbers once meant something. Pythagoras probably demonstrated (not “discovered” or “invented”) his theorem with triangular ceramic, stone or wood tiles. So what I plan to do in this post is draw an analogy between some of the key relationships at play in two famous museums designed by two famous contemporary architects (relationships which might be termed mathematical or geometric) and some corresponding relationships at play in what might be described as two contemporary ways of doing church (relationships which also might be descried as geometric).

There is a well-known evangelical way of doing church that is nicely exemplified in the hotly debated virtues or lack thereof of the typical mega-church (or in smaller churches that emulate them). Its like a shiny, well oiled machine that runs so smoothly that its members just continue to desire joyfully to do all the necessary work to keep the heavy and complicated machine running just as smoothly as it “always has.” After all, the point of a nicely humming machine is to attract “other” now-greatly-blessed people to come over and take a look at your shiny red car, right? Off, then, into the great frontiers…err, wheat fields…of God’s labour!

Corresponding to the peacefully running well-oiled pretty and shiny machine of the mega-church is The Getty Center in Los Angeles, CA, by American (of course) architect Richard Meir. Like the shiny mega-church, it photographs really well; however the photographs are often merely graphic and actually mean next to nothing (and often have no relationship to the ground). I mentioned once to a pastor who runs something like a mega-church that there is a strong correspondence to his typically Cartesian way of moving around the world by notation and the fact that the cross on the wall in his church has no body. He simply explained to me the history of the Protestant tradition of showing the cross without the body of Christ in order to celebrate the Resurrection. In his mind that was pretty much the end of the discussion (but not before he did share some fairly personal and touching stories of his own experiences with death).

The Getty is designed on a graphically-imposed orthogonal grid whose module size is determined by the distance at which most Americans have a “comfortable” level of intimacy when standing next to another person (determined by a survey, of course).  If I remember right this measure is 30 inches, but in Africa, or even Europe, you will notice that people stand much closer to each other in line. Similarly the preaching in a mega-church has that funny “warm tone” to it, but in reality the guy is talking to thousands of people he’s never met using an expository format that is meant to graphically expose everything in an obscene way to all these foreign people. By "obscene" there I mean the exposing of more than what is appropriate, even the very source of life, to a public showing.

Correspondingly, at the Getty there is no Shadow. Instead the joints between the elements of construction expose the fact that the shadows are really meant to be reveals. A reveal, these days, is a joint in the plaster finish of a building to prevent cracking. Or back in the day when a mason would take a hand tool to get the extraneous mortar that had dripped out of the joint between the bricks off the wall, the tool might leave a "reveal." Or in enlightenment period architecture, sometimes you just see this horizontal band, a visual/linear line of a little shadow cut into the stone finish of the building that is meant to evoke the mechanical motion of...well, everything...including the planets going around and around (hence the band's going "around and around" the building, and hence the elliptical contour of the wall around which the "reveal" probably runs "around"). At Meir's building, the "reveals" are the little joints between the white aluminum panels, or between the stones that are mechnaically fixed to the side of the building as the finish. The reason you see the reveal is because it makes a shadow; but figuratively it is not a Shadow but a reveal.

Additinally, the Getty is designed in such a way as to look holy and pure and “set apart” from its context. Of course, though, we then have to be reconciled to “nature,” so there are a bunch of gardens and trees around the grounds in which people can mosey. And the buildings themselves seem to twist and turn peacefully along with the Romance of the innocent American Landscape, a “view” of which is a primary feature of the Getty experience. In that picture one should take note the “fallen impurities” of the tall buildings in the way of the view (so unfortunately); luckily for the viewer they are really far away and so comfortably insignificant.

Similarly a mega-church has supposedly been “set apart” into a holy life with God. The only problem is that it is not really till after we die, so it is kind of far away and appears insignificant (the “it” that is far away is either life in the now or life in heaven after we die). Or maybe life with God is even in the now, but just as the Getty Center looks white, pure and shiny but isn’t really any different from the “context” around it – and in fact borrows its most important and determining features from its “context” – both the mega-church and the Getty, in their Downy-absorbent whiteness, really don’t do anything but cater to the stifling powers that be. In their “whiteness” they take on the colors of the things around them, although in a way that looks quite distorted and even a bit horrifying.

Ironically the biggest problems the architect had getting the Getty built was with the neighborhood “context” around the proposed center. The neighbors didn’t want this mechanically busy white piece of soon-rusted metal in the way their peaceful life in the mountains.

There is another less well-worn way of doing church that some evangelicals have been exploring lately. It doesn’t rely on expository disjunctions between what we do now and the “landscape” or context that we inhabit. It doesn’t rely on a series of whitely abstracted propositions about truths that conform strictly to the eternal laws of logic but then have a hard time conforming to the actual world that we live in. And it generally seems less interested in the erotic shiny redness of the well-oiled sports car. Instead some people today are interested in embracing their history as the only door to their present and future in such a way that – surprise - life and all of its oily and greasy mess is actually lived in a hopefully coherent way that leads to the wholeness of man living with and toward God. Some of us are trying to live in sight of the Cross and Resurrection rather than the red shiny Carriage. The King's Carriage is of course carried on the backs of the workers rather than on that of Jesus.

Corresponding in my analogy to this new way of doing church, about which others have already said much that they are more qualified than myself to say, is Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. The building shares a plot of land with and sits right next to a pre-existing museum of the history of Berlin, which itself was built in the 1800s. As a tribute to the importance of the past in shaping the present, the only entrance to Libeskind’s new museum is through the old and pre-existing one. The new museum has no public entrance of its own.

Rather than being a reactionary tribute to the fading shine of the red sports car (think Joel Osteen as a most extreme example), the museum is also meant to, through various expressions of the language of architecture, remember the pain of the Holocaust and the resulting sense of loss and place of the Void in our souls and in the world. Yet the building is also meant to, in the face of such pain and sorrow, celebrate the past and ongoing collaborative influence of the Jewish people of Berlin on their city. As Libeskind says: The task of a Jewish Museum in Berlin demands more than a mere functional response to the program. Such a task in all its ethical depth requires the incorporation of the void of Berlin back into itself, in order to disclose how the past continues to affect the present and to reveal how a hopeful horizon can be opened through the aporias of time (to note: I apologize for the lack of a proper reference, but all the quotes provided here by Daniel Libeskind are from a particular book, owned by me but packed away in a long and winding rabbit hole due to my recent move across the country, on his Jewish Museum in Berlin).

Like the more liturgical character of some of the new churches, the parts of the Jewish museum are themselves like measured modules of the life of the Jewish people of Berlin, meant to reflect the character of Jewish life and the Jewish God. It is also constructed or ordered in such a way that those invisible and visible remnants of Jewish life and the character of their God (both painful and hopeful, scarring and encouraging) is to be gathered into one experience, in time, of the “microcosmic” whole of the museum and city, an experience which itself will later leave a kind of footprint of memory in one’s soul after having “been through” it (someone I respect once said that an architectural plan is like a footprint). Says Libeskind: The Jewish Mesuem has a multivalent relation to its context. It acts as a lens magnifying the vectors of history in order to make the continuity of spaces visible.

Interestngly, then, rather than being designed over a superimposed and at least conceptually infinitely extended “grid,” the overall plan is a broken construction of the ancient Jewish symbol, the Star of David. The many-sided "symbol" of the Star of David is not, by the way, just an object that appears on the spacially flat and infinite screen of life, but fits inside the geometric Unity of a circle as part of a larger alchemical geometric construction of the world (figuratively speaking, of course). The referenced figurative geometric construction is that of a square (an ancient symbol for mother earth) inside a circle (signifying the heavens), and its beginnings are actually the logo of Studio Libeskind.

Back to the Jewish Museum, the grounds do not form a flat platform good for viewing the whole world as if from atop the Tower of Babel, but instead leaves the pilgrim on a series of labyrinthine and interconnected pathways that are often deeply disorienting and yet in turn sometimes profoundly re-orienting. Spacially, the re-orientation is only possible through the actual physical and sensible horizon, which was unfortunately lost a good 400 years ago. Even a keen awarenes of, as well as a profound questioning of a naive reliance upon what we take to be the very laws of optics, are a part of the actual "ground plan" of the building (Libeskind knew that Deleuze was aware that objects in the world become subjects when they stare back at you). This becomes very evident in some of his drawings. In some of his early exploratory drawings, the vanishing point, which occurs at the "ground," is exposed and exploded as something more than just a point on a line at which you stare blankly. You can see the remnants of this in his buildings.

Interestingly, Libeskind’s mentor was Catholic, and the following quote from him helps me to come to terms with the definition and sacramental nature of ritual. The Jewish Museum is conceived as an emblem in which the Invisible and Visible are the structural features which have been gathered in this space of Berlin and laid bare in an architecture where the unnamed remains the name which keeps still. Libeskind also says: The Jewish Museum is based on the invisible figures whose traces constitute the geometry of the building. The ground on which the building stands is not only the apparent one in Kreuzberg, but that other one which is both above and below it (Libeskind).

Libeskind’s mentor, mentioned a moment ago (named John Hejduk), would in his projects oftentimes be sure to bring you into contact with a scratching of the surface of the ground before you enter simply to remind you that its here. I had mentioned that at Libeskind’s museum, you can only enter through the past, but you also actually enter through the ground. You actually break the surface of the ground and descend into the depths of the earth in order to begin your journey of contact with the above-ground Jewish history of Berlin. You enter the depths of the Ground of Being, and by the time many people emerge from their experience of the building they are on their knees weeping, having been stirred to the depths of their soul.

As soon as you enter the building, then, you are underground, as when you proceed through more liturgical worship. The only “windows” are above you. They are the breaking of the surface of the ground, and in form and placement are part of the embodied story of the building and the city. The windows are the physical manifestation of a matrix of connections pervading the site. These ‘cuts’ are the actual topographical lines joining addresses of Germans and Jews immediately around the site and radiating outwards. The windows are the ‘writing of the addresses by the walls of the Museum itself’ (Libeskind).

As you can see, then, the windows are more than simply panes of glass meant to fulfill the biological function of sight. After contact with the Jewish Museum, some come to associate these “cuts” in the face of the building with facial “scars” (those of the past, no doubt). Like a missional church, the museum, rather than being a pristinely disjointed machine for the production of surface level truths and experiences that avoid the depths of reality, elicits deep sympathies with the very depths of God and the human heart.

Another interesting aspect of Libeskind referring to the “windows” as “cuts”, again considering his interest in the actualization of history, is the fact that the word “covenant” means “to cut.” It is a reference to the covenant ritual performed by God and Abraham, in which Abraham “cut” the animals into two halves through which the a holy fire of God then passed, thus symbolizing the two sides of the covenant between God and man. This was the “old covenant” on which stands the covenant by which our savior bears our “scars.”

Once you have entered the museum and are underground, the image of the God in you and in covenant with you is played out through your choices between three pathways (which in the procession of the Stations of the Cross, are associated with Christ's pathos). As you walk down each, you find that they lead, respectively, to a Void with a sliver of light descending from above accompanied by an upside down staircase, an “upside down” Garden of Exile and Emigration, and a long and slowly ascending staircase leading up to the exhibition spaces from which light floods downwards.

And just for the curious, here is what the “windows” look like from inside the building on the upper levels. It is appropriate, by the way, that its the windows, the openings, that symbolize the covenant. In Greek mythology windows are Orphic; in the Judeo-Christian tradition windows guide us on our procession toward God. It is often those heterogeneous places in a given space of a Libeskind building where the "cuts" begin and/or end that you begin to notice the figure of vanishing point staring back at you.

Much could be said about all of these, and the rest of the architectural features (or “words”) of the museum, as well as how it relates analogically through other buildings to other ecclesiologies. Suffice it to say for now, however, that the building is meant to be an embodiment – in time - of what it means to be human, or maybe Jewish, in the specific world in which we dwell and in relation to God. It is not a machine with a distant love/hate relationship to the body that involves lots of bickering arguments between originally harmonious parts of the self, arguments which themselves involve throwing foreign cinematic projectiles at a screen from across the room.

Instead the objects in the room, so to speak, are meant to be gathered up as parts of a meaningful and coherent whole that does not ignore the pains of our days or our bodies but instead “lays bare” all the deepest desires placed on our heart by God in such a way as to make a “pathos” to a place of hope in the face of an all-too-easily-ignored blackness (thus leading to those regrettable yet memorable purchases of red sports cars). Although Libeskind often intentionally ignores entirely the term "form" in his written discourses because of all the baggage that comes with it, the very form of his building, and not just the linguistic content that is often assumed to be the only messenger in the world, is meant to be part of the wholistic message of hope and breath in a constricted world of darkness whose future can tend to look so bleak.

Call for Papers: Postmodernism, Truth, and Religious Pluralism

Fourth Biennial Conference
Society for Continental Philosophy & Theology

Postmodernism, Truth, and Religious Pluralism

April 11-12, 2008
Gordon College (Wenham, MA)

Keynote Speakers:
Roger Haight (Union Theological Seminary)
Richard Kearney (Boston College)

With the so-called “return of religion,” it is almost impossible not to address the issue of religious pluralism, which acutely raises the question of truth. What kind of positive sense of religious truth is possible in a postmodern era? What is religious truth—is it representational, propositional, orthopractical, symbolic, aletheiological, or something else altogether? How does the notion of “truth” square with a multiplicity of religious traditions? Is the very term “religion” appropriate in a pluralistic society, since the term is distinctly western? How might the earnest faith of a Christian, say, be compatible with the equally earnest faith of other believers or even non-believers? With the varieties of religions (not to mention the varieties of expressions of religions), how can their respective differences be respected? Are there forms of religious expression that simply cannot find a place in the public square?

We encourage papers that draw on continental figures; philosophical traditions such as deconstruction, feminist philosophy, hermeneutics, and phenomenology; and religious traditions such as Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

Only complete papers (maximum of 3,000 words) will be accepted. Papers should be prepared for blind review and sent to Trent.J.Koutsoubos@Wheaton.edu as email attachments.

DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 15, 2008

The Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology seeks to promote inquiry at the intersection of philosophy and theology. For more information about SCPT, visit http://www.scptonline.org. For further information regarding the conference, contact Bruce.Ellis.Benson@Wheaton.edu.

Coming to America

Geoff suggested that I post a note on some upcoming events that may be of interest to this blog's readers.  For me, though not for most of you, they will require coming to America... which still feels weird.

First, Azusa Pacific University is sponsoring an event called "Evangelical Voices on Science and Culture" on November 15.  Jamie and I are both involved in this conference, as well as Craig Boyd, Amos Yong and Tom Oord.

Second, the Stead Center for Ethics and Values at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary in Chicago is sponsoring a conference on "Christology and Ethics" in early March.  The speakers are Jan-Olav Henriksen, Lois Malcolm, Kathryn Tanner, J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Bernd Wannenwetsch, Brent Waters, John Webster and me.

I'll post more details on my blog as soon as they are available, but I wanted to give you all a heads up.

Is Philosophy a "Way" or a "Tool"?

Question for the Week:  Is Philosophy a 'way of life' or a 'tool of thought'?

Advanced question: How does the decision between either 'way' or 'tool' effect philosophy's relation to faith and church practice?

(Extra points for those who can ferret out the context of this question.)

(and super extra points for those who can explain which type of philosophy the previous post assumes.)

And lastly, check out 'Rebellion (Lies)' by Arcade Fire, first because it is a great song be a great band, but also because of what it might say to this question (and tips the hand of my answer):

Sleeping is giving in, no matter what the time is.
sleeping is giving in, so lift those heavy eyelids.

people say that you'll die faster than without water.
but we know it's just a lie, scare your son and scare your daughter.
 
people say that your dreams are the only things that save ya.
come on baby in our dreams, we can live our misbehaviour.

everytime you close your eyes lies, lies!
everytime you close your eyes lies, lies!

Telling God's Story: "Homiletics as Biblical Hermeneutics"

My pastor, professor, and friend, the Rev. Dr. John W. Wright, recently released an illuminating book called Telling God's Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation.  For the scope of this post, I will only be covering what Wright is doing in the first chapter, dubbed "Homiletics as Biblical Hermeneutics." [Brief glossary: "homiletics" means the study of or art of preaching, and "interpretation" can be thought of in place of "hermeneutics".]

Horizons and being grasped by Scripture

In this first chapter, Wright argues that "preaching is not merely a technique of application subsequent to interpretation"; rather, "preaching represents interpretation par excellence" (p. 12).  Drawing on Robert Bellah, Wright offers a diagnosis of recent trends which has left pastors in a situation such that the 'managerial' demands of a pastor are contrasted with the 'therapeutic' needs of those sitting in the pews whereby the therapeutic always wins the day.  Thus, Scriptures then must made relevant and conform to the individual in need of therapy, but Wright would rather ask: "How do we translate human lives into the biblical narrative to live as part of the body of Christ in the world?" (p. 19)

Wright traces much of this disconnect to the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher.  Seeking to remove ambiguity from interpretation, Schleiermacher attempted to set up a universal method of interpretation that objectively sought after the true meaning of the text -- perhaps even better than the original author!  Meaning in Scripture, however, must be kept purely historical, and thus has no contemporary relevance.  Effectively, "Hermeneutics is about historical retrieval; homiletics [is] about contemporary significance" (p. 24).  The wedge is firmly hammered in: hermeneutics (meaning) gets relegated to professionals in the academy, and preaching is for pastors.  As Wright notes, Scripture itself then becomes a 'relic' to be excavated.  Or, as Indiana Jones often quipped, "It belongs in a museum!"

Tracing his story after Schleiermacher, Wright introduces Martin Heidegger and his pupil Hans-Georg Gadamer into the fray of interpretation. For Heidegger, his hermeneutical circle made it such that "Interpretation is not a method per se, but the enclosing of new data that arises from within the whole of human lives" (p. 26).  Wright uses the example of parents who, after an initial trip to urgent care to discover that their relentlessly crying child had an earache, they will now know what signs to look for to signify an earache, if another episode should occur.

Gadamer, deepening Heidegger's insight, explicitly recognized that there was something about preaching that "revealed important dynamics of what goes on in all interpretation":

Gadamer's rethinking of the relationship between interpretation and application holds the key to our story about preaching as interpretation.  If the theologian and preacher Schleiermacher developed an interpretative theory that excluded preaching from interpretation, the philosopher Gadamer explicitly held preaching up as a normative exemplar of the very dynamic of interpretation.  Of all practices associated with reading texts, Gadamer noted that both legal judgment and preaching embraced application as central to their task:

In both legal and theological hermeneutics there is an essential tension between the fixed text--the law or the gospel--on the one hand and, on the other, the sense arrived at by applying it at the concrete moment of interpretation, either in judgment or in preaching.  A law does not exist in order to be understood historically, but to be concretized in its legal validity by being interpreted.  Similarly, the gospel does not exist in order to be understood as a merely historical document, but to be taken in  such a way that it exercises its saving effect.  this implies that the text, whether law or gospel, if it is to be understood properly--i.e., according to the claim it makes--must be understood at every moment, in every concrete situation, in a new and different way.  Understanding here is always application (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming [New York: Seabury Press, 1975], pp. 309-10).

According to Gadamer's insight, application remains within interpretation.  Preaching provides an archive from which application could be retrieved as an indispensable aspect of interpretation (Wright, pp. 28-9).

For the Christian, then, "There is no meaning and then application; the application grows, changes direction, corrects, reproves as part of the very hearing of the text withing the ongoing life of the Christian" (p. 30).  Thus, "Interpretation is application because to grasp the meaning of something changes the history of the one who grasps and is grasped by the text in the very act of grasping" (ibid).

Wright points to the example of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Dr. King did not merely "apply Scripture" and "apply" the writings of Gandhi who, in turn, read from Jesus' teaching of nonviolence. 

Rather, King stood within a particular history, the history of the oppression of African Americans in the United States.  He stood at a particular time, the time of the African American struggle for civil rights.  Finally, he, along with other African Americans, stood within the church as a people formed by the Scriptural teaching on nonretaliation.  King's concrete historical existence opened him to grasp the gospel's teaching on nonviolence, even as those same teachings grasped him (p. 31).

Comedy vs. Tragedy, or complacency vs. call to conversion

In the last section of this chapter, Wright contrasts the notions of comedy and tragedy as they correspond to the horizons and outlooks we all share.  He upholds the TV show I Love Lucy as an example of a comedy that reinforces the continuities of love, despite the disruptions of the disturbances of life.  On the other hand, a tragedy such as Romeo and Juliet calls into question our assumptions about love and challenges us such that we realize the frailty of life itself. 

Instead of a continuity with one's horizons, a discontinuity is experienced.  Gadamer calls this "hermeneutical experience" (and Alasdair MacIntyre calls this an "epistemological crisis").  Speaking again of texts, Wright states, "Whereas the fusion of horizons enfolds a text into our past horizons [comedy], hermeneutical experience [tragedy] opens our horizons to the future" (p. 40).  It is at this point that this opening up to the future has the hope of opening up the possibility of seeing anew.

For the preacher, Wright considers the tragic moment such that it "unseals the congregation so that they might find their lives in the biblical narrative, rather than absorbing the biblical narrative into [their lives]" (p. 44).  Throughout the chapter, Wright equates the construing of the biblical narrative as it enfolds the lives of Christians into God's story one that sets the church up as a "contrast society" (Wright draws heavily from Rodney Clapp and Stanley Hauerwas here). 

As a contrast society, proclaiming the good news of the Gospel, we may be able to receive the gift of Christ such that we also pose that "tragic" moment to the world so that it, as Wright says in his introduction, "might see, and in seeing, believe."

On the receiving end of preaching: What are ways in which our own churches fall prey to only preaching comedies, or, sermons in which there is only a continuity between the way we already live our lives and what we know of Scripture? (Leaving aside, of course, the fact that everybody likes a funny preacher.)  Or, here's a good one: What are ways we have been preached at "tragically" such that the discontinuity called for invokes a challenge we are not ready to face? 

On the proclaiming side: In what ways can we better our own proclamation of the good news -- nay, in what ways can we more faithfully proclaim the gospel such that we do not capitulate to the continuities and comfort of the stories we already live within, but rather preach such that it is God's story in which we should be finding ourselves? [Note: I intend "preach" very loosely hear, I don't imagine that everybody is a preacher reading this; instead, I mean "to proclaim" in all aspects of our lives.  Wright's book is on preaching, but it should grasp us beyond thinking that it is a book explicitly for those called "preacher."]