Zionist Offerings and Resistance to Capitalism

While listening to Geoff present his work to our Seminar on liturgy as resistance to capitalism, I was put in mind of Robin Petersen's analysis of the South African Zion Christian Church. Robin was a brilliant young theologian, full of promise, who has now dropped off the scene. His work has given me several cues for my own analysis of South African Christianity. What follows is from his doctoral dissertation (bibliographical details follow):

"Money, as Marx showed, is the ultimate symbol of the mysterious power of capitalist production; it is seemingly unrelated to the materiality that it is (the coin, the paper), the materiality that it can command (commodities), and the labor necessary for its acquisition. It is the ultimate free-floating signifier, or so it seems. It is also the symbol of the domination of wage labor for those who are subjected to its command but never have enough of it. The ritual offering of the mission churches reinforces this anonymity—the money is given only semi-publically and is detached from the giver. The Zionist church offering, on the other hand, is a clear attempt to bring the alien and detached power of money under social control. As described by [Jean] Comaroff (and witnessed by this author on numerous occasions), the money that is given is publically presented, with each giver dancing to the table on which the offering plate is set, publically displaying how much is being given, and invoking prayers an blessings over each coin as it is placed in the plate. The whole process is communally oriented. On a few occasions, for instance, I observed two plates being set up; one for the work of the church, and one for a particular member who had a special need at the time (anything from funeral expenses to unemployment). Each person giving showed exactly how much was going into each plate, and prayed for the person in need. In this way, an attempt is made to resituate the coin, symbol of domination and of power outside of their control, into a ritually controlled and communally orientated context. Comaroff describes the logic of this as follows: ‘These media circulate through communicative processes which themselves appear to marginalize people at the periphery; hence the major vehicles of value have come to elude their grasp… In these circumstances, efforts are made to restructure activity so as to regain a sense of social control… repositories of value, like the Zionists’ money,are resituated within practices that promise to redirect their flow back to the impoverished, thus healing their affliction.’"

Petersen, R. M. 1995. Time, Resistance, and Reconstruction: Rethinking Kairos Theology. Diss. University of Chicago, 230-231.

The Worst Liturgical Innovations in the History of the Church...

... is offered in honour of the Calvin seminar reaching its halfway point. Enjoy!

http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2006/07/new-poll-worst-liturgical-invention.html

(None of these tops the Puppet Eucharist, though several come close.)

Calvin SCS —Summer 2007—Day 5
July 2, 2007

Reading: Cavanaugh, W. T. 2004. Discerning: Politics and reconciliation. In The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, S. Hauerwas and S. Wells, 196–208. Malden, PA: Blackwell.

Link to PDF of my presentation.

CP: Could this be narrated as searching for eucharist (nation-building 1) and finding eucharist (nation-building 2)… but the eucharist that’s found is the market? MG: How about an even bolder narration: the state doesn’t matter? Peter Storey talks about Tutu at the height of the repression of the state saying to the Prime Minister (and ignoring the latter’s weapons): "You can still go over to the right side."

On the issue of apartheid in the churches (and the performance metaphor): can the eucharist be performed badly? The eucharist is to rearrange our common lives. CP: The nation state is built on a logic of not-remembering (representing itself as timeless). It can’t talk about time in the way the church does. SL: Spatial boundaries function by violence. MG: Why give up space? Doesn’t this give us the "invisible church"? Christ on the cross takes up space. MB: Space is part of the drama of church history. How would you spatialize the unity of the church? MG: As a gift. Better a martyr than a soldier. CD: Perhaps "creation order" is a way of imagining the space called church. SL: What about those places like the Vatican and Canterbury? We can celebrate their beauty without having a stake in defending them. What we want to do is affirm BC’s idea of church as time without letting go of importance of certain spaces. CP: Church buildings should be disruptive. Architecture can do this.

JR: If the body is so important why aren’t we talking about footwashing. CP: Footwashing can be both a powerful practice and an empty sign. MG: can’t inhabit a space nonviolently without an eschatology. LA: Perhaps we do need to let space claim us. Look at the North American practice of choosing not to worship in our own parish. Perhaps we should worship in our own parish no matter how good the liturgy across town is.

CD: Cavanaugh’s idea of performing is weak. It is insufficiently ontological. I like better the idea of a drama on a cosmic level, taking place in the space opened between the Father and the Son.

Calvin SCS —Summer 2007—Day 4
June 26, 2007
Reading: Charles R. Pinches, A Gathering of Memories: Family, Nation, and Church in a Forgetful World (Brazos, 2006).
Main points in Pinches' (CRP) presentation from his handout:

1. "The moral life is not fundamentally about choice or achievement, but rather about response to gifts received. We receive who we are from those who have gone before us, and those near to us who have offered us love and care, especially our families and local communities. Remembering is the first essential step in discovering the gifts of the identities we have received."

2. "Remembering the past means more than to gawk at it, like a tourist (at Reading). The power of memory lies rather in participation (like at Gettysburg). I remember as one who shares in a story sustained by the sacrifice of others. Yet the power of participatory memory is never benign, and can quickly turn violent. Especially in the modern climate where identity is unstable, nations are prone to sudden, self-deceptive lunges to identify and remember as a WE over against a THEM."

3. "The church must resist nationalism, especially as it competes for faith and hope. Yet radical critiques of patriotism (e.g., Hauerwas’) risk detachment from the body and the earth, to which we are held by family and country. Christian witness, rather, can mingle in national stories, as illustrated by Lincoln, King, or Romero."

4. "Without obliterating ‘natural’ memories, Christian memory is tied securely to a different bodily presence: Christ’s, shared at table, broken on the cross, resurrected in the body of the church. ‘Doing this in rememberance of me’ sustains Christians in a hope that endures every betrayal. Whiile in one sense ‘spiritual,’ the hope reorients bodily life (e.g. in Christian marriage) and is made flesh in witnesses like Romero, a national hero but more importantly a Christian saint and martyr."

KS: This sounds like a nature-grace split, wherein grace transfigures nature. Is this correct? CRP: It’s a danger in the book… but the point is that nature (and body) matters. There may be a parallel to Aquinas’ idea that charity transforms prudence. I’m trying to resist gnosticism. Christ’s body gathers us up into embodied communities. But there are always two stories. Romero is a martyr but also a national hero. Christians can name who Romero is in a way not possible outside the church. KS: I want to see how Romero makes El Salvador possible. CRP: El Salvador will bear Romero’s memory in another way, with another telos. We can speak of both earthly and heavenly peace. CD: Hauerwas’ problem is that the model of the church in exile makes Christians zombie-like. This risks the possibility of KS’ critique. We have to be both with and against the story of the world.

KM: Does CAP entrust the church to bear memory or does it only train our memory? CAP: It’s a mistake to try to make church memory compete with other memories. The megachurch tries to "make church memorable." This is wrong. KM: does church have a history in judaism? is our history borrowed? [MG: sentimentality. does CRP turn all "sex appeal" over to the nation? no attempt to narrate church stuff with any beauty. CRP: if God forgets we don’t think of ourselves as known in terms of the sins. readiness to forget can also open up a way of remembering the darkness.]

SW: I worry about blood sacrifice and nationalism, especially in the Gettysburg account. Does this make blood necessary? The language of atonement belongs to the church. Can it be legitimately used by the nation? CRP: surely the kind of atoning Lincoln wanted is not the kind the church speaks of. KB: Actually, Lincoln (incidently a Deist, not a Christian) wanted bloodshed (and it’s dangerous to Christianize this). The question is: how do we name Lincoln truthfully?

MG: There seems to be an ijmplication that the nation is better able than the church to narrate the beauty of the world. Do we give this over to the nation because we are not as good at narrating? After the time of martyrs, have we turned the body over to the nation? KM: The church reclaims the body in baptism.

PH: The experience of 9/11 raises the question of how to remember suffering in American history. It opens the hidden wound (of slavery). What about King as martyr rather than Romero? Mark Noll argues that since Christians couldn’t resolve slavery (through the use of proof texts), it was left to the generals to resolve it through bloodshed. CRP: 3,000 Americans were killed in 9/11. Our first repsonse is, let’s not forget the other people who died. But does 9/11 have the same significance in remembering the Americans who died? Is it good or bad that we feel more for the Americans who died? Are we democratic about death? Rightly accounting for the nation is rightly accounting for family (our natural community). We [Christians? Americans?] shouldn’t think of everyone’s death the same way. JR: Is our inability to democratically remember death descriptive or normative? SL: Thomism asks, do I not have an obligation to love those nearer me? CRP: At the same time, we have to name danger of the nation-state having its own god that will do whatever it wants. Nations can’t live without gods. The church’s challenge is to name the idolatry of the nation’s god.

JR: Why does CRP want to rehabilitate this particular term "nation"? CRP: There are two reasons: 1. it parallels the idea of "country" (which is tied to the history of land); 2. the Bible speaks of "nations" raging against Christ. So we have to account for it. Family and nation are both good and dark, and we have to name the darkness in the nation.

CRP’s challenging question: during the celebration of Uganda martyrs day (in Uganda), the church invites international pilgrims to process at offertory with the flag of their country displayed. He was recently asked, "Can you bring an American flag?"

JR: The split of the Mennonite church between Canada and the USA was a tragic story. Christians should resist replicating the divisions that flags represent. CP: Doesn’t this illustrate the problem of "overaccepting" (see Sam Wells’ Improvisation book) nation and nationalism? How do we imagine this land? What sorts of land are problematic? Is this a problem with CRP’s attempt to mediate the Porter-Hauerwas debate? Is the pathos of A Gathering of Memories related to Canadian-American border-crossing. CRP: I had the great fortune of always being in Canada on the 4th of July. CP: What about borders? Who decides what they are? MB: How long does it take for a construct to become "natural"? All nations presumed dispossession of people from land, with levels of exclusion and power that a few generations later seem "natural". What stake does the church have in this? SL: Do we have a stake in the natural? Theological moves are now taking place abandoning nouvelle theology in favour of "pure nature". What is "natural" now in light of technology (when males can become females, etc.)?

CRP: Again wants to assert that we should be able to tell stories as Christians about particular pieces of land. There is a danger in dualistically detaching from the land that these stories can’t be told.

SM: An outsider to the Thomist natural law debates. Do we need to raise the question of the ontological status of human constructs, and the eschatological status of human acts? The nations, made as they are, have some role to play in the eschatological city (Isaiah 60 says the kings of the earth bring their treasures to the eschatological city—treasure no doubt gotten through violence). KM: This is a problem with the nature-grace discussion: it’s spatial. We need to introduce time (and eschatology) into the discussion. Land, we have to remember, is only "land" in time. SL: Ratzinger gives a caution, though. The "fall" in western culture happens with Vico’s dictum, "the true is the made". This demonstrates the dominance of the will. To correct this, the category of nature (in the sense of the given) needs to remain. CRP: The moves Christians make are toward gathering up. Treasures are not now gathered. God is the one who gathers up. SL: Jesus supernaturalizes love of the family at the cross: "Woman, behold your son" (John 19:26-27). GH: We are enabled to remember our families well because we remember Christ well (… and Judas). CRP: Church graveyards signal a reconfiguration of the family, and also its taking up into the Christian story.

PH: I like the portrayal of women in the book, and see a pattern of men being like Odysseus. SW: Reminded of how Matthew’s genealogy redeems sin through recollection of women like Bathsheba (treated in the book). LA: However, even the stories of women in the gospels are stories of women as imagined by men. Ironically, the people who do remembering the best are nuns (and remember nuns have displaced "natural" family ties). Note the way the elderly are cared for in convents.

MB: Is there a danger of being self-congratulatory about the significance of church identity in sustaining nation? Poland (like El Salvador) comes to mind, where you can’t separate church and nation. SL: How does the church function transnationally? We need to be careful of the fetishization of the particular in late modernity. The church has to be both local and translocal in order to avoid the idea that it’s the nation that makes the church possible. SM: Remember that the story the church is grafted into is a Jewish story. Therein lies its particularity. Jesus is not a generic human being but a Jewish male living in the time of the Roman empire. Maintaining the Jewishness of the story always locates the church in tension. MB: If the church is to remind the nation that it is not ultimate, how do we recognize its idolatry? What people are most attached to are the things they are ready to pay for, die for, and kill for. SL: Do I not have an obligation to protect my neighbour? Yoder talks about restraining evil and protecting the good.

CRP's last word: The unfinished business of the book is to think about the Eucharist and Christ’s body as a kind of land for us to live in.

Welcome to the United States

When I deplaned in Denver last week, this was one of the first things I saw...

No comment necessary (but feel free).

Calvin SCS —Summer 2007—Day 3
June 27, 2007
Text: Smith, A. D. 2003. Chosen peoples. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press; Hauerwas, S., and S. Wells, eds. 2004. The Blackwell companion to Christian ethics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.

John's summary: Smith says reports of the death of nationalism are premature. Nationalism is persistent. There are certain elective affinities between religion and national identity. ADS gives 3 models of their relation: [1] secular replacement of religion; [2] reformulation of religion into nationalism; [3] millenialist religion transmuted into nationalism. ADS examines the second—the nation as sacred communion—by showing how religious modes of being are adapted to support national identity. JR’s three reactions: [1] The historiographical context of ADS’s work. There are other clusters of scholarship saying similar things. An old tradition by Carleton Hayes (Chicago) generated work on "the surprising emergence" of nationalism after WW1. Within German historiography this is also a well-worn theme. Studies of the history of central Europe have taken three foci on "confessionalisation": a) Christian traditions consolidate convictions in form of confession as anchors of identity; b) The efforts of each group to communicate confessions to resistant populations; c) Tracking the rise of the modern state and its appropriation of impulses in social disciplines (how the state co-opts the church in using it as an agent of disciplining citizens). This is a somewhat reductionistic and top-down view. Smith’s view parallels Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Experience. Religion as the worship of the corporate body. [2] The history of church in ADS’s account disappears into the history of the state. It’s worth inquiring as to how religion and nationalism coexist.

Two directions of conversation: 1. the need for a more robust account of how religious groups ceded authority to the state. E.g. The Lutheran Augsburg Confession obliges the Christian prince to attend to the religious and social wellbeing of the subjects… yet no Lutheran would think this legitimate today. Even the early Luther contradicts this: he initially wants to define space for Christians outside the state, but after 1525 the Prince becomes summus episcopus. There’s nothing inevitable about this. Conscious choices were made. Eventually we get "God with us" on belt buckles. [3] We need a counterhistory (to that of ADS and AM) that traces the history of resistance. For instance, Norbert Elias on the civilizing process through examining a history of manners… collective rules of behaviour that are internalized. What would be the ecclesial analogues? We’ve talked about the Eucharist, but this hasn’t always carried the freight. Are there other forms? E.g. from the Mennonite tradition Sunday laws. Behind these there is a genuine concern to keep buying and selling from defining one’s life. Similar with "cultivated modesty" in speech (gelassenheit) that makes it more difficult to kill one’s enemy, or modesty in dress that shields from fashion world. Note the response to the Amish community killings. There was an immediate and collective understanding of what was to be done. What kinds of practices make that thinkable? Finally… is the problem nationalism? Or is there something deeper, traceable perhaps to when the sword became used to ensure the church’s survival? Can we distinguish among these forms: nation, kingdom, body of christ, new world, America as holy experiment, modern Israel, eschatological gathering? What does it mean to pray "thy kingdom come"? Does this prayer abet the process ADS describes? And how would we know the difference?

SL: Wolterstorff sees a rupture with nationalism--Constantinianism is at an end. SM: Augustine pushes the Fall back to Cain and Abel. CP: actually he pushes it back further to fall of angels, disembodied beings that are embodied (in states?) MG: Fleshing out how agencies function with reference to discipline. CP: does JR’s list have an anti-institutional bias (as if institutionalisation = fallenness). MG: What does agency look like? MB: Weapons of the spirit. SL: There’s an important question here. What is the relationship between agency and liturgical practices? There’s no simple causal relation. SW: Wink’s theology of the powers. CD: Question about what is agency? What’s the relation with intentionality? SL: Does Thomas’ natural, connatural, and supernatural help? The supernatural sheds light on the connatural and natural. […]

SL: How is confessionalization played out in evangelicals? How does a creed differ from a confession? CP: Councils are revisable in a way that confessions are not. CD: How to break out of confessionalism? SM: Can confessions be liberating in one context and not in others? CP: … and what’s the relation between the sacred text of the nation state and its practices? SL: There’s no penance before saying Pledge of Allegiance. MB: ADS gives four dimensions to nationalism appropriating biblical traditions: 1. community; 2. territory; 3. history; 4. destiny. These give rise to five core doctrines of nationalism: 1. world divided into nations; 2. the source of power is nation; 3. to be free every individual must belong to a nation 4. nations are autonomous; 5. a world of peace and justice must be founded on nations. MB: Example of this is in grafting nationalism onto former colonies. Basil Davidson’s account of nationalism in sub-Saharan Africa. CD: Christians can play into the hands of state builders by self-segregating, which feeds into state-building of four components.

SL: Let’s turn to the Blackwell Companion. How does liturgy as practice form and shape us as Christians in a way we can inhabit it, and why doesn’t it "work"? Ordered practices… habits… models. ecumenical diversity and divergence. Threefold form of the Body of Christ: historical body is absent (hence can’t be fetishized), but is mediated by word and sacrament. The eucharist makes the third form of the body of christ, the church (de Lubac). Question: what is the role of the liturgy and how does it help us address the question of identity? AS: Is their "Eucharist" like Levinas’ other that never shows up? A Baptist Eucharist has same ontological significance as a civil war reenactment. Compare this to a Russian Orthodox service. Are we talking about the same thing in each case? That said, there can be different liturgies within one tradition. (JR: does this foreground dogma? AS: No… it’s more like "see how we pray and you’ll see what we believe." GC: But what happens after the liturgy? Where’s the law of love? CP: Can we even call it "liturgy" if it’s not working? GC: Look at the Amish again… especially their response to the murders. And they don’t have a liturgy. KS: Here’s catechisis and the importance of it.

SL: Remember that the purpose of liturgy is not to form us but to worship God well. We have to watch instrumentalisation of liturgy. There has to be a Matt 25 … but the liturgy is not justified by Matt 25. AS: The liturgy is being used in different ways in this discussion. For me it’s shorthand for a way of life: the church year… fasting… BD: Reminds of the problem of distancing of laity from Eucharist. e.g. of Evensong where work of people is extracted from the people (where the people are an audience). AS: Leiturgia is a public work done for the people. Jesus is our chief liturgist.) CD: The Companion has no historical analysis of liturgy. Does this reify the eucharist (CD has the same critique of Cavanaugh)? SL: How does diversity of practice underwrite nationalism (assuming Marx’s point that catholic homogeneity does not provide a basis for nationalism)? MB: The book is part descriptive, part aspirational. AS: At some point dogma has to count. BP: Which comes first: liturgy or dogma? Why can’t we just eat? CD: Eschatological banquet… that’s where we’re going. SL: Mike and I are good friends but we can’t share the Eucharist. Maybe not having it is also formative.

SL: We have to be careful of identity politics in life of church. We may have to give something up for the sake of communion. The new creation is pouring out your life for others. The truth might mean that the Zwinglians and the Orthodox can’t both be right. We don’t have a right to our identities. CD: There’s a crisis now that there’s nothing to check capitalism. Are we prepared to risk? Will MacIntyre deliver us? Is he his own St. Benedict? The liturgy messes up predictibility of traditions… we don’t know where we’ll end up. The whole world is part of glory of God. If we don’t do liturgy the world will disappear. SL: Perhaps we should be doing this Maryologically. If Mary doesn’t say yes to God the incarnation doesn’t happen. The task of liturgy is to stand in the place of Mary and say yes. Hauerwas says the church makes Jesus possible. SL: The (over)use of "incarnational" is also a problem. MB: Can it be that unlearning nationalism and unlearning ecclesial divisions are two sides of the same coin?

Will Campbell debating someone on capital punishment: "you can’t be right because what you said is ugly and capital punishment is ugly and therefore it can’t be true. I didn’t learn much in philosophy but I did learn about the convertability of the transcendentals and if something isn’t beautiful it can’t be true or good."

Calvin SCS —Summer 2007—Day 2
June 26, 2007
Reading: Anthony Marx, Faith in Nation (OUP, 2005)

Note: Here begins a daily account of our Seminars in Christian Scholarship seminar on Liturgical Identities: National, Global, and Ecclesial. Members of the seminar are identified only by initials. The notes are my own and doubtless reflect my own particular understanding or lack thereof. Caveat lector!

Chad’s summary. Anthony Marx has two targets: Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner. His thesis: each depends on liberal way of narrating nationalism as emergence of an inclusive body politic. AM rather narrates nationalism as an attempt by an elite to encorporate masses. AM begins with 1492 Spain. Five things happened that year: (1) Christians completed conquest of formerly Muslim Spain (which was made possible (2) by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella 23 years previous which consolidated kingdoms); (3) the Jews were expelled by the Inquisition (which 14 years ago was given by the Pope to the monarchy to administer); the first vernacular grammar was published in Spanish; (5) Columbus departed for the west (Marx 2003, 3). Early nationalism understood by Marx as political drama in which an emerging state is looking for a partner. States are impotent by themselves. CP suggests this analogy: states are cult and nation is culture. The challenge is how to get masses to have "faith in nation"? Nationalism is the tool for generating collective soul and the linking of political culture to new cult. Thus state secures legitimacy on monopoly of coercion. This narrative runs counter to Rousseau (author of the dominent liberal narrative) who says shared ancestry gives rise to ???. This assumes the individual over the community. AM wants to push the origins back to 16th century religious tensions as generators of nationalism. There is no unifying group consciousness except that generated by elites. Much therefore turns on forgetting alternative solidarities. State requires nationalism to forge political body. But how to construct corporate will? The possibility comes from Protestant challenge to unity of catholic church (CR: what of Luther and Calvin on individual and collective will?). The disruption in liturgical identities generates possibility of new kind of liturgical identity. The pre (again Anderson and Gellner) that all this (the rise of nationalism) is social contract and society based and that no state action was needed is critiqued. Rather the mechanism of bringing them together is the state. This is also prior to consolidation of capitalism, contra Gellner. Anderson’s appeal to imagination ignores institutional power. More positively, AM’s argument is identity/difference: nationalism is exclusive because cohesion emerges out of conflict. Outsiders defined as untrustworthy if friends and evil if enemies. Thus inclusion is built on exclusion. Religion and early nationalism are different because liturgical identities not formed by state boundaries at all. All such boundaries are radically relativized. The loss of universality of church makes divisions tools for new secular form of allegiance. Nations are fragments of a lost catholicity. Religion is generator of sentiment of nationalism. Historians of nationalism participate in nation-building by forgetting the memory of past troubles. Thus selective amnesia is practiced by elites and masses. CR’s response: in support: idea of artificial body displayed in woodcut on original cover of Hobbes’ Leviathan. The King’s two bodies relates to the two natures of Christ, which is not dealt with. The separation of the two bodies (corpus mysticum and corpus verum) creates problem picked up in Luther and Calvin. Questions about earlier religious conflicts. How far back to go? What of 14th century peasant revolts? A final thought: what does this say to us about current divisions in the church?

Discussion: Civic and ethic nationalism as foundational dyad. JR: religious conflict as legitimatizing state action and resolving. Religious is source of violence and state is source of peace (Cavanaugh’s work on the Wars of Religion). MB: the story that liberalism tells to itself is a modern version of 1 Samuel (we want a king like the other nations), though the causality is probably the reverse. Early state-making agencies are more like protection rackets. SL: c.f. Rorty’s cautionary theory of truth: "no one knows how to resolve differences of doctrine" (which is not true: the church does know how to resolve such differences; it’s just that Rorty doesn’t like the method). Liberalism requires Christians to not resolve doctrinal differences. MB: problem of legitimacy. Does he create this himself. CD: the Preface is full of anxiety. He’s trying to avoid Hegelian-Marxist dialectic (e.g. p. 19). Note the phrase "dark age" on p. 18. We should avoid historical determinism, yes. but … MB: there is a remarkable change that has to be accounted for. In the mid-1400s there are about 500 political entities in Europe. Within 200 years, 500 becomes 50. SW: Note that the state is a top-down institution. MB: The definition of the state presupposed by Marx is Weberian. You are a state if you are treated as a state (i.e. recognized by other states). SW: Wallerstein’s idea that capitalism encompasses state-system. SL: The originality of Marx’s argument is that the state constantly creates a national identity through an act of selective forgetting. He turns on its head the dichotomy between state and civil society. If Marx is correct, civil society has been constituted by the state, not the state by civil society. [SM: this could segue to Mbeki’s attempt to coopt the churches]. States need resources. You can’t tax peasants (too dangerous). Early capitalism centralizes commerce, which solves the problem.

MG: what makes Marx’s narrative possible now? CP: States are renegotiating their power currently. CD: We need to problematize Tilly’s notion of a necessary relation of state and capitalism. Pierre Manent said you don’t go to war against your trading partners. MB: WW1 plays havoc with that thesis (trade was never greater than in 1914). JR: is it useful to distinguish different kinds of things called states? Should we spend more time on the different histories in ch. 2? Another question concerns the "victim narrative" of the church. The people are seen as as dupes, malleable. MB: The theological status of natural communities is important. Is it self-evident that there are certain groups drawn toward each other? Or is it constructed… and what theological status does this have? CP: contrasts Anderson’s (after W. Benjamin) Angel of History with St Bartholomew: a man canonized by faith but living in the world. One of the 12 apostles: founder of catholic faith and secular institution of church. He was also martyred (flayed with skin hanging off). CD: so Bartholomew vs. Benedict. SL: western liberal democracies identity constituted by exclusion (O’Donovan: politics is the art of exclusion). Is there a scapegoat mechanism still operative in US? BP: the liberal story as a reversal of augustine’s founding story of Cain v. Abel.

What does Marx say to the church? SW: Marx’s picture of world as one of conflict, violence, manipulation. Is there a way to be inclusive and preserve identities. LA: We have to acknowledge the myth of one united church under Jesus, with the external enemy of Jews and internal enemy of heretics. Why are we all of a sudden (after so many years of this legacy) against exclusion? Is it because we don’t care anymore? CP: Williams on heresy is helpful: heresy is dangerous because it excludes conversation. MB: Is exclusion in ecclesial terms analogous to what Marx is talking about? After all the invitation is open… you exclude yourself (at least in the early church), unlike in the nation. PH: The heritage in the US South. State-building as exclusive. Jesus is always on the borders. How do we remember in Eucharist both Jesus’ death and the exclusions of the world? SL: Note the way inclusive identities are precisely used to exclude. Are all identities therefore exclusionary? Do we not then need to move away from form (that there is exclusion) to content (why and how there is exclusion)? What is the truth content of the exclusion? CD: Volf’s analysis is problematic at this point. His idea of otherness premised on an abstract other. Otherness is never concretized. For Levinas otherness always calls self into question. But who is my other? I can’t answer the question without particularity. I have to judge who is my other (which necessitates ontological claims)… and that’s violence. Christians get their particular identities at the altar rail. GC: Ricoeur’s polemic against Levinas is instructive. In our very being there is otherness. Reciprocity of recognition is that it’s mutual. SL: Derrida’s "other" takes away the ability to act in here and now: if I feed my cat I have violated my obligation to all other cats in the world. In sleeping with my wife I’m excluding.… LA: The problem with any identity is in its totalizing. We have multiple identities. MG: That’s still formal, though. The assumption is that these identities will be conflictual. SW: Bible’s multiplicity not exclusionary (the eschatological journey toward the worship of lamb has as its end the healing of the nations—through the edenic tree and the tree of the cross). SL: Here’s the question: does the nation have a role in the divine economy? At the end of Revelation there is both inclusion (gates never shut) and exclusion (there is an outside). KM: The truth is not violent.

CD: What are the modes of production that make identity? Identity is always in-formed by something outside itself, but identity is a static concept. Hegel: identity is an "in itself". Difference is non-identical repetition. For christians, identity is on the move. It’s not static. MB: In the early church… while there was difference, there was also a commonality that "chose us". Augustine’s fall involved humans and angels. KS: Jesus. Jews and gentiles. What is it that makes israel a nation? How are the gentiles grafted in (to a nation)? BP: what does it mean when St. Peter repeats Exod 19? SL: Both Barth and Balthasar say nation has no role in divine economy. Barth on the 10 commandments acknowledges natural communities (e.g. family)… but observes there’s no command about nation. For von Balthasar, nation is not "theological person". GC: For Badiou Jesus is the exception (a Jew rejected by Jews), which makes him a "singular universal". SL: But how does that differ from Kant and Harnack? JR: Jesus in the "bounce" from particular to universal is non-violent. MB: Richard Hays says the church is not an affinity group, but "God’s gamble" … SW: We need to distinguish not just the "other", but the enemy (e.g. the Samaritans). SL: I’m always waiting to meet this "other". But enemies… that’s different. KM: Salvation is being worked out by a God who is faithful (to the Jews). So we have to be careful that the church doesn’t swallow the nation. AS: Go’im is the Hebrew word translated "nation". But it simply means "people".

MB: Does Marx’s argument change our theological interpretation of the Reformation? JR: The politicization of religion is a consequence of the reformation. MG: The politicization of religion is a problem, whatever the fall narrative you choose (Scotus, Constantine). MB: Is the Reformation the problem or the solution (MG and to which problem?)? SL: The Reformation’s idea of invisible church delegitimates papal power but as Cavanaugh writes the crucial division happens a century earlier with the distinction between corpus verum and corpus mysticum. The Reformation is a correction to the fetishization of the Eucharist. But consider Hugo Rahner’s dictum: "all churches that seek to free themselves from the magisterius first seek refuge with the nation-state, and then fall with it." Can you have a transnational religious identity without a magisterium to sustain it?

Risen Indeed!

Yesterday I heard a scintillating sermon that literally had me on the edge of my seat. Eileen+ (our parish priest) started by noting a headline in the Edmonton Journal about a local passion play: “Bringing the Easter Story to Life”, then saying (after wryly observing the propensity newspaper headlines have for misconstruing the stories they report) that this is precisely backward: we don’t bring the story to life; the story brings us to life. What followed related the “us”—doubting, cynical, world-weary, questioning, despairing people—who gather at church on Sunday mornings (“it’s a myth,” “it’s a metaphor,” “it’s a folktale”) to the doubting, cynical, world-weary, questioning, despairing people who first heard the news on the first Easter morning (“it’s an idle tale,” it’s the women at it again,” “it’s wishful thinking”). As we gather (and Eileen was aware that the church was full of “Christmas and Easter” folk who rarely gather), and hear the story, and perform the story, we are transformed into a body… the very body of Christ.

She wove this idea together with another… inspired by another Journal article. A mother bemoaning her children's lack of interest in the meaning of Easter speaks of gathering her youngsters at this time every year and explaining to them “the meaning” of the story, which she reduced to a phrase: never, ever give up. Eileen (who is a former English teacher and a lover of children’s stories) mused that this is a little like sparing your kids all the words of Aesop’s fables and simply (because you think it important that they learn some kind of ethic) reading them a list of the morals. “Um… don’t speak to wolves on the way to Grandma’s house.” Imagine that.

This is why we gather (often in spite of our culturally-formed instincts, for reasons adequate and inadequate), and indeed why we must gather every Sunday: to hear and perform the story again. All of it. It’s not reducible to a “point”, a “meaning” that we can then transfer to “life” or “apply” to the world. It’s an enacted opening of ourselves to the God of life who imparts his life to us, and who then commissions us to impart that life again to the world.

As the service continued into the celebration of the Eucharist, I felt like stones were being rolled away and a “thin space” hovered over the sanctuary. Everything that followed was bathed in a kind of glow (helped no doubt by the sun streaming through the stained glass). We ended with chocolate indulgences downstairs (the only way to celebrate the end of Lent!)… at which time a 95 year-old woman stood up and thanked the church for sending flowers to her (and acknowledged the rather embarrassed person who—unbeknown to us to that point—has made it a practice of taking flowers to nursing homes for elderly folks celebrating birthdays without community or family connections). I learned afresh that this is what the church is: a newly transformed body "going in peace to love and serve the Lord" by insinuating itself into the spaces of abandonment (and cynicism, and world-weariness, and questioning) in the world, extending that thin space, and bringing good news.

Oh... the choir also ended the Holy Week commemorations (gosh, we sang a lot this week!!!) by belting out the Hallelujah Chorus, accompanied by trumpets (of course) and organ, after which Eileen turned to us and commented thus: "in the fullest theological sense of the words... you guys rock!"

Alleluia! Christ is risen.