Rowan Williams on "Refuge"

In light of the postings on Central Methodist, I thought this reflection might be appropriate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1J3aAe5oOQ

“We are Dying”

J.L. Zwane Memorial Church has Aids.

This Presbyterian congregation runs a series of impressive programmes reaching out to members of the Guguletu community striken or affected by this pandemic. The pandemic has reached staggering proportions in South Africa’s townships, with Guguletu itself having an HIV-positive rate of 29 percent (http://www.thesenumbers.com/faqs.html).

But J.L. Zwane is not interested in statistics; it provides refuge for suffering bodies. Every Sunday during worship there is an Aids presentation, where a member of the church will address the congregation. As Mandisa approached the front of the church on the Sunday we visited, the congregation sang “Never, never give up”—echoing the words embossed on a wall of the sanctuary. Diagnosed in 2001, she didn’t expect to live three years, much less eight. Marginalized by family members, she came to "the Aids church" (as J.L. Zwane is popularly, if not notoriously, known). There she received a warm welcome, medical care, and support from one of the groups established for that purpose. The anti-retrovitrals she’s taking allow her and her three children (all HIV-negative, praise God!) to live a relatively normal life. However, there was a poignancy to Mandisa’s story: her brother—who openly mocked her when she went public with her diagnosis—is himself HIV-positive (actually diagnosed in 1998), and gravely ill.

Calling the church to a reponsible and caring practice is deeply unpopular. Aids remains a silent killer. But the stigma associated with it is nearly as destructive as the disease itself. According to J.L. Zwane’s minister, Rev. Dr. Spiwo Xapile, pastors who dare talk about the issue run the risk of losing their jobs. And having pastors ministering for short amounts of time doesn’t allow the development of a ministry in which space can be created for the discussion of sexuality. It’s a cruel catch-22.

Rev. Xapile himself knows the deadly disease only too well, having lost five family members to Aids.

The Centre has a number of programmes that promote responsible behaviour, and take care of those who have fallen victim to the disease, both directly and indirectly. Each Sunday, public health volunteers come to the church and offer a clinic for those who cannot afford health care (which, with an unemployment rate of 70 percent, is the vast majority of Guguletu’s population). The Centre itself expresses healing in its physical representations, featuring a number of striking works of art on its walls. All this has come about through Rev. Xapile’s vision, a partnership with Stellenbosch University, and the support of overseas donors.

But what was especially challenging was the way the church itself supports grassroots initiatives, including the work of two exceptional women we were privileged to meet.

Priscilla (right) is an elderly woman who has opened her small home to twelve--soon to be fifteen--Aids orphans. When an HIV-positive parent becomes ill, they receive support from the grandparents—most of whom are on a fixed income; when the parents fall to the disease, the children live with the grandparents. Rev. Xapile told our group that there are children in Guguletu who are now being cared for by their third grandparent, the others having died. The children are sometimes simply abandoned, and so Priscilla has taken some of them in.

Nancy, who herself has a sixteen year-old severely handicapped daughter, is taking care of twelve abandoned children who are physically and developmentally challenged.

The public support structures are simply inadequate in Guguletu to meet these kinds of needs. The J.L. Zwane church has organized itself into zones. And members in each track the needs of their community, and initiatives like Priscilla’s and Nancy’s. The church then distributes food parcels to them. A network thus extends through the body of Christ, linking such small spaces where the kingdom of God has taken root.

We ought not romanticize—despite this good work, the challenge remains enormous. Rev. Xapile put it baldly during one of our discussions: “we are dying.” Not they, but we. Aids affects the church as Christ’s suffering body. “By his wounds, we are healed,” said Isaiah. And so as the church suffers with those bearing the social, as well as the physical, effects of the disease, it imparts the healing of Jesus Christ—one face, one body at a time.

Mark’s gospel tells the story of an unnamed women who had been suffering from “an issue of blood” for twelve years (Mark 5:25-34). She came, incognito, to Jesus—pressing her way through the crowd hoping to touch the hem of his garment. This woman’s plight has particular resonance for women in rural South Africa, where menstruation may exclude someone from contact with men, even in church. Reflecting on the way the text is read among the Amawoti of KwaZulu, Beverley Haddad and Maleka Sebeko write:

The women of Amawoti immediately identified with the woman with the hemorrhage in the text. Discussion followed concerning this woman’s situation. However, the woman with the hemorrhage had no name, no relationship, and was known by her illness (v.25). Her situation defined both her name and her personhood. There was speculation as to what might have happened had the woman not revealed herself to Jesus (v.33). The readers felt that Jesus had made it possible by his attitude. He had not regarded the woman as unclean and had affirmed her by healing her (v.29). It was also acknowledged, however, that the woman herself had shown courage and inner strength by taking the initiative. In spite of her circumstances, there was a recognition that she had never given up hope throughout the twelve years. Through the encounter the woman was given the ‘right to talk to Jesus.’ (1)

Contact with the woman would have made Jesus ritually unclean. However, what happens is not that the woman’s uncleanness is passed to him, but his healing power flows from him to her. This story takes on new significance in the context of the “uncleanness” of HIV-Aids. The unnamed come fearfully but courageously to J.L. Zwane, “the Aids church”. But rather than experiencing condemnation by the pure, they participate in the healing present in Jesus Christ.

The lesson of J.L. Zwane Memorial Church is that the body of Jesus Christ has Aids. We who are in communion with J.L. Zwane—which means all Christians who share the Eucharist—also have Aids.

Think about it. Then find a way to act in solidarity.



Note

1. Malika Sibeko and Beverly Haddad, “Reading the Bible With’ Women in Poor and Marginalized Communities in South Africa,” Semeia 78. Reading the Bible as Women: Perspectives from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Ed. Katherine Doob Sakenfeld and Sharon H. Ringe (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997) 87.

Mvume Dandala: A Christian In Office

Without question, Mvume Dandala has been one of the most widely respected church leaders in South Africa's recent past. A Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church from 1996 to 2003, and most recently General Secretary of the All Africa Council of Churches, Dandala is best known outside the church for mediating an end to the violence between ANC and Inkatha supporters in Johannesburg's hostels. He is known to be a man of integrity, and of deep holiness.

But this was in a previous phase of his life. As the political culture of South Africa degenerated into cronyism and corruption, a section of ANC members saw an opportunity to break away from the ruling party to form The Congress of the People (COPE). And they approached Dandala to lead the party into the most recent election.

For many, this would have been an immediate career-defining move, and a high promotion. But not for Dandala. The request resulted in a time of soul-searching, prayer, and discernment. He had always agreed with Archbishop Desmond Tutu that the place of a pastor was outside partisan politics--at least in a "normal" situation. And Dandala has always had “a pastor’s heart.” But South Africa was descending into abnormality--at least in terms of its professed democratic vision. So Dandala asked to be released from his position as pastor, effectively laying aside his clerical collar, in order to bear witness as a politician.

As he spoke to our group, I could hear the struggle in his voice. The questions he faced were stark. How could he, a well-respected Bishop, expose himself to abuse as a politician? Would the give-and-take of parliamentary debate, and the often-unsavoury nature of partisanship--corrupt him. But the alternative, in his view, was to perpetuate the idea that party politics was "unholy"--a significant issue given his Methodist theology. Even this calling must be sanctified. So he agreed--and agreed to suspend his credentials with the church. But he remains a Christian fulfilling what he and his spiritual advisors considers a redeployment by God.

But he also had a message for the church from his “new” location. Pastors need to engage in “political education”: shaping members as citizens aware of their responsibilities. They should remain non-partisan, but at the same time passionately informed about the political process.

Dandala’s talk raised a number of important issues for our discussion group (and others who joined us), and had us arguing rather loudly--to the point of being asked to “quiet down” as we were disturbing the sleep of our fellows! Here were some of the issues raised:

1. What is the nature of citizenship for Christians? Are Christians citizens of one city (the New Jerusalem)? Or two?

2. If party political involvement is entered into, what are the norms that govern such involvement for Christians? Is creation, cross, or resurrection most determinative?

3. Should the church always and necessarily understand itself as neutral in its activity during the world? Should it understand this neutrality as “a-political”? “Pre-political”? “Post-political”? “Differently political”? When Mvume Dandala decided to “enter politics”, and set aside his office in the church, what was he doing?

4. How should the teaching office of the church (Bishop) be employed with reference to #1? Is it additional to catechesis? Or part of it?

5. What should be the system of accountability of Christian political office-holders to the church? What are the implications of a president who professes to follow Jesus disobeying his Bishop (George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq comes to mind)? What would the electorate think of a bishop excommunicating a President?

6. Can #5 be addressed positively (i.e. that there is a role for the church) without reinstituting Christendom?

7. Finally, a question asked by one of our members: what can Mvume Dandala do that Rev. Frank Chikane (who was both a pentecostal pastor and Director-General of Thabo Mbeki’s office) could not?

It’s possible to read Dandala’s decision as a form of kenosis, and perhaps even of embracing a form of suffering. And I do think his soul is in danger, given the recent cut-throat practices of South African parliamentarians. But Christians are sometimes called to dangerous and risky service. St. Augustine said that a Christian should not seek office, but neither should he [or she] refuse to serve when called upon. I remain unwilling to make a conclusion—which is probably just as well. But I do commit to keeping the former Rev. Mvume Dandala in my prayers.

“Like Grass Through Cement”

There’s something uniquely South African about the aesthetic of many important public sites here, in which the materials of the old are used to construct the new. Take the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg (right), which our group visited last Friday. When the Justices discussed the site for the new Court in the mid-1990s, they decided on the old Braamfontein jail, in which the notorious Number Four detention centre stood as a scar on the landscape. In this disciplinary space, both heroic protesters—including Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Luthuli, and Nelson Mandela—and more conventional lawbreakers were incarcerated between 1902 and 1983.

The Court combines African traditional themes with the relics of past suffering. The foyer (below left) contains a large wall built from bricks of the old prison—including a concrete slab displaying the graffiti of the past and one of the old cell doors. Some 150,000 bricks from the old prison were used in building the court. But the foyer also has seats made of tree trunks, pointing to the African tradition of mediating disputes while sitting on stumps under a tree. In fact, the logo of the Court is an umbrella tree, under which can be seen figures representing the tradition of open and transparent judgement. This juxtaposition of ancient, old, and new confronts visitors to the Court from the outset.

The courtroom where hearings take place and judgments are announced is decorated with cowhide, representing the significance of cattle in African traditional society. A large South African flag made of thousands of tiny beads woven together stands to the right of the Justices’ seats. To the left is a window, about half a metre high, but extending for the length of the wall. The Justices can see only feet through that window, with no idea of race, class, or gender—an unusual invocation, I think, of John Rawls’ “veil of neutrality.” The court is open to all, and our group was greatly privileged to hear Deputy Justice Dikgang Mosenke (himself a former political prisoner who had spoken to us earlier in the day) deliver a judgement on a case reminding the Executive (the President) of its obligations to protect South Africans made vulnerable by the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy.

But the most striking thing about the Court is the way it represents the pain, embodies the hopes, and celebrates the gifts of South Africans. Indeed, the space is part memorial, part judiciary, and part art gallery. Walking down the main hallway one sees lined along the walls diverse representations of South Africa’s creativity, a wonderful collection of iconic pieces assembled by Justice Albe Sachs, uniting themes of human rights and cultural diversity.

Perhaps the most moving of these is “The man who sang and the woman who kept silent”, by Judith Mason. Inspired by testimony from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Mason’s tryptich is centred by a complete dress made of blue plastic bags (right). It recalls an anti-Apartheid activist who was captured, stripped naked, tortured, and then marched out to a field to be executed. As she walked, she picked up a discarded shopping back and used it to cover her genitals. When she knelt over her grave, according to the testimony of her executioner, she asked to be permitted to sing “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” (a hymn entitled “God Bless Africa”—the anthem of the liberation movements). She was shot in the back of the head and buried. When the Commission recovered her remains, the plastic bag was still wrapped around her pelvis.

Mason wrote:

“Sister, a plastic bag may not be the whole armour of God, but you were wrestling with flesh and blood, and against powers, against the rulers of darkness, against spiritual wickedness in sordid places. Your weapons were your silence and a piece of rubbish. Finding that bag and wearing it until you were disinterred is such a frugal, common-sensical, house-wifely thing to do, an ordinary act… At some level you shamed your capturers, and they did not compound their abuse of you by stripping you a second time. Yet they killed you. We only know your story because a sniggering man remembered how brave you were. Memorials to your courage are everywhere; they blow about in the streets and drift on the tide and cling to thorn-bushes. This dress is made from some of them. Hamba kahle. Umkhonto.”

+ + + + +

The same aesthetic is visible in the many “informal settlements” that dot the South African landscape—corrogated metal and cardboard shacks assembled on the outskirts and backyards of townships (left). Here, the very poor take the things cast off by the well-heeled, and use those materials to build dwellings. Old sheets of advertising, found behind some corporate warehouse, become colourful wallpaper. Bits of wire and discarded Coke cans are twisted into intricate sculptures which can be found for sale at the side of South Africa’s highways. While the “briocoleur” is fashionable intellectually in the West (or at least was), bricolage is alive and well here in the South. Indeed, bricolage here is a matter of survival.

Both the Constitutional Court and the random shacks remind me of a song by Bruce Cockburn. Written as an imaginative recollection of an uprising in Pinochet’s Chile in the mid-1980s, Cockburn juxtaposes imagery of “day flowering out of the night”, “shots ringing through smoke and gas”, and the bells of “first mass”.

Santiago Sunrise

See them marching home

See them rising like grass through cement

In the Santiago dawn

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“Like grass through cement”: that’s how the kingdom of God irrupts into the world. Even the Constitution itself—perhaps the most progressive in the world—is a matter of contestation, interpretation, and bricolage. While Romand Coles (citing Sheldon Wolen) argues that constitutions represent the "end" of the democratic struggle (Coles and Hauerwas: 139), the ossification of liberation, one can see the new continually irrupting through South Africa’s, “like grass through cement.” Anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff remind us that while South African has a Constitution instantiating the European ideal of the bounded, bureaucratic nation-state, it is situated within a contest of alternative sovereignties (traditional societies, chiefdoms, religious and other loyalties) which they identify as a “counter-politics” of the “Kingdom of Culture” (Comaroff and Comaroff:446). This is not simply between “citizens” and “subjects”, but within political persons who experience themselves as fractured between multiple sources for the construction of identity (447). The resolution of this tension is not happening in theory, but in the pragmatics of legal negotiation. Thus contextualized, the Court and the Constitution exist alongside “self-defined aggregates of persons [who] seek to open up possibilities for themselves, in pursuit of their passions, principles, ideals, interests.” These name ”a politics of everyday life” (448) where “the modernist sense of ideology gives way to ID-ology, the quest for a collective good, and sometimes goods, sanctioned by, and in the name of, a shared identity.” (447) Ideas of human rights—carefully defined within the Constitution but contested and renegotiated in everyday life become part of the symbolic “bricolage” making up the new South African identity. I think this is a sign of fragile, but real, hope.

+ + + + +

There’s a theological lesson here. After all, as Charles Mathewes reminds us, we live "during the world"—that time from the ascension of Christ to his second coming. The fact that South Africa decided not to start anew (contrast Washington D.C., which was built on an eradication, a levelling of space into which romanticized symbols of ancient Rome were imported) but using and reusing the material and symbolic resources of the old reminds us that we still live in media res. And "during the world", history is a site of contestation, deconstruction, and reconstruction. Yet we also see signs of a longing for a true novum, a true “new heavens and new earth”, in which our relations are governed by love, and our lives stretch forth to the God who fills all things. As long as South Africa remains in media res, there is hope.

References

Cockburn, Bruce. World of Wonders. True North Records TN-66, 1986.

Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. “Reflections on Liberalism, Policulturalism, and ID-Ology: Citizenship and Difference in South Africa.” Social Identities 9.4 (2003): 445–73.

Coles, Romand, and Stanley Hauerwas. Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary. Theopolitical Visions. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2007.

Mathewes, Charles T. A Theology of Public Life. Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge UP, 2007.

http://concourt.artvault.co.za/overview.php

Enfolded in a Warm Blanket of Singing and Dancing

As we approached the township of Tembisa, the change in scenary was jarring. We’d passed the sprawling developments on the outskirts of Johannesburg, illustrated with bulletin boards praising progress and promising a glowing future life (the streets of “Egoli” paved with gold). But there was not much of that visible here. The same matchbox houses we saw in Soweto, with the occasional more luxurious dwelling, alongside shacks of corrugated metal built from the cast-offs of the elite.

Like other South African townships, Tembisa was built for Africans who had been “removed” from white areas in and around Johannesburg. Established as a township in 1957, Tembisa (from a Zulu word meaning “promise”) was one of the flashpoints of anti-apartheid “unrest” at the height of state repression. Also as in other townships, criminal gangs such as the notorious “Toasters” and “Section 12”, established themselves. But Tembisa is also a bustling area which as many as one million South Africans call home. Most of them are formally unemployed, though the “informal” sector is alive and well.

We pulled up beside the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (left), a smallish church building at a busy intersection (the noise of cars frantically hooting would form the counterpoint for our worship). The EPC is a small denomination, with historic ties to the Swiss missionaries that evangelized and educated Africans from the mid-nineteenth century. The pastor, Rev. Wilson Rambau, greeted us warmly outside. As we filed into the church, we found a simple sanctuary, with benches for pews, a communion table, and a pulpit. There was neither piano nor organ. A plaque behind the communion table bore greetings from the mayor of Hartford, Connecticut. We would later learn its significance.

We took our place in the choir seats and watched the congregation enter a few at a time. The church was not full during the service, though as Tinyiko Maluleke explained to us there had been a service the day before and consequently some would have stayed home.

The service began with a greeting—and a special welcome to our group. The first hymn was announced, and members paged through worn, dog-eared hymnals and service books. There were not enough for our group, and the service was in Tsonga and Shangaan (two of South Africa’s eleven official languages). But that didn’t seem matter. Strangely I found myself able to follow along quite well with the spirit of the worship.

And what spirit (or Spirit) there was! As the congregation raised their voices in that characteristic polyphonic, four part harmony, I felt myself enfolded as if wrapped in a warm blanket. There was a welcome familiarity. I was back in Africa, and Africa was holding out her arms. Soon the announcement of hymns became redundant, and people sang spontaneously—or so it seemed—in that wonderful African “call and response” way. Choir after choir got up to sing, and we soon learned that there was no need for accompaniment.

And then it was our turn. We’d rehearsed Amazing Grace the night before, and delivered a quite competent rendition, I thought, which was received appreciatively. The pastor called Bob Evans forward, who gave greetings on our behalf and explained the purpose of our visit to South Africa. He called on Rev. Christopher Byaruhanga, one of our members, to present our gift to the congregation—a beautiful batak cloth from his native Uganda. The response of the church leadership was deeply moving. An elder named Victor Nesangane came forward and promised that the church would take care of the cloth, and that if we returned in ten years time we would still find it in good condition. The significance of this should not be underestimated, given the xenophobia that had enveloped South Africa just a year ago. The fact that something from the other side of the Limpopo would have a permanent dwelling place amongst this people is deeply important.

But it was the response of the congregation that took us aback. They broke into song, left their seats, and danced up the aisle of the church toward the front. We found ourselves dancing too—and soon we joined the congregation circling the front of the church. It was quite a sight to see—all of us academics shaking our limbs and moving our feet in joy and praise!

Everything else followed in rapid succession. A sermon, prayers, and benediction. The service ended with the offering—people coming forward, dancing, as they placed their tithes in the baskets on the communion table. It was announced that a “small finger lunch” had been prepared for us—something neither we nor the sisters at the retreat house back in Johannesburg had known about. We could not, however, refuse. As it turned out, the “finger lunch” included massive bowls of potato, carrot, and bean salads, beets, and chicken pieces.

Actually, we should not have been surprised. For we’ve found nothing but generosity among the poor here. But this is an especially generous congregation. Let me return to that plaque behind the communion table. On one of his first visits to the EPC in Tembisa, members of the congregation expressed surprise to Bob that there were poor people in America. Bob, who is based in Connecticut, spoke to them about Hartford, the second poorest city in the U.S. The congregation immediately responded by taking a special collection “for the homeless of Hartford”. The grand sum of $35.00 was raised. Later, theological ethicist Donald Shriver would write, “I discovered the meaning of stewardship and commitment in Tembisa.”

We did too, that day. We learned a generosity not seen in the bureaucratic spaces of Parliament, nor the polished halls of the Constitutional Court. It was among God’s people, gathered in the name of Jesus, that we found—and I apologize for sounding romanticistic—a true wealth, the streets paved with gold anticipating the communion of the New Jerusalem. That city, unlike Egoli, has neither temples nor townships. For there, all gather to share the wealth of Yahweh.

That is the true "promise" of Tembisa.

Reference

Shriver Jr., D.W. 1992. “A night in Tembisa.” Christian Century 109, no. 18: 535. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed June 11, 2009).

Update on Central Methodist

The following evening (after our visit), as the same throng was moving toward the church, a waste management truck under contract to the City of Johannesburg drove past them and sprayed them with sewer water. The case is under investigation.

From “Fashionable Church” to “Den of Iniquity”

“The place resembled a train station. People were seated on rows of wooden benches, mounds of blankets, with heaps of clothes and bags next to them. Some blankets, spread on the floor, were makeshift beds, taking up the interior of the church. Inside the chapel, more people were lying on the floor. Even the pulpit was occupied. Several women prepared to go to sleep under the pulpit.”

So begins an account of the “once fashionable Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg. Our group visited this “den of iniquity” (as the article went on to call it) on June 4, and were greatly privileged to be addressed by Bishop Paul Verryn, whose commitment to the gospel has transformed this church from respectibility to notoriety, giving refuge to 3,200 mostly Zimbabweans fleeing the regime of Robert Mugabe. In so doing, he has brought the principalities and powers to bear on this historic church in Johannesburg’s Central Business District.

As our group entered the building, we immediately realized this was no ordinary church. Informal traders lined the paths leading to the entrance, while inside the cries of infants could be heard throughout. The awning that sheltered the windows was covered in drying laundry, and as we sat in the sanctuary the sight of clothes flapping in the breeze silhouetted against the stained glass conveying stories from the life of Jesus. No ordinary church indeed. Central Methodist is probably the only church in the world that has resident representatives of Medicines Sans Frontiers. And it’s also probably the only church in the world where every step one takes—in corridors, doorways, and Sunday School rooms—represented space for a bed. Anyway, we waited… and waited for Verryn, who finally emerged breathlessly from his office. This time there had “only been ten people” waiting for him on his arrival at the church. He asked that space be cleared for us in the chapel, and we sat in rapt attention as he spoke (pic on right).

I knew Verryn only by reputation, though I’d had strong memories of his testimony before the TRC in the “Mandela United Football Club” hearings back in 1997. There he spoke tearfully of his inability to protect 13-year-old Stompie Sepei—in whose murder Winnie Mandela was implicated. Verryn had been pastor to the Mandelas in Soweto at a time when whites were as forbidden to live in that sprawling black township as blacks were from living in white Johannesburg. His credentials as an anti-apartheid icon were even then incontestable, officiating as he had at the funerals of activists during his first charge in the highly politicized Eastern Cape, and then as a pastor in the politicized hotbed of Soweto during the height of the liberation struggle. The poor have never been “pictures” to Verryn. He has lived and worked in their midst for his entire ministry. Opening the doors of Central Methodist to the poor is an action in basic continuity with his life story.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. With thousands sleeping in such close promixity, and fearing anxiously for their lives outside the church, it’s not surprising to hear that “every conceivable social problem happens in this building.” Indeed, the residents of Central Methodist represent a microcosm of humanity-in-exile. Rules have been formulated in order to faciliate peaceable living together: no drinking (two alcohol-related murders have occurred), smoking, fighting, stealing, and no sex outside of marriage. These don’t represent an arbitrary moral code, but rather the minimal conditions under which conflict and violence can be curbed. Community leaders, who also addressed our group, are appointed to ensure these rules are followed. A strict curfew is observed, after which the church doors are closed and a worship meeting takes place.

But this is no ordinary worship meeting in such an extraordinary church. It’s a time for gathering and organizing. Announcements concerning employment opportunities are made (the church functions as an informal job agency) and other matters concerning the life of the community are addressed. Once a week, this meeting takes the form of a service of healing. The most recent of these featured an explosion of energy as dancers dramatizing the pain of the Aids pandemic encircled the communion table—as Verryn said, the exact place where Aids should be addressed. Part of the healing of this ecumenical, “African orthodox” church, according to a community leader named Ambrose is the social networking in which displaced people are incorporated into a body social.

Recalling his experience during the years of apartheid, Verryn confesses to a mistrust of police. And indeed this has been borne out—not only in the daily harrassment and arbitrary arrest of migrants (legal or not), but in police raids on the church itself. One particularly brutal event took place in January, 2008. Some 1,500 refugees were arrested in a raid on the church. The Bishop himself was dragged backwards down the stairs as police searched for weapons and contraband, finding none. “In searching for criminals,” he said, “they became criminals.” And this was publically demonstrated. For Verryn had already alerted the world media, and the events were broadcast all over the world the next day, causing serious embarrassment to the state. Ambrose said that the community tries to work with the police, though time after time the police will be called on to arrest troublemakers who disrupt the life of the community, only to find them being released and returned to make more mischief. Indeed it seems that there are agents provocateurs that have infiltrated the community. This calls for constant vigilance, but also names the vulnerability of life at Central Methodist.

But it’s not only the police and other authorities that Verryn indicts. It’s the South African nation, of which 80 percent claim to be Christians. If this seems harsh, one must remember that four months after the January raids, and in spite of his warnings, xenophobic violence was spreading across the country, leaving 100 dead in its wake, and countless thousands homeless and unemployed. According to the recent report of the South African Migration Project, “South Africa exhibits its levels of intolerance and hostility to outsiders unlike virtually anything seen in other parts of the world.” Despite holding arguably the most progressive constitution in the world, and representing an international icon of peaceful transition and racial reconciliation, “with the exception of treatment for Aids, at least two-thirds of South Africans still feel that irregular migrants to the country should be extended no rights or protections.” Ironically, while the world was marvelling at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, xenophobic attitudes were hardening, and when these attitudes turned into action, “xenophobic thugs discovered they could act with virtual impunity.” In my experience, South Africans had always lived with a strong sense of exceptionalism (“are you going to see Africa while you’re here?” was a question sometimes asked of me when I lived in Cape Town). “Nation-building”, it seems, had only exacerbated the sense of “us” against “them”, spreading that exceptionalism across racial divides. On the basis of its research, the report concludes damningly: “xenophobia and hostility to (particularly) Africans is not the preserve of a lunatic fringe but represents the convictions of the majority of citizens. When one journalist wrote recently that ‘we are all guilty’, he was speaking truth to power.”

Central Methodist also speaks truth to power. Its actions of radical hospitality and countercultural welcome earn the ire of police, media, and the public. Its neighbours are not happy. This doesn’t phase Verryn, who notes that the church should discriminate against the well-off, and consequently “ought always to be arguing with lawyers.” Neither do the numerous death threats he receives daunt him. Verryn is simply engaged in performing the gospel story, remapping and remaking space to welcome and include vulnerable outsiders. A “round peg” no longer “fitting into” the “square hole” role given it by society, the church has become radically visible—and vulnerable. But this only reminds us of what the church is called, in every locality, to be.

South African theologian Neville Richardson, reflecting on the example of Central Methodist Church, invokes two important theologians: Stanley Hauerwas and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. From Hauerwas: “The kingdom of love initiated by Jesus is also the kingdom of love which is most clearly embodied in the Christian obligation to be hospitable. We are a community on principle ready to share our meal with the stranger. Moreover we must be a people who have hospitable selves—we must be ready to be stretched by what we know not.” Bonhoeffer might ”glimpse [in this “religionless Christianity”] an almost unrecognizable church, a church that exists not only for itself, but for others, a witness to Christ the man for others, the crucified Christ—Christ existing as community today.”

As we filed out of Central Methodist Church, the sun had gone down, and we were meeting throngs of people moving toward the church. Their day’s work (or day’s looking for work) done, they were preparing to settle in for the long night. But in that night, the light of Jesus Christ was shining. And they were returning, in the best—temporary—sense of the word, home.

Works Cited

Hauerwas, Stanley. The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Social Ethics. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1983.
“Place of Worship Now Den of Iniquity.” The Star (Johannesburg) 2006, June 20 2006: 15.
Richardson, Neville. “Sanctorum Communio in a Time of Reconstruction? Theological Pointers for the Church in South Africa.” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 127 (Mar 2007): 96–115.
South African Migration Project. The Perfect Storm: The Realities of Xenophobia in Contemporary South Africa. Res. rept. Series ed Jonathan Crush. Migration Policy Series no. 50. Cape Town; Kingston: IDASA; Southern African Research Centre, Queens University, 2008.

Public Theology: The South African Experience

Some of you may know that I won the lottery a few months back--along with 18 or so others (see pic below for a snapshop of our first meeting) from across Africa and North America--with an all-expenses paid trip to South Africa to study Public Theology. The seminar is sponsored by the Nagel Centre at Calvin College, and facilitated by Bob and Alice Evans of the Plowshares Institute. The idea is to bring scholars together to learn from South Africa's experiments with connecting Christian faith to nation-building and democratic transformation.

The next few blogs reflect on my experience with the team, and on the new, NEW South Africa (post-Mbeki). Most readers of my blog will know that I lived in South Africa for most of the 1990s, completing my doctoral studies under John de Gruchy at the University of Cape Town. Our travels will begin in Johannesburg and end in the Cape, at Volmoed, a retreat centre where de Gruchy is currently theologian-in-residence.

Our group will also be facilitated by Tinyiko Maluleke, one of the most exciting of the new generation of South African black theologians. We will visit churches, the Constitutional Court, memorial sites, NGOs, and other places. I'm excited about what we'll learn and discuss--but also cautious as there's always the temptation to turn the church, and theology, into a servant of a particular political/ideological agenda. And even with the best intentions, there's also the temptation to think that the Kingdom of God "is within our grasp, as long as we have hands to clasp" (with apologies to Dr. Seuss). No: the kingdom is always coming, and always gift.

Stay tuned for more!

"That School Where You Can't Be Gay" #2

Well, the presence of King's in the news over the Delwin Vriend case has indeed (as I suspected it would) continued. Last Sunday, Vriend himself weighed in in the Edmonton Journal, stating that (1) King's is a publically funded institution (a fact that, according to him, is "hushed up") but without "public accountability"; (2) King's did not have, neither at the time he was hired nor thereafter, a code of conduct; (3) Vriend's "boss" was aware that he was gay at the time of his hiring; and (4) that the court case was against the Alberta government, not the College. The latter point, along with the first, strongly implies that continued funding of private "religious" colleges by the Alberta government demonstrates that government's continued lack of recognition of the rights of GLBTs, despite the legal victory celebrated ten years ago. The Journal published today a response by Harry Fernhout, President of King's, which I think gives a good response to the only points he could have responded to (#1 and #4). I'm reprinting it here for those benefit of those with no access to the paper.

Delwin Vriend (“Albertans shouldn’t have to go to court for protection,” Letters, April 13) made a number of statements concerning The King's University College that require clarification.

Mr Vriend correctly points out that “no court case was ever fought against the college.” The King's University College has never contested court rulings at any level in Vriend v. the Queen. We agree that every citizen’s fundamental human rights must be protected, and we recognize the significance of the Supreme Court’s ruling in this case.

Mr Vriend’s claim that The King's University College receives public funding “without public accountability” is incorrect, however. King’s meets public accountability requirements very similar to those expected of fully funded public institutions. Our degree programs are subject to the same accreditation process through the Campus Alberta Quality Council. We meet the same financial reporting requirements, and must provide business plans and annual reports to the government just like the fully funded institutions. We have an open admission policy. The only substantive differences in accountability are that the Minister of Advanced Education and Technology does not appoint our governing board, and the Province does not own our campus. The Province provides partial instructional funding, in recognition of the public service we provide by educating Alberta citizens through accredited degree programs. The Province provides no capital funding for campus construction or maintenance.

There is nothing “hushed-up” about King’s funding and accountability; it is a matter of public record. We are strongly committed to contributing to the public good in higher education. One of our professors recently co-authored a science textbook for use in Alberta’s public high schools. Another recently received Canada’s highest teaching award because of his leadership in the scientific community. A third will soon be recognized for contributions to the music community in Edmonton. Since King’s inception in 1979, some 1700 students have graduated with approved degrees in the arts, sciences, commerce, music and education.They have entered the workforce or graduate programs in and beyond.

King’s has a long history of advocating on behalf of the disadvantaged and marginalized members of society locally and globally. Our research work is energized by concern for justice and sustainability, particularly with regard to poverty and the environment. King’s is strongly committed to making a constructive contribution to society as a partner in post-secondary education in Alberta.

Harry Fernhout, President
The King's University College

"Les Canadiens Sont La!"


We emigrated from the UK in 1967 (I was seven) and we settled in Toronto. The Leafs were the champs that year. But from the first time I saw them I was hooked on Les Canadiens. Maybe it was the colourful uniforms (bleu-blanc-et rouge as compared to the drab blue and white of the Leafs); maybe it was the passion of the fans (the Forum had an organ, a bugler named "Dutchy", and Roger Doucette who sometimes made up his own words to the national anthem, the Gardens had no music until the early seventies, and even then it was endless choruses of "The Maple Leaf Forever" on a very protestant-sounding Wurlitzer, and the same scratchy record of "O Canada" we listened to as part of our public school opening exercises); maybe it was the technicolour language and near cardiac gasping and groaning of Danny Gallivan (while the Leafs had the nasal intoning of Bill Hewitt); or maybe it was the storied, quasi-mythical history and tradition of the Flying Frenchmen. From an early age, I read voraciously everything I could get my hands on about the Canadiens. My favourites were the autobiographies of Rocket Richard and Jean Beliveau, and Andy O'Brien's "Firewagon Hockey", which I read over and over again.

Or maybe I just wanted to be different. The only Toronto team I supported growing up was the Blue Jays. The high points of my teen years were discovering Star Trek and watching the Canadiens kick Maple Leaf ass (see video above from April, 1978--btw this is not a power play!) again and again and again.

I could go on. It's in my blood, I'm afraid. I'll root for the Oilers... except for when they play the Habs. So I'm especially excited this spring... even though the shrine of Les Forum has given way to the hi-tech Centre Bell , Dutchy has long ago hung up his horn, Danny Gallivan and Roger Doucette have shed this mortal coil, and the Flying Frenchmen are more like the Rushing Russians.

Go Habs go!

"That School Where You Can't be Gay"

I'm gonna get on the soapbox.

It's been a frustrating week. I teach at King's University College, and we've been in the news every day from Sunday till today (and who knows about tomorrow and the next day). In 1991, Delwyn Vriend was dismissed from his position as a lab instructor at King's, ostensibly (at least this is the way the media puts it) "for being gay." Ten years ago this month, the government of Alberta (which refused to support Vriend's appeal) lost a Charter case on the matter. So now the rights of gays and lesbians not to be discriminated against by their employers is protected. And I think that's a wonderful thing.

There's a whole complex history behind the events which led up to Vriend's firing, including the increasing visibility of GLBT people in society and in the church, the desire of the local legal community for a Charter "test case" with which to challenge the Alberta Government's lack of recognition of the rights of GLBT people, and Vriend's own contention that the Christian community--and King's in particular--take a clear stand affirming the acceptance of GLBTs in the church. Adding to the complexity is the fact that King's was (and to an extent still is) supported by hard-working Dutch immigrants in Alberta and British Columbia (sometimes in stuff I've read about the case, mis-named "Dutch Reform"). This is itself a diverse community defying the simplistic, Manichean categorizations so beloved by the mass media: politically progressive in some ways, and conservative in others. Our "left wing" and "right wing" distinctions, which owe too much to the culture-wars discourse of the US, simply don't fit here. And--I say this with great affection as a long-time observer though not "insider"--members of this community love to argue amongst themselves about controversial political and social matters!

It was this community of post-war Dutch immigrants that built a Christian school system, not based on the superiority of the Christian faith but on the need for a plurality of perspectives within the educational sector and for a robust Christian witness therein. Partly from its experience as outsider to the largely Anglo culture that ran the country in the 60s and 70s, it taught its children to honour and respect cultural differences. (As someone raised in the Ontario public system of that time, I can testify to the anemic space given to "otherness" in my own schooling). It was this that enabled members of this community to stand behind aboriginal peoples and their struggles with "development" of their lands in 1970s Alberta. Sharing a commitment to caring for the earth as given by the Creator, it dissented from the idea of "limitless progress" pressed by the Trudeau government. And it's a community that reaches out especially to the weakest in society. Go to most any Christian Reformed church and you'll see "differently-abled" people as fully participating members of the community, not pushed to the background.

Doubtless this community was at the time uncomfortable with the presence of gays and lesbians in the institutions it supported, especially when sexual orientation was foregrounded to the extent it reportedly was by Vriend. While on this particular issue, the community remains divided, I strongly believe that many if not most of its members will eventually move toward acceptance for GLBT people. This won't be because of some thin, woolly liberal idea of "tolerance" or "live and let live", however, but because of its own "thicker" (in the Geertzian sense) history of marginality, the memory still borne by members whose families hid Jews during the Second World War, and its faith in the One whose ministry consisted in the embrace of social outcasts.

In short, the community that made, and continues to make King's and all the things it does possible (see below) has been, and remains, a community in dialogue and in process. While I'm not in a position to judge the actions of the College at the time of the Vriend firing, it certainly would have been extremely difficult for King's to have acted in any other way. Things would be very different today, as our current president has said.

Anyway, the thing that has frustrated me this week is that King's--then and now--is dismissed with the "that's the place where you can't be gay" appellation. (These very words were actually spoken to me by a cabbie the first week I was here. When I pressed him, he said, "Oh we studied all that in high school".) Even behind those four words repeated again and again in the media ("dismissed for being gay") there's a whole lot unsaid. And it especially doesn't help when the Canadian Family Action Coalition stands up for you in the letters section of the local paper!

Vriend still has friends at King's, though I think even his strongest supporters would concede that the events were manipulated behind the scenes in order to bring about the famous case of Vriend vs. Alberta. King's was simply a means to an end, just as Vriend is now a "symbol" of something he ultimately didn't control. The College was not part of the court case and to my knowledge has never contested the results. I've not done any formal polling, but I've yet to hear anyone at King's say that the recognition of the rights of GLBT people to be protected under the law, and therefore the 1998 decision, was a bad thing. Quite to the contrary. In fact, while the court case was going on, Citizens for Public Justice (a Christian advocacy group with similar cultural, philosophical, and theological roots to King's), was producing a document advocating the full legal equality of gays and lesbians under the law.

King's itself is a diverse institution: we have students from North America and Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Many are Christian of one sort or another, some are not (last I heard, the ratio was about 70-30). I've taught Muslims (some of whom were among my best students), Hindus, new agers, and agnostics at King's. I've taught straight and gay students, and never heard anything other than support for the latter from the faculty and support staff. Contrary to some reports, King's is not formally associated with the Christian Reformed (or any other) Church. In fact, our faculty represent the spectrum of Christian churches: Anglican, United Church, Baptist, Roman Catholic, Ukrainian Catholic, Quaker, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, and Lutheran. Oh, and of course we have a good representation of Christian Reformed folk too! It's true that King's has a (minimal) statement of faith, but there is no formal code of conduct concerning sexual orientation or other matters--aside from expectations concerning relations with colleagues and students (put simply, it's a no-no to become involved with a student... surely a good thing, no?). King's is far more concerned that faculty demonstrate an understanding of their scholarly vocation as part of Christian discipleship (and I've yet to meet a colleague who thinks that means advocating "free markets", "family values", "creationism", or "intelligent design"). Our faculty participate fully in the "mainstream" of their disciplines--one of our faculty members just received a prestigious national teaching award and another has just co-published a science textbook for use in Alberta's public high schools. Last year we attained the highest rating among the Globe and Mail-polled Universities, largely because of our small classes, innovative teaching methods, and the personal attention we give to students. Faculty also contribute to the cultural and artistic life of Edmonton, and share their expertise on environmental and other issues. My colleague in political science is currently researching the ideology behind Alberta's thirst to exploit its natural resources at any cost. My colleague in economics works with Thabo Mbeki's New African Development initiative in South Africa. My colleague in sociology is involved in the development of men's resources within the city of Edmonton. I could go on and on. Students are active proponents of social and environmental justice, both locally and globally, and our guests on campus from the local social justice community have included Michael Phair, the openly gay city counsellor who helped advocate in the Vriend case.

I've worked, in one capacity or another, at five "secular" universities, and I would rate the scholarly atmosphere at King's as highly as any of them. Indeed, the fact that faculty share a common sense of vocation and the same understanding of academic community as service to the creation (and in that way imaging the creator), as well as our size, means we are free, at least in my experience, of the competitiveness within and between disciplines that dogs larger and more ideologically diverse institutions. King's is such a good place to work and teach that I've applied for (and, thanks be to God, been given) tenure. So I'm in for the long run. And I'm excited about it!

I think we deserve better than to be called "that school where you can't be gay."

"The Body and Blood of Christ"... To Go

Okay, so I said I was going to blog again. I thought of all kinds of profound topics to reinaugurate it: resurrection of Jesus as God's laughter, the ambivalence I feel about praying for the troops in my church, my thoughts about an upcoming trip to South Africa, my eager anticipation of the April 4 restart of Battlestar Galactica, etc., etc. Well here's the first post, and I'm afraid it's none of those things.

Hold it... wait... I think there might... yes indeed... be another entry blog coming soon!

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?