My favorite Irish theologian and critical theorist has been at it again–deconstructing the church, Christianity, religion, and any other monolith that stands in his way! Peter Rollins’s latest book, Insurrection, unfolds what I call a Christian form of inverse theology–a theology that views damaged life (the material world in which we live) from the perspective of the redeemed. I’ve talked a bit about this notion elsewhere, so I won’t go into the details of inverse theology here. But you can listen to the podcast of Tripp Fuller and I’s breakout session at the Emergent Village Theological Conversation to get a basic understanding of what I mean by ‘inverse theology.’

In Insurrection, Pete does two things that I find particularly helpful from a materialist standpoint: first, he gives us a biting critique of “religion” that I think works well with a thorough-going criticism of Western Christianity as overrun and co-opted by the forces of global capitalism; and second, he tells us without any reservations that seeking an escape from this world in favor of a perfected realm “beyond” is not what God intends for us. On the first point, Pete uncovers “religion” as a sort of security blanket: it tells us what we want to hear and does it in such a way that no serious life change is required. This, he thinks (and I agree), is basically the opposite of the message of the gospels. For this reason, he asks Christians and Christian leaders (pastors, youth workers, etc.) to realize and admit their own doubts. Only by doing so can we ever unshackle ourselves from a “reified” religion in order to more fully experience the events of Jesus’ life as orienting us to participation in this world. He writes: “The whole religion industry is thus fueled by our desire to escape suffering and avoid the gnawing sense of meaninglessness. The certainty is marketable because it is a response to our unhappy situation, and it keeps selling because it is ultimately ineffective in properly transforming it.” These lines connect my first and second points by describing how religion attempts to make itself “marketable” by providing bits of belief through sound bites that don’t really have any depth or meaning and don’t ultimately either require a person to realize and admit her/his own doubt or engage more radically with the world in which we live. Our desire to avoid suffering goes hand in hand with a desire to avoid doubt, since witnessing or acknowledging suffering oftentimes leads to religious or existential doubt. Moreover (and most importantly for Pete), we cannot fully experience or participate in the crucifixion and resurrection if we are concerned solely with escaping material reality or damaged life.

In the second half of his book, Pete turns precisely to the resurrection, suggesting that the resurrection not be viewed as the means by which we leave the world behind, but as an invitation into deeper relationship with the world we currently inhabit.

“We do not find happiness by renouncing the world and pointing our desire toward the divine, but now we discover the divine in our very act of loving the world.”

Pete writes against what he calls the religious view by saying that we aren’t to seek God as a transcendent being–an object to be loved–but we recognize and realize God through the very act of loving. It’s what we do in this world with and for those around us that actually makes us most aware of God’s presence. “In the very mode of seeing that raises the suffering, broken, and excluded to the level of the beautiful, sublime, and absolute, God is present. Not dwelling behind or above, but as dwelling in the very midst.” For this reason, the resurrection is not a turn away from the world, but a return to the world (very literally).

This understanding of the resurrection I think highlights most clearly a Christian form of inverse theology in that it reorients our gaze away from a transcendent realm and onto the reality of damaged life, forcing us to acknowledge and live in and among the suffering, joy, pain, and bliss that life in this world entails. And in so doing it also requires us to work toward alleviating at least some of the suffering of damaged life. We can’t pretend that in 10 or 50 or even 200 years the world will be a shiny, happy place because of our efforts, but we can certainly hold out some small bit of hope that it will be better than it is now.

Here is my long delayed second blog on Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right, and my follow-up to comments posted on the first blog dealing with human atrocities  and socialist thought.  If you didn’t read through those comments, it’s enough to  know that some took issue with Marxism based on the way it was twisted (my words, not theirs) into violent and oppressive dictatorships under Mao and Stalin.  Fortunately, Eagleton addresses precisely these issues in chapters 6 and 8 of his book.

Like Jesus, Marx was not a violent person.  And yet (also similar to Jesus) Marx had marginal followers, vaguely adhering to some of his major ideas, who ended up murdering large numbers of people.  How was this possible, and should Marxism be blamed?

Marx discusses the fact that revolutions might be necessary in order to up-end existing political-economic regimes, such as 19th century regimes that maintained a poor and uneducated peasant class.  Removing these oppressive powers sometimes involves revolutions, and Marx was aware of this.  However, he did not advocate for violent, bloody revolutions.  To the contrary, as Eagleton points out, Marx held that revolutions “are usually a long time in the brewing, and may take centuries to achieve their goals.”  Case in point:  feudalism in Europe (a system that kept the great majority of people from receiving an education or making enough to sustain themselves) took centuries to overthrow.  Eagleton again:  “You can socialise industry by government decree, but legislation alone cannot produce men and women who feel and behave differently than their grandparents.”  Revolutions might make quick work of installing new political powers, but undoing one system and rebuilding another (which was the sort of revolution described by Marx) does not happen over night, and rarely even happens over the course of 365 nights.

On the issue of Mao and Stalin, I wholeheartedly agree (and so does Eagleton) that the atrocities they committed were staggering and sickening.  The sort of authoritarian state that undertakes such violent actions on its own people is no state that Marx would have advocated.  The actions of these dictators were inexcusable and deserve to go down in the history books as some of the most heinous crimes against humanity.  But in no way were these murders based on Marxian theory.  Just as the thousands slaughtered during the crusades (and on the way to the crusades) cannot be accounted for by appealing to the gospels or the teachings of Jesus, the violence of dictatorial communist regimes has no basis in the writings of Marx or Engels or any other worthwhile socialist theorist.

Instead, like Jesus, Marx advocated for a type of revolutionary politics intended to overthrow the prevailing political order (which he viewed as unjust) in favor of a new order aiming at economic justice and political equality.  Such a revolution, for Marx as well as for Jesus, should take place under non-violent means.  Under this rubric, the revolutions of Gandhi and King are far closer to Marx’s teachings than the actions of Stalin or Mao.

The type of revolution that Marx (and, I’m arguing, Jesus as well) would support would be one in which advocates of the poor and oppressed, and the poor and oppressed themselves, stood up to the wealthy class and demanded equal access to healthcare, a living wage for work performed, and a reorientation of government policies away from favoring big business and toward favoring the welfare of the majority.  In the past, these types of revolutions have been successful over the long haul without violent uprisings or bloody insurrections, and they can be successful again in the same way.

I am honored to be a guest blogger for the Feminism and Religion blog today, hosted by a few of my friends at CGU. You can read my post on feminism and process theology here.

I have recently been reading Bill McKibben’s latest book Eaarth, in which McKibben points out that we are already living in a different world (or on a different earth) than we were 20 years ago.  Because of the effects of global warming, the earth we once knew is gone, and it will never return.  This is a sad reality, but one with which we must come to terms before we can move on and work toward increasing options for human survival in a changed world.  I’m entirely in favor or remembering the past and maintaining a vibrant memory of the way things used to be, but it strikes me that nostalgia for a world that is no more will not serve us well in the future.  By nostalgia I mean a mindset that operates through the lens of the past, unable to adjust to present and future conditions.

Daddy, what did YOU do to stop global warming?

This past week I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium and walked through an exhibit on how the seas are changing as a result of increasing water levels and temperatures.  The exhibit included wall-sized versions of old posters that have been modified to raise awareness of this new world in which we live.  The World War I poster pictured to the left was changed so that the caption read:  “Daddy, what did YOU do to stop global warming?”  A woman visiting the museum on seeing this modified poster exclaimed: “That’s bizarre.  That’s just wrong.”  Evidently she would prefer to hold onto some nostalgia of the past rather than face the reality of the present.  It seems that the modification of the poster struck her as somehow perverse, as denying (rather than re-appropriating) the original meaning and power of the poster.

We often ask what we can do as people of faith in response to the environmental crisis.  As a start, we can stop being nostalgic, which means stop living and acting as we did 20 years ago.  The way we live and operate as people of faith must change.  I’m not talking about worship, denominational structures, or church governance (although I think some of those 20th century models are also unsustainable), but about the way we approach creation and creation theology.  The days of proclaiming the stewardship model are over.  It is no longer productive to say that we are stewards of the earth.  The earth is not ours to have dominion over and protect, and numerous Biblical scholars now suggest that it never was.  In fact, many have already argued that this view of dominion is precisely one of the theologies of the past that has gotten us into the present crisis in the first place.  Instead of proclaiming a stewardship model, I suggest (with others such as John B. Cobb, Jr., Roland Faber, and others) that we view ourselves as co-existing on the earth with all other (created) forms of live, rather than as somehow elevated above the rest of creation.  I think this fundamental realization and shift in perspective is a necessary first step in approaching questions of sustainability as people of faith.

If the modified version of the above poster is in fact perverse, then perhaps that kind of perversity is precisely what we need as people of faith to wake us from our nostalgia and orient us to this new world.  And if throwing out the stewardship model is somehow a perversion of Christian creation theology, then I definitely think that this sort of perversion is what Christianity needs in order to understand that we can no longer view humanity as the top of an ecological hierarchy.  We must see ourselves instead as vitally and inextricably connected to all of creation.  The fate of the world is our fate, and nostalgia will not help us solve the problems of the present and future.

David E. Fitch’s new book, The End of Evangelicalism?, brings together about the two most unlikely conversation partners I could imagine–Slavoj Žižek and American Evangelicalism.  And it does so with surprisingly good results.  I have to admit, since I don’t really consider myself an evangelical and don’t generally accept the major tenets of evangelical theology (Biblical inerrancy or substitutionary atonement), I approached Fitch’s book with high intrigue and moderate expectations.  But I can honestly say that every expectation was greatly exceeded.

The End of Evangelicalism? begins with the premise that evangelicalism in North America has experienced a crisis.  Fitch agrees that we may well be living in what can more appropriately be called a post-evangelical age.  In order to diagnose this crisis (and death?) of evangelicalism, Fitch employs the critical theory of Slavoj Žižek, the left-wing Hegelian, Lacanian, atheist who has in recent years become the rock star of postmodern philosophy.  Fitch examines three dearly held convictions among evangelicals–belief in the inerrant Bible, the decision for Christ, and belief in the Christian nation–using Žižekian analysis to demonstrate through each how evangelicalism has devolved into a set of beliefs that are empty at the core.  In his analysis Fitch is clear to say that, unlike Žižek, he does not believe that Christianity itself is empty at the core.  He does not think that Christian beliefs “are somehow necessarily false or illusory,” but he argues that the way in which evangelicals voice and practiced them leads toward a reified set of beliefs which then become ideology.  For both Žižek and Fitch, it is this ideology that is truly empty at its core.

If you have read only a bit of Žižek or are completely intimidated by Žižek, fear not.  Fitch takes some difficult concepts and makes them easily accessible to those uninitiated in contemporary critical theory.  The first chapter of the book provides some background into Žižek’s social critique and draws out the concepts that Fitch employs in the next three chapters, which deal with the three beliefs he sees as signaling the devolution of evangelicalism into ideology.  The most important Žižekian concept for Fitch is that of the master signifier–”a conceptual object around which people give their allegiance thereby enabling a political group to form.”  Yet master signifiers don’t actually stand for anything concrete, and hence they are “empty signifiers.”

Fitch argues that Biblical inerrancy, the decision for Christ, and the Christian nation are all master signifiers, since they shape an ideology around which evangelicals organize themselves and their witness in the world.  Biblical inerrancy becomes nothing more than an identifier or a “badge” to prove one’s evangelical standing, since it doesn’t actually say anything about what a given church or organization believes regarding Biblical interpretation.  In fact, what the master signifier of Biblical inerrancy does (and what each of these master signifiers do) is allow us “to believe without believing.”  Each of these master signifiers organizes people’s allegiance and belief around an idea that remains empty at the core.

What Fitch suggests instead is that these empty signifiers be replaced with beliefs and practices informed by the fullness of Christ.  Out of this will come a politic of mission that adopts “a posture that embodies socially the incarnate presence of God in Christ that participates in his mission in the world.”  The important word here is “participation.”  It is only when evangelicals (or Christians of any stripe) embody the gospel, embody what it means to be a follower of Christ, and live out a Christ-centered politic in the world that empty-at-the-core ideology will be replaced with the fullness of an incarnational theology.  The last chapter of the book articulates exactly how this might happen, taking again each of the three beliefs in turn.

In the epilogue, Fitch looks briefly at four evangelicals who are practicing the sort of politic of mission described here:  Peter Rollins, Brian McClaren , and Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost.  While Fitch has points of contention with each of these authors, he sees in them promise for the future of the post-evangelical world.

Whether you are an evangelical, a progressive, or a progressive evangelical, I highly recommend reading Fitch’s book and grappling with his critiques.  The fun thing about master signifiers is that we all eventually fall into their trap.

This past week I attended the memorial service of my dear friend Judy Goldblatt.  For many Judy was a beacon of light in an otherwise increasingly dim world.  She worked tirelessly, in her hometown of Indianapolis, on behalf of the under-represented by helping those less fortunate than herself register to vote, by driving lower class and home-bound voters to the polls on election day, and by counseling women who had fled homes in which they were victims of domestic violence.  A number of others (here and here) have told the story of her commitment to the Obama campaign in Indianapolis and her political work in the low-income districts of the city.  However, the story of my friendship with Judy Goldblatt involves not political work, but the very faith that led her to seek out justice and work toward the transformation of the world.

For me, Judy was the embodiment of Tikkun Olam, a Hebrew phrase which means roughly “repairing the world”.  I met Judy in a course at Christian Theological Seminary on Jewish/Christian dialogue, co-taught by Clark Williamson and Rabbi Dennis Sasso.  After the course ended, Judy graciously invited the class participants to meet at her home on a monthly basis in order to continue our discussion and dialogue.  Only six of us showed up, but we continued to do so without fail for the next two-plus years.

For those of us who stayed in the group, our monthly meetings became, oftentimes, the most joyous two or three hours of our weeks.  I will never forget sitting on Judy’s couch drinking wine, eating whatever treats corresponded to the season, and discussing books such as Irving Greenberg’s For the Sake of Heaven and Earth, Brian Maclaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy, or essays from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audicity.  Judy treasured these meetings, and we treasured our time with her, her generous spirit, and her eagerness to read, discuss and learn from one another.  It was from Greenberg’s book that we began to think of Jewish/Christian dialogue and our own dialogue group as a part of the process of Tikkun Olam.  Our conversations never stopped with the theoretical, but always merged into the ethical demands we faced in our own locations.

Judy embodied Tikkun Olam not only by engaging in dialogue and considering how together we could begin to repair the world, but by actively and incessantly reaching out beyond herself.  I think I would not be wrong to say that each of us in the group felt ourselves to be a part of her extended family.  We joined the Goldblatts for the high holidays and for Passover; we shared in each other’s difficulties; and we celebrated together the good things in life.  Beyond our group I think it was Judy’s commitment to the hope of repairing the world that led her to political activism, to engagement with the working-class neighborhoods in Indianapolis, and to her commitment to Jewish victims of domestic violence.

Judy will be missed more than I can possibly express in words.  But as I remember and cherish our time spent in her living room, I will always think of the lessons we learned together and, more importantly, the lessons we learned from her.  Our acts of Tikkun Olam, of repairing the world, will be our most fitting tribute to the woman we loved so much who was never shy about giving her opinion, who made everyone feel cherished and included, and who never turned her back on those who most needed her help.

The latest issue of the Atlantic features a provocative article by Hanna Rosin on the rise of women in the business world and higher education.  In the article Rosin posits that the “modern, postindustrial economy” may be more congenial for women than for men.  She cites recent studies pointing to young women’s success in the college classroom (above that of men) and reports the anecdotes of a number of collegiate females who are becoming increasingly convinced that they will be the “providers” for the family, while their husbands stay at home (if they decide to marry at all).  Make no mistake–I consider myself a feminist.  Yet I find the overarching claims of Rosin’s article to be somewhat troubling.

Rosin displays an odd mix of second-wave feminism and postmodern tendencies.  In the paragraph where she questions whether the modern economy is better suited for women, she also appeals to a view of gender-roles as socially constructed:  ”But what if men and women were fulfilling not biological imperatives but social roles, based on what was more efficient throughout a long era of human history?  What if that era has now come to an end?  More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?”  This last sentence betrays her ultimate position–there are certain traits that are ultimately gender specific, and traits possessed by women are more suitable to our current economic milieu.

While I am quite pleased that Rosin reports on women’s excelling in many areas of the economic, political, and educational arenas, I don’t think arguments that rely on gender essentialism will prove terribly helpful in addressing the reasons for such success.  In fact, aren’t these the very same essentialist categories that enabled sexism to exist and persist in the first place?

Rather than relying on these same old gender stereotypes to simply turn the tables, wouldn’t a better approach be to dismantle the stereotypes that maintained women’s role as second-class citizens for so many years?  Another blogger [onehandclapping] wisely commented on Rosin’s discussion of the decline of men in education and business:

“If we keep defining men according to what put them on top in ages past, there is going to come a point where men are going to fail (which according to the article is happening now). Men don’t have to fail for women to succeed, but they will if they keep being fed lies about what it means to be a man. There are two ways we can respond what this article reveals. We can value the character traits that work in a postindustrial age – which are neither masculine nor feminine – and encourage people to develop those skills (social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus according to Rosen). Or we can keep banging the drum that our cultural stereotypes are universal and in fact God-given and freak-out about the end of the world.”

She is right to say that the character traits that seem best-suited to the modern economy are neither masculine nor feminine.  They are merely character traits that can and should be developed by all.  This anti-essentialist approach leads to valuing both men and women without constructing gender-types according to age-old views that simply aren’t true.

I’ve recently becoming involved with a group of thoughtful and brilliant people from Pilgrim Place, a local retirement community, as a part of a Progressive Christians Uniting reflection group.  Last week we read and discussed Robert Heilbroner’s 1972 publication An Inquiry into the Human Prospect–a text that Heilbroner updated in both 1982 and 1992, but that remains a timeless work.  Today just happens to be the anniversary of Heilbroner’s birth, and I thought it might be appropriate to write a few words about our discussion and about whether there is any prospect left for humanity?

In The Human Prospect Heilbroner cites three threats the to prospect of continued human existence: the rapid increase of industrialization, (nuclear) war, and the energy crisis (which we now view as the ecological crisis).  After giving depressing statistics and laying out desolate scenarios, he evaluates possibilities for helpful responses from a socio-economic position and a political position, finally hinting at the fact that strong governmental pressure may be necessary for coalescing efforts around finding solutions to these three threats.  His conclusion is rather bleak, and while Heilbroner himself does not endorse totalitarian movements, he does see them as perhaps one of the few ways in which humanity may have any prospect for the future–a possibility that I find rather frightening.

In the coming weeks, our group plans to discuss ways in which Christians can and should (or already have) respond(ed) to this book and to the seriousness and timelessness of the threats Heilbroner lists.  Two of the responses I want to throw into the discussion are:

1. Shane Clairborne’s new monastic community – communal living with religious convictions can develop in urban settings and radically change the lives of those involved.
2. Mobilization around critical issues via online communities and relationships – The NFL raised more money in 60 minutes during the playoffs via text messaging than most professional fundraisers raise in a lifetime. Protestors in Iran utilized Twitter in order to find and communicate locations for demonstrations following last year’s elections.

Yet is communication and community enough?  Can localized communities or delocalized online communities change the shape of the future, or are we simply doomed to letting totalitarian regimes guide the way?  What other options does Christianity propose to the threats of war, rapid industrialization, and the impending ecological crisis?

Brian McLaren’s new book, A New Kind of Christianity, addresses 10 “profound and critical” questions that are being asked, or should be asked, by Christians today.  In his engagement with the first two questions–the Narrative Question and the Authority Question–McLaren unfolds a critique of Christian tradition that has become wed with Platonic philosophy.  He calls this paradigm “the Greco-Roman narrative” and notes that such a narrative results from reading the biblical text backwards through the lens of subsequent interpreters–namely Augustine, Aquinas, German reformers, and 20th century evangelical and Catholic religious leaders.

This view of the text relies on Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy that separates being and becoming from the ideal and the real.  The result is an understanding of the Gospel that is divorced from the story line out of which it emerged–the story line of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob–giving us a Greco-Roman God who is not in line with the narrative of the Bible.  McLaren says this paradigm has “unwittingly traded its true heritage through Jesus from Judaism for an alien heritage drawn from Greek philosophy and Roman politics” (41).

Interestinly, McLaren is joined in this viewpoint not only by Christian writers, but also by Jewish theorists.  Susan Handelman in The Slayers of Moses describes the Christian tradition as having adopted Aristotle’s distinction between matter and spirit and incorporated this philosophical move in its entirety into the dominant theology.  Judaism, on the other hand, resisted this move and has thus maintained a strong appeal to metaphor, plasticity, and maintaining tension within the biblical narrative.

What is striking to me is that McLaren (rightly, I believe) suggests that Christians return to what Handelman and others might call a rabbinic understanding of scripture.  This understanding does not, as McLaren writes, see the Bible as a constitution, but as a community library–a collection of narratives that relate the story of a faithful God.  We need not seek a straightforward legal document, free of inconsistencies, but rather keep the tension inherent in the text.  Since the beginning of the rabbinic tradition, Judaism has sought to maintain inconsistencies, embrace the tension, and leave disagreements about biblical passages unresolved.  Aiming for a final, set solution claims perhaps more authority than we humans really have.  But leaving the ambiguities intact leaves room for continued searching, continued thought about the best way to interpret the text and the best way to embody it in the present.

Way to go Brian!  Embrace your inner Rabbi!

What could turn of the century (19th to 20th that is) philosopher William James possibly have to say about interconnectivity in a Google world?  As it turns out, quite a bit.  Ok, he wasn’t so ahead of his time as to be able to predict the advent of the internet or any such things, but his essay “The One and the Many” echoes the ponderings of many social and tech theorists of the 21st century (Jeff Jarvis for one).

He begins this essay by recognizing that philosophy has generally been concerned with the quest for unity in the world, but James is more interested instead by the variety of things.  Ultimately, James argues that “what our intellect really aims at is neither variety nor unity taken singly, but totality.”  In other words, we strive to understand the world in all of its manyness, and the totality of the world includes this variety organized into multiple hubs of manyness.

James goes on to describe the result of human efforts to unify the world:  ”The result is innumerable little hangings-together of the world’s parts within the larger hangings-together, little worlds, not only of discourse but of operation, within the wider universe.”  These networks, as he calls them, become “superposed” such that nothing escapes being a part of one network or another.  Interconnectivity is ultimate.

How might the world in which we now live exemplify James’s understanding?  Let me suggest a few ways:

• In the Google world, interconnectivity is fundamental:  individuals can easily organize themselves into communities (whether virtual or “real”) that become the “hangings-together” of our world.
• No blog is an island:  the principles of web 2.0 go along with James’s view that “everything that exists is influenced in some way by something else.”  Most bloggers desire readers and comments.  By commenting in return, the blogosphere comes to embody mutual influence.  My ideas are shaped and furthered by those who critique them, comment on them, and dialogue with them.
• Overlapping networks is inevitable:  our various selves in the social networking realm bump into each other and overlap with each other.  Consider the number of times you been to a friend’s Facebook page and noticed the surprising number of “mutual friends” you have.  Consider the ways in which you are connected to different networks and how these networks overlap when you write for, to, or about them and post it in a common space.

How do you see the web 2.0 world as embodying the one and the many?  In what ways does our interconnectedness change who we are and how we act in the world?