Continental Philosophy and Christian Theology (Book Review)

This review was published in the first print edition of The Englewood Review of Books (Advent 2010), and then a blurb was created by Baker to be used in their advertising. Read the blurb and then read the following review and note their creative cutting and pasting to make me sound much more laudatory of this volume than I intended to sound:

"All the contributions are valuable in their own way, and the collection as a whole is quite stimulating. . . . Paul's New Moment is a rich but dense discussion of some significant themes at the interface of Christianity and continental philosophy. . . . For those who have [read Milbank and Zizek before], this volume carries their dialogue forward in interesting and insightful directions."--R. Dean Hudgens, Englewood Review of Books

Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology.
John Milbank, Slavoj Zizek, and Creston Davis.
Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2010.  256 pages.  $29.99 pb.

Perhaps one could only imagine an extended confrontation between philosopher Slavoj Zizek  and theologian John Milbank in some geeky fantasy league video game.  Nevertheless, here is the third such encounter coordinated by Creston Davis, the Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rollins College in Winter Park, Flordia.  The first, Theology and the Political: The New Debate (Duke, 2005) was co-edited by Davis, Milbank, and Zizek, but included a variety of contributors.  The second and better known volume came out last year entitled The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic (MIT Press, 2009) and featured a more straightforward debate, although with a lot of feinting and sidesteps.  

Both volumes emphasized the culturally resistant and even revolutionary message of Christianity in the face a nihilistic capitalist world.  But Zizek and Milbank fundamentally disagree, as one would expect, on how that resistance takes place with both of them, strangely enough, claiming to be more “orthodox” than the other.  Davis, a former student of both, seems to be on a mission to demonstrate that while seemingly opposed, Milbank and Zizek are in fact working on similar and even converging premises.  Davis admits that at the end of the day one may have to choose between the two, but then again he hopes maybe not.

The premise of this volume is identical with that of the previous two: namely, that Christianity, specifically Christian theology, offers a revolutionary possibility that provides a critical and political stance in the midst of the contemporary world.  This stance is in sharp contrast to modernism, postmodernism, neoliberalism and neoconservatism.  The Apostle Paul (in part one) is seen as someone giving us the coordinates for a true theology of liberation (Milbank, Zizek, and Davis).  Liturgy (in part two) puts this Pauline theology into action (Catherine Pickstock, and Davis).  Finally, Milbank and Zizek discuss how theology relates all of this to mediation, predestination, and apocalypse.

With the exception of Davis’s two chapter, the writers here are not really interacting with each other.  Milbank and Zizek are both interacting with Badiou and Agamben, but only tangentially with each other.  Pickstock’s essay stands alone, and Davis’s two essays seem like one extended thesis in two parts.  All the contributions are valuable in their own way, and the collection as a whole is quite stimulating; but the reader should not begin this volume expecting a dramatic debate smackdown.  

In part one Milbank and Zizek enter into the recent philosophical reflections on the thought of the Apostle Paul (thus the “new moment” of the title is this philosophical Paul examined by Badiou and Agamben, and not the other “new Paul” debated by New Testament critics).  The engagement of continental philosophers with Paul is one of the most remarkable developments in recent years; especially in their insights into Paul as a politically revolutionary thinker.

Milbank interacts with Agamben in chapter one, and then closes the volume with a chapter on Badiou.  In the opening chapter (“Paul against Biopolitics”) Milbank develops Paul’s pneumatic politics over against both ancient and modern biopolitics rooted in a conflictual natural order.  This chapter is more about Milbank’s views on Paul’s politics than it is Agamben’s, but it is a fascinating expedition nonetheless, full of rich political, philosophical, and biblical insight.  

In the final chapter (“The Return of Mediation”) Milbank examines Alain Badiou, by looking in detail at his most recent work L’etre et l’evenement (Being and Event, 2006; French edition untranslated). In brief, Milbank asserts that Badiou’s is ironically a “latent Christian metaphysic” which he is compelled towards by his emphasis on the supremacy of the Event.  Milbank finds Badiou a valuable ally in his own quest to restore the “European tradition of universality”.

Zizek’s three chapters are typically “Zizekian” (however one feels about that).  In “Paul and the Truth Event” Zizek responsibly chronicles the work of Badiou on Paul, and then predictably twists the interpretation so that Paul and Badiou seem to endorse Hegel and Lacan.  Zizek’s second chapter “A Meditation on Michelangelo’s Christ on the Cross” is a suggestive reflection on the death of Christ, including extended references to Rosa Parks, G K Chesterton, Job, and Joan Baez.   “On Mediation and Apocalypse” is his third chapter where Zizek examines three contemporary forms of apocalypticism.  He concludes with an appeal for a Pascalian wager on the significance of revolutionary action rooted in Chesterton’s notion of “thinking backwards” and in keeping with an anachronistic Buddhist Hegelianism.  I know it sounds odd, but that’s Zizek.

Catherine Pickstock’s “Liturgy and the Senses” is a wonderful chapter which seems to only be included to keep Davis’s subsequent chapter on “Subtractive Liturgy” from getting lonely.  Both of Davis’s chapters (chapter three is “Paul and Subtraction”) provide a construal of Paul’s logic of subtraction, by which Davis is reading Paul as a former student of Milbank who believes that Zizek’s reading provides a way forward against the twin dilemmas of universalism and fragmentation.

This is a rich but dense discussion of some significant themes at the interface of Christianity and continental philosophy.  One may feel a bit overwhelmed by thinkers like Milbank and Zizek, who can be exasperating in their verbosity.  For those who have not read them before this is perhaps not the place to jump into the conversation.  For those who have, this volume carries their dialogue forward in interesting and insightful directions.

Philosophy of the Beats (Book Review)

The Philosophy of the Beats

Edited by Sharin N Elkholy

Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2012

291 pages

With the release this summer of a film version of Jack Kerouac's On The Road (directed by the phenomenal Walter Salles) as well as the publication of the first issue of the Journal of Beat Studies (May 2012) we are apparently in the midst of a revival of interest in the so-called “beat generation”. Was there a “beat generation”? Allen Ginsberg said no, there was only a bunch of writers trying to get published. To Jack Kerouac the beat generation were those “who really know where we are.”

When one former Beat poet was told of a new book entitled The Philosophy of the Beats she asked “Did the Beats have a philosophy?” Well, yes, but only if the word “philosophy” is interpreted in the broad, non-technical sense utilized in this University Press of Kentucky series The Philosophy of Popular Culture (edited by Mark T Conard). As far as I can tell this is the only volume in that series of twenty-five that is not focused on film, television, or sports.

As Ginsberg's response indicated the Beats were primarily a group of young men (and a few fascinating women) who met after World War II and influenced one another, collaborated and published a variety of novels, poems, essays. As editor Sharin Elkholy indicates in her introduction the word “Beat” refers to both a literary movement and a lifestyle. There was a New York City nucleus around Kerouac, Ginsberg, and William Burroughs; and a West Coast movement around Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. The subterranean bohemian currents of American life had been running for a hundred years, but it was during this post-war decade that they broke the surface into national consciousness. 

This volume analyzes “beat style” recasting some central Beat themes in  a philosophical framework that the authors believe demonstrate their abiding relevance. The sixteen essays  are arranged in four sections of four essays each, gathering recent scholarship around Beat history, identities, aesthetics, and politics. The triumvirate of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs are examined in about half the essays. Two of  the more significant essays are on two often overlooked female Beat poets Diane de Prima and Joanne Kyger. Two others look at the work of Gary Snyder, a figure clearly related to the other Beats, but also somewhat distinct. The essays situate the Beats in relation to their own intellectual sources (existentialism, surrealism, Dada, etc) and contemporary philosophical analogues (Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, French feminism, etc). They provide a comprehensive survey of the current state of Beat studies, introducing the main subjects, themes, and scholars involved. This volume is a nice complement to an earlier set of essays edited by Jennie Skerl entitled Reconstructing the Beats (Palgrave, 2004).

In the 1950s the Beats were celebrated by few and scorned by most. In post-war America the societal expectation was for hard work, getting married, starting a family, owning a home, settling down, and enjoying the benefits of a growing consumer society. It was the apotheosis of the American Dream. The United States was in a cold war with the Soviet Union and just as Sputnik represented a threat from abroad, many thought the “beatnik” represented a threat at home - not a violent, terrorist threat, but a more insidious moral, spiritual, and psychological threat. The television character Maynard G Crebs on Dobie Gillis became the archetypal beatnik: lazy, unemployed, irresponsible, and needing constant supervision. Overshadowed by mushroom clouds and gripped by the slow death of conformity some youth began to march to “the beat” of a very different drummer and in a very different direction – away from the American Dream and towards something more cosmopolitan, spontaneous, and primal.

It's curious that in 1956 when Ginsberg was reading “Howl” at City Lights, Martin Luther King was leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama, and Billy Graham and Carl Henry were beginning the magazine Christianity Today.  All three of these moments were distinctively American expressions of religion and spirituality. There were few (if any) overlap in concerns or involvements between them, except for a common spirit of contestation. All of them believed that something significant was underway in America. All believed that religion was crucial to what was happening.

The evangelicals around Graham and Henry were determined to increase their educational and cultural capital in the wider society and to not lose ground to secularism. Dr. King and the civil rights movement were determined to break the grip of Jim Crow in the South and to obtain the equal access that the Constitution promised, thereby increasing their political and economic capital. Both groups shared a common Christian heritage, a biblical vocabulary, and a desire to be part of mainstream America.

The Beats were trying to “capitalize” on something entirely different – they wanted to escape the American mainstream. The Beats responded to secularism not through retrenchment in traditional Judeo-Christianity, but by becoming the first group in America to be “spiritual but not religious.” They were also largely apolitical (or at most anarchist libertarians) interested more in free speech than voting rights.  However, they reveled in black music, language, and style. In fact, without urban black culture there would never have been a beat generation.

Perhaps the Beats are still of interest to some young Christians simply because they flagrantly violated so many evangelical taboos. Andreas Seland's essay comparing the poet Charles Bukowski and the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard on the dialectics of love opines “the Beat figure, as we know, is a person who throws himself into the cracks of middle-class morality.” Many of the Beats eventually became trapped in solipsism and despair, and that is one lesson that should not be overlooked. “There were many casualities,” noted Gary Snyder. However, in their restlessness with the American Dream, their cynicism about mainstream society, their hunger for spontaneous expression, and the desire to be at home in their own bodies and with the bodies of others, there is a recurring call that many still find difficult to ignore. I don't look to the Beats for all the answers, but I sure do find them giving voice to some of the most fascinating questions about embodiment, desire, imagination, poetics, vulnerability, and emotional intensity. These are not topics alien to Christian life but they are topics often foreign to Christian thought and reflection.

For those interested in the Beats there are so many good essays in this book it is impossible to note them all. Two of my favorites are on Diane di Prima and Joanna Kyger. These are  insightful treatments of overlooked women who not only outlived many of their Beat contemporaries, but also perhaps outgrew them. The di Prima essay (by R G Quinn) situates her in a larger context of French feminism (with helpful comparisons to Cixous, Irigaray,and Kristeva) and explicates her “feral sexuality.” Di Prima underlines the masculinist nature of the Beat movement and their “gendered ignoring” of female Beat poets. The Kyger essay (by J Falk) explores this even further through an examination of Kyger's prose poem “Descartes and the Splendor Of” which  deconstructs and subverts Descartes's privileging of the rational, “feminizing Descartes” by rooting reason in the imagination which is rooted in the body and not the other way round.

Another of my favorites is Christopher Adamo's essay on Kerouac arguing that On the Road is a work of “utopian individualism” in a world where “the hegemonic grip of the present society has virtually foreclosed setting a spatial political utopia anywhere on this planet.” I agree that in Beat literature community is too divorced from place. The self is uprooted and flies (often psychotropically) above the surface. The only potential location for home is in the body itself. This is why the exploration of sexuality and drug use is so central to the Beats, especially Ginsberg. In the popular mind the Beats are united by a community of style around music, language, clothes, and attitude. They sought embodiment with a vengeance and the transgression of bodily prohibitions in terms of sex, drugs, or discourse was the closest thing to a creed they had. But primarily the Beats were looking for a way to feel at home in the world. Society as given was a consuming and conforming machine (Ginsberg called it Moloch). Where sanity and morality are determined by conformity then only the mad are truly sane, and only the immoral are truly good.

Another valuable essay is Eric Mortenson's on Kerouac and Ginsberg's drug-induced literary composition which sought to privilege the body as the primary site for poetics. Moretenson draws parallels with Deleuze and Guattari's “experimental body” and quotes Henry Miller's desire “to succeed in getting drunk, but on pure water” (which is it seems to me a desire to be Pentecostal without the Holy Spirit!). Two other essays link William Burroughs' work to contemporary postmodern theorists. Burroughs perhaps preceded  someone like Derrida in suspecting that freedom for the self may not be found in unity, but in disintegration and the multiplication of identities.

Ed D'Angelo's “Anarchism and the Beats” is a fascinating glimpse at anarchism's abiding invisibility in American culture. The pre-Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth is the anarchist behind the scenes influencing Ginsberg towards a more activist stance in relationship to both nuclear disarmament and the Vietnam War. Another thing I learned from this essay (and another one by David Need) was the influence that Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (1918) had as a shared text among the early Beats. Spengler predicted that a new religiosity would arise out of the primitive elements of a declining civilization. Following Spengler, the Beats could understand themselves to be prophets of a new consciousness. Remaining wary of politics and ideology they could affirm that the transformation of consciousness would eventually lead to a new form of political engagement.

Gary Snyder's environmental pragmatism distinguishes him in the Beat circle. Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs are city dwellers. Where Snyder connected with the Beats was in his poetry, his disciplined pursuit of Buddhist spirituality, and his desire to put humanity back in touch with our “wild” selves. But for Snyder home must be a geographic location and not just a psychic space. Place is an experience that deepens over time as one grows into and inhabits a place. My favorite essays in this volume all involve Snyder and include Josh Michael Hayes on the poetics of place, Paul Messersmith-Glavin on deep ecology, and D'Angelo's on beat anarchism. You will find your own favorites and the volume is diverse enough to have something for everyone.

When I imagine going on the road with some of the early Beats I see Ginsberg as the loud, obnoxious, nonstop talker in the back seat always needing a bathroom stop. Burroughs is manic and wants to drive but you'd be crazy to let him. Kerouac can drive forever, but never wants to stop. And Gary Snyder has the maps and is the only one who knows where the hell we should be going.

[Also published in the Englewood Review of Books, June 1, 2012]

Prayer as Resistance in Karl Barth (Part Two)

Karl Barth once said “the clasping of the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of this world.” In this two part essay I talk about Barth’s understanding of prayer as a form of Christian resistance. Part one described Barth’s understanding of Christianity as resistance. Part two will now describe how Barth understands prayer as a form of resistance.

Barth wrote over 500 pages on prayer alone. It has a significant place in every volume of his Dogmatics. It is also crucial to his ethics in that Barth roots human freedom in the practice of prayer. Prayer is the human action that declares God’s freedom as primary and human freedom as a response to God. Prayer is how we enter into God’s freedom and follow it into the world. When we pray we take up a posture that reveals our true humanity, uniting what we do with who we are. Barth’s makes the forceful claim that “prayer is literally the archetypal form of all human acts of freedom in the Church, and as such it must be continually repeated in all other acts of freedom.”1

Prayer in other words reveals the core of Barth’s understanding of proper order: the human with open (or clasped!) hands symbolizes the openness for identity, redemption, reconciliation, and guidance. In prayer the self is curved outward. Prayer does not ignore the world or replace it with something else, rather prayer repositions the world and re-places it where it belongs—under God’s lordship and sovereign care.

For Barth prayer is primarily corporate prayer. It is the primary work of the Church, which as a communion of saints functions as a “fellowship of prayer.”2 The prayer of Christians must be united in their calling upon God because they must be continually reminded and in the presence of and conversing with the One who has united them.

However, God remains the constant object of prayer. God “summons us to make His purposes and aims the object of our desire.”3 Prayer situates our human desires and by that rearranges all relationships formed by that desire. Barth always insists that prayer is not about the self but about God. We are not the ones we have been waiting for!

When the Church gathers to pray the “Our Father” we also acknowledge that the “we” of that prayer unites not only our individual and corporate lives, our private and public prayers, but it also unites us with the One who prays with and for them: “The distinctive value and importance of the ‘Our Father’ . . . consists in the fact that in it Jesus ranges Himself alongside his disciples, or His disciples alongside Himself, taking them up with Him into His own prayer.”4

It is crucial to Barth’s understanding of prayer that it is “primarily and predominantly action” which is a basic element in “the whole action of the whole community.” Barth interjects here that even the church’s theological work (also a form of action) is “inconceivable and impossible” without prayer: “All the gulfs and contradictions which occur in it have their final cause in the fact that it is not everywhere carried through in the fellowship of prayer. And what is true of theology is equally true of all other functions of the Church’s ministry.”5

Petition and asking are prayer’s most central features. However, if prayer is to be an “uprising against the disorder of the world” it has to be more than just a conversation! Barth writes at the beginning of The Christian Life that prayer is not “just contemplative or waiting or passive. It goes to work. It intervenes. It commits and exposes itself. It helps, and since it does so totally, it saves.”6

Most importantly for Barth, as he moves into these final reflections of his life and work, he insists “the life of Christians is to be understood in its totality as a life in invocation of God.”7 This invocation is grounded in a “very definite and special passion” that is distinctive to Christians. Christians are of course moved by all the passions that every other human being possesses, and yet, Barth insists that the unique Christian passion is “zeal for the honor of God.”8 This zeal is evident in the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer with the first petition to “hallow” God’s name.

To pray the second petition “thy kingdom come” is to join with God in resistance to human disorder. “God, resists the torrent of human injustice and evil, and therefore . . . (Christians) cannot cease to oppose it as well in their own place and manner.”9 God acts in “the kingdom” in an unexpected and inconceivable manner, inaugurating a new history and bringing it to its goal.

For Barth praying “thy kingdom come” becomes inevitably self-involving, committed the praying Christian to the movement of which the prayer is a part: “Praying the second petition bravely means following this movement and turning, having no other choice but to look ahead and also to live and think and speak and act ahead, to run from the beginning, the history of Jesus Christ first revealed in his resurrection, to the goal, its final manifestation, the coming kingdom of God.”10

If this prayer is a brave prayer then those who pray it will be “claimed for a corresponding inner and outer action which is also brave.” They will be neither idle, acquiescent with disorder, adjusted to the status quo, nor filled with gloomy skepticism. Instead “they wait and hasten towards the dawn of God’s day.”11

So to briefly summarize some of what Barth says on prayer: we have to understand prayer not merely as a ritual practice characteristic of those concerned with religious devotion. Prayer is the archetypal human activity. It is the unique and distinctive human action, an event in which what we do conforms to who we really are. It is the fundamental act of human freedom.

The object of prayer is God and the fundamental nature of that prayer is found in asking and in petition. When we engage in prayer we do not pray alone but rather enter into prayer with Jesus, the true God-human, who intercedes for us and with us. Prayer repositions our selves and our world in its proper dependent relation with God.

Finally, prayer is a form of action that leads to further actions. Prayer pulls us from the sanctuary (and the seminary) into the streets where we join in solidarity with the neighbor whose dilemma has become apparent to us through prayer. This is not a solidarity of self-righteousness but a solidarity of grace carried out in a manner that not only flows from prayer but is shaped by it and conforms to its archetypal pattern.

I doubt Barth is being read as extensively among the Christian anarchists as perhaps he should be. His book on the Lord’s Prayer, titled, Prayer, might be a good start. Clasping the hands in prayer is a rebellious and revolutionary act in the midst of a disordered world. It is also the first and fundamental action of an uprising against that world – a revolt that will attempt to actualize a repositioning of humanity in relationship to the action of God through the event of Jesus Christ. It is an action of human freedom for human freedom made possible by divine freedom.

 [Also published on Jesus Radicals, May 23, 2012]

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1.              Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (CD) (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010), I.2.698. ↩

2.              CD, IV.2.643. ↩

3.              CD, III.4.104 ↩

4.              CD, IV.2.705. ↩

5.              CD, IV.3.3.882–83. ↩

6.              Barth, Christian Life (CL)(London, T & T Clark, 2004), 68. ↩

7.              CL, 49. ↩

8.              CL, 115. ↩

9.              CL, 234. ↩

10.           CL, 262. ↩

CL, 263-264. ↩

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Prayer As Resistance in Karl Barth (Part One)

Karl Barth is reported to have once said “the clasping of the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of this world.”[1] In this two part essay I will talk about Barth’s understanding of prayer as a form of Christian resistance. Barth (1896-1969) was the most prolific and influential Protestant theologian of the twentieth century. I will not attempt to introduce him here. But I hope that what I have written will be accessible and helpful even to those who have only read a little of Barth or never read him at all (or perhaps even heard of him!).

Whether we are interested in Barth or not, the central issue for this essay is significant for everyone. How do we understand the relationship between our private and public lives as followers of Jesus? How is spirituality related to politics? What does prayer have to do with resistance? I find Barth’s thoughts on this to be a compelling proposal for thinking about the unity of prayer and politics. Rather than understanding prayer as a withdrawal from the public square perhaps we should understand prayer as a primary form of worldly engagement. Part one will describe Barth’s understanding of Christianity as resistance. Part two will then describe how Barth understands prayer as a form of resistance.

In his final lectures (published posthumously under the title The Christian Life[2]) Barth maps the situation of the Christian in three concentric circles: the world, the church, and the individual. He argues that when humanity seeks to live independently of God a complex set of “lordless powers” is unintentionally let loose.[3] (Barth compares this to the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice.) He describes these powers under themes such as Leviathan, Mammon, Religion, Ideology, Technology, and gives them the feel of idols. The forces that are set loose claim our subjective loyalties and conform us to patterns of thought, feeling, and action that create and perpetuate human conflict. The Bible calls these forces “principalities and powers” (Col. 2:9).[4]

These lordless powers create a “kingdom of disorder.” This disordered kingdom is the repetitive and stale condition of the world. It is a world where true freedom cannot be found. The kingdom of disorder tries to create its own freedom yet finds itself in bondage. It seeks constant newness and finds itself trapped in an endless cycle of sameness. The repetitive, stale, enslaved disorder manifests itself in the world, the church, and the individual.

Barth also discusses empire as a lordless power and a form of “political absolutism” that can come in many forms (even democratic forms). The “myth of the state” stands approximately “behind and above all government.”[5] Hobbes’s Leviathan is the most prominent example Barth uses. Hobbes’s Leviathan is an alternative God-man, an alternative Christ. We find the beginning of the conception of “the idea of an absolute and lordless power concentrated at one point in one hand.” Hobbes’s state is a machine that produces, protects, and perpetuates its own power. In Barth’s view every type of state is infected with this virus: “no state of any kind is or has or will be immune to the tendency to become at least a little Leviathan.” This imperial polity allows only one of three options: 1) intoxication with the myth of the state itself; 2) assimilation without intoxication; or 3) “law-breaking opposition.”[6] Reading this passage you can appreciate the ease with which some of those influenced by Barth (like Vernard Eller or Jacques Ellul) could find compatibility between Christianity and some form of anarchism.

“God’s design” is something entirely new. It reflects a God who “will always be new to us.” God’s design is an “unthinkable thought” beyond human imagination that can only “come” through God’s unique act. Jesus is the “the new thing.”[7] In Jesus we see lived out the primary and proper Creator-creature distinction. As Christians assume this stance of creature (not Creator), the presence of God becomes “actual” in the world. This stance embodies humanity’s proper place as creatures under God’s care and provision, faithfully learning to live without anxiety. The “Christian attitude”[8] expresses itself in faith, obedience, and prayer. They are part of the “basic forms of the Church’s ministry.”[9] They are distinct but never separate, and prayer is the most fundamental of the three. For Barth the Christian attitude forms the action-based foundation for theological reflection. In other words, theology is rooted in politics and spirituality.

           

Christianity is resistance. The Christian attitude exerts a counter-imperial force. It is the form that Christian resistance takes to the disordered, lordless powers that rule over the world, the church, and the individual. The Christian practice of faith, obedience, and prayer also represents a worldly and material concern. Barth even refers to Christians as true “humanists” because the nature of their “militant revolt” works in favor of all humanity and does not discriminate between friend and foe. Christians share in the guilt and oppression of the world and recognize that their own righteousness is “imperfect, fragile, and highly problematical.” Christians express their solidarity with all of humanity in the struggle for justice. The call to faith is part of this struggle, but the Christian task cannot be limited to that. Christians must stand in solidarity with humanity by, in my words,  “being there.” This will be a discerning “being there” that will sometimes affirm humanity’s efforts and sometimes question them; but it can never become so concerned with Christian purity (of whatever kind) that the “being there” becomes a “not” being there.

Barth’s understanding of Christian resistance is humanistic, engaged, and non-sectarian. The church is the Holy Spirit in community but never confined to the community. Christian resistance is never merely for the sake of holding out against a majoritarian culture opposed to its values and purposes. Christian resistance is witness that works for social transformation. The church lives out the demonstration of God’s own partisanship for humanity. Just as God will not abandon creation, so Christians can never abandon their neighbors.

Finally, the Christian attitude is not just resistance “to” the lordless powers and their malformation of human subjectivity. It is resistance “for” or better yet “towards” the “kingdom come” that Jesus commanded us to pray for. The second petition of the Lord’s Prayer “thy Kingdom come” is for Karl Barth a call to Christian resistance. That call will be examined in part two.

[Also published on Jesus Radicals, May 18, 2012] 

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[1] See Kenneth Leech, True Prayer: In Invitation to Christian Spirituality (Harrisburg, Pa: Morehouse Publishing, 1980), 68.

[2] Karl Barth, The Christian Life (New York: T & T Clark, 2004). I will refer almost exclusively to §78 The Struggle for Human Righteousness, pages 205-272.

[3] Ibid., “The Lordless Powers”, pages 213-233.

[4] It is not a coincidence that those who have made the principalities and powers a major part of their social analysis were all influenced by Barth (see Jacques Ellul, John Howard Yoder, William Stringfellow, and Walter Wink).

[5] Ibid., 220.

[6] Ibid., 221.

[7] Ibid., 236.

[8] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson, 2010), III.3.244ff

[9] Ibid., IV.3.2

Benedict Rules (book review)

The Rule of Saint Benedict: A Contemporary Paraphrase

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2012

112 pages

Conversation with Saint Benedict: The Rule in Today’s World

Terrence G Kardon, OSB

Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012

150 pages

When someone offers us a contemporary English paraphrase of a 1500 year old text on monasticism we probably should not wait for the movie!

Saint Benedict of Nursia (480-547 CE) wrote a “Rule” for monastic communities that synthesized a number of earlier efforts. Benedict’s Rule became the template for all subsequent attempts to establish a sustainable order for Christian community life. One strength of contemporary “new monasticism” is the impulse to resource our classical Christian tradition for contemporary practice. The Rule of Saint Benedict therefore may function like an ancient map pointing to landmarks and communal pathways that have been overlaid or obscured. It may remind us of undiscovered territory, unexplored horizons, or overgrown treasures.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove offers us a Eugene Peterson style paraphrase of a work that was foundational to both Christian monasticism and the expansion of Western civilization. It is his hunch that “Benedict is a prophet for our time” and that “the Rule” might become a “curriculum for finding our common future together.” His brief book strengthens that intuition.

We forget how many of the “saints” were driven by a disgust for their own culture, and a restless discontent with their own initial attempts to join or establish counter-cultural Christian communities. However a homogenous unit of social dissenters and spiritual seekers is not a sustainable religious fellowship. If the emerging anti-imperial animus of Benedict’s day was ever going to become more than just a passing fad it would have to take some type of enduring institutional form. The Rule was not about stifling that disruptive energy but channeling it into a constructive program that could endure over generations. After a millennia and a half we might conclude that Benedict’s experiment succeeded!

Wilson-Hartgrove writes well and his paraphrase is faithful, relevant, insightful, and (unlike Benedict perhaps) fun. He resists “spiritualizing” Benedict’s message by not removing it from its specific contexts and references. He lets it remain a foreign text while providing a paraphrase and a commentary that both communicate and translate that foreignness. He attempts to say in Benedict’s voice what Benedict might say to Christian communities today.

Benedict’s Christian faith resonates with many contemporary evangelicals and anabaptists because of its communal focus, its biblical foundation, and its fixation on discipleship. A summary of Benedict’s own version of the “four spiritual laws” might read “left to our own desires, we make a mess of our lives. But our Creator has shown us the way to true life. To receive the gift of this way is to follow it. This is not a rule for some part of our life called ‘spiritual.’ It is a rule for all of life.” (page 6).

Benedict’s coverage of subjects seems strange to us. How different his concerns than our own! Yet we are forced to pay attention to this difference and be measured by it.

Wilson-Hartgrove notes that “If we had to boil the Rule down to its basic elements, it would be fair to say they are two: how to pray and how to eat.” (page 68). Maintaining that union of praying and eating is part of the Rule’s genius; and part of the genius of this wonderful little paraphrase is to deepen the resonance between Benedict’s time and our own – our communities needs and challenges and Benedict’s insightful and enduring counsel.

The Rule has 73 short chapters and so does Wilson-Hartgrove’s paraphrase. He inserts brief commentaries throughout the book that serve to highlight, explain, contextualize, or apply Benedict’s guidance. The Rule contains both spiritual wisdom on living the Christian life, and administrative counsel on living in Christian community. Part of the Rule’s abiding value is in seeing these two halves as one whole. What might be considered the mechanics of communal life are not separated from the overall model of sanctification – nor the reverse.

Listening and humility are central to both. Wilson-Hartgrove emphasizes the importance that Benedict places on good leadership; however so does the Harvard Business School. But Saint Benedict’s leadership, according to Wilson-Hartgrove, functions to insure a “specific context for learning to listen” and submission to good leadership is part of growth in humility - a topic that will not be taught at Harvard.

Are our contemporary communities too focused on mission and not enough on the listening that makes faithful and effective mission possible? We start and live in communities focused on simple living, justice ministry, or permaculture; but where are the new monastic communities devoted to listening and growth in humility? The Rule provokes such questions.

Benedict also assumed (as did all of the rules from which he drew) that discipline was a necessity for healthy community. So what does it say about us today that Benedict’s eight chapters on discipline “seem particularly strange” (page 54)? Perhaps returning to Alasdair MacIntyre’s commendation of Saint Benedict in After Virtue is one necessary (but insufficient) place to start answering that question.

Finally, many young communities become disillusioned with the amount of administration and organizing that life together requires. Even prayer requires planning! The number of chapters Benedict devoted to organizational topics (picking leaders, providing correction, ordering the worship times, administering the work and food) reminds us that divinity is in the details.

No community sustains its life over time without both coherence and flexibility. The miracle of Benedict’s Rule is that it has somehow seemed to provide for both.

Terrence Kardong’s Conversation with Saint Benedict emphasizes how Benedict’s Rule looks after fifty years living inside of it. Kardong has been a resident of Assumption Abbey in Richardton, North Dakota. His collection of seventeen essays on contemporary Benedictine practice provides a wonderful complement to Wilson-Hartgrove’s outsider’s view. Kardong is droll, insightful, and even sarcastic at times.

Whereas Wilson-Hartgrove tries to point out the value of the The Rule to contemporary Christian communities, Kardong reflects upon how the Rule has been questioned, adopted, dismissed, and reinterpreted by those who have devoted their lives to it. He addresses everything from getting along with other people, dealing with anxiety, to negotiating the use of cell phones and the internet. He questions the ability or necessity of contemporary Benedictines understanding leadership in the same authoritarian way that Benedict did. Those who have lived for awhile in Christian community will find a wonderful kinship with Kardong’s narrative of community’s journey of continuity and change.

Everyone lives with a “rule” that guides and directs their thoughts, feelings, and actions each day. For the most part this “rule” remains unexamined, a bit neurotic, and remarkably rigid and resistant to growth or change. Benedict’s word to us is that such rules are made to be broken. You must (in Wilson-Hartgrove’s paraphrase of Benedict) “give up your addiction to yourself.” We do this not that we might live without all rules; but that we might embrace a rule that is examined, mature, flexible, and beneficial for growth in Christian discipleship and life in Christian community. It is the rule of Christ.

[Soon to appear in The Englewood Review of Books]

Democracy More or Less

“Are you for or against democracy?” Well, it depends. At the same time as an apparent shift in global politics towards democratic forms of governance (the Arab Spring is only one example), the economic forces of globalization are redefining democracy and widening the gap between those in power and those subordinate in power. Theologian Jeffrey Robbins has noted that “democracy always demands more democracy.”[i] But for an increasing number of western intellectuals today democracy is an annoyance. Fareed Zakaria the editor of Newsweek International and editor-at-large for Time Magazine has written, “What we need in politics today is not more democracy but less.”[ii]

The practice of radical democracy has always been central to anarchist practice and theory. David Graeber has said that anarchism as a whole and movements against globalization are “about reinventing democracy.”[iii] Anarchistic democracy is radical because it is a set of emancipatory practices and actions rather than a constitutional form or an institutional structure. Anarchism as a theory of radical democracy is an open-ended project.  Australian anarchist Saul Newman argues, “anarchism can be seen as providing the ultimate politico-ethical horizon for radical democracy.”[iv] What posture should Christian anarchists take in relationship to the democratic governments that most of us are a part of?

Democracy ain’t what it used to be – and maybe it never was. Political and economic influence is channeled into fewer and fewer hands while “democracy” and “freedom” spread everywhere. Everything is being redefined by economics. Even the state is now organized, regulated, and legitimized by how well it serves the financial markets. We live in “corporate democracies” where P.R. techniques provide the illusion of participation yet keep people in a state of apathy.

Sheldon Wolin defined radical democracy as a “rebellious moment”, unstable, and inclined toward anarchy. According to Wolin democracy is a revolutionary activity by common people against the injustice of the established regime. He concluded his classic survey of the history of Western political philosophy by asserting that “The central challenge at this moment is not about reconciliation but about dissonance, not about democracy’s supplying legitimacy to totality but about nurturing a discordant democracy.”[v]

French philosopher Jacques Ranciere agrees when he distinguishes between “policing” and “politics”. Policing is the set of policies and procedures that establish, organize, and legitimate power. Policing refers to the hierarchical political structures we inherit and the rationale used to justify their imposition. We do not need “the police” to do all the policing because we internalize the structures and thus police ourselves. Most of what we call politics (like elections and voting) is actually policing.[vi]

“Politics” according to Ranciere is antagonistic to policing and to the hierarchical structures that policing enforces. Politics implements difference, contingency, and equality into the system. Politics is “the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being.”[vii] The lowest is no lower the highest. The highest is no higher than the lowest. Politics rarely happens because policing discourages it. According to Ranciere the purpose of politics is not consensus but dissensus. Politics is the refusal of the given policed order and the continual quest for the equality and liberty that must disrupt the false identities and social roles that are imposed upon us. Wolin and Ranciere therefore define the politics of radical democracy as a discordant democracy creating dissensus.

One of the most common objections I hear against anarchism is that it is reactionary and parasitic; and that anarchists have no positive program. We consistently hear this complaint against the Occupy Movement. I disagree. Anarchism is a proactive and generative understanding of society and politics.

Gustav Landauer was one primary example of a constructive anarchist (and a mystical one at that!). Landauer reframed the classic anarchist question about the necessity of abolishing the state. Landauer wrote “The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.”[viii] The State only seems to be necessary because we presume it. In fact, the State is artificial and can be overcome by forming real relationships with “People”. The question of state or no-state is a false choice. “If the State is a relationship which can only be destroyed by entering into another relationship, then we shall always be helping destroy it to the extent that we do in fact enter into another.” Landauer advised the formation of alternative communities of real relationships that would not destroy the prevailing system by a frontal assault, but by withdrawing energy from it would render its institutions redundant. Landauer’s position didn’t require that everyone become an anarchist, nor did it force anyone to do so. It only forced those who desired to live differently to begin doing so immediately – to practice radical democracy.

We might consider the Mennonite John Howard Yoder as another constructive anarchist.[ix] Political philosopher Romand Coles write, “I read Yoder’s radical reformation theology as radically democratic—in the temporal as well as the directly ethical-political sense of the term.” [x]  Yoder’s Body Politics[xi] can be read as both a tract about the life of the gathered Christian community and also a forecast of what a radically democratic society might look like.

Yoder rejected the false dualism between state politics or no politics: “The choice or the tension which the Bible is concerned with is not between politics and something else which is not politics, but between right politics and wrong politics . . . Our first need has been to deny a dualism, to reject the splitting apart of territories separating the political from the nonpolitical.”[xii]

Yoder’s commitment to nonviolence has implications for how political discourse is practiced. The command of Jesus to love our enemies implies that loving our enemies means listening to our enemies. Coles observes that Yoder’s “pacifist epistemology” requires the practice of radical democracy. Patience is a necessary method for Yoder’s politics because only patience can guarantee everyone gets taken seriously. Radical democracy refuses to limit discussion to those “in power” or allow the majority to stifle the voice of the minority.

Yoder’s radical democracy is expressed primarily in the “social process” of the local Christian community. Yoder describes the “open process” by which the congregation welcomes full participation and due process so that every voice is heard and every witness evaluated. Yoder’s radical democratic process requires a congregation to be receptive, vulnerable, and always prepared for an interruption that reconfigures everything.

The church functions “prefiguratively” as the embodiment of the future that it hopes will some day be a reality for everyone. David Graeber described the prefigurative politics of those at the 1999 Seattle WTO protest: “When protesters in Seattle chanted ‘this is what democracy looks like,’ they meant to be taken literally. In the best tradition of direct action, they not only confronted a certain form of power, exposing its mechanisms and attempting literally to stop it in its tracks: they did it in a way which demonstrated why the kind of social relations on which it is based were unnecessary.”[xiii]

The resonance here between Yoder’s prefigurative Christian assembly and the prefigurative General Assemblies at the Occupy Movement is not coincidental. David Graeber’s insistence that the anti-globalization movement is about reinventing democracy might also be said of Yoder’s radical reformation vision for the church. This is not of course the first time that some version of Anabaptist practice has reinvigorated the practices of democracy. Anarchists have emphasized the importance of immediate direct action: the concrete prefigurative practice of a radical democracy in whatever social circle, order, organization, institution, or collective of which one is already a part. The practice of radical democracy flows out of radical Christian discipleship.

[Also published on Jesus Radicals, April 6, 2012]

[i] Jeffrey W Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political Theology (Columbia University Press, 2011), p 32

[ii] Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (W W Norton, 2003), p 242

[iv] Saul Newman, “Post Anarchism and Radical Politics Today”, Post-Anarchism Reader, edited by Duane Rousselle and Sureyya Evren (Pluto Press, 2011), p 65

[v] Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2006), pp 605-606

[vi] Saul Newman, pp 58ff

[vii] Todd May, The Political Thought of Jacques Ranciere: Creating Equality (Penn State: 2008), pp 29-30

[viii] Buber, Martin. Paths in Utopia (Syracuse University Press, 1996), p 47

[ix] Yoder would have denied being an anarchist, but this essay would argue that his position is in fact compatible with anarchism – whether he recognized it or not.

[x] Romand Coles “The Wild Patience of John Howard Yoder: ‘Outsiders’ and the ‘Otherness’ of the Church” in The New Yoder, edited by Peter Dula and Chris K Huebner (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade: 2010)

[xi] John Howard Yoder, Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World (Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 2001), esp. chapter 5 “The Rule of Paul, pp 61-70.

[xii] John Howard Yoder. For the Nations: Essays Public and Evangelical (Eerdmans, 1997), pp 222-223

[xiii] David Graeber, Fragments of Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), p 84