The Devil, Hell, Demons, and Excorcism (enough to interest you yet?)

This is a rough draft of my sermon on Sunday (Mark 1:9-15; 1 Peter 3:18-22).  I will likely make some more edits and developments but I am curious if there is any feedback that I should take into consideration here.

At times the church gets criticized for holding on to outdated and backwards views of the world.  And we do need to be open to these criticisms and concerns.  But it is interesting to note that while many churches on the one hand are working hard to remove unhelpful ideas about mental illness being some sort of evil spirit or of heaven and hell as literal places in the clouds and in the center of the earth on the other hand we find so-called enlightened western culture fascinated with movies about books about zombies, vampires, demons, ghosts and all sorts of hellish creatures.  Out of curiosity I went online to search for videos on YouTube about demon possession and exorcisms and I found plenty, some with millions of views.  What is going on here?  How do we discern these matters as a church?  Is there a relationship between our current curiosities and interests in evil spirits and other hellish matters and what is happening with Jesus and the Devil in the wilderness and Jesus message to the spirits of the dead in prison?  I think there may be a connection but I think the connection is in their opposition to each other.  Let’s start by looking at our current and ongoing fascination with the realms of the dead.

From here is eternity

I have not posted recently on my Kierkegaard reading.  Things continue to progress more or less on target.  I am currently in the middle of Christian Discourses.  I continue to have a mild reception to most of his religious writings.  The first section of CD comes off as firmly okay.  It is essentially an exploration of how living in light of eternity creates a reversal of popular (temporary) understanding.  So wealth and poverty are inverted, gain is loss, strength is weakness, etc.  There is nothing wrong with this approach in itself and there are moments of insight in Kierkegaard’s thinking here.  For instance when Kierkegaard develops the inversion of wealth and poverty he does so by demonstrating the nature of wealth.

Riches are indeed a possession, but actually or essentially to possess something of which the essential feature is losableness or that it can be lost is just as impossible as to sit down and yet walk – at least thought cannot get anything in its head except that this must be a delusion.  If, namely, losability is an essential feature of riches, then it is obvious that no essential change has occurred when it is lost, no essential change occurs in it by being lost.  Therefore, it is essentially the same, but then it is indeed also essentially the same while I possess it – it is lost – because it must indeed be essentially the same at every moment.  Lost, it is essentially the same; possessed, it is essentially the same, is lost; that is, in a deeper sense it cannot be possessed. (28)

A key element of how Kierkegaard energizes this dialectic is the role of eternity.  Eternity for Kierkegaard is a mode or posture of approaching the world.  In one key passage Kierkegaard describes how eternity creates a way of being more present as opposed to a future or spiritualized orientation.  In this section Kierkegaard is referring to self-torment as the next day.

The one who rows a boat turns his back to the goal toward which he is working.  So it is with the next day.  When, with the help of the eternal, a person lives absorbed in today, the decisively he turns his back to the next day; then he does not see it all.  When he turns around, the eternal becomes confused before eyes and becomes the next day.  But when, in order to work toward the goal (eternity) properly, he turns his back, he does not see the next day at all, whereas with the help of the eternal he sees today and its tasks with perfect clarity.  But if the work today is to be done properly, a person must be turned in this way.  It is always delaying and distracting impatiently to want to inspect the goal every moment, to see whether on is coming a little closer, and then again a little closer.  No, be forever and earnestly resolute; then you turn wholeheartedly to the work – and your back to the goal.  This is the way one is turned when one rows a boat, but so also is on positioned when one believes.  One might think that the believer would be most distanced from the eternal, he who has completely turned his back and is living today, whereas the glimpser stands and looks for it.  And yet the believer is closest of all to the eternal, whereas the apocalypt is most distanced from the eternal, then the next day becomes a monstrous confused figure, like that in a fairytale.  Just like those daimons we read about in the book of Genesis who begot children with mortal women, the future is a monstrous daimon the begets the next day. (74)

Organic theology . . . no, wait, don’t click to another site!

The term ‘organic’ seems to be moving quickly into disfavor among many philosophers and theologians.  The impression I get is that the term is most often evoked with a sense of nostalgia and naivete with respect to how we can best understand and respond to situations (and the co-option of the term for less than desirable purposes cannot help).  Whether this reaction comes from the pushback against ‘localism’ over at AUFS or the apocalyptic theology of Doerge, Kerr, Siggelkow et. al. it seems that ‘organic’ is not the right mode of engagement.  This is a reductionistic preface but a preface that should indicate our ongoing desire to find the next and better mode of inquiry.  That is fine and I am not looking to go back.  I am just setting this up for one simple observation.

I was given a plant.  It is in my office.  This plant seems at once to be both dying and regenerating itself.  At times it has beamed with robust health and at other times it teetered and I have not known what will come of it (though I know what should come of a plant).  More often than not I do not know what to do.  At one point branches were snapping.  The giant leaves seemed too heavy or was it that the branch was too weak or was it that they had simply grown to completion.  I would grow anxious.  Too much or not enough of any number of things can spell the end.  I rushed to the Sunday School supply room and came back with pipe cleaners and popsicle sticks trying to create splints to see if they could heal.  But I had to let them go.  Out of the three only one sprouted a new leaf.

This all reminded me of my childhood on the farm.  I could not farm.  In my bones I despised farming because I would work an already too wet field and see dark clouds roll in from the West miles away on the prairies bringing more rain.  It made me ill.  So I left the farm unconsciously thinking there were places where I could have more control.

And I found these places in regular paychecks and relatively clear job expectations.  But now several times a day I look over at that plant and I do not know its fate.  Again, I am trying to be very conscious of nostalgia or paternalistic tendencies in my thinking.  I suppose the only point I am trying to make is that if someone wishes to move beyond the organic metaphor they should have made sure they sat long enough with it in all its precariousness and anxiety . . . and beauty.

A Faithful Life?

I notice a tension between a substantive conception or articulation of a faithful life on the one hand and its entirely contextual and unexpressable nature on the other.  The notion of the substantial reality of faith is most often employed as a negative presence.  This is why my life is not faithful.  The most common refrain being that I live in the midst of and am embedded in powers and principalities that benefit the few at the cost of the many.  In Yoderian language I cannot say that I live independently of these powers.  Therefore my life is not faithful. But I can look to the ungraspable notion of grace and hope in apocalyptic action (of which I seek and participate).  So maybe my life is not faithful but God is faithful.  I am internally in contradiction.  I live in tension.  I would argue, though, that this tension is not a creative dialectic but a binding and entangling cord.  It is only a negativity.  Perhaps a negativity that will serve a purpose or has a place but it is a negativity nonetheless.

I think of a family I know.  She works and receives an increasingly rare middle-class salary.  They have bought a modest house in a ‘bad’ but developing neighbourhood.  He suffers from mental illness and requires stability but is still unable to work.  They have a young girl who he cares for.  This is not a dramatic home (well I cannot attest for everything that goes on there) but also not an easy life.  They discuss and strive for faithful choices in daily life.  I would characterize this house as faithful in the sense that Jean Vanier speaks of when he refers to enough stability for healing and growth and enough chaos and uncertainty to keep life open.

My life is not much different.  But I struggle some days even to conceive of their life as faithful never mind my own.  Negativity can always appeal to a lower (or higher) denominator.  This is binding, indebting and imprisoning.  It is not Gospel.  But I don’t know another way forward.  Is this process I am in necessary . . . is it helpful?  What would freedom mean?  Can I enact that freedom (who will rescue me from this body of death . . . )

Am I stuck in morality?  Do I need to move beyond good and evil as they say?  There is not enough nuance in the world to account for its complexity, at least in terms of possibility.  Who then is the righteous fool?  Who is the faithful one?

Have You Seen This Dead God?

Lately it seems I cannot turn around without coming across the dead God.  I have been reading Zizek again and instead of simply being playfully amused by his counter-intuitive insights I have begun to see more clearly his hegelian reading of the Trinity.  God empties himself into Jesus and is split, de-centered from himself.  And dies.  The God of ‘beyond’ which can and does ground every ideology is emptied and the space of struggle, the Holy Spirit, is opened in this death.  Traditional theology will tend to keep God the Father above and beyond pulling the strings and maintaining order.  It is precisely that God that must be emptied into Jesus die for the purpose of salvation.

Man is eccentric with regard to God, but God himself is eccentric with regard to his own ground, the abyss of Godhead. . . . Christ’s death on the Cross thus means that we should immediately ditch the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology – Christ’s death on the Cross is the death of this God, it repeats Job’s stance, it refuses any ‘deeper meaning’ that obfuscates the brutal reality of historical catastrophes. – The Monstrosity of Christ

I also recently finished reading Ronald Osborn’s Anarchy and Apocalypse.  This is a relatively conservative appeal to the biblical resources of non-violence set within particular contemporary settings.  However, here the dead God surfaces in the form of post-holocaust Jewish thought, namely that of Elie Wiesel.  Wiesel sees God as the young child hung from his neck, dying and almost dead.  This becomes the straightforward,

ethical as well as a religious imperative: if we are to remain human we must refuse passivity, ease, complacency, and fight for the justice which God, in His captivity, in the time of His banishment, cannot bestow. – Anarchy and Apocalypse

And all the reminded me of an old post I wrote reflecting on Kierkegaard’s test for true love which is to love someone dead.  The dead is the absolute relationship.  If the relationship of love changes it must be because of you, the variable element (no blaming the dead for not understanding you).  To love one dead is love a non-being.

In order properly to test whether or not love is faithful, one eliminates everything whereby the object could in some way aid him in being faithful.  But all this is absent in the relationship to one who is dead, one who is not an actual object.  If love still abides, it is most faithful. – Works of Love

What is going on here?  Will a decade, more or less, pass after which we will look back at these silly caricatures of theology?  Or are these accounts already reflections and indictments of an already over-caricatured and debased theology and ecclesiology?  I would like to call this theme humanist in its apparent rejection of God but that does quite do it justice.  Death is something other than human or perhaps fully human; something that modern humanism (as I have encountered it) does quite seem to grasp.  Also these accounts remain in many ways thoroughly theological.  They are dealing with the dead God not with God as an illusion.  It is this possible realism in theology that I find intriguing and potentially attractive.

And for your listening pleasure he is Gash’s 1986 God is Dead

Digging Into the End

I remember when my little brain first gained the conceptual ability to ponder (outer) space.  I let my mind wander as far as it would go into space.  It traveled deeper and deeper where the star lights began to grow dim.  Then light became absent.  Things slowed down but my mind continued.  Eventually my mind reached a wall, or more accurately a corner, a point where my mind was funneled.  This is the end, there is no further.  But the thought came to me, What if I began to dig into the end?

This thinking always comes back to me when the question of immanence and transcendence surfaces.  It always supported, in my mind, a position of transcendence.  I no longer see this as the case.  I see the question now more as a Hebrew one; that is a question of boundary.  In any  event I have been trying to think through various expressions of immanence lately.  Most of them are loosely or directly connected with Gilles Deleuze (and seems to characterize much of the contributions at AUFS).  Currently I am reading Philip Goodchild’s Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire.  As I am working through many things I do not understand I came across a very helpful and short statement on understanding immanence.

A truly critical philosophy can only be judged by the immanence of its criteria: it must do what it says, and say what it does.  It becomes a being-thought: a thought of being and a being of thought.  The second limit of critical philosophy is therefore a pure plane of immanence; this is the only possible meaning of the ‘end of philosophy’.  Immanence does not mean the absence of determination; rather, it implies that all that one is should be put into how one thinks, so that one’s entire mode of existence may be changed by encounters and idea within thought. [emphasis added]

This is far and away the most helpful thinking I have encountered in this discussion.  I have always approached the question as a jockeying for position over transcendence.  Who is policing the boundaries?  Who is claiming access or insight into the other side?  Who has dug through the end?  Goodchild’s (or Delueze’s) posture orients the question much more existentially and in many ways reminds me of statements found in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground in which the Underground Man attempts to face himself.

There are certain things in a man’s past which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends.  Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as a secret.  But, finally, there are things which he is afraid to divulge even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things in his mind.

. . .

I particularly want to put the whole thing to the test to see whether I can be absolutely frank with myself and not be afraid of the whole truth.

This thinking has no interest in the perception from outside as an abstracted and inaccessible site of conversation.  This thinking desires to put all into play; a venture of risk and trust.  I cannot rely on a secure deposit outside the relations of this world.  What else is kenosis?  As such this becomes a venture that may offer traction to the Christian notion of faith.  And perhaps more importantly this thinking may actually put flesh on the possibility of conversion.

Book Review – Anarchy and Apocalypse

Ronald E. Osborn. Anarchy and Apocalypse: Essays on Faith Violence, and Theodicy (Cascade Books, 2010).

Osborn’s short collection of essays is one of the more eclectic publications I have read in some time.  Faith and violence are indeed the mingled themes that bind this work together; having said that, however, the collection is somewhat nomadic moving from shorter almost op-ed pieces to longer more technical engagements.  Osborn’s introduction claims that a possible underlying ‘project’ here is an attempt to relate anarchist and Christian approaches to nonviolence.