Keep it to yourself

A number of blogs that I follow push back (most recently here) pretty hard against a type of personal activism that ends up creating a structure a moral evaluation with no sense that effective change is produced or even possible.  What do I mean by this?  I mean simply that personal activism can be a therapeutic response to the guilty conscious of privilege.  There is nothing new in that statement and many of the blogs that I follow outline and develop this a more thorough manner.  However, I though it might be helpful to outline a few simple guidelines for how to discern this reality.

1. If you believe your action has direct connection to effective change, then outline the network of relationships that demonstrates this, so as to help enable others to participate.  So the personal practices of reducing and recycling are good but I personally do not know of the statistics that relate the basic difference between the personal recycling of material goods and the inherent production of corporate waste in producing our goods and services.  Therefore, in our current structure I do not actually know if increased recycling will actually make a dent in the realities of environmental damage.  So reduce, reuse, and recycle but unless you can articulate a well-informed understanding of how that effects change in the environment in relationship to all the other variables then just do as a base-line practice and nothing more.  The same is true for alternative or ‘guerrilla’ gardening.  These practices can be fun and meaningful but can they address global issues of starvation?  Should they function as anything more than a ‘good habit’?
2. Be honest that ‘fair-trade’ products represent a sort of premium or ‘luxury’ brand.  They are not bad.  They are simply out of reach for many people to consistently have access to.  The result of creating a morally elevated status for such products is that those who are the most vulnerable in our society will actually have guilt heaped on them (in addition to the prevalent social stigma of being poor).
3. ‘Symbolic’ gestures are only powerful if they register or gain traction in the face of those in power.  In my Mennonite culture there is an emphasis on ‘simple’ or humble lifestyles.  This basically means that people are not supposed to be ‘flashy’ with their money.  So a family can have a cabin, an RV, snowmobiles, a boat, etc. but if another family occasionally goes out to a fancy restaurant or purchases a piece of ‘abstract’ art they are deemed frivolous or ‘materialistic’.  Simple living is fine, not having flashy things is fine, but there should be no moral scale here.  The only time a particular way of living has symbolic power is if it is actually taken note of by those in power and disrupts the flow of power.  Otherwise, go ahead and do it but drop the implicit or explicit pretense of righteousness.

The result of not following some of these guidelines is, I believe, the very real possibility of insulating ourselves from the possibility of actual change because we are already the change we want to see in the world.  So, again, to repeat there are all manner of good and relatively equivalent (I did not say neutral) ways of living (because in many instances we do not actually know the good or harm we do).  This is not a critique of particular practices as such, rather I am concerned about the moral structure that gets developed around these practices that serve to sanctify and pacify our privileged guilt while condemning those in our midst outside the privileged ability to attain this sort of personal social-piety.  Sure we will condescend to acquit the poor from such guilt but it will be done not from solidarity but from ‘on high’.  And to be clear it is not only those without material means who struggle to attain this sort of personal social-piety but the reality is that it is a lot of work to be consistent in this area.  Many people with mental illness or with children with disabilities or with other significant stress in their life will find it hard attain this piety and will only have more guilt/shame added to their lives as they already have difficulty achieving the other salvation narrative of the ‘American dream’.

So is this another expression that functions to insulate my own position?  I am sure there are elements of self-protection here.  But I do want to offer this as a sort of confession.  For most of my adult life I have lived in the ‘less-desirable’ areas of Canada.  I have, for the most part, quite enjoyed this experience.  I have, however, also held it up as a sort of implicit model of ‘faithfulness’.  And for the most part the practice has been selfish as it has kept me in touch with certain social realities that we tend to ignore.  But functionally there has been no more method in this approach than the baseline hope of being a ‘good neighbour’.  Being a good neighbour will look differently in my neighbourhood than it will in other neighbourhoods but it is also no more righteous (and I am not convinced I have lived up to this in my context in any event).  While I need to take down my lifestyle as a model of personal piety this is different than articulating the manner in which neighbourhoods are formed and maintained (which I have articulated here and here).  This articulation can be a framework in which possibilities for effective or symbolic action can be developed.  This becomes a participatory and collaborative expression rather than a personal posture of living in the ‘hood is more righteous than living in the ‘burbs.  My point in all this is simple.  There are many good things to do in the world but for the most part keep it to yourself.  If it is an effective or truly symbolic act then it will speak for itself.

So what am I missing in my thinking or on my list?

Kierkegaard on politics

In Kierkegaard’s Postscript to his treatise on authority and revelation, also known as The Book of Adler, Kierkegaard makes some telling political statements.  Kierkegaard is of course popularly criticized for his lack of politics but rarely is it mentioned that he is most often simply trying to maintain a rigorous qualitative distinction.  Some may simply disagree with his distinction but it needs to be clear that Kierkegaard is entirely intentional in what he develops.  Kierkegaard makes clear in his postscript that he this writing is ‘ethico-religious and has nothing to do with politics’.  The point of departure for the religious is from above, from God, “and the formula is this paradox that an individual is employed.”

Humanly understood, an individual, according to all reason, is infinitely nothing in comparison with the established order (the universal), so it is a paradox that the individual is the stronger. . . . When there are hundreds of men, what comes to pass is explained simply by the activity of the hundreds of men, but the paradox compels us (insofar as freedom can be compelled) to take notice of God, that he is taking part in it.

Kierkegaard then goes to talk about the political which comes from below, that is, how does politics attempt to change the established order.  I will include several excerpts as there are few times in all his published corpus that he speaks this directly.  The political as he understands it is being conceived and built now as a ‘monstrous multitude’.

“The multitude,” an absurd monster or a monstrous absurdity, which nevertheless is physically in possession of power, of outcries and of noise, and besides that has an extraordinary virtuosity in making everything commensurable for the decision of the hands upraised to vote or the fists upraised to fight.  This abstraction is an inhuman something, the power of which is, to be sure, prodigious, but it is a prodigious power which cannot be defined in human terms, but more properly as one defines the power of a machine, calling it so and so many horsepower: the power of the multitude is always horsepower.

This abstraction creates politics as a game and the game is played for the multitude whoever can win over the many legs.

This human mass becomes at last enrages by friction, and now demands – or rather it demands nothing, it does not itself know what it wills, it takes the threatening attitude only in the hope that something after all will come to pass, in the hope that the weaker side (the established government, the ruler) will perhaps become so much alarmed that it will go ahead and do something which neither the multitude nor those at the head of it, the stronger ones, the courageous ones (if there be any such), have the courage to speak out in definite words. . . . In alarm the king goes off and does something – and what the king does, that the human multitude then adores, maintaining that it had done it.

Kierkegaard then returns to the individual.

While the individual who truly connects himself with a religious movement [in the internal sense] must watch out and be ready to fight lest the dreadful thing should come to pass that this monstrous abstraction should wish to help him by going over with its legs to his side.

When the abstract of the multitude has finally taken the throne the result is idolatry.

Wherever this abstraction is set upon the throne there really is no government.  One is obedient only to the man whom he himself has boosted up, pretty much as the idolater worships and serves the god he himself has made, i.e. one obeys himself.  With the discontinuance of the rational State the art of statesmanship will become a game.  Everything will turn upon getting the multitude pollinated, and after that getting them to vote on his side, with noise, with torches and with weapons, indifferent, absolutely indifferent, as to whether they understand anything or no.

Kierkegaard’s politics are of course conservative but what I would want to further reflect on is the implications of his theology.  It will of course have political implications.  Is it necessary to label and criticize Kierkegaard’s politics as unduly conservative without considering the implication of what it would mean to be engaged in his aesthetic-ethical-religious movement?  For instance Kierkegaard, towards the end of his life, made the political gesture of abstaining from public worship on Sunday.  He sat outside at a cafe nearby the church so he would indeed be visible.  I am not convinced that Kierkegaard would have spoken out against various forms of progressive political theory. What seemed to be his concern was his perception that ‘these days everything is politics’.  This led for him inevitably to a herd mentality in which the ‘horsepower’ of the multitude would ultimately be wielded for destructive purposes.

I am hoping within the year or so to get into Hardt and Negri’s trilogy in which ‘the multitude’ is explicitly leveraged.  I am curious to see how that notion is developed.

The corsair affair and yet another rejection of politics

Volume 13, The Corsair Affair, is a collection of texts (many of which not written by Kierkegaard) that helps readers to understand what came to be known by this volume title.  The Corsair was a satirical journal that took aim at any culturally relevant figure in Denmark.  While the journal was notable and feared for its lampoons Kierkegaard (or Victor Emerita) was first mentioned in praise for work Either/Or.  Kierkegaard (Emerita) responded publicly by asking how he could be so insulted as to be praised in The Corsair.  While there are many layers involved in understanding why this exchange escalated the way it did one aspect was the growing awareness of Kierkegaard as the author of his pseudonymous works.  Once Kierkegaard’s indirect method became engaged directly he was skewered mercilessly for his own personal appearance, affect and mannerisms.  It is said that the phrases ‘Soren’ or ‘Either/Or’ became pejorative terms hurled at him in the streets.  He was also consistently compared to a local known as ‘Crazy Nathanson’.

What interests me is the extent to which this escalation reflects Kierkegaard’s vehement guard against directness.  To what extent was The Corsair taunting him to see if he would show his cards and lose composure.  Kierkegaard it seems never lost his composure though he appears to have been hurt considerably in the process.  I admit that my reading of this volume was a little more superficial as I found the historical understanding more interesting than the texts themselves.  I did however pause over an extended comment by Kierkegaard rejecting any notion that he is interested in changing externals (politics).  It seems as though from the very beginning people were interested in leveraging a political theory out of him.  I thought it worth offering his comments almost in full.

In Ursin’s Arithmetic, which was used in my school days, a reward was offered to anyone who could find a miscalculation in the book.  I also promise a reward to anyone who can point out in these numerous books a single proposal for external change, or the slightest suggestion of such a proposal, or even anything that in the remotest way even for the most nearsighted person at the greatest distance could resemble an intimation of such a proposal or of a belief that the problem is lodged in externalities, that external change is what is needed, that external change is what will help us.

. . .

There is nothing about which I have greater misgivings than about all that even slightly tastes of this disastrous confusion of politics and Christianity, a confusion that can very easily bring about a new kind and mode of Church reformation, a reverse reformation that in the name of reformation puts something new and worse in place of something old and better, although it is still supposed to be an honest-to-goodness reformation, which is then celebrated by illuminating the entire city.

Christianity is inwardness, inward deepening.  If at a given time the forms under which one has to live are not the most perfect, if they can be improved, in God’s name do so.  But essentially Christianity is inwardness.  Just as man`s advantage over animals is to be able to live in any climate, so also Christianity’s perfection, simply because it is inwardness, is to be able to live, according to its vigor, under the most imperfect conditions and forms, if such be the case.  Politics is the external system, this Tantalus-like busyness about external change.

It is apparent from his latest work that Dr R. believes that Christianity and the Church are to be saved by ‘the free institutions.’ If this faith in the saving power of politically achieved free institutions belongs to true Christianity, then I am no Christian, or, even worse, I am a regular child of Satan, because, frankly, I am indeed suspicious of these politically achieved free institutions, especially of their saving, renewing power. . . . [I] have had nothing to do with ‘Church’ and ‘state’ – this is much too immense for me.  Altogether different prophets are needed for this, or, quite simply, this task ought to be entrusted to those who are regularly appointed and trained for such things.  I have not fought for the emancipation of ‘the Church’ an more than I have fought for the emancipation of Greenland commerce, or women, of the Jews, or of anyone else. (53-54)

Kierkegaard continues on in this letter to drive home with all clarity that external institutions and systems cannot essentially hinder or encourage Christian faith.  The question I have with respect to contemporary forms of ‘liberation theology and thought’ is whether this reading and presentation within Kierkegaard’s larger project can truly be said to move towards the liberation of the individual, that is, beyond political/economic (Greenland), gender (women), or religious (Jew) boundaries.

Whether or not Kierkegaard is being completely ironic he concedes space for those who can understand and interpret the larger social systems (different prophets).  I also think it is important that he encourages any who can improve on their surroundings to do so.  I say this is important not because it is a minor concession by Kierkegaard but because it is assumed.  If someone would try to critique him on this level he would likely ask how ignorant that person is in thinking that someone should not improve conditions around them only that something must transcend the quantitative value (and it still is value) that externals can play in life.

Total guilt

I am drawing close to the mid-way point of Kierkegaard’s writings.  Appropriately enough this coincides with Concluding Unscientific Postcript which represents a sort of culmination of his earlier writings (which he actually attempts to integrate in one section of CUP).  As I understand it this work was potentially to be  his last and subsequent works are called his ‘second authorship’ many of which reflect a more ‘concrete’ engagement with social issues.

I want to offer an extended quote here as it helped to clarify certain lingering thoughts that have surfaced in various areas of my life namely the interplay of guilt and action.  How does one reconcile (if that is the appropriate method) the call of the Gospel, the limitedness of humanity, and the unwieldy variables of life?  In many ways I find my own experience partially reflected in a heightened and intensified way through recent posts by Dan O (here and here . . . in many ways it is the comments [particularly on the second site] that capture what I am talking about).

What I find intriguing in the quote is how it forms part of Kierkegaard’s attempt to shift guilt-consciousness towards a category of ‘totality’ rather than remain in an ethical category.  To remain under the ethical is to remain under the numerical (I think I am getting this right).  To remain under the numerical is to forever have the more hanging over our head that while aimed at being life-giving tends towards death-dealing in the one desiring to be a practitioner of the Gospel.  This death comes in the externalizing of guilt-consciousness which can never be integrated directly into another individual and so becomes a law unto itself.  There is no amount of ‘good’ that will resolve this guilt.

Now perhaps Kierkegaard’s ethical and religious domains are infinitely caught up in ‘beginning’ and never become as political as people want them to be but I think he should be well heeded in also acknowledging that running furiously in the wrong direction is also not much better . . . likely worse.

The second half of this quote gets a little diluted but the first half reads well in terms of the line between much guilt and total guilt.  Particularly poignant is the line about the one bound up with happiness, by the finest thread, as it were, by the help of a possibility that continually perishes.  There is a possibility that holds us even if the possibility continually perishes.  The emphasis added belong is mine.

In the eternal recollecting of guilt-consciousness, the existing person relates himself to an eternal happiness, but not in such a way that he now has come closer to it directly; on the contrary, he is now distanced from it as much as possible, but he still relates himself to it.  The dialectical that is present here, still within immanence, creates resistance that intensifies the pathos.  In the relation that is the basis of the misrelation, in the intimated immanence that is the basis of the dialectic’s separation, he is closely bound up with happiness, by the finest thread, as it were, by the help of a possibility that continually perishes – for this reason the pathos, if it is there, is so much the stronger.

The guilt-consciousness is what is decisive, and one guilt joined together with the relation to an eternal happiness is sufficient, and yet it is true of guilt, more than of anything else, that it sows itself.  But the total guilt is what is decisive; compared with it, making oneself guilty fourteen times is child’s play – this is also why childishness always keeps to the numerical.  When, however, the consciousness of the new guilt is in turn referred to the absolute consciousness of guilt, the eternal recollecting of guilt is thereby preserved, in case the existing person should be on the point of forgetting.

If someone says that no human being can endure such an eternal recollecting of guilt, that it is bound to lead to insanity or to death, then please not who it is who is speaking, because finite common sense frequently speaks that way in order to preach indulgence.  And this way of speaking rarely fails, provided three or four people are gathered together.  I doubt that anyone in solitude has been able to deceive himself with this talk, but when a number of people are together an one hears that the others are behaving in this way, on is less embarrassed – how inhuman, also, to want to be better than others!  Once again a mask; the person who is alone with the ideal has not knowledge at all about whether he is better or worse than others.  So it is possible that this eternal recollecting can lead to madness or death.  Well, now, a human being cannot endure very long on water and bread, but then a physician can discern how to organize things for the single individual, not in such a way, please note, that he ends up living like the rich man but that the starvation diet is so carefully calculated for him that he can just stay alive.  Just because the existential pathos is not the pathos of the moment but the pathos of continuance, the existing person himself, who in pathos is indeed inspired and is not, spoiled by habit, peeking around for subterfuges, will seek to find the minimum of forgetfulness needed for enduring, since he himself is aware, of course, that the momentary is a misunderstanding.  But since it is impossible to find an absolute certainty in this dialecticizing, he will, despite all his exertion, have a guilt-consciousness, once again totally defined by his never having dared to say that, in his relation to an eternal happiness, he had done everything he was able to do in order to hold fast to the recollecting of guilt. Concluding Unscientific Postscript 535-537

Did you wish . . . could you wish

Either / Or concludes with Judge William offering the transcript of sermon he received from a friend who is a minister.  William is convinced that this sermon reflects what he had been straining towards in his letter (which is what all of vol 2 is considered).  The minister has yet to preach this sermon but believes in time that he will be able to have his entire congregation understand it “for the beauty of the universal consists precisely in the fact that all can understand it.”

Between slavery and control

Perhaps this imagery goes without saying but I think there is still significant contemporary theo-political content to be developed from the Pentateuch.  Here are some excerpts from last Sunday’s sermon on Leviticus 19,

I think one of the most misunderstood aspects of Leviticus as well as the first five books of the Old Testament in general is the notion that the commandments given represent some sort of static or fixed law.  The center of Old Testament faith is not the following of particular laws.  This may flow out from the center but the center of Old Testament faith is the presence of God.  Everything in Leviticus as well as Exodus and Numbers finds its orientation in relationship with the Holy of Holies, the center of the Tabernacle, which was the Tent of Meeting, around which the Israelites camped as they travelled in the wilderness and when they first settled in Canaan.  And what is at the center of the Holy of Holies?  Inside that space is the Ark of the Covenant.  The Ark is a box covered with a lid sometimes called the Mercy Seat that had two angels, called cherubim, mounted on either side on top.  I view the Ark as a sort of frame.

At the center of other religions at that time there would tend to be a physical idol that would represent who or what was being worshipped.  However, in the Tabernacle there was an empty space between the wings of the cherubim on top of the Ark.  In the book of Exodus God says to Moses, “There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the covenant, I will deliver to you all my commands for the Israelites.”  What is the significance of this image?  God comes to meet with Moses from the place that humanity cannot control and confine, in the space that is left open and empty.  God cannot be directly equated with our conceptions, with our tradition or with our expectations.  So while we have the framework, so to speak, of ethics and tradition that provide some continuity and stability we must always be open to the newness or aliveness that the love of God will speak into situations.

. . .

The Tabernacle by its nature is movable.  The Tabernacle as well as Mt. Sinai exist in a special place in the Old Testament story.  These sites exist between the experience of slavery in Egypt on one side and the experience of slowing taking power and control in Canaan on the other side. The Tabernacle exists in the freedom of reliance and dependence on God between and therefore beyond being enslaved or being in control.  And as the author of the Gospel of John put it so well of Jesus saying literally that “the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.”  We are to learn to be a tabernacling people. . . . We remain a people with history and tradition but can these things be dismantled, stakes pulled up, to set up the site again in a new place?

. . .

And so like the nomadic Hebrew people of the wilderness we must nourish the ability to migrate, gather and frame the possibility of God’s holiness over the spaces between slavery and control.  We gather and walk with one another and with our neighbours seeing how our objects, our actions and our minds relate to one another.  This is the body of Christ that walked the earth 2000 years ago.  He never grasped for political and social control and even when his body was ultimately grasped by these forms of control he never became enslaved to them.  He always held open that space for the love of God which enters the world as the love of our neighbour as our self.  This is to be the body of Christ today, that is the church, it is to spread and wander with eyes attentive to power and bondage and then to stand between them.

Debating whether or not I care

I recently crossed paths with someone heavily involved in an atheists group at the local university.  This person was not of the ‘sort’ I expected.  In any event the encounter spurred me to do a little snooping around on the internet for local atheist blogs and see what was happening.  In the process I ran into The Winnipeg Skeptics.  One of the contributors has his own blog Startled Disbelief.  I started reading various posts and before long I chimed in with a few comments.  Now I have to say I appreciate Gem Newman’s tone at Startled Disbelief and so was quite open to hearing his positions.  After my initial comment Gem directed me to an earlier post which outlined in broader terms his position as a skeptic.  We had a decent little exchange going before I realized that the arc of the conversation was quickly moving into territory I simply had no interest in pursuing.

If you are interested in the full conversation see the last link (I did quite appreciate his overall presentation).  In any event there was one aspect to the conversation that continued to trouble me.  Gem constantly pushed the notion that skepticism was somehow non-political.  Skepticism is simply a method of critically examining claims (as he puts it).  I didn’t think anyone believed in a neutral mode of scientific inquiry anymore.  Gem went on to say that skepticism does not “provide a personal moral framework” and also that “atheism says nothing about politics, economics, or even belief in the supernatural.”  He claimed I was confusing the politics of particular atheists with the politics of atheism (I had earlier proposed that atheism was actually a much more robust approach than skepticism . . . for him atheism is a one-off subject).  Gem claims that he is “a skeptical, liberal, humanistic atheist.”  I suppose it is this combination that clarifies his politics.  However, he continues to maintain a broader skeptical orientation in saying, “I think that everything should be open to question. All conclusions are provisional.”  How is this not political?  How will that not continue to deny participation to decisive and potentially life-threatening postures that need to be taken in response to abusive powers?

Now so far as theology goes I would agree that a skeptical atheism comes much closer to biblical faith than many other contemporary theologies do in its rigor for idol-smashing.  However, biblical faith is a decidedly declared position.  That is, biblical faith will always ultimately undermine earthly authorities which abuse power.  This is Christology (as well as good Old Testament theology).  So I put it to Gem saying that I am much more interested in the proposition ‘love everything’ as opposed to his tagline ‘question everything’.  Love maintains a critical posture (because of its love for others) but always orientates the person towards a constructive and engaged posture.  This is where things started coming off the rails in my mind.  Here Gem began ‘applying’ his method.  His defense of and basis for skepticism was simply the apparently self-evident role of the Enlightenment as “proven to have held up.”  This is exactly my criticism he does not address.  The Enlightenment does not hold up because it offered nothing socially or politically substantive to engage the West.  I am then accused of a ‘false dichotomy’ in my opposition of love-or-question everything.  Though, I should add that love under Gem’s definition is some sort of fond cuddling.  When I advanced my view of love (as something restorative) I was accused of having a definition that “seems vague, misleading, needlessly complex, and in some cases probably guilty of equivocation.”  Oh man, I guess Gem has the definition down for love.

It is at this point at the end of the conversation that Gem offers the strange example of giving lectures to teachers on how to teach mathematics.  In this example it would not interest him to consider how to integrate the possibility that some children are unable to learn due to unstable life circumstances.  That sort of clinched it.  I suspect he would say that indeed would care about it but he also says that he has “neither the skills nor the inclination to be a counsellor, and the fact that some of them may need counselling does not make teaching mathematics any less important.”  Who the hell would argue from that example that mathematics are not important?  Yes, fine we are all able and limited in various capacities but to consider one aspect of education as ‘pedagogically pure’ regardless of circumstance seems unhelpful.

Why am I recounting this?  I guess I wanted to process it for myself.  Christian and skeptical/atheistic apologetics are pretty big these days.  I thought it might be a good exercise to understand why I don’t care.  What this has clarified for me is the reality that by and large these expressions (on both sides of the fences, as I have encountered them) have a drastically insufficient or at least dis-integrated view of politics as though they can go about their business because they are a-political.  Its not my responsibility for what others do with the sacred truth I discover.  In any event it seems more like bullshit than before.

The mockery of careful planning

I have always been a little uneasy with Jesus’ parable of ‘planning’ (Luke 14:28-31).  Jesus asks whether the people would not plan ahead of time to make sure they had sufficient materials to complete a tower and sufficient soldiers for victory.  The ‘moral of story’ as I have received it is that of the wise stewardship of resources.  I could not quite put my finger on why this bugged me other than the fact that it seemed to propagate good, bland suburbanites.  I’m not sure why I didn’t see it but the two images obviously have strong connections to the Old Testament in the Tower of Babel and David’s census taking.  Both of these acts reflect careful planning.  They are also both sins.  Who has the materials to finish building a tower? The answer is no one,  because a tower is never finished.  Who has the man-power to win a war? The answer is no one, because a war is never over.

The parable drives this home in a way that should have made it clear.  The parable  is book-ended first by the command that one cannot follow if they do not first hate their family. And at the end of the parable Jesus offers a re-articulation that states that you cannot become a disciple if you do not give up all your possessions (i.e. ending the production of tower-building and war-making).  The internal space of these commands is the mockery of ‘careful planning’.

Christ, Who Fills Everything in Every Way

This past Sunday I preached on Ephesians 4:4-16.  I wanted to draw attention to two themes in the book.  First is the abundance of language about abundance.  Believers are filled with riches, power and wealth.  Second, this is set within the context of the body of Christ which (who) fills all things.  A broad theme in my recent reading is on the notion of capitalism as that body which currently (and rapidly) seeks to fill everything.  From last Sunday’s sermon,

The basis of economic growth is of course to make more money.  This requires more resources to make products and more markets in which to sell them, and ideally cheaper labour by which to make the products.  Consider how coorporations scour the entire globe in search of resources and labour.  Consider the manner in which resources that arguably should be public are increasingly coming under the umbrella of private coorporations.  The issue of access to water comes readily to mind; the patenting of seeds for agriculture is another.  Think of ever expanding marketing we face.  Children are marketed, lifestyles are marketed, environmentalism is marketed, health and beauty, relationships, status; the list could go on forever.  The public space for gathering is now the food court surrounded by the constant refrain of the mall to consume.  High-interest money-lenders are popping up everywhere taking more money (and security) than they will ever give.  The market of money knows no limit to its desire to bring everything under its control.

Borrowing heavily from Philip Goodchild I then went on talk about how the financial crisis exposes both the power and the fragility of contemporary capitalism.  Even governments submit to its whims.  Though the ‘limits’ of contemporary capitalism are also becoming more apparent (increase in material costs).  In this way capitalism forms a mocking portrayal of an expanding and universal body which we participate in.

Also, borrowing heavily on Goodchild, I turned to the role of attention as a primary indicator of piety (whether ‘secular’ piety of religious).  To what then does the body of Christ call our attention to?  Here I returned to the Ephesians text and drew attention to what had seemed like a strange insertion for me.

[E]ach of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it is said, “When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.”  (When it says, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions of the earth? He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.) Eph 4:7-10

Here I drew attention to Christ’s descent.  The primary movement for the body of Christ is one of descent.  It is after this movement that ascension occurs, captivity is held captive and gifts are released.  Therefore our attention is turned to the descent.  I described this as attention to suffering and vulnerability.

This is the paradox of the body of Christ.  That in turning our attention to the vulnerability and suffering within and around us we enter in the joy of God’s grace; in feeling bound and helpless by the scope of suffering Christ binds bondage and frees us with his gifts of grace.  We are called to draw near to that strange place where we face each other, where crying and laughing become almost indistinguishable. [I thought of the description of the Cairo protests as by one participant as a 'wedding feast']

I had a relatively strong reaction to this sermon both positive and negative.  I ran into one group after the service vigorously discussing the implications of the sermon.  I also ran into other individuals who felt that the message was too ambiguous and loosely connected.  This sermon was part of a small series on ‘lay’ leadership.  In this way I suppose I could (or should) have been a little more ‘practical’.  However, I could not shake the notion that practicality in the church has typically meant ‘plugging into’ existing programs that are often ‘unplugged’ from pressing issues.  While the Mennonite church may have a slightly better track-record in this regard my hope is that ‘abstract’ sermons like this one can eventually build a new framework for church expression.

Introduction to Louis Riel and His Philosophical Theology

[Update: For those who may be interested in following this I have included a link to these posts in the 'Translation Projects' tab.]

Louis Riel was a Metis Canadian born in 1884 near Winnipeg Manitoba, Canada.  He was the leader of two resistance movements that attempted to preserve Metis rights in the face of the expanding Canadian government in the East.  I do not pretend to be a Riel expert nor do I consider myself particularly knowledgeable of the political context for the expansion of Canada.  However, I do know the following;

Louis Riel is a controversial figure.  He has been described as a hero, revolutionary, lunatic, self-proclaimed messiah and traitor.  Louis Riel was a deeply religious man.  Louis Riel attempted to promote an alternative politics in the face of the monopolizing government and Hudson’s Bay Trading Company.  In the process he established a provisional government in Manitoba in opposition to the Canadian government in the East.  Riel continued this pursuit in the face of extreme resistance.  Riel received capital punishment for his actions.  Riel is part of my local history.

This scant information has provided enough motivation to seek out his writings to find if there are any explicitly theological tracts.  In his Collected Works I have come across a short section that includes fragments he called a ‘philosophical theology’ in French.  So far as I know these are untranslated.

While there is a book on Riel as a religious man, Louis ‘David’ Riel: Prophet of the New World, there is no substantial study of his theology in relation to his politics in English.  There is one work in French that I hope to eventually give some attention.  This is Gilles Martel’s, Le messianisme de Louis Riel.

My intention is to slowly offer his Système philosophico-théologique in translation (it is only 12 pages of fragments).  I have no idea what this pursuit might offer but it seems helpful to at least render more of Riel’s French writing into English.  It also seems helpful to look over these writings (in addition to his occasional writing relevant to his theology) with a more thoroughgoing theological attention than has been given.