It is so easy to say; But what does it mean?

It seems that so many Christian communities proclaim in the same attitude as their other proclamations of belief—without the statement being truly reflective of something happening within *and without*. Just like many people proclaim a belief in Jesus as Lord without it having any material change in their life, so the same with forgiveness.

We say I forgive you, not to describe an event within our life, rather all too often it is used as a means of subversive control and power. All too often we are too quick to assert our forgiveness when we have no desire to change ourselves.

True forgiveness never leaves the forgiver unchanged. To truly forgive requires taking the burden from the forgivee, something much more difficult and long term than a simple ‘ernest’ statement. What all to often happens, in the statement of forgiveness, is a desire by someone to gain or retain control over another. This is a veiled attempt to turn the tables of power. The forgiver attempts to assert their power over the forgivee by ‘offering’ their forgiveness. This ‘offering’ allows the forgiver to be perceived as humble, all the while forcing a position of weakness upon the forgivee by creating a situation where they much receive their ‘gift’ of forgiveness. This allows the forgiver, whose place is one of ‘giving’, to keep control over the transaction.

I recently came across the quote Mahatma Gandhi, “forgiveness is the attribute of the strong”. This quote coupled with the context of Katharine Sarah Moody‘s recent posts on Nietzsche‘s understanding of master/slave morality, I can’t help but think that all too often forgiveness is manipulated into a slave morality will to power, a desire to control through manipulation of meek humbleness.

I also think this idea can go the other way. All to often we falsely humble ourselves by asking for forgiveness, apologizing for our mistakes—not because we really seek change, but rather because we desire to get out of the immediate problem. After the problem is resolved, we revert to our old ways. This is classically seen in the cases of domestic abuse.

It’s easy to say things which satisfy another’s ego while never intending to actually act upon those words. I wonder what a way forward would be towards reclaiming the truly revolutionary aspect of forgiveness—a conception so powerful, no wonder forgiveness would be circumvented.

[When] asked if he wanted to do market research, [Jobs] said, “No, because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”

I’ve said this same thing in regards to the structure and style church worship services. If people haven’t been shown or taught a different way, how can they be expected to desire anything more than what they’ve seen?

It is the responsibility of the leadership not to simply give the people what they want, but to further propel them into something which creates new experiences, which draw the people into a new seeing and a new way of living.

I’m reminded of Peter Rollins’ thoughts on our dreams and aspirations: we shouldn’t be trying to fulfill our dreams but rather to dream new dreams.

The desire came to make a book which would chronicle that Lenten exploration. The initial idea was to make a book of photos, photos as prayers, which followed the form of the daily office. I loved the idea—but was stuck on how to actually execute such a project. How could the photos correlate with Lent or with the readings of the daily office? I felt the project needed something, something to ground the photos, to give them context—without the kitsch of Thomas Kincaid.

At the same time, I wanted to participate in a great project which Peter Rollins began. The idea is to take the time of Lent which is normally used to give things up, to clear away that which has hindered our connection to God and our fellow wo/man and to instead give up god for Lent. He cleverly called this Atheism for Lent. The idea is to use the great critiques of the modern prophets; Marx, Nietzsche, & Freud to burn away the idols which have crept into our psyche, those distortions of God which have kept us from embracing the world as it is.

In Peter Rollins’ book Insurrection he talks about how the institution of church, its structure and practices, does much to insulate us from the trauma of the cross by comforting us with these false images of God and reality. Rollins wishes for churches to include within their liturgies the reality of our doubts and laments.

My project for Lent is to combine these two thoughts of atheism and creativity for Lent.

For inspiration and reflection during this period I will read the writings of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and also the writings of philosophers and atheists Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. These will be the interpretative a/theism lens through which I will read the liturgy of the daily office, found in The Book of Common Prayer.

My proposal is to make a prayer book, which includes as commentary my journey of rewriting the liturgy to reflect the prayers of one who doubts and laments. I will include photos of those 40 days which chronicle my eye of lament. It will also include the daily reflections on the words, phrases, & prayers which I will include, omit, or rewrite. After the period of time is completed, I will collect these resources together into a collected work, with the original and rewritten liturgy along with my reflective commentary.

There are plenty of thorough reviews all over the web. I see no point in repeating what others have done better than I could. I just want to include one thought. This repeated in my mind throughout, while reading the book:

This is the most important book published for the general Christian audience since N.T. Wright’s Surprised By Hope (2008). What N.T. Wright did for eschatology, I think Scot McKnight does in this book for soteriology.

He takes personal salvation and removes it as the central element of the gospel. This is similar to how Tom Wright moves our hope from a personal trip to heaven to a reconciliation of all things in his said book. Both authors open up the New Testament story into something that is deeper, richer & more encompassing than simply a personal faith in a personal salvation.

And if you can’t imagine what the gospel might ever be if it’s not personal salvation then you need to read this book…immediately.

In John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus I was lead to a possible glimpse of an endless eschatology. Let me quote the pertinent passage:

In correlation with our sense of impossibility we tend to think of “apocalyptic” promises as pointing “off the map” of human experience, off the scale of time, in that they announce an end to history. But the past deliverances of Israel had been recounted as having taken place within their own history and on their own Palestinian soil. The whole body of hermeneutic prejudices linked with the concept of the “interim ethic,” as if what Jesus was predicting was an end to time and space, gets us off the track right at this point. Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom was unacceptable to most of his listeners not because they thought it could not happen but because they feared it might, and that it would bring down judgment on them.

…

The mighty acts of God in Israel’s history had been neither the end of history, nor off the scale of human events. We have every reason to assume that the inauguration of the jubilee was understood by Jesus’ hearers with the same concreteness as the Exodus story or the deliverance of Jehoshaphat had for them. (p.85-86, the end of the chapter “God Will Fight For Us” from The Politics of Jesus)

Previously in this chapter, Yoder describes the experiences of Israel in the Old Testament where they find their saving grace in the acts of God. The point he was making was how people would have heard Jesus’ message in the Palestine of the first century. The point being that the teachings of Jesus were not an unattainable perfection which showed people’s need for his saving power or a vision for a world to come which had no connection to his contemporaries. Rather what Jesus was saying, according to Yoder, would have been interpreted within a worldview where God’s redemption happens within history—because God had already done it before, the Old Testament being our remembrance of that.

What if we took this understanding of Jesus’ hearers not just simply as a hermeneutic but as our eschatology. What if we took the end out of our eschatology. What if Christianity was about continuing the story of God’s involvement in the world…a world without end.

“There is no reason to despise democratic elections; the point is only to insist that they are not per se an indication of Truth—on the contrary, as a rule, they tend to reflect the predominant doxa determined by the hegemonic ideology…There can be democratic elections which enact an event of Truth—elections in which, against sceptical-cynical inertia, the majority momentarily “awakens” and votes against the hegemony of ideological opinion. However, the very exceptional nature of such an occurence proves that elections as such are not a medium of Truth”
Žižek from “First As Tragedy, Then As Farce”

Žižek from First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

Adam Moore described the work as primarily about Resurrection—an affirmation of it, a call for transformation, conversion, & being born again. I had a hard time seeing this aspect of it with my first reading. But after a second reading with more time to reflect upon Pete’s thoughts, I can see and agree with Adam’s reading of the text. Peter Rollins divides the book in two parts: Crucifixion & Resurrection.

Crucifixion

The first half is about cutting our ties to the deus ex machina, the God of the Machine. This term comes from Greek tragedy where a god is lowered down onto the stage to resolve a conflict. Rollins describes how third-rate playwrights began to employ this technique not add to the story but to simply solve plot difficulties. And this is exactly what the Church does today, which Rollins describes as such:

For Bonhoeffer, the Church approached God as a deus ex machina. God was merely an idea clumsily dropped into our world in order to fulfill a task. God was introduced into the world on our terms in order to resolve a problem rather than expressing a lived reality. The result is a God who simply justifies our beliefs and helps us sleep comfortably at night. God is brought into the picture only when we face a problem of some kind that doesn’t lend itself to solution by other means. In Bonhoeffer’s view, this God plays the same meager role as the supernatural beings in third-rate Greek plays.

Rollins uses the Crucifixion as the central event for deconstructing the God-as-crutch. He sees the cry of Jesus, ”Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”, my God my God why have you forsaken me, as a definitive event for our faith. It is the moment of atheism, not the intellectual atheism of Dawkins but rather an existential atheism, the lived experience of abandonment. This is the moment that we all experience the loss of all meaning and comfort.

After setting this event of the cross as the central hermeneutical element, he sets his attention not only on our stated beliefs which affirms a God-crutch but also exposes how the structures and liturgies of church re-enforce a comforting system which believes so that we don’t have to. And I think this is the highlight of the first half of the book. His deconstruction of how we may affirm our doubts, intellectually, but when it comes to songs we sing & liturgies we read there is no hint of the doubt we affirm.

His point is that this allows us to insulate ourselves from the trauma of the cross, the rupture that it causes for our comforts & meaning. We allow our friends, family, & clergy to believe for us. While we may not affirm a creed each week, we find comfort in knowing that our blessed mother goes each week and prays for us. This allows us to not feel the trauma of hanging above the void of meaningless & nothingness.

Peter Rollins argues that we must re-align our structures, liturgies, songs so that our Sunday worship doesn’t allow us to hide from the truth of the cross but rather we need songs which speak from that place of the cross. Not just songs which speak ofthe cross as a comfort—Jesus experienced it so you don’t have to—rather we must lead people to their own experience of the cross through our worship. This is a pulling away of the security blanket that so often is the church.

The point of this for Rollins, is to get to Resurrection. The trauma of going through the cross to get to the Resurrection he sees as necessary. Here is how he frames it as the concluding thought of Part 1:

In short, the Christological crisis is one where everything that grounds us (the political, spiritual, and social) is torn away, where we stare into the void, and, as Nietzsche once said, we feel the void stare back. In this place we are alone as we dimly glimpse life without the gilded cage of religion. And it is here that we stand or fall. Here we must choose whether to embrace life or to turn and run. It is only here, in this dry and barren land of death, that we can approach the truth of life testified to in the event of Resurrection. If, however, Resurrection is not possible, then those who go through this death are, as the apostle Paul knew, “to be pitied more than all men.”

Resurrection

If the Crucifixion is fundamentally about turning towards the reality of yourself and the world, then Resurrection is the embrace of that reality. As Rollins says:

If the Crucifixion marks the moment of darkness, then the Resurrection is the very act of living fully into this darkness and saying “Yes” to it. The faith that is born in Resurrection does not enable us to escape these deeply troubling anxieties; it provides the power to face up to them.

Resurrection for Rollins is about materiality, it is about enveloping the life of love. Often people affirm Resurrection with their mouth but not their hands. Affirming the Resurrection happening by caring for the poor, destroying the systems of injustice. This transforms how we think about not just religion but life itself:

In the Resurrection faith is testified to in the New Testament, the question Do you believe in God? is transformed and now involves the very being of the one asking the question. As such it can be rendered in this way: Is your entire being caught up in a commitment to embracing the world? In Christianity to believe in God means nothing other than to be the site where love is born, where to find the courage to affirm the world and live fully into.

The much of the rest of Part 2 is about helping us to realize that our actions in the world need to be more radical than simply ‘being a better person’. He uses Batman as a great example of this. Bruce Wayne is shown to be fighting crime under the guise of Batman, but Rollins questions the hows & whys of that. How can Wayne get the money to fund this project? Wayne Industries, but how much are they making, that they don’t notice this multi-million dollar project! And what if Wayne used that money for education, homelessness, joblessness wouldn’t his dollars be spent better in fighting crime and making a better city? Rollins looks deeper and finds Batman’s ‘good deeds’ are actually a result of anger & revenge for seeing his parents murdered as a child—talk about good motives…

So he concludes the book by saying “…denying the Resurrection means nothing less than to turn away from the world, to run from our suffering, to avoid an authentic meeting with our neighbor and to hide from ourselves…For it is only when we are the site where Resurrection takes place that we truly affirm it. To believe in the Crucifixion and Resurrection means nothing less than enacting them.”

My Question To Peter Rollins

I love this book, I love the deconstruction and then the call to action from that place. But I can’t get past the central assumption that God is dead, absent, or unable to intervene. While I would agree that too often we rely on a God who is simply there to solve my problems. I am thankful for your tearing down that idol, but at the same time it seems so much of the scriptures is based upon the notion that God has committed himself to making all things right, that God intervening within the world, even today still.Your reading of the Resurrection puts all the responsibility upon us, where my Protestantism would say that is the exact opposite of the gospel, God’s intervention is because we were powerless to rescue ourselves.

I could understand how good this book may be for someone who finds themselves in a dark night, who hasn’t experienced God for quite sometime if at all. But what about the person whose reality is an experience of the divine. Is that a false reality? I have a hard time taking a Radical Theology which seems to want to throw the baby out with the bath water.

I understand you wanted to bracket out these questions because they distract from the direction you wanted to go with your book. But my question is couldn’t you make the moves you made and keep the historical-orthodox understanding of Crucifixion/Resurrection (not that I’m saying you should, but I have a hard time throwing out the historical). For me it is the historical events which give these words power, I don’t understand {though I continue to be very curious in} how the liberal move to divorce historical from symbol keeps meaning intact.

To Everyone Else

Get the book if you haven’t already. Join the Conversation. The Church and Postmodern Culture blog hosted a discussion of the book that is worth reading.

“Do you use non-sacred Christmas music in December worship?“

Here was my reply & conversation with @Clayfire about it on Twitter:

Below is my longer response that I posted on their Facebook page:

I didn’t mean to sound contentious with my statement. But the topic of secular/sacred in general is often poorly understood & spoken about. What makes something sacred or Christian?
So I would say in regards to what makes non-sacred ‘holiday music’ have the potential to be transformed into the ‘sacred Christmas’ is this: These songs are the soundtrack to our lives during December, the time of year when we are most mindful of thanksgiving and love towards another. We are thinking of our loved ones, trying to find the perfect gift, celebrating over plates of tasty treats made with love.
Those songs then become associated with all those good things, while ‘the reason for the season’ is Jesus, it is also an expressed love towards those around us…fulfilling both parts of the law loving God & neighbor.
These songs bring this together, and just because the words don’t explicitly speak of Jesus they are doing something very Jesus-like in what they do.

Agree?

I would add to this that we mustn’t simply use lyrics as the only criteria for claiming sacred/Christian or not. Many objects and events are filled with the divine sacredness while not explicitly speaking of or being named as religious. I feel these songs are capable of doing something because of the context they are experienced in. I’m also thinking of the writing of Gianni Vattimo in regards to the secularization of Christmas being a praised thing because it meant that the underlying currents of Christmas have permeated all of society. I would also admit that this is a very idealized image of the holidays and the reality would speak very different, but I don’t think that completely dismisses my thought on this this.

Furthermore I would like imagine how we as the church could do this transformation of secular & sacred throughout the whole of the calendar.

While I understand while people would want to use this argument, I don’t think it is valid. Lets reflect on the prophets of the Old Testament. I just finished a recent book by Walter Brueggemann Out of Babylon. I actually received the book last year for Christmas but just finally got around to reading it. It’s not the strongest of his work from the limited amount I’ve read, but there was one thing that I gathered from it, time and again the prophet wasn’t speaking outside of the problem looking in but was rather speaking from an cultural embeddedness.

Isaiah readily admitted his guilt along with the guilt of the people. He didn’t pretend to be outside of the problem, but still recognized that he had something to say to the leaders in power who led and controlled the direction of the people. If you look on Jeremiah, he writes in the tension of in one had telling them to accept the Babylonians and accept that they will live under their rule and culture but then also speaking of a separateness of being the people of God in a foreign land.

Not to mention Joseph, Moses, Daniel, Nehemiah, etc who all held positions within foreign countries and used their place to help the people of Israel—the underclass, the poor & disenfranchised of the empire.

This is the meaning of original sin. We are all guilty. We all have blood on our hands. We all find ourselves living within an unjust system, having already made decisions that go against the ideals that we have set for ourselves. Do that mean that all our work is in vain? If we can’t redeem the tools of empire for restorative acts of transformation then what is our hope, where is our grace then?