Pixar’s Wall-E (2008) tells the story of an impolite robot, a world that is collapsing in every imaginable way (biologically, socially, economically), and a human race that has divorced itself from that world. The demi-god of the ruling commerce culture declares that the planet is toxic and forbids the return of the exiles. Freed from the tragic cost of doing business terrestrially and floating aimlessly in space aboard their interstellar pseudo-ark, the Axiom, humans decline into overweight, non-ambulatory automatons, divorced even from each other, aside from superficial conversations via the heads-up video display inches from their faces that filters out the real for the virtual, the simulacra. The fact that the H.U.D. is transparent is more a salve to their eroded consciences than it is a legitimate window to the real. In one of the most poignant scenes of the film, the robot Wall-E, having stowed aboard the Axiom, interrupts several of the ship’s denizens in their dematerialized reverie, and introduces himself. And for many on the Axiom, robot and human alike, the introduction of this personal, conversant presence is unwelcome. Wall-E does not accept, or rather can not fathom the terms of their anti-dialogical existence. He lives for relationship and, even in this alien environment, can not help but make friends. But, at times, even making friends can be an impolite act – to contest what in Wall-E was really toxic, the exchange of real conversation for a fetish with commercial simulacra.
This is the kind of impoliteness that Graham Ward calls for in The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Post-Material Citizens. The act of being a citizen does look crass next to the polished acquiescence to consumerism and endless materialism. But for the theologian, who is not a citizen of this world, Ward’s is a call to a radical kind of impoliteness, the scandal of the Christ.
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Let the Christian remain in the world, not because of the good gifts of creation, nor because of his responsibility for the course of the world, but for the sake of the Body of the incarnate Christ and for the sake of the Church. Let him remain in the world to engage in frontal assault on it, and let him live the life of his secular calling in order toe show himself as a stranger in this world all the more. But that is only possible if we are visible members of the Church. The antithesis between the world and the Church must be borne out in the world. That was the purpose of the incarnation. That is why Christ died among his enemies. That is the reason and the only reason why the slave must remain a slave and the Christian remain subject to the powers that be.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 264-5
Religion will not go away; it will not be repressed; it will not succumb to instrumental reasoning. There will be no new Enlightenment. So let us herald the advent of the postsecular state.
- Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship, 301
One’s identity within the body of Christ is worked out in Christian terms of practices of faith, hope and love that go beyond the naming and labeling of the churches, fellowships and denominations in this world. While remaining a Greek, a Jew, a male, a female, a slave, or a freeborn, one is also and more significantly a member of the body of Christ. It is a body that is “heavy with meaning” that is not possible to translate. One condition or identity is not necessarily effaced in the other, but it is transformed in ways beyond telling. one discovers one’s somatic nature in the tranquility of recollection; it is not self-evident. It is discovered not discretely but by continuing to work within the body of Christ, a new polity, with new relationships and new distributions of power that can never find their full realization in any political system in this world and that therefore resist accommodation with the politics of this world and offer possibilities for an alternative politics. The altar on which Paul asks the Roman Christians to present their bodies as a living sacrifice can never be identified with a particular throne. The body is continually being given, continually moving out and being enacted elsewhere, and so it continually transcends strict identifications that it imposes on itself or are imposed on it. The body is never there as such (as if a static object in a freeze-frame still photo); the body is there only because it moves, it circulates, it acts, it disseminates its knowledges, rejecting, absorbing, and adapting itself to new knowledges. It is in this way that it can be deemed apophatic.
-Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship, 255-56
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