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
The contours of the kingdom that is already among us do not readily present themselves and they are not – following Augustine (and Metz) – identical with the institution of the church or, rather, the different ecclesial institutionalizations that call themselves churches or Christian denominations across the world… Yet, by faith, we believe that Christ is among us now as well as coming again, and the body of Christ also. By “a certain continuity,” I mean that we are already living within the future messianic return. Eschatological remainder alerts to a messianism operative now – a messianism that Agamben explores. Such continuity views eschatology not as what is lacking in all the secular ideologies of the future, but what is excessive and superabundant to them.
Ward, The Politics of Discipleship, 170
The image, in its simplicity, has no need of scholarship. It is the property of a naïve consciousness; in its expression, it is youthful language. The poet, in the novelty of his images, is always the origin of language. To specify exactly what a phenomenology of the image can be, to specify that the image comes before thought, we should have to say that poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of the soul. We should then have to collect documentation on the subject of the dreaming consciousness.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, xiv-xx
The transmutation is a reforming of the language, not the disappearance of the praised object into existing patterns of words foreordained responses. It is, as David Jones said of all art that is in any sense representation, a ‘showing forth under another form’; and for this to be serious, it entails some sens at some stage of loss of control, unclarity of focus. A celebratory work that simply uses a repertoire of stick techniques that direct our attention not to what is being celebrated but to the smooth and finished quality of its own surface is a failure. So with the language of praise for God: it needs to do its proper work, to articulate the sense of answering to a reality not already embedded in the conventions of speech; to show the novum of God’s action in respect of any pre-existing human idiom.
Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology, 9
Admirable as it may be, man’s capacity to manufacture and produce useful objects even of the highest quality, such as the machines of our modern technological civilization, is not to be directly associated with human personhood. Perhaps on this point the contrast we have been making here between man as a person, on the one hand, and man as an individual thinking or acting agent, on the other hand, becomes more evident. The ‘creation’ of a machine requires man’s individualization both in terms of his seizing, controlling and dominating reality, that is, turning beings into things, and also in terms of combination of human individuals in a collective effort, that is, of turning himself into a thing, an instrument and a means to an end. Hence, it is only natural that the more collectivistic a society, that is, the more it sacrifices personhood, the better the products it achieves. But when we say that man is capable of creating by being a person, we imply something entirely different, and that has to do with a double possibility which this kind of creation opens up. On the other hand, ‘things’ or the world around acquire a ‘presence’ as an integral and relevant part of the totality of existence, and, on the other hand, man himself becomes ‘present’ as a unique and unrepeatable hypostasis of being and not as an impersonal number in a combined structure. Un other words, in this way of understanding creating, the movement is from thinghood to personhood and not the other way round. That is, for example, what happens int he case of a work of real art as contrasted to a machine. When we look at a painting or listen to music we have in front of us ‘the beginning of a world’, a ‘presence’ in which ‘things’ and substances (cloth, oil, etc.) or qualities (shape, colour, etc.) or sounds becomes part of a personal presence. And this is entirely the achievement of personhood, a distinctly unique capacity of man, which, unlike other technological achievements, is not threatened by the emerging intelligent beings of computer science. The term ‘creativity’ is significantly applied to art par excellence, though we seldom appreciate the real implications of this for theology and anthropology.
John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 216
two things after a long hiatus.
1. While preparing for a class on Christology, specifically Athanasius’ on the Incarnation, I re-discovered these beautiful passages.
Man, who was created in God’s image and in his possession of reason reflected the very Word Himself, was disappearing, and the work of God was being undone. The law of death… prevailed upon us, and from it there was no escape…. Was He to let corruption and death have their way with them? In that case, what was the use of having made them in the beginning?
…..
…the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. In one sense, indeed, He was not far from it before, for o part of created had ever been without Him Who, while ever abiding in union with the Father, yet fills all things that are. But now He entere the world in a new way, stooping to our level in His love and Self-revealing to us. He saw the reasonable race, the race of men that, like Himself, expressed the Father’s Mind, wasting out of existence, and death reigning over all in corruption. He saw the corruption held us all the closer, because it was the penalty for the Transgression; He saw, too, how unthinkable it would be for the law to be repealed before it was fulfilled. he saw how unseemly it was that the very things of which He Himself was the Artificer should be disappearing…. All this He saw and, pitying our race, moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure that death should have the mastery, rather than that His creatures should erish the work of His Father for us men come to nought, He took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own… He surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men.
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2. Aron doesn’t talk about his music much at all, not nearly as often as he ought to.
Good Dust – and death shall have no dominion
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington DC has declared that they will pull their social services to city residents if the same sex bill, currently being considered by the Washington DC city council, is passed as is. “The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that’s really a problem,” said Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the archdiocese.
So, essentially, those in the Archdiocese who are making this decision are saying that, contrary to what we might have believed, agape is not unconditional, but dependent on the Archdiocese’s imprimatur of City Council policy.
Tell me, where does Christ append an anti-secularity clause to his “do it to the least of these, you do it to me”? What kind of Church is this that demands compatibility with bureaucrats before it will do the work of Christ?
Read the whole story here.
PS. Vox Nova has picked up on the discussion here.
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