#theological reflection

[bobonbooks]

Review: The Gospel According to Christ's Enemies

The Gospel According to Christ’s Enemies, David J. Randall. Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 2022. Summary: How the statements of Jesus’s enemies about him often proclaimed, in unintended ways, the very gospel truth about him. We often start with the statements of Jesus himself, as well as those of the apostles, to understand his mission and message, indeed who this Jesus is in his person.…

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[bobonbooks]

Review: Reading Black Books

Review: Reading Black Books

Reading Black Books, Claude Atcho. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2022. Summary: Theological reflections on ten key pieces of Black literature. A number of books have been written about reading diverse literature, for example, the literature of the Black community, to gain understanding and empathy for that experience. Reading Black Books does that and more. Claude Atcho considers a variety of key…

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[saeculorum-amen]

Halloween, Weltanschauung, Birthright.

I find myself this week once again embroiled in this cycle of thinking about worldview, of how it shapes our experience of the world, our knowledge of ourselves.  This week, in the context of a strange confluence of the Indigenous research methods of Shawn Wilson ("Research Is Ceremony") and returning once again to the topic of the eschatological setting of Orthodox liturgy, to its occurrence in the presence of the Kingdom of God, realized for a moment on Earth, so that we cannot stay in, but may catch a fleeting glimpse of, our home.

It’s hard to write in the West without a presumption of dualism peeking over your shoulder.  As though somehow to talk about the liturgy like that is to deny the presence of God in all things, or the imperfect realization of the Kingdom in the day-to-day.  As though when consciousness is brought to one thing, is drawn to a focus, everything else ceases to be.  As though there could only be one thing at a time.

The liturgy draws us into an experience of something much more real than what appears to be real.  Then, we might go out into the world prepared to see, and be, this extraordinary thing that too long has been hidden.  This is the heart of Christianity, at every level; consider how we are drawn to see the weakness in power, the futility of violence, and the transitory nature of death.  The material illusion is to make you believe the opposite of each of those true things, and we are all of us formed by the material.  The eschatological and heavenly reality of liturgical space-time must infect the quotidian, the mundane, and the material.

Into the woods.

When I was a kid, there was a very real sense of the woods being a spooky place.  I mentioned that to someone this week, who repeated it back to me as that I had said the woods were scary.  I’m not sure.

The spooky is somewhere in the vicinity of, I dunno: haunted, enchanted, mysterious, powerful, wild, unpredictable, irrational, dark.  The spooky has its own ways and purposes, which are not entirely knowable.  The spooky has influence on us, and can be thrilling, but you also do not want to get lost in its grip.  The spooky exists in boundary places, or is encountered by crossing thresholds.

This, to me, sounds a lot like the unconscious.  This thing which influences us, and is just outside of the bounds of consciousness, which is vast and expansive and has its own logic.  It requires ritual preparation, something like ceremony to make the boundary a little more porous and to enter into it.  There are rules for how you comport yourself in relation to it.  It’s like the depths of the ocean that way, that other great avatar of what lies beneath what consciousness can perceive.  You descend and ascend with intention, and there is much that you cannot bring with you from one realm to the other.  You will never fully know the depths.

We pass down stories, folktales and fables which tell us something about the realm of the spooky, about its charms, its treasures, its temptations, and its tendency to be the home of the trickster.  These stories tell us real things.

The Western impulse is to figure out how they are real.  “Ah, yes, it’s easy to get disoriented in the woods.”  No, it’s easy to get disoriented in your own mind.  “Sometimes trees fall.”  No, sometimes everything falls.  “The mind can play tricks on you.”  No.

The truths are analogical, and they are also more than that.  They speak to things that cannot be named, and to the vast potential that exists.  These stories contain material morals and they tell us something about the reality that consciousness simply does not have category for.  It’s not just a matter of reframing it.  It’s a matter of understanding how broad real is.

Out of the woods.

The reductive, material, positivist impulse is to decide one way or the other about things.  The woods contain danger, and that danger can be managed.  Perhaps the danger cannot be managed, and so the woods should be torn down.  Perhaps the woods are beautiful, and we should traipse through them.

No.  Sometimes it is the time to venture into the woods.  Sometimes we can go there to be fed, or to encounter something more than we can name, and sometimes there are things going on in the woods that do not need our presence.  We are not welcome when the spooky needs to stretch its legs, or when the understory needs a chance to regenerate without our footsteps.  We need seasons and rhythms that draw us to encounter what consciousness leaves out, and also that lets everything else have a break from the intrusion of consciousness from time-to-time.

The goal is not to illuminate everything, or to make it all the same.  It is not to have a flattened Earth with an infinite horizon, which consciousness can scan at its leisure and observe whatever it imagines it will find.  Do not raise up the ocean floor and flatten out the mountains, do not dissolve the universe into an undifferentiated blob of mediocrity.  Value the particular nature of hidden things.  You exist in relation to the unknown, and it helps to hold up the fabric of existence itself.  It is not good for consciousness to be alone.

The contour of reality.

I call myself a sacramental realist, because I believe and experience that the character of reality which is pointed to by the sacraments is the essential character of reality.  The sacraments are not an overlay or a conceptual framework for conveying moral teachings, but draw our attention to something which otherwise hides just beyond our peripheral vision.  That is my reality, along with so many other realities I live with.

When I was a teenager, desperately alienated and lost, feeling untethered from any kind of ground of my being, and having had a lifetime of formation to doubt my own reality, I found comfort in what I read in the Bhagavad-Gita, what formed for me a model of existence in which all things are connected, and one thing exists in relationship to another.  I don’t know if I would find that in that text as an adult, but it helped to dislodge me from my anxious attachment to a precarious reality, and to start me towards recognizing that I exist in relation to all others, and will not be lost or cast aside.

I have transformed a childhood need to find someone to fuse with, for safety and survival and to know who I was, into a curiosity about the intersubjective experience that emerges through deep encounter with another.  I love to just talk, and talk, and talk, and to let my perceptions be changed, to let a new reality emerge for me through the experiential sharing of another.  I cannot experience their reality directly, but God, how I love to create some space between us in which something real is shared.

None of this is a denial of material realities, but the material’s primacy is not absolute.  The material has primacy in material matters, but not everything is a material matter.  Vaccines and viruses address material realities, and material methods matter much more than anything more subjective than that.  The subjective may draw our attention to what is left out by attending only to the material, but it does not deny the reality of the material.  We may be aware how our distortions and ignorance causes us to misread even the material, and how imperfect our efforts will always be, but this does not make it utterly futile.

So I find myself with a dual consciousness, or perhaps even a little more multifaceted than dual, and perhaps not consciousness alone.  I can believe in science and spooky forests, and sometimes the two have something to say to each other.  I think of Chesterton in “Orthodoxy” talking about how water moves not because of gravity, but because it is bewitched.  This does not have to be a reactionary anti-intellectualism, but can help us to recover awe and wonder as we learn about gravity and hydrostatic pressure and the contour of terrain and watersheds, and also draw us towards the mystery of why rather than the relatively knowable how of how reality is held together.

Maps and ownership.

I find so much that resonates, in structure if not always in content, in the work of magic realism to reunite the splitting of reality in Latin America by these competing ways of knowing and experiencing.  So much, too, of the model of qualitative research that Wilson talks about as Ceremony, embedded in an Indigenous model of relational accountability, and relational reality.

Those things are not mine.  When white folks try to appropriate magic realism, I sometimes see a response that magic realism arises out of having to exist in the colonial world, while also remaining embedded in something other than the colonial world, and finding a way to make both of those things real.  The suggestion, then, is that white people exist only in the colonial, and should not try to steal from culture, again, as they have so often stolen in the material, as part of the colonial endeavour.

Whiteness is undeniably a construct of colonialism, and one of the defining characteristics of both whiteness and colonialism is the ways in which they exclude other possibilities.  Vancouver Island becomes a colony, and so it can no longer be what it was before it was a colony.  That’s not necessarily true, but it is the view colonialism espouses: an atomistic, commodity-oriented model of ownership.

To identify with whiteness is to be willing to give up everything else that whiteness might leave out.  It is like being identified with consciousness alone, and cutting down all the forests.  Colonialism makes mountains low.

The thing about whiteness and colonialism is that they are, though, so fundamentally incomplete.  They are like a trade jargon: they may be adequate for some kinds of communication, but they are not fit for other purposes, and it would take a true artist to find a way to make them do something creative.

Appropriation and emptiness.

I imagine a white person saying that they want to situate themselves in the model of “Research Is Ceremony”, and I suspect they don’t mean they want relational accountability and to be expected to defer to Elders (and ancestors) and to follow protocol.  They mean that they feel something missing, and want to find a way to accrete something beautiful that they see in another context.

I think if one really appreciates the work Wilson did to recover research methods which honoured his ways of knowing and being, the calling is to take up that same task with one’s own ways of knowing and being.  Everyone has a birthright that is more than the consensus reality of global capitalism, and the trade jargon of mercantile consciousness.  Those things cannot nourish a whole person, and all of us are whole people.

The mercantile lie, the model of colonial scholasticism, and all its scientific reductivity, is to believe that we can identify the good parts of a thing, and then only have those good parts.  You can figure out what makes something work, and then simplify it down to just those things.  Moreover, the emptiness of individualism creates an inflated, unsatisfied narcissism in which we might be fooled into thinking that the good is synonymous with what we like.

So we might think we see something good in Indigenous methodologies, and want to find a way to graft it onto ourselves, but that intensity?  That is our own emptiness, much as when I was a teenager I fell so profoundly in love with people that it threatened to destroy me, because I felt like I could not exist without someone to be merged with.  The intensity is telling us not that we need to harvest and feed, but that we need to create something within ourselves.

For a white, colonial, settler sort of person who finds themselves so bewitched, there is a need to engage in our own work along the lines of what Wilson did.  To deepen our connection with our ancestral and innate ways of knowing.  It may end up looking a lot like what he has produced, but probably not entirely, and this is good.  It may end up looking entirely different, and that is good, too, because perhaps that is what is real.

Maps and ownership 2.

The first lie of colonialism is “this is how things have to be.”  Land must be owned by someone.  We must settle here.  This must be ours.  That’s how it begins, but it continues into a limiting of imagination.  Of course we can’t give the land back.  Of course we can’t govern differently.  Of course we can’t live differently.  Everyone is formed to believe this lie.  To believe that bread can only ever be bread.  To believe that we are all so radically divided from one another.

There is a second lie that I have only recently become able to name, although it still requires some circumambulation to really pin down.  I think it is an important lie, however.  It is something like “this is our way of life.”  Perhaps even “this is our culture.”

This lie suggests that the way things are in the colonized lands is simply the extension of one cultural way of being into a new place.  In a very materialist way, this also maintains the status quo and creates the need for racism and for the commoditization of culture, because it insidiously asks: and how can you prove if one culture is better than another?  How can you say it is wrong for me to practice my culture?

The trouble is that colonialism is a company culture and whiteness is a commodity way of being.  Nobody is white, but they bought their way into it.  Colonial culture is what happens if you raise generations of children in an extractive, highly structured workplace, with a prohibition on encounter with the outside world.  Sure, some come and go, but the collective reality is constructed in a way which leaves out all other possibilities.

Maybe it is easier to simply prove the existence of this lie than to name it.  Colonial culture could never exist or be accepted in the places from which it ostensibly came.

I think about how if I went to Scotland, I would have the right to travel over land, over anyone’s land, in the paths where my handful of Scottish ancestors walked.  Those traditional rights have been maintained.  Every European culture has some kind of notions of places and ways of life that are such important cultural traditions that they belong to everyone, that they cannot be restricted.

This is not how things are in colonies.  You can identify who owns what, and ownership is nearly absolute.  Indigenous people have to clear impossible hurdles to regain access to traditional fisheries, travel routes, and the woods that yearn to feed them, if they are granted those rights at all.  Nor is it something that even white settlers expect for themselves, by and large, although some feel a right to personal enrichment through extraction of common wealth so unbridled that we call it poaching.

Colonialism and whiteness set up more rigid and comprehensive boundaries than the cultures and governments that gave birth to them.  Colonialism and whiteness are tricksters, who will entice you into a bargain with them in which you forget who you ever were.  They draw you into the woods and then change the terrain so that even if you had a map it would do you no good.

The rules cloak themselves in rationality, so that their irrationality lies hidden, where you cannot access it or challenge it.  You are denied access to any ways of knowing which might destabilize this precarious arrangement of power.

Hopes.

To talk about these things may give rise to the illusion that there are neatly separable categories, around the illnesses which have diminished us, and the ways in which we have been diminished.  There is a temptation to find technical fixes, to find limited interventions which target deficiencies and so bolster the status quo.  I find no hope in that.

We must shatter the illusion that these structures which exist to serve a certain kind of extractive wealth-building were ever for us, or about us.  We must let ourselves see more broadly and more deeply, and court our awareness that some things are not for us, or about us, or even at all accessible to us.  We must live at the edge of darkness, and let ourselves be enchanted by it from time-to-time.

I find hope in a spookier world, which is neither scary and to be destroyed, nor love and light which is freely accessible.  I find hope in ancient wisdom which is not subservient to individual will.  I find hope in the good work others are doing to recover who they really are, that I might do so, also.  I find hope in the destabilizing of cultural binaries and norms which we are so enmeshed in we cannot even name.  I find hope in recovering my ability to see the world is, as an icon and a sacrament, which is filled with good things I can glimpse, and powerful things I will never know.  I find hope in moments where the veil thins, and something more can be glimpsed.  I find hope in the many ways of being, and knowing, as a person.  I find hope in the depths of the oceans and the woods.  I find hope in existing alongside things I do not understand, and in the joy of getting to create a little reality that can, imperfectly, be shared.  I find hope in experiencing all of these things and more I cannot, or will not, name.

May we dwell in love and spookiness and hope, and other things that go bump in the night.

[questioningchristianqueer]

It seems that there comes a time when the question of identity is foundational in moving to the next step of adulthood. I started this year...

This is my blog post as i wrestle with questions of identity - calling identity, theological identity and sexual identity. Please read, comment, inbox, give advice. 

[mamilton]

Writing Theology Papers: Resources for Graduate Students

Writing Theology Papers: Resources for Graduate Students

I have provided a resource page for our students at the U.S. Army Chaplain Center and School. I share this (a mere collection of the good work of many others) for our civilian students in theological education. My continuing concern is that we help our graduate students (future clergy and scholars) prepare papers with guides to writing content, as well as form, that is measurable. Theological…

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[andrewtgates]

How "Noah" Rearranged My Guts

I have deep respect for filmmakers who are excellent at their craft: telling great stories, asking great questions and inviting viewers into conversations with their own convictions, with others, and with God. All this while being, y’know, entertaining.

My favorite films embody these characteristics in varying ratios and capacities. Hiyao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Ponyo, The Secret World of Arietty)makes animated films more visually stunning than I thought possible. The Coen brothers (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, A Serious Man, Ladykillers, Fargo, No Country for Old Men, True Grit) use unorthodox storytelling methods, humor and violence to awaken and challenge my sometimes-fast-asleep moral convictions. Wes Anderson (Bottlerocket, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Moonrise Kingdom) sneaks profoundly redemptive family interactions into his luxuriously and meticulously crafted worlds.

And then there’s Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler, Black Swan, Noah), whose films rearrange my guts (I first used the term “rearrange my guts” to describe Black Swan in a twitter conversation with my dear friend Joshua Overbay, he an excellent filmmaker in his own right). Aronofsky’s films are deeply disturbing and not for the faint of heart (none, not even Noah, are kid friendly). He unflinchingly stares down the darkest tendencies of the human heart, whether it be drug addiction (Requiem), grief (Fountain), failure (Wrestler), unbridled ambition (Swan), or, well, Noah.

[Note: Noah spoilers ahead. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.]

Many see “Hollywood” making a “Biblical epic” and immediately assume that “the world” is trying to “cash in” on the “faithfulness” of Christians. Man, that’s a lot of scare quotes. My first thought was, “I can’t wait to see what Aronofsky can do with this deeply disturbing Biblical story,” followed almost immediately with, “I bet a lot of my fellow Christians will balk at the idea.” Both my excitement and the balking thing came to pass.

And I get it. In the film, Aronofsky inserts the Watchers from 1 Enoch into the story, depicting them as Ent-ish rock monsters. God’s blessing is passed from generation to generation via the shed serpent skin of the first deceiver. They always use the term Creator rather than the Christian-preferred term, God. Methuselah gets more or a role than the Bible gives him. And Noah becomes convinced that God does not intend to repopulate the earth with humans, but to allow humanity to die with them, and is willing to kill his own grandchildren to make that happen.

For me as a filmgoer, that last detail is precisely where Aronofsky displays his genius. I expect to be disturbed by Aronofsky films, but I have long ago forgotten to be disturbed by the Noah story. Recall that the entire premise of the Biblical Noah narrative is that “…the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence…So God said to Noah, ‘I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth” (Genesis 6:11-13).

In the film, we see Noah wrestle with this call from God. We see his family fight against his decisions. We hear the cries of the last humans to die while the ark sails in safety. We watch Noah become more steadfast in his commitment to do the Creator’s will, and for all his steadfast obedience, we see him lose a bit of his humanity. If God is wiping out all these people for their wickedness, what about the wickedness that lives in me? What makes me special? We see how Noah comes to the conclusion that he and his family must also die, but we do not agree with his conclusion. Noah became despicable to me as I watched the film, as I saw him willing to murder his baby granddaughters in the name of obedience to God. I squirmed in my seat and wanted to punch Noah and knock sense into him.

And Noah, so committed to obedience to God, is filled with something he will eventually describe as love. But Noah despairs his lack of obedience. He didn’t have the strength to follow through on what he was convinced God wanted him to do. I can’t ever recall being so immediately consumed with anguished theological wrestling while watching a film.

Is this how the story happened? Is this how the Bible depicts it? Well, the Biblical account leaves a lot of the story untold. I understand the impulse to reject any “reading into” the Biblical narrative. Revelation warns against adding words to Scripture, etc.

But Noah is to me a compelling artistic statement that draws me into theological wrestling right along with Noah and his family. I may not like what I see when I look at the God who destroyed the earth for its wickedness, but that is a reality I am faced with precisely because of Aronofsky’s bold interpretation. Once again, an Aronofsky film rearranged my guts in a significant way, something that always ends up becoming for me a call to repentance. It’s not a perfect film, and not precisely what I expected, yet somehow exactly what I hoped it would be.

A final thought. 1 John tells us that “God is love,” so if love really stopped Noah from taking the lives of his granddaughters…well, I’ll let you do the math.

Next post: Some thoughts on the fantastic 2013 Best Picture 12 Years a Slave.

[undercovernun]

We are meaning-seeking beings who hope to find wisdom that guides us.

From the essay Theological Reflection as a Life Skill, part of the Reading and Reflection Guide for Sewanee's Education for Ministry

I also liked this bit:

Each of us is a theologian. It is not an option.  The question is not whether or not we reflect theologically. The question is how proficient we are.

[youreawanker-number9]

While taking notes

A: I am the scribe I can write what I want.

B: Is that how The Bible was written?