This is the second post in a nine-part series for the Spectrum/re-church Summer Reading Group. The nine posts will be drawn from chapters of Deep Church, by Jim Belcher. You can find the reading schedule here. Please join in the comments at the Spectrum blog.

Imagine you are sitting down to a Bible study with your neighbor. It’s not the formal fill-in-the-blank kind, but a conversation between old friends.  The conversation settles on the topic of life after death. Part of you is excited about introducing the Adventist perspective, but you’re also nervous as you know that your neighbor believes that people go directly to heaven or hell when they die.

As you study the topic with your neighbor, how will you prove the truth of your beliefs? Will you use evidence from Scripture? From science? Will you refer to an authority like your pastor or the Biblical Research Institute? Will you connect it together with a logical argument, or just let your words speak for themselves?

This, of course, isn’t a one way conversation.  Your neighbor will likely have evidence from Scripture and science, authorities, and personal experience. What does this imply for how strongly you should hold your belief?  Should you be open to your belief being wrong?

At the root of these questions is the debate about the possibility of knowing the truth. Jim Belcher addresses this in the fourth chapter of Deep Church, “Deep Truth.”  He analyzes what the traditional and emerging church have to say on the matter, and attempts to navigate a third way between classical foundationalism and excessive post-modernism.

Modernism was fueled by the confidence that it was possible to build a foundation of certain and universal truths using reason. From this foundation one would build up a body of true knowledge. And with this ideal, modernism was not without fruits: modern science, medicine, liberal democracy, religious liberty and capitalism. Belcher doesn’t assess modernism very kindly, however, claiming that   it has “led to the breakdown of morality, self, and community” by cutting off the individual from tradition and divine revelation.

Traditional churches, however, have adapted the model of knowledge from the Enlightenment, along with modernism methods for establishing truth. Having proved the Bible to be true, and their carefully reasoned out interpretation of it, many pastors have an overconfident and triumphalistic attitude, which leads to arrogance; this shuts down conversation, learning and growing. Belcher agrees with the critique of the traditional church made by the emergent church in this regard.

The emerging church has been associated with “post-modernism.” Belcher distinguishes between two kinds of post-modernism: post-foundationalism and anti-realism.  Post-foundationalists reject the idea that one can establish a certain foundation of knowledge. We are constantly interpreting our histories, our sacred texts, our personal identities, our relationships, and our activities, whether individual or collective, through the lenses of our past, culture, language, emotions and subconscious desires, and even our genetic pre-dispositions; our vision of reality is clouded.  Every foundation we try to build is imperfect, because we ourselves are imperfect. Belcher agrees with emergent thinkers that this post-modern critique of foundationalism is consistent with our fallen nature and that this understanding ought to inspire a desperately needed humility.

However, some thinkers go further and making an anti-realist claim, denying there is a reality independent of our perception, and if there is, that it is really knowable. Usually this isn’t a denial of physical reality, but a denial that mental objects (concepts like the number 7, goodness, or solidness) are true for all people, at all times, in exactly the same way. The fact that we all have similar concepts of ‘solidness’ is due to the similarity between the contexts in which we constructed the concept, not the fact that we perceived some universal truth of ‘solidness’.”

Belcher argues that this version of post-modernism is incompatible with Christianity. Referencing the Bible, Belcher claims, “We have an outside authority to tell us about this reality.”  He doesn’t claim anyone in the emergent camp actually accepts anti-realism, but seems to think they are in danger of tacitly accepting of some variant of it by not distinguishing it adequately from post-foundationalism. Belcher is uncomfortable with constructivist epistemologies and a “relational hermeneutic” that discovers truth in community. He asserts, “[A]part from revelation, there is nothing to hold a particular tradition, community or history accountable. There is no prophetic voice.”

Belcher claims that the deep church rejects both classical foundationalism and hard postmodernism. In doing so, we can, in a sense, have the best of both worlds: feel confidence in God’s revelation of reality, while being characterized by a humility born out of an awareness of our limits as sinful humans.

Belcher’s analysis has much to say to Adventists, but also raises many questions. Much of Belcher’s  negative description of the traditional church because of its foundationalism can be applied to us. Like other evangelicals of the traditional church, Adventists have a paradoxical relationship with modernism. Our belief in self-evident truth, our practice of using texts as evidence for our beliefs, our suspicion of creeds, the individualistic and intellectual nature of our sermons, conversion, and discipleship practices are all modern in their very nature. At the same time, modernism challenges the Bible that is foundational to our beliefs.

I wonder, however, if Belcher’s third way solves the arrogance problem. His appeal to “outside authority” seems to be, well, very foundational. Who gets to interpret the Bible? Which interpretation is the best one? Furthermore, how does all this work in the context of living in a religiously diverse world?

While I appreciate Belcher’s emphasis on the need for “humble confidence” and “boldness,” I’m drawn to the emergent church’s vision of church as a community that is honest about doubt, characterized by a deep humility, and a willingness to learn. I long to see more of this in the Adventist church. I’m tired of the fear that seems to lurk in the shadows of people and institutions deeply vested in certainty.

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William Cordis is a Sales Rep for Red Hat, Inc. and a graduate of Southern Adventist University.  He lives with his wife Ann in Atlanta, Georgia.  He is a bookworm and computer geek with interests ranging from philosophy to Japanese culture.  This is his first contribution to SPECTRUM and re-church.

Cross posted at the SPECTRUM Blog. Please join us over there to comment.

The election of Ted Wilson as President of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists has been heralded as a victory for Traditional Adventists. The fact that it makes sense to speak of sides with the conservatives winning and by extension the liberals losing indicates something is terribly wrong. The increasing polarization of society is invading our church with divisive results.

Can we find a bridge to cross the traditional/progressive divide? Is there a third way for the majority who are still in no-man’s-land wondering what the incendiary comments, screaming polemics, and deadly exclusion are all about? If there is a third way, is traveling along this path possible or even desirable?

Jim Belcher explores these questions from his own Evangelical perspective in Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional. As we gaze with sympathetic eyes over Belcher’s shoulder, perhaps we can find a way to do as Wilson exhorted us in his inaugural address – go forward.

Belcher’s term for the third way is ‘Deep Church’ in reference to C. S. Lewis’ description of the inclusive universal Christian faith in Mere Christianity. As Lewis noted, Deep Church may lack humility. However, Belcher’s lack of humility in holding up his own church as an example of the Deep Church is redeemed by his insight and sincerity.

Belcher reveals that he is both an insider and an outsider to the Emerging Church Movement. He is an insider since he was involved in the North American conversation from the beginning and remains sympathetic to the questions and concerns with which the Emerging Church struggles. Yet, he feels like an outsider given his discomfort with the answers some in the Emerging Church are expressing.

To keep us all on the same page, definitions are needed. Because the Emerging Church is relatively new and notoriously difficult to pin down, Belcher attempts a definition. He identifies seven representative categories in which the Emerging Church calls for change in Christianity.

1. Captivity to enlightenment rationalism in which the Traditional Church condones modern individualism, rationalism, and pragmatism leading to the mainline social gospel or fundamentalist tribalism.
2. Narrow view of salvation emphasizing justification over sanctification and the future salvation of souls at the second coming over the present inclusive Kingdom of God.
3. Belief before belonging such that Traditional Churches set up boundaries to keep some in and others out. This category is familiar to those acquainted with Rick Rice. The emerging emphasis on belonging before believing includes a call to revitalize evangelism by recognizing the importance of community.
4. Uncontextualized worship in which out of touch worship forms alienate the current postmodern culture.
5. Ineffective preaching which is no longer an effective method of spiritual formation. Instead, the Emerging Church calls for spiritual formation in which we learn from one another in a participatory community.
6. Weak ecclesiology leads to an emerging concern that the Traditional Church is too hierarchical and more concerned with institutional survival than being the missional, sent people of God.
7. Tribalism in which the Traditional Church is seen as sectarian and unwilling to engage the culture.

It should be evident that there are many similarities between the Emerging Church and Progressive Adventism as well as between the Traditional Evangelical Church and Traditional Adventism. The content of Wilson’s recent sermon and the progressive critiques leveled against it covered all seven of these categories.

One of the difficulties with defining the Emerging Church is its great diversity. Belcher recognizes this in part by discussing three main emerging groups as identified by Ed Stetzer – Relevants, Reconstructionists, and Revisionists. The Reconstructionists provide a convenient middle group to represent the third way.

1. Relevants are theologically conservative Evangelicals who are deeply committed to both orthodox belief and the historic forms of church while seeking to make worship more contextual.
2. Reconstructionists also remain orthodox in belief while seeking institutional change toward a less hierarchical, more missional church structure.
3. Revisionists are the most radical, questioning and re-envisioning both traditional beliefs as well as the church structure.

Belcher is concerned with our tendency to emphasize the most egregious examples and question the motives of the other side. Instead, we must define our conversation partners in a way they would recognize and assume the best of intentions. Because we fail in this, there is a profound lack of trust between both sides and without trust there can be no restoration of unity which Belcher states is his ultimate goal.

The introductory section of the book closes with a discussion of the ancient creeds. Belcher sees these as a first tier of belief where unity in relation to the ancient creeds allows for a broadly ecumenical deep church with freedom for a wide variety of interesting second tier beliefs.

The first three chapters are a helpful introduction to the concepts Belcher will explore in more detail later in the book. However, there were several issues which stimulated divergent thoughts.

Belcher assumes, as do most, that the Revisionists represent an intentional, top-down response to postmodernity which is imposed upon naïve believers by (mis)leaders. Instead, the very term emergence implies a bottom-up groundswell from a variety of backgrounds converging into a complex whole which is greater than the sum of its varied perspectives. Emergence Christianity then is not a capitulation to postmodernity. Rather, it is an outgrowth from the same forces which brought us to our postmodern perspective, and thus represents a very Adventist concept, present truth.

Another faulty assumption is the often repeated idea that deconstruction is undertaken to allow for re-construction. Rather, as Peter Rollins points out, the purpose of deconstruction is not to clear a space so that a new foundational structure can be re-constructed. Instead, deconstruction is an ongoing, warming hermeneutic which keeps beliefs fluid and prevents them from freezing into the rigid boundaries of the Traditional Church.

Belcher did recognize the fallacy of conflating the Emerging Church with Emergent Village and further reducing the entire movement to Brian McLaren. However, he did not acknowledge that the Evangelical perspective on the Emerging Church is part of a much larger movement embodied in Emergence Christianity which was brilliantly described by Phyllis Tickle in her book The Great Emergence.

Belcher’s limited reformed perspective also fails to recognize the contributions of Adventists such as Samir Selmanovic who has opened the door to conversations beyond mere Christianity in his book It’s Really All About God. Rather than the enemy which Belcher makes Muslims out to be, Samir affirms Islam and other religions as interdependent conversation partners.

While I resonate with Belcher’s concept of unifying around a central point, I remain uncertain that this focus should be the ancient creeds. I prefer the simplicity of what Scott McKnight calls the Jesus Creed – “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul, and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.” This fits with Alden Thompson’s concept of the one, the two, and the ten.

In addition, Belcher’s concern over the unorthodox beliefs of the Revisionists is more nuanced from our Adventist perspective. Through questioning beliefs such as the duality of human nature and the reality of an eternal hell, Revisionists actually move closer to our understanding of orthodoxy.

Despite my differences of opinion with Belcher, I remain hopeful that as we respectfully converse with him and one another we will discover a third way which will transcend our polarities and help us better appreciate the present though not yet fully realized Kingdom of God. I pray that we don’t have to wait until the ultimate fulfillment of our Advent hope to go forward in unity.

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Brenton Reading is a medical doctor and recently finished a fellowship in pediatric radiology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Radiology, at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine. He is an avid reader and is interested in the confluence of faith and culture, occasionally reviewing books and films for SPECTRUM.

There are 10 chapters in the book and we will blog one chapter a week (except for the first week) for nine weeks, starting July 8.  This leaves some time between now and then to get a copy of the book and start reading. Here’s the schedule we are planning to follow:

1.       July 8 – Mapping New Territory (Chapters 1-3)
2.       July 15 – Deep Truth (Chapter 4)
3.       July 22 – Deep Evangelism (Chapter 5)
4.       July 29 – Deep Gospel (Chapter 6)
5.       August 5 – Deep Worship (Chapter 7)
6.       August 12 – Deep Preaching (Chapter 8 )
7.       August 19 – Deep Ecclesiology (Chapter 9)
8.       August 26 – Deep Culture (Chapter 10)
9.       September 2 – Becoming a Deep Church (Conclusion)

Our bloggers will include some new and old names to Spectrum: Ryan Bell, Will Cordis, Lisa Diller, Todd Leonard, Will Johns, Brenton Reading, and Zane Yi. We invite you to join us and anticipate your comments, questions, experiences, and insights. Feel free invite a friend, and drop a short comment over at the Spectrum blog where these posts are crossposted.

This is the sixth post in a six-part series in the re-church Summer Reading Group. The six posts correspond to the six chapters of What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, by John D. Caputo. Thanks to all who participated!

What is a/the church?

Our forays together into the murky waters of Derridian deconstruction end with us pondering this question (and also with what is my favorite chapter of the book).

We’re familiar with some of the standard definitions of church. The church is “the communion of the saints”; where the bishop or priest offers the sacrament, where the Word is preached and where people are baptized; it comprised of “those that keep the commandments of Jesus.”

Caputo offers none of these standard definitions. Rather, he juxtaposes two kinds of churches, the Big church”, i.e. the institutional church, and “the working church.” The former is visible with “bishops, buildings, power, and the photocopying machines”, the latter exists on the margins and “is left on it’s own to face a brutal world” (119).

To illustrate the difference and relationship between the two churches, Caputo describes the ministry of John McNamee, a Catholic priest who serves St. Malachy’s Church in Philadelphia. The concerns of this priest and his community are far removed from news of “clerical changes, the gossip of the diocesan newspaper, and fundraising campaigns” (119). Rather, McNamee spends his days helping “people who need detoxification programs, jobs, a priest to testify at a bail hearing or in night court, or a handout for food or an unpaid bill” (119). His ministry is about “helping people without health insurance get admitted to a hospital, or about a ride home in the middle of the night, the priest being the one with a car (eventually stolen)” (119).

The list goes on and on.

Here’s the surprising fact; the Big church, if it could avoid the negative press, would shut St. Malachy’s down. Why? “No money. No Catholics” (119). In other words, the tithe and offerings generated by the few parishioners that attend the church cannot justify a full-time pastor or priest.

Off the beaten track, without money, and with out power, MacNamee’s ministry seems to be a futile cause. It causes MacNamee’s life to exist in a tension of despair and hope. He confesses “two forces within me ebb and flow…Nothing is out there. No one. Never was….The other is that sense which seems deeper and stronger: love has you here at all, sustains you, draws you to this Mystery” (121).

In other words, according to Caputo, “The two voices together; the one never giving the other any peace. Doubt as the condition of faith, not its opposite, making faith possible as (the) im/possible” (121). Or,

“A faith insulated from doubt fuels fanaticism and high-handed triumphalism and is in love with itself and its own power. Such faith soundproofs the walls of the intramural boys club called ‘the Church,’ the big visible one on top with all the bureaucrats and vestments.” (126).

So we have a contrast between two kinds of churches—the church of power and certainty, and the church of powerlessness and uncertainty.

Caputo clearly sees the latter as being the “true church.” Invoking Kierkegaard, Caputo claims, “The gospel is not a set of doctrines, but a way of life” (124). The New Testament is not a theory to be understood, but something that takes a leap of faith, and must be translated into existence. Ubi caritas, ibi ecclesia. “Where love is implemented, there is the church” (124).

The existence of the working church is deconstructive.

But Caputo reminds us, and these comments are a great summary of what has preceded this chapter:

“When something is deconstructed, it is not razed by reconfigured and transformed in response to inner and uncontainable impulses. When something is deconstructed, it takes on a certain look, not unlike the look of these two communities, among other unforeseeable and unprogrammable possibilities” (135).

“[A]n institution modeled after deconstruction would be auto-deconstructive, self-correction, removed as far as possible from the power games and rigid inflexibility of institutional life, where a minimal institutional architecture pushes to some optimal point, near but not all the way to anarchy, some point of creative ‘chaosmos’” (137).

So Caputo leaves us with a new vision for doing, or should I say being, church-being a people with out answers, without agendas, yet full of faith, hope, and love.

To be honest, Caputo’s vision of faith and church makes me deeply uncomfortable; yet, at the same time, it strikes me as being true. How does it strike you?

What kind of church do you attend, lead, or belong to? A “Big” one or a “working” one? Practically speaking, how could the two churches work better together in your context?

This is the chapter we’ve all been wondering about, I think. What would Jesus deconstruct, specifically? In this chapter Caputo takes the deconstructive virus that he has been cultivating in the past few chapters and injects it into contemporary American culture. He focuses his deconstructive fury on four areas of American social life: economic justice, militarism, patriarchy, and sexual issues (abortion and homosexuality). If you tend to be on the liberal side of the political spectrum you probably enjoyed this chapter immensely, maybe even pumping your fist a time or two. If you are on the conservative side of things you probably had a hard time getting through these 28 pages. But regardless where you stand on these issues, you may have had a thought something like mine: “Isn’t this just too convenient? So you apply a Derridian deconstructive move to Jesus and he comes out looking like a liberal Democrat. How nice.” In other words, is Caputo really working backwards from what he wants Jesus to stand for? Is he creating Jesus is his own postmodern, liberal, democratic image?

What I would like to do in this short post is focus again on Caputo’s hermeneutical framework. Rather than going through each of the four major areas that take up the majority of the space in this chapter and tell you what I think and why (which is really not that relevant or important), I would like to ask the question, does Caputo’s hermeneutic make sense and does it rightly yield the kind of outcome he says it does in modern life? But before I do that, let me make this very personal with a short story about something that will happen tomorrow in Hollywood.

As you must know, unless you’ve been on silent retreat for the past 3 months, America is in the midst of a (now quite ugly) debate about health care. Congress is officially on summer recess and during this time the debate about health care is moving to the local front. Tomorrow, at one of the churches in Hollywood, I will be speaking on behalf of the 25 member congregations (churches and synagogues) that make up LA Voice, about the moral and religious values that we feel call us to speaking out for health care reform. (If you want to know more about our message, visit www.coverallfamilies.org). Congressman Xavier Becerra will be present, as well as dozens of other clergy and leaders from our congregations in Los Angeles.

Is this what Jesus would do? Would Jesus speak out for health care reform? I think he would, for some of the reasons that Caputo names in this chapter. And for me, it comes down to hermeneutics.

You will not find a passage in scripture that tells us to try to influence our government for more just policies that will benefit the poor. In fact, as Caputo points out, Jesus works outside the dominant political structures of his day. He challenged the social order (remember he ended up on a Roman cross, convicted of high treason). But you don’t see Jesus trying to become the next Caesar or even stage a coup.

The funniest expression of Caputo’s hermeneutic comes on page 91 when he says:

My basic hermeneutic formula is this: if you want to draw your vision and inspiration from the New Testament, bless your heart, but you need, in addition to a good reading of the text, an independently good argument.

What I think he’s saying here is that your interpretation needs to work in the world you live in. This is the hard work of living Christianly in the world. We have to use our heads and think. He gets a bit more specific about this.

I may be forgiven…if I have concluded that the private-charity argument is a cynical cover for greed, which as a way of working things out so that I get to keep as much money as I can for myself and let the poorest of the poor go to the devil. I have the idea that this is precisely the sort of hypocrisy that made Jesus flash with anger, so that if Jesus showed up on day uninvited and caught me holding forth on that point, the “revelation” I would experience would be of his meaner side. The more Jesus-inspired thing to do today, in my opinion, is to translate the gospel’s commitment to hte poor into an effective public policy that would actually implement an evangelical imperative, to come to the aid of the weakest and most defenseless people in society, above all the children (93, italics supplied by me).

This is not to say that the government is the answer to the world’s problems, or to shift the locus of God’s kingdom to Washington, D.C. I think it is possible to maintain that the church, filled with the Spirit and commissioned by Jesus himself, is the primary locus of God’s action in the world and that it is the role of the church to bear witness to Christ and his kingdom by doing everything possible now to enact that kingdom in the world we actually live in. Bill Colburn commented on the last post and quoted Stanley Hauerwas as saying, “To be a Christian does not mean that we are to change the world, but rather that we must live as witnesses to the world that God has changed. We should not be surprised, therefore, if the way we live makes the change visible.” (You got a reference for that, Bill?) I think this gets the balance exactly right. To say, the church itself is the message and the witness is not to absolve the church from putting it’s faith into tangible action in the world as a witness to future God’s is bringing into our present.

It is our responsibility to breathe with the spirit of Jesus, to implement, to invent, to convert this poetics into a praxis, which means to make the political order resonate with the radicality of someone whose vision was not precisely political. We need hermeneutics, which means understanding linked to historical context, and deconstruction, which means an interpretive theory that is mad about justice, in order to make this translation (95).

This statement above comes the closest, I think, to saying what Caputo is up to in this book. This deconstructive hermeneutic peels back the layers of our hypocricy and complicity with systems of power that benefit the wealthy and franchised, and exclude the poor and disenfranchised. So, in the areas of economic justice, war and violence, patriarcy and sexuality, how does this hermenutic apply? Do you find Caputo’s application of his own hermeneutic compelling? Would you like to argue with him about this?

For example, how does this statement below set with you? Can you read the Bible in this way or has Caputo gone too far?

I appreciate the scholarly work that has been recently undertaken to interpret what the Scriptures have said about homosexuality and I wish it well. But even were this research not to hold up, I could live with the idea that Paul condemned what we today have constituted as “homosexuality: and that if anyone ever asked Jesus about it (and if they did we have no record of it) he would have said the same thing as Paul….

In my view even if there is a dominant view against homosexuality in the Scriptures and tradition…I would argue that on this point the Greeks were right and the dominant tradition among Jews and Christians is wrong, just as the Scriptures are wrong to underwrite slavery and the oppression of women (108-109).

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Ryan Bell is the pastor of the Hollywood Adventist Church and the co-founder and coordinator for the re-church network.

A brief overview of our own history reveals our checkered record when it comes to the political use of power. When Constantine became a Christian, and Christianity was no longer a persecuted minority, we tried in many ways, to dominate the political order, or at least use it to carry out our ends. (Christians began persecuting others!) During the Reformation, Luther and Calvin, while critical of the church’s theology, were willing to continue working with political authorities. During this time, Christian from different traditions, in the name of God and doctrine, went to war with each other.

Evidently, the people of God are not immune from the lust for power that Augustine, in his City of God, attributes to the city of man; we are all infected.

It was the radical reformers, i.e. the Anabaptists, who deplored all political involvement, seeing it as the first steps of spiritual compromise; they advocated a withdrawal from secular affairs. The church should not yield political power in any form, nor should Christians be involved in the affairs of government.

Caputo, in this chapter, challenges this solution to the problem by re-framing the debate. According to him, the main issue is not finding the best model for church and state relations, but addressing a more fundamental issue–our view of power; we have adopted our understanding of it from the world and it must be reconceptualized in the light of Jesus’ life and death. Caputo claims:

“The crucified body of Jesus proposes not that we keep theology out of politics but that we think theology otherwise, by way of another paradigm, another theology, requiring us to think of God otherwise, as a power of powerlessness, as opposed to the theology of omnipotence that underlies sovereignty” (88).

In Jesus’ own day, power was exemplified by the Roman army crushing anything that got in its way. In contrast to this is Jesus, whose “powerlessness” Caputo lyrically and poetically extols in the first half of this chapter.

“[W]henever one would expect an exercise of power form a classical hero, Jesus displays the stunning power of powerlessness—of nonviolence, nonresistance, forgiveness, mercy, compassion, generosity” (84).

Caputo’s contrast of Jesus’ powerlessness to Roman power make me think about our own context. A few centuries after Jesus, in the time of emperors, the analogous head of the church became the pope, who was understood to rule over a sacred kingdom as the emperor ruled the secular one. Interestingly, church structures have, and continue to be, modeled after the reigning political structures of the day. Today, denominations are run by “presidents”, “vice-presidents”, or, modeling the corporate world, “pastorprenuers.” This makes me wonder:

1. How are we doing as a community in modeling Jesus’ powerlessness? Practically speaking, how would the organization and protocols of our own denomination(s) look if they were truly “powerless”?

I appreciated Caputo’s meditations on the life and death of Jesus and its implications for our lives; namely, that we are called to live lives of excessive love toward the unlovable (84). Caputo also reminds us that this love expresses itself through word AND deed, proclamation AND concrete actions.

“To announce the kingdom of God is to bring good news to all those who are poor in spirit and just plain poor, to those who hunger for justice and who are just plain hungry, to those whose minds are blinded by sin and who are just plain blind, to those whose hearts are bent by evil and whose bodies are just plain bent” (85).

I think most of us are in full agreement with Caputo on these points.

However, at the close of the chapter Caputo draws out the political implications of Jesus’ “theo-poetics.” He writes:

“We are called to imagine the kingdom of God in the concrete political structures of the day, and that requires political imagination and judgment….[It] requires, in addition to prophets, the hard work of concrete political invention, the cleverness of inventive political structures” (87).

Here, I am not sure if I agree or disagree with Caputo.

First of all, conceptually, I find the claims in the first half this chapter difficult to reconcile with the one made in the last part. In the idea of using power to divert power on behalf of “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger” makes sense to me. I have a hard time grasping, however, what Caputo is suggesting we do, i.e. emulate Jesus’ powerlessness, but be political.

What do you think?

2. Can one seek to be powerlessness, but then seek through laws, and political structures, i.e. power, to shape a loving society? Wouldn’t this lead to a performative contradiction?

But beyond this, on the one hand, I agree with Caputo’s assessment that much of what passes for Christian politics today is based on a very selective and distorted read of the Bible. I am sympathetic to the view that as a Christian I am to work for the best of society and for the flourishing of others. Furthermore, I recognize my right and duty as a citizen to play an active role in the life of my society and community.

However, I also find this in tension with my own upbringing. I was raised in a tradition that was very much influenced by the Anabaptist emphasis on withdrawal from “worldly” matters. Coupled with the emphasis on eschatology I heard growing up, the theological cocktail I’ve imbibed provides little motivation for wanting to actually work for long term change in the community and society in which I live. (After all, it’s all going to burn and be recreated!)

In other words, I’ve grown up hearing spirituality being presented as withdrawal from society and that something in the immanent future; it will break in apart from my own personal efforts to bring it about. My duty is to preach “the everlasting gospel.”

Several more questions arise for me, which I will raise in closing for further discussion:

3. In the Adventist tradition, we are already involved in politics in order to defend our own religious liberties and rights. To what extent are we called to advocacy, lobbying, and lawmaking that addresses other issues?

4. Could the involvement of Christians and/or the church in political life detract away from its “primary” purpose? What is this purpose?

5. Is political involvement the responsibility of all Christians, or just some?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

This is the third  post in a six-part series in the re-church Summer Reading Group (click these links to read parts one and two). The six posts will correspond to the six chapters of What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, by John D. Caputo. Next week’s post will also be written by Zane.
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I like to think of myself as a generous person. This summer, my wife and I have had the privilege of attending several weddings. Each of my family members or friends received gifts from us. According to Derrida and Caputo, however, these so-called “gifts” came with some unstated expectation of gratitude or reciprocation. In other words, they are not really gifts and I am not really a generous person. I do not truly give gifts; rather my gift giving is a form of putting someone in debt to me!

The distinction between names and events is central to understanding Caputo’s provoking discussion of gifts and along with his thoughts on forgiveness, love, and hospitality. I will start by providing some further distinctions that I hope will clarify Caputo’s general claims regarding names and events, and then raise some questions for discussion. (By all means, feel free to add your own below, or to touch on topics I do not mention in the discussion below.)

Words and events

There are three helpful distinctions from the world of linguistics and grammar, and one from metaphysics, that help us understand the difference between names and events or the cryptic phrase “events are not names or things but something going on in names or things” (59).

First, is the distinction between words and the things, people, actions, etc. to which those words refer (the referent). Names and words fail to fully capture the reality of the people, actions, and events they seek to describe. In other words, they are never adequate, and at best, they serve as icons–at worst, they are idols–directing us to a reality beyond themselves.

Another helpful distinction, for all the grammarians out there, is the one between the nominative case (as well, as other cases) and vocative case. Nouns, we know, can be used as a subject of a sentence, i.e. the nominative case (Ex. The man ate the cow.), as the direct object of a sentence, i.e. the accusative case (Ex. The cow ate the man.), the indirect object, i.e. the dative case (Ex. The woman gave the cow to the man.), or as a possessive, i.e. the genitive case (Ex. The man’s cow at the grass.).

All this can be distinguished from the vocative case of a noun, in which someone or something is called upon by someone else (Ex. He has shown, you, O man, what is good.”).

Giving something a name, or learning someone’s name, gives us a certain sense of familiarity or even certainty about them. It gives us a sense of power and mastery over them. We call out someone’s name; they respond to us. We invoke names; they legitimate our agenda. We are the subject; the person or thing we refer to is the object.

Caputo reverses the priority and power we give ourselves and our cognitive abilities. Events are not something we grasp, something we call for. Rather, events call us into account and into action.

Thirdly, we know that verbs have tenses—they refer to actions that have happened in the past, are happening now, or will happen in the future.

Lastly, is the distinction between, necessity, i.e. what exists, how things are or must be, and possibility, i.e. how things might be.

We do not find the ideals we profess perfectly embodied somewhere, or in an alternate reality, i.e. the pure world of Platonic Forms. Events give us a vision (albeit, an unclear one) of what might and should be.

So to briefly summarize, names (words) should not be mistaken for events (realities and possibilities) and where they are, they can be “deconstructed”, i.e. analyzed and criticized to show how they will always fall short of the possibility to which they refer.

Caputo draws out the implications of this distinction between names and events by discussing justice, gifts, forgiveness, and hospitality. Each of these events exceeds our linguistic and conceptual grasp of them, along with our present experience of them, and call us to us further action.

Gifts, love, and forgiveness

True gifts, according to Caputo, are impossible. If we are honest, we will admit we never give something to someone for free. In our most generous givings, we expect at least “a thank you.” “[A]s soon as the gift is given, the gift begins to annul itself,” Caputo writes (67).We are all entrapped in an endless cycle of exchange.

This, for me, raises uncomfortable questions about my own personal “givings”, religious or otherwise. I think it raises questions about communal giving as well:

1. When we give our lives to God, or return our tithes and offerings to God, are we really giving? Don’t we expect further blessings at least, or eternal life, at most?

2. There’s a lot of  talk these days about “needs-based” evangelism. The old methods of preaching to people don’t work. “You have to ‘love’ them first. Meet their needs and they will come,” it’s explained. Is the church loving or giving to anyone in such cases? Aren’t we seeking to indebt and manipulate people? What would happen if we were to really love the world?

“We must also be aware of making everything turn on rewards, even long-term celestial awards,” Caputo warns (72). He tries to assure us that his critique is not to throw us into despair or to inhibit us from giving, but to make us aware of the truth about our situation, and provide an ideal aspiration.

God is the only true giver.

Or is s/he? This raises yet another uncomfortable question:

3. In Scripture, God is called the giver of every perfect gift (James 1:17). Salvation, it is explained, is a gift (Ephesians 2:8). Is it? Doesn’t God’s supreme gift of himself to us in Christ actually indebt us? If so, can it rightfully be called a gift?

On a related note, critiquing traditional understanding of God’s forgiveness as based on atonement, Caputo asks, “Is not the highly Anselmian story we have been telling ourselves in atonement theology completely at odds with the figure of the father in [the parable of the prodigal son] told by Jesus? Is not the God of Jesus marked first and foremost by forgiveness?” (75).

I would answer Caputo’s first rhetorical questions in the negative; I don’t think Anselm’s view of the atonement is at odds with the story of the prodigal son. In the story, at least the way I read it, the father absorbs the shame and cost of his younger son’s rebellion. (I would also ask the question, “Can a gift be a gift, if the gift cost nothing to the giver?) Perhaps, I’m being too much of a traditionalist on this. What do you think?

Justice and law

Caputo’s discussion on justice and law has thought-provoking implications for the legal minds amongst us. The law, Caputo speaks of, of course is human or political law, which is not to be confused with justice. Furthermore, justice should not be confused with consistent application of the law, i.e. legality. Some times, justice requires the abrogation of law or in Caputo’s words, “[I]f laws are universals, justice is sensitive to the singularity of the situation, to the idiosyncrasies and differences” (65).

Laws exist as a means, to the end of justice; they are not an end in themselves. Caputo suggests that this was Jesus’ attitude toward religious laws (63). “Whatever exists, whatever is present, is contingent, historical, constructed under determinate conditions—like the church or the Sabbath—and as such is inwardly disturbed by the undeconstructible, unconditional impulse that stirs within it,” Caputo claims. (68). He quotes Jesus to make his point, “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath?”

To this, the Sabbath apologist will say, “Yes, Jesus deconstructed the human laws of how to observe Sabbath, but not the Sabbath itself, which is a part of the divine law.” This is a distinction that Caputo fails to make. This, however, still raises some interesting questions:

4. Are divine laws, i.e. the Ten Commandments, or the teachings of Jesus, an end in themselves or a means to an end? If it is the later, what is this purpose?

5. Could the purpose of divine law “justice”/shalom, as Caputo suggests? If so, can it be deconstructed, or set aside, when it fails to actually lead to justice?

Concluding thoughts

Caputo purpose in this chapter is ultimately practical. He leaves us with a question that haunts all those who feel the call of these events that are described in this chapter: “What would love or justice or hospitality require, here and now, in the concrete” (80)?

How does all this relate to prayer? Well, some prayers are never answered; they cannot be answered in the final sense (at least in this life). We never arrive at our destination. Deconstruction point us to what is absent in our lives and in our world.

Without the comfort of presence, we are forced to pray. Perhaps this is what St. Paul had in mind when he admonished us to “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17).

—–

Zane Yi is completing his Ph.D. in Philosophy at Fordham University in New York City.

When I first opened this book, the title of this 2nd chapter, “Spiritual Journeys, Postmodern Paths,” seemed innocuous. I find myself exhausted by all the deconstruction that is going on around me, theologically, economically, politically, personally. So, I was glad Ryan assigned this straightforward chapter to me. The words were familiar. In the parlance of traditional Christian spirituality, terms journey and path have been a way of comforting us on the demanding race of Christian life towards achieving an overwhelmingly all-encompassing perfect image of “being Christlike.”

Traditionally (here by “traditionally” I mean “before the blessings of deconstruction entered our psyche”) the destination was clear, good, and certain—but far away. To get there—we would say in our sermons—we need to take the Christian journey. The concept helped us focus our efforts and be patient. It was a way to keep ourselves going towards that perfect image, a way for a pilgrim to make progress.

Such a journey or path was something concrete, something we could envision, choose to take, and be disciplined about. It had maps and steps. And, importantly, it had a history and there was a concrete future awaiting us at the end. We were to hold on to “faith delivered to the saints once and for all” and cling to “hope that will not fail.” My contention here is that although we proclaimed the text that was authoritative, future that was certain, the present that was doable, we were not really comforted. There were too many things on the map towards God that did not correspond to the landscape of life, and no matter how beautifully attractive was the map, it produced anxiety within.

In contrast, Caputo (by Caputo, I mean Caputo and his cohort of philosophers) offers us cor inquietum (“restless heart”) and homo viator (“human being ever under way”), in other words: discomfort. He describes these spiritual journeys, paths, and maps (notice his “irreducible pluralism”) in quite un-inviting terms. To us, human beings bewildered with finitude, apparent randomness, suffering, injustice, mortgage payments, ailing family, and car breakdowns Caputo offers no consolations. At least not at the outset. Ultimately, he has the gall to say, adding salt to the human wound, we can never really know the past, present, future, ourselves, or other people. The bad news is worse than you think, he says.

I ask myself, why would I then take up this journey of deconstruction? Why not turn the tools of deconstruction against itself (deconstruct the deconstruction) and settle for something of substance? Life is short. I want to die in one piece, constructed and whole, with my family and friends around me, also constructed and whole. And my hope within me, also constructed and whole.

Think of it. He describes people on this journey as “people who crash-landed,” “frightened by the mysterious” and always partially “lost.” We are supposed to live under “hauntological principle?” We are invited to embrace “contingency” on a journey that has “teeth” and “bite,” a path seeded with “interrupted passages and missteps,” maps with “multiple tracks” and “counterpaths” on every turn. And to live in the world where other people are “shores we will never reach!” He calls this place, our very own lives (yes Christian lives too) “very spooky.” He brings ghost back into the Holy Ghost. He summarizes the situation we find ourselves in as the “postmodern condition.” It does not sound like a journey or a path to me. It sounds like a chronic disease.

As I began reading this chapter, I recalled meeting Caputo, after I heard him speak back in 2004 at an Emergent gathering in 2004 in San Diego at the seminar entitled “Why the Church Deserves Deconstruction?” He is Roman Catholic, and Brian was very happy to have brought him to Emergent for both his background and his topic. What was most surprising though, was how full of life this man was, with irrepressible and wry sense of humor (you can see it jump out from every page here). His uncommonly generous and kind wisdom stirred me. It seemed he genuinely enjoyed this postmodern journey. To describe it, in the first two chapters of this book he used word “felicitous” three times. This is telling, I think. He sees so much joy and grace in this postmodern dis-ease. The very last statement in the chapter is a question that is supposed to come later in the book, but since he cannot hold back the testimony, it bursts out of him (I can just see this short, stocky, grayhaired passionate man pulsating with felicity as he is exclaiming it), “If truth be told, is this not a fairer figure of our lives? Is this not a more compassionate and merciful account of who we are?”

The question I want to bring up here is, how so?

This deconstruction thing starts with tremendous experience of being undone, confused, and disempowered. I am quite sure all of you can testify (feeling deconstructed lately?). And although for those of us in Christian service/vocation who “hope against hope” the felicity of the journey will surface to the fore at the time when we least expect it (feeling breezes of grace lately?), it seems that from now on the deconstruction will always stay by our side. Like in nature, everything that is, is there because something in the past has died. Deconstruction and death are part of good life, after all. If you think that this is Hindu or Buddhist or materialist kind of twist, I would call on the witness of the gospel: the resurrection experiences are always contingent on experiences of death. Seeds must die. In the hyper-reality of the Kingdom of God, both of these processes, construction and deconstruction, are good. None of them spell “destruction.” A saying of the Kingdom of God goes, “Everything will be OK at the end. If it is not OK, it is not the end.” But there is more to it. Because everything will be OK at the end, everything is OK now.  Life will not only win; it has been winning all this time. Look at us, still kicking, still thinking, still feeling, still singing, still crying, still dancing, still dying, and being born. Just look into the eyes of the first person you meet today. Amazing, isn’t it? Life itself is an irreducible and undeconstructible experience. Jesus called it the Kingdom of God, all of us alive, together.

Being an extrovert (I don’t know what I am really thinking until I share it), I offer eight questions related directly to the comforts of the “postmodern condition” that this chapter has helped me see more clearly, for your consideration. Feel free to address any, all, or none of them. I hope you will dig into the chapter as well as into your experience.

1)    What is comforting about losing certainty, control, and independence? Was Jesus independent?

2)    Which concept of the Christian journey — traditional or postmodern — seems more rational to you and why? Was Jesus the Deconstructor sane?

3)    Do you think of your spiritual journey as primarily Christian or as human? How so?

4)    Nathan’s point here. Caputo uses a very disheartening phrase for anyone who has joined a “movement that has already arrived”: “present future” (contrasted with “absolute future”). How does that relate to a concept of “present truth” (for those of you who are not familiar with Adventist tradition, this means “truth for present time”)?

5)    How does this “postmodern condition” view the value of human beings? Caputo uses, shall we say, the felicitous phrase: “perfect excess of the other.” How does that compare with Lutheran notion (Vince, this might be a caricature, I admit) of humans as “worms before God?”

6)    How is living out this postmodern journey fun?  Do you have any preliminary observations towards Jesus’ theology of humor?

7)    What about purpose? Wouldn’t a “purpose driven life” be better? Or not? How so?

8)    Passion is usually connected with certainty. How can we out-passion idolaters of certainty? Any personal experiences, intuitions?

Over to you.
—–

Samir Selmanovic writes this morning from his native Croatia where he is on vacation. He is the founder of Faith House Manhattan and author of the forthcoming book, It’s Really All About God.

The title of the book, which we will be discussing here on the re-church blog, is a play on the title of the classic Christian novel, In His Steps, by Charles Sheldon. I distinctly remember reading this book when I was in college, over 100 years after it was originally published. It had a profound impact on me at the time. It helped me to see an important connection that I had mostly missed up that point in my life. Namely that my profession of faith in Jesus needed to have very tangible results in how I lived my life. Coming from a very conservative place at that time in my life, I was intimately familiar with the idea that my faith should make my life different. But that difference was always in the realm of personal piety and cultural taboos – “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!” (Col 2:21). But what Sheldon was suggesting is that my faith in Jesus had everything to do with how I treated others and even the systems of oppression that keep people broken.

At that point in my life I knew nothing of the social gospel (as an actual movement or as an epithet). Nor had the Christian marketing machine yet gotten a hold of this slogan, “What Would Jesus Do?” and made a mint off bumper stickers, T-shirts, bracelets and Special Edition Bibles. Since that time, as Caputo rightly notes, the slogan, “What would Jesus do?” has been used as a weapon in the modern culture wars.

What Caputo is setting out to do, in this book, is to suggest that what Jesus would do – indeed, what Jesus did and does – is deconstruct the religious edifices we have built in his name, i.e. Christianity in its various expressions.

Perhaps now is a good time for a word about “deconstrution.” If you are new to philosophy, and postmodern philosophy in particular (and I am by no means an expert on this, though we do have some experts in our midst), I would suggest that you try to put out of your mind what the word “deconstruction” sounds like to you. If you try to understand what Caputo, following Jacques Derrida, is talking about by thinking of what you know of the English word “deconstruction,” you will probably be misled.

In the first chapter Caputo offers several definitions of “deconstruction” (though I don’t think he is setting out to give us definitions). Let’s look at these:

“…deconstruction is treated as the hermeneutics of the kingdom of God, as an interpretive style that helps get at the prophetic spirit of Jesus.”

“Deconstruction is good news, because it delivers the shock of the other to the forces of the same, the shock of the good (the “ought”) to the forces of being (“what is”)….”

“Deconstruction is organized around the idea that things contain a kind of uncontainable truth, that they contain what they cannot contain. Nobody has to come along and “deconstruct” things. Things are auto-deconstructed by the tendencies of their own inner truth.”

“Deconstruction is memory.”

There are more, but these are the main statements. What is important to see here is that deconstruction, while in its English colloquial sense, sounds like something damaging or destructive it is actually something hopeful and, perhaps ironically, “constructive” even though it is sure to be painful, transformational and threatening to the status quo. To engage in this kind of deconstruction is an act of faithfulness. Remember that Jesus was perceived to be unfaithful by the religious establishment of his day. (Why is it that we always think we are the exception?)

So one of the things that Caputo points out is that Sheldon’s book, or more specifically, the slogan, WWJD, is a kind of Trojan horse in the conservative evangelical establishment. It is as though the evangelical wing of the church has inadvertently grabbed a hold of the tail of a cobra. Latent within the slogan WWJD is the sharp critique of the church that exists for its own sake, congratulating itself for its righteousness. Sheldon’s act of deconstruction, if we can put it that way, was to suggest that the church had lost its teeth. The story, from which the slogan is lifted, is a challenge for the church to engage in changing the broken structures of society instead of sitting piously in the pews singing hymns while the world burns.

Adventism even more than Christianity in general, has put a great deal of emphasis on knowing “the truth.” We even use the word “Truth” as a kind of shorthand for Adventism as a denomination or movement. In this chapter, Caputo claims that deconstruction is an act of truth – “a hermeneutics of truth,” as he puts it. It seems to me that these two uses of the word truth are almost completely opposed to one another. The one standing for those who have carefully packaged “the truth” and the other for the “event” of the truth that is uncontainable, undeconstructable. The truth that Caputo is talking about is a truth that subverts the institutions that attempt to contain and control the truth and use it as a tool, or even as a weapon, to manipulate and control others.

How are we doing as being followers of Jesus who overturned the money changers’ tables in the Temple, daring to suggest that the truth could not be contained in the Temple?

I think one of the most important statements in this chapter is this,

“The question [What would Jesus do?] presupposes the inescapable reality of history and of historical distance, and it asks how that distance can be crossed. Or better, conceding that this distance cannot be crossed…it asks how that irreducible distance can be made creative. How does our distance from Jesus illuminate what he said and did in a different time and place and under different historical circumstances? And how does Jesus’ distance from us illuminate what we must say and do in the importantly different situation in which we find ourselves today? The task of the church is to submit itself to this question…” (34).

There is so much other good material in this chapter that I have not commented on, especially the section entitled,”The Church Is Plan B,” which seems like it could have been a whole chapter of its own. Perhaps I’ll write another post just on this section.

What stand out to you from what you’ve read?

How can we remain faithful to a tradition and still embrace the deconstructive nature of truth itself? Put differently, how can we be both radically committed to the truth wherever it leads us and at the same time be rooted in a tradition that has given us life?

What is your experience of Jesus Christ, Deconstrutor?

——

Ryan Bell is the pastor of the Hollywood Adventist Church and the co-founder and coordinator for the re-church network.

There are 6 chapters and we will blog one chapter a week for six weeks, starting July 13, so you have time to get the  book and start reading. Our bloggers will be:

::Ryan Bell, Senior Pastor of the Hollywood Adventist Church
::Samir Selmanovic, founder of Faith House Manhattan and Pastor of City Lights
::Zane Yi, Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at Fordham University in New York City.

Please drop a comment below if you plan to read along with us. The blogs will be posted here at the re-church blog and we invite your comments, questions, challenges and insights. This will be a much more enjoyable experience if you participate in the comments.

Please invite anyone you know that might be interested in this group and lets have some fun this summer reading together.