Gluttony and Grace

I’ve had a question plaguing me for some time. Assuming that capitalism, and more basically, human inclination is gluttonous, how does then gift — an economy of grace — operate? Certainly there is martyrdom and the christological kenotic life, but there is also the responsibility for self-care, to make healthy choices. How do we reconcile the Christian work of universal gift, when it seems to conflict with healthy choices against people who would simply consume us?

Long on Gift, Love, and Ontology

I do not mean to keep quoting from Long, but he has put forth an interesting work that intersects well with some of my own interests. And since I refer to this blog more than I’m sure any other reader does, so as to help organize my own thoughts, here is another post with another quote.

Here we find Milbank answering the question why there is something rather than nothing. The answer is ‘gift.’ The gift of Christ to redeem us is the plenitude that allows us t ‘glimpse’ the Fall and thereby Creation. This answer assumes that love is as basic to our existence as reason, which is something Balthasar endeavored to show. We do not understand reason well if it remains unrelated to love. We can only know what we love and love what we know. Love is the perfection against which Creation and reason can appear.

John Paul II states this well. “The truth Revelation allows us to know is neither the mature fruit nor the highest reach of the reflections of human reason. On the contrary, it is the expression, together with its particular characteristics, of a totally free gift: it stirs up and disturbs ideas and requires that it be accepted as a declaration of love.” Only on the basis of an ontology of love can gift be understood Because love, and not pure reason, is the basic structure of being, the failure of human reason to achieve its infinite desires is not negative but positive. Thus we do not need to negate reason in order to believe, but rather supplement and intensify it. We receive knowledge as a gift. To forget the necessity of gift, or to bracket it out as philosophically problematic, is equivalent to forgetting that our very being only comes through the laborious gift of another. Of course, gift’s necessity does not entail reception. I can reject the gift of being. Gift, another name for the Holy Spirit, is the fullness of being, the perfection that surrounds us with an inevitable desire for truth, goodness, and beauty. It illumines our lives.

Page 158-159.

Towards an Anabaptist Marian Theology

Theological feminists find much in the character of Mary, specifically within the magnificant. This, I believe, is quite right. This is also held by the majority of feminists that I have encountered.

These feminists, or at least the ones I like and have had fruitful conversations with, are wary of what I shall condense into the term: self-annihilation. Lets be honest, there is no way to get around the idea of obedience. Some feminists recoil at the idea, but personally, while I understand the logic, I do not believe that obedience is the real problem. Obedience can be a very good thing. It is a bad thing, however, to tell an abused woman to be obedient to her husband and send her back to him.

I confess, I have never wanted to be rid of obedience because the divine community is built on humility and bowing to one another in a healthy way. But I have been unsure how to voice another way while still meeting feminism’s legitimate concerns. In reading von Balthasar, I was confronted with obedience in a different sort of way, and more to the point, perhaps here is the beginnings of a legitimate obedience, although it requires some (or much, very much) outside help. So I couldn’t simply drop obedience for many reasons.

After a long time mulling, I think the true objection is that often obedience is seen with self-annihilation. This, this is not what Mary did. The incarnation to which she responded was not abuse, but gift. She chose participation in the work of God. Mary responded to the gift of the incarnation. Mary’s work was gift back to gift. It was not self-annihilation.

With Mary as an image of healthy discipleship, this Marian theology could make us all feminists in a certain way. I could certainly live with that.

This theology also means that anabaptist need a stronger theology of gift — grace and sacrament — which they/we have never been strong on in a multifaceted way. Should it look exactly like the Catholics? Of course not, however, that doesn’t mean that we should just end with the abstract notion of the community as grace.

Jesus, Gifts, and Christmas

It is a mistake to simply leave the incarnation to Christmas. It is likewise a mistake to leave our protests to the abuse of the Christ Mass by Fox News, Colorado Springs, and company, who raise support through raising fear over their bourgeois Christmas. Around Christmas and now, instead of hyping fears about relativism and pluralism (instigated by the ethnocentrists just mentioned and their theocapitalist equivalents), how about we do much work on grace (the pure-gift)?

And so I find the image below perfectly legitimate to post in May:

The image is from: buynothingchristmas.

The Strong No: Pax Christi v. Pax Americana

I firmly believe that at times, the Christian vocation is to say a very strong no. This can be seen as an “either/or” that so many theologians seek to avoid. Indeed it is often anathema: “You just did an either/or, not a both/and. You have ignored a truth that should be included!”

It should be recognized that whenever no is proclaimed, it is located in two spheres. It is first located within the grand yes to creation: creation is indeed good. In fact, it is very good. As Christians, we are in point of fact, incredibly strong materialists. The second sphere is that because the no to sin is located in the larger yes to creation, the no is an act of love. The no is inherently a call to justice and redemption — an act of the economy of grace first instituted by divine action. Thus the prophetic call, even those who carefully emphasize a radical discontinuity, is not committing an either/or. We should at the same time, however, be careful not to blunt the prophetic call. Instead the call must be sharp when it must, exactly because it does rest within the yes.

Thus we can recognize that the “peace” promised by the state, rooted in a flawed understanding of power — a self-serving, oppressive power, is over and against the peace of Christ. This is where we can call the state a simulacra of the ikon of God. We say no to such an understanding of power and therefore say no to the actions rooted in such power.

He is risen and the Roman soldiers, who represented the attempt by imperial power to keep Jesus in the tomb, were tossed about.

And so we join with Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton and Pax Christi:

And then as often, John Paul was especially aware of young people. He’s at the World Youth Day right now in Toronto where he really seems to be energized when he’s with young people — his concerns about them, what they will become. And so he asks the question, ‘Which voice will the young people of the 21st century choose to follow?’

A very important question. We come out of a century which was the most violent in all of human history. A new century, a new millennium is upon us; and which voice will the young people follow during this century? To put your faith in Jesus means choosing to believe what Jesus says, no matter how strange it may seem — and choosing to reject the claims of evil, no matter how sensible and attractive they may seem. Choosing to reject the claims of evil no matter how sensible and attractive — and often they can seem to be sensible, reasonable, attractive — for the way of Jesus, which might seem foolish, utopian, idealistic, all the words that people use about the Gospel. Which choice will I make? Which choice will you make? And to identify those choices clearly in the world in which we live — the reality of the world where we are right now.

I have a conviction that it’s a choice between what we’d like to call pax Americana, or the other choice, pax Christi.
On October 7, when President Bush announced the war strikes on the Taliban in al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan, he said, “We are a peaceful nation!” Then a few days later while speaking at the FBI headquarters, he declared, “This is the calling of United States — the most free nation in the world, a nation built on fundamental values that reject hate, reject violence, reject murderers, and rejects evil. He says we are a peaceful nation, and that’s what we stand for. He would call it, I’m sure, “peace America, or pax Americana.”

But to show you how wrong it is to think of this peaceful nation as following the way of pax Christi, I call to your attention to an article that appeared on the MSNBC.com website by Arundhati Roy. And she pointed out that since World War II, since 1945, this peaceful nation has in fact been at war and bombed China, 1945 to ‘46, 1950 to 1953; Korea, 1950, 1953; Guatemala, 1954 — and for four decades we supported a cruel, low-intensity warfare there, killing 200,000 people; Indonesia, 1958; Cuba, 1959 and ‘60; Zaire, 1964; Peru, 1965; Laos, 1964 up to 1973; Vietnam, 1961 to 1973; Cambodia, 1969 to 1970; Granada, 1983; Libya, 1986; El Salvador, during all of the 1980s, again low intensity warfare killing tens-of-thousands of people; Nicaragua, the 1980s; Panama, 1989; Iraq, 1991, and still going on; Bosnia, 1995; Sudan, 1998; Yugoslavia, 1999. And now she says, we can add Afghanistan to that list.

Pax Americana: bombing, killing, wherever we decide. As Madeline Albright put it, “We are America. We are the indispensable nation. If we have to use force, it’s because we see further than anybody else.”

But pax Americana gets even worse when we begin to look at what is happening in the reality of the world in which we live; when we look at it even more closely. Many of us probably think that our present foreign policy — the war in Afghanistan, the war against the al-Qaeda, and the unending war that the President says we’re involved in — that this foreign policy is a result of September 11.

… The aim, simply put, was to establish unilateral control of the world. Such an aim would involve — and these are the kinds of words they use in the report — smashing all possible enemy threats — even before those threats become real. You may have heard we now have a pre-emptive military policy. We will attack another country whenever we decide that they are about to attack us, whether we have any proof or not, but we have a pre-emptive defense policy.

… [but] we could be the ones that would lead our Church and our nation away from pax Americana and to pax Christi, the only peace that really is peace. (15 seconds of applause).

I thank you for that response, and I leave you now with some very sober words, that will perhaps linger in our consciousness and help to continue to motivate us. The words were written, again by that Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, who is leading the way of India protesting against their nuclear weapons development. And at the end of the article which she writes deploring and protesting these weapons, she says this:

“The nuclear bomb is the most anti-democratic, anti-national, anti-human, outright evil thing that human kind has ever made.” and then she says, “If you are religious, believe in God, then remember, this is our challenge to God.” It is worded quite simply: “We, we, God’s creatures, have the power to destroy everything You have created.”

A very evil challenge that a religious person would make to God. It’s blasphemy:

“We can destroy everything You, God, have made — the God who made everything out of love, we can destroy out of our hate.”

But then she goes on to say, “If you’re not religious, then look at it this way: This world of ours is 4,600 million years old. It could end in an afternoon.”

Let that thought: if you are religious, that we do not want to offend God with that blasphemy. Or, if your faith doesn’t move you, the thought that we can destroy our world in an afternoon, let that move us to try with all that we can bring to it to reject pax Americana and to embrace pax Christi. Thank you.

Maintain the Humanity in Humans or Become the Nazi

One may find the trailer below disturbing.

First thought: Dehumanizing is exactly what the Nazis did. I hope for the best in this movie, that it will shed light on what we should not do: fall into the equally violent and sinful way of seeing people as animals to be scalped. And for those readers who are protesting, this criticism is nothing new. However, Tarantino has given me little in the past to hope that such a criticism will be written into the movie. Although, perhaps the title is an indication to the contrary, or perhaps not. After all, Tarantino is not beyond the Norse understanding of the hero — the hero seeks to transcend death by doing great deeds so as to be remembered in lore.

Death calls out death. It is toxic and creeps into us all. This the trailer shows so thoroughly. How could we respond differently than a murderous cycle where all humanity is lost? Thank God for the interruption of grace.

In other movie news, Watchmen did alright in my book. Even if the Christology in it was just as terrible as the Dark Knight.

Von Balthasar Synthesizing Grace, Covenant, and the Transcendent God

The great qualities of God, which make his holy sublimity concrete for man, seem at first glance almost to obliterate his utter otherness, for all are taken from the world of human relationships (where, admittedly, they always had a religious reference), and have taken on a unique character only when they are attributed to the absolute subject. But not for a moment is it forgotten who is the object of the affirmation: i.e., the one who as the only Lord stands alone over against all other beings, which are his creatures and servants. God’s remoteness does not actually lie in the fact that he is unknown, so much as in the incomprehensible fact that he, the only one (Is 43.10-12), who is absolutely free and sovereign, deigns to communicate himself to the others, to the many, permitting them to enter the sphere of his uniqueness and holiness. This grace is an unheard-of demand made of the creature, something that snatches it from its own dwelling in the land of servitude into a ‘land’ that belongs to God, and all the creature’s concepts are transformed thereby: a ray of God’s glory touches them all, and this makes them more beautiful, but also heavier. Everything is now measure against the standard of divine rightness, of this ethical ‘justice‘ and his aesthetic ‘justesse‘. In God’s covenant, grace and demand are inseparably locked into one another.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics: VI: Theology: The Old Covenant, 177.

Metz on Grace

Living differently: this was indeed always a characteristic mark of Christians. And when Christians truly believe in grace, in its free and liberating presence, in its intimate connection with our senses, then it must also mean that in society as well they do not just live under the anonymous constraints of the issues, but under the “constraint” of grace. But grace signifies here the ability to interrupt, to stop; it means not simply having to go on living as before. Grace is the capacity, manifested at last in the political dimension also, not to see ourselves and evaluate ourselves with our own eyes, but with the eyes of our victims, out of which, in the end – the Lord himself impressed this on us with unmistakable clarity – he himself looks upon us.

Metz, The Emergent Church, 61.

Suspicion of the State and the Divine Economy of Grace

Sadly, I again feel justified in my suspicion of the state. And not only by way of history and political theory. Just recently I’ve come across the following.

From the Republicans:

I’ll just go ahead and say it: God damn the Republicans, and much of the Republican structure, who would turn divinely-inspired prophetic speech into a political tool by calling it hate speech. You parasitic fools.

However, Democrats, you will probably have a lot of explaining to do, if this article, This Is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama’s White House, is even half true about the future:

Amid the euphoria over Obama’s election and the end of the Bush era, it is critical to recall what 1990s U.S. foreign policy actually looked like. Bill Clinton’s boiled down to a one-two punch from the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of U.S. militarism. Clinton took office and almost immediately bombed Iraq (ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged plot by Saddam Hussein to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush). He presided over a ruthless regime of economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and under the guise of the so-called No-Fly Zones in northern and southern Iraq, authorized the longest sustained U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam.

Under Clinton, Yugoslavia was bombed and dismantled as part of what Noam Chomsky described as the “New Military Humanism.” Sudan and Afghanistan were attacked, Haiti was destabilized and “free trade” deals like the North America Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade radically escalated the spread of corporate-dominated globalization that hurt U.S. workers and devastated developing countries. Clinton accelerated the militarization of the so-called War on Drugs in Central and Latin America and supported privatization of U.S. military operations, giving lucrative contracts to Halliburton and other war contractors. Meanwhile, U.S. weapons sales to countries like Turkey and Indonesia aided genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the East Timorese.

The prospect of Obama’s foreign policy being, at least in part, an extension of the Clinton Doctrine is real. Even more disturbing, several of the individuals at the center of Obama’s transition and emerging foreign policy teams were top players in creating and implementing foreign policies that would pave the way for projects eventually carried out under the Bush/Cheney administration. With their assistance, Obama has already charted out several hawkish stances.

Although unassuming, Jesus of Nazareth as the incarnation of the divine and human stories was an interruption from the beginning. The embodiment of divine grace, a relational act that always calls others toward the divine economy of reconciliation, had to enter into the world in some fashion. In fact, there could be no other way than interruption. With the truth of God encountering a broken world that acted as simulacra of divine politics and disconnected from its telos, and therefore in need of healing, God’s grace interrupted the structures of the world. The true politics of God could not but show self-reliant, human politics for the farce they are. Quite simply, the grace of God was not, nor is now, the economy of the world; the story of God did not live as human in the category of bargain, but that of radical grace and reconciliation.

We cry for true peace.

Chauvet, Grace, and the Incarnation

I’m working on my incarnation paper, due all too soon. Below is an excerpt. If anyone has a word about the following content (yeah, I know, I’ll get an editor soon), I would be interested. Especially the last sentence.

The world, humanity, and history, must be reconciled. But what method for reconciliation would God incarnate use? Grace and interruption was and is the method.

Grace is characterized by an over-flowing, or beyond what is necessary. As Louis-Marie Chauvet put it: “grace is essentially that which cannot be calculated and cannot be stocked.” Grace is not achieved in bargain, but through “super-abundance.” Indeed there is a sense of joy at providing more than is necessary, further than any need may go. With grace understood as such, the method of grace speaks partly to the measure of the incarnational action and life, that the incarnation is immeasurable. This over-abundance indicates that grace supersedes, or meets and surpasses a need, but through a process from one to another that is not understood through an economy of bargain.

Thus Chauvet touches on the other half to grace – a gift freely given from someone not ourself. Grace, rightly understood, is gift. But Chauvet does not simply stop with gift, possibly extended without hope for response; rather, for gift to be gratuitous, it must be dialogical: “the gratuitousness of the gift carries the obligation of the return-gift of a response.” Grace, the process of extending graciousness and waiting for reply to complete the “whole circuit,” is not safe, but includes exposure to rejection. The incarnation then was the literal embodiment of divine gratuitousness and graciousness open to humanity; a different kind of messiah than expected, Jesus of Nazareth was divine hesed within humanity seeking reciprocation. Thus, the incarnation was grace, or, by another name, a eucharistic self-giving that affirmed existence, but called for the human story to participate in reconciliation.

The quotes are from Symbol and Sacrament, pages 108 and 109.

The Christian Life: The Comedy of Death (Pt. 2)

In the past two posts, “Moving Towards the Comedy of Death” and “The Christian Life: The Comedy of Death (Pt. 1)“, I’ve been putting forward something titled “The comedy of death.”

The first post was on scientific soteriology and the inability for science to truly deal with death. Indeed, science is more than impotent, but rather, at times hurries death along farther than we could on our own, sending millions to the reaper. Humanity’s greatest achievements are equally destructive and not actually salvific. The Christian answer is not to run from death, but to face it and live well together, participating in the redemptive work of God.

The second post functions like a case study of sorts, mentioning three movies based on grace — being given what you need from an estranged family member, rather than getting what you want. These movies function as a way to imagine justice and solidarity at work while undergoing unusual, stressful circumstances, with the theme of death.

Consider this last one, yet another different view of the Christian life functioning redemptively in the face of death, but this time summed up in the phrase, “Memento mori“: Remember (you too are) mortal.

In Republican Rome, conquering commanders coming back from a victory against a new people group could maybe get a triumph — a grand parade where the commander is literally is dressed up like a god, decked out in red and the recipient of the city’s adulation. Now, tradition says that in the moment of such praise, the commander was reminded of his mortality by a slave with the words: Memento mori. Such a job is the height of prophecy, yes? I would pay money to be given the time and space, during his Roman triumph, er, I mean, his Inaugural Address, to proclaim to the next president: Memento mori. Remember you are but dust! Remember your death!

This is a Christianity that is not necessarily at the service of the state — as a Bible used to swear in an office holder — but rather this is the work of God, making clear to the people of the world that they are not gods. This is comparable to the Barthian “Nein!” This is the loud refusal to confuse the state’s justice with true justice and true peace.

This comedy of death is first a liberation through the acceptance of our limits. This isn’t liberation from death, but the acknowledgment of our finitude — our status as creature and not creator — and to face death throughout our life. Instead of cheapening or avoiding death and tragedy, this takes evil seriously. The comedy of death, in many ways, is the Christian stabilizing weakness (strength) for our world — seeking justice/redemption and peace — in the face of frustrating, trying, bizarre, or farcical circumstances. The way this often plays out in a crazy world of violence, coercion, and commodification, we peaceably seek a scandalous redemption. After all, in a crazy world, the actions that are in step with the world are crazy as well. Part of the nature of the peaceable scandal is that it doesn’t fit into crazy and looks to the masses like foolishness.

The Christian life is death because the grim is always at our door, and comedy because God’s work culminates in redemption where the scripture “Death where is your sting?” is fulfilled, as death, the last enemy, is addressed for the last time.

The Christian Life: The Comedy of Death (Pt. 1)

This post is the continuation of the previous post, Moving Towards the Comedy of Death.

The “dark” comedy. It may be my favorite film genre, partly ’cause I like the brand of humor — which is generally irony and understatements in the face of frustrating, trying, bizarre, or farcical circumstances — but mostly because the good “dark” comedies are the gospel parables of our time. Simply, they’re about the redemption of broken relationships.

I have in mind three great “dark” comedies, The Royal Tenenbaums, Little Miss Sunshine, and Death at a Funeral. These extend beyond the wikipedia definition for a dark comedy, which in my opinion (although I am no professional film critic) is lacking: “a sub-genre of comedy and satire where topics and events that are usually regarded as taboo (such as death, rape, or domestic violence) are treated in a satirical or humorous manner…. usually includes an element of irony, or even fatalism.” Instead, I find that a more adequate definition of the wonderful movies listed above centers around the following: an odd assortment of diverse and well crafted characters who strive for what they want but do not receive it. Instead, in the end the characters get what they need.

Interestingly, each of the three movies relies on not the nuclear family, but an extended family. Halden has touched on the nuclear family, and I am quite sympathetic to his view, but would like to build upon it a little. Importantly, the only way redemption could exist in the movies above is through extended family interaction. Uncles need their nieces and nephews, grandparents need their grandchildren, and in-laws or future in-laws need the family they married or will marry into. Such notions of interaction and redemption ought to call into question how we exist today as family units. How much redemptive work are we missing in our family alone, much less the church? That gay uncle you have shunned? He is important, and if the movies are true, he is fundamental to any true fulfillment/redemption in the family.

Its not about grabbing what you want, its about being told and given what you need. Theology calls this grace. And in theory, the justice that the church works towards, the redemption of people and their broken relationships, is the climax. Peace is the aftermath, the dénouement; it is after the narrative resolution where peace lives between people and where almost, if not literally, the lion lays down with the lamb and swords are beaten into plowshares, or where in the movie, familial enemies hug and so begins the flowering of a previously damned relationship. This is the Christian life. In the face of death or farce, we peaceably seek a scandalous redemption.

(As for this last image, the family was arrested together because they showed real solidarity with Oliver.)

The Problematic Theology of Blessing

“Count your blessings.” “America is so blessed.” “God bless the United States.”

I think blessings are a curious thing, for often, the receiver proclaims what blessings are. It is almost as if blessings are self naming from the perspective of the receiver, and that is the way they’ll always be. That said, it does seem that blessings are something we receive. In fact, as Christians, blessings would best be understood in terms of Grace. However, in order to do this, one must realize what Grace is and where it comes from.

It seems when people on the 4th say count your blessings, they’re talking about what America has gathered — the freedom to achieve the American dream of wealth and security and what people have already in terms of wealth and security. This is not necessarily God’s doing, but rather, America’s civil religion draped in its own theological language.

The method at which we get our blessings or receive Grace speaks to whom it comes from. Jesus died instead of killed others. The kingdom of God didn’t, nor does now, function as a colonial power like Rome. Therefore, on days like today, we ought to interrogate which blessings are really from God and which ones have been achieved through force and theft.

On Capitalism, Social Status, Hospitality, and Hamlet

The focus on hospitality in America today is a positive focus on grace and therefore a subversion of capitalism. No longer are people buying commodified comfort, but instead, people give gifts to those people in need. No artificial barrier like class, race, sex, etc. should have any limit on grace, for it is for all or it isn’t grace at all.

Hamlet speaks this well, and in fact, I can see the words of Hamlet, speaking of the visiting players, being the words of Jesus:

HAMLET
‘Tis well: I’ll have thee speak out the rest soon.
Good my lord, will you see the players well
bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used; for
they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the
time: after your death you were better have a bad
epitaph than their ill report while you live.

LORD POLONIUS
My lord, I will use them according to their desert.

HAMLET
God’s bodykins, man, much better: use every man
after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?
Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less
they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.
Take them in.

Hamlet Act II, Scene II

The Politics of Preschool

This video is just too good not to post. It is excellent.

I find most interesting (other than the fact that this story starts in a thanksgiving celebration) the mention at the end about narrative, creating a narrative, and then telling this hurting boy that this is simply the way the world works, so “get used to it.” In such a stark reality that the video so eloquently portrays, gifting (grace) is a radical reality, but has apparently no proper place in governmental politics. Juxtaposing the divine economy of grace and the economy of governmental politics begins to help the Christian understand what political theology really is; the two are very different at the most fundamental level. Such a dramatic category distinction is the beginning of the re-politicizing of American Christianity.