Money as Its Own Faith, We Call this Mammon

Theologians say this over and over, but its the atheist that gets a hearing. Still, Simon Critchley is right:

In other words, the legitimacy of money is based on a sovereign act, or a sovereign guarantee that the money is good, that it is not counterfeit. Money has a promissory structure, with a strangely circular logic: money promises that the money is good. The acceptance of the promise is the approval of a specific monetary ethos. We all agree that the money is worth — in the best of circumstances — more than the paper on which it is printed. To buy and sell in the U.S. dollar, or any other currency, is to trust that each bill is making a promise that it can keep.

This ethos, this circular money-promising-that-the-money-is-good, is underwritten by sovereign power. It is worth recalling that gold coins called “sovereigns” were first minted in England under Henry VII in 1489 and production continues to this day. It is essential that we believe in this power, that the sovereign power of the bank inspires belief, that the “Fed has cred,” as it were. Credit can only operate on the basis of credence and credibility, of an act of fidelity and faith (fides), of con-fid-ence. As historians of language have shown, there is a strong etymological link between ideas of belief, faith and forms of economic exchange. The goddess Fides or trust was sometimes depicted on the verso of Roman coins. “In Fed We Trust,” as the title of David Wessel’s new book has it.

There is a theological core to money based on an act of faith, of belief. One can even speak of a sort of monetary civil religion or currency patriotism. This is particularly evident in attitudes in the U.S. to the dollar, particularly to the sheer material quality of the bill. It can also be found in the U.K.’s opposition to the Euro and to the strange cultural need for money marked with the Queen’s head, underwritten by the power of the sovereign, who is also — lest one forget — the head of the established church.

… To push this a little further, we might say that in the seemingly godless world of global finance capitalism, money is the only thing in which we really must have faith. Money is the one, true God in which we all believe. It is this faith that we celebrate in our desire for commodities, in the kind of fetishistic control that they seem to have over us. It’s not so much that we revere the things that money can buy. Rather, we venerate the money that enables us to buy those things. In the alluring display of shiny brands that cover the marketplace, it is not so much branded objects that we desire, but rather those objects insofar as they incarnate a quantifiable sum of money.

To wear a brand is to display the money that was able to buy it. With us, it is not so much that the money-changers have desecrated the temple, but that the only temples where we can worship are places where money changes hands in some perverse parody of a religious service. This is the strange mass that we celebrate in the cathedral-like malls that litter the land.

It is an understandable misunderstanding of capitalism to declare that it is a materialism that consists of a voracious desire for things. I would argue that we love the money that enables us to buy those things for it reaffirms our faith and restores the only theological basis we have for our trust in the world. Money is our metaphysics. In that God we trust. And when trust breaks down, as it has done so dramatically in the last year, then people experience something close to a crisis of faith.

Faith, Justice, and the Economic Crisis

I’ve mentioned a couple of times a class called “Christianity and the U.S. Crisis” back at my old stomping grounds of Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

This tendency towards immediately dealing with the problems at hand is characteristically Union. But what has always concerned me is, even at a place with a tradition like Union, how can we get our voice heard?

Well, if you haven’t noticed, Union has a relationship of sorts with Bill Moyers. If I’m not mistaken, he attends Riverside Church, which is right next to Union, and is a church in a historically special relationship with Union as well. Judith and Bill Moyers were also awarded the Union medal a few years ago. James Cone, months before the Rev. Wright fiasco, was interviewed on the Journal. And when I was at Union, I saw Moyers visiting a few times.

Thankfully this special relationship continues. On Moyers’ Journal this coming Friday, the interview of Cornel West, Serene Jones, and Gary Dorrien, centered around their class, will be aired. You can see the preview here.

From Union’s website:

The professors presented strong positive critique of the Obama administration’s current bailout and restructuring plan, and called for real alternatives to the crumbling “religion of the market.”

“This is a society that has stoked and celebrated greed virtually to the point of self-destruction,” says Dorrien. “We can’t just go on saying, ‘Well, if we can just patch this thing up and get back to where we were,’ that things will be all right. And none of us believe that, so we also have to talk about what was wrong with the system to begin with, that had outcomes that you can’t really justify morally.”

Who are these three?

Cornel West should need no introduction.

Serene Jones has been president of Union for the past year. I hear she is an interesting feminist and a Calvin scholar. From seeing her interview lecture for the presidental office, she seems well positioned to lead Union and a good theologian in her own right.

Gary Dorrien was my advisor, but more importantly(!) I’ve heard from theologians across the spectrum that he is the one who could save liberal theology in America. And you know what? I believe them.

The point of all this? Here is a brief platform for strong and insightful (faith and) theology to be heard. Will the people in power hear it? Oh, I hope so, but even if they don’t, I do have faith in the ability of the local community to affect change around them, despite or in spite of policies in Washington. So watch it.

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.

Badiou interviewed on the BBC

Alain Badiou on the economic crisis:

Despite the problems inherent to someone taking theology into their project (and possibly warping theology for their own purposes), I still find Badiou a very interesting man. Although I think I’m more sympathetic to Agamben.

I do wish we had a media like the BBC seen here in the video. At least he seems to know what he is talking about and actually done some reading of his interviewer’s works.

H/T: Ry

Dorothy Day on Riches and Poverty

Last month there was a sensational story in all the New York papers, and probably reprinted all over the country, about two brothers, Langley and Homer Cohyer, who were misers and accumulators and who met with a horrible end. ON receipt of a telephone call, police broke into a house on upper Fifth Avenue in the Harlem section, a four story house which in this housing shortage could have been converted into homes for four families. They found Homer, who had been blind and helpless, dead from starvation. His brother had disappeared. The house was so filled with junk that Langley had had to tunnel his way through to go in and out of the house to make their few purchases. In fear of intrusion, he made booby traps with hundreds of pounds of old iron ready to fall on whoever threatened their privacy. One of these booby traps caught Langley who smothered to death within a few feet of his blind brother, who on account of the junk, could not reach either his brother or the window to call for help.

He slowly starved to death, while listening to the rats feeding on the corpse of Langley a few feet away.

This story seems to me, a vision of hell, a very literal and appalling sample of the hell that awaits the acquisitive, the greedy, the accumulators, the seekers after markets, wealth, power, prestige, exclusiveness, empire, dominion, of everything opposed to the common good. Here were two old men who epitomized to the nth degree suspicion and hatred of their fellows, and a desire to gather together to themselves everything they could lay their hands on. “They were worth $100,000″ the newspapers reported. What a strange use of words! They spent little. Among the things they collected were six grand pianos, dismantled cars, babies’ cribs.

Peter, on the other hand, has accumulated nothing in his life. He has nothing but the suit on his back, the shoes on his feet. He has lived on Bowerys and Skid Roads all his life, not believing that his dignity needed to be maintained by residence at a decent address, or by stopping at a good hotel. To reach one’s fellows by the practice of the works of mercy, AT A PERSONAL SACRIFICE — this meant embracing voluntary poverty. Voluntary poverty as a means to an end, to publish a paper, to put out leaflets, to live on the land, to sever one’s fellows. He has lived these ideas.

By Dorothy Day, “A Letter to Our Readers at the Beginning of our Fifteenth Year” The Catholic Worker (May 1947): 1-3), found in American Catholic Religious Thought: The Shaping of a Theological and Social Tradition, edited by Patrick Carey, 414-415.

On the Economic Crisis from a Social Ethicist

I mentioned a while back a class open to the public at Union Theological Seminary that addressed the current economic social crisis. My alma mater has made the lectures available for download online from iTunes U.

Just recently, Gary Dorrien gave a great lecture as part of the class. While a very strong theologian and ethicist, Dorrien is also impressively aware of history, the economy, politics, and a number of other disciplines. I was very impressed by him when I was at Union. In my estimation, if theology is rightly going to work towards justice and talk about the economic crisis, Dorrien must play large in the discussion. So give him a listen.

Explanation of the Crisis:

Economic Democracy as the Solution:

Bonhoeffer, Liberation Theology, and Neoliberalism

Here a central difference with liberation theology is revealed. Bonhoeffer is blind to the idolatry under which he is about to be executed because it falls within the realm of political ideology and so lies outside theology’s traditional areas of concern. Liberation theology, instead, takes Bonhoeffer’s critique of religion a step further to the critique of idolatry in the world; it thus does not speak of an irreligious world but of idolatries found in the world that are masked by an understanding of modernity as secular. A by now classic example of the unmasking of idolatry within a supposedly secular discourse is the liberationist critique of neoliberalism best articulated by Jung Mo Sung. Neoliberalism has its own vision of paradise; Francis Fukuyama stresses that technological developments make possible the unlimited accumulation of wealth and thus the satisfaction of ever more desires; neoliberalism demands faith; for Milton Friedman critics of the market lack faith in market liberty; neoliberalism has its own version of original sin; for Friederich Hayek the greatest of economic sins is the pretension of knowledge that lies behind market intervention, the belief that government knows how to allocate resources better than the free market; neoliberalism demands sacrifice; insofar as the market is the one and only path toward the development of human kind then the suffering of those excluded from the market are but the necessary sacrifices required for the progress of humanity as a whole. Neoliberalism is theology disguised as social science.

From Ivan Petrella’s Beyond Liberation Theology: A Polemic, 127. So far this book has proven rather interesting.

I also recommend another book of Petrella’s, The Future of Liberation Theology: An Argument and Manifesto.

Paul VI on Economics

58. In other words, the rule of free trade, taken by itself, is no longer able to govern international relations. Its advantages are certainly evident when the parties involved are not affected by any excessive inequalities of economic power: it is an incentive to progress and a reward for effort. That is why industrially developed countries see in it a law of justice. But the situation is no longer the same when economic conditions differ too widely from country to country: prices which are “freely” set in the market can produce unfair results. One must recognize that it is the fundamental principle of liberalism, as the rule for commercial exchange, which is questioned here.

59. The teaching of Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum is always valid: if the positions of the contracting parties are too unequal, the consent of the parties does not suffice to guarantee the justice of their contract, and the rule of free agreement remains subservient to the demands of the natural law. What was true of the just wage for the individual is also true of international contracts: an economy of exchange can no longer be based solely on the law of free competition, a law which, in its turn, too often creates an economic dictatorship. Freedom of trade is fair only if it is subject to the demands of social justice.

Popularum Progression

Its about more than being relevant, how do we get heard?

In light of the housing market crash, Greenspan said that his model for the world was flawed in front of a congressional inquiry.

It seems that now there is room for theology to be heard (or at least there were, a very brief period) — always saying that humans have a tendency towards self-collapse.

But also importantly, America seems to be in the midst of rethinking, or more likely, reconstructing a broken system into another broken system. To who and what should theology say? But also, how on earth do we get heard? I’m pretty sure economists don’t give a damn about what theologians say.

Chauvet on the Language of Market and Gift

But these two poles in dialectic tension belong to two different levels of exchange. The logic of the marketplace (under the form of barter or money) is that of value; it belongs to the regime of need which seeks to satisfy itself immediately through the possession of objects. The logic of symbolic exchange is of another order. For what is being exchanged through yams, shells, or spears, as through a rose of a book offered as gifts in our own culture, is more and other than what they are worth on the open market or what they may be useful for. It is more and other than what the objects are in themselves. One is here outside or beyond the regime of usefulness and immediacy. Rather, the principle which rules here is one of super-abundance. The true objects being exchanged are the subjects themselves.

… Therefore, theologically, grace requires not only this initial gratuitousness on which everything else depends but also on the graciousness of the whole circuit, and especially of the return-gift. This graciousness qualifies the return-gift as beyond-price, without calculation — in short, as a response of love. Even the return-gift of our human response thus belongs to the theoligcally Christian concept of “grace.”

… Grace must be treated as something outside the boundaries of value, according to the symbolic mode of communication, and in the first place communication of the word. Rather than being represented as an object-value that one would “refine” through analogy, the “treasure” is really not separable from the symbolic labor by which the subject itself bears fruit by becoming a believer.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 106, 108, 109.

The Interruptive Jesus: “Who do you say I am?”

A Christian community that situates itself in the world, does so, whether it explicitly acknowledges it or not, through a Christology. The experience of Jesus – in both ontology and praxis – remembered by the community, forms the foundation for an ecclesial politic. To begin to engage, say, torture, we must look back at whom Jesus was. Thus implications for change upon American Christians are vast, because Jesus was and is fundamentally interruptive. Therefore, the community of faith that understands itself primarily around the Christ should likewise understand itself as interruptive.

Theologically, we are bound to a tragic past and we also have a tragic future as well. Save for the interruption of God, we live in evil and its consequences, tragedy. But such an idea does not play well in the state that says it is the agent of peace or the market that claims a monopoly on lifestyle. The state could not be the agent of peace if it did not claim the ability to achieve it, which necessitates power and the moral will to create this “peace.” Likewise the market could not claim the ability to achieve happiness if it could not force humanity into a structure that gains wealth for some. Optimism, of a Deus ex Machina nature – our self-made god by our constructed machine (i.e. social structure, technology, etc.), is a necessity for the state and the market: We will intervene and resurrect ourselves when it seems bleak. Faith in the American experiment is a must, or the false stories die and torture loses its foundation.

The remembrance of 9/11, as remembered by the state and the market, is inherently an American memory and not a Christian memory. Allowing our memory to be altered by the matrix of culture’s identity leads into a vindictive Christology by the Rome of our time, rather than allowing the challenge of Jesus – the scandal of Jesus’ life – to wash over the body of Christ. Because “the image of Jesus…allows us to encounter him as the revelation of God’s open narrative,” as opposed to the closed narrative of the state and market who seek to maintain power and control, quite simply, Jesus, and not the state or market, “can be described as God’s interrupter.”1

The incarnation was an interruption. It validated creation and yet opposed commodities. God came as a human, an impoverished human, and not a dollar sign. Jesus was not to be bought and sold, nor a price tag put on him – it was an evil act that sold him for thirty pieces of silver. Jesus was also born not into Roman citizenship or among the emperor’s family, but into a “lowly” status. Jesus was not a commodity or human royalty, but God interrupting economic anthropologies with God’s own economy of grace.

The preaching of the basileia was an interruption of the Emperor’s rule, in both political and economic forms. The very words of Jesus interrupted the language and stories of the status quo – the basileia had come.2 Jesus accompanied his words with actions, equally interruptive actions as the rule of God.3 To name some praxis: there were healings, caring for the poor, miracles, and upsetting the established economic balance in the temple: “Jesus not only aroused the amazement of the bystanders, but at the same time he summoned the forces behind the hegemonic narratives against him in their defense.”4

The cross was an interruption – the death of God was and is a scandal. The idea that God would be the tortured and not the torturer, the criminal and not the emperor, and the one who died instead of lived on, was a scandal of the highest magnitude. “A crucified messiah, son of God or God must have seemed a contradiction in terms to anyone…and it will certainly have been thought offensive and foolish.”5 Quite simply, Jesus suffered; Jesus was tortured and executed in political terms at the low social level of a slave and by Jesus’ own admission, forgotten.6 The connection then of the cross, and the torture associated with it, to the oppressor yesterday and today is not a comfortable connection. “[T]he earliest Christian message of the crucified messiah demonstrated the ‘solidarity’ of the love of God with the unspeakable suffering of those who were tortured and put to death by human cruelty.”7 The cross calls us to the margins, where the people are tortured, and not to stay where we are as complicit with the torturer. This interrupts our entire life and lifestyle.

The resurrection was an interruption. The resurrection made clear that no oppressor will win forever and death lost its sting. For the Romans, and by implication, America today, “the suffering of a god soon had to be shown to be mere simulation, rapidly followed by punishment for those humans who had been so wicked to cause it.” Indeed, the cross still ought to be a scandal that informs the body of Christ about those who suffer in society today – the cross was not followed by a war, but a resurrection and hope with solidarity. The resurrection pre-pictured the parousia and added an extra dimension of eschatological hope in the basileia, combined with the suffering of Jesus.

Christian suffering and hope are intertwined and together constitute the climax of Christian interruption, while the state’s continued torture shows the stark contrast between Jesus and the state.9 9/11 Christology leads to blindness, a subsumed racism, pride, (at least) partially undeserved wealth, and oppression – a bourgeois Christianity comfortable in its sloth. Opposite, Jesus forms a communal body that seeks to speak of God’s salvation in the world. “For Christians, professing Christ is then also the interruption par excellence of history.”10

_______________
1. Lieven Boeve, Interrupting Tradition: An Essay on Christian Faith in a Postmodern Context, (Dudley, MA: Peeters Press, 2003), 145.
2. Ibid., 121-124, 127-131.
3. Ibid., 124-127.
4. Ibid., 126-127.
5. Martin Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 10.
6. Ibid., 46, 51.
7. Ibid., 88. Also see, “Jesus, the memoria passionis, mortis et resurrectionis Jesu Christi both attest to God’s solidarity with all victims of suffering and oppression and assures the final, still unrealized deliverance of the victims. Christians thereby read history not in affirmation of conquest but in hope for the conquered.” Bruce Morrill, Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory: Political and Liturgical Theology in Dialogue (Collegville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 2000), 36.
8. Hengel, 15.
9. Anthony Kelly, Eschatology and Hope (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2006), 88.
10. Lieven Boeve, God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of Upheaval (New York: Continuum, 2007), 47.

Imagining a Theopolitical Response

I watched Romero today.

It got me thinking, again, on how Romero responded and how we might respond to our circumstances. I imagine something that I call liberative action-speak rooted in the subversive communal-existence of the church.

In today’s crises, the combination of war by the state and economic oppression by Wall Street, we need an Oscar Romero. We need someone who would not stop proclaiming the Christ who saves – the Christ, who incarnated in the Church, stands against the violence of the state and the coercion of the market in a stand-fast love (hesed).

We need another Martin Luther King Jr. who, as an ordained minister, died for both civil rights (or theologically, human dignity) and condemned the war in Vietnam before it was fashionable to do so. In fact, it is easily argued that it wasn’t civil rights that ultimately led to his death, but the standing against evils that America perpetrated; once the “north” saw MLK Jr. as a threat to the powerful in America (not that visible racism isn’t a real, violent power), he was a marked man.

We need a loud prophetic voice and the church to surround such a man or woman. We need an ecclesial movement that moves into the margins. I see the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and a number of other movements started by Christians, but these seem to lack a specific force behind them.

It is quite plain to me that the state forces the stripping of the prophetic tradition in black theology, merely on the basis of electability; the economic forces attempt to absorb the criticizers; and the media, with their own poor understanding and latent racism (not to discount the racist tendencies of the state and market), will call those speaking truth in the church as the church, racist.

The freedom of God is never at the expense of someone else, while American freedom says that others must die. The freedom of God is the rejection of throwing people down. God’s freedom recognizes that the American wealth accumulated is by and large blood money – stolen at the cost of others’ lives and continues to mine people as if they were ore deposits.

This new Romero must stand up in today’s world – in America – and speak for both hurting Americans and those outside of America. While there are numerous domestic issues that desperately need to be addressed, there are equally a multitude of foreign issues as well. What is the common denominator? Xenophobia. The fear of strangers, and more specifically, that these strangers are a threat to future prosperity. Never mind that these economic “gifts” we have “received” are at the cost of other people.

Therefore the new Romero is an international person, with international concerns. No one is a stranger for the new Romero. While there might be people outside of one’s community, an “other” if you will, they are no stranger, nor treated as a stranger. The new Romero is hospitable in a “radical” way, a subversive way that says creation matters first and foremost – the guiding hermeneutic for living in the world is how we treat other humans. This new Romero captures the attention of many people, while he or she regularly condemns the crises at hand. However, this new Romero, as part of the church, follows in the footsteps of Christ that lead to ruin. The church may find itself in “ruin.” It will find itself in death. It will find itself in death.

Yet this folly or foolishness is the cross, with the trust that the body of Christ will never really die forever. Our political act is to walk forward and to not expect safety, for no disciple is greater than the master. Our freedom in God is to die and know that God will redeem despite of the evil done.

We need a new Romero. Perhaps Christians in America – maybe even the church as a whole – will collectively be this Romero and answer its call. I pray it does. For what other hope do victims have?

Your Bitter Hilarity for the Day

From the BBC:

Blair to teach in the US on faith

Tony Blair will take part in a number of events around the Yale campus
Tony Blair is to teach students at Yale University in the US when he leads a seminar on faith and globalisation.

Now this is laughable. I can only presume that he’ll teach some neo-liberal economic theory, instead of faith contradicting or critiquing his economics. This stinks of politics, networking and academic one-upmanship. He is a “catch” because he won’t rock the boat, kinda like Bono, Jeffry Sachs, and the Gates Foundation. The economy won’t save the poor, it’ll have to be the community of faith at the margins. Wallstreet, 5th Avenue, and the Hamptons doesn’t give a damn about the homeless, other than keeping them out of their view.

Thesis Intro

R. O. Flyer wanted to see the thesis statement, but I just figured I’d post the introduction. So, whatcha think?

Introduction
Subverting Torture
This thesis first understands itself in relation to torture. While much of the thesis itself may not mention torture explicitly, and in fact could be used as the foundation for a political theology that engages more than just torture, the reader should not forget that each argumentative turn is made with torture in mind. The thesis functions in this unusual way because it attempts to strike at the fundamental logic of torture by the state, instead of getting lost in the mire of case studies that use the threat of immanent danger to justify manipulative violence. Quite simply, I am subverting the whole discussion as I ask again and again, “Why should we torture?”

While this thesis is chiefly arguing at levels deeper than the specific action of torture, it is both deconstructive and constructive at the same time. I identify and argue against some of the first assumptions, while proposing a re-oriented economy – a different ontology, epistemology, etc. – all first grounded in the identity of a savior who suffered and the community of faith that follows suit. Therefore, the second question driving the argument is, “What should we look like if we are to be a people who refuses torture?”

Consequently, the problem this thesis seeks to address is the American Christians’ quiet acceptance of torture. Despite how little this thesis may actually mention torture, implicit in each move is the subversion of a theology that allows for current American theology to be either apathetic towards or blasé about torture (since most Christians do not seem to explicitly support torture) or, even worse, candidly protorture.

Assumptions
This thesis has many presuppositions, but I shall touch on a few of the most important. I first assume that torture is morally and ethically wrong, and that torture should not be used. This is not a discussion on the justification of torture, for that is a whole other argument worthy of its own time; rather, this thesis understands torture as a form of violent conversion used by the state and, as such, is to be handled with considerable suspicion.

Secondly, I assume, as hinted above, that Christianity is a deeper association than the citizenship in a nation-state or one’s cultural-economic participation. Christianity is cosmically rooted. At the same time, Christians are defined by the culture they live in. Therefore the politics of the body of Christ is a complex mixture of the existential situation in the present and the rule of God. In the end, however, the basileia informs the space and time of the here and now, resituating one’s ontological understanding and praxis within the cultural milieu at hand.

I also assume that Christianity does not naturally merge well with the nation-state or bourgeois market. In fact, Christianity can function as an antagonistic and an interrupting movement: “Christians are bearers of the subversive, dangerous memory of the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”1 Therefore, Christianity critiques society through the church’s formative discipleship rooted in the remembrance of Jesus.

Lastly, I assume that political theology, as Johann Baptist Metz asserts, must begin with engaging history, because historical consciousness regularly reforms our current identity and thus allows for the continual, interrupting praxis of solidarity.2 As such, any engagement with or construction of a body politic must address the historical discussion of one’s cultural genesis. In this case, the historical myths America asks its citizens to believe, in contrast to the example of Jesus and the political implications of his life and message, are no longer uncritically assumed canonical stories, but instead are now subject to suspicion. Such critical interrogation will shed light on the negative and oppressive nature of the American story.

I also speak in explicit Christian categories. Quite simply, I champion a way of acting and being for Christians in America; I promote an imagining of the ecclesia in the confluence of subversive communal-being and visible, liberative action-speak. After reviewing what torture actually is, I address deep assumptions, such as memory and willful self-blindness, inherent in the American story that are counter to a Christological ecclesiology.

In light of the basic assumptions, the thesis will also cut both ways, against both theological liberals and conservatives, because I do not fault the Christian Right alone. Rather, I put forth William Cavanaugh’s critique of the nation-state and Eugene McCarraher’s Catholic/Marxist critique of capitalism, who both take aim at the theological complicity and structural compromise of American Christianity as a whole.

Thesis
As stated earlier, this thesis is a writing on torture. More specifically, it develops a political theology which subverts any current American theology that seems apathetic to torture, blasé about torture, or worst of all, resolutely pro-torture. To be more percise, 9/11, as a microcosm of the greater American story, is used by the privatizing nation-state as an identity-forming, eschatological event (a “Christological” event within a larger colonizing context) that supplants the life of Jesus and the cross and resurrection and works with the commodifying market to break down the Christian call and community of Christians in America. And, just as the Christian story of the cross does not end with death, so too the nation-state supplies a hope for a grand future. However, this future is an anthropocentric future, most vividly seen in Ronald Reagan’s hope, which was wrapped around a perverted, humanly controlled and realized salvation of fear, anger, and violence. The state’s story and justification for violence – to ensure “safety” (the status quo) in the face of fear – become the ruling meta-narrative.

The outcome is a breakdown and reversal of relationships and allegiance and the end result is a Christian public polity that is at least indifferent to violence by the state. Accordingly, the body of Christ is no longer forged by the memory and promise of the cross and resurrection, if it indeed continues to exist as a body. The solution to engaging American Christianity against torture, then, is to bring to bear Johann Metz’s idea of “dangerous memory” and an explication on the political implications of church movement – liturgical/sacramental theology. Metz reorients Christians to the identity-forming memory of the Christological life, and it is in liturgy that Christians solidify themselves and act out, resulting in a politically prophetic movement by the church.

This political theology is an attempt to re-narrate the church in America. Such an act will hopefully place the church on the margins, with the marginalized. Christendom of old will not be resurrected, nor will the modernist project continue to hold sway. Instead, both the theologically liberal and theologically conservative will be moved in the direction of a politically liberative praxis championed by a community formed through the remembrance of Christ.

________
1. Lieven Boeve, God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of Upheaval (New York: Continuum, 2007), 203.

2. Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, translated by J. Matthew Ashley (New York: Herder and Herder, 2007), 150-155.

How’s this for a thesis?

I’m curious as what the theoblogosphere thinks of my following MA thesis:

I plan on writing on torture, more specifically, developing a political theology that subverts current American theology that seems apathetic or blasé on torture (since most do not seem explicitly for torture, but even if that were not case, the political theology I envision would cut against those pro-torture as well).

To distill the thesis I envision, I summarize it as such: 9/11, as a microcosm, is used by the privatizing nation-state as an identity-forming, eschatological event (a Christological event within a larger colonizing context) that supplants the cross and resurrection, and works with the commodifying market to breakdown the Christian call and community of Christians in America. The state’s story and justification for violence to ensure “safety” (the status quo) in the face of fear becomes the ruling narrative. Because the Christian body is no longer forged by the memory and promise of the cross and resurrection, if it indeed continues to exist as a body, the outcome is a breakdown and reversal of allegiance and relationships and the end result is a Christian public that is at least indifferent to violence by the state. The solution to engaging American Christianity against torture then is to bring to bear the Metzian idea of “dangerous memory” and an explication on the political implications of church movement – liturgical/sacramental theology. Metz reorients Christians to the identity forming memory of the Christological life and it is in liturgy that Christians solidify themselves and act out resulting in a prophetic movement by the church that is inherently political.

Any ideas? Praise and glory is welcome, helpful criticism even more so.