flying.farther

I just opened the latest Newsweek issue to find an article interviewing N. T. Wright. Needless to say, I was a bit surprised. Happily surprised, but surprised, particularly because earlier in the magazine, it had this to say of Dr. Jeremiah Wright, “Talks to St. Moyers, seems reasonable if unrepentant. Now go away.”

Anyways, here is a bit of what is said about N. T. Wright’s latest book, Surprised by Hope:

It should come as no surprise that N. T. Wright believes that the resurrection really happened. As the Anglican bishop of Durham, a commitment to the idea of a risen Jesus would seem to be part of the job description. Among many Western Christians, however, the word “resurrection” means something else: a supernatural event, a spiritual ascent, a poetic metaphor. In his new book “Surprised by Hope,” Wright explains why he believes in a material resurrection—as well as how that belief should inform a Christian life. He spoke with Jon Meacham and Lisa Miller.

NEWSWEEK: When you talk about the resurrection, are you telling people something they haven’t heard before?

N. T. Wright: Usually, yes. People have been told so often that resurrection is just a metaphor, and means Jesus died and was glorified—in other words, he went to heaven, whatever that means. And they’ve never realized that the word resurrection simply didn’t mean that. If people [in the first century] had wanted to say he died and went to heaven, they had perfectly good ways of saying that.

Are people receptive to this message?
Yes and no. I think people are fascinated, but then the imaginative leap required is so huge that for many people it’s like describing life on Mars: “Well, that may be fine, I may believe you in theory, but I don’t think I’m ever going there myself.”

What does the resurrected body look like?
Obviously, we don’t know. But it will be probably much, much more like our present bodies than we dare to imagine. The analogy that I use is this: if you are with somebody who is very sick, you say, “Poor old so-and-so, he’s just a shadow of his former self.” He’s still recognizable as the same person. Who we are at the moment is just a shadow of our future selves. There’s a real you, a real me, which will one day be there and we’ll say, “My goodness, you’re looking well.” There’s a sense of “like but more than.”

How do you reconcile your orthodox theology with your progressive politics?
The task of government in the present is to anticipate the eventual sorting out of all things, and the task of the church in the present is to remind governments that that is their job. The resurrection gives you a sense of what God wants to do for the whole world, and it gives the church the courage to say, “God’s new world has actually begun already.” The church can then say to the powers that be, whether it’s George W. Bush or Gordon Brown or the United Nations, “We are urging you to do justice, and we’re going to hold your feet to the fire and go on reminding you when you’re getting it wrong and congratulating you when you’re getting it right.”

And for the best quote yet:

Just as empirical writing is the phenomenal manifestation of an arch-writing that constitutes language as the place where the human subject comes into being, so the sacraments can be appreciated as the empirical manifestation of the “arch-sacramentality” that constitutes the language of faith, which is the place where the believing subject comes into being. this arch-sacramentality is a transcendental condition for christian existence. It indicates that there is no faith unless somewhere inscribed, inscribed in a body — a body from a specific culture, a body with a concrete history, a body of desire. Baptism, the first sacrament of the faith, shows this well: the plunge into water, together with this “precipitate” of the Christian Scriptures, which is the mention of the names of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, is a metaphor for being plunged into the body of signifiers — material, institutional, cultural, and traditional — of the Church: assembly, ordained minister, sign of the cross on the forehead, book of the Scriptures, confession of faith, remembrance of Jesu Christ and invocation of the Spirit, paschal candle… All these are symbolic elements that are inscribed on the body of every baptized person, his or her scriptural body on which they are bestowed as a testament. One becomes a christian only by entering an institution and in lettering this institution stamp its “trademark,” its “character,” on one’s body.

The faith thus appears to us as “sacramental” in its constitution, and not simply by derivation. Our existence is Christian insofar as it is always-already structured by sacramentality, better still, as it is always-already inscribed in the order of the sacramental. It is thus impossible to conceive of the faith outside of the body.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 154-155.

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.

Dr. Wright was on Moyers Journal tonight. Personally, I think Wright did an excellent job. Moyers as well. Well done sirs. Watch it here.

You can also here it on Youtube:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

With this whole hoopla around Dr. Jeremiah Wright, perhaps the most frustrating part, besides the airing of an out-of-context, five-second clip over and over, was that virtually no one talked to Wright himself. Well, thats going to change tonight. I’d heard some rumors this past week, but now even CNN is reporting that Wright will be on Moyers tonight, so I figured I would mention it as well. Moyers, 9 PM on the east coast on PBS.

I’ll post links later when the interview is up on the Moyers website. In the mean time, for those who still feel they need a first time introduction to black liberation theology, or a re-fresher course, watch Cone interview on Bill Moyer’s Journal here.

In its role as hermeneutics, theology has the job, not of retrieving an original meaning, but on the contrary, of producing, starting especially from the text of the Scriptures, new texts, that is, new practices which foster the emergence of a new world. Its truth is always to be made; it resides in a future constantly happening. “Thus, the Christian truth is not,” Geffré emphasizes, “an invariant core that is passed on from century to century in the form of a frozen deposit. It resides in a continual advent exposed to the risks of history and of the Church’s interpretative freedom under the Spirit’s inspiration. In regard to the content of the faith, it is manifestly inadequate to always speak of a rapport between some invariant core and variable cultural expressions. One must guard against the illusion of a semantic invariability which somehow subsists beyond all contingencies of expression; to believe this is to retain an instrumental and vehicular conception of language. Rather, one must speak of a relation of relations.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 69.

Theological discourse, even in all its rigor, must therefore touch the quick of the subject. The critical thrust in Christian theology is precisely this in our opinion: to show the conditions which render possible a passage — a passage which must be continually undertaken — from the attitude of a slave toward a Master imagined as all-powerful, clothed in the traditional panoply of the attributes of esse, to the attitude of a child toward a God represented from differently because this God is seen always in the shadow of the cross, and thus to the attitude of a brother or a sister toward others.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 43.

Because of its exclusive fixation on the being of entities, metaphysics is to be placed at the level of a “technique of explanation of reality by means of ultimate causes.” The god it posits appears only in the perspective of a causality working as a foundation. The entire discussion is distorted by the passion to master the truth. Such an ambition inevitably degrades the truth into an unfailingly available foundation, a substantial permanence, an objective presence. This need for a reassuring plenitude is symptomatic of a visceral anthropocentrism: the need to begin with the certitude of the self, with the presence of the self to the self, by which everything else in the world is ultimately to be measured. In this manner, everything “is ordered,” everything is justified, everything has good reasons to be and to be there as present. From the notion of being-as-substance as present permanence to the notion of the subject-substance as permanent presence, it is the same logic at work, a logic of the Same unfolding itself: a utilitarian logic which, because of fear of all difference of what is by its nature permanently open, and finally of death, reduces being to its own rationality and, unknowingly, makes of it the glue that bonds a closed totality.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 28.

Romero: If this were an ordinary funeral, I would speak of my friendship with Father Grande. At crucial moments in my life, he was always there, close to me. And those times will never be forgotten. But this is a moment to gather from these deaths a message for all of us who remain on pilgrimage. The liberation that Father Grande preached was a liberation rooted in faith. And because it is so often misunderstood, for it, Father Rutilio Grande died. Who knows, perhaps the murders are listening to these words? So we want to tell you, murderous brethren, that we love you and that we ask for repentance in your hearts. (36:03-37:22)

Romero: I’d like to make an appeal in a special way to the men in the army. Brothers, each one of you is one of us. We are the same People. The farmers and peasants that you kill are your own brothers and sisters. When you hear the words of a man telling you to kill, think instead in the words of God, “Thou shalt not kill!” No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the Law of God. In His name and in the name of our tormented people who have suffered so much, and whose laments cry out to heaven: I implore you! I beg you! I order you! Stop the repression. (1:37:50-1:39:07)

From the movie Romero.

Welp. I am graduating soon and moving on to another program. First it was a Bible college, then a “liberal” seminary, and now on to a Catholic school. It should continue to prove interesting. However, before moving on, required for graduation by most any MA program is a thesis.

If the reader has been paying attention for any length of time to this blog, one would notice that torture has routinely popped up. Well, thats because I have just done my MA thesis on torture. This thesis is available for download in pdf (now that I’ve realized they’ll let you attach pdfs in the new wordpress) and is titled “Responding Theologically in the Face of Torture: Re-Politicizing American Christianity in Light of the Interruptive Jesus.”

I still plan on bringing up parts here and there in a more “bloggable” form, as I have already. This allows comments on each section to be made easier. However, for those of you who want to see the entire argument, in all its theological jargon, here it is.