For Tripi

Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Beatitude

With reference to my last post, I’d like to propose a new beatitude:

Blessed are the uncertain for they will experience excess.

Why settle for certainty?

I have been thinking more about my desire to embrace uncertainty and why, for many people, this project is so threatening.

I live in a society that cannot handle sustained periods of doubt, instead demanding answers. Church discourses, as explored in my last post, devalue doubt in their insistence on certainty, on ‘truth’ in the Platonic sense. However, it is not only the concrete discourses of some of the religious that feed this worldview; Western scientific knowledge also requires faith in an unbiased ‘truth’, determinable by objective quantitative research.

Both of these dominant discourses, prominent on the West, have a vested interest in sustaining a regime of truth that celebrates certainty over uncertainty, because both enjoy a position of privilege through their exclusive cannons of knowledge. The result has been a common-sense, taken for granted acceptance that not only is ‘truth’ possible, but desirable (for the Church could the centrality of a Platonic logic of truth be idolatrous?). And just incase you’re not completely sold, we are warned that the alternative to certainty is nihilism.

But I want to question this: what ‘absences’ are these discourses creating? The absence of uncertainty? And just as you can’t prove an absence, how can you prove the nature of an absence? What if uncertainty leads, rather than to the nihilism we are taught, to excess!

Derrida’s event posits just that. For anyone unfamiliar with Derrida’s event, the event is the uncontainable promise that words and names attempt to do justice – but never do. For Derrida language is always historically, geographically and culturally constructed. This means that language is restricted by its own historical limitations and can be deconstructed. The event, however can not be contained in language, and is undeconstructible. Take for example Law and Justice. The law tries to contain justice, tries to explain it, to point towards it, but it cannot ever truly embody justice. One can deconstruct the Law which is man made, but we can not deconstruct justice, which is beyond man made languages. Similarly Theology could be like law, it could try to understand, to contain God, but it will always fail. If you like the law is ‘certianty’ – we can know it, understand it, apply its logic. And justice is ‘uncertainty’ – that which we will never fully contain, that we betray through our very comprehension.

I find the idea of the event so liberating in terms of the journey. An event cannot be contained within a name, and consequently names are endlessly translatable in their attempt to actualize the event. Names carry themselves toward the event, which they will never grasp, setting off chains of promise and aspiration that surpass them. This translatability distinguishes the event from a mere occurance by its multiplicity and undecidability. The event is vocative, you are always travelling towards it, yet you never grasp it, never arrive, because an event is an excess, it overflows language in order to shatter our horizons of expectations.

Through negating and suppressing doubt we settle for certainty. But if we embraced the journey, if we spend our lives open to the plurality and undecidedness of the call of the event we experience, not the nihilism science and the Church would have as believe, but an excess, an abundance, the potential to shatters pre-given horizons and exceed all expectations.

Just a thought.

Time to ditch the Lonely Planet

I’ve been revisiting past posts. After nearly a years break from blogging I was curious that people were still visiting my blog, and still commenting, having stumbled over old posts from google searches. As I read their comments, and refreshed my memory of the posts they were commenting on, I started to re-visit all of my old posts, which read like a diary of my struggles with faith. I was really struck by the pace and speed of my spiritual journey as documented in these posts. No sooner had I hoped for a positive experience of Church as a ‘Complex Adaptive System’, then I am accusing it of being a ‘frozen accident’ and then profess that I am losing my religion. I go from investing hope in a faith to despair in that same faith all within the time period of one month. And from there the direction is fixed. I try to cling onto my faith through the idea of a post-church discourse, and later explore how the atheist Ernest Bloch maintains “a messianic Front-space even without any theism” (1,200), and even try to transcend universalism and cultural relativism through a diatopical hermeneutics of religion. In the end I conclude that my faith is not represented in any Christian discourse, and deconvert, proclaiming myself post-secular.

It seems that I am in a hurry to arrive. I am so anxious about settling my faith and defining it that I have lost the whole point. I would always maintain the process is more important than the outcome, which was always my pedagogical philosophy when I was a teacher. I love to backpack, the travelling being more important to me than the arriving. However re-reading my posts, I’d never assume that of the person who wrote them. Within these posts I have lost my love of the journey, and I seem fixed on the end point (having it fixed so that I can programme my life, taking it on some kind of auto pilot to the known end point, in effect taking myself out of the journey).

But this isn’t just characteristic of me. I am a product of my surroundings, and I learnt this need to establish my faith, know what I believe, from the very faith that brought me up. There seems to be an urgency in the Church to ‘save people’. The Church doesn’t like loose ends, it needs to know that you ‘know’ what they have taught you, and while it might profess to accommodating doubt it really does not provide any space for it. This description might ring true for any readers who have experienced the Christian Right or conservative Christianity, but it was my experience also of the Alt worship community. As I argued in my post on developing a post-church discourse, many para-church groups and activities which label themselves 'Alt Worship' or 'Emerging' are merely alternative ways of doing church are not alternatives to the Church (Since writing this post I have come to the conclusion that many Christian discourses around ‘Alt worship’ and ‘emerging church’ are to Philosophy what creationism is to Science), hence it would stand to reason that they share some of the same characteristics – this being one of them.

Many Alt worship spaces may profess to accepting doubt, and even providing a space for doubters, however as I have learnt myself from the discrepancy between how I view myself as a process not outcome person and the reality of my longing for outcome, so too can a group’s self-perception be different from a perceived reality. I used to belong to a group that identified with and contributed to discourses around Alt worship and the emerging church. I have since left as it is no longer a helpful space for me, however it was a very safe space for me for a season of my life, for which I am grateful. This group claimed to be a space for doubters, somewhere where questions were not feared and where I perceived the journey could be enjoyed. They even has a service entitled ‘unknowing God’. However my experiences were different, and I found that while my questions were seen to be of an academic of intellectual nature (born out my reading of philosophy) they were welcome, even celebrated and enjoyed. As soon as my doubts took on a more personal nature, however, I felt less and less comfortable within the group. The final confirmation of these feelings of unease manifest itself in the most brutal way after the unknowing god service. It is ironic given that the group had just publicly pronounced their acceptance of doubt, that when I expressed my doubting faith one of the main leaders of that service rather casually dismissed my doubt out of hand, challenging me to fell like that on Good Friday, only a few days away. While the group expressed space for doubt, the expectation was that exploration would lead you through the doubt to a place of faith. It is my argument that unless the outcome is completely undecided and can potentially lead away from faith, then the exploration is not authentic. My experience was that the group did not, in fact provide a space for doubt. I wondered if my initial reaction might have been an over-reaction, that in my battered state of doubt I had misread the situation, however my reading was confirmed when the group some months later went on to for formalize their position through a constitution which demanded a confession of faith or intention of faith from voting members.

The reason for telling this story is not to slander the group (although I may have been wanting to get that story off my chest for a while now) as I believe the group itself now identifies itself as a church and recognizes that it is not best equipped for someone like myself. I am still very appreciative of the group I once belonged to, and there are good feelings between us (for anyone in this group reading this blog – and I’m making assumptions here – who is still bemused that I am writing about you even a year on, I am writing about where I was a year ago, that’s why. Don’t worry, I’ll stop writing about you soon). I tell the story to illustrate that even the most understanding of Churches demands expediency on faith issues. It doesn’t let you enjoy the journey; it doesn’t allow you to take your time. To the answer ‘What do you believe’, it can’t accept ‘I don’t know’ – and this doesn’t only apply to the obvious churches.

But, since I stopped blogging about 12 months ago (which has very roughly coincided with me stopping going to church) things have changed in the sense that nothing has changed. I haven’t gone through a rollercoaster faith journey, rushing through different opinions and perspectives, struggling to decide what I believe, to have an answer to the question ‘Where are you with your faith now?’. I’ve just stayed where I am – lost, but enjoying being lost. The great thing about not putting so much emphasis on the outcome is that you are then left to enjoy the process. I liken it to the difference between my travels in China and my recent holiday to Japan. When I was travelling around China I didn’t really know where I was going or what I was doing. I landed in Beijing with no plan, and decided to see where my travels would take me. The outcome of my time in China was completely undecided, I didn’t know where to go, I made decisions in the moment, and each decision opened up a new horizon of possibilities. I ended up getting lost hitching across the Tibetan plateau. I had a great time, I really enjoyed the experience, I revelled in the sense of adventure. It didn’t bother me that I couldn’t speak Mandarin, or that the truck driver who kindly offered me a lift couldn’t speak English. I didn’t care that I had no road map (to be honest, I’m not sure if we were even following a road!), and that I had no idea where we were going. It didn’t bother me that I wasn’t in control, that if someone asked me where I was going I didn’t know the answer. I was enjoying the ride, I was enjoying the hospitality of my new found friends, the truck drivers who refused to let me pay for my dinner in what must have been the remotest and most isolated truckstop/café in the world. I didn’t really care where I’d end up, I was having a great time getting there and where ever it was, it was going to be somewhere I’d never been before – new and exciting for me to explore. I love travelling. When you don’t know the way, don’t have a plan, aren’t in control, you’re actually free. This is what I would call travelling, a journey, an adventure. It contrasts with my recent trip to Japan, where the whole trip was decided in advance. The hotels prebooked, the train times confirmed – we even know what platform number we needed. If everything is mapped out in advance it’s not a journey, indeed the pre-planning vitiate the journey. Now I’m not complaining, I had done well to evade the restrictions of a formal ‘job’ for so long, and now, new job in tow, I found myself in the position of limited holiday time. The expense of Japan and my measly budget of time made such pre-planning necessary. And I did have a great time. It was better to experience Japan this way than not at all, and I am extremely grateful that I had the opportunity to visit Japan. My Japanese experience wasn’t travelling, it wasn’t a journey, it was a holiday (a great holiday!). It is this distinction I make between where I was 12 months ago and now. 12 months ago I had this sense of urgency to fix my end point. I wanted to answer the question ‘What is your faith?’, ‘Where are you in your faith now?’. I wanted to know that I was ‘Christian’, ‘post-secular’ or ‘deconverted’. I wanted to make up my mind. There was no journey involved, because journeys are open ended, and I wanted to know where I was going. So Japan was great, and holidays are fine. If the only option is to experience a holiday, rather than to go travelling, it’s better than nothing. But if you had the option to do more, wouldn’t it have been fantastic to ‘travel’ in Japan.

So I’m lost. But I’m enjoying being lost. My journey to ‘I don’t know where’ is exciting and eye opening, and each corner I take opens up new horizon of previously unforeseeable opportunities (you can see more opportunities in China than you can from the lonely planet – why make the lonely planet your point of decision making, it cuts of an infinitely endless stream of possibilities). Currently I’m lost in the works of Derrida, but I’ll leave that for my next post. Incidentally though, Derrida’s philosophy of the event, which John Caputo applies to God and theology, is also open-ended, distinguished by its undecidability. But I’ll share more on that in my next post. If you like you can think of this as my travel blog…

Blogging again!

Hey!

Seems my blog's been a little neglected. I've been scrolling through though, and seems people have still been reading, I have a few recent comments on some old posts. The main reason I've been so inactive in the bloggosphere is because I suspended my PhD for a calander year and got a job. It was a good job, I was education project manager for an 'award winning' exhibition on the Transatlantic Slave Trade, but it didn't lend itself to blogging. Well, there was quite a lot of stimulus for a rant actually, but unlike ranting about theory you've just read and applying it to institutions, this stimulus would have led to quite a different kind of rant, and getting personal or ranting about work (at least on a public blog) is a big No No in my opinion.

But I've left work now, and I'm back to my PhD. My prediction is that this may lead to a less neglected blog, and so far early signs seem to confirm this. After all it's my first day back to my research and I'm procrastinating with this post!

Just to give you some idea what to expect in the forthcoming posts I'm currently reading Derrida on forgiveness and justice, John Caputo's Weakness of God, and I'm interesting in exploring more about 'decenterdness' and the philosophy of 'the event'.

Well, I better get to work on these topics then. Hopefully be ranting about one soon.

It's between me and God!

My sister phoned with a funny story:

My 7 year old nephew J, had a fight with his older brother, W. During the parental interrogation that pursued J confidently informed his mother that God had made him, and that his motives and actions were between him and God, defying her to question his actions.

I found this story very amusing, not least because J doesn’t go to church very much at all, and I have this sneaky suspicion that he doesn’t really believe what he’s saying, he’s just trying out a new line of excuse. I laughed and warned my sister the next line to teach him should be ‘God told me’! Now J is not allowed to go to church, because it makes him a bad boy!

There are too many parallels to draw from this story, and I think it’s simplicity is what makes it appealing – I couldn’t make up a better parable or metaphor! So I won’t spoil it with a long, convoluted commentary complete with words prefixed with ‘post’. Suffice to say it appears that using god to justify your violence and point of view is child’s play, no matter how much you dress it up in scholarly research, interpretation and theology. Isn’t it about time we grew up?

The Call to Sin

A bit of a rant seems long overdue. My new gainful employment has been using up all of my blogging time. But at last I’ve found some space, in my now hectic schedule, to off-load some of the thoughts swimming around in my mind.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of a ‘call to sin’. It’s in its inception phase, but I think the idea has some potential. You may or may not agree – I look forward to your comments.

The call to sin rests on the idea that sometimes ‘sinning’ is the most Christ-like reaction to given circumstances, so that, in a paradoxical way, sin becomes an act of righteousness. Of course I’m playing with the discourse here, by sin I mean the colloquial understanding of sin, an act that runs contrary to the hegemonic understanding of right and good.

Let me illustrate with an example. A common sense and consensus view of Christian sin would conclude that to denounce one’s faith is a sin. However Costa-Gavras plays with this very issue in his film Amen. In this film, set during the Second World War, the priest rejects his own faith tradition to become a Jew in order to identify and suffer with the persecuted. What on one level could be interpreted as a sin, on a completey different level could be interpreted as a Christ-like action.

I guess you could argue that this example is just about discourse. And I agree, but then most things (all things) come down to discourse in the end. There is definitely an argument to say that my main gripe is about the defintion of sin. One could argue that the priest wasn’t committing a sin, because the definition of sin is an act……
I’ve been thinking about this and I think Derrida’s reflection on the relationship between law and justice is illustrative here too. Derrida posits that any attempt to embody justice is futile, because it will always fall short. While the Law may attempt to set out justice, it never fully encompasses justice because the written law can embody injustice – for example the destruction of private property is injustice until it is done in the name of justice (in revolution/just war?). Each time the law is written down it is presented with new situations it has not accounted for and must be edited or added to, thus the law can never be a full embodiment of justice. Sometimes I think that Paul was a post-stucturalist, because he seemed to understand this principle and apply it to theology. His anti-legalistic approach to sin and endorsement of pork (so long as it didn’t cause your brother or sister, or transgendered friend, to stumble) seems to have grasped the futility of any kind of religious law to embody righteousness.

So yes, I concur, part of my notion of a call to sin lies in the disempowerment of a power discourse used to control and limit actions undesirable to those in the position of creating knowledge. For example, Sidekick was once immorally and illegally thrown out of her abode by her landlord (well the people she paid rent to anyway). This couple happened to be high standing members of the church, and the congregation’s version of sin saw the slandering of Christians as sinful, while my version of sin saw the act of an injustice going unchallenged as sinful. Sidekick tried to avoid sinning by avoiding slander, but actually she allowed an injustice to go unchallenged, and later on repeat itself. As usual, it’s all in the discourse. It’s not that I’m called to sin, it’s that I disagree with the definition of sin, or more precisely the definition of my particular ethical action as a sin (like getting angry over injustice in my previous post don’t look back in anger).

But actually not just so.

What if, in some instances, the call to Christ-likeness requires one to commit an action they actually do consider a sin? Take the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Considered a celebrated theologian today, in his day Deitrich Bonhoeffer found himself embroiled in an assassination plot. Bonhoeffer, a confirmed pacifist, found his whole ethical system up-rooted when faced with the horrors of Nazi Germany and the dilemma of how to respond – the murder of Hitler? Today it is easy to empathise with Bonheoffer’s stance, because we have all of the assurances of hindsight and the comfort of almost universal public opinion that Hitler was indeed inhumane. However, Bonhoeffer did not have such assurances. Holding what was a minority view point in Germany at the time, and with a lack of absolute assurance that what he was planning was indeed God’s will, Bonhoeffer none-the-less persevered in his plans.

The story of Bonhoeffer is not about how he defined sin. Bonhoeffer was a confirmed pacifist who ‘knew’ violence to be a ‘sin’, his writing revealed his lack of certainty that that he was doing the ‘right’ thing, he doubted it was God’s will, and he believed he would go to hell for his actions. For Bonhoeffer he was planning to commit a sin, and there’s no getting around that. But by acting in the aporia something very Christ-like was revealed and, accordingly, now celebrated in Bonhoeffer’s life.

This story raises lots of questions for me. It reminds me of some of the questions contemplated in Ikon’s service ‘Eloi, Eloi, Lama sabachthani?’ but inverted. Pete Rollins describes this service in the second part or his excellent book ‘How (not) to speak of God’. In this service Ikon explore the idea of a faith without the resurrection, and ask if, when faced with a Christianity without the comfort of giving one’s life in order to regain it, we would embrace faith so freely. The main question of the service centers around how the economy of return in the resurrection and notions of heaven impact our faith. If Jesus never rose from the dead would many people still follow his ways faithfully, even though it will be costly, and that death will one day defeat them as it did Him? This question uncomfortably centers around our motivations for faith. Does one endure the costs of faith as some kind of economical exchange, or does one endure the costs of faith because of its innate value, outside of the comforts of a certainty that everything will turn out alright in the end? It’s a question of utility over mystery. Ikon probes this question by asking; would you follow Christ without the assurances of the resurrection, without the comforts of heaven? My question is: would you follow Christ even if it meant going to Hell? What if the Christ-like way to respond to a situation was really to sin? Would you be Christ-like at the personal cost of risking to hell, like Bonhoeffer?

It’s a hard question. I’ve been heard on many occasions to profess a preference to hell over engaging in some Christian agendas. I implied it in my post on anger, where I concluded that I’d carry on getting angry over injustice even if it meant going to hell. I’ve said I’d rather go to hell than to certain churches. But I’ve never really considered the question seriously. And considering I’m not sure I actually believe in heaven or hell anyway, at least not in it’s most popularized conception, it’s a really hard question to consider (and even if I did believe in hell I don’t really think I’d be sent there for being angry). But I think it’s worth considering regardless of how hypothetical or academic it is, because it reveals something about your nature and faith. What if the Christ-like response to a situation was a sin, and the cost of my faithfulness in that situation was the risk of hell? Would I, like Bonhoeffer, value my faith beyond its utility?
Of course, it’s impossible to answer. No-one knows how they will respond in a given circumstance until they meet it. But I do believe that it is only in the renunciation of all economics that God’s will can ever be done. The idea of relying on some conceptualization of sin to remove any responsibility for making moral decisions seems wrong. Derrida points out that a moral decision can only be made when one doesn’t know what to do. A moral decision is defined by its undecideabiltiy, and it is only when one does not know what to do that one decides, even if that decision is not to decide!

So is it possible that we might be called to sin?

P.S. Pete Rollins explores something similar in his post (dis)obeying God