A Classic Re-Posted: “The Real Reason Jesus Hasn’t Come Back Yet”

[Anthony just mentioned this old Weblog post in comments, and having gone to the trouble of tracking it down, I felt it might be nice to bring it to the attention of a larger audience by posting it here. This is the original posting.]

Around the turn of the century, many biblical scholars, led by Johannes Weiss, claimed that the historical Jesus expected the parousia to come in a very short time. Since that did not occur, Jesus was mistaken in his expectation, and theology must come to terms with that.

While such a theory has much to recommend it, it neglects a simple fact: after his resurrection, Jesus was fully capable of bringing about the parousia at his leisure. His mistake was not so much in the timing of the parousia as in his ignorance of basic physical laws. Simply put, at the time of his ascension, Jesus did not realize what is now taken for granted: namely, that above the earth’s atmosphere, one does not find “heaven” as traditionally conceived, but rather the vast expanses of outer space.

Nor, we might suppose, was Christ fully acquainted with the workings of the resurrection body. While he showed himself to be quite adept at the various tricks the resurrection body could perform within the created world (changing his appearance, walking through walls, etc.), he was apparently ignorant of the way to enter the heavenly realm. Typically stubborn man that he was, he refused to ask the angels for directions. Determined that he knew how to get there — after all, he had been there before and in fact used to live there — Jesus ascended vertically, expecting to find “heaven” above the “firmament” of the sky.

From this crucial miscalculation follows the most horrible tragedy in the history of the cosmos. Expecting to find his heavenly home in a region physically contiguous with the earth’s atmosphere, Christ was not emotionally prepared for the vast emptiness of outer space. Already traumatized by the experience of crucifixion and death, he assumed the worst: God the Father really had foresaken him, sending him on a wild goose chase on earth in order to buy enough time to pack up heaven and move before he got back.

Too proud to go back to earth without the full complement of the heavenly hosts, Christ gave in to despair. Thus he has been drifting in space for the past 2000 years in a catatonic state. The angels have thus far been unsuccessful in bringing the old Jesus back since his psychotic break, and the Holy Spirit refuses to have anything to do with him, angry about having “gone to all the trouble of raising him from the dead — for what?!“

Thus, no parousia appears to be forthcoming. To my mind, this situation really underlines the importance of basic scientific literacy.

Abortion as murder, pregnancy as rape

I try to steer away from day-to-day political events in my posts, but I can’t in good conscience continue teaching a course in feminism and ignore this: literally the third bill introduced in the new GOP House of Representatives is the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” one of whose stipulations is that Medicaid patients can only receive funding for abortions in the case of “forcible rape.” As many have pointed out, “forcible rape” is not a term with a legal definition in most states, meaning that it could effectively undo the rape exception for abortion.

My fear is that this is exactly the kind of thing that moderate Democrats, including Obama, might be willing to use as a negotiating chip, as happened with the exaggerated fears of abortion funding in health care reform. How many women does it affect anyway, they might ask? The numbers may be small, but the symbolism is appalling. Presumably the term “forcible” is a response to the fear that women may file spurious rape charges in order to take advantage of the rape exception and get a free abortion on the taxpayer’s dime. They don’t want to get rid of the rape exception altogether, but they want to make sure that only the most unambiguous cases of rape (the “forcible” ones) qualify. As Amanda Marcotte and others have pointed out, this would leave out young women who are molested in a non-forcible way, as well as many other cases such as date rape.

The logic behind this attempt to curb (fantasized) abuse of the rape provision is based on the idea that the fetus is a legal person equivalent to the post-born mother. This notion itself has no basis in either U.S. law or in any legal tradition that I’m familiar with, including that found in the Hebrew Bible — and indeed, for all the rhetoric that “abortion is murder,” virtually no pro-lifers actually propose treating women who get abortions or doctors who perform them as murderers. So starting from this flawed premise, the pro-lifers then say that since the fetus is the more innocent and helpless party, its needs must be given the benefit of the doubt over the mother’s — combining this with the proposition that in the case of a rape accusation, the burden of proof must be put on the accuser. Only in cases where the woman has obviously gotten the shit beaten out of her does she get priority.

Could there be more obvious proof of the misogyny that effectively underlies so much of the pro-life movement? I know that there are many individuals, indeed many women, involved in such movements who are motivated by a sincere conviction that the fetus is a human life that must be protect — but if one looks at the movement as a whole, it’s clear that this concern has been taken up into a broader discourse that is anti-woman and anti-sex, that says that women who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant are sluts who need to suffer the consequences of their actions. Only in this perspective can the frequent combination of anti-abortion stances with distrust of birth control — an obvious contradiction from the standpoint of common sense — possibly make sense.

H.R. 3 is a profoundly immoral bill that all decent people should oppose. The fact that proponents of such laws are so readily granted the moral high ground (“you have to admit they have a point, though…,” “you have to admire their conviction…”) and are so commonly placated in the service of other priorities only shows how completely distorted the terms of moral and ethical debate are in contemporary America. In the debate between self-satisfied technocrats and reactionary bullies, women and other vulnerable groups are always going to lose — an outcome that is all the more perverse in that the fantasy-formation of a vulnerable “person” who is invisible, fully human, and yet fully sin-free is so often used as a cudgel in such debates.

Some Philosophical Fragments on the Struggles in Tunisia and Egypt

Like many of our readers I’ve watched the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt unfold with a mixture of hopeful expectation and anxious trepidation. It has been a long time since something called a revolution has actually been one. Still, I am one of those on the Left who celebrate every act of resistance, regardless of its subsequent failure, because they serve to remind all of us that the state we are in is always contingent. That there are fissures and cracks dotting the seemingly monolithic entity that is Empire. And so with the same expectation I have watched and tried to understand. I don’t think that I do completely understand, as I’m sure most of us feel, but I felt the need to write down some thoughts on the matter especially since the other big theology blogs yet again remain silent in the face of massive political and social unrest. Preferring instead to continue their usual self-flagellation about their chosen career path or posting links to lectures by yet another conservative theologian espousing a sophisticated form of apologetics.

Saturday Night Jazz

It’s been quite some times since our last Saturday Night Jazz. I think tonight, for some reason I can’t quite put a finger on, calls for Joe McPhee’s “Shakey Jake,” from his amazing 1971 album, Nation Time. If you don’t know, Joe McPhee is a monster: his early stuff, like Nation Time, is completely unafraid of imitation (remembrances of Coltrane are in nearly every note) and repetition; his later stuff runs headlong for the breaking point, blazing adventurous paths that sometimes work, sometimes don’t.  I like “Shakey Jake” so much because it represents for me a sound of jazz not quite taken up–not even really by McPhee. AllMusic’s description of the track is nice enough to quote: “With the quintet expanded by an alto sax, organist, and electric guitarist, McPhee gets busy marrying free jazz to James Brown funk or maybe creating a vision of what would have happened if early-’60s Coltrane had revisited his R&B youth.”

Dig it.

Translations in Honor of Ongoing Revolutions: A Weekend Link Post

Zachary Luke Fraser has made available his draft translation of the first chapter of Alain Badiou and François Balmès Of Ideology for readers of AUFS. He’s making it available in part to give us all a preview of the book’s contents, which will be published in full with re.press as both a print book and as an open access electronic book, but he’s also making the draft available to crowd source your suggestions for anything that looks as if it could be translated differently. For those moments where your help may be welcomed look for text in square brackets. Feel free to leave any comments here and they’ll be forwarded on to Zachery.

Daniel Whistler, co-editor of After the Postsecular and the Postmodern (Amazon: US, UK; Book Depository), has also made available a number his draft translations of Schelling and others on his webpage. You can also find a number of book reviews, unpublished articles (like the relationship of Schelling’s work on Kierkegaard), and his doctoral thesis on Schelling’s symbolic language.

Update: I meant to include a link to these translated excerpts from the work of Mario Tronti (h/t Alberto Toscano), whose work I mentioned in a recent post. In the last comment of that post a commenter points us to yet another translation, this time of Houellebecq’s book on Lovecraft [warning: PDF] by Robin Mackay.

“I’m living in the future so the present is my past”

I’ve been somewhat obsessed by the work of Elias Canetti of late. I’ve written a little about his book Crowds & Power already, but have not said too much about his novel, Auto-da-Fé. Let me remedy that now.

Written in Vienna in 1935, Auto-da-Fé feels dated, other-worldly even, but not in a necessarily bad way. Perhaps it is best instead to say it feels like a fable, for that is what it effectively comes out as being. That is to say, it is a modernist fable: a skewering and embodying of high modernist sentiment. The novel’s protagonist, Peter Kien, the world’s leading sinologist and owner of a massive library subject to much envy and object of pride, fits the prototype of most modernist literature. For every action he takes–be it his writing of erudite papers on Confucius and Aristotle, his foolhardy marriage to his greedy housekeeper, “rescuing” books from their doom at the hands (& stomach) of an unseen pawnbroker, and even his incendiary actions in the novel’s climax–is more than offset by actions taken upon by him. Most notably is the physical and mental abuse Kien suffers throughout the novel. Indeed, each of the three acts–”A Head Without a World,” “Headless World,” & “The World in the Head”–highlights at least one new mode of assault & degradation.

Even more philosophy of religion

Blogger Vis Viva has weighed in on my ongoing quest to redefine philosophy of religion:

This seems right to me actually, though I hasten to add that many who take philosophy of religion courses may benefit more from being exposed to skepticism regarding God’s existence than they do from exploring the nuances of religion taken generally. Churches aren’t really up to the task, and of course public education does not allow it–which is why philosophy of religion is so important–but at the same time the courses the post’s author describes seem too timid, too vulnerable to the lazy self-verification undergrads like so much already.

This reminds me of the response to my IHE article on evangelicals, where I suggested that maybe we could just focus on teaching students writing and argumentation skills in freshman comp instead of jumping straight to making them question their entire worldviews. There was a similar rhetoric of cowardice there, as though I was playing to students’ prejudices by suggesting that “here’s how you structure an essay” could be treated separately from “here’s why you’re probably wrong about abortion.”

More on philosophy of religion

I brought it up in comments, but it seems worth highlighting: Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, arguably the founding documents for philosophy of religion as a specific subdiscipline, represent a much more capacious kind of reflection than that found in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Despite its obvious flaws, it does make an effort to reflect on the nature, role, and origin of religion and does so through a systematic reflection on as many religions as possible, as opposed to the contemporary focus on monotheism and proofs of God’s existence. For all that, it also seems to be clearly different from mere “sociology of religion” (something that the relatively new commenter Jim H. brought up but that has come up multiple times before in similar discussions), whatever “sociology” might be.

Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone is another example of philosophy of religion rather than what I’ve called “philosophy of God” or “philosophical theology.”

Working in Marx’s margins

There’s a fine line, when you encounter work close to your own, between the excitement that someone else considers your little area worth working on, and the worry that they might already have written the work that you are struggling to put together. This happened for me most recently when reading Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins. As I’ve been trying to write about ways in which class reductionism misrepresents Marxism, Anderson’s detailed investigation of Marx’s writings on race, nationalism, and non-Western societies looked like it might render my gestures in that direction irrelevant. Luckily for me, Anderson’s book is actually the best sort of work to encounter, as it contains a huge amount of material on which one could build, while leaving enough theoretical space for others to do that building. Indeed, it is this combination of Anderson’s great aggregation of material with his comparatively sparse theorization of it that leads me to some thoughts about methodology for those of us attempting to construct theory through close dialog with particular texts and authors.

On the philosopher of religion who quit

Although the philosopher Keith Parsons posted his reasons for giving up philosopy of religion several months ago, it has for some reason become part of the online dialogue again — and after teaching philosophy of religion (and abortively interviewing for a position in philosophy of religion), I thought it may be appropriate to “weigh in.”

My first reaction to the piece was to ask, incredulously, “that’s supposed to be philosophy of religion?!”