Elizabeth Johnson Under Attack

Feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson’s book Quest for the Living God has been denounced by the US Council of Catholic Bishops. The bloggers at Women in Theology have been following this story closely and promise to continue to address it in detail — I strongly recommend checking out their ongoing defense of Johnson’s important work against an apparently ill-conceived attack.

The Return of Greek: Hebrews 3

After an overly long break, I have returned to my work on the Greek New Testament, attempting to round out my reading of the NT epistles with Hebrews. Today I worked through chapter 3, the primary focus of which is Christ’s superiority to Moses. Commenting on Psalm 95:7-11, the author exhorts his readers not to harden their hearts like the Israelites who wandered in the wilderness for forty years.

Here is a passage I have questions on, with highlights added:

The Incarnation as God’s Leap of Faith

At perhaps the pivotal moment in the Church Dogmatics IV/1, Barth poses the question Cur Deus homo? He discusses the incarnation and what it meant for God “to deny the immutability of His being, His divine nature, to be in discontinuity with Himself, to be against Himself, to set Himself in self-contradiction” (184). Continuing with these questions, Barth goes on to ask about the how the perfect, eternal, and omnipotent God could become limited, lowly, and impotent. Barth considers what it meant that “His becoming man, consisted in this determination of God to be “God against God” (184). Further on he writes, “God in His incarnation would not merely give Himself, but give Himself away, give up being God. And if that was His will, who can question His right to make possible this impossibility?” (184). This rift, this gap in the Godhead for Barth culminates in cry of dereliction on the cross. With fear and trembling, Barth wonders if this cry ultimately is a temptation that would encourage the notion that there is a “contradiction and conflict in God Himself” (185). Barth comes very close but ultimately rejects this idea because “God gives Himself, but He does not give Himself away” (185). Also, God is a God of peace not confusion (1 Cor 14:33). Despite the fact that God experiences this contradiction, “He acts as Lord over this contradiction even as He subjects Himself to it” (185). As Barth approaches the mystery of Christian theology, he stops short. He looks over the cliff but refuses to jump. At the very moment where he could ultimately embrace the death of the sovereign God, he pulls back. The sovereign God ultimately never left the control station even at the cross. Altizer once said that the death of God could help us finally come to terms with what the cry of dereliction actually meant for the Godhead. Radical death of God theologians seem to be the only theologians who actually take this question seriously.

Weaponized debate

In yesterday’s post on Schmitt’s critique of liberalism, I referred to the Republican abuse of the fillibuster as an attempt to “weaponize the pretense of debate.” President Obama’s speech last night “making a case to the American people” for the Libyan intervention illustrates what might be called a distinctively Democratic mode of weaponizing debate: trying to persuade people of the wisdom of a move that has already happened. A similar thing happened last summer with the “town hall meetings” meant to drum up support for a health care bill whose basic shape was never in serious question — and just as with the abuse of the fillibuster, Republicans “weaponized” that pretense of debate as well, both figuratively and literally.

The case of the health care propaganda effort shows the differing instincts of Democrats and Republicans when it comes to influencing public opinion: Republicans seek to rile people up, while Democrats try to soothe their anxiety (through Obama’s uniquely “grown-up” public speaking style, for instance) and render them passively accepting of the wise technocratic solutions they’ve dreamed up.

Domestic Violence and the NFL

This might seem hardly worth a blog post, but I think the reading audience might like to know about this.  Here is an article highlighting the ten percent rise in reports of domestic violence in cities under the circumstance of their NFL team losing. A study between 1995-2006 of six NFL teams- the Carolina Panthers, Detroit Lions, New England Patriots, Denver Broncos, Kansas City Chiefs and Tennessee Titans-showed an increase in reports of male violence toward their female home partners, within the narrow window of the last hour of the game to two hours after the game ended. I don’t think this can be taken to mean a whole lot about American sports and culture on its own, but when combined with other social phenomenon it has to say something about our culture’s obsession with violent entertainment, and its reproduction in viewers (though it might be interesting to see if other sports correlate with domestic violence, suggesting that it is not the violence of the sport that is influencing violence, but maybe the gambling going on or something else).

Capital and Sovereignty: Scattered reflections on Schmitt’s critique of liberalism

Last week I read a couple of Schmitt texts I had lying around but had never gotten to, namely Political Theology II and Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. I’ve already written on the former, but the latter is in my opinion more worthy of discussion. In it, Schmitt’s critique of liberalism seems to be that, broadly speaking, the ideal of governing through the reasoned deliberation of parliamentary representatives engaged with a broader public sphere has essentially never worked out the way it was supposed to. The self-binding of government through the division of powers and other related concepts led to the dominance of capital as the only other real power center, and meanwhile the supposed “reasoned debate” in parliament itself has been reduced to a facade that no longer even tries to hide the backroom deals between special interests that actually determine policy.

The liberal responses to this critique in Schmitt’s time seem to have been “but there’s no alternative” — and this lack of a real response, a real principled defense of parliamentarism in face of its decadence and failure, represents half of the “crisis of parliamentary democracy” (the other half being the conceptual conflict between parliamentarism and democracy in Schmitt’s opinion). Contemporary defenders of parliamentarism in the United States seem to have arrived at an interesting mutation of this defense: “since there’s no alternative, we must act as though it’s working.” This commitment to maintaining the fiction of the “normal” operation of liberal government creates a situation in which enemies of liberal government are more than usually able to game the system.

Adam Roberts reviews Awkwardness

Via SEK, I learned that Adam Roberts, the English SF writer perhaps best-known in these blogging circles as a former contributor to The Valve, has written a very nice review of Awkwardness. It marks a major contribution to the literature on what I’ve missed in the book, adding the element of class alongside the missing gender component that several others have pointed out.

(It also mentions an unfortunate exchange from my brasher days — believe me, dear readers, when I say I was provoked! Though not by Roberts himself, admittedly.)

Laruelle in New York and JCRT CFP: A Weekend Quasi-Link Post

François Laruelle will be speaking in New York City April 7th at the Miguel Abreu Gallery. This will culminate a three-day event hosted at the gallery to celebrate the release of a new book The Concept of Non-Photography which Urbanomic is publishing in association with Sequence Press. Sadly, though I will be in New York at the time, I will be a few hours North for the first day of the Syracuse University Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion conference. But I will be speaking at the Abreu Gallery with others, including Alexander Galloway, on the 6th for a panel that aims to introduce Laruelle’s work (yet again, I’m looking forward to when the man is introduce and we can start having deeper conversations about his work). I’m a bit type cast as the “theology guy” in the speculative philosophy world and I won’t be helping matters here since I’ll be speaking on the place of religion in Laruelle’s non-philosophy. You can find more information, including directions, at the Urbanomic website. If you’re planning to go and you’re a reader of the blog please do say hello to me.

T. Wilson Dickinson has also sent us the CFP for a special issue of The Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory on “Pedagogical Exercises and Theories of Practice”. More information about the issue is below the fold, but the deadline for submission is December 31st 2011 and papers should be submitted to Dickinson  (twdickin@syr.edu).

Further thoughts on Libya

Since writing my post questioning the Libya intervention, I have read a great deal by people who know much better than me what they’re talking about, most notably Aaron Bady (a specialist in Africa) and Juan Cole (a specialist in the Middle East). Bady is probably right about the trap of “taking a position” on an issue like this that is not under any form of democratic control, but he winds up being relatively non-pessimistic that this intervention will result in something better than the absolute worst possible result of Qaddafi remaining in power:

at this point, the best case scenario is that the UN intervention will turn out to have been chemo-therapy: poisonous and awful, but still better than the alternative. It’s because we know what cancer is that aggressive chemo-therapy — also one of the worst things there is — turns out to be the less horrible alternative. Almost any outcome is better than dead. By the same token, it’s because we also know what Gaddafi is that the same thing might be true here. The worst case scenario was the one where Gaddafi fulfilled his promise and took over the country house by house, a scenario that seemed a virtual certainty the day before the NFZ was imposed. And as likely as it is that the UN will fuck this up, in other words, Gaddafi was a dead certainty. And so it still seems right to me to celebrate that uncertainty.

Bady also discusses Qaddafi’s history as an imperialist power within the African continent itself:

Lent 2: Nicodemus’ Secret

The following is my second sermon for the season of Lent at Zion “Goshert’s” United Church of Christ in Lebanon, PA.  The congregation celebrated a healing service with the rite of anointing with oil following the sermon.  The preaching text was John 3:1-17.

This passage of scripture has two of the most famous lines from the bible.  First, “you must be born again” and secondly, “for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, and whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  These two phrases are so well-known that they are part of regular conversation between Christians, as in, someone asking if they are “born again” or describing themselves as a “born again Christian,” or people holding up John 3:16 signs at football games.

We all know that so often these two statements are meant to be exclusionary, rather than inclusive statements of love.  When Jesus says you must be born again, we often focus on the fact that Jesus is probably speaking to Nicodemus about a small group of people being saved.  When Jesus says that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life, very often it is not the everlasting life that is emphasized or celebrated, but instead the focus is upon the exclusion of much of the world in this great statement.  And while I want to resist the exclusive nature of these statements, it’s hard to ignore them.