Curtis A. Bronzan

In this post, I continue looking at the deconstruction of the church by engaging with René Girard, who, being trained as an anthropologist and historian, has written extensively upon the inherent violent nature of cultural systems by thoroughly examining literature as well as engaging the founding myths of civilization(s). He is known for articulating the connection between sacrificial violence and religious systems, developing the theory of mimetic desire, and describing the scapegoat mechanism – three concepts intimately intertwined.

Girard argues that only the Judeo-Christian Scriptures give us the possibility of denying such violent, culturally inherited impulses. In Girard and Theology, Michael Kirwan states, “Jesus’ ferocious attack on Israel’s religious leaders is really an assault on a religious system which preserves its authority and integrity at the expense of sacrificial victims.” (GT, 83)

Thus, Girard is a necessary thinker for seeking to fashion a postmodern ecclesiology in light of Jesus destruction of the temple.

Mimetic theory builds on the insights of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who asserted that subjects desire what others possess, in defiance of the tenth commandment! Girard, however, postulates that our desires are even more rudimentary: specifically that we desire what we see others desiring. He stated in an interview that

the root of all conflict is… ‘competition’, mimetic rivalry between persons, countries, cultures. Competition is the desire to imitate the other in order to obtain the same thing he or she has, by violence if need be… Human relations are essentially relations of imitation, of rivalry. (GT, 22-23)

Could we not extend his statement to include even religious communities seeking to increase their attendance? Whenever difficulty arises in a given society, this mimesis leads to violence. To understand why this is so, we must turn our attention toward another of Girard’s theories, the scapegoat mechanism.

In his book The Scapegoat, Girard sets out by engaging with Guillaume de Machaut, a French poet in the mid-fourteenth century, who authored Judgment of the King of Navarre. In it, Guillaume describes what we now refer to as the Black Plague, which he wrongly believes was caused by Jews who purposely poisoned the town’s drinking water. Using this historical event – and more importantly Machaut’s explication of it – allows Girard to explicate how the Jews were scapegoated:

Ultimately, the persecutors always convince themselves that a small number of people, or even a single individual, despite his relative weakness, is extremely harmful to the whole of society. The stereotypical accusation justifies and facilitates this belief by ostensibly acting the role of mediator. (TS, 15)

An obvious corollary is evident in the Gospel accounts. Notice even in Mark, most likely the earliest account, that asserts,

the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have Pilate release Barabbas instead.
“What shall I do, then, with the one you call the king of the Jews?” Pilate asked them.
“Crucify him!” they shouted.
“Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate.
But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!”
Wanting to satisfy the crowd, Pilate released Barabbas to them. He had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified. (Mark 15.11-15)

Within this account we can easily recognize both the scapegoat mechanism applied to Jesus, as one who is presented by Pilate as an innocent victim, as well as mimetic desire, with the chief priests ‘stirring up the crowd’ to release Barabbas instead.

His reading of the Gospel accounts, especially through the lens of myth, leads Girard to continually argue for the victimization and innocence of Jesus. While ultimately, of course, this is undeniable, the way in which Girard does so betrays a historical understanding of Jesus’ temple action and its ramifications.

In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard states, “the Gospels are aware of what they are doing. They not only tell the truth about victims unjustly condemned, but they know they are telling it, and they know that in speaking the truth they are taking again the path of the Hebrew Bible.” (127) By reading the Gospel accounts as primarily literary texts, Girard fails to properly integrate the historical event that undergirds them. Thus, we must further deconstruct Girard’s deconstruction!

Again, without seeking to assert that Jesus’ crucifixion was somehow justified, notice Mark’s explanatory comment following the symbolic temple action and Jesus’ ‘teaching’: “The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.” (Mark 11.18) While the evangelist has revealed that the ‘chief priests and teachers of the law’ have been seeking to kill Jesus since the early chapters of Mark, it is this quotation that leads directly to the crucifixion.

Thus, Kirwan’s interpretation, that “Jesus symbolically completes his mission to Israel through the cleansing of the Temple, but instead of preaching resentful vengeance he moves towards a loving self-offering as an act of atonement for the collective force of human sin”, (GT, 38) is reversed. Indeed, it is the other way around: Jesus’ loving self-offering leads Him to symbolically complete his mission to Israel through the destruction of the Temple. Of course, as the fulfillment of the promised Messiah, Jesus’ judgment upon the temple system was entirely justified.

Contrary to the charge leveled against deconstruction, Girard’s theory vehemently relinquishes any emphasis on lack. Kirwan asserts,

mimetic theory renounces any kind of ‘pact with the negative’ which makes the sinfulness and need of the human beings the controlling factor in the narrative. The reality is the other way around: we only have a sense of the mess because Christ has been raised from the dead. (GT, 68)

It is striking, then, that both he and Girard include few of the historical implications of Jesus’ counter-temple movement, which need not be confined to the symbolic event that induces the temple authorities at the end of the synoptics, but could also be implied throughout Jesus’ continual mission to extend the Kingdom outside Israel’s central institution. To his credit, Girard does find great significance in Jesus’ quotation of Psalm 118:22; “The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone”, which is found in each of the synoptic Gospels, Acts, and 1st Peter. Kirwan notes, “‘The stone the builders rejected’ means that the fate of the scapegoated victim has become the great hermeneutical principle, enabling us to decode all such instances of persecution.” (GT, 84)

Though he does not engage specifically with Jesus destruction of the temple, we can recognize the importance of Girard’s thinking for our thesis. Indeed, Girard’s insight to the nature of religious systems and their violent foundations helps us recognize the possible implication of Jesus’ death, were we to fully recognize it in the way Girard reveals. And while we may not go so far as to assert that “no religious culture or institution has done a demonstratively better job of ‘deconstructing’ sacred violence than Christianity”, (GT, 123) we could agree that this ought to be the case. Indeed, Girard’s theory does present “a petite idée of infinite applicability, rather than yet another totalizing system”, (GT, 134) especially in light of our project here.

Jesus’ destructive temple action functions as the fulfillment of His counter-cultural, counter-temple movement which sought to emphatically extend the good news of the Kingdom to the other, in which Girard’s theory does assist. Engaging with Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Kirwan explains: “There is no change in ‘me’ without change in my relation to the other; nor is there any change in ‘me’ unless it is initiated by the other.” (GT, 51) This insight is perhaps most helpful, as it pertains specifically to Jesus’ proclamation, that the temple was to be “a house of prayer for all nations”, (Mark 11.17) necessarily implying engagement with the other – and the Other.

In this post, I argue for the deconstruction of the church by addressing the father of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida. I do so primarily through engaging Derrida and Theology, a recent book by Steven Shakespeare. In the coming days, I will do the same by looking at the work of Gianni Vattimo and René Girard.

At the outset of Derrida and Theology, Steven Shakespeare relates the work of Jacques Derrida to Woody Allen’s 1997 movie Deconstructing Harry. He writes

Allen’s film plays on the caricature of the dissolute writer. [The main character] objects to religious fanaticism, indeed to all religion as arbitrary and exclusive, undermining our universal obligations to all people regardless of creed and race. However, his own life is fragmented, shallow and bitter. He cannot help confusing real life and fiction, with disastrous consequences for the former. He seems incapable of sustaining any lasting relationship. In the end, it is only his fiction that offers him any redemption, any way of gathering the shards of his life together. (DT, 1)

This comparison, though limited, holds keen insights for another comparison at the heart of this essay: the work of Derrida with Jesus’ first-century temple action. Just as Block, the main character in Allen’s film, objects to fanatical expressions of faith, so Jesus’ deconstructive temple action pronounces judgment upon exclusivist religious practices in his day.

Indeed, as we will see, Jesus’ pronouncement immediately following his action, seeks to reorient the first-century Temple toward its original purpose for the ‘other’: to be “a house of prayer for all nations.” (Mark 11.17) While we may not be willing to go as far as to assert that His personal life is not divided, the Gospels do present Jesus as the fulfillment of Israel’s history, whose communal life could be characterized as “fragmented, shallow and bitter.” Further, Jesus cannot help integrating the Hebrew Scriptures with his own life, indeed with “disastrous consequences,” and yet it is this text that guides His mission toward redemptive meaning. A final similarity is found in Jesus’ relationship with the religious authorities, His twelve disciples, and even His own family, each of who have been entirely incapable of sustaining any pronounced commitment to His Kingdom movement. This post, then, will seek to explore the culmination of Jesus’ counter-Temple movement with regard not to Harry Block, but Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction.

There are those, of course, who would question engaging Christian theology or ecclesiology with one who openly declares he could “rightly pass for an atheist.” At the same time, we ought to recognize that this perspective “ignores the difficult and contested history of theology itself, which, even confining ourselves to the Christian tradition, is one of dialogues, appropriations of other languages, debates and disputes.” (DT, 3) Indeed, in faith “we are invited into the space of an open-ended conversation.” (DT, 7)

At the outset, we note the limits of comparing Jesus’ action with Derrida’s concept:

Deconstruction is not so much a technique that an individual can master and employ. It is more an inherent dynamic of language and meaning. It is something that happens, and that reading and writing and acting engages with, without us ever fully grasping it. Reading deconstructively means something like being attentive to an event, an unexpected arrival, that interrupts, contradicts and dislocates what appeared to be settled and fixed. (DT, 25)

Indeed, deconstruction – which builds upon Heidegger’s destruktion – is not something to be employed in order to bring about a desired result. At the outset, then, it seems there is an inherent problem in our comparison, namely that we are arguing for Jesus’ action as the employment of this technique. On the contrary, our thesis here is much simpler: that Jesus’ temple action functions as the culmination of His mission, which, as a result of our reading here, can be characterized as opening a space for the Event. This must taken place, then, “in the middle of secondariness, interpretation and flux.” (DT, 27) In this sense, then, we are seeking to view Jesus’ mission as a reading of first-century Jewish faith, which ‘interrupts, contradicts and dislocates’ the seemingly ‘settled and fixed’ system of power. Notice, for instance, Matthew 11.16-17:

To what can I compare this generation? They are like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling out to others:
We played the flute for you,
and you did not dance;
we sang a dirge
and you did not mourn.

Indeed, here we see Jesus deconstructively “reading” the faith of those within His own first-century context. As Steven Shakespeare notes, “Human religion produces only idols. Only the free self-revelation of a wholly other God can create in us the capacity to receive God’s word.” (DT, 210)

As aforementioned, the mission of Jesus took place secondarily, within the history of interpretation. While a Christian understanding regarding the role of the temple is often projected onto the gospels, we must seek to pull back these layers to reveal a Jewish understanding. As Derrida asserts in Glas, “The risk, then, is the Jewish reading.” (DT, 124) Jesus’ particular reading regarding the role of the temple could have been influenced by Solomon’s prayer of dedication in 1st Kings 8.41-43, which includes an emphasis similar to what some proponents of “missional” thinking would assert today:

As for the foreigner who does not belong to your people Israel but has come from a distant land because of your name – for men will hear of your great name and your mighty hand and your outstretched arm – when he comes and prays toward this temple, then hear from heaven, your dwelling place, and do whatever the foreigner asks of you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your own people Israel, and may know that this house I have built bears your Name.

Structurally, then, the temple was meant to be “associated with the reality of the object”, (DT, 35) in this case, YHWH – for ‘all the peoples of the earth.’ And yet, as Derrida would assert, “[s]ense can be lost along the way. Meaning can wander from its source.” (DT, 32) Jesus’ temple action, viewed from this perspective, seeks to reorient Israel’s central institution back to its original purpose. Thus, it functions as both the continuation and fulfillment of His counter-temple movement that has previously included subversive teaching, table fellowship, healing, forgiveness, and symbolic actions (such as baptism and the Passover meal) all of which were tied unambiguously to the Temple cult.

Jesus’ temple action, then, reveals that the institution is a function of what Derrida would call différance, a term crafted by Derrida himself. This neologism plays on the French word différer, which can mean both “to defer” and “to differ.” Thus, Jesus is seeking to remind the Jews that the temple was originally built in order that all people would know YHWH, who is both different from the institution and to whom the institution is meant to defer. As Derrida himself asserts in Writing and Difference, “[l]ife negates itself in literature only so that it may survive better. So that it may be better. It does not negate itself any more than it affirms itself: it differs from itself, defers itself and writes itself as difference.” (DT, 98)

Commenting on this, Shakespeare notes, “In this sense, life and God are close to one another.” In the same way, Jesus’ temple action negates the institution in order to save it. Note also: “The trace is always crossing itself out, always deferred, never at one, never home. The trace is therefore not only a condition of meaning of unmeaning too.” (DT, 41)

With many allusions to what seems like a negative Christian theology, Derrida seeks to distance himself by utilizing the term khôra, found in Plato, and more recently Heidegger, which is defined not as “a receptacle, not a giver or gift… [though] in its passivity… allows the world to take place.” (DT, 154) If we can briefly set aside the idea of a receptacle as a physical area, we must ask, is not such an ‘interval’ or ‘space’ congruent with Jesus’ declaration regarding the purpose of the temple? Indeed, by overturning tables and benches, as well as keeping anyone from using the temple court as a shortcut through town, Jesus seeks to provide a passive openness to the other. It can become, then, “not a barren desert (a very patriarchal image of lonely aridity) but a fecund matrix, a womb of possibilities and new life.” (DT, 202)

Notice a similar theme in Derrida’s assertion in Writing and Difference, that

God separated himself from himself in order to let us speak, in order to astonish and interrogate us. He did so not by speaking but by keeping still, by letting silence interrupt his voice and his signs, by letting the Tables be broken… God no longer speaks to us, he has interrupted himself: we must take words upon ourselves.” (DT, 67; 68)

If our thesis, so far, is correct, we can find a corollary between Jesus’ temple action and the demise of Western metaphysics. Shakespeare notes that Derrida’s project uncovered how

the very openness and incompleteness that we find in the most purified structures of truth shows that such distinctions are unstable at best. At worst, they lead us back into dogmatism. We might even suggest that they result in a form of idolatry: taking as timeless and absolute what is secondary and contingent. (DT, 49)

In the same way, the structure of the first-century Temple cult reveals an incomplete system of truth, namely because of its exclusion of the other. Its dogmatism can be as clearly perceived as its idolatry. We need no further evidence than to note that, historically speaking, Jesus temple action leads directly to his execution. Note especially Mark 11.18, which immediately follows Jesus’ action and proclamation: “The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.”

We have been seeking to elucidate how the first-century temple functioned similarly to how Socrates viewed writing; as a pharmakon, “a Greek word that means both cure and poison.” (DT, 57) As such, we are now at a place to recognize the primary reason Derrida’s project is so central to Jesus’ symbolic action. This is due to its functioning as a heterology, a project focused on radical otherness, as Rodolphe Gasché has asserted. Indeed,

Derrida does not claim that deconstruction must be purely secular, this-worldly, renouncing all ideas of transcendence. We should not forget that it is in the name of the other, in response to the other, that deconstruction seeks to expose the limits of any system. (DT, 75)

In the same way, as aforementioned, Jesus’ entire countercultural, counter-Temple mission and temple action is centered on the ‘other.’ Note, again, Jesus’ proclamation:

Is it not written:
‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’ (Mark 11.17)

For the temple cult to remain faithful to its “missional” calling, it was to be a place where all people could come to pray. And yet, it had betrayed its purpose. Just as Derrida asserted that “[w]riting exposes us to the other, not just the other person but to the wholly other that subverts our mastery and divides our human essence”, (DT, 83) so the function of the temple was meant to be a place that exposed God’s holy people to other people and to Himself, the tout autre.

It has been written that “[f]or Derrida, philosophy is always obsessed with its ‘other’” (DT, 57), and yet, this is much more than ethereal philosophical speculation. Indeed, “Derrida’s thought invites the coming of the other, the address of the other, and this is an irreducibly religious motif.” (DT, 197) Jesus’ symbolic action, then, seeks to reopen the structural understanding of the first-temple so that it can be available to the other: “In other words, signs can only be available to others if they are not tied to a present meaning immediately contained within my own mind.” (DT, 79)

The temple had, of course, become irreplaceably tied to a function of what Emile Durkheim would call mechanical solidarity, namely that there are insiders and outsiders, with obvious distinctions between them. Missiologically speaking, the temple had become a bounded set, when it was meant to be centered. By engaging with Foucault’s History of Madness, we see the injustice of the temple was, in some sense, necessary:

This inhuman madness is necessary for thought to get going. If it is not acknowledged, even by those wishing to stand up for the victims of history’s exclusions, then we risk erecting a totalitarian structure, with all the potential for violence that entails (and we should not this early ethical concern of Derrida’s). (DT, 84)

Here one thinks of Žižek’s dictum that those who rob banks are often those who set up others – and it could be argued that throughout history Christian ecclesial institutions have done just that. Steven Shakespeare notes that at the American Academy of Religion conference, John Caputo once asked Jacques Derrida “To whom did Derrida pray and what answer did he expect?” (DT, 11) In his reply, Derrida noted that “his skepticism is part of the prayer, part of an openness to the approach of the other that no secular or religious system [could] stifle.” (DT, 13)

In conclusion, we again ask, can we not find in this response a similarity to the prayer that Jesus believes should be characteristic in the khôra of the temple? Is this not why he seeks to deconstruct the entire temple cult? Shakepeare concludes with a statement about Derrida, that could be easily applied to Jesus’ symbolic temple action: “It is as if he is saying, or showing us, that one way in which to disrupt systems of thought that have totalitarian pretensions is to pray.” (DT, 15)

As we have seen, Derrida’s thought lends itself quite well to aspects of Christian theology and ecclesiology. His emphasis on deconstruction helps us imagine – in a postmodern setting – what ministry in Jesus’ name among systems of power could look like. His emphasis on différance reminds us that, to employ Nietzsche’s assertion, our institutions are not facts, but are merely interpretations. And his khôra helps us recognize what such institutions could be. It has been noted, “[p]erhaps we can find in Derrida, if not a new theology, at least a thinker who provokes us to consider the possibility of doing theology otherwise.” (DT, 47) Could we not, in the same way, find in Derrida, if not a new ecclesiology, at least a thinker who provokes us to consider the possibility of doing ecclesiology otherwise?

Throughout recent decades of declining church attendance, a curious dynamic has been uncovered, most emphatically pronounced by the title of a 2007 book: They Like Jesus But Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations. In it, pastor Dan Kimball asserts that those outside of the institution of faith see the church as

an organized religion with a political agenda, judgmental and negative, dominated by males and oppress[ing] to females, homophobic, arrogantly claim[ing] that all other religions are wrong, and full of fundamentalists who take the whole Bible literally. (Kimball, They Like Jesus But Not the Church, 9)

Interestingly, throughout its pages, Kimball never asks the central question necessary for ecclesiological insight: what is the church? If he did so, he might uncover an interesting dynamic, namely that the church is not – and was never intended to be – preeminently an institution, but instead was, is, and will forever be, a people.

After recognizing that dynamic, however, Kimball might then realize that those who hate the church are also those who are a part of it; who are seeking to renew it by their very presence in it.

In his book What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, philosopher John Caputo, brings these two streams together. After emphatically pronouncing that the church is “Plan B” (to the Kingdom of God, of course), he asserts:

if we ask, “What would Jesus deconstruct?” the answer is first and foremost the church! For the idea behind the church is to give way to the kingdom, to proclaim and enact and finally disappear into the kingdom that Jesus called for, all the while resisting the temptation of confusing itself with the kingdom. (Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 35)

Alongside the demise of metaphysics, then, does not our current postmodern culture allow us – even demand of us? – that we question the role of institutions in and for our lives? Is this not what Jesus proclaimed, that tearing down the temple would result in it being raised in three days (John 2.13) and proclaimed “‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’” (Mark 11.17)

Instead of, like Kimball, fearing the distrust of emerging generations, we are in a perfect place in history to remember God’s initial plan for institutions of faith, as Solomon prayed so long ago:

[a]s for the foreigner who does not belong to your people Israel but has come from a distant land because of your name – for men will hear of your great name and your mighty hand and your outstretched arm – when he comes and prays toward this temple, then hear from heaven, your dwelling place, and do whatever the foreigner asks of you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your own people Israel, and may know that this house I have built bears your Name. (1st Kings 8.41-43)

Here we see both the centripetal and centrifugal aspects of mission. Indeed, this brings us back to our original section on postmodernism and deconstruction. James K.A. Smith, again, clarifies:

God does not call for the deconstruction and dismantling of the deconstructible on the basis of or with a view to some undeconstructible and impossible kingdom; rather, God condescends to inhabit the deconstructible.” (Smith, What Jesus Did: The Incarnation as the More Radical Hermeneutics)

In other words, the mission of those who like Jesus – or, better yet, seek to follow Him – in postmodern cultures is not to tear down the existing institution, but to echo Derrida’s veins! to the coming of God’s Kingdom into a new time and place, by the power of His Spirit, transforming within their sphere of influence.

As we have seen, postmodern philosophy and culture do not necessarily preclude Christian faith. On the contrary, they can lead to a renewed appreciation for the incarnation of God’s Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ, who willingly took on human flesh to “swim in cultural water” like each of us. When recognized in light of God’s saving work throughout history, postmodernity can indeed lead to a robust faith that seeks to grow through Scripture and in community, that it might go out into the world to proclaim God’s narrative: the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

[Photo credit: Dave Walker]

For the church newsletter:

On March 21^st, at 11:12pm – a mere five hours after the conclusion of my ordination service – I updated my Facebook status. It read, “Curtis A. Bronzan is not now, nor will he ever be, a reverend. ‘Curtis’ is just fine.” Amidst the myriad responses was a friend from my seminary days who wrote, “hmm…not just a river in Egypt?”

In one sense, I suppose, he’s right. I now am a Reverend. Which is fantastic. Serving the Church of Jesus Christ is all I’ve ever dreamt of doing with my life. But, in another sense – as many of you know – I bristle at the thought of being “Pastor.” Notice Jesus’ strong words for the religious leaders of His day:

The religion scholars and Pharisees are competent teachers in God’s Law. You won’t go wrong in following their teachings on Moses. But be careful about following them. They talk a good line, but they don’t live it. They don’t take it into their hearts and live it out in their behavior. It’s all spit-and-polish veneer.

Instead of giving you God’s Law as food and drink by which you can banquet on God, they package it in bundles of rules, loading you down like pack animals. They seem to take pleasure in watching you stagger under these loads, and wouldn’t think of lifting a finger to help. Their lives are perpetual fashion shows, embroidered prayer shawls one day and flowery prayers the next. They love to sit at the head table at church dinners, basking in the most prominent positions, preening in the radiance of public flattery, receiving honorary degrees, and getting called ‘Doctor’ and ‘Reverend.’

Don’t let people do that to you, put you on a pedestal like that. You all have a single Teacher, and you are all classmates. Don’t set people up as experts over your life, letting them tell you what to do. Save that authority for God; let him tell you what to do. No one else should carry the title of ‘Father’; you have only one Father, and he’s in heaven. And don’t let people maneuver you into taking charge of them. There is only one Life-Leader for you and them – Christ. (Matthew 23.2-10, The Message)

In “Jesus’ day” – as we might say in Sunday School – the religious folks put themselves up on pedestals because of their knowledge, prestige, and power – and they didn’t live how they taught others to live. I fear that things haven’t changed all that much in 2000 years. And as I recognize the sinfulness of my own heart, I fear that being called Reverend might just go to my head and keep me from trying to, as Paul says, “work out my salvation with fear and trembling.” (Philippians 2.12) Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful to have received a profoundly transformative education and am honored to serve at Good Shepherd, amongst some of the most wonderful people God ever created. But I never want my office to become who I am. Instead, I want to follow the one true “Life-Leader” for you and me – Christ.

That brings me to a second reason I’m uncomfortable with my new title: in short, where’s yours!? The Christian Scriptures repeatedly affirm that the Church of Jesus is a Body where everyone has a part, and I fear that seeing pastors “up there on a pedestal” negatively influences the inherent worth of the other parts of the Body. One of the foundational doctrines of our faith is the priesthood of all believers, which reminds us that each and every one of us is a priest in Jesus’ Church. In sports terminology, everyone gets to play! Or, better yet, in the Apostle Paul’s words,

Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be?” (1^st Corinthians 12.14-19)

In short, if I’m “Reverend Curtis,” then among us are also “Teacher Joanne” and “Pray-er Michelle” and “Administrator Jack.” Yes, administration is a spiritual gift! (see 1^st Corinthians 12.27-31)

Another Facebook response that night asserted that my wife’s grandmother would be proud. It went on to explain “She thinks it’s ‘irreverent’ to call any person, but Christ, Reverend.” In short, I’m with her. But, I suppose you can call me anything you like – as long as it’s not late for dinner. But know this: if you call me “Reverend” or “Pastor,” be prepared for me to grimace – and then call you by your spiritual gift as well.

I ran across an article this morning by James K.A. Smith in response to John Caputo’s What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church. What would be better? Not much, except maybe Caputo responding to Smith’s response!

The Calvin college professor and prolific author starts out by asserting that he is “already clearly on record as a friend and fan,” but seeks “to push the conversation further, taking the spirit of Jack’s book seriously enough to disagree with it.”

After affirming that the church is deconstructible, Smith goes so far as to affirm that the Kingdom itself is deconstructible as well, since Jesus characterizes the Kingdom “to come,”  revealing it’s “contingency, particularity and finitude.” As such, he asserts that “Catholic orthodoxy actually makes a more radical affirmation of deconstructibility than Caputo’s Derridean Jesus.” Here’s his conclusion:

And here’s the crucial difference: the Trinitarian God of Catholic faith is not scared off by contingency, particularity or deconstructibility. Unlike the Wholly Other of the Derridean Gospel, the Incarnate God exhibits no allergy to the deconstructible. Indeed, this is the very distinctive logic of incarnation: God does not call for the deconstruction and dismantling of the deconstructible on the basis of or with a view to some undeconstructible and impossible kingdom; rather, God condescends to inhabit the deconstructible. If we want to ask ourselves what Jesus would do, we might consider what Jesus did. The Incarnation is the mad story of the undeconstructible God who did not consider undeconstructibility as something to be grasped, nor did he despise deconstructibility, but rather taking the “human, all too human form” of a servant, he humbled himself to the point of inhabiting the very deconstructible structures of human law and culture—even to the point of suffering death at the hands of these institutions. But he did so not with a view to eviscerating the deconstructible, but rather to rightly ordering it such that the contingent, particularity of this deconstructible creation might reach its proper telos (a loose paraphrase of Philippians 2:5-11). It’s not “deconstructibility” that’s the problem; it is the particular, wrongly-ordered configurations of the deconstructible that are at issue.

The scandal of Catholic ecclesiology is that this logic of incarnation then extends to an institution, the church Catholic, which is now configured as the body of which Christ is the head. The same Spirit that inhabited and empowered the incarnate Jesus (e.g., Luke 4:1, 14, 18) is given to the ecclesial community (Acts 1:8). This continues the logic of incarnation: the undeconstructible God continues to condescend and inhabit the very deconstructible institution that is the Church. Far from being infallible or perfect, nonetheless the institution is an extension of this logic and bears within it all the resources it needs to make sense of its own failures. Indeed, two of its most significant seasons (Advent and Lent) are seasons of penitence; it gathers as a community weekly to confess its failures (when was the last time the Democrats got together to do that?!). But in contrast to the logic of purity that seems to motivate the Derridean critique of deconstructibility as itself a problem, the logic of incarnation testifies to a God who inhabits, affirms, and takes up all the messiness of a deconstructible institution. The Catholic affirmation of the institutional church is rooted in this logic of incarnation which is a continuing testimony of what Jesus did.

Some thoughts to ponder. It makes me wonder why Smith questioned David E. Fitch’s use of Žižek’s “lack” for the reformation of the church at the SBL conference last year. Maybe I don’t understand his criticism fully.

Today was supposed to be a pretty full day, with two fairly important meetings at Fuller (important for me, anyway). Instead, I’m at home trying to fight an impending migraine.

With reading difficult, I put in one of the best documentaries ever in the history of the world, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.” Here’s a quote from Jeff Tweedy I need to remember for my impending ThM thesis:

It’s a constant process, we make records and they’re like, that ends up being a thing that you’re making and you have a million options as to what that thing can be and what shape it can be… We generally go for a pretty straight definitive version of what the song sounds like it should be and then deconstruct it a little bit and see if there’s some more exciting way to approach it… There’s no reason – at all – not to destroy it. We made it, so it’s ours to destroy. That’s liberating and exiting in a really creative way.

It’s wild how many things in this DVD seem applicable to my work, but then again, I may be just reading into it my own love of Wilco. But seriously, couldn’t this same sentiment be applied to the church? Like John Caputo says (previously noted here):

The church is Plan B. (In deconstruction, everything is Plan B.)… The existence of the church is provisional – like a long-term substitute teacher – praying for the kingdom, whose coming Jesus announce and which everyone was expecting would come sometime soon. But this coming was deferred, and the church occupies the space of “deferral,” of the distance of “difference,” between two comings. (I just said, in case you missed it, the church is a function of différance!) In the meantime, and it is always the meantime for the church, the church is supposed to do the best it can to bring that kingdom about in itself, here on earth, in a process of incessant self-renewal or aut0-deconstruction, while not setting itself up as a bunch of kings or princes. The church is by definition a call (kletos) for renewal.

That is why the church is “deconstructible,” but the kingdom of God, if there is such a thing, is not. The church is a provisional construction, and whatever is constructed is deconstructible, while the kingdom of God is that in virtue of which the church is deconstructible. so, if we ask, “What would Jesus deconstruct?” the answer is first and foremost the church! For the idea behind the church is to give way to the kingdom, to proclaim and enact and finally disappear into the kingdom that Jesus called for, all the while resisting the temptation of confusing itself with the kingdom. (WWJD?, 35)

I’m working through Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer for my continued ThM research. This bit speaks specifically to my desire to propose the de(con)struction of the church, or how to theologize with a hammer, or how to circle the institution by crossing it out:

Our institutions are no longer fit for anything: everyone is unanimous about that. But the fault lies not in them but in us. Having lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, we are losing the institutions themselves, because we are no longer fit for them. Democracy has always been the declining form of the power to organize. I have already, in Human, All Too Human, characterized modern democracy, together with its imperfect manifestations such as the ‘German Reich’, as the decaying form of the state. For institutions to exist there must exist the kind of will, instinct, imperative which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to centuries-long responsibility, to solidarity between succeeding generations backwards and forwards in infinitum… The entire West has lost those instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which the future grows: perhaps nothing goes so much against the grain of its ‘modern spirit’ as this. (104-105)

I recently came across this on the Facebook:

President Obama has decided that there will no longer be a “National Day of Prayer” held in May. He doesn’t want to offend anybody. Where was his concern about offending Christians last January when he allowed the Muslims to hold a day of prayer on the capitol grounds. As a Christian American “I am offended.” if you agree copy and paste no matter what religion you are, this country was built on Freedom PASS IT ON

It turns out, however, President Obama had nothing to do with it. The USA Today put it this way:

The rumors arise out of Thursday’s decision by Wisconsin U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb that the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. She ruled that it violates the First Amendment’s ban against a law respecting an establishment of religion.

The National Day of Prayer has been in effect since Harry S. Truman signed a bill bringing it into law in 1952, stating that it provided an opportunity for “the people of the United States [to] turn to God in prayer and meditation in churches, in groups, and as individuals.” It has been held on the first day of May since 1988, during President Reagan’s second term in the White House.

All that aside, upon returning to the Facebook status update itself, we ought to question what is really at stake, what is really going on in the statement. At the outset, the assertion is that “President Obama has decided that there will no longer be a “National Day of Prayer” held in May.” It concludes, on the other hand, with “if you agree copy and paste no matter what religion you are, this country was built on Freedom PASS IT ON.”

So, let’s question what’s really at stake: Is it prayer we are urged to fight for, or is it freedom? This may seem unimportant, but is this not the most important?

Christian faith – at least biblically speaking – is firmly based on the principles of both freedom and prayer. But can either of those things be granted by a government? Can true freedom – in the Christian sense of the term – be granted by a civic agency? Can true prayer be legislated?

Notice 1st Thessalonians 5.16-24:

Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

Do not put out the Spirit’s fire; do not treat prophecies with contempt. Test everything. Hold on to the good. Avoid every kind of evil.

May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it.

How is it that in the midst of the thoroughly pagan Roman empire, followers of Jesus were encouraged to “pray continually”? Had they been granted that opportunity once a year?

Of course not. Their simple faith statement “Jesus is Lord” had, of course, been stolen from the playbook of Caesar, who, believing himself to be god incarnate, required all Roman citizens to state “Caesar is Lord.”

And Christians throughout the centuries have prayed not because they have been given the opportunity to pray by their governments, but rather because they have been given freedom through the work of Jesus, the Messiah, Son of the Living God.

Notice also Romans 8:

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

Could our attempts to legislate prayer be abdicating our responsibility to live as “children of God”? Do we spend more time “fighting for our rights” than we do living the true freedom granted us by Jesus himself?

Or, to put it in even more stark terms, would the Christian movement be exploding exponentially in China – where Christians are not allowed to gather together – if instead of gathering subversively they took to the streets to fight for a day of prayer?

The church has always spread explosively when governments tried to put it down. Always.

But, with all due respect to my well meaning friends, we don’t want the good news of freedom to spread, we just want our Commander in Chief to recognize our rights. And if he doesn’t, well then, let’s post it to Facebook.

Just as many have missed the subversive element in Jesus’ teaching, many have missed his emphasis on community. In some cases, of course, this is a result of reading into the Gospel accounts our own cultural presuppositions. At other times, however, it is the result of poor theology. Adolf von Harnack, in an 1899 lecture, may have been guilty of both:

Anyone who wants to know what the kingdom of God and the coming of this kingdom mean in Jesus’ preaching must read and meditate on the parables. There he will learn what the kingdom is all about. The kingdom of God comes by coming to individuals, making entrance into their souls, and being grasped by them.

This reading, as well as countless others, addresses Jesus’ Kingdom inaugurating mission in individualist Western eyes in light of the Christian church, thus failing to incorporate Jesus’ Jewishness; that he was, as we saw above, offering covenant renewal to God’s chosen people, Israel. In discussing whether Jesus came to start a church, Gerhard Lohfink rightly corrects Harnack’s individualist presupposition, that “[a]fter a history of more than a millennium, the people of God could neither be founded nor established, but only gathered and restored.” (Jesus and Community, 71)

This was done, of course, by Jesus’ reaching out to individuals for the purpose of the larger community. Interestingly, however, Jesus did not offer this covenant renewal on his own, but gathered the Kingdom community from within a discipleship community. The Gospels assert that Jesus called disciples – a subversive, upside-down practice of its own – which included those from completely divergent political backgrounds. Lohfink states,

The Twelve must have been an odd mixture – from Matthew the tax collector (Matt. 10:3) to Simon the Zealot (Luke 6:15). Including both a tax collector and a Zealot in a single group united the most opposed forces that existed anywhere in Israel at the time, for the tax collectors collaborated with the Romans, while the Zealots emphatically rejected the Roman occupation as incompatible with the reign of God. (Jesus and Community, 11)

These disciples were, of course, meant to represent the twelve tribes of Israel. Common understanding of these disciples often misses the reality that the twelve were appointed from among the crowds who were already following Jesus. Note, in particular, Mark’s account: “Jesus went up on a mountainside and called to him those he wanted, and they came to him. He appointed twelve – designating them apostles – that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach and to have authority to drive out demons.” (Mark 3.13-15)

Commenting on this passage, Lohfink notes, “At that time, Mark intends to say, Jesus instituted twelve of the disciples as the Twelve.” (Jesus and Community, 9) These twelve, as well as the many others who were incorporated into the Jesus community, were to join Jesus in proclaiming and enacting his kingdom. This was, thus, a “learning community”;

[t]hey must learn all that he teaches them so that they can proclaim it. They must receive the power that only the can give so that they can challenge the powers of the world in the name of the Sovereign Jesus… Thus they learned the how of Jesus’ mission as they learned the what and the why of good news. (The Incarnation and the Church’s Witness, 5)

Thus, this community learned from Jesus’ subversive teaching addressed above and continued his kingdom-centered mission, often outside of the institutions of first century Jewish faith. Scot McKnight thus notes,

[w]e are similarly bound to think that this society will spread justice in this world. Nothing could be clearer from the prophetic denunciations of Jesus against the leaders (Matt. 23), Peter’s revolutionary, insubordinate response to the Jerusalem officials (Acts 4-5) and his summons of the Asia Minor parishes to live the gospel responsibly, and Stephen’s prophetic explanation of what God was doing through Jesus (Acts 7:51-8:3) – and what else could be said about the apostle Paul’s relentless preaching of the gospel to Gentiles? Jesus and his many followers created an alternative society, but not simply in a sectarian sense. Instead, they took their message of the kingdom of God, the ecclesial body, into the public square as both proclamation and performance.” (A Community Called Atonement, 131)

The appointing of twelve disciples seems, at first blush, to be anything but subversive in light of the Hebrew Scriptures. This fails to take into account, however, the perspective of the first century Temple cult, which Jesus sought to challenge by said renewed covenant community. Horsley and Silberman note,

Jesus sought to turn the People of Israel away from that Herodian vision toward the tradition of an independent Israel, and it is significant, in this connection, that the gospel traditions stress “twelve” as the number of the core group of disciples, with Jesus proclaiming that his twelve closest followers were commissioned with establishing justice for all the twelve tribes of Israel (Matt. 19:28; Luke 22:29-30). (The Message and the Kingdom, 63)

The twelve, then, as devoted members of Jesus’ community were meant to function as the bearers of this new society committed to justice for Israel. While it is common to separate their communal activities from symbolic destruction of the Temple, they go hand in hand, as N.T. Wright asserts, “Jesus’ action in the Temple was a symbolic destruction… these words and this action followed with a close logic from the rest of Jesus’ agenda, the programme enacted in healings and meal-sharings.” (Jesus and the Victory of God, 61) Horsley and Silberman likewise note, “Jesus’ healings and exorcisms were, in fact, merely part of a larger program.” (The Message and the Kingdom, 52) It is to these healings and meal sharings that we now turn our attention, in seeking to examine Jesus’ community building activity.

In recent history, the church has examined and defended Jesus’ healings and exorcisms in light of an Enlightenment dualism instead of a first-century Jewish worldview. Lohfink, therefore, is right to link Jesus’ healings with his eschatological preaching: “[s]ince the eschatological horizon of Jesus’ activity has reentered consciousness, it has been clear that Jesus’ miracles of healing must be seen in connection with his preaching of the kingdom of God.” (Jesus and Community, 12) A example of this inherent connection is found in the opening verses of the Gospel of Mark:

They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law. Just then a man in their synagogue who was possessed by an evil spirit cried out, ‘What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are – the Holy One of God!’
‘Be quiet!’ said Jesus sternly. ‘Come out of him!’ The evil spirit shook the man violently and came out of him with a shriek. (Mark 1.21-26)

Notice not only Jesus’ authoritative teaching – which is unlike “the teachers of the law” – but the authority by which he casts out the evil spirit, as well as the implicit connection between the two. Commenting upon this episode, Ched Myers asserts that at the very outset of his ministry, “Jesus’ practice – specifically his healing, exorcism, and solidarity with the socially outcast – brings him into conflict with the authorities.” (Binding the Strong Man, 140)

As Jesus journeys toward Jerusalem, to borrow Luke’s literal and metaphorical reminder, this tension is heightened. In another healing event, Jesus “forgives” a paralytic in full view of the scribes. (Mark 2.1-12, Matthew 9.1-8, and Luke 5.17-26) Again, Ched Myers offers a helpful examination:

In choosing to introduce the language of the debt code, Jesus is elaborating the symbolics of hierarchy. The man’s lack of bodily wholeness would have been attributed to either his own sin, or, if a birth defect, inherited sin; he was thus denied full status in the body politic of Israel. Jesus summarily releases him from all debt – hence restoring his social wholeness and thus his personhood, which in turn is equated with the restoration of physical wholeness… The scribes are incensed, and for good reason. Their complaint that none but God can remit debt is not a defense of the sovereignty of Yahweh, but of their own social power. As Torah interpreters and co-stewards of the symbolic order, they control determinations of indebtedness. (Myers, Binding the Strong Man, 155) Note also Horsley and Silberman: “In many cases, the painful symptoms of illness were subject to cure through personal atonement, a prayer of supplication to God, or the contribution of a free-will offering to the Temple in Jerusalem.” (The Message and the Kingdom, 48)

Thus, it was not only Jesus’ later symbolic temple action that pronounced judgment upon the first century religious system, but his continual healing ministry of bringing wholeness back to the broken both bodily and socially.

Another element to Jesus’ community building was his practice of table fellowship, which, like it’s corollary, healing, “became seen as a further way in which the kingdom was actually being inaugurated.” (Jesus and the Victory of God, 149) Unlike contemporary Western culture, where mealtimes are at best occasions for individuals to eat together, in first century Jewish culture meals were consumed within the context of the extended family, alongside others from their own social class. S.S. Bartchy notes,

[a]nyone who challenged these rankings and boundaries would be judged to have acted dishonorably, a serious charge in cultures based on the values of honor and shame. Transgressing these customs consistently would make a person an enemy of social stability. (Table Fellowship: Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, 796)

This is, of course, exactly what Jesus did in proclaiming and enacting the Kingdom of God.

The Gospel of Mark provides an interesting example of these eating habits. After calling a tax collector as a disciple – another subversive action – Jesus is immediately pictured as having dinner in his home:

While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and ‘sinners’ were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the ‘sinners’ and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and ‘sinners’?”
On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 2.15-17)

Ched Myers asserts that

Jesus’ concluding maxim in 2:17 unmasks the Pharisaic duplicity: for all their rhetoric about extending holiness to all of Israel, their practice betrays their commitment to rigid social boundaries between the “righteous” and the “sinner.” This boundary Jesus flatly rejects, and his mission is specifically aimed at transgressing it. (Binding the Strong Man, 159)

We see Jesus’ eating practices, then, in a very similar light to his healing mission: to restore the outcast as a part of the covenant people. As in his teaching, these community buiding activities were done outside of the Temple system, with blatant disregard for its requirements. N.T. Wright concludes,

What Jesus was offering, in other words, was not a different religious system. It was a new world order, the end of Israel’s long desolation, the truth and final ‘forgiveness of sins’, the inauguration of the kingdom of god. This, I suggest, was what was implied when Jesus announced ‘forgiveness of sins’ to particular people. The effect was the same as his eating with ‘sinners’: he was celebrating the coming of the kingdom, and those who shared this celebration with him were benefiting from this great ‘forgiveness of sins’. There is, in fact, no tension, no play-off, between the personal and the corporate at this point. (Jesus and the Victory of God, 272) Toole puts it this way: “Jesus thus made possible a new community that refused to be founded upon the exclusion of the other.” (Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, 246)