Curtis A. Bronzan

The books on the left symbolize the completion of the coursework for my ThM, with nothing but the 8 unit thesis left to write. These books formed my final two classes, Missiological Integration with Douglas McConnell and a reading on postmodern culture with Barry Taylor.

I’ll be spending the summer doing some unofficial reading in order to present my thesis proposal in September, in order to begin writing in the fall. If all goes well, I’ll have a rough draft ready by the end of the year, which will function as a writing sample for the PhD program. But we’ll see about that.

After a couple nights of tossing and turning, I slept in for quite a while this morning. A little after 10am, I pulled myself out of bed, took the dog for a walk, grabbed some coffee, and set out for a lunch meeting in Pasadena.

I had a great lunch meeting with Barry Taylor, one of the professors with whom I’ve been studying toward my ThM, in the Fuller cafeteria. The food was palatable, the conversation brilliant (in the British sense of the term).

After picking up a few books at the bookstore (three as gifts, two for me), I headed off to mall near Hollywood to purchase a gift certificate for a friend. While there, I took a break from driving and dug into Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue (between Gianni Vattimo and René Girard – two authors that were a part of the lunchtime conversation, though I purchased the book just today).

Here’s some excerpts from the introduction:

This book… offers two voices in the contemporary intellectual debate that are engaged not in separating the two camps but in uniting them, on the basis of an intuition already partially elaborated by Max Weber, implicitly suggested and described by Eric Auerbach in Mimesis, and more recently argued by Marcel Gauchet, to the effect that secularization – and hence laicism – is, in substance, produced by Christianity. In other words, Christianity is the religion of the exit from religion, and democracy, the free market, civil rights, individual freedoms, and laicism have all been, if not precisely invented in the absolute sense, “facilitated” in their development and expression by the Christian cultures. Even Richard Rorty, a philosopher allergic to the religious, has recently conceded this – though without attempting an explanation of the historical reasons. (2)

In his polemic against Christianity, Nietzsche was able to discern the real anthropological kernel of religion: its sacrificial and victimizing origins. (6)

The nexus between religion and violence, which appears so striking to us today, comes about not because religions are intrinsically violent but rather because religion is above all a mode of knowledge about mankind’s violence and the ways of keeping it in check, about the “homeopathic” use of violence in order to control violence (from which derives Girard’s interpretation of the apparently cryptic passage in the Gospels about “Satan casting out Satan.”) (7)

For Girard, the Christian gospel (or, if one prefers, the New Testament) was the hermeneutic key that made it possible, in history, to reinterpret both mythology and the Hebrew Scriptures (or the Old Testament) as the gradual emergence into historical awareness of the violent and persecutory matrix of the social and cultural order, and to interpret the sacrifice of Christ as the moment of rupture of the equilibrium that had kept the symbolic-religious mechanism on which the archaic societies were based stable, recurring, and mythical. (8)

…Christianity is not a “religion” in the strict sense but a principle that destructures all the archaic religions and must temporarily clothe itself as an institutional “religion,” too, so as to be able to enter into dialogue with the historicity of religions. Like a Trojan horse, it penetrates the age-old citadel of the mentalities instituted by the natural religions and empties it from inside, adopting the language and symbolism of the religions but completely reversing their meaning, demystifying all the violence on which the walls of the citadel of the sacred had been erected. (8)

Vattimo the “progressive” tries to drag Girard the “conservative” onto his own terrain, asking him to accept all the theoretical consequences implicit in his own analysis of Christianity as the religion that reveals the victimizing foundation of human culture; that destructures all the natural religions from within, steering them toward their own disappearance; that heralds the deconstruction of all the rigid structures imposed by history: state or ecclesiastical apparatuses, authoritarian notions about truth and nature, and so on. (14)

The problem is that today, with the dissolution of any solid philosophical, political, ethical, or religious foundation, its place is taken by the caricatural version called fundamentalism, which, in fact, recuperates all the persecutory forms typical of the sacred. (18)

Can you tell I’m excited about this book?

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)

Slavoj Žižek’s forthcoming book Living in the End Times has caught my interest.

Biblically speaking, we’ve been in the “end times” since the first century, but any time somebody brings up the apocalyptic, my ears perk up. Usually “end of the world” language comes from fairly conservative Christian circles, like the Left Behind series. Which makes it that much more interesting to me – sociologically speaking – when an atheist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, continental philosopher who thinks everyone should “go through the Christian experience”, like Žižek, writes on the “end times” with reference to the biblical account!

While I’ve enjoyed reading Žižek, most of his overly playful writing is not – in the end – very helpful to my ThM research or service in the church. His engagement with Christianity is interesting to engage with, but much of his writing is so deeply indebted to Lacan, Hegel, and Freud, I have a hard time incorporating it, since I’m not very familiar with them. His indebtedness to Marx is seen clearly in the product description below.

In full disclosure, I’m am not worried about the end times. At all. My faith is in the One who will bring forth “a new heaven and a new earth” and “make everything new” (see Revelation 21). But really, how interesting does this sound (again, sociologically speaking)?:

There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. Slavoj Zizek has identified the four horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and exploding social divisions and ruptures. But, he asks, if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to the end times? In a major new analysis of our global situation, Slavok Zizek argues that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the stages of grief: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and withdrawal.

After passing through this zero-point, we can begin to perceive the crisis as a chance for a new beginning. Or, as Mao Zedong put it, “There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.” Slavoj Zizek shows the cultural and political forms of these stages of ideological avoidance and political protest, from New Age obscurantism to violent religious fundamentalism. Concluding with a compelling argument for the return of a Marxian critique of political economy, Zizek also divines the wellsprings of a potentially communist culture – from literary utopias like Kafka’s community of mice to the collective of freak outcasts in the TV series Heroes.

As my ThM program comes to a close, I’ve been looking into some possible PhD programs. Much to my surprise – and chagrin – after countless hours of searching their websites, it seems neither USC nor UCLA has a doctoral program in religion! In Los Angeles of all places, arguably the most religiously diverse city in the world… a city that practically invented the new age spirituality movement!

USC’s website explicates – in great detail – a PhD program in religion and social ethics. Wait, scratch that… It no longer exists. Not even UCI, with it’s stellar philosophy department, features a graduate program in religion. The closest doctoral programs (outside of Fuller and Claremont) are at UCR and UCSB.

The image to the left reminds me of John Drane’s thoughts regarding the McDonaldization of the church (which built upon George Ritzer’s social theory). And it reminds me of James’ thoughts on the topic:

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

(not to mention the countless other passages throughout religious traditions that call for a truly committed faith)

This fall, I again have the distinguished opportunity to do a directed study with Ryan Bolger, which comprises another 4 units en route to Fuller’s ThM degree in the School of Intercultural Studies.

I’ve previously been able to fill units (and even meet requirements) by studying missional ecclesiology with Ryan and postmodern philosophy/culture with Barry Taylor.

This quarter, however, I’ll be delving into the religious and social setting of the first century. Ultimately, my hope is that all three streams come together for my thesis, tentatively titled The De(con)struction of the Church: An(other) Attempt at Religion (Without Religion).

I am often asked, especially around the church, when I will be “ready for ordination.” Those asking this question are usually referring to the taking of 144 Master of Divinity units, four extra PC(USA) courses in preparation for five ordination exams, as well as church and hospital internships (totaling 400 hours each).

Then comes my rambling attempt to explain, in essence, “I’m there.” I have been approved, that is, to accept an ordained position, after which I will be officially ordained. But, don’t get any crazy ideas, I will never be “Pastor Curtis” or “Reverend Bronzan.” Just “Curtis” is fine, thank you.

You don’t call a plumber “Plumber Joe” or a secretary “Secretary Linda.” Referring to a pastor as “Pastor [Name],” I’ve become convinced, implicitly sets up an unbiblical hierarchy. Furthermore, I’ve become convinced that such titles often contradict Jesus’ ideas regarding religious leadership, note especially verses 8 through 12:

But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have only one Master and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called ‘teacher,’ for you have one Teacher, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

“So,” comes the response, why are you still going to school? And at that, I struggle even more to respond coherently.

At times, I have said something to the effect of how the Master of Divinity degree (though earned from the best seminary in the history of the world) sought to make me into a Constantinian who had very little ability or developed skill to tell anyone outside the church anything important about Jesus. In short, it can become all about keeping butts in the pews, instead of faithfully exegeting our post-Christian culture, thus reaching outside the church to proclaim and enact good news.

Thus, I began a post-graduate degree focused upon contemporary, postmodern culture. My proposed thesis is tentatively entitled “De(con)structing the Temple(s): An(other) Attempt at Religion (without Religion).” Thus far in my research, I have found a rather interesting dynamic; when you ask big questions, like the role of institutions in the life of faith, lots of people (who would normally be ousted from discussions among the “faithful”) have something to say, including even the likes of Neitzsche (who taught us how to philosophize with a hammer).

It all got started with John Caputo’s brilliant little pamphlet of dynamite, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church:

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)

My contention is that in our day and age, the church has, in fact, set itself up as a bunch of “kings and princes.” Thus, I am hoping to short-circuit Jesus’ original, prophetic “de(con)struction” with post-modern ecclesiology, by engaging Scripture, critical theory and continental philosophy.

This summer, in the midst of a flurry of activity at the church, I’ve had the opportunity to work as a Teaching Assistant in Fuller’s School of Intecultural Studies under Ryan Bolger.

Throughout August and September, I’ll be doing an Independent Study with him looking at recent (and some not so recent) literature engaging the missional conversation. While it’s a departure from the more philosophical reading I worked through previously with another professor, thus far it’s proven a nice change of pace – and may ultimately be of some help for my ThM research and thesis.

I stopped by the Fuller Bookstore before a class I’m taking / TAing with my ThM advisor, Ryan Bolger to pick up In Name Only: Tackling the Problem of Nominal Christianity upon which the course, Evangelizing Nominal Christians, was originally based. The material for the course has since shifted toward engaging the emerging / missional conversation, though I wanted to become acquainted with In Name Only as well, since Gibbs’ other works – including his recent ChurchMorph – are epic.

Stopping by the Fuller Bookstore is extremely helpful, but also exceedingly problematic – at least for my bank account.

Today, before even finding Gibbs’ In Name Only, I encountered James K.A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation (which, along with Derrida and Theology, was on the same Amazon order as In Name Only, that wasn’t due to ship for another couple of weeks!). But I also ran across Graham Ward’s The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Christians and Merold Westphal’s Whose Community, Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church, both of which aren’t due out until October 1st!

Needless to say, I picked both up, as well as Hegel and Theology.