Curtis A. Bronzan

I previously posted some brief thoughts on Monster of Folk’s self-titled debut record, specifically the first track “Dear God.” The last track offers some concluding thoughts:

Mohammed rolling dice with Christ at twilight,
and they hear their Master’s voice.
They run to do their chores at Master’s calling.
Their job tonite, re-write the bible,
for a whole new generation of non-believers.

Singer Jim James, formerly of My Morning Jacket, helps us understand the theological perspective behind “His Master’s Voice” (albeit while discussing “Dear God”):

I consider myself really spiritual. I feel the presence of God, or whatever that is, all of the time, whether it’s life or music. I’ve never been able to define it or call it Christianity or Islam. I can’t put a label on it.

He concludes the track with

You’re only gonna hear what you want to hear,
do you hear your Master’s voice now?
Mohammed and Christ speak twice as nice,
but the one that I like best, he sings inside my chest.
I hear my Master’s voice now, calling out, calling out, calling out, calling out.

David Toole’s Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse, engages some similar territory, as does the documentary on quantum physics What the Bleep Do We Know?, which tells the story of native Americans upon the arrival of Columbus.

As the story goes, native Americans living near the Atlantic ocean could not see the ships in the ocean, because they had never seen one before. The holy man of the village was the first to notice ripples in the water, and stared for days before he was able to comprehend the reality of the ships who had docked a hundred yards out.

Could this be a metaphor that helps us understand Jesus’ constant question whether we have “eyes to see” or “ears to hear”?

I suppose it’s been a while since I’ve written anything substantial here, which I hope to change after this quarter’s TA duties are completed. Until then, check out a couple excerpts of a rather brilliant transition from Foucault to Yoder, in David Toole’s Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse, (originally his PhD dissertation from Duke, under Stanley Hauerwas):

Perhaps the first indication that Foucault and Yoder share a vision or a style, if not exactly a method or a politics, comes in Yoder’s insistence that an apocalyptic style will “free us to live without the myth of a complete systemic causal overview of how all that we do will work out for the best, because we see things whole and intervene ‘responsibly’. The axiom of systemic causal perspicuity is part of the legacy of the enlightenment in its most sanguine phases.” Like Foucault, Yoder argues that we need to resist this legacy, for precisely in it’s “sanguineness” it has proved to be a legacy of violence driven by an overly confident sense of the direction history needs to take. The apocalyptic style, says Yoder, “does us the service of ignoring and thereby striking down our confidence in our system-immanent causal explanations for the past, and, even more in system-immanent causal descriptions of how the future is sure to unfold from the choice we are just now making.” In other words, the apocalyptic style is something of an exercise in skepticism, as it seeks to destroy our confidence in traditional historical narratives…

Both Yoder’s apocalyptic historiography and Foucault’s archaeological/genealogical method assume that history is the realm of the unique and the impossible. Foucault calls this impossibility “chance”; Yoder calls it “God.” Of course, to suggest this similarity between Foucault and Yoder is not to conflate their understandings of history. The difference between “chance” and “God” is significant, since to say “God,” for Yoder at least, is to invoke the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Hence, as we will see in the next chapter, Yoder finds his account of a counterhistory upon a particularity missing in Foucault. Still, for both Foucault and Yoder, this assumption of the irruption of an impossible event into the series of events makes a politics of resistance thinkable – a politics that we now need to call, taking our cue from Yoder, the art of the impossible.

Yoder says of the relationship between an apocalytic reading of history and an impossible politics that “what the apocalyptic perspective enables the believing community do is ‘deconstruct’ the self-evident picture of how things are which those in power use to explain that they cannot but stay that way.” A community playing the victim role within a society,” Yoder continues, “needs first of all to know not what they would do differently if they were rulers, nor how to sieze power, but that the present power constellation which oppresses them is not the last word.” Like Foucault, Yoder understands that politics as the art of the impossible requires the construction of a counterhistory that deconstructs the “self-evident picture of how things are.” And like Foucault, Yoder links the demands of producing a counterhistory to the necessity if rethinking power, as will be apparent if we consider first Yoder’s analysis of the link between history and politics and then the metaphysical background of this link, as we find it portrayed in the New Testament. (210-212)