A Textual Community

Walter Brueggemann wrote a great article for Theology Today back in the 90s. He relates the Old Testament texts to current ecclesial issues in an interesting, thought-provoking and classical Brueggemann way.

He points to the difference between modeling the praxis of communities on the Monarchy experience versus the exilic experience. In the exilic experience the community is a textual community. The experience of the textual community is a marginalizination and it responds by favouring specific. particular and 'peculiar' texts.

Yet simultaneosly there is an experience of pluralism and diverse interpretations in the textual community. There is still a process of canonization and a supreme appreciation of the text as authoritative. Yet there is no single, authoritative interpretation only authoritative texts. Thus (it seems to me) there is midrash.

Brueggemann links the experience of exilic Israel as a textual community to the experience of Post-Christendom.

I wonder: is there away to be a textual community as the Church in the 21st Century? With the splitting of the Anglican communion the fundamentalist-modernist debate is returning. Can this type of Ecclesiology provide a way forward or will it lead to other dead ends?

Great Video

Found a great interview with Jacques Ellul here.

A Theology of Liberation

This is in response to what Jeremiah posted below. The question I seek to pose is how does God liberate?

I intentionally leave the question open ended. I think foundational to any Christian god-talk is acknowledging that God does liberate but how does relate to our own experiences, authorities, hopes, behaviours and general way of living in the world as individuals, communities, the church and larger political societies? I think it does but I think we really need to examine this.

Jacques Ellul writes about these issues in The Ethics of Freedom, a brilliant book that I encourage everyone to read. In it he examines alienation and shows how alienation pervades all aspects of the human experience. Christ came to end alienation and only in Christ is alienation is ending. At the time I read it I found the book interesting because I felt it successfully contextualized the gospel in the terms of contemporary socialist and academic discourse while remaining true to what I consider the quintessential Christian message "Jesus saves".

Looking back on it I feel Ellul and I differ in one main area: Technological determinism. Although I find his analysis on "the technological society" in his book fascinating, insightful and useful. What I feel is though he is correct about the dangers and workings of a technological society I feel that the Christian faith can still flourish, if the technology is used right. I differ from Ellul primarily because of Michel de Certeau's "The practice of everyday life". His argument concerning the role of the user as being distinct and not determined by the producer has influenced the way I understand technology contra Ellul. Again I feel Ellul's insights are penetrating and important but incomplete.

Thus I see the danger not in technology but it's use: thus a Consumerist Liberation Theology.

But before I can even muse on such a topic I really have to ask: how does God liberate? I believe that he does. I see this in physical healings, in conversions, in the breaking of addictions, in the stories of the scripture and even Creation itself. I believe further this liberation comes especially through the person of Jesus of Nazareth who is both God-with-us and resurrected.

The problem with some liberation theologies as I see it is their engagement with the Exodus narrative as a paradigm of liberation. Although I agree it can be I see a lack of canonical thinking when Christ has nothing to say about the situation and the church is eroded into an arbitrary institution which by sheer luck bares the message of God in the scriptures. Thus I criticize the past liberation theologies for what seems to be inadequate christological and ecclesiological thinking (I criticize here the more colloqial and non-academic liberation theologies not the kind of Boff and Guietterez) despite what can often be good praxis.

Most evangelicals seem to criticize Liberation theologies reliance on the social situation to help interpret scripture. I think this an unfair accusation. I believe that it is very important to read scripture mindful of social situation. I think a lot of the major issues the Church is dealing with today is doing this kind of reading inadequately: from the GOP-Evangelical synthesis in the United States to the odd prosperity gospel churches of some regions in Africa. I will try to expand this thought in a future blog post.

Then the reason I propose such a Theology of consumer liberation is because I believe it is absolutely essential to the orthodoxy,orthopraxy and orthopathy of the church. That is to say that our gospel is the full gospel, our discipleship is authentic and that we have the ability to hope for God's coming reign and mourn the powers of darkness still at work in the world.

Just a thought

Here's a thought: since the end of the climate change conference many have complained that it was a complete 'failure'. Although this is true it seems wrong to me that no one blames the average western consumer. It seems to me that their complacency (or OUR complacency?) in consuming way too much oil, producing way to much waste and generally living like we can have as much energy as we want (which we do not) since the end of World War II is the cause our current crisis.

Big business? PLEASE. The businesses only produce what we want them to produce because they can sell it to us.

Corrupt governments? Maybe. But an even worse self-deceiving,gluttonous and corrupt citizenry.

Experiencing Mozart

While studying for my greek exam I listened to Mozart's requiem.

The reason I tell this story is to understand and engage with how music is experienced, sometimes the same piece of music or composer, differently by different people in different contexts.

In an interview Micheal Ignatieff mentions how his uncle George Grant would listen to Mozart on records, smoking a large cigar and a singing along.

The two contexts are clearly different: myself quietly listening to Mozart ripped off Youtube and the thinker George Grant smoking and singing along to Mozart's music on a record. I can only imagine how different the context would be for the Austrian aristocracy sitting down for the first time to listen and enjoy one of the man's operas.

This got me thinking further.

I have, with the aide of the internet and the computer, access to countless digital recordings of almost any piece of music that I can listen to within a few moments of wanting to listen to it.

George Grant's choice and speed of what he listened to was both widened to anything recorded for a record and limited to owning or borrowing the record to listen to.

The Austrian aristocracy had even less choice only being able to listen to music live, and probably less at that, although I am sure the Hapsburgs would have live court musicians.

This leads me to a firm conclusion: the way I use technology shapes and fashions the way I enjoy, receive, reproduce and think about music. The three examples I gave illustrate that at different points in time depending on the technology and socioeconomic location of the listener music was experienced very differently. There are other factors but right now I want to focus on just the technological aspects of experiencing music.

Why?

I have recently been considering giving up a lot of my consumption of music both online and digitally? I do this first of all because I sometimes consume far to much of it and thus causes me to appreciate it (the music) less. If I am truly to live liberated from satiation (as my last post suggests I wanted too). Secondly I know people who play music; what a great way to build meaningful friendship with these people if the number one way I consume music is listening to their talents?

And finally most of the music I listen to is a pop culture canon (by that I mean an eclectic mixture of different musical suggestions - not the 'top 40') - whether that is Metric for Canadian Alternative, Miles Davis for Jazz or Relient K for Chirstian pop - I don't really have my own taste in music. It's a hodge-podge of digital malaise and I desire something better.

I want to experience the beauty of music. But I need to learn how to do this. Being self-aware is the first step.

Dying to write... a liberation theology

For the last year I have been dying to write a liberation theology.. for North Americans. I appreciate the Latin American and other liberation theologies but I feel there is a DESPERATE, DESPERATE need for a Liberation Theology not for the liberation of the poor/oppressed (although such a thing is still needed) but the alienated, depressed, satiated, hedonistic and tragically nihilist North American consumer (if such a group of people can be liberated it might signal the end of other contemporary oppressions - caused primarily by western Behemoths called corporation which 'serve' the needs of North America).

Anyways - I feel I NEED to write this.

Tax-deductible wine

I came upon this quotation in Illich's "The Rivers North of the Future" and I had to write in down somewhere:

"And a good tax lawyer found a way of making it credible to the IRS that a certain number of cases of ordinary but decent wine are my major teaching tool and can, therefore, be written off from my taxes."

Books and Authors that I would want to read

Here is a list, not very comprehensive, of the various books and authors I am interested in reading and probably should at some point.

Alasdair Macyintyre - Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
Charles Taylor - A Secular Age
Stanley Hauerwas - The Peaceable Kingdom
Noam Chomsky - The Responsibility of Intellectuals
Slavoj Zizek - The Parralax View
Jurgen Moltmann - A Theology of Hope
Ernst Bloch - Principle of Hope
Jacques Derrida - Of Grammatology
George Lindbeck - The Church in a Postliberal Age
Lesslie Newbigin - The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
David Bosch - Transforming Mission
Frederiech Nietzsche - Twilight of the Idols
John Howard Yoder - The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel
Reinhold Niebuhr - Christian Realism and Politics Problems
John Maynard Keynes - The General Theory of Employement, Interest and Money
Rerum Novarum - Papal Encyclical issued by Leo XIII
GK Chesterton - Utopia of Usurers
Dorothy Day - Loaves and Fishes
Walter Brueggemann - Old Testament Theology
Karl Marx - Das Capital
Soren Kierkegaard - The Sickness unto death
Michel Foucalt - The Archeology of Knowledge
Fredrich Schleiermacher - On Religion: Speeches to it's cultured despiser
Samuel Beckett - collected Plays
Karl Barth - Dogmatics in Outline
GWF Hegel - Phenomenology of the Mind
Rene Girard - Violence and the Sacred
Immanuel Kant - A critique of pure reason
Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan
JP Sartre - Being and Nothingness
Gabriel Marcel - The Mystery of Being
John Calvin - Christian Institutes
Baruch Spinoza - Ethics
Arthur Schopenhauer - On the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason
Goethe - Faustus
Arthur Miller - collected plays
St. Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologica
Irenaues - collected works
Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics AND Tragedy
Plato - Apology
Negri and Hardt - Empire

I realize this is a very unbalanced list - oops. It's almost exclusive male, western and within the last two hundred years with a philosophical-theological bent.