RHE nails it again!

Many of our Reformed brothers and sisters are severely theocentric, to the point of dismissing the Third Person of the Trinity. But some of our "mystical" brothers and sisters are severely pneumacentric, to the point of dismissing the other Persons. I am grateful that the Covenant http://www.covchurch.org/ connects me with people who strive to be fully Trinitarian, and relate to all three Persons of the Godhead.

Rachel Held Evans

Is God's presence limited to Scripture?

"You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life." – John 5:39

It has become something of a sport for folks in the evangelical, neo-Reformed tradition to take to the internet to draw out the “boundaries of evangelicalism,” boundaries which inevitably fall around their own particular theological distinctions and which seem to grow narrower and narrower with every blog post on the topic.
Pastor and blogger Tim Challies recently added a few more stones to the fortress wall in a blog post entitled “The Boundaries of Evangelicalism.” In it, Challies writes about his concerns regarding “the power and prevalence of mysticism” in the contemporary church and posits that true evangelicalism rejects all forms of this “mysticism” and instead embraces the doctrine of the Reformed tradition and its emphasis on knowing God through Scripture alone.
He concludes:

“God has given us his Word to guide us in all matters of faith and practice. When we commit ourselves to mysticism, we commit ourselves to looking for revelation from God and experiences of God that come from outside that Word. We reject his gift--his good, infallible, inerrant, sufficient gift--and demand more. Because God promises us no more, we quickly create our own experiences and interpret them as if they are God’s revelation. Yet the Bible warns us that we can do no better than God’s Word and have no right to demand anything else. The question for Evangelicals today is just this: Will God’s Word be enough? Because whatever does not lead us toward God’s Word will always, inevitably and ultimately lead us away.”

The post is so full of historical inaccuracies, theological problems, and contradictions that it’s hard to know where to start, but I want to make clear from the get-go that my response to this post should not be seen as an attack on Tim Challies himself, (who I respect and like), but rather a response to the general belief that God’s presence is limited to the pages of Scripture and that all forms of contemplative or experiential spirituality should therefore be dismissed out of hand or regarded with suspicion. As evangelicalism in the U.S. has been working its way through something of an identity crisis over the past few years, and as many young evangelicals like myself have reconnected with the spiritual disciplines, this seems to be a recurring point of contention, and therefore one that should be addressed.
Challies defines mysticism as “those forms of Christian spirituality which attempt direct or unmediated access to God” and mentions, generally, the popularity of books on spiritual disciplines and spiritual formation and, specifically, books by Christian authors like Sarah Young and John Eldredge. In the past, Challies has been highly critical of Ann Voskamp’s spirituality in One Thousand Gifts, chastising her for her experiencing the presence of God in nature and in a Catholic cathedral, and for being influenced by the likes of Henri Nouwen, Brennan Manning, Teresa of Avila, Brother Lawrence, Annie Dillard, and Dallas Willard.  One of the commenters after Challlies’ post also mentioned Richard Foster, Thomas Merton, centering prayer, contemplative prayer, lectio divina, and prayer labyrinths, which the commenter describes as efforts to “access God in a pagan/occult way.”
According to Challies, mystics are those who experience  “a direct inner realization of the Divine,” and an “unmediated link to an absolute.” He goes on to argue that mysticism is any connection with God outside the context of Scripture.
Challies writes, “Mysticism was once regarded as an alternative to Evangelical Christianity. You were Evangelical or you were a mystic, you heeded the doctrine of the Reformation and understood it to faithfully describe the doctrine laid out in Scripture or you heeded the doctrine of mysticism. Today, though, mysticism has wormed its way inside Evangelicalism so that the two have become integrated and almost inseparable.”
I have no idea where Challies got the idea that “mysticism was once regarded as an alternative to evangelical Christianity.”
While it is true that the Reformers occasionally used the word “evangelical” in their writings, most historians locate the roots of evangelicalism solidly within Wesley’s Methodism in England and in the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries. Evangelicalism was, at its heart, a movement, influenced not only by a strong emphasis on the authority of Scripture but also by a lively, impassioned, and deeply personal spirituality—an eclectic, ecumenical mix of elements from Pietism, Presbyterianism, Puritanism, and Pentecostalism. Evangelicalism’s mothers and fathers were mystically-inclined Christians like John Wesley, Jonathan and Sarah Edwards, William J. Seymour, and A.W. Tozer—people whose “hearts were strangely warmed” by profound experiences with God, by  “a direct inner realization of the Divine.”
And indeed, mysticism—which I would define as practices intended to help connect a person to God through experience, intuition, contemplation, the devotional reading of Scripture, ritual, and prayer—has been a part of the Church from the very beginning.
From the events of Pentecost, to the practices of communion and baptism throughout Christian history, to the writings and teachings of the desert fathers and mothers, to the Reformation, to the divine offices being prayed continually throughout the world today, to the Azusa Street revival, to the spread of Christianity in the global South and East, the story of Christianity is the story of regular people connecting in powerful ways to the presence of God.
Indeed, the history of the faith, and the teachings of Scripture itself, show that Tim Challies is dead wrong on one very important point: 
He says at the end of his post that when it comes to our connection with the holy, “God promises us no more” than Scripture as a means to knowing and experiencing his presence.
This is absolutely not true. Scripture itself teaches us that God has promised us the Holy Spirit (Luke 24:49, Acts 2:33, Ephesians 1:13).
As Peter exclaimed at Pentecost, “you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for your and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”
The Holy Spirit  has sustained the Church through good times and bad, through persecution and imperial power, through the centuries before the Christian Bible was fully assembled, through the assembling of that Bible, through the centuries when most Christians had very little access to the Bible, through the centuries when many American Christians have multiple versions of the Bible on their bookshelves and multiple Christian denominations in their hometowns.
And as Jesus told Nicodemus, “the wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
In other words, the Holy Spirit doesn’t have boundaries. 
Furthermore, to limit the presence of Jesus to the words of Scripture, as if Christ’s presence is restricted to paper and ink, is to deny the resurrection of all its power. Christ is not merely an historical figure that we read about, a person from the past to whom we make intellectual assent. Christ is alive! Christ is present! Christ is directly accessible to all who believe! 
Jesus himself said that we can expect to encounter his presence not simply in the pages of Scripture, but also among the least of these, where two or three are gathered, in persecution, and in communion. Paul experienced Jesus on the road to Damascus. Peter experienced Jesus in the home of Cornelius (much to his surprise). Stephen saw Jesus just before his death. I have encountered the presence of Jesus in fellowship with other Christians, among the poor and disenfranchised, as I eat the bread and drink the wine. And if this makes me a mystic, then count me in! 
The whole point of Scripture is to testify to the Living Word, which is Jesus Christ. As Jesus told the Scribes and Pharisees, "You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life."

When we become more committed to the testimony than to the Person to whom it testifies, we are likely to miss the presence of Jesus even when it’s right in front of us. Probably because it took some form we weren’t expecting. Probably because it showed up outside of our boundaries. 

But Challies says “we can do no better” than the Bible.
I’m not sure this is true. For what do we long for when we read the Beatitudes, when we meditate on the words of Christ through lectio divina, when we join with Christians past and present to pray the hours, when we climb Teresa of Avila’s “Interior Castle,” when we raise our hands in worship, when we eat the bread and drink the wine, when we walk the labyrinths, when like David we see that the night sky declares the glory of God, when we study the Bible in Hebrew and Greek, when we connect with a glorious line from Wendell Berry or Frederick Buechner, or Annie Dillard? 
We long for consummation, for total union with our beloved Christ. For He is the source of eternal life, the fulfillment of Scripture, and the object of our desire. 

Scripture points to Jesus, not the other way around. 

And all of these practices—from prayer to communion to fellowship to reading Scripture— give us glimpses of the day when that union will be realized, when we will all gather at the marriage supper of the Lamb.  But right now, even with Scripture, we see through a glass darkly. Right now, even with Scripture, we know only in part.
Only later will we see Jesus face to face and be known even as we are known.
Now, here’s where I suspect Challies and I may agree: Because we believe Scripture to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice and a trustworthy testimony regarding Jesus Christ, we would be right to be highly suspicious of anyone whose claims about their experiences with God run contrary to the teachings of Scripture. Our testimonies should harmonize. Mysticism that morphs into mere superstition, or that contradicts what we know about Jesus from the written Word, is not a faithful testimony and should be warned against in the sternest terms.
But while we should be appropriately wary of anyone whose claims of personal revelation run contrary to Scripture, we should not discount, out of hand, all personal experiences with God that occur outside the context of Scripture...which is what Challies has essentially done with this piece. 

Furthermore, any understanding of “sola scriptura” that totally divorces reason, experience, and tradition from the interpretation process is a misunderstanding of that principle. We never approach Scripture alone. It does not exist in a vacuum. We approach Scripture with our Helper, the Holy Spirit, with the influence of the great cloud of witnesses who have read and interpreted it before us, and—like it or not—with the subtle but powerful influences of our culture, our language, our background, our experiences, and our biases. This notion of total, exclusive reliance on Scripture is a fantasy; it cannot be done. 

Challies says that “whatever does not lead us toward God’s Word will always, inevitably and ultimately lead us away.” But the point of Scripture is not to lead us back to Scripture. The point of Scripture is to lead us to Jesus Christ.  And any student of Luther will know that this was central to the Reformer’s theology as well.

Finally, when Challies defines mysticism as “direct or unmediated access to God” and then essentially trashes it as heresy, he (probably unintentionally) communicates that Christians need some kind of additional mediator to access God— Scripture, he seems to think, or perhaps the pastor interpreting it. (This is a fine example of how many Protestants tend to simply replace the Pope with the Bible and priests with the pastors interpreting it.) 

But once again, Scripture itself disputes this claim.  “For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Jesus Christ, who gave himself a ransom for all people,” writes Paul. “Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need,” says the writer of Hebrews.

Challies is wrong. We do have direct access to God. We need no additional mediator. 

And if labyrinths and lectio divina and contemplative prayer and Annie Dillard help remind us of that, I see no reason why we should fear them.
A lot of young evangelicals are reconnecting with these mystical practices, and I count myself among them. I suspect we are drawn to ritual, tradition, contemplative prayer, and silence because these are things that give us a sense of history, identity, and communion with the universal Church that has perhaps been lacking in the evangelical church of late.  Praying the hours provides a rhythm to my day that takes the focus off of myself and my schedule and puts it on God and the members of God’s Church who are praying along with me. Ancient liturgies connect me to followers of Jesus from the past. Reading St. Francis and Teresa of Avila and Dallas Willard and Madeleine L'Engle help put words to my experiences and stretch me to see God in new ways. Communion…well, I can’t explain exactly what happens in communion, and I’m beginning to wonder if maybe that’s the point. While none of these things should serve as replacements of Scripture; they can certainly function constructively alongside of it. 
Honestly, the more Scripture I memorize, the more labyrinths I walk, the more prayers I pray and the more mystics I engaged, the sadder I become by all this boundary marking and fortress building coming from the more fundamentalist camps within evangelicalism. 

For I have tasted and seen. I’ve felt this wind blow wherever it wishes, however it wishes, whenever it wishes. I’ve caught a glimpse of this God who is bigger than Calvinism, bigger than evangelicalism, bigger even than the Church. 

And I have come to see that these boundaries designed to shut others out only serve to shut the builders in.

They’re missing out on all this space, all this freedom, all this fresh air we call grace.
***

So what do you think? Is mysticism helpful or harmful to Christians? Should we expect to encounter God outside the context of Scripture? Do we have "direct, unmediated access" to God? 

Against Chrapitalism

Love Is Stronger than Debt

Eugene McCarraher

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2013/mayjune/love-stronger-than-debt.html?paging=off
Against Chrapitalism.
 

If the last five years of American politics have demonstrated anything, it's that Marx's dictum about the modern state couldn't be more indisputable: our government is the executive committee for the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. Now more than ever, our liberal democracy is a corporate franchise, and the stockholders are demanding an ever-higher return on their investment in America, Inc. Over the last four decades, the Plutocracy has decided to repeal the 20th century, to cancel the gains and protections won by workers, the poor, and others outside the imperial aristocracy of capital. Enough of this coddling of those Ayn Rand vilified as "moochers" and "looters." Return the country to its rightful owners: the "Job Creators," the Almighty Entrepreneurs, those anointed by Heaven to control the property interests of the American Empire. Endowed with the Divine Right of Capital, they deserve our thanksgiving and reverence, for without them we would not deserve to live, such common clay are we.

Lest anyone think that the re-election of President Barack Obama invalidates this judgment, think again. Mitt Romney may have been a more egregious and openly disdainful lord of the manor, but Obama has compiled an impeccable record of imperial corporate stewardship. Despite all the hype about a rising progressive coalition of non-whites and young people, there is no reason to believe that Obama's second term of office will be any less a model of deference.

The Plutocracy's beatific vision for the mass of Americans is wage servitude: a fearful, ever-busy, and cheerfully abject pool of human resources. Rendered lazy and recalcitrant by a half-century of mooching, American workers must be forced to be free: crush labor unions, keep remuneration low, cut benefits and lengthen working hours, close or narrow every avenue of escape or repose from accumulation. If they insist on living like something more than the whining, expendable widgets they are, reduce them to a state of debt peonage with an ensemble of financial shackles: mortgages, credit cards, and student loans, all designed to ensure that the wage slaves utter two words siren-sweet to business: "Yes, boss." It's the latest chapter in the depressing story that David Graeber relates in Debt: debt as an especially insidious weapon in the arsenal of social control. "There's no better way to justify relations founded on violence … than by reframing them in the language of debt," he writes, "because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong."

Alas, we're living in the early, bewildering days of the demise of the American Empire, the beginning of the end of that obsession-compulsion known as the Amerian Dream. The reasons are clear, if often angrily denied: military hubris and over-extension; a stagnant monopoly capitalism with a bloated financial sector; a population on whom it's dawning that low-wage labor is their inexorable fate; ecological wreckage that can only be limited or repaired by cessation of growth. The patricians' task will be threefold: finessing the increasingly obvious fact of irreversible imperial decline; convincingly performing the charade of democracy in the face of popular vassalage; and distracting or repressing the roiling rage and tumult among the plebs. How will the elites maintain and festoon their ever-more untenable hegemony?

Empires have always evaded but eventually accepted their impending senescence: first, willful, vehement denial, and redoubled, often violent devotion to the imperial customs and divinities; then the slow, entropic apocalypse of demoralization and retrenchment. As imperial twilight descends, a brisk if melancholy market of fashions in acquiescence will undoubtedly arise. Reconciled to the dystopian prospect of a world engulfed in war and famine, the affluent will sport a variety of brands of what Simon Critchley dubs "passive nihilism," a withdrawal from politics into tasteful, well-guarded enclaves of resignation. Radical visions may revive as well, but right now they're dispiritingly feckless. Looking at first like a pentecost of utopia, the "Occupy" movement has dismally failed to gain any popular traction, in part because of the utter mediocrity and incoherence of its demands. "Fairness" is populist pabulum; "we are the 99%" is a slogan, not serious political analysis. The injustice and indignity of capitalism have seldom been so openly wretched, but as Graeber ruefully observes, just when we need "to start thinking on a breadth and with a grandeur appropriate to the times," we seem to have "hit the wall in terms of our collective imagination."

Don't expect any breadth or grandeur from the Empire's Christian divines. Across the board, the imperial chaplains exhibit the most obsequious deference to the Plutocracy, providing imprimaturs and singing hallelujahs for the civil religion of Chrapitalism: the lucrative merger of Christianity and capitalism, America's most enduring covenant theology. It's the core of "American exceptionalism," the sanctimonious and blood-spattered myth of providential anointment for global dominion. In the Chrapitalist gospel, the rich young man goes away richer, for God and Mammon have pooled their capital, formed a bi-theistic investment group, and laundered the money in baptismal fonts before parking it in offshore accounts. Chrapitalism has been America's distinctive and gilded contribution to religion and theology, a delusion that beloved community can be built on the foundations of capitalist property. As the American Empire wanes, so will its established religion; the erosion of Chrapitalism will generate a moral and spiritual maelstrom.

What will American Christians do as their fraudulent Mandate from Heaven expires? They might break with the imperial cult so completely that it would feel like atheism and treason. With a little help from anarchists, they might be monotheists, even Christians again. Who better to instruct them in blasphemy than sworn enemies of both God and the state? Christians might discover that unbelievers can be the most incisive and demanding theologians. As Critchley asserts, " 'God' is the first anarchist, calling us into struggle with the mythic violence of law, the state, and politics by allowing us to glimpse the possibility of something that stands apart." By inciting us to curse and renounce the homespun idolatry of Chrapitalism, Critchley and Graeber can point Christians back to a terrible but glorious moment in their history: when the avant-garde of the eschaton were maligned as godless traitors. We'll need that dangerous memory in our frightful if doubtless very different time.

An anti-globalist firebrand and renowned anthropologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, Graeber has been touted as a guru for Occupy, writing portentously in the Guardian that it represents "the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire." Debt should be read as a scholarly barrage in that colloquy on imperial decay. Indeed, Graeber himself tells us that his is an Important Book. "For a very long time, the intellectual consensus has been that we can no longer ask Great Questions." Graeber's Great Answer is a tour de force of interdisciplinary erudition, a sprawling, disheveled, and fascinating mess of a book. After 200 pages of anthropology, economics, sociology, and philosophy—even a bit of religion and theology—the history of debt unfolds as a magpie collection of anecdotes: stories from around the globe about coinage, slavery, markets, trade, and law. The last two centuries get jammed into the last 40 pages; the last 40 years into the final thirty. It's a rambling, ill-focused account, and it's not at all clear by the end of the volume exactly what the Great Answer is.

Graeber's history is less engrossing than his vigorous diatribe against the sado-science of economics—the ethical nexus of Chrapitalism—and his sustained assault on this phony discipline will endure in the annals of schadenfreude. There's been a Himalayan rise in the inflation rate of arrogance among economists since the 1970s, and having failed to see the current turmoil coming, practitioners of the dismal science should be required to eat a daily helping of humble pie. Their account of history (where they pretend to know any) has been discredited for over a century; drawing on an ample anthropological and historical literature, Graeber shows that money and markets emerged, not from Adam Smith's "natural liberty," but from the need of ancient states to provision their expanding temple-military complexes. From its "myth of barter" to its truncated, utility-maximizing humanism, economics, Graeber contends, has "little to do with anything we observe when we examine how economic life is actually conducted." Historically illiterate and morally cretinous, economics—not theology—is the most successful confidence game in the history of intellectual life, a testament to the power of avarice to induce and embellish human credulity.

In Graeber's view, economics' most nefarious impact on morality is its perverse account of social relations, especially those revolving around obligation and interdependence. Graeber distinguishes between obligations—the incalculable owing of favors, as when you give me something, and I owe you something back—and debt as a precisely enumerable obligation, and therefore calculable in terms of equivalence and money. Conceivable only when people are treated not as human beings but as abstractions, equivalence is the categorical imperative of pecuniary reason, and it sanctifies the self-righteous, skinflint buncombe that parades as an ethic of "character." Isn't paying one's debts the basis of morality and dependable personal character? Especially when translated into money, the quantification of debt can justify a lot of indecent, horrific conduct. Can't pay me back? I'll take your daughter, or foreclose on your home, or demand austerity measures that result in famine, disease, or destitution.

Graeber's alternative to debt and its moral atrocities is communism: "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs." (Not, note well, according to their "deserts.") Knowing that he'll face a fusillade of umbrage about "totalitarianism," Graeber insists that communism "exists right now" and lies at "the foundation of all human sociability." Our lives abound with moments of everyday communism: we don't charge people who ask us for directions, and if we do, we're rightly considered jerks. Communism is not "egalitarianism"—which, as even Marx observed, partakes of the boring, inhuman logic of equivalence—and in Graeber's view, it doesn't entail any specific form of property. (An unromantic admirer of peasant societies and their moral economy of "the commons," Graeber appears to endorse what anthropologists sometimes call "usufruct," in which property becomes a kind of trusteeship dependent on the performance of a function.) A communist relationship—between spouses, lovers, friends—is not only one in which accounts are not kept, but one in which it would be considered "offensive, or simply bizarre" to even think of doing so. Love keeps no record of wrongs—or rights.

Thus communism restricts or negates a "freedom" conceived solely as lack of restraint. As Graeber explains, "freedom" has meant several things: release from debts, as in the biblical notion of "redemption"; friendship, as derived from the German freund, connoting amicable solidarity; and unfettered power, or libertas, enshrined in Roman jurisprudence, the right of a patriarch to do anything with his possessions. And as Graeber reminds us, those possessions included his family: famulus meant slave, while dominus, or master, derived from domus, or household. (Remember that next time you're tempted to swoon to claptrap about "family values.") The notion of absolute ownership of things originated in the absolute ownership of people. Roman libertas leavens the mean-spirited ideal of "freedom" in liberal capitalist democracies. As "self-ownership," freedom both makes property a right rather than a function and turns a right into a kind of alienable property. Of course, capitalists have every interest in getting us to see "freedom" this way, since "self-ownership" entails the notion that we can give away, sell, or rent out our freedom. As 19th-century craftsmen and workers understood better than we do today, wage labor is the slavery of capitalism: if you don't own the means of production, you work for those who do—unlike chattel, you enjoy the dubiously ennobling privilege of choosing your master.

Graeber affirms redemption and friendship against the command economy of libertas. Friends and lovers don't treat each other as servants or vendable objects, so freedom should be "the ability to make friends," the capacity to enter into human relations that are uncoerced and incalculable. And since friends are naturally communists, they'll live without thinking of their relations in a way that leads to double-entry bookkeeping; they'll live in the light of "redemption," which isn't about "buying something back" but rather about "destroying the entire system of accounting." To create a more humane and generous world, we must unlearn our moral arithmetic and throw the ledgers into the bonfire. A communist society of friends requires the abolition of capitalism.

Hence the expectation, after 500 pages, of a Great Answer with "breadth and grandeur"—but Graeber fails to deliver anything more than exhortation and tepid reformism. "History is not over … surprising new ideas will certainly emerge," he assures us; popular movements are having "all sorts of interesting conversations." Yet Graeber's own call for "a Biblical-style Jubilee" is magnanimous but disappointingly banal. A wholesale cancellation of consumer and international debt seems bold, but it's fundamentally conservative: it would liberate debtors while maintaining the existing arrangement and logic of capitalism. Property forms do matter; we can't treat them with the cavalier indifference that Graeber exhibits. To end the tyranny of debt, we would have to cultivate a political imagination that sees well beyond a jubilee.

While Graeber asserts that some great conceptual breakthrough could arise "from some as yet completely unexpected quarter," he pretty much dismisses religion as a source of moral and political innovation. Religion parrots the language of money and debt: "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors" as the Lord's Prayer pleads, and religions often speak of the debt we owe to God or some other cosmic force. "Redemption" meant buying back, and the Atonement is often conceived as Christ's paying a debt we sinners owe to God. And besides, as Graeber observes, Christians don't take their own Savior at his word. Christian bankers and creditors don't forgive their debtors; why should God forgive them their sins? Yet Graeber concedes that Christianity harbors traces of a moral and ontological revolution against the regime of debt. "Redemption" could point to the destruction and transcendence of equivalence; as Thomas Aquinas and other medieval theologians explained, "our relation with the cosmos is ultimately nothing like a commercial transaction, nor could it be." You can pay off the bank or the bartender; how do you square a "debt " to God?

Graeber drops the point and moves on; Critchley makes "our relations with the cosmos" the central concern of his incisive volume. A philosopher at the New School for Social Research, Critchley has written often and profoundly on ethics in the wake of God's apparent death, especially in Infinitely Demanding (2007), where he sought to explain and overcome the demoralization he sees in liberal societies. Tracing what he calls their "motivational deficit" to the "felt inadequacy of secular conceptions of morality," Critchley proposed an account of moral and political agency in terms of "dividualism," where the self is incessantly called and divided by "fidelity to an unfulfillable demand." We can and should never be "at one" with ourselves; we can and never should be "authentic." The energy for political transformation resides in our "endless inauthenticity, failure, and lack of self-mastery."

With his new book, Critchley joins other left radicals—Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, and Terry Eagleton—who seek in theology not some balm for disappointment, but a tonic to sharpen the mind and revive the spirit of anti-capitalist struggle. Presented as a modest portfolio of "experiments in political theology," Critchley's volume is a rich, audacious attempt to plumb the meaning of faith, the most sustained left-atheist engagement with Christian theology since the work of Ernst Bloch. Struck by Oscar Wilde's bracing assertion in De Profundis—"everything to be true must become a religion"—Critchley provides an exacting and indispensable reflection on the nature of political commitment.

From Hobbes and Locke to Rousseau and Marx to Rawls, Nozick, and Foucault, the modernity of modern politics has been thought to reside in the rejection of any conception of political order rooted in nature or divinity. But by grounding the political completely and unreservedly in the human, this apparently "secular" mode of politics requires that the human be "unchallengeable"—in other words, sacred. All political order depends, Critchley maintains, on allegiance to a "supreme fiction" whereby a people becomes a people—an "original covenant," as he puts it. Whether it's fascism, communism, or liberal democracy, modern political forms, Critchley contends, comprise "a series of metamorphoses of sacralization." In this view, the American civil religion is an especially brazen displacement and renaming of sacral devotion.

This is a provocative and unsettling claim, for it counters the tale of modernity narrated as "secularization" or "disenchantment." First told by Marx and Max Weber, it's been given a Christian re-statement most recently by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age (2009). I've long thought that religious intellectuals give too much credence to the "disenchantment of the world," and that they need, not to call for some reactive "re-enchantment," but to tell a new story about modernity. (As readers may know, I'm finishing a book that makes a Critchleyan claim about the history of capitalism.) For those who want to challenge the very narrative of "secularization," Critchley will be an invaluable interlocutor, if not quite a kindred spirit.

Still, Critchley's account of "the sacred" remains utterly human and terrestrial—it echoes a lineage that extends from Ludwig Feuerbach to Norman O. Brown—and it underlies the promise and failure of his attempt at a political theology without God. Honoring its "infinite demand," the dividualist self commits to a truth that is fundamentally religious—a "troth, the experience of fidelity where one is affianced and then betrothed." This is a powerful and persuasive phenomenology of faith as unswerving devotion. But from whom or what does this infinite demand to which we betrothe ourselves originate? Critchley summarily rules out any origin "external to the self … any external, divine command, any transcendent reality." It seems that in Critchley's telling, we marry ourselves. Polonius is right: to thine own self be true.

This religious fidelity to ourselves behooves both love and communism. In two chapters on Pauline theology and the late-medieval movement of the Free Spirit, Critchley hints at a radical politics sustained by faith and suffused by love. Perusing the writings of Marguerite Porete—a learned, lyrical Beguine mendicant who died at the stake in 1310—Critchley affirms her belief that sin could be overcome in this life through a mystical, quasi-erotic union with the Spirit, and that such a union requires what Simone Weil called a "decreation" of the ego in the transformative crucible of love. Love, for Porete, is a strenuous, intrepid pilgrimage into self-annihilation; "love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty"; in Critchley's words, love is "the audacity of impoverishment," an exhilarating, paradoxically enriching loss, an abandonment of all security for the sake of communion—friendship—with divinity.

Thus, as Critchley interprets Paul, "who I am is not in my power"; called and divided, my identity requires "a certain affirmation of weakness." The self is not a seizure and assertion, but rather "the orientation of the self towards something that exceeds oneself." Freedom is not, as in Roman and liberal capitalist libertas, some "virile assertion of autarchy," but rather "the acknowledgement of an essential powerlessness." Freedom comes through submission to the anguish of love; it is not the possession but the endurance of all things. "Love," Critchley writes compellingly, "is not as strong as death. It is stronger."

For Porete and the Free Spirit, love and poverty—tokens of friendship with God—entailed a "faith-based communism," in which the wealth of God is held in common by all, without regard for class or status. (As Graeber emphasizes, friends and lovers are communists.) At the same time, "there is no longer any legitimacy to moral constraints … that do not directly flow from our freedom"—freedom understood as friendship with God. In Pauline terms, love is the law of our being.

Though (wrongly) condemned by the Inquisition for sexual libertinage, the Free Spirit was less about doing than about changing what you want. A revolution of desire must both precede and accompany a revolution of politics. The Free Spirit explored the outer limits adumbrated by Paul and the earliest Christians—"rejects and refuseniks, the very filth of the world," as Critchley glosses Paul, who produced a "political theology of the wretched of the earth." Reading Paul (properly) in an eschatological light, Critchley sketches what he calls the Christian meontology: "an account of things that are not" together with an account of things that are, but are passing. (Like, say, the American Empire.) Meontology is the historical and political analogue to dividualism: we are called and divided from the present, beckoned to "see the world from the standpoint of redemption." We are to live as if the new world already is, and as if this world were already not—not cutting deals with the transient and god-forsaking powers and principalities of the age. Living as a vanguard, Christians reside—or better, travel—within the radical insecurity of time, since the parousia could occur at any moment and render all our calculations foolish.

Critchley clearly believes that the contemporary left must recuperate something of this eschatological faith, but his political theology founders on his avowed dismissal—and misconstrual—of Christian ontology. "To be is to be in debt," he writes, and "original sin is the theological name for the essential ontological indebtedness of the self." There are two problems with this account of ontological "debt." If, as Critchley holds, there is no "transcendent reality," then to whom or what do I "owe" this "debt"? To the "infinite demand" of whom or what do I owe my faith and commitment? If Critchley's "dividualism" is right, I owe it to myself—but I suspect that any debt that I owe to myself will be a fairly easy tab to settle, with ever-negotiable terms of repayment to myself as my lenient creditor.

In other words, I'm sinful—and here Critchley makes another mistake. Sin does not name our "ontological indebtedness"—this makes existence sinful in itself, which makes the calamity of sin incomprehensible. Graeber comes closer to getting it right when he remarks that sin "is our presumption in thinking of ourselves as being in any sense an equivalent to Everything Else that Exists … so as to be able to conceive of such a debt in the first place." Sin is not only a refusal to acknowledge our "indebtedness"—it's the very idea of our indebtedness itself, the notion that our ultimate relation to God is that of dependence, not of loving friendship. It's not just that we desired to be independent of God; it's that we didn't trust God, didn't desire his friendship. So when Critchley writes that Christian love rests on a conviction of "the absolute difference between the human and the divine," he forgets the Incarnation, where the divine entered into the human, and the human was raised to the level of divinity. (Following Paul, the Church Fathers would elaborate the Incarnation in the doctrine of theosis, or the deification of humanity.)

Being Christian consists in realizing that we don't "owe" God a single thing; it's not as though, in giving, he's parted with something, and become poorer or more diminished because of it. I would argue that this perversion of our relationship with God lies at the root of the American Dream, the delusion that the endless pursuit of libertas and wealth is an offering to God. Turning God into a ruthless creditor, we pile up money, achievements, property, and empire to settle the debt. And when the money runs out, the achievements fade, the property depreciates, and the empire crumbles, we wail about losing his favor, as if he's found us unworthy of lending on account of a low cosmic credit score.

In his magnificent sermon, "Poverty and God," the late Father Herbert McCabe reminds us that God is our Creator, not our creditor, nor some demanding investor in our earthly pursuits. "God makes without becoming richer … it is only creation that gains by God's act." (As Henry Miller once put it, "God doesn't make a dime on the deal.") Thus, God is literally poor because he "has no possessions … nothing is or acts for the benefit of God." We can't "give back" to God, or win his love with an impeccable credit history. His delight is to be with, not hound his children, like a rude collection agent; what parent thinks of a child's life as a loan to be repaid or a debt to be squared?

Come to think of it, the God of Jesus Christ has no business sense at all, and violates every canon of the Protestant Ethic. He pays the same wage for one hour of work as for ten, and recommends that we lend without thought of return. (Finance capital could not survive a day with this logic, which is one excellent reason to recommend it.) He's an appallingly lavish and undiscriminating spendthrift, sending his sunshine on the good and the evil. He has a soft spot for moochers and the undeserving poor: his Son was always inviting himself into people's homes, and never asking if the blind man deserved to be cured. How can you run a decent economy this way?

He calls us his friends, and friends share all things; as Thomas Merton knew, "to be a Christian is to be a communist." And divine friendship is to live without debts by "throwing ourselves away"—giving (not charging) according to our ability, and receiving according to our need. "To aim at poverty," McCabe said, "to grow up by living in friendship, is to imitate the life-giving poverty of God, to be godlike." By comparison, the American Dream is a shabby hallucination. As the American Empire totters and slides into history's graveyard of hubris, the glorious poverty of friendship will be our only hope of moral renewal. It's a model of another, very different empire, one innocent of creditors and debtors: the people's republic of heaven, the realm of divine love's utterly unearned, unarmed, and penniless dominion.

Eugene McCarraher is associate professor of humanities and history at Villanova University. He is completing The Enchantments of Mammon: Capitalism and the American Moral Imagination.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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An Incredible Tombstone

Why  we celebrate Easter.

Good Friday, 2013

Carolyn McCready captured this image just as our service for Good Friday was about to begin at Valley Covenant. We have a ceramic sculpture of Christus Victor on the back wall, and on the opposite wall is a stained glass window with a cross and Covenant logo.  Here the shadow of the cross is superimposed over the sculpture, with chilling effect.

Thoughts on "Marriage Equality"

Here's a few random thoughts, in addition to those presented by Josh Tucker
https://www.facebook.com/notes/josh-tucker/why-christians-should-not-oppose-legalized-gay-marriage/407481142680588

My husband is a pastor, and when he does a wedding, he is required to act as an agent of the state, signing the couple's marriage license, and mailing it in. In effect, he is administering a contract.  If we really believe in the separation of church and state, then we ought to separate sacramental marriage and civil unions. However, as I have pointed out elsewhere, when the  Puritans dumped the idea of sacramental marriage and embraced the idea of marriage as contract, they muddied the waters, and protestants (and Americans) have been confused ever since. This has lead the conversation to employ language like "marriage equality" and "gay marriage," but IMO these are oxymorons. As I reject Puritanism, my preference is to use the term "civic union

I'm all for civil unions, not only for homosexuals, but for anyone who doesn't hold the sacramental view of marriage.  IMO there need to be more heterosexual civil unions, and less heterosexual marriages. As representatives of the City of God, Christian clergy need to be more discriminating in who they agree to marry, and not just be agents of the state or paid actors in the romantic dramas that are American weddings. Churches are not venues. Thy are sacred spaces. We have allowed culture and the wedding industry to perpetuate rituals apart from their meaning, and the sooner Christians resist this, the better.

In the City of Man, all human beings should be held equal in the sight of the law, so all human beings should have the right to unite with whomever they please. Contracts uniting people in sexual relationships should be just as respected as contracts uniting people in business. Further, if we hold to a democratic form of government, then we must admit the logical possibility that individuals could have the right to unite with however many people they please, if the majority so wills. After all, in a democracy, majority rules.  Christians have confused America with the City of God, and it's about time we repent. Maybe then the Gospel can finally get a hearing.

Many heterosexuals (and homosexuals) think that the "love" is all one needs for marriage. Indeed, it might be sufficient for civil unions, but not for sacramental marriage. Sacramental marriage requires not only love, but the fruits of the Spirit: joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Because sacraments are not rights, but rather gifts from God, sacramental marriage is a not a right, but a gift from God. Sacramental marriage is impossible to initiate or sustain apart from the Trinity. (See http://medievalmind.blogspot.com/2012/05/steves-sermon-for-susan-and-andrews.html)

Of course, for many protestants who hold a modernist/postmodernist hermeneutic, "gay marriage" is not an oxymoron,  because their definition of "marriage"  (and arguably, "sacrament") is colored by their "progressive" reading of scripture. However, evangelicals are caught in the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, in order to preserve their identity as protestants, they must reject the idea of marriage as a sacrament. On the other hand, they need to affirm the idea of marriage as a sacrament, if they are to be faithful to the biblical witness. It will be interesting to see how the issue of "gay marriage" transforms evangelical theology.

Faith as God's Barcode?

I lived through this time as the daughter of a Catholic father and Southern Baptist mother.  My. How times have changed. And yet, they haven't, so much.  Ironic, isn't it, that the same day this article crossed my screen, so did this one:
The Bible: It's Just Not That Into You,  offering your own customized scriptures in a veritable apotheosis of nominalism.

Great Suspicion

Mar 15, 2013 @ 5:14 By scotmcknight 12 Comments

Our weekly post From the Shepherd’s Nook by John Frye

While at Fuller Theological Seminary studying the history and practice of the spiritual disciplines, an opening statement by Dr. James E. Bradley, church historian, jolted me by its simplicity and frankness. “Most Christians think that true spirituality began with Martin Luther and John Calvin.” Bradley went on to explain a deep-seated suspicion in the church about anything to do with Christian formation prior to the Reformation. Bradley’s statements are not hard to comprehend, but the truth of them is utterly staggering. The frisky theological wars between Catholics and Protestants caused many in the evangelical church to unwittingly jettison the vast treasure of pre-Reformation literature penned by deep lovers of God, i.e., books by women and men who dared to keep Jesus and his Way the focus of their lives. The Protestant Church began its own gallery of “saints” (heroes) including John Wycliffe, John and Susanna Wesley, David Brainerd, Hudson Taylor, Richard Baxter, George Herbert, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Spurgeon, Charles Finney to name just a few.

I remember reading Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth in the late 1980s and thinking “This is just too ‘Catholic’ for me. It feels like works-righteousness.” Foster is a Quaker which puts him in the Protestant camp. I had been so conditioned by sola fide that any cooperation with God in Christian formation was a ‘Catholic thing.’ I am embarrassed to write this, but I will because I think I represent hundreds or more evangelicals who don’t even know who these folks are: Teresa of Avila, Antony the desert father, Julian of Norwich, Bernard of Clairvaux, Catherine of Genoa, Benedict of Nursia, to name a few. As I recall, the only pre-Reformation writer I knew of and read was Thomas a Kempis and his Imitation of Christ. How he squeezed through the sola fide filter I do not know. Had I known he also wrote Imitation of Mary, I probably would have gone apoplectic.

What pre-Reformation writers have influenced your spiritual formation?
By the time I came to faith in Christ in the late 1960s (in Junior High school), a virulent strain of “justification by faith alone” prevailed in the more conservative evangelical churches. There was an intense grace/law, faith/works, Protestant/Catholic divide and to “do” anything seemed to be an ungodly denial of salvation by grace and faith alone. Bible books like Ephesians were bifurcated—doctrine (chapters 1-3) / duty (chapters 4-6) or position/practice, yet the emphasis was always on the doctrine-position side of truth. Faith in Jesus became, as Dallas Willard points out, simply a barcode God scans to let you into heaven when you die. As long as you affirmed your “position” in Christ, you could live as a habitual gossip, but not drink beer; a blatant racist, but not dance; a liar, but not go to movies; a mean-spirited person, but not play cards. I was engulfed in a shallow, boundary-marker spirituality. Because any emphasis on how we actually lived was considered the dreaded “works righteousness” error, we could ignore the biblical call to Christian formation. It’s funny now, but back in those days reading your Bible and praying was for Protestants the equivalent to the Catholics’ once a week Mass: you do it and the slate is cleared for another week or day of self-centered living.

A good teacher pointed out to me one day the object of the judgment seat of Christ in 2 Corinthians 5:10—“…the things done in the body.” What?! Things done? I thought the judgment seat was about “things believed in the head.” You know, right doctrine. The teacher, then, pointed me to a phrase in Paul’s first letter to Timothy, “…rather, train yourself to be godly” (1 Tim 4:7). Train myself? I thought godliness was positional, imputed by faith! Why, Paul even calls me a “saint” positionally. All this was a skewed, Americanized, self-centered justification by faith theology that probably would horrify both Luther and Calvin. Any theology that deceives you into thinking you are OK with God and allows you to live an unloving and unserving life is a theology unknown to God whether it is Catholic or Protestant (evangelical) theology. Pre-Reformation Jesus-followers believed in loving God and loving others.

Libertarians make bad lifeguards

Why the Chinese aren't nominalists

I love the way Chinese culture gives everyone a unique and valuable place in the community, and forces one to recognize one's relationships in that community. Nominalism would have a harder time growing in Chinese soil than in western soil.