Karl Barth and paganism: toward a theology without nature

I’ll be presenting a paper on Barth and paganism at the Princeton conference tomorrow morning. Here’s a little excerpt:

“Within contemporary paganism, there are two main forms which this theologised nature-devotion may take. Nature may (this is the usual response) be celebrated as the caring, mothering womb, the source of all love and kindness. In this approach, all the emphasis falls on the sacred feminine; one reconnects with nature by dancing in a field, being kind to animals, practising vegetarianism, and so forth. Or nature may (as in some of the Nordic varieties of contemporary paganism) be revered for its dark and terrible power, its exhilarating cruelty and might. Here, the emphasis falls not on the sacred feminine but on patriarchal and hierarchical structures; one reconnects with nature by dressing in warrior raiment, by engaging in the hunt, by sacrifice, libation, carnivorous feasting. These two varieties of contemporary paganism have an uneasy relationship, since, on the surface, their attitudes and practices seem antithetical. But as Marion Bowman has documented, these very different pagan groups nevertheless band together and perceive each other to be members of a wider pagan family, united by their ritual and theological devotion to nature. For all their differences, they are sides of the same coin: a response to the theologisation of nature.

“Of course, the appropriation of paganism by contemporary Christian theologians and liturgists leans decisively towards the happy side of nature, so that everything centres on the sacred, nurturing kindness of Mother Earth; even the most progressive Christian liturgists with their flowers and their Maypoles would presumably have second thoughts about summoning the congregation to a bloody hunt in the woods as a means of reconnecting with the earth. The real problem with syncretistic pagan-Christian theologies and liturgies lies not in their benign adaptation of rural festivals, but in their uncritical adoption of this theologisation of the transcendental category of nature.”

Princeton Barth Conference: religion and the religions

The Center for Barth Studies in Princeton will be holding its fourth annual Barth conference in June: the theme is Karl Barth on Religion and the Religions.

I’ll be giving a paper on “God and the Gods: Karl Barth and Polytheism.” Other speakers include Matthew Myer Boulton (you really have to see his new book on Barth and worship), Lai Pan-Chiu, Garrett Green, Scott Jones, Mark R. Lindsay, Katherine Sonderegger and Charles West.

So I look forward to seeing all my Princeton friends again in June!

A bargain with God?

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

Not long after I became a Christian, a friend of mine gave me a collection of sermons by Karl Barth. The collection was appropriately entitled Deliverance to the Captives; all the sermons were preached towards the end of Barth’s life in the city prison in Basel. One sermon in particular shocked and overwhelmed me. It was entitled “The Criminals with Him”, and took as its text a verse from Luke’s passion narrative: “They crucified him with the criminals, one on either side of him” (Luke 23:33). “Do you know what this implies?” asked Barth. “Don’t be too surprised if I tell you that this was the first Christian fellowship.” And Barth went on to conclude: “In reality we all are these crucified criminals. And only one thing matters now. Are we ready to be told what we are? Are we ready to hear the promise given to the condemned, [and] to ‘get in line behind’ [them]?”

“Get in line behind them?” I thought. Hang on a minute, Karl! I know you’re big on grace, but aren’t you getting carried away, isn’t this taking grace a bit too far? I mean isn’t this unjust, criminals at the front of the queue to the kingdom, evil folk ahead of the good? I was particularly miffed at what Barth preached because I myself came to Christ – or rather Christ to me – out of a rather sordid existence, having lived for a time on the streets of Amsterdam and London, homeless and broke, begging, taking drugs, shoplifting just to survive. I knew what kind of people wheeled and dealed there, the crime and the violence. And now Barth tells me that I’m going to have to get in line behind this scum? And, adding insult to injury, observe: Barth made no distinction between the penitent and the impenitent thief – both were going to precede me. And, in fact, these weren’t just thieves, they were what we would now call terrorists.

Can you sympathise with my annoyance and discomfort? I’m sure you can. For my anger and confusion are, I think, typical of Christians – indeed they are the temptation of all good people, especially all good religious people. For here is what religion, at bottom, is all about: it’s about making a bargain with God. And the bargain goes like this: Lord, I give you my faith and all that goes with it: the church-going, the praying, the giving, the rectitude, the extra mile, and so on; and you, God, in return, you’ve got to be fair. If I keep my side of the bargain, I expect you to bless me with good things – health, work, family. I don’t expect life to be all strawberries and cream, but I do expect a sense of proportion – no serious illnesses, traumatic divorce, or kids on crack. Of course if I don’t keep my side of the bargain, if I lapse and behave very badly – hey, nobody’s perfect! – fair enough, I get what’s coming to me. But, Lord, we both keep to the contract. And there is an unwritten codicil to this contract: other people – they too must get what they deserve: as the righteous must prosper, so the sinner must suffer.

This is religion. Isn’t that the way it is? Isn’t that why we get so bloody, viciously vengeful, when criminals and murderers “get off lightly”? That’s not in the contract! May they rot in hell! And isn’t that why suffering, especially seemingly undeserved suffering, especially my underserved suffering, is so faith-threatening? How can it be that my child is crippled in a car accident, or my wife gets ovarian cancer and dies in a matter of months? That’s not part of the bargain!

Well, today I am here to tell you that God doesn’t do bargains. I mean the whole idea, really, is a no-brainer. Why should God do deals with us? What do we have to offer God that he doesn’t already have? And indeed – pardon the sacrilege – why should we trust God to deliver the goods we’re expecting? I mean the deity has form, doesn’t he? Two words should suffice: Good Friday. For heaven’s sake, man, God didn’t deliver his own totally sinless and obedient Son from torture and death, he watched him get strung up between those two thieves, terrorists – so what, am I God’s gift that I am going to be exempted from fortune’s slings and arrows? What makes me a special case? The idea that God might owe me for good – or them for bad – really, folks, it is fairyland. Deserve? As outlaw William Munny (Clint Eastwood) says in that great line from Unforgiven: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

A bargain? Think again. But we can only think again when we abandon religion and accept revelation – which is what Christianity is: revelation. Unlike religion, revelation is not something that confirms the way we think and what we think we know. On the contrary, revelation rudely interrupts the way we go about our existential business, shaking and shattering our conventional norms and complacent assurances. Although revelation is a gift – it is good news – our first response is always recoil, resistance, outrage at such an unexpected and unasked-for invasion of our moral space. In order to be redeemed, our cover must be blown, and our worlds blown away.

Do you know Flannery O’Connor’s short story entitled – succinctly – “Revelation”? It is about one Mrs Turpin from the deep South. Mrs Turpin is a hard-working, upright, church-going farmer’s wife. One day, at her doctor’s office, she is bad-mouthing the white trash and lazy blacks she has to put up with. Suddenly a mentally disturbed girl in the waiting room throws a book at her and calls her a “wart hog from hell”. Visibly shaken, Mrs Turpin returns to her farm, unable to get the girl’s offensive words out of her mind. “Wart hog” indeed! For Mrs Turpin knows that she is a good person, certainly far superior to red necks and “niggers”, and she reminds God of her rectitude, as well as of all the good work she does, especially for the church. Then she angrily asks, referring to the girl’s outrageous insult, “What did you send me a message like that for?” And then, suddenly – revelation! As she stares into the pigpen, Mrs Turpin is given a glimpse of “the very heart of mystery,” and she begins to absorb some “abysmal life-giving knowledge.” She has a vision of a parade of souls marching to heaven, with white trash, blacks, freaks, lunatics and other social outcasts up front, leading the way, and, taking up the rear, folk like herself, “marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behaviour. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”

Yes, religion is a bargain, but revelation is no bargain, revelation is grace, it is free. Nothing is necessary, all is a gift. We have no rights, we are never owed, and we are never one up on the bastards and undeserving. That “scum” I thought I’d left behind – I didn’t: it was me too, and I took it with me. But no matter: God’s sun shines and his rain falls on the good and the evil without distinction. As Oxford Regius Professor of Divinity Marilyn McCord Adams puts it: “Expecting God to be interested in invidious distinctions among us would be like our judging the ladybugs to see which had paid us the appropriate honour!”

God is sheer, exuberant, overflowing, prodigal love, inside and out, from top to bottom. May God grant us the insight and wisdom that Mrs Turpin takes home with her that fateful night: “In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”

God against religion

A new book has just landed on my desk, and I really like the look of it: Matthew Myer Boulton, God against Religion: Rethinking Christian Theology through Worship (Eerdmans, 2008). “There is today,” Boulton observes, “a kind of pious haze that clouds much Christian writing about worship” (p. 4).

Boulton’s argument develops as a new appropriation of Karl Barth’s critique of religion – and at the heart of the book is the claim that Barth’s critique is fundamentally a critique of worship. “It is worship, most fundamentally, that has this double aspect, both veil and clothing, ‘fall’ and ‘reconciliation’. And thus it is worship, finally, that God will cast aside” (p. xviii). Worship constitutes the “fatal disease”, the “wound of human life” – and it is this very wound which God sublimates, transforming it from within in order to effect our reconciliation. Liturgy is both the wound and the cure, both fall and reconciliation. The Eucharist is paradigmatic here: “For whenever it is celebrated, it is simultaneously a meal of consummate betrayal and desertion … and a meal of consummate joy and reconciliation” (p. 17).

Anyway, so far I’ve only read the opening pages. But this looks like a very promising and very provocative work of constructive theology. “As a brief systematic theology of invocation, this book proposes that Christian theology be thought through worship, that it be conceived, developed, and articulated in liturgical terms…. In what follows I argue that God’s reconciliation of humankind is a radically liturgical solution to a radically liturgical problem: the problem, as Barth puts it, of ‘religion’” (p. 12).

As Boulton rightly (and discomfortingly) reminds us, Barth’s critique isn’t merely directed against some vague religion-in-general. It is directed against Christianity – and especially against Christianity in its highest and noblest and most exalted expressions and activities.

Palm Sunday sermon: lose your faith!

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

There is a lot of twaddle and guff talked during Holy Week. A few years ago I heard a Good Friday sermon – some of you heard it too – in which it was suggested that Jesus, being a carpenter, in order to distract his attention and ease his pain on the cross, may well have admired the quality of its wood. As if our Lord was thinking, “Nice bit of teak this. It’d make a great desk for the study.” It was positively Pythonesque.

No guff and twaddle today. Today I’m going to try to speak shocking, scandalous, scalding truth, say outrageous, even sacrilegious things. You will probably be too polite to heckle or jeer me, but if you walk out on me I shall consider it the highest compliment. I thought of having the elders hand out eggs for to you to throw at me, but pitied the poor cleaners. But eggs are nothing compared to the darts I’m going to fire at you. It’s time to attack your faith, wound it, leave it bleeding, dying, dead – just like the guy on the cross.

Let’s start with some cherished beliefs. For example: that our redemption was achieved by Jesus suffering more horribly than anyone else. But how could we possibly know that? Crucifixion? Yes, a terrible, terrible form of torture and execution. But Jesus’ was only one among thousands and thousands of crucifixions carried out under the so-called Pax Romana – the Roman Peace – when gibbets would stretch for miles down the Apian Way. And the death of Jesus – mercifully swift it was, he expired by mid-afternoon, most usually languished for days. Besides, after the Inquisition, after Auschwitz and the Gulags, after the killing fields in southeast Asia, the tribal slaughter in Rwanda, the mass graves in the Balkans, how can anyone possibly presume to compare national atrocities and personal tragedies, let alone grade them according to some calculus of pain?

For example: that our redemption was achieved by Jesus facing his death more courageously than anyone else. But clearly this is special pleading. And didn’t the first Christians know it – which is why they were hesitant about sensationalising the death of Jesus in terms of martyrdom. As pagans were quick to point out, rather smugly, Jesus sweating blood in Gethsemane, and crying out in agony on Calvary, compares rather unfavourably with the great philosopher Socrates on death row, calmly drinking the hemlock as he reminds a friend – his last words – to remember to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, the god of heath. For Socrates death was the moment of release, for Jesus a time of despair.

And for example: that our redemption was achieved by Jesus dying at the hands of evil men, particularly “the Jews”. What self-serving propaganda! And what a perverse fillip to the church’s long and shameful history of anti-semitism. No, it was not the bestial but the best that killed Jesus. The state in all its glory and religion at its most awesome killed Jesus: not the mob but the upholders of public order, not the wicked but the standard-bearers of morality. Yes, the trial was conducted with unseemly haste and the evidence was selectively marshalled, but the defendant incriminated himself, confessed even, so (if you like) there were no grounds for appeal. For Jesus did undermine a religious system based on law and cult, and Jesus did threaten a political regime based on violence and retribution. Jesus acted with freedom and broke the rules, embracing the dirty, the deviant, and the dangerous. And Jesus prophetically unmasked the mighty pretensions of the local procurator and publicly subverted Caesar’s claim to lordship. Jesus really did force the hands of Caiaphas and Pilate and leave them no choice but to get rid of him. Better that one man die than that the entire social order be at risk – the tried and trusted scapegoat principle. No doubt about it, this peasant troublemaker from up north profoundly threatened the status quo. He had to go.

So: for one Holy Week forget about the suffering of Jesus, the courage of Jesus, the wickedness of it all. Forget even about the dying of Jesus: it is not to the crucifix, or even to the deposition, that I would direct you – no! Rather look at the man – dead – gaze upon the corpse of Christ, fix your eyes on his cold and rigid body, laid out on a slab, already showing signs of decomposition. I am thinking of Hans Holbein’s painting “Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb”. The Russian author Dostoevsky saw the painting, in a museum in Basel, stopping on his way to Geneva, and forever after it haunted him like a nightmare. He describes it in his great novel The Idiot. The character Prince Myshkin says: “Why some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture!”

This sermon doesn’t have three points, it’s got three words: Lose your faith! (I warned you I would be sacrilegious.) Yes, lose your faith. Lose your faith in God. For as the French mystic Simone Weil insisted, there is a kind of atheism that is purifying, cleansing us of idols. Lose your faith in the god that the cross exposes as a no-god, a sham god. Lose your faith in the god who is but the product of your projections, fantasies, wishes, and needs, a security blanket or good-luck charm god. Lose your faith in the god who is there to hold your hand, solve your problems, rescue you from your trials and tribulations, the deus ex machina, literally the “machine god”, wheeled out onto the stage in ancient Greek drama, introduced to the plot artificially to resolve its complications and secure a happy ending. Lose your faith in the god who confers upon you a privileged status that is safe and secure. Lose your faith in the god who promises you health, wealth, fulfilment, and success, who pulls rabbits out of hats. Lose your faith in the god with whom your conscience can be at ease with itself. Lose your faith in the god who, in Dennis Potter’s words, is the bandage, not the wound. Lose your faith in the god who always answers when you pray and comes when you call. Lose your faith in the god who is never hidden, absent, dead, entombed. For the “Father who art in heaven” – this week he is to be found in hell – with his Son.

No one puts it more starkly – or more honestly and truthfully – than Bonhoeffer. We must recognize, he wrote from prison, “that we have to learn to live in the world ‘as if God were not here’. And this is just what we do recognize – before God! God himself compels us to recognize it… God would have us know that we must live as men and women who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us… Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world and onto the cross” – and then down from the cross and into the grave. “He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.” God a Super-Power? That god is a demon, the Devil. If that god is your Lord, this week is a call for “regime change” (Walter Brueggemann).

So, yes, lose your faith! For as with life, so with faith: only those who lose it will find it. Or rather may find it. Faith is a risk, and discipleship demands that we learn to live with insecurity and uncertainty, setting out on a journey without a map, with companions who are as lost as we are, following a leader who is always way ahead of us, beckoning mysteriously, “Follow me!”, and then vanishing just as we arrive. God is mystery, ineffable mystery, naming a reality that we know, but the more we know, the more we are forced to un-know and rethink everything we thought we knew.

But hang on, Kim, frankly you’ve lost us. We don’t know what you’re talking about, but whatever it is, it sounds crazy, foolish. You’ve accomplished the remarkable achievement of making someone like Rowan Williams sound lucid, simple, straightforward. And you’re supposed to be a preacher, and isn’t the whole point of the sermon to make it easier to understand God, to increase our faith, so that we can go back to the world feeling edified, uplifted, and ready to share the Good News? Not today it’s not. Today I can’t help you. This week no one can help you. Come Friday, not even God – especially not God – can help you. And come Saturday, God himself is lying in a tomb. Emptiness. Zero. Nothing. But might it be a pregnant emptiness, a significant zero, a silent nothing that yet says everything? (after Alan E. Lewis). We shall have to wait till Easter. Only then shall we learn that this Week is Holy, and its Friday Good. Only then may we just find a new faith rising from the old faith that I pray you will lose today.

Ten propositions on Richard Dawkins and the new atheists

by Kim Fabricius

1. Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists do not like Christians. They like Muslims even less. We are like people who believe in leprechauns, only worse, because people who believe in leprechauns, while ignoramuses, are not warmongers and terrorists (unless they also happen to be Irish Catholics or Presbyterians). So the New Atheists are our enemies. But remember, Jesus said that we should love our enemies, forgive them, and pray for them. Besides, nothing will piss them off more.

2. But Professor Dawkins is not just angry with Christians, with particular dismay at scientists who are Christians, who, of course, are huge flies in his ointment (at the word “Polkinghorne” he grinds his teeth). Dawkins also gets angry with fellow scientists on scientific matters. One of his most bitter and public altercations was with the late Stephen Jay Gould, the famous Harvard palaeontologist. The religious affairs correspondent Andrew Brown wrote a book documenting this rabies biologorum: it’s called The Darwin Wars. So you’ve got to be fair to Dawkins, he is evenly balanced: he has a chip on both shoulders.

3. I should point out that the word “wars” in The Darwin Wars is (I think) a metaphor. Professor Dawkins himself has a knack for the memorable metaphor. His great book The Selfish Gene is a case in point. People can be literally selfish, but not genes. Indeed Dawkins does not even think that there are genes for selfishness. Okay, he wrote: “The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.” But he didn’t really mean it. Not literally. The author of Genesis said that the universe was created in six days. But who would take that literally except some crazy fundamentalists? Oops – and Dawkins.

4. In The God Delusion Professor Dawkins suggests (no, states, Dawkins doesn’t do “suggests”) that “the Christian focus is overwhelmingly on sin sin sin sin sin sin sin.” No commas, unrelenting. And count them: that’s sin x 7. Perhaps this is a clever allusion to Matthew 18:21. After all, even the devil quotes scripture. The self-proclaimed Devil’s Chaplain continues: “What a nasty little preoccupation to have dominating your life.” Yes, we Christians think of little else. But here’s a thought. All those wars like the one in Iraq that Christopher Hitchens is so keen on, or the practice of torture that Sam Harris says is necessary – that couldn’t have anything to do with our “focus”, could it? But, hey, aren’t Hitchens and Harris New Atheists?

5. Their teaching on sin shows the New Atheists to be true children of the Enlightenment – that and their belief in religionless “progress”. Now Professor Dawkins’ case against faith is that it is “belief without evidence”. (For the sake of argument, never mind that this definition itself is belief against the evidence.) So on his own terms we may be permitted to ask Dawkins, “Where is the evidence for this progress?” Forgive me, dear reader, for wearying you with the obvious: the names of such progressive statesmen and harbingers of world peace as the atheists Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, and Pol Pot. Oh, and isn’t there the little matter that teleology has no place in evolutionary theory? Progress? My money is on the leprechauns.

6. “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.” After this now famous first-line knockdown punch by Terry Eagleton it would be unsportsmanlike to bully the bully. Professor Dawkins does not enter the ring with the intellectual heavyweights of the Christian tradition, though he occasionally throws a bottle at them from the seats. Is he ignorant, hubristic, or just plain chicken? Whatever. The irony is that Dawkins thereby again betrays the very Enlightenment he represents (as Tina Beattie records a comment Keith Ward made to her, with sadness), “everything that the Western intellectual tradition stands for, with its privileging of informed scholarship based on the study of texts.”

7. If Professor Dawkins is the “bad cop” of the New Atheists, the Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee is probably the “good cop”, while Christopher Hitchens is undoubtedly the “corrupt cop”. I saw him on the British TV programme Question Time, contemptuously holding court like Jabba the Hutt. And I sat for half-an-hour at Waterstone’s dipping into the over-priced God Is Not Great as if it were dishwater, a highly flattering simile. Hitchens’ penetrating scholarly appraisals include descriptions of Augustine the “ignoramus”, Aquinas the “stupid”, and Calvin the “sadist”; while Niemöller and Bonhoeffer’s resistance to the Nazis was motivated by a “nebulous humanism”, and Martin Luther King’s faith was Christian only in a “nominal sense”. Enough said. It is all rather embarrassing.

8. There are two reactions to this sort of illiteracy that must be avoided. The first is the response of the right, which, when not hysterical, simply confirms the unquestioned assumption of the New Atheists that God is a huge and powerful supernatural being whose ways with the world are, in principle, open to empirical discovery and verification. This is the God of Intelligent Design. If ID is science, it is either bad science or dead science. “Bring it on!” cries Professor Dawkins, gleefully rubbing his hands together. But even if it were good science (and, by the way, weren’t driven by a political agenda), it would be dreadful, indeed suicidal theology, for the god of ID is but a version of the “god of the gaps”, a god deployed as an explanation of natural phenomena, a hostage to scientific fortune, in short, an idol. The operation of ID can be successful only at the cost of the patient.

9. The second response is the response of the left, the liberals. On this Enlightenment view, science is given its due in the realm of “facts”, while religion is cordoned off from the New Atheists in the realm of “values”. There is a superficial attractiveness to this division of territory – Stephen Jay Gould called it “NOMA”, or Non-Overlapping Magisteria, separate but equal – but in the end it amounts to theological appeasement. For the realm of “facts” includes not only the empirical, natural world but also the embodied, public, political world, while religion becomes the sphere of the “spiritual”, the interior, and the private. The church cannot accept this partition for Leviathan, the nation state, is a violent and voracious beast. Nor, however, is the church called to become the state: theocracies are inevitably gross distortions of power, whether the flag bears a cross or a crescent. Rather the church is called to be a distinctive polis forming citizens for the kingdom of God and sending them into the kingdoms of the world as truth-tellers and peacemakers.

10. The New Atheists don’t only have a dashing if reckless officer leading an army of grunts, they also have their aesthetes, a brilliant novelist in Ian McEwan, a master fantasist in Philip Pullman. Are they dangerous? Of course! Yet if the Russian expressionist painter Alexei Jawlensky was right that “all art is nostalgia for God”, there is nothing to fear and something to gain from them, their didacticism notwithstanding. Unlike atheist writers such as Camus or Beckett who (if you like) have been to the altar but cannot kneel, McEwan and Pullman are unacquainted with the God of Jesus. Nevertheless, McEwan, in novels like Enduring Love, Atonement, and Saturday (titles freighted with theological irony), so elegantly probes the human shadows, and Pullman, in the His Dark Materials trilogy (the title drawn from Paradise Lost), so imaginatively narrates the themes of innocence and experience and exposes the corruptions of false religion, that we feel at least that we have been in the outer courts of the temple. It is certainly better to read this outstanding literature and be disturbed by it than not to read it at all.

Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan: Political Theologies

Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (eds.), Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 796 pp. (review copy courtesy of Fordham)

This vast and energetic collection brings together over 30 essays on the relation between religion and public life in an age of globalisation. The essays are written by some of the world’s foremost political and philosophical theorists – Jürgen Habermas, Jean-Luc Nancy, Ernesto Laclau, Claude Lefort, Judith Butler and Chantal Mouffe, to name a few – and together they constitute a landmark engagement with the problem of “political theology.”

The current interest in political theology is perhaps best understood against the backdrop of Carl Schmitt’s famous remark that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts.” Schmitt’s point was historical and descriptive rather than normative: theology reappears in the sphere of secularised politics (in concepts such as sovereignty, intervention, state of exception, decision), but theology reappears here precisely as that which has become obsolete by passing over into the political.

While some writers in this collection follow such a descriptive understanding of an implicit political theology (a notable example is Bruce Lincoln’s entertaining analysis of “Bush’s God Talk”), others seek to develop a normative understanding of the precise relation between religion and the political. In the fascinating exchange between Habermas and Benedict XVI, for instance (recently re-published as a separate volume), we witness a debate over the question whether the modern democratic state is dependent on “autochthonous conceptual or religious traditions” or “collectively binding ethical traditions.” And, if so, is the state able to “renew the normative preconditions of its existence out of its own resources” (p. 251)?

While, in spite of their differences, both Benedict and Habermas are concerned to articulate the pluralistic unity of reason, Chantal Mouffe inserts the religion–politics relation into her “agonistic” model of radical democracy. Mouffe raises the pointed question whether Habermas’ (and, we might add, Benedict’s) vision of “a final resolution of conflicts” through free dialogue is not in fact a vision of the end of democracy, since the expectation here is for “a reconciled society, where pluralism would have been superseded” (p. 320). Through a creative modification of Schmitt’s friend/enemy conception of politics, Mouffe argues that the task of democratic politics is to establish “the us/them distinction” in such a way that the opponent is seen not as “an enemy to be destroyed” but as “an adversary whose existence is legitimate” (p. 323). In a word, the fundamental political relation is not antagonistic but agonistic – it is not warfare, but struggle.

On this basis, Mouffe argues (contra John Rawls) that “comprehensive doctrines” – with all the particularistic passion and commitment that these entail – should not be excluded from the public sphere. While Rawlsian and Habermasian models of deliberative democracy seek to relegate divisive religious issues to the private sphere so that a rational consensus can be established in the public sphere, Mouffe rightly sees that the fundamental church/state separation (which simply designates the state’s monopoly on coercive violence) is not equivalent to the religion/politics distinction, much less to the private/public distinction. Indeed, Mouffe’s model of agonistic democracy suggests that there is an important place for “religious forms of intervention within the context of agonistic debate” (p. 326).

I’ve focused here on Mouffe’s richly suggestive proposal because I find it more convincing and more interesting than some of the rationalist or rights-based conceptions of democracy which are developed elsewhere in the volume. But that is no criticism of this book: on the contrary, the great strength of this collection is its remarkable range of diverse and divergent proposals – a diversity which nevertheless coheres around an intensive concentration on the question of the contemporary reappearance of religion in the political sphere.

The fundamental question which is pursued throughout the whole collection is – as Hent de Vries notes at the close of his lengthy introduction – the ways in which “the legacies of ‘religion’ disarticulate and reconstellate themselves as the elementary forms of life in the twenty-first century” (p. 88). This is indeed a compelling question. And this splendid volume will be essential reading for anyone who wants to explore the whole terrain of contemporary “political theologies” through which this question is addressed.

Note: If you’re interested in Chantal Mouffe, you might also like to check out Richard’s helpful reviews of some of Mouffe’s major works.

Marx and Hitchens among the theologians?

A guest-post by Scott Stephens

For all of the claims that Christopher Hitchens has abandoned his earlier Leftist proclivities, there is at least one point at which he remains an orthodox Marxist. His recent book, God Is Not Great, is a straightforward reiteration of Marx’s own critique of religion, albeit in the most splendidly bombastic fashion:

“God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.… Thus the mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made.”

Hitchens here evokes one of philosophy’s most defiant veins: the reduction of the religious impulse to the product of our basest human instincts. He thus places himself within an intellectual tradition that stretches from Kant (“we cannot conceive God otherwise than by attributing to him without limit all the real qualities which we find in ourselves”) through Feuerbach (“man – this is the mystery of religion – projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself”), until it finally reaches Marx himself (“the foundation of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion, religion does not make man”).

But, as one might expect, Hitchens gives this tradition his own contemptuous twist. He is not content just to strip religion of its nobility, to dislodge it from its pride of place as the founding gesture of civilization – the moment when Homo sapiens, driven by its emerging thirst for transcendence, takes the first step out of the domain of primates by investing certain ritualized practices with meaning. He goes further, and dismisses religion as little more than the invention of hucksters and frauds who, at every occasion, aim to exploit our innate fears and profit from our listless servitude.

Here, again, Hitchens invokes Marx’s authority, citing his famous anti-Darwinian quip that “human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape” (though he misattributes it to Engels). His point is that, even as the later manifestations of a process disclose the true nature of its origin, so too the most notorious historical examples of religious fabrication and plagiarism – from Muhammadanism and Mormonism to the preposterous “cargo cults” of Melanesia – provide a window onto religion’s murky beginnings. For Hitchens, the history of religion remains a sordid tale of outright fraudulence preying on a fearful species still trying to master the use of its opposable thumbs. Both sides are thus implicated in the sweeping verdict, “Religion is man-made.”

The basic problem with this depiction is not that it is unnecessarily pessimistic, reducing religion to a quasi-Darwinian universe of predators and prey, but that it is not pessimistic enough. It fails to go to the heart of the matter, quite literally, and identify the full reach of the religious impulse. And it is at this point that Richard Dawkins is at his best. The great (and perhaps only enduring) achievement of The God Delusion is to have radicalized the definition of “man-made,” by transferring the driver behind the religious impulse from those vulgar, primitive instincts – say, fear or predation – to the solipsism of the meme itself. In this book, Dawkins gives his fullest, though by no means best, account of the operations of the “God-meme”, which he first proposed in the final chapter of The Selfish Gene.

The meme, according to Dawkins, is a kind of replicating unit of cultural evolution, capable of adapting and spreading from one brain to another. Its logic is its own and its aim is its own survival, even at the expense of its host. Much like a virus, the meme “parasitizes” the brain, “turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation.” This is indeed a strangely speculative notion – which Daniel Dennett describes as properly “philosophical” – to find developed by so hard-shelled an empiricist. For, in effect, Dawkins is ascribing to religion a life of its own, transforming it from mere fiction to malignant idolatry. The meme is, as Marx put it, “full of theological subtleties and metaphysical niceties.”

In fact, it was Marx who first identified the enigmatic operations of the meme within economic and social life. In that most bizarre passage which concludes the first chapter of his Capital, Marx insists that in order to understand the existence and function of the commodity-form, “we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race.”

An uncharacteristically intelligent amalgamation of Dawkins and Marx occurs in Michael Bay’s otherwise terrible film, The Island. Hundreds of survivors of an apparent nuclear holocaust are housed in a sterile, asexual, infinitely regulated environment – part fitness-centre, part preschool, part prison. Nevertheless, a desire grows within these innocents, a spontaneous genetic mutation which craves the corrupting excesses of Western life: the trademark vices of capitalism, from the five strips of bacon at the beginning of the film, to the “lots and lots of sex” which causes a character’s liver failure at the end. The innate lust after these vices drives the inmates to break out of their prison and discover their own garden of earthly delights on the streets of Los Angeles.

It is this idolatry – which courses like poison through our veins, accentuating the egotism of the life-instinct and parasitizing our mammalian drives – that is the real object of Marx’s and Dawkins’ attack on religion. Theirs is a powerful demonstration of the truth of Marx’s dictum, “the criticism of heaven becomes the criticism of earth”: the fight against evil in our time must begin with the opposition to every idolatry, whether religious or economic. And this is the task to which Christian theology must devote itself today.

On Capitalism, God and Mammon

A guest-post by Scott Stephens

In his review of Don DeLillo’s highly acclaimed Underworld – whose sheer size and overall chutzpah established it as the last great novel of the 20th century – James Wood observed that “the book is so large, so ambitious, that it produces its own antibodies and makes criticism a small germ”.

I’ve often thought that the same description could apply just as easily to capitalism. Every attempt to curb its voracious appetite, to “humanise” its world-wide dominion, to place the economy back in the service of the greater good and thus temper its lust for unregulated growth, has not simply failed, but has been assimilated, folded back into the existing economic order and turned into yet another expression of capitalism itself.

Take, for example, the wide-spread use of “anti-globalisation” rhetoric by designer labels and marketing firms, or even the current wave of chic enviro-fundamentalism. In both cases, there is a kind of coming together of opposites, where two trends which are logically opposed (like popular consumerism and radical conservationism) come to occupy the same space, and seemingly without contradiction. So, the exemplary product of global capitalism are T-shirts made in Chinese sweatshops bearing the “World Without Strangers” motto.

But my favourite instance of this absorption of a potential criticism of capitalism into the inert safety of pop culture can be found in the book version of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Its back cover features an endorsement, not from Sir Nicholas Stern, nor even from Tim Flannery, but from none other than Leonardo DiCaprio! (I suppose there is a connection between Leo and big chunks of floating ice – but wasn’t his problem that the ice hadn’t melted?)

Yes – capitalism, too, produces its own antibodies. And it seems that nothing is outside of its grasp.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of global capitalism is to have made choice one of those inalienable human rights, to have ensnared the very notion of democracy within an indiscriminate right-to-excess, to have transposed freedom into economic or consumptive terms. This is an achievement that DeLillo grasped in a remarkable way. As he put it in Underworld:

“Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that’s electronic and sex that’s cyberspaced, the convergence of consumer desire – not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.”

Choice itself has thus become the true object of human longing, a longing that has parasitised or colonised human nature itself. And so it seems that Karl Marx was right: the vision of capitalism that I’ve just described – which embraces the entire globe, which can generate more money ex nihilo through the mysteries of financial derivatives and futures speculation, which can bring together polar opposites in apparent economic harmony – is, in the end, theological. Or, to put it another way, capitalism is Mammon.

So, here’s my question: how can we take Jesus’ statement, “You cannot serve God and Mammon,” seriously when God and Mammon are now in cahoots?

Let me explain. While everyone loves to poke fun at the ridiculous platitudes of “prosperity theology”, the conspiring of God with Mammon is much, much older. Max Weber, in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, famously proposed that the capitalist disposition to earn and accumulate arose directly from the Puritan sense of calling which embraces all of life.

But now that the capitalist drive has shifted from thrift to choice, from prudence to indulgence, from accumulation to experience, the way religion operates within capitalism has also changed. Instead of a secularised motivation for work, the function of religion today more closely resembles those medieval rituals that provided sinners with the means whereby to atone for their sins.

We have our own thinly veiled forms of penance – like tithing, charitable donations, watching PBS – each of which makes us feel better about participating in decadent consumerism. And not only that, these forms of penance allow us to participate by relieving any sense of guilt.

And so it is that capitalism and charity can cohabitate. The one lets you indulge, and the other lets you get away with it. The problem at the heart of the matter is that Christianity traditionally has geared itself to dealing with the guilty conscience of the West, how to escape from the consequences of our wrongdoing. No wonder it has so readily been accommodated by capitalism as its ideal religious accessory. It was, of course, Marx that first recognised the inherent connection, the deep symbiosis between actually existing capitalism and various forms of religious belief and practice:

“Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal basis for consolation and justification. It is the imaginary realization of the human essence, because the human essence possesses no true reality. Thus, the struggle against religion is indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.… The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about their condition is a demand to give up a condition that requires illusion.”

When Marx goes on to insist that a critique of capitalism must begin with a critique of religion (“the criticism of heaven is thus transformed into the criticism of earth”), wasn’t he simply repeating Jesus’ warning, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them”? Such expressions of disingenuous charity – performed for one’s own peace of mind and in the service of Mammon – are the oil in the capitalist machine.

Perhaps the best way of breaking today’s alliance between God and Mammon, then, is to refuse ourselves the false comfort of token acts of charity and fashionable faith, so that we can see our behaviour for what it really is and dare really to live differently.

Now just to be clear, so that no one can come back later and accuse me of coming dangerously close to Marcionite language, let me just confirm that I am absolutely a Marcionite! Radical Paulinism – as Barth recognised in the preface to the second edition of The Epistle to the Romans – represents one of the crucial resources for opposing capitalism, liberal democracy, and the inherent idolatry that sustains them both.

Bonhoeffer and the end of religion

“It is the advent of the reality of reconciliation – much more than the simple advance of secularisation – that has dissolved, for Bonhoeffer, the old antinomy of religious and secular. In the wake of God’s epoch-making incursion in Christ, the categories ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ no longer map onto reality as it has been remade.... It is possible for Christians to embrace the dissolution of religion as a historical development finally because human religion has already been abolished prospectively but ultimately in God’s act of justifying the ungodly.”

—Philip G. Ziegler, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer – An Ethics of God’s Apocalypse?” Modern Theology 23:4 (2007), p. 589.

Religion is a bargain

In a sermon posted over at Connexions, Kim Fabricius suggests that religion is all about bargaining with God: “Yes, religion is a bargain, but revelation is no bargain, revelation is grace, it is free. Nothing is necessary, all is gift.”

Bonhoeffer versus John Shelby Spong

A guest-post by Scott Stephens

When it comes to theological brand-names, they don’t come any sexier, or more marketable, than Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The inherent nobility of his short life, his blistering intelligence, and his martyrdom at the hands of the Nazis places Bonhoeffer among the unassailable luminaries of our time. Even Christopher Hitchens – who savaged Mother Theresa in a vicious polemic entitled The Missionary Position – can’t find anything bad to say about him: “Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by Nazis for his refusal to collude with them.”

Because of his near universal appeal, it was inevitable that Bonhoeffer’s demanding body of work would be made more available for popular consumption and reduced to an “Everyday-with-Dietrich” style anthology of sayings, sermons and other morsels of spiritual advice. But every now and then, one comes across an appropriation of Bonhoeffer that is so perverse that one is compelled to put one’s foot down and say, “Enough is enough.”

Anyone who has read John Shelby Spong – whose books I’ve always found very easy to put down, and almost impossible to pick back up again – will by now be familiar with his pretentious appeal to Bonhoeffer’s “non-religious Christianity.” His strategy, of course, is to position himself as the heir to Bonhoeffer’s legacy, the realization of his dream. But nothing could be further from the truth. Not only is it outrageous to pass off the bilious swill that Spong mass produces as being in the same league as Bonhoeffer, but Spong effectively destroys his own intellectual credibility by failing to recognize that he is implicated in Bonhoeffer’s critique of religion. Let me explain.

An important touchstone in any consideration of Bonhoeffer’s attack on religion is his remarkable book, Discipleship, whose manuscript was completed exactly 70 years ago this week. Unlike Bonhoeffer’s earlier books, written effortlessly in the unmolested surroundings of the University of Berlin, Discipleship reflects a deep sense of urgency, as though it was demanded by the reality of an escalating crisis.

There had been, in Bonhoeffer’s reckoning, a chronic malfunction in the church’s life which all but neutralized any effective witness it might have to the world. Somehow “grace” had ceased being the power which binds us to Christ, which elicits the repetition of the drama of death and resurrection in the lives of members of the church. It had instead been cheapened, and re-tooled so as to consecrate indiscriminately all the banality, idolatry and godlessness of culture.

When the church peddles a form of “grace” aimed at making people “feel more secure in their godless lives,” it frankly ceases being the church, insisted Bonhoeffer. Having forsaken its duty to be “salt and light,” the church whored itself to the state, offering its wares in exchange for financial security and the benefit of a quiet and peaceful existence. It was thereby reduced to the status of a mere service-provider, the state-sanctioned dispenser of sentimentality and meaningless assurance. He writes: “We gave away preaching and sacraments cheaply; we performed baptisms and confirmations; we absolved an entire people, unquestioned and unconditionally.… When was the world ever Christianized more dreadfully and wickedly than here?”

This instrumentalization lies at the heart of what Bonhoeffer calls the “religion-concept” (Religionsbegriff). In so far as “religion” represents a mere expression of the human longing for transcendence and meaning, it can be employed by a culture as a pagan affirmation of the people’s inherent divinity. For Bonhoeffer, the shared category of “religion” was the means by which the church had been absorbed into the bloodstream of German culture, and thereby rendered complicit, impotent, idolatrous.

Bonhoeffer’s call for “non-religious Christianity” (Nicht-religiöse Christentum) had nothing to do with abandoning rigid dogma and other forms of traditional Christianity in favour of a more spontaneous communion with the Ground of Being. Instead, it stands for the church having the courage to be the church, to follow Jesus in his uncompromising concreteness, and not to seek refuge in the shadows of pseudo-theological, liturgical or ethical obscurantism. The irony, of course, is that the mishmash of pop-existentialism and flaccid pluralism that Spong urges upon the disaffected faithful is precisely the kind of cancerous religiosity to which Bonhoeffer was opposed. The following passage from Spong’s A New Christianity for a New World speaks for itself:

“God is the Ground of Being who is worshiped when we have the courage to be. Jesus is a God-presence, a doorway, an open channel.… These are the claims that will be part of the Christianity of tomorrow. I am hopeful that such a Christianity can be born and that with it an invitation can be offered to all people to step into their own humanity so deeply that they will find it a doorway into God.”

While Spong famously predicted that “traditional faith is dying,” Bonhoeffer would have pronounced this brand of “new Christianity” dead on arrival, a carcass from which the breath of the Spirit and the pulse of Jesus’ mission have long since disappeared.

John Shelby Spong: Jesus for the Non-Religious

John Shelby Spong, Jesus for the Non-Religious (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 316 pp.

John Shelby Spong has been touring Australia to promote his new book, Jesus for the Non-Religious. The Uniting Church (an Australian denomination) asked me to write something about this book for the September issue of their newspaper, Journey. Here’s a copy of my article:

Spong’s Jesus: Not Radical Enough

John Shelby Spong, the controversial Episcopal bishop, has always regarded himself as an iconoclast. Throughout his long career, he has vigorously attacked Christian doctrine, and has called for “a new reformation.” The main themes of his prolific writings have now been brought together in this new manifesto, Jesus for the Non-Religious – a book which Spong himself describes as the culmination of his life’s work. So what should we make of this book?

In the first place, we can appreciate Spong’s desire to communicate the findings of biblical criticism to a wider audience. A vast gulf still separates scholarly biblical research from everyday devotional Bible reading – and this is one of the great pastoral crises of our time. So Spong is on the right track when he tells his readers that there is a difference between the historically authentic elements in the New Testament portrayal of Jesus, and the later layers of liturgical and theological interpretation which have embellished the Gospel stories. And he’s right to point out that the Gospels give us not a straightforward historical account, but “a magnificent interpretive portrait” of Jesus (p. 115).

Admittedly, Spong’s interpretation of the Gospel texts often rests on outdated research and flawed interpretations of the scholarship. And he misses the mark when he insists on a rigid dichotomy between faith and history. He tells us, for instance, that the Gospel stories are sheer “make-believe” (p. 20), and that the texts “are not the chronicles of a remembered history, but the proclamations of a community of faith” (p. 84). But presumably the stories about Jesus were also attempts to make sense of something that actually happened. In any case, regardless of such shortcomings, Spong’s desire to promote a historically informed understanding of the Gospels is commendable.

Further, one can only admire the bishop’s sheer enthusiasm for his work. He regards his own interpretation of Jesus as a uniquely radical gesture, and he is remarkably optimistic about the impact of his book. He assures us that the book will free us from “the prison of religion” and will usher in “a renaissance and a reformation” (p. 290), unleashing “a new burst of energy and power that has not been seen for hundreds of years” (p. xiii).

Unfortunately, however, such rhetoric sets readers up for disappointment, since the book’s entire argument amounts to this: Jesus overcomes our prejudices and stereotypes, so that we can be inclusive and tolerant towards others. This, in a nutshell, is “the new reformation”; this is Bishop Spong’s Jesus.

And for all Spong’s iconoclastic claims, there is something strangely familiar about this Jesus. A Jesus who champions inclusiveness and tolerance is a Jesus who looks suspiciously like – well, like ourselves. Presumably Spong’s readers will already identify with the Western liberal values of tolerance and inclusiveness. We did not learn those values from Jesus, but, thanks to Spong, we discover subsequently that Jesus himself is also committed to the same values.

The function of Spong’s Jesus is thus simply to maintain the social and political status quo. He takes our own most cherished and self-evident Western values, and he provides them with a theological justification. Thus our own values are made absolute and unimpeachable – they are elevated to the status of ideology. Simply put, Spong tells us that political correctness is correct, since even Jesus was politically correct.

This should give pause to any reader of the Gospels. After all, the Gospels consistently depict a Jesus who is radical and confronting and unsettling – a Jesus who challenges the status quo, who hangs out with the wrong people and antagonises the establishment, who resists every attempt to domesticate his message, refusing to allow his actions to be calmly assimilated into any existing religious framework. And for just this reason, the Jesus of the Gospels is finally executed. In contrast, however, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would be offended by Bishop Spong’s politically correct Jesus. A Jesus whose sole commitment is to tolerant inclusiveness is simply not the kind of Jesus whom anyone would want to crucify.

So in spite of Spong’s characterisation of his own book as radical, “shocking” and “audacious” (pp. 10, 290), the real problem is that this book is not radical enough. The Jesus who emerges from these pages is ultimately indistinguishable from any other respectably innocuous, politically correct member of the Western middle classes.

Instead of provoking a challenging political or theological response, therefore, this Jesus serves to justify our own values and assumptions. To adopt such a Jesus is like the new tendency of consumers to purchase “carbon offsets” as compensation for their own greenhouse emissions: one makes a seemingly radical gesture precisely in order to ensure that nothing changes! Like purchasing a carbon offset, Spong’s Jesus – far from challenging us or provoking us to action – simply reassures us that all is well.

Bishop Spong’s Jesus may be useful and consoling, then, but he is not especially interesting, much less unique. He poses no threat, no challenge. He makes no demands. He tells us nothing that we didn’t know already. And for just that reason, it’s hard to see why “the non-religious” – or anyone else, for that matter – should have any special regard for this Jesus.