Myself and three others from ikon (Jonny McEwen, Kelly Turtle and Sarah Williamson) are gearing up to go to Minneapolis in a couple of weeks. There we will be offering a rich mix of talks, facilitated discussions and workshops to those who are interested in pioneering creative, radical new faith collectives. This will be an intimate, focused conference dedicated to working at a serious level with those who wish to explore a post-secular theory and practice that has the potential to reconfigure the religious landscape and blur the lines between sacred/secular, religious/irreligious, church/world. For more details contact Chris Enstad.

Here are the details,

Cost is $100 and includes four meals and materials.

Send check plus name, address, phone and email to:
ikon event
6100 Normandale Road
Edina, MN 55436

Location:
Solomon’s Porch
100 W. 46th Street
Minneapolis, MN 55419

Sponsored by: Normandale Lutheran Church and Solomon’s Porch

Over the next few weeks I am going to offer a series of short commentaries on parts of the new book. If you have a section you would like me to expand on let me know the page number etc. and I will try to include it. Anyway, to start I thought I would simply offer this quotation from chapter 1, a quotation which sets out the central thrust of the book,

“There are countless people who betray Christianity, individuals who turn their backs on its message because they no longer believe in it or because it asks too much of them. But there are a few who betray Christianity, not because they no longer believe in it, but because they believe in it so deeply, because they understand that unless the seed of our Christianity falls to the ground and dies it will remain a single seed, but if it is allowed to die it will produce many seeds…

The cost of Christianity, for so many, is thought to lie in the demand that we die to ourselves for the sake of our Christianity. The cross we are called to carry is thus one upon which we are to be put to death. But what if this cross we bear had another meaning? What if the cross that we are called to carry is not for us at all but rather, like the cross that Simon of Cyrene labored beneath, is really for another—a cross for us to crucify what we love? Is it possible that the cross we labor beneath must be used to crucify our Christianity? How many of us can truly understand this question? How many of us can really know what it is like to destroy what we love for the sake of what we love—to be the most faithful of betrayers? Yet perhaps it is precisely this that we are being called to: engaging in that most difficult task of putting our religion to death so that a religion without religion can spring forth”

If you have read How (Not) to Speak of God or The Fidelity of Betrayal and would like to share your thoughts (good, bad or ugly) please consider visiting Amazon and leaving a review,

How (Not) to speak of God
The Fidelity of Betrayal

I went to see the film Wall-e a few nights ago and was interested in its visual exploration concerning the nature of human fulfilment. The story, as most of you know, begins from the premise that humans have left the Earth because it has become uninhabitable due to the pollution and refuse that has resulted from our insatiable desire to consume. Human have opted to temporarily live in a huge spaceship called “axiom” until the earth is habitable again. They originally intended to leave for only 5 years but, when the film begins, they are in their 700th year. Before leaving the Earth the humans left an army of robots charged with the task to clean the mess up however, over the years, all but one of these robots (the hero) have broken down.

The idea of humans leaving Earth and going to live in the heavens can be seen to mimic the notion of heaven that is found in the popular imagination. The spacecraft is represented as a place where all ones needs are met, a place where there is no pain or suffering or tension or conflict and no-one has a job to do (except the captain whose job is largely a symbolic one). In short it is a place of perpetual peace, harmony and relaxation. While we can presume that people still grow old and die the film does not show any old people (or, of course, death) – everyone appears to be around the same age (apart from some brief scenes of babies) and so we get the impression of a place of equilibrium, a place without old age or death. On the spacecraft people’s needs are instantly satisfied. Desires for particular foods and fashion etc. are all met in an instant and (in homage to Silent Running) it is always a perfect 72 degrees.

However, it turns out that this “heavenly” existence is actually a type of mundane, melancholic hell. No one walks anymore (they all use hovercrafts to move), everyone is overweight, and humanity is portrayed (via the photos of different captains) of slowing devolving into what one can only imagine to be a fatty, inactive blob. This dystopia is not however enforced on people (as in films like Equilibrium), it is what human beings have chosen, what they want, or at least what they think they want. They do not hate it any more than they love it, they have rather entered into a type of undead existence, not unlike a cryogenic state, in which they are not dead and yet not really alive.

Once the film has shown us how this first (“heavenly”) attempt at salvation and fulfilment has failed it charts humanities return to Earth and, more than this, of humanities return to the earth itself, to the ground, the soil. Here, as humans slowly turn from their reliance on technology and desire for instant gratification, they begin to experience joy and wonder again. This is symbolised in their desire to return to growing food rather than instantly getting it in the form of an artificially flavoured smoothy (as they did before).

This is not however a romantic scene in which the director paints the rural life as one of true peace and tranquility over and against the false peace and satisfaction of their heavenly existence. This is to miss the point – their heavenly existence did offer peace and tranquility in a direct, unmediated way (not some false version of these) and was, for this very reason, the true enemy of existence. Instead, by forsaking this direct (horrifying) engagement with peace and tranquility, and instead living up to the fact that life involves a host of tensions and difficulties to overcome, a more substantive life was rediscovered.

Here we see a glimpse of Nietzsche’s point that heaven (in the popular sense) would be a living death, a mummified existence. Whereas truly embracing the fluctuations, fragility and tensions of life, supremely difficult as this is, brings with it a true joy and exuberance.

Here, in a Derridian fashion, the obstacle is the very opening to that which it blocks. By returning to the very thing that they thought was the obstacle to their fulfilment they indirectly find fulfilment (a fulfilment without fulfilment, an impossible fulfilment). While their previous direct attempt to find fulfilment (to make it present in its fullness) led to nothing but a type of living death.

So what do we learn? Perhaps we are reminded of the old Christian insight that heaven is the impossible that we indirectly glimpse only when we renounce it and put ourselves to the task of utterly offering ourselves to the world. Of unreservedly embracing worldliness in Bonheoffer’s sense. In his Letters and Papers from Prison he writes,

“This is what I mean by worldliness - taking life in one’s stride, with all its duties and problems, its successes and failures, its experiences and helplessness. It is in such a life that we throw ourselves into the arms of God and participate in his sufferings in the world and watch with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith, that is metonoia and that is what makes a man and a Christian”

My November/December speaking tour is almost set thanks to the hard work of Carol Showalter at Paraclete. This time I will not only be hopping round the US but will also get a chance to dip my toe into Canada. There is however one day in the tour that is still up for grabs. Sunday evening 7th December in Boston (the night before I return home). If you live in Boston and would be interested in me speaking please drop an email to Carol Showalter. Of course it is my last night so maybe we should just have a big party!

I am starting to plan a tour of the US that will take place in January/February 2009. The aim of the tour is two-fold. Firstly, I am keen to present some of my latest thinking in the form of sermons, seminars, workshops and facilitated discussions. This work will be expressed in two forthcoming books, but I am looking forward to giving people a chance to hear it, wrestle with it and challenge it before it comes out in print. Secondly the tour is designed to help raise some money for my ongoing work with ikon.

The tour will be starting at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan on the 27th January and will finish up in New York City on the 20th February.

If possible I am keen find a mix of universities, seminaries, churches and conferences to work with and can offer anything from a 5-minute children’s address to a week of in-depth seminars, workshops and facilitated discussions.

I will be sending official feelers around the blogosphere in the next few weeks but wanted to give advance notice of my plans for those who read my blog.

My plan is to find some speaking engagements close to Calvin College to start with and then slowly make my way towards New York City. So if you are interested in having me speak then please drop a line to Alyson McElroy.

Here is the a rough copy of the presentation I offered at my book launch this evening. It is partly an apology for why I live the way that I do and partly a summery of what the book is about…

A question that I am often asked when sitting in coffee shops or out for an evening, indeed a question that even my family and close friends sometimes ask, comes down to this: “what exactly is it that you do?” Well I was thinking that tonight might be a good opportunity to answer that question once and for all. And the answer is, “I have no idea what ‘it’ is that I do.” In fact, more than this, I can tell you honestly that I have no idea how I have done it for so long or why on earth I continue to do it.

Now this answer might come across as a cryptic way of saying that I do nothing much at all, and it must be said that I am not the most industrious person on the face of the planet, but this answer is saying something more than that. Indeed if heard correctly it might actually help people to understand what ikon is all about and what this new book is exploring.

All too often we know exactly what it is that we do and we have a pretty good idea of what we would want to be doing, if we had the resources. But what if this knowledge is actually the very thing that is holding us back? What if the problem we face is not our inability to fulfil our dreams, to make our dreams become a reality but, more fundamentally, our inability to forge new dreams?

Our dreams always take place within a particular context, one that is for the most part transparent to us. And this context moulds those dreams. For instance, within our Western Capitalist system our dreams are often manifested as a desire for material wealth, romantic love and some work-free apolitical life by the beach. An example of this can be seen in the way that Western fairytales, as mythological expressions of our values, are often concerned with poor people becoming wealthy and powerful while in different cultures fairytales often revolve around the idea of a wealthy and powerful person renouncing their wealth in favour of simplicity and Enlightenment. These fairytales being simultaneously both a manifestation of our underling societal values and a powerful means of passing them on to a new generation.

Yet more problematically, our political dreams concerning what justice looks like and how to affirm human rights all to often simply accept the dominant political apparatus for creating and distributing wealth. With the result being that when we live these dreams out they turn out to be nothing but an exercise in rearranging chairs on the Titanic. Why? Because they fail to link the subjective injustice they want to address on the streets with the objective injustice of the current political structures that are simply taken for granted.

And so, in order to put ourselves in a position where we can dream new dreams. Putting ourselves in a place where we can imagine and instigate genuine emancipatory alternatives to the current theo-political system. We need to step out of that world.

This is not a step into something substantive that we can conceptualise in advance but rather is a step into what we do not know. All we do know is that the world where we currently reside is not the country where we wish to dwell. That there are alternative political landscapes, new theological possibilities and brighter, more life-affirming shores elsewhere. All we know is that if we are ever to discover these brighter shores we must take some provisions and leave this present shore behind us. We do not know where we will end up as there is no map for what does not yet exist, but we are nonetheless compelled to go.

The problem with this act is, of course, that we have no idea in advance whether what we discover will be more beautiful, liberating and authentic than what went before. If what we imagine into life becomes significant then it is history, not our peers, that judges whether those who made straight the paths for the new reality were saints or sinners.

The Fidelity of Betrayal attempts to show how this challenge to step into the unknown is central to the logic of Christianity. That Christianity, in its most radical expression, operates as a type of irreligious religion that cannot be captured in the development of a particular type of concrete religious community but rather is manifest as an eternal challenge to transform society in a way that brings healing and life to the excluded and marginalised.

This is not, I must confess, a traditional understanding of Christianity. My approach to the Christian faith is not concerned with certain doctrinal or creedal formulations and neither is it concerned with the concretely existing historical church. Rather I argue that the Christian is one who is ready to betray doctrines and creeds and who is willing to turn their back on the historical manifestation of Christianity, not in order to move beyond it, but rather so as to instigate a repetition of its radical a-historical kernel. Betraying it as an act of fidelity toward it.

My desire in this book then is not to valorise some particular point in the life of the historical church, even in its early form. It is not about returning to a certain period in its history. Rather it is about attempting to unearth again the emancipatory event that gave birth to the historical church, forging a new movement that will also fail but that will fail in a better way, in a way that addresses the exigencies of the brave new world that we inhabit today.

So what do I do? I do not know and perhaps I never will, but I am fortunate to be among people who are in a similar place to myself, people who do not know what they are doing, or what needs done, and yet are utterly committed to doing it. People who are ready to dream new dreams.

It is commonplace today for religious people to attack the idea of ‘original sin’. Apart from the unseemly connotations some, such as Matthew Fox, have employed the Genesis account to say that sin was not original, rather it was blessing. Sin thus came after blessing as the result of a subsequent fall. Interesting as such thinking is my concern is that we can all too easily lose the central theological insight of original sin. Namely that it is actually the idea of original sin that allows us to reject the notion of a temporally located fall. For in the idea of original sin the fall is inscribed into our very being. The fall is no longer something one can point to and say, “there is where it all went wrong”. In the theological category of original sin one must embrace that moment as ones own. In the theological category of original sin “the fall” becomes “a falling” (as Heidegger understood).

To explain what I mean let us take the almost ubiquitous claim within the church that there was once a type of pre-fall religious community (not in the sense of being perfect, but rather of a community before “the” fundamental mistake). For instance people often refer lovingly to the community of believers that existed before Paul came along and formed the church, or the church before Constantine converted to Christianity or Catholicism before Luther created a schism or the community that Luther founded that was perverted by later protestant sects etc. etc.

Here we witness the logic of anti-Semitism in its abstract form, namely the externalisation of blame onto someone/thing external to us that must be repelled/overthrown/overcome in order for the community to find peace again and a renewed homeostasis. In the anti-Semitic gesture one externalises the fall/obstacle by placing it onto another. Here we see the scapegoat mechanism at work in its most obvious form.

Against this logic of the scapegoat one can approach the notion of original sin as a countermeasure, one that forces us to re-inscribe the fall/obstacle into ourselves. In relation to the above example it can make us embrace the reality of concretely existing Christianity in all its problems as our own, rather than pointing to some external point in time. This does not mean that one cannot point to times when things went wrong within the church or political life. By no means. This is covered by the idea of sin. With ‘original sin’ one is simply prevented from pointing to some idealised perfection that we have lost and which we can return to and repeat in an identical manner – i.e. the common cry that we ought to return to the early church.

Instead, in original sin, the fall is inscribed into the very foundation of all concretely existing Christianity. The point then is not to attempt some kind of return to the early church, the church before it got caught up in X (Platonic concepts, state power etc.) but rather to return to the revolutionary event that gave birth to the early church. Fully embracing the fact that we will fail but working diligently to fail in a better way. We thus avoid the deadend of either sitting back and saying, “everything we create will end up just as bad as what currently exists”, or naively claiming that we can return to the way things used to be, before it all went wrong.

This opening can be seen in relation to Kierkegaard’s use of the term ‘repetition’. Here one attempts to repeat what has gone before but in a non-identical manner. Thus returning, not to the concrete reality of the early church, but rather to that which gave birth to it.

The result of this radical reboot will very likely take a form that is very different to what the church has looked like at other times. And what arises will look like a betrayal of so much of what has gone before. But true fidelity to Christianity involves a deep reservoir of courage that will help us return to the revolutionary source from which the concretely existing church arose. This is a sacrificial act as one is unlikely to find much support (financial, emotional) by walking this road. Indeed one is likely to be sidelined and attacked.

In response then to those who shout, “let us return to the early church”, we must resolutely respond by crying out, “no, let us return to the event which gave rise to the early church”

If you live nearby you are more than welcome to come and celebrate the official launch of The Fidelity of Betrayal with me on Wednesday July 16th at 19:00 in the Trans Lounge of The Waterfront Hall in Belfast. Music will be provided by DJ Brasilia. Hope to see you there.

A while back I listed some podcasts that I subscribe to, and was told to check out the Nick and Josh Podcast. I did, and now it has become an important companion to me as I journey from A to B. These guys are great and well worth subscribing to. Anyway they did an interview with me last month about some of the themes in my new book and it is now up on their podcast. Their site can be found here.