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.
