Creston Davis, Ed Monstrosity of Christ A Discussion 32p

DISCUSSION: THE MONSTROCITY OF CHRIST: PARADOX OR DIALECTIC?
BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK AND JOHN MILBANK, EDITED BY CRESTON DAVIS (CAMBRIDGE, MA. & LONDON: THE MIT PRESS, 2009)
A Lacanian Reading of the Monstrosity of Christ with the Television Series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Lyle A. Brecht
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DISCUSSION: THE MONSTROCITY OF CHRIST: PARADOX OR DIALECTIC? BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK AND JOHN MILBANK, EDITED BY CRESTON DAVIS (CAMBRIDGE, MA. & LONDON: THE MIT PRESS, 2009) The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture C.S. Lewis 1 In our dreams, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart; and in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom by the awful grace of God Aschylus Agamemnon 2 The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear3
A Lacanian Reading4 of The Monstrosity of Christ5 with the Television Series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles6
Just for a moment, lets imagine that Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles television series (both season 1 and season 2) is true in its entirety and in its specicity. There really is a Sarah Connor, mother of 16-year old John Connor and a girlTerminator, Cameron Phillips, sent from the future to protect John Connor, masquerading as Johns sister.7 This ctive narrative is centered around Judgment Day occurring on April 21, 2011 when Skynet, an articially intelligent (AI) missile defense system built for the U.S. military by Cyberdyne Corporation 8 becomes selfaware and launches a preemptive nuclear attack on Russia, knowing full-well that under the present Deterrence Doctrine9 strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction10 (todays current version of National Security through deterrence based on counterforce) the Russian counter-response will be to launch all their nuclear-tipped missiles against the U.S. homeland. This First Strike, counter-force nuclear exchange response essentially destroys the climate of the earth and the ability of the earths ecosystems to support existing food production, as well as much of the man-made infrastructure of the worlds cities. The result of this nuclear war is to leave only a remnant of a human population of 500,000 from the more than six billion of the earths human population alive at the start of the war.11 Additionally, Skynet has released Terminator cyborgs, human-looking-like robots with living tissue over hyper-alloy exoskeletons as hunter-killers of the remainder of humanity. What humanity that survives is organized as an armed Resistance to the machines under the leadership of John Connor. In this bleak, apocalyptic future, with humankinds very existence hanging by a thread, both Skynet and the Resistance have acquired the use of time travel technology. Skynet has sent Terminators back in time before the Holocaust to kill John Connor so
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DISCUSSION: THE MONSTROCITY OF CHRIST: PARADOX OR DIALECTIC? BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK AND JOHN MILBANK, EDITED BY CRESTON DAVIS (CAMBRIDGE, MA. & LONDON: THE MIT PRESS, 2009)
that he will not exist and rise to lead the Resistance in the future. Likewise, the Resistance has sent back Resistance ghters and reprogrammed Terminators to protect John Connors life and to destroy Cyberdyne Corporation and the software code that Cyberdyne uses to create the AI that becomes Skynet. In our imaginative scenario, this ctive narrative is no longer ctive, but comprises historical documents.12 That is, Skynet, Terminators, the future holocaust in 2011, John and Sarah Connor, Cameron, and essentially everything embodied in the Events recorded in these historical documents is part of the Real.13 Assuming the Real includes, in its actuality, a future described accurately by the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, we will posit two questions. We will also assume that these historical documents have received a fairly wide audience via the mass media (e.g. television and the Internet): 1) Will the elite of today in America (and the developed world) voluntarily choose to relinquish their power and wealth if doing so would change the projected future of destruction and human immiseration as recorded in the historical documents of The Sarah Connor Chronicles; and 2) Will the multinational corporations voluntarily relinquish the tenets of a nihilistic capitalism 14 and the national defense15 of this capitalistic system whose trajectory will lead unequivocally to future destruction of the earth and the majority of humans and other life forms presently inhabiting this earth? 16 The answer to both these questions, at least as depicted in the narrative of the now imaginary historical documents, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, is No! Zizek and Milbank through their dialogic discourse recorded in The Monstrosity of Christ provide an answer for why both scientic materialism 17 and Christian religiosity18 under the Reality framework provided by modernity19 are incapable of responding to the pleas of John Connor and his mother, Sarah, to repent, and to make the decisions today that will prevent a certain known future of destruction and human immiseration. Provisionally, Zizek and Milbank also venture to propose an alternative post-modern20 formulation for both scientic materialism and orthodox21 Christianity22 that may have some survival value in being able to process new data
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from the Real, such as our illustrative Sarah Connor Chronicles historical documents, and to act on this new data. Why do Zizek and Milbank believe that both scientic materialism and Christianity, under the constraints imposed by modernity, are defective and decient in providing the impetus for true believers in either system of thought to address a future of impending apocalypse? The problem as envisioned by both these philosophical theologians revolves around three entangled aspects concerning the limitations of both these systems of thought for accessing Reality. These three intertwined aspects include: (1) misunderstandings of what constitutes rational thought that devises construct limitations on what new data can be incorporated into ones understanding of Reality at any given time; (2) the construction of self as the Reality perceiving subject that relies on the big Other to validate the selfs experience; and (3) an assumption regarding the apperception of Reality that splits thinking from acting. That is, the self is allowed to perceive itself as possessing a certain attribute if it thinks in a certain way. How the self acts either doesnt enter in to affect such thinking or is relegated to immateriality in the assessment of ones self-disclosure (e.g. ones self perception of Christian religiosity is over-determined by what one self referentially thinks of ones Christian-ness versus how one objectively acts to exhibit Christian virtues in ones everyday behavior). For these above reasons, neither the secular materialist nor the good Christian is able to process the new data provided by the Sarah Connor Chronicles and believe the Reality depicted in these historical documents. Not only is individual belief blocked from accessing new data, but also the natural reaction is to suppress new data about the future and to render the carriers of this data as crazy, criminal, or worse, ignored completely. This is just the reaction from almost everyone that John, Sarah, and Cameron encounter that the Chronicles record: disbelief and active denial of the new data these individuals are offering the world. What characterizes responses from both scientic materialism and Christianity under modernity is their adiphorization and quietism.23 Both scientic materialism and Christianity in its modernist form subscribe to a humanocentric24 theology of utilitarianism (the more human desires that can be
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met, the more moral good that has been created or the greatest good for the greatest number). This philosophy/theology of utilitarianism presently serves as the primary moral framework for decision making in modern societies.25 Utilitarianism is legitimized and sustained due to two factors: (a) a central myth of modernity that equates the telos of history as human progress brought about by goods resulting from economic development and technological innovation; and (b) the goods of human progress can be justied as moral exclusively through self-reective interiority and determined by human happiness measured in economic terms. Thus, God is superuous to the order of the material world26 as self-identity is dened primarily by the consumption of the goods of human progress. And, the overarching organizational/power structure, the State,27 is but a false copy of the Body of Christ.28 Yet, without a truly post-modern Christian (or post-modern secular materialist) ethics where Reality has a non-instrumentalist value, the basis for the common good, for collective action, civic virtue and the very consent to common social goals on which [present] societies depend29 is undermined. For Christians, a utilitarian environment devoid of God with only instrumentalist value is a theopolitical construct,30 an imaginative invention of post-Enlightenment modernity.31 From post-Reformation Christianitys removal of God from the human vision of the cosmos,32 the modern concept of the environment inherits the central myth of modernity: reclaiming a utilitarian Garden of Eden that is a new space of timeless convenience and unbounded personal happiness. This garden is created through the self-interested pursuit of and consumption of industrially manufactured and marketed goods and services33 developed through the application of a particular, humanocentric (and oftentimes ethnocentric and/or nationalistic) and modern rationality. Zizek and Milbanks rst task is to obliterate the privileging of data about Reality that arrives solely via empirical operations (and forms the foundations of modernist atheism,34 attesting that there can be no God as God cannot be proved through experiment) as denitional of what is rational. Of course, the poor souls that claim this preference as denitional of rationality have little conception of how science actually works in practice. How many years was it that Einsteins Law of Special Relativity was accepted on the basis of belief before any experimental evidence
was proffered to support this theory? 35 Today, in the conuence of general relativity and quantum theory, the majority of theoretical physicists subscribe to string theory, a theory that has no foreseeable means for experimental verication.36 Knowing about reality cannot be limited by rationality as only determined empirically, either by the secular materialists or by the modern Christians who use this epistemological version of what is rational to promote the status quo against new data to the contrary. This brings to mind the present conundrum concerning global warming, the alteration of the earths climate by the release of anthropogenically generated carbon into the earths atmosphere, something that has been at issue for at least the past 37 years.37 The deniers of global warming have consistently claimed that the theory behind global warming has not been scientically proven (i.e. is not rational or not rational enough).38 But what these deniers of global warming were actually saying all along and are continuing to say is that this new data is not allowed because it calls to question the myth of capitalism as a means to create real, economic wealth, as opposed to being just one big Ponzi scheme transferring wealth from the future for present consumption. For if the scientists and economists who think about global warming are even partially right, the cost of bringing atmospheric carbon under control and within bounds below the tipping point, presently estimated at ~$20,000 billion,39 means that capitalism may never have produced any real, economic prots since its inception. It has all been smoke and mirrors; a chimera of fancy, inaccurate, and highly incomplete accounting for real costs (economic and environmental). One might think, OK, I can see why the secular materialists are fooled by their denition of what is rational, but why so the Christians (who have been equally doubtful of the reality of global warming and are just as likely to doubt the Sarah Connor Chronicles). This is where the big Other comes in. For the Christians, the big Other is the transcendent God, above humankind, that watches over human History and intervenes just-in-time to prevent total collapse of human history. The secular materialist version of the big Other substitutes the government or some supra-agency (e.g. the state) or ideology (e.g. conservatism) or in-group above the individual that gets each individual off the hook since it is always up to the big
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Other to set things right. Thus, the ethics of receptivity concerning new data about Reality is suspended and projected to this big Other, whether instantiated as God, the Church, the state, or some other convenient big Other. As an individual actor, I am set free to wallow in misbeliefs, to project my ire (and righteous judgment) on others who do not agree with my misbeliefs, and to live essentially in a construct reality of my own choosing, far from the Real. However, to Zizeks and Milbanks thinking, the most pernicious aspects of both scientic materialism and Christianity in their modern form are what they portend for the self, the I that is doing the denying of Reality and the projecting judgment on to any other who disagrees with my version of misbeliefs concerning Reality. Zizek and Milbank trace this pernicious constellation of self to the notion that one can have a personal god (i.e. the god/ideology of/for just me). For the secular materialist, this god might be rational science, the myth of capitalism, the state, etc., but for the Christian, this personal god, at least nominally, is God, the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as explicated in Scripture. However, for Christians in modernity, the God they worship is not this God, but a God intermediated by the Church (and/or a faulty view of Scripture) and formulated by the State under Constantine. And, this personal God of the modern Christian is nothing like the communal God described in Scripture and the writings of the patristic Fathers of the early Church. Instead of the self deciding to believe in God, or not, early Christians (and their Jewish forbearers) understood that their persons, their selves, were not dened via interiority, but by relationally; through their relationality with God, with neighbor, and with their environment. There was no existent self independent of these relationships. And, pre-modernity, they understood that God is not bound by any external rational truths (84). Thus, ethically, the only thing that constituted Reality was how one behaved relationally. It was never enough to personally ascribe ones membership to the community of Christians. If one was Christian, it was because one actually acted Christian. The notion that the majority of Christians support torture (or capital punishment, or capitalism, or nationalism, any ism) would not have made any sense. That is because, by denition, anyone supporting torture (or
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capital punishment, or capitalism, or nationalism, any ism) would not, could not, be Christian. How anyone reading the New Testament Gospels closely might arrive at the support of torture is beyond me, but Zizek and Milbank would explain it is because this Christianity, under modernity, allows a personal God that can be moulded exactly as each self desires. What results from both scientic materialism and Christianity under modernity is compliance with the status quo (i.e. the adiphorization and quietism we spoke of earlier above). No new data is allowed that might upset the construct reality of the predominant capitalist (or socialist or whatever is in current rationalist vogue) worldview. The world is thus saved from the disparate information being proffered by Sarah and John Connor. This new data that the world, at least the world of the Real, is doomed by the trajectory of modernist scientic materialism and Christianitys ability to critique nihilistic capitalism is suppressed. Zizek and Milbank offer a way out of this bind, however. The way involves two moves: (1) adopting Hegels methodology for discerning what is part of the Real through a dialectic process where the Whole is reconstituted from a synthesis of the antithesis of opposites, a highly post-modern move away from and beyond modernity;40 and (2) a repristination of the crucixion of Christ and recognition of this Event as the monstrosity it occasions, in Reality (whether one is a Christian God-believer, or not).41 That is because the cross is the preeminent place where God (either guratively or in actuality) shows his engagement, his radical involvement and identity with human beings and their history, including our brokenness and suffering to the point of his own death.42 Gods gracious, loving solidarity and communion with the depths of human pain and suffering, of lostness and brokenness in the death of Christ on the cross illuminates our human destiny to also be in solidarity with others in their suffering (others here might include all of creation). It is only in this monstrosity of Christ that human freedom is grounded; and, at its most fundamental, it is neither as payment for our sins nor as legalistic ransom, but by enacting this openness that Christs sacrice sets us free to be present with others in their suffering (82).
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Solidarity with the other begins with accusatio sui, an alienation from self, an emptying (kenosis) that results in metanoia, a turning away from ones former path,43 a conversion to a new way that is seen as a taking of the cross, standing where Christ once stood. This is the essence of Christian humility, the recognition of ones total poverty [dependence on God], the emptying out of human wisdom and human righteousness. It is a true coming together with the other in that it unveils the truth of our dependence on a God who reveals himself only in weakness, our interdependence with others, and our common suffering.44 If God is free to act and to be present in all the diverse conditions of human life [even those times of human suffering], men and women are free to go nd him there.45 But, this Christian theology has importance even for those secular materialists who believe that God, even if he/she existed once in the moment of creation is absent from human History.46 That is because this Event (the crucixion) has created a rent (a cut or schism) in human history - whether the Event was real (actually happened as depicted in Scripture, or not). In other words, the Christ Event is part of the Real and must be dealt with from this perspective.47 There is divergence between Zizek and Milbank from this point onwards. For Zizek, these two movements are enough to reformulate and re-foundation scientic materialism into an active force in Reality capable of receiving and acting on the new data concerning the Real. Hegels dialectics indicates not the logical inevitability of the course of human history, but rather the dependency of even our most abstract, universal assumptions on past contingent events that might have occurred otherwise and retain an unlimited potential for alternative renderings without recourse to a transcendent God (114). For example that new data as presented by the Connors that has the potential to alter human History from that point forward, if this new data is received and acted upon! For Milbank, however, this dialectical process does not stop with scientic materialism. It moves through and beyond dialectics to a paradoxical, repristinated, orthodox Christian ethicality founded on justice for the other.48 For Milbank, Real being and real truth must be innite - and this is one of Hegels most genuinely Christian conclusions! (137). Justice for the other, for example, stems from the
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grace of God mediated by Christ (181). In the words of Meister Eckhart, the just man is the word of justice, by means of which justice manifests and declares itself. For if justice did not justify anyone, no one would know it (187).49 For Milbank, It follows from this that when we see the perfectly just man on earth, namely Christ, we see at once the innite particular, the concrete universal... and also the innitely abstract source of this innite particularity (187). Thus, the secular materialists claim that there is only this world can also logically read as there is only God (189). In a Hegelian dialectics sense, paradoxically, This God is no longer the highest aspect of [the Whole], but inconceivably beyond any whole (192). The form of this justice modeled by Christ stems from a recognition that all existence is borrowed as a gift from God (205) and thus, justice implies equal concern for all (208). For Milbank, Gods act of incarnation saves the world from itself by opening up a way beyond the material realm into the beyond of the innite life of God (18). For both Zizek and Milbank what is recovered is an ethical turn toward the Real. This ethical turn is where new data concerning Reality is not only able to be processed, but also acted upon communally. And, these actions effuse beyond comfortable limitations of narrowly dened empiric rationality (e.g. positivistic scientism), recourse to the big Other, and/or provision for a personally-derived self, buttressed by ego-derived convenience. In a Hegelian dialectical analysis, what is at stake is the inner journey of remembrance versus rebirth through the shock of external encounter (37). All that remains of reality without Christ is the Void of the meaningless multiplicity of the Real. This monstrosity is the price we have to pay in order to render the Absolute in the medium of external re-presentation (Vorstellung, [presentation/conception]), which is the medium of religion (80). Although the routes are different for Zizek and Milbank, the destination is similar: the secular materialist has no need to rid the world of God and the Christian who truly believes in God has absolutely no need to rid the world of this newly derived post-modern atheist (secular materialist). They are more like brothers (or sisters) rather than foes, expressing an understanding of the Real that may be both received and acted upon as new data is brought to them by Sarah and John Conner. These post-modern perceivers of the Real are now open concerning the
shape of Reality that is highly contradictory and disparate from the reality of the prevailing status quo. What the secular materialist under post-modernity realizes is that without God, reason [alone] degenerates into a blind self-destructive skepticism: in short, into total irrationalism... if you do not believe in God, you will soon be ready to believe anything, including the most superstitious nonsense.... (87). In other words, both scientic materialism and Christianity have survival value when constituted via Hegels post-modern dialectics and when one accepts the monstrosity of the Christ Event. In this fashion, this book is a survival guide for those lost in modernity, whether one is a government ofcial, member of the military, poorly educated technologist or scientist (who believes rationality is dened by empiricism and mathematics), or just an old-style atheist who claims he/she personally does not believe in God, or conversely one is a conventionally educated member of the clergy, seminary student, or lay member of a non-denominational Christian church or mainline Christian church. Unfortunately, almost all secular materialist and Christian venues today still subscribe to modernist versions of Reality that we have seen have little or no survival value. Do Zizek and Milbanks updated formulations for scientic materialism and for Christianity help? Lets hope so, for the world we live in depends upon it. But, it is really up to us, collectively and as individuals, to reform our thinking and our institutions, and mostly our everyday behavior. For unlike John Connor, we do not have the cyborg, Cameron, to protect us from the Terminators emerging from the future to exterminate us. Instead each day we go about our daily activities contributing to the construction of our very own Terminators, those hunterkillers who not only have us in their sights, but much of humanity, or not. Whether it is the ravaging effects of global warming and the subsequent loss of the worlds food production from climate change and the attendant pandemics this is expected to release (this has all happened before in history); nuclear Armageddon by a military machine hell bent on national defense through death and destruction (where does it say that defense means ever more sophisticated weapons of death and a minimum of 12,000 nuclear warheads pointed still at map coordinates in the
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former Soviet Union); or who knows what else the engine of unbridled and out-ofcontrol nihilist capitalism may have in store for us in whatever future may still exist, our ultimate task is to apprehend the Real. Remember, Judgment Day occurs in 2011. That date is rapidly approaching. There is still plenty of time to read and consider The Monstrosity of Christ. If the Sarah Connor Chronicles are real, the fate of the world may depend on it. But, after all, the Chronicles are just a television series. Maybe there really is nothing to worry about after all. Or, is that thought just remnants of my modernity speaking? Might, instead, it be way past time to move into post-modern Christianity or scientic materialism? Its your pick. I know what I pick.
Note: Probably the most prevalent reason why atheists and non-believers reject Christianity is not due to philosophical reasons, but due to Christianitys sordid history of violence. Pope Benedict XVI, recalling his visit to Auschwitz, might decry the Shoah: No friend can fail to weep at the suffering and loss of life that both peoples have endured over the last six decades. Allow me to make this appeal to all the people of these lands: No more bloodshed! No more ghting! No more terrorism! No more war! Instead let us break the vicious circle of violence. But, where were the defenders of Christianity on November 12, 1938 when Herr Hitler announced new laws against the Jews for wholesale conscation of Jewish property and capital, and the establishment of Ghettoes on the pattern of the 16th century? Followers of Islam still remember the Christian Crusades of the 11th through the end of the 18th centuries (in 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte nally defeated the last of the Knights Hospitaller who had been crusading around the Mediterranean Sea near Malta). This remembrance was renewed only recently by the U.S. Global War on Terror (GWOT) that was seen by some Muslims as just a renewed crusade by the Christian West against Islam. This view is only reinforced, for example, by recent revelations of the highly inappropriate use of Christian Scripture combined with images of soldiers, war, and military hardware in the Secretary of Defenses top secret Defense Intelligence Update brieng to the President (see http://men.style.com/gq/features/topsecret). In the Americas from the 15th through the 19th centuries, Christian missionaries were complicit (according to reliable historical sources) in the elimination of as many as ninety percent (estimates vary, but maybe more than 60 million people) of the indigenous population. Under the watchful eye of the Christian clergy and laity, these indians were hacked apart, burned alive, hunted as game, fed to dogs, shot, beaten, stabbed, scalped, worked to death as slave labor, and infected with diseases from which they died like ies as their bodies had no immunity. All calculation and denial: necessary utility for constructing the Great Empire. Likewise, today, many indigenous populations of countries around the
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world view globalization, obstentially a means to lift the undeveloped world out of poverty, instead as another Western-Christian means for hegemony and denial of anothers culture. But this violence done under the banner of Christianity (or other god-religions) pales in signicance compared to the violence done to others in the name of scientic materialism. National Socialist Germanys Third Reich (kingdom), cost the lives of 49 million people, most of whom were civilians, including the extermination of six million Jews and the murdering or enslaving of hundreds of thousands of Poles, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners, Gypsies (Romas) and handicapped German nationals.* The Allied rebombing of Dresden in February 1945 resulted in 20,000 civilian deaths. Allied bombing of German cities claimed between 305,000 and 600,000 civilian lives during WWII. In 1946, reliable estimates of the civilian deaths from the from the American atomic bombs and those dying within a year of radiation sickness were 90,000. After WWI, Stalin was responsible for 10,000s of thousands of deaths under his Communist rule. Since 9/11, Americas global war on terror, waged to preserve the American way of life, has killed an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 people, wounded another 100,000 to 250,000 people, and displaced as many as a million people from their homes, the vast majority of those killed, wounded or displaced being women and children. But, the entire system of disaster capitalism, practiced worldwide since the 1970s, has resulted in the immiseration of much of this worlds population where many exist in conditions of severe deprivation living on the edge of poverty while the total wealth of the top 358 global billionaires equals the combined income of 2.3 billion poorest people.** Maybe the greatest violence is presently being done under the combined banner of scientic materialism and a heterodox utilitarian Christianity to the earth in the release of large amounts of anthropogenic carbon into the earths atmosphere.**** If this situation is not rapidly reversed, the potential is pandemics and collapse of the earths food production systems, resulting in the up to an estimated morbidity of two billion humans.
O seasons, O towers! What soul is blameless*** Non ha l' ottimo artista alcun concetto Ch' un marmo solo in s non circonscriva Col suo soverchio; e solo a quello arriva La man che ubbidisce all' intelleto. The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superuous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do.
-Michelangelo, quoted in Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961)
* See Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale State Press, 2001), 262. * * Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (European Perspectives; New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 70-1.
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DISCUSSION: THE MONSTROCITY OF CHRIST: PARADOX OR DIALECTIC? BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK AND JOHN MILBANK, EDITED BY CRESTON DAVIS (CAMBRIDGE, MA. & LONDON: THE MIT PRESS, 2009) * ** Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems, ed. and trans. Oliver Bernard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 336 quoted in Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London & New York: Continuum, 2004), 245. * *** Progress measured as annual growth in GDP, irrespective of the human immiseration and environmental destruction this causes.
ENDNOTES
1
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), 43 quoted in Michael S. Northcott, The Environment and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 36.
2
Quoted in Joseph Blenkinsopp, Treasures Old & New: Essays in the Theology of the Pentateuch (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 140.
3
Herbert Sebastian Agar in A Time for Greatness (1942) quoted in Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 19. We live in a country where telling the truth with clarity has become taboo. See William Grieder, Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 2009), 1.
4
Lacanian refers to Jacques-Marie-mile Lacan (19011981), a Parisian psychoanalyst who has contributed to continental philosophy, reader-response literary criticism, and psychoanalytic theory. A Lacanian reading (informed in this case by taking into account Jacques Derridas [1930-2004] poststructuralist criticism of Lacans method) proposes a contingent explanation of the text and attempts to elicit a plurality of and signicance of the texts intensions by reading the text on a number of levels, often in tension with a lessor text in order to explicate both said and unsaid meanings of the primary text to arrive at understanding. [I]t is in the experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we can grasp by what oblique imaginary means the symbolic takes hold in even the deepest recess of the human organism. See Jacques Lacan, Seminar on Purloined Letter in Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, Bruce Fink, trans. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007), 11. In this context, text, is used here in the sense of Paul Ricur (1913-2005) and its application to preguration (the narratives the reader brings with him/her to the text); conguration (the authors emplotment and the readers construal of the narrative world of the text); and reguration: a fusion of horizons occur between the text and an appropriated world in front of the text. See Dan R. Stiver, Theology after Ricoeur: New Directions in Hermeneutical Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 66-69. In explanation we explicate or unfold the range of propositions and meanings, whereas in understanding we comprehend or grasp as a whole the chain of partial meanings in one act of synthesis. See Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Forth Worth: Texas Christian University, 1976), 72.
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5
The monstrum (monster) refers to the exceptional that cannot be accounted for in rational terms alone and is, paradoxically, that which the rational itself rests (17). Monstrosity comes from Hegels use of the word to mean something so outlandish, so beyond the normative, consensual reality of everyday as to constitute a break, a cut, so to speak, that invites a renewed apperception of The Real - the fabric of Reality (all there is) - as opposed to that portion of Reality that is apprehended through empirically derived data (e.g. scientic experiment that is performed on just a portion of all there is). Thus, for both Zizek, an avowed Christian atheist and for Milbank, an avowed Orthodox Christian, theology must start with the monstrosity of Christ. This is the foundation of Christianity. Christ cuts the Real into the time before Christ was crucied and the time after his crucixion. [Page numbers in parentheses refer to The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? By Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank, Edited by Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA. & London: The MIT Press, 2009) unless otherwise noted.]
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6
The television series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-9) created by Josh Friedman with Lena Headey, Thomas Dekker and Summer Glau (River Tam from Josh Whedons Firey and Serenity) assumes the narrative presented in the movies, The Terminator (1984) directed by James Cameron with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton and Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) directed by James Cameron with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton and Edward Furlong. An interesting cultural meaning of Terminator is a recognition of and combining of two twenty-rst century post-industrial cultures largest nightmares that actually threaten the extinction of humanity: what is different about cyber warfare is that the technologies underlying weapons of mass destruction (WMD) i.e. nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons require access to hard to acquire and often large scale, sophisticated weapons programs. However, cyber warfare weapons, along with other networked technologies such as genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. Cyber weapons are potentially so powerful that accidents, abuses, and deliberate malicious attacks are capable of producing circumstances whereby, for example, instead of global GDP going from $60 to $240 trillion (in $2005 purchasing power parity) by 2050, it declines to $6 trillion. Thus, we now have the possibility of threats not just of weapons of mass destruction, but of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD) weapons; KMD weapons will most likely use the power of self-replication to amplify their destructiveness by many orders of magnitude. Knowledge alone will enable the use of and destructiveness of these weapons.* These issues are presently topical in the notion that cyberspace is considered just another war-ghting domain by the Pentagon: e.g. We are not comfortable discussing the question of offensive cyberoperations, but we consider cyberspace a war-ghting domain, said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. We need to be able to operate within that domain just like on any battleeld, which includes protecting our freedom of movement and preserving our capability to perform in that environment. The blow back from such loose calculated ambiguity talk may be unwanted another very expensive arms race, this time in cyberspace, but this time w/o out a countervailing strategic game doctrine, like MAD, that has the potential to actually deter First Use. Of all the economies in the world, the U.S. has the most to loose from cyber warfare. For example, it is trivial to make cyber weapons that fake a perpetrators location to appear that a nation state is attacking our networks, and watch the nation-states square off: e.g. Gen. Kevin Chilton, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, said I think you dont take any response options off the table from an attack on the United States of America, Chilton said. Why would we constrain ourselves on how we respond?.... I think thats been our policy on any attack on the United States of America.... And I dont see any reason to treat cyber any differently. (U.S. General Reserves Right to Use Force, Even Nuclear, in Response to Cyber Attack, Global Security Newswire May 12, 2009).
* Bill Joy, Why the future doesn't need us, Wired (June 2008) at http://www.wired .com/wired/archive/8.04/ joy_pr.html.
Lyle Brecht
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One of the fascinating aspects of the Cameron character is that she represents the ultimate goal of AI: to take humans out of the meaning loop and to establish a system that both explores to obtain information and exploits that information to successfully adapt to changing environmental circumstances. The series leaves her character ambiguous whether her intelligence follows a weak AI model (i.e. a simulating through cyber engineering, those human characteristics and behaviors that generally appear to be regarded as intelligence) or strong AI (i.e. the mimicking of human intelligence by reconstructing the way that the human brain processes data).* It is even unclear whether Camerons intelligence has reached a singularity, as it may represent an advancement over human intelligence.** The philosophical issues of the Cameron character are quite striking, in that the post-modern world that the John and Sarah Connor and Cameron inhabit identity is dened no longer as a permanent essence but as a process of autoconstitution or fashioning to reclaim the term used by Foucault, a process at whose heart a multiplicity of possible gurations unfolds. Today, everyone lives multiple lives, at the same time and successively.... To ask, what should we do with our brain? is above all to visualize the possibilities of saying no to an aficting economic, political, and mediatic culture that celebrates only the triumph of exibility, blessing obedient individuals who have no greater merit than that of knowing how bow their heads with a smile in the face of the most pervasive and utterly unethical and immoral violence.*** What Cameron represents is a break from this cultural exibility to a true synaptic plasticity that represents the capability not only to receive new data from her environment, but also to give form to the environment she inhabits as a protector of John Connor. There is even some allusion that her primary role, other than providing immediate protection, is to tutor John Cameron by providing learning experiences that will enable John to become the leader he needs to be in the future. Might Cameron represent an alternate vision of hospitality, more similar to the hospitality Christ offered as recounted in the Gospels? This is a hospitality that is freely given in a language of the other (e.g. in this case from a machine that is more human than the humans, echoing the Cylon dilemma in the recent Sci-Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica series narratives). That is, instead of a language of hospitality not our own, imposed by the master of the house, the host, the king, the lord, the authorities, the nation, the State, the father, etc., Cameron, like Christ, freely gives all herself, to the point of death, for the benet of the other, in this case, John Connor.**** From an evolutionary perspective, what Skynet and Cameron represent is the emergence of Articial Life, the advent of self-replicating [cyber] entities with genetic variation and differential survival, which leads to changes in the characteristics of the population of [cyber] entities over the course of generations. It appears that Skynet, in its development of ever more capable Terminators is capable of causing an explosive increase in the complexity of replicators, through many orders of magnitude of complexity.*****
*Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 183-4, 208; Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, trans. by Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 89 (footnote 12). ** See Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2006). *** Malabou, 70-1, 79. **** Of Hospitality, Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. by Rachael Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 15. ***** Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis, eds., Evolution: The First Four Billion Years (Cambridge, MA & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 429, 432.
Lyle Brecht
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Skynet as depicted in the television show and the Terminator movies is a combination of the real Skynet, a series of military satellites built and operated by Paradigm Secure Communications for the UK Ministry of Defense, and the U.S. militarys advanced weaponry systems research and deployment of autonomous weapons systems (weapons that do not require human intervention to attack) including the Navys rapidre Phalanx system designed to shoot down enemy missiles or aircraft. Although the 5,000 Predator unmanned aerial drone robots used in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq are not presently autonomous (they are own from video consoles at airbases in Nevada, Pakistan and Balad, the largest U.S. air base in Iraq, 50 miles north of Baghdad), the U.S. Army, in a 2007 memo to the Pentagon, requested funds to develop an autonomous hunter-killer Predator drone. The most recent Predator robot upgrade used in Afghanistan is called the Reaper which is a drone the size of a jet ghter, able to y at 300 mph, outtted with infrared, laser and radar targeting, and with a ton and a half of guided bombs and missiles. The MQ-9 Reaper is built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. of San Diego.
MQ-9 Reaper Robot (2007) [Getty Images] In Pakistan, Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent hardly precision. See David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum, Death From Above, Outrage Down Below, New York Times (Sunday, May 17, 2009) available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/opinion/17exum.html?th&emc=thavaliable. The idea of a self aware emergence from networked computers was rst proposed by Arthur C. Clarke in his Dial F for Frankenstein (1961). The prospect of computer CPU processing capabilities exceeding the human intelligence was described as The Singularity in a 1993 paper by Vernor Vinge. Presently. there is a fair amount of research being conducted by the military, NASA, and a few Silicon Valley rms on post-human evolution that build on the ideas of machine intelligence surpassing human intelligence contained in Ray Kurzweils The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005).
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Unclassied: http://www.scribd.com/doc/16490356/Nuclear-Posture-Review-Rethinking-DeterrenceDoctrine
Lyle Brecht
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Unclassied: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13115836/Was-Mutual-Assured-Destruction-a-Good-Strategy
Before long, we may face planet-wide devastation worse even than unrestricted nuclear war between superpowers. The climate war could kill nearly all of us and leave the few survivors living a Stone Age existence. See James Lovelock, Climate war could kill nearly all of us, leaving survivors in the Stone Age, Conservation Magazine (29 June 2009).
12Historical
documents is a direct reference to the Thurmians (a ctional alien civilization living on a planet in a galaxy beyond the Milky Way) use of the television series, Galaxy Quest, as historical documents (read in a literalist, fundamentalist fashion) that shaped the reality of their own history and technical development as depicted in the movie Galaxy Quest (1999).
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Our use of The Real here comes from the study of quantum physics, where our understanding of nonlocality* and other aspects of the quantum world indicate that science is far from yielding an assured access to the Real (436) (i.e. independent reality as opposed to an empirical reality understood by science and described by mathematics, validating Kants claim that the purpose of science is not a knowledge of the Real but that of phenomena [38]). Therefore, it appears we can deduce that we live in a universe of Veiled Reality where: the Real cannot be separated, by thought, into distinct parts (456). For example, knowing all the basic laws of science, the laws, all by themselves, cannot yield a complete understanding of the world we live in. Chaos and complexity prevents this full knowing (443); The Real is not even [fully] conceptualizable by humans (p. 456) for the Real is prior to time... the cause it constitutes is not specically anterior to its effects (458); Aspects of the independent reality, the phenomena we decide to study or cull out from the Real (these aspects that we study or cull out are referred to as empirical reality), exist to the extent only as we perceive them. They are dened by the proprioceptive limits we impose on them (456); The Real is not delimited by what we know, as emergence must be accounted for (456). Emergence is a property of dynamical complex systems whereby novelty (unpredicted and oftentimes unpredictable behavior) results from the particular combination of parts in their interaction or the surprising behavior of a system interacting with other systems. * Bells Theorem proves nonlocality (correlation of our knowledge of the physical characteristics of particles at a distance) in a quantum eld. Essentially, two particles, at a distance, can become entangled. Entanglement means that the state of one particle inuences the sate of another particle (175) This phenomena is described by Schrodingers equations. Locality is the principle where inuences ( a set of knowable or unknowable parameters that are real numbers, 64) are not propagated at innite speed. In Nature, locality is violated (57). [Page numbers in parentheses refer to: Bernard dEspagnat, On Physics and Philosophy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006).]
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Since 2008, more than $14,000 billion -- in taxpayer dollars -- has been pledged, committed, lent or spent by the federal government in response to the economic crisis. This does not even account for the more than $50,000 billion fall in the value of nancial assets worldwide from September 2008 - March 2009. Along with this unprecedented wealth destruction, the economic crisis, over the last 14 months, has produced a loss of 4.4 million jobs in the U.S. Additional federal bailout funds are expected to be required and continuing job losses over the rest of the year are predicted. If Wall Street nancial institutions, for example, are unable to pay back the loans already provided to zombie banks from operating prots (as opposed to equity sales), this means that these nancial institutions have not generated any prots since 1970. It has all been smoke and mirrors: prots, annual GDP growth, the whole ball of wax. See Capitalism, 9/11, and the Economic Crisis available at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13075884/.
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Essentially, National Defense, is a prisoners dilemma game and will not engender resolvable outcomes other than more wars and greater and greater capital employed to build ever more sophisticated weaponry in order to avoid the use of nuclear weapons to win these potential and actual wars. However, any wins are merely chimerical in that such resolution is always merely temporary. Thus, whereas National Defense appears necessary and logical and even rational, it is not. Only as National Defense is viewed self-referentially, does it make any sense at all. The logic and rationality of the game being played is internal to the game rules and self-referential. The deterrence National Defense actually achieves in not of war, but of human and economic development. The instability and unwinnabality of the defense deterrence strategy and ongoing requirements for massive injections of capital to continue playing the game not only engender large opportunity costs by diverting capital from other important human development activities, but contribute to the increased probability of global war by doing so. See Thinking Strategically about National Defense available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/14661130/.
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Is global warming, for example, an emergent property of disaster capitalism? Disaster capitalism refers to making a huge fortune from natural and planned disasters exacerbated by poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions. Disaster capitalisms raison d'tre may be the promotion and generation of market inefciencies pricing signals that distort real prices for goods and services and their real cost to the environment, public health, and social justice. [See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007).] One of the characteristics of disaster capitalism is the advent of corporate welfarism in which losses are socialized and prots privatized. This is neither old-style capitalism where markets determine who wins and who looses, nor is it socialism. For example, socialism is concerned about ordinary individuals. By contrast, the United States has provided little help for the millions of Americans who are losing their homes. Workers who lose their jobs receive only 39 weeks of limited unemployment benets, and are then left on their own. And, when they lose their jobs, most lose their health insurance, too. [See Joseph E. Stiglitz, America's socialism for the rich: Corporate welfarism, The Jakarta Post (June 9, 2009) at http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/06/09/america039s-socialism-rich-corporate-welfarism.html.
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Scientic Materialism is used here to mean something similar to what Creston Davis calls secular humanism in his introduction: that which obeys the Kantian injunction to conceive of the possibilities of human experience without reference to transcendence (4). In 1978, E.O Wilson summarized the ideology of scientic materialism thusly: But make no mistake about the power of scientic materialism. It presents the human mind with an alternative mythology that until now has always, point for point in zones of conict, defeated traditional religion. Its narrative form is the epic: the evolution of the universe from the big bang of fteen billion years ago through the origin of the elements and celestial bodies to the beginnings of life on earth. The evolutionary epic is mythology in the sense that the laws it adduces here and now are believed but can never be denitively proved to form a cause-and-effect continuum from physics to the social sciences, from this world to all the other worlds in the visible universe. Every part of existence is considered to be obedient to physical laws requiring no external control. The scientists devotion to parsimony in explanation excludes the divine spirit and other extraneous agents.... If this interpretation is correct, the nal decisive edge enjoyed by scientic naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, its chief competition, as a wholly material phenomenon. Theology is not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline.* What is important to understand is that the discussion in Monstrosity does not position scientic materialism against Christianity as competing ideologies that privilege a non-scientic understanding of evolution, for example, in defending Intelligent Design as a an alternative model to evolution. The purpose of the debate is not to position philosophical naturalism against Christian theism as explanatory to natural phenomena such as evolution, the mechanics of the birth of the universe, or any other properly scientic endeavor. The object is not to posit a theistic science, where Gods intervention is explanatory to aspects of nature that are neither fully testable at this time nor may be testable in the foreseeable future. Nothing would be gained by such an enterprise. In terms of a subject like evolution, I would imagine that Milbank fully agrees with E.O. Wilsons modied 2006 discussion of scientic materialism written as a letter to a Southern Baptist pastor: In order to solve these problems [to save the earth from ecocide, the destruction of the earths environment that supports life], Ive argued it will be necessary to nd common ground on which the powerful forces of religion and science can be joined. The best place to start is the stewardship of life. Obviously, neither religion nor science has addressed this great issue effectively. Ive attempted to identify those elements of biology and education most relevant to the proposed partnership. In the process Ive not tried to water down in any way the fundamental difference between science and mainstream religion concerning the origin of life. God made the Creation, you say. This truth is plainly stated in Holy Scripture. Twenty-ve centuries of theology and much of Western civilization have been built upon it. But no, I say respectively. Life was self-assembled by random mutation and natural selection of the codifying molecules. As radical as such an explanation may seem, it is supported by an overwhelming body of interlocking evidence. It might yet prove wrong, but year by year that seems less probable. And it raises this theological question: Would God have been so deceptive as to salt the earth with so much misleading evidence?**
* E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 192 quoted in Michael Ruse, The History of Evolutionary Thought, in Ruse and Travis, 43-4. ** E.O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), 165-6. Lyle Brecht DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009 Page 21 of 32
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Christian religiosity is used here not to mean some supercessionist view of Christianity that believes that Judaism was replaced by the Church with Christs crucixion. This often comes in various forms used to justify anti-Semitism: (a) punitive - Jews who reject Jesus as the Jewish Messiah are consequently condemned by God (Hippolytus, Origen, Luther); (b) economic - in God's plans, Israel is replaced by the Church (Justin Martyr, Augustine); (c) structural - the Old Testament is immaterial for shaping Christian understandings of God (Wikipedia). By the focus on the Christ Event as pivotal in History of the Real, I am also not implying a judgment as to belief truth claims relative to other religious systems such as Islam (21% of the worlds population); non-religious (16%); Hinduism (14%); Buddhism (4%); Chinese traditional (4%); Indigenous (4%); other religions (4%). This argument is not to infer that the 67% of human population that are not Christian are somehow lesser than or that their beliefs are inadequate or wrong compared to the 33% of humans on the earth that identify themselves as Christians.
The Monstrosity of Christ??
[Bloch, Sermon on the Mount]
Lyle Brecht
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In modernity, Reality (i.e. what is part of the Real) is apprehended primarily in terms of a humanocentric rationality that reveals the real workings of the universe bringing salvation through the ingenuity of humankinds technical achievements. This progress through human rationality is the telos of history. This modern description of reality collapsed as a result of the First and Second World Wars, the Holocaust, the development and use of the atom bomb and subsequent nuclear arms race with ICBM-tipped hydrogen bombs, and the environmental crisis which destroyed forever the concept of linear technical progress (things are getting better and better every day) fueled by human rationality (e.g. under what form of rationality was the Holocaust constructed and 125 million humans murdered in the wars of the 20th century?). Today, about the only place that modernity as a world-picture still plays as the dominant world view is in the grammar of totalitarian political regimes. In modernity, the self exists as an autonomous, self-directed being, entirely constituted through the interiority of the person. Modernity was an post-Enlightenment advancement on the Pre-modern where Reality was described primarily in terms of a revealed historical telos leading toward salvation for the whole world through Jesus Christ. The seventeenth century Enlightenment, through Descartes, introduced a dualism previously not imagined between matter and God, mind and body, the real and the unreal. Both modernity and postmodernity are projects of the Enlightenment movement. Religion, as we imagine it today was not really invented until the Enlightenment. In pre-modernity, the self is only constituted through an interior relationality with God. The person does not really exist outside this relationship. Likewise, pre-modern Reality was believed to be an advancement on the Biblical where Reality is described in terms of a historical telos leading toward salvation revealed to a chosen people, Israel, by their god, YHWH. Persons still do not have a self. Personhood is constituted entirely through ones relationship with their family and tribe. The most lasting feature of modernity may be the invention of nuclear weapons and the advent of the Nuclear Security State. For example, current strategic thinking, developed under the tenets of modernity, that equate nuclear weaponry and large stocks of state-of-the-art conventional armaments as a means of deterrence to war (i.e. Mutual Assured Destruction = MAD) may be obsolete in a world with 8 nuclear states possessing ready parts and supplies for 12,000 nuclear weapons, 40 states capable of going nuclear at anytime and nuclear proliferation with enough HEU (highly enriched uranium) for building 240,000 nuclear weapons in the future. This insanity persists even as it is understood that nuclear war cannot be won and cannot be fought (President Ronald Reagan). For example, the common deterrence strategy today assumes my opponent will not attack my country if I possess nuclear weapons. Also, my country will have higher prestige and better negotiating power on the world stage if I possess nuclear weapons or a credible threat as to my ability to produce them at any time of my choosing. Given this deterrence strategy, it is conceivable for this poorly thought-out strategic policy choice to result in actions that make a nuclear terror attack (or exchange) more probable. If such a nuclear event occurred, that could produce circumstances whereby, for example, instead of global GDP going from $60 to $240 trillion (in $2005 purchasing power parity) by 2050, it declines to $6 trillion (global GDP estimate is from U.S. Central Intelligence Agency). See Thinking Strategically about Nonproliferation at http://www.scribd.com/ doc/13450838/.
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In Post-modernity (or late-modern), Reality is described in particular and contextual ways that reveal a contingent description of reality that includes both rational and non-rational components. Whereas, modernity assumes an Archimedean Point external to the system under investigation from which reality can be described, post-modernity assumes, based on von Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle and the Copenhagen School of quantum mechanics, that there is no Archimedes Point from which reality can be described (the investigator will always disrupt the system being investigated and depending on what the investigator chooses to investigate will ultimately determine what results he/she achieves). The self in post-modernity has both interiority and exteriority. But the person is primarily constituted through external relationality with self, god/God, the other (our neighbor), and with creation (the environment). Whereas modernity assumes that rational human decisions can always reveal the route to solving problems, post-modernity has doubts concerning rationality as a means for solving all problems. Under post-modernity human rationality is suspect based on work by Freud in psychology (about the strength of unconscious motivations); neurobiology, in our ability to even apprehend reality (neurobiologists suggest that as much as 90% of stimuli reaching the human body remains unconscious [below conscious detection]); and work in quantum physics that calls-to-question some of humanitys most cherished beliefs regarding descriptions of space and time and causality (see endnote # 9). Theology, instead of being bound only to religious discourse, also is assumed to underlie discourse in science and philosophy just as science and philosophy underlie legitimate theological discourse (meaning discourse that can be said or shown to have meaning within the world-picture of post-modernity). One of the best treatments of the differences between modernity and post modernity (more-thanmodernity) is the Wachowski Brothers movie,V for Vendetta, set in a futuristic, totalitarian Great Britain. The movie depicts a morally questionable and ethically suspect soul-making journey for both the messianic character in the movie, V (Hugo Weaving) and his apostolic and resurrected, somewhat reluctant follower, Evey (Natalie Portman). First, there is a precipitating event that elicits crisis, a disorientation of the normal day-to-day a time of exception. In the movie this is an outbreak of a deadly virus blamed on terrorists that kills 80,000 people. Then begins the propaganda campaign that elicits fear by changing the grammar for how reality is described. Now, reality comprises a dualistic world of terrorists and protectors. In order for the protectors to do their job, they require unaccountable power. What is at stake are the very foundations for how one describes reality. What V does is to provide an alternative discourse to the lies promulgated through the media by the government agents seeking to preserve their unlawful power positions. V understands that violence alone, or maybe not even, is not enough to unseat existing power structures. V must restore the peoples capacity to deconstruct the descriptions of reality proffered by the power-elite and offer an alternative grammar of post-modernity that is capable of questioning the world-picture of a totalitarian, modern state-of-being constructed to avert the evil of terrorism. V offers hope. With hope, there is at least a potential for human freedom. But rst, we need a grammar for this hopeful discourse and a world-picture for what this hopeful-picture might look like. V imagines that we are capable of constructing this picture for ourselves. All V knows is that it looks very different than the reality of the world-picture that is offered us by the powers-that-be, those very same powers that are abridging our freedoms and rapidly destroying existing structures that limit and make power accountable.
Lyle Brecht
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Orthodoxy is a loaded term. Some use the term to disguise their personal fears and prejudices, often referring to a past moment in the Churchs history, a retreat from Reality rather than a moving toward the Real. In this context, Milbank is not using Catholic Orthodoxy to refer to some misogynist time, the homophobic exclusion of others who may have different sexual orientations, making reference to Tridentine liturgic practices, a closed Eucharistic table other than to a select, a political statement for ProLife against Pro-Choice in the abortion debates, or any of the many common uses of these term, that over the years was used to justify everything from slavery to deserved poverty through reference to Scriptural passages proof-texts and tradition. Instead, Milbanks orthodoxy has its roots in the early Church when the ekklesia, as described by Paul and the early Fathers of the Church, was a contrast-community of God. The ekklesia was foremost for God and against the mass-culture of the State. Its orthodoxy lay in its opposition to the established heterodoxy of Rome. The empire that Paul formed ekklesia as a counter to was the Roman Empire: Pax Romana (peace and security) was the ofcial theology and propaganda motto of the Roman world after the establishment of the Principate, that is, after Augustus miraculous termination of the civil war and his establishment of universal peace and economy supported, to a large extent, by the slave labor of conquered peoples. Paul challenges the soteria (salvation from the forces of chaos) represented by Caesar and his empire by claiming that pistis (Gods loyalty/faithfulness) is universal and democratic, that it applies to all people regardless of their class, race, gender, wealth or accomplishments and status in the world and this is expressed in Gods dikaiosyne (solidarity and justice) with the entire human race, not just the elite. Paul describes how those who claim to be superior or privileged, instead of making the world better, just cause more chaos and bring on catastrophe [echoes of the snake in Genesis 2-3 that offers superior wisdom that leads only to disaster]. Instead, Paul offers Jesus as the exemplar of an archetypal human/divine being who, through his faith of God, signies what real peace and security looks like - not a hegemony or authority of domination and oppression, but the prototype of a community pledged to life. Paul goes on to describe this community pledged to life, the ekklesia, an exemplary community of those who are set free from the false precepts of empiric power where, instead, identity is shaped by a radical democracy of justice, difference, freedom, equality, and solidarity that set the ethical conditions; where the critical events for the fate of the universe does not come to pass in heaven with God or among the gods. It does not involve force or violence or even the Law. It takes place within and through a community held together by faith, love, and hope. [See Dieter Georgi, Theocracy: In Pauls Praxis and Theology, trans., David E. Green (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 28, 34, 45, 59, 66, 67, 68, 71, 76, 86, 97, 99 in Lyle Brecht, The God Who Sacrices His Desire And Gives Hope To All Creation: An Exegesis of Genesis 2:4b 3:24, (March 2008) available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/10062312/]
Lyle Brecht
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The form of Christianity envisioned here assumes a theology that speaks of a God other than the speaking of man in a loud voice; that make[s] images of God that are in truth only reections of ourselves. Instead, the God we are appealing to is a self-revealing God where our knowledge of faith has to do with God himself and not with some reection of humanity. The enabling and actualizing of the authentic knowledge of God is an act of pure grace. See Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barths Theology, trans. By Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 59, 60, 61. For example, in Jesus Christ, we understand the Word of God as the epitome of Gods grace, grace means simply that man no longer is left to himself but is given into the hand of God. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 1.1: The Doctrine of the Word of God, 2nd ed., trans. By G.W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 150.
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Might the present day culture of America and the Church be incapable of modeling ethical life in community? Unable because the Church and its secular brethren, probably unbeknownst to itself and its clergy, have bought in to the very structure of modern, rational organization that produces the adiphorization of action the separation of action from morality. The sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, outlines this structure that so often effectively eliminates the moral from our human agency in the pursuit of articial, rationally designed order (269). First, in a modern organization every personally performed action is a mediated action, and every actor is castin an agentic state: almost no actor ever has the a chance to develop the authorship attitude towards the nal outcome of the operation, since each actor is but an executor of a command and giver of another; not a writer, but a translator of someone elses intensions; Second, there is the horizontal, functional division of the overall task: each actor has but a specic, self-contained job to perform and produces an object [or service] with no written-in designation, no information on its future uses; no contribution seems to determine the nal outcome of the operation; Third, the targets of the operation, the people who by design or by default are affected by it, hardly ever appear to the actors as total human beings, objects of moral responsibility and ethical subjects themselves (270). [Pages in parentheses are from Zygmunt Bauman, A Century of Camps? (1995) in Peter Beilhartz, ed., The Bauman Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001). See The Adiphorization of Christian Ethics in Society and the Church at http://www.scribd.com/doc/15260699/]
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Humanocentrism, for example, in the Star Wars lms (1977- 2005) written and directed by George Lucas, was illustrated in terms of Human High Culture that was represented as an ideal or high point of achievement in the Galactic Empire. Thus, the Empires subsequent genocide and slavery of aliens was entirely justiable, as these non-human beings were merely aliens. This humanocentrism on the part of the Empire is one of the reasons for the rebels, led by Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, and Chewbacca, etc. to oppose and attempt to bring down the Empire. Today, humanocentrism is played out especially in economic cost/benet analyses that discount loss of species diversity and/or ecosystem services as having little or no value compared with the monetized benets accruing directly to specic power elite (in their impunity) or national groups. This has resulted in many dis-economic decisions over how to manage national economies for a sustainable future.
Lyle Brecht
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25 26 27
Northcott, 70. Northcott, 57.
State is being used here as a construct to connote a totalizing socio-political space dened by the perpetuation or conservation of organs of power which in todays modern/post-modern world use institutional structures, policies, laws, and practices to create a totalizing political space of peace more terrifying than total war through the means of ghting an enemy, no longer another state, or even another regime, but the unspecied enemy. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. By Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 357, 421-2. The natural evolution of such states-of-Being through state-sponsored global capitalism is the national security state defended by nuclear weapons (or the threat of developing nuclear weapons) against the evil Other, the unspecied enemy. Thus, the national security state itself tends to evolve into the nuclear security state dened by its allegiance to, and focus on, the unlimited threat of using nuclear weaponry as a primary means for assuring peace. See The Nuclear Security State at http://www.scribd.com/doc/9775180/.
28 29 30
William T. Cavenaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2002), 46. Northcott, 76.
The term theopolitical recognizes that supposedly secular political discourse is really theology in disguise providing an alternative soteriology to that of a marginalized and privatized [meaningfully absent from public discourse concerning the common good and focused on individualistic spiritual interiority] Church. As Christians, our objective must be to look to resurrect a Church as a Christian community of freedom; a community of people acting together in reciprocal respect for one anothers dignity and Gods good creation. A community where the ethics of the common good confronts the destruction of people and nature [that] amounts to a celebration of collective suicide. See Cavenaugh 2002, 2, 5, 9, 31; William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist (Challenges in Contemporary Theology; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 66; David Hollenbach, S.J., The Common Good and Christian Ethics (New Studies in Christian Ethics; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 83, 102; Franz J. Hinkelammert, Cultura de la Esperanza y Sociedad sin Exclusion (San Jose: DEI, 1995), 127, 195, 303 quoted in Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Liberation Theology after the End of History (London: Routledge, 2001), 12.
31
Until the Enlightenment, the Christian tradition sustained the belief that God and not humans is the principal locus of consciousness and moral purposiveness in the cosmos. Similarly, the creation is rst and foremost Gods possession, not humanitys. Essentially, as Karl Barth suggests, a loan from God to humans. See Michael S. Northcott, Ecology and Christian Ethics in Robin Gill, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 223.
32 33
Northcott, 77.
Natures fate and humanitys fate are closely intertwined. See Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 2-3, 246.
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34
Atheism, a rejection of theism, from the Greek (atheos), was originally applied to those who believed in false gods, no gods, or doctrines that stood in conict with established religions. The notion of someone identifying themselves as atheist was a post-Enlightenment phenomenon. Today, about 2.3% of the world's population describes itself as atheist, while a further 11.9% is described as non theist. Up to 65% of Japanese describe themselves as atheists, agnostics, or non-believers; and up to 48% in Russia. The percentage of such persons in European Union member states ranges between 6% (Italy) and 85% (Sweden). Atheists reject theist claims, citing a lack of empirical evidence (Wikipedia). The philosophical basis for atheism today is typically scientic materialism.
35
Albert Einstein (18791955) published his paper on the special theory of relativity in 1905, building on the work of Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincar and others. Essentially, the theory assumes: (A) that the speed of light is always the same and (B) that the laws of physics are always the same everywhere in the universe. From these assumptions, Einsteins theory deduces that: (1) the length of an object is a function of the speed at which it is traveling. The faster the object travels, the shorter the object becomes; (2) the mass of an object is also a function of the speed at which it is traveling. The faster the object travels, the heavier it becomes; and (3) time slows down as an object increases in speed. Some of the consequences of this theory are: (a) time dilation the time lapse between two events is dependent on the relative speeds of the observers' reference frames: (b) relativity of simultaneity; (c) Lorentz contraction of dimensionality; (c) composition of velocities; (d) inertia and momentum dependent on velocity of an object; and e) equivalence of mass and energy, E = mc2. The rst proof of a portion of the theory that predicted that light will be bent out of a straight path if it passes near to a very massive object was obtained in 1919. Not until 1971 did two physicists, J. C. Hafele and R. E. Keating, experimentally verify the time dilation consequences of the theory (Wikipedia).
36
This lack of experimental veriability is, of course, cause for concern for some scientists who claim that string theory, then, is not science!
37
In 1972, George Kukla, a professor at Columbia University who studied glacial deposits in Soviet Union wrote President Nixon a letter predicting abrupt climate change from mans activities. Nixons administration did not respond as it believed the entire issue was unimportant.
38
The joke is that these global warming deniers will need to experience 100 foot rises in the oceans due the melting of the arctic and antarctic ice caps, mass starvation from collapse of the global food production system, and summer temperatures that kill thousands during each successive heat wave before they know rationally that global warming is a real phenomenon. But, of course, by then the earth may have exceeded its climactic tipping point and abrupt climate change will be a runaway phenomenon, not subject to correction other than by the most drastic, expensive, and potentially lethal measures human ingenuity may devise.
39
Estimate only. No formal studies have yet been completed for this reduced 350-ppm of atmospheric CO2, assuming this is the real climactic tipping point. However, the cost most probably will be some multiple of keeping CO2 concentrations below 450-ppm atmospheric CO2 (estimated at $9,000 billion). The difculty is that present global economic system was constructed based on an assumption that dispersing CO2 into the earths atmosphere had a cost of zero. Today, we now know with a high degree of certainly that this cost is actually very large and potentially determinant for maintaining life on earth.
Lyle Brecht
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40
G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) developed a philosophy of History wherein dialectics is the way by which we come to realize that the world is meaningful through a process of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, leading to an understanding of the Whole. Rowan Williams describing Hegels method: Reection requires that the plain opposition of positive and negative be left behind. Thinking is not content with the abstraction of mutual exclusivities, but struggles to conceive of a structured wholeness nuanced enough to contain what appeared to be contradictories. See Darren Staloff, Hegel-History and Historicism in Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition, Part 5: The Age of Ideology DVD (The Teaching Company, 2000); Simon Lumsden, Hegel, Derrida and the Subject, Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 3, # 2-3 (2007), 47, Rowan Williams quote at http://accurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2008/11/understanding-rowan-williamsfor-rst.html.
41
In Zikeks account, Hegels underlying premise is that what dies on the Cross is not only Gods earthly representative-incarnation, but the God of beyond itself: Christ is the vanishing mediator between the substantial transcendent God-in-itself and God qua virtual spiritual community (29). My own view of Hegel and his dialectics comes less from Heideggers take on Hegels notion of God, which tends to discount the transcendent, than from Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, Lisabeth During, trans. (London: Routledge, 2005): "For Hegel, the divine negativity, conceived in its most radical form, does not manifest the lack or the passivity, but rather the plasticity [receptive to being transformed/producing transformations] of God" (104), mirrored in the dialectic process itself (180).
42
This is Martin Luthers theologia cruces (theology of the cross), developed in 1518, which posits that, God displays himself visibly publicly and historically, only as the humiliated and tortured Jesus. Thus, it is useless to consider the transcendence of God, His glory and majesty, independently of the human encounter with him in the godlessness of the cross. God himselfshatters all our images [of Him] by addressing us in the cross of Jesus. See Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New testament to Saint John of the Cross (Cambridge, MA.: Cowley Publications, 1990), 157-8.
43
Metanoia is a physical movement and new engagement with the world, not just a change of attitude or intension. The thrust of the Spirit does not end with the discovery of the battered victim lying in the ditch. It drives us, to make a commitment to that victim to enter actively upon his or her pathway, to make a commitment to his or her liberation. See Roberto Oliveras Maguero, History of the Theology of Liberation, in Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, eds. Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino (Maryknoll, NY Orbis Books, 1993), 9 quoted in Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Liberation Theology after the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering (London: Routledge, 2001), 177-8.
44
For example, a close reading of New Testament Scripture reveals that Jesus is not nave, he does not ask us to be passive [in the face of suffering], he does not require us to give up ghting against evil but he shows us that equivalence in evil, even in the name of justice, does not transform human society. What is required is an attitude that is not determined by what has already been done, an innovative, a creative gesture. Otherwise enclosure within a repetitive logic is inevitable, and the term of this logic is the exclusion or death of at least one of the parties. It is forgiveness that represents this innovative gesture: it creates a space in which the logic inherent in legal equivalences [i.e. counter-violence] no longer runs. See Christian Duquoc, The Forgiveness of God, Concilium 184 (1986): 39 quoted in Bell, 149. In this forgiveness of God and our fellow human, the endless cycle of violence and counter-violence as the response to human suffering is interrupted and holds out the promise of a peace [e.g. the cessation of suffering] that is more than the uneasy truce of adversaries (Bell, 150).
45
(Williams 1990, 158-160, 163). William Tyndale (c. 1494-1536) in his Obedience of a Christian Man builds on and extends Luthers theologia cruces by describing why the solidarity with others is a requirement of our God-given freedom. Rowan Williams summarizes Tyndales thinking: We are delivered by Christ from slavery into freedom; and that freedom is experienced and expressed as indebtedness not to God, but to each other.Gods service to us in Christ is both the model and the motive force for our relation to our neighbor (Lev. 19:18; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27; Rom. 13:9; Gal. 5:14; James 2:8). See Rowan Williams, Anglican Identities (Cambridge, MA.: Cowley Publications, 2003), 11-13.
46
Surprisingly, both scientic materialism and Christianity, under modernity (and potentially under postmodernity, as well), has a difcult time with History in that what underlies a philosophy of history is the premise of progress, as dened by humanocentrism. In the most radical break with this underlying notion of progress, either as determined by God or by human technology and ingenuity, is Charles Darwins (1802-1889) theory of evolution (1859): It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked long lapse of ages.* Darwins theory was itself a blow to William Paley (17431805) and British Functionalism in its praise of God in the details of design where we can learn important aspects of Gods nature and character from the works of creation: The marks of design are too strong to be got over. Design must have a designer. That designer must have been a person. That person is God. [His Evidences of Christianity (1794) remained a required text for entrance to Cambridge University until the 20th century.] Paley used the image of a ne watch to make two points: (a) complexity: natural history is too complex; chance could never result in anything so intricate; and (b) design: natural history is adapted toward a clearly perceived end. The watch implies, by its utility, a mind capable of forethought, design, and construction....The thing required is the intending mind, the adapting hand, the intelligence by which the hand was directed. Darwins, by now irrefutable, objections to Paleys intelligent watchmaker (resurfacing today as Intelligent Design - ID) utilizes: (a) Charles Lyells (1797-1875) uniformitarianism that posits History occurring over very long reaches of time. Thus, natural selection can occur by small, isotropic, nondirectional variation. Essentially, trial and error replaces intelligent purpose; (b) natural selection acts at the level of the individual; and (c) using Adam Smiths paradox of laissez-faire, it is individuals struggling for themselves alone that drives natural selection. [What is interesting is that this principle works in the natural world but has been demonstrated again and again to be less applicable to the world of economics.] These are the mechanisms that construct the entire panoply of vast evolutionary change by cumulating its small increments through the fullness of geologic time. God does not appear in History the way Paley imagined and History does not represent progress the way many scientic materialists and Christians would like to believe. Agency within History has shifted from a purposefully benevolent deity to the amoral self-interest of organisms. This may be the most distinctive and radical aspect of Darwinism.
* Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 94-5, 123-4, 125, 262-3, 264-5, 596.
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47
The antidote to what, under modernity, becomes a secular/sacred (supernatural/non-rational) disintegration is the acceptance, both for secular materialists and for Christians, that, The whole of Jesus life before, as after his death is such a life-giving sacrice given by God for us to feed on, for our nourishment.* This liberating presence of Jesus as cut, a schism or break, between the rational/nonrational then provides a model for all of us going forward to begin to be open to the Real whereby taken from the cross we are returned to our original owner God, to Gods kingdom of unconditional giving, snatched out of a world of deprivation and injustice from which we suffer because of our poverty, our inability to pay what others demand of us.** Thus, our acts are perfected only as we incorporate what is Gods very own within ourselves; our actions are perfected only as we act along with and under the direction of God.we are ourselves only as we incorporate what is Gods very own within ourselves.we are ourselves and act according to our human nature only as we thereby act along with and under the direction of God.*** But, this acting under the direction of God in response to the monstrosity of Christ begins and ends in the story of a healthy God, the God of radical grace where unconditional mutual regard for the other all others abounds. For only this God is a God of human health and liberation. All other gods that we place before us as models are sick gods.
* Kathryn, Tanner, Incarnation, Cross, and Sacrice: A Feminist-Inspired Reappraisal, in Anglican Theological Review 86/1 (Winter 2004), 56. * * Kathryn Tanner, Economies of Grace in William Schweiker and Charles Mathewes, Having: Property and Possession in Religious and Social Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 374. * ** Tanner, Economies of Grace, 379-380.
Note: According to J. Harold Ellens, Radical Grace: How Belief in a Benevolent God Benefits Our Health (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 7-8, following a healthy god includes these attributes:
The incarnation of grace is evident in, and an ontological state of, all creation and every human other; The unearned gift of this ontological state of being in grace is regard for the other manifest as compassion, a profound empathy, modeled, for example, in the life work of Jesus; Compassion for the other has the potential for recognizing a mutuality in the quest for well-being that all creation strives for, including all human others; This mutuality of purpose for well-being begs the ethical question as to what impairments we ourselves may be placing in front of the other for obtaining their well-being; Acknowledging a mutuality of purpose and owning any impairments we place in front of the other obstructing the others path towards well-being illuminates a systemic wholeness. Essentially, we are all in the same boat; all of creation and all human beings are groaning to be whole, and well; Even from a purely secular utilitarian perspective, this state of affairs suggests that we all receive a benet by supporting a mutual liberation towards growth and well-being for all creation and all persons; If our well-being ultimately depends on the health of the god we choose to worship, we have a stake in modeling what behavior of a healthy god looks like on-the-ground. We cant get to health through violence against an other or a god we deem as sick according to our standards. Afrmation of the other has the potential of relaxing some of the defensive posture towards the other that has the world spending, for example, a trillion dollars a year on military defense rather than solving real problems of community and environment that are moving us toward well-being; Movement either towards unconditional positive regard (i.e. radical grace) and well-being or towards sickness is an ethical endeavor and there are ethical tests that can serve as metrics as to which direction we are moving in.
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This relationship to a wholly other God that allows God the freedom to be God is ultimately political. Under this notion of orthodoxy, the Church is really the community of remembrance whose task it is to remember for I am with you declares YHWH to deliver you (Jer. 1:19b, NJPS). Thus, the political task of Christian orthodox theology is to bring forth those public expressions of hope and desires for encountering the Real that are being denied under the strictures of modernity and suppressed so that we may not even realize that the Reality we believe in does not exist. From this vantage point, one might argue that the ultimate cause of poverty, injustice, and oppression [as sources of human suffering is the] breach of friendship with God and others.* The dream of God may be that through suffering and our willingness to forgive in the face of this suffering, we may be reconciled to the other and to God. For Like a tireless, and long-suffering parent, our God is there for us when we are ready to hear His still, small voice in our lives.** This is the same God that is in the other who may be the cause of our unjust suffering. For the Church, a moral social order is based not on defeat of enemies but on identication with victims through participation in Christs reconciling sacrice.*** For Milbank, this process of forgiveness of the other and relationality through friendship is encapsulated in action as justice.
* Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, rev. ed. Ed. Trans. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 24 quoted in Bell, 151. The basis for this friendship is forgiveness. For through forgiveness, The victim is freed from the enmity that is borne of a violation that cannot be undone; the victimizer is freed from the guilt and loathing that comes from never being able to undo the violation. Forgiveness places them both in a position to risk a new relationship. Ultimately forgiveness is an act of hope that denies the destructiveness of injustice [i.e. the suffering of the innocent] the nal word, instead insisting that something else is always possible (Bell, 152-3). ** At its foundation is Gods very good creation, this is a moral universe, which means that, despite all the evidence that seems to be to the contrary [in a world where the innocent suffer], there is no way that evil and injustice and oppression and lies can have the last word. God is a God who cares about right and wrong. God cares about justice and injustice. God is in charge. See Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time ( New York: Doubleday, 2004), 2, 11. *** For example, we can no longer account virtue as that which is won through the defeat of the other (Cavanaugh, 9-10, 11). If habits of mind are not so much something you see as something through which you see everything, then the habit of mind Christians are being called to cultivate is a new vision that embraces the other in our thinking. From this perspective Christian ethics is more fundamentally about habits, and thus about producing certain kinds of people, then about decisions, or producing certain kinds of consequences. See Michael Hanby, Interceding: Giving Grief to Management, in Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer on Christian Ethics, 2nd ed. (London: SCM Press, 2003), 238.
49
Meister Eckhart, Commentary on the Gospel According to St. John, in Meister Eckhart: Selected Treatises and Sermons, trans. James M. Clark and John V. Skinner (London: Fontana, 1963), 228 quoted in John Milbank, The Double Glory, or Paradox versus Dialectics: On Not Quite Agreeing with Slavoj Zizek in Zizek and Milbank, 187.
Lyle Brecht
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DISCUSSION: THE MONSTROCITY OF CHRIST: PARADOX OR DIALECTIC?

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

The Monstrosity of Christ??

[Bloch, Sermon on the Mount]

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

Northcott, 70. Northcott, 57.

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

DRAFT 4.3 Sunday, July 5, 2009

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